February
From Somebody Else’s Kids by Torey Hayden
Because of my years in the self-contained classroom, I had that mysterious thing Birk called “experience.” Translated, it simply meant that I did not have the option to get upset, I should know better
I did not want to chase him. Whatever little bit of lunacy this was, I did not want to be a party to it. My greatest concern was the door. Within minutes, Boo had completely stripped and now capered around in naked glee. I had not enjoyed chasing him the first time when he had been fuilly clothed. I could just imagine doing it now. This was a nice, middle-class, sedate and slightly boring elementary school without any classes of crazy kids in it. Dan Marshall, the principal, swell guy that he was, would have an apoplectic fit if some kid streaked down one of his corridors. I would hate to be the cause of that.
“And with all due respect and credit to what you’re trying to do, Torey, I can’t see it myself. Giving her all that extra help when nobody else gets it. It’s a waste of time on some kids. I’ve been in the business a long time now, and believe me, you get so you can tell who’s going to make it and who isn’t. I just cannot understand spending all the extra time and money on these little slowies who’ll never amount to anything. So many other children would profit from it more.”
I rose to wrestle a can of Dr. Pepper out of the machine. The right thing to do would have been to correct Edna, because to my way of thinking at least, she was dead wrong. The cowardly thing was to get up and go fight the pop machine. Yet that is what I did. I was, admittedly, a little afraid of Edna. She could speak her mind so easily, she seemed so confident about her beliefs. And she possessed so much of the only thing I had found valuable as an educator: experience. In the face of that, I was left uncertain and questioned my own perceptions. So I took the coward’s way out.
Boo remained a dream child. As so many autistic-like children I had known, he possessed uncanny physical beauty; he seemed too beautiful to belong to this everyday world. Perhaps he did not. Sometimes I thought that he and others like him were the changelings spoken of in old stories. It was never inconceivable to me that he might truly be a fairy child spirited from the cold, bright beauty of his world, trapped in mine and never quite able to reconcile the two. And I always noticed that when we finally reached through to an autistic or schitzophrenic child, if we ever did, that they lost some of that beauty as they took on ordinary interactions, as if we had in some way sullied them. But as for Boo, thus far I had failed to touch him, and his beauty lay upon him with the shining stillness of a dream.
Once long ago when I was a very little girl I told my mother that when I grew up was going to be a witch and marry a dinosaur. At four that seemed a marvelous plan. I adored playing witch in the backyard with my friends and I was passionately interested in dinosaurs. There could be no better life than one in which I could do what I loved doing and live with one I found immensely fascinating.
I haven’t changed a lot in that respect. Somewhere deep inside there is still a small four-year-old looking for her dinosaur. And there was no denying that the single hardest task as my career progressed had become synchronizing life with the kids with the remainder of my life outside school.
The task did not seem to be getting any easier. I know I did not help things much. I loved my work profoundly. It stretched me to the very limits of my being. The time spent within the walls of my classroom had formed fully my views of life and death, of love and hate, of justice, reality, and the unrestrained brutal beauty of the human spirit. It had given me my understanding of the meaning of existence. And in the end, it had put me at ease with myself. I had become the sort of person who got home Fridays and waited anxiously for Mondays.
That kind of intensity was hard to compete with. I tried to step back from it and appreciate the slower, less rabid hours that I spent outside school but I knew my appetite for the extreme, both mentally and emotionally, made me a complicated companion.
Tomaso glared. His shoulders pulled up under the black jacket. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t hate you. We don’t even know one another.”
Abruptly Tomaso jerked around and grabbed a chair. Twirling it briefly above his head, he then let loose and sent it flying across the room and into the finches’ cage. The birds fluttered as the cage swayed wildly, but it did not tip over. Lori squealed in surprise. Boo dove under the work table.
This reaction seemed to please Tomaso. He set off on a rampage. Tearing from one side of the room to the other before I even had a chance to move from the door, he flung books off the shelves, cleared the top of my desk with a swoop of his arm, ripped Lori’s work folder into quarters and threw it into the air like confetti. Another chair went flying. Luckily it only grazed the west wall of windows and fell harmlessly to the floor. Once he started, I remained against the door and did not move. I was fearful of inciting him further. Or letting him get loose outside the room.
Tomaso stopped and turned back to me. “There. Now you hate me, don’t you?”
“I’m not precisely in love with you for doing that, if that’s what you mean,” I replied. “But I don’t hate you and I don’t like your working so hard to make me do so.”
“But you’re mad, aren’t you? I made you mad, didn’t I?”
Cripes, what did this kid want? I had no idea what to say to him. I was not mad. I did not hate him. Terror was more along the lines of what I was feeling right then, but I was not going to admit that either. My palms had gotten cold and damp and I wiped them on my jeans. Birk did not prepare me at all for this one.
“I bet you think I feel sorry I done that,” he said. “Well, I don’t. Here, let me show you.” He grabbed a potted geranium off the counter and crashed it to the floor. “There.”
Still with my back to the door to keep him contained in the room, I did not move. My mind was going at the speed of light, trying desperately to sort out viable alternatives before the kid wrecked my entire room. Or worse, decided to hurt someone. My inaction was not so much from indecision as it was from fear of consequences if I made the wrong move. I did not reckon this boy gave much opportunity for replay.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” he said. “Cat got your tongue? Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you get mad? Aren’t you normal or something? Are you some kind of fucking crazy teacher?”
“I’m not going to let you make me angry Tomaso. I don’t want to feel that way.”
“You don’t? You don’t?” He sounded outraged. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go ahead and hate me like everybody else does/ What makes you think you’re so special?”
“Tomaso, sit down. Take off your jacket and sit down. It’s time we got started on the afternoon’s work.”
Reaching down for a piece of the broken pot, he lofted it at me. Not a serious throw in my opinion. I imagine if he had meant it, he would have hit me. We were not that far apart, and I doubted that he missed when he aimed.
“What are you going to do about me? Are you going to suspend me? Are you going to get the principal?”
“No, I’m just going to wait until you decide it’s time to work.”
“Hey man, I ain’t never gonna decide that, so you might as well just give up.”
I waited. Sweat was running down along my sides and I pressed my arms against my body to stop it.
“At my other school they called the police. They took me to juvie. So you can’t scare me.”
“I’m not trying to scare you, Tomaso.”
“I don’t care what you’re trying to do. I don’t care about anything.”
“I’m just waiting, that’s all.”
“you can send me to the principal, if you want. And he can give me whacks. You think I haven’t had whacks before? I’ve had a million of them. And you think I care?”
I waited without saying anything. My stomach reminded me of the price I was paying for a calm exterior.
“I could bite your titties off”
My back against the coolness of the glass in the door, I waited.
“Hmmf. Mmmmmmph. Pphuh.” Tomaso was full of noises when I would not talk back to him. He was not ready to give in yet. Still too much pride at stake. And God only knows what else.
My gut feeling was that Tomaso did not really want to leave. No single thing I could put my finger on told me that, but I felt it. I studied him carefully.
Sometimes I think I missed my calling. I should have been a swindler. In the end, my best defense always seemed to come down to the good con game I play. My gut told me this boy was hot air. That was enough to go on. I pushed myself off the door and walked by him to the other side of the room. Righting chairs and slinging paper back onto my desk, I sat down at the work table. Reaching under, I pulled Boo out and sat him down in a chair. Then I beckoned Lori over and took out her L and O flashcards. My stomach was doing the cha-cha, a surefire clue to the extent of my concern for winning this game of psychological bunco. If he chose to walk out the door I would have no alternative but to go out and physically drag him back in. That would be a really lousy way to start any relationship. All I was operating on was a hunch. A hunch about a kid I did not even know.
Because of my years in the self-contained classroom, I had that mysterious thing Birk called “experience.” Translated, it simply meant that I did not have the option to get upset, I should know better
I did not want to chase him. Whatever little bit of lunacy this was, I did not want to be a party to it. My greatest concern was the door. Within minutes, Boo had completely stripped and now capered around in naked glee. I had not enjoyed chasing him the first time when he had been fuilly clothed. I could just imagine doing it now. This was a nice, middle-class, sedate and slightly boring elementary school without any classes of crazy kids in it. Dan Marshall, the principal, swell guy that he was, would have an apoplectic fit if some kid streaked down one of his corridors. I would hate to be the cause of that.
“And with all due respect and credit to what you’re trying to do, Torey, I can’t see it myself. Giving her all that extra help when nobody else gets it. It’s a waste of time on some kids. I’ve been in the business a long time now, and believe me, you get so you can tell who’s going to make it and who isn’t. I just cannot understand spending all the extra time and money on these little slowies who’ll never amount to anything. So many other children would profit from it more.”
I rose to wrestle a can of Dr. Pepper out of the machine. The right thing to do would have been to correct Edna, because to my way of thinking at least, she was dead wrong. The cowardly thing was to get up and go fight the pop machine. Yet that is what I did. I was, admittedly, a little afraid of Edna. She could speak her mind so easily, she seemed so confident about her beliefs. And she possessed so much of the only thing I had found valuable as an educator: experience. In the face of that, I was left uncertain and questioned my own perceptions. So I took the coward’s way out.
Boo remained a dream child. As so many autistic-like children I had known, he possessed uncanny physical beauty; he seemed too beautiful to belong to this everyday world. Perhaps he did not. Sometimes I thought that he and others like him were the changelings spoken of in old stories. It was never inconceivable to me that he might truly be a fairy child spirited from the cold, bright beauty of his world, trapped in mine and never quite able to reconcile the two. And I always noticed that when we finally reached through to an autistic or schitzophrenic child, if we ever did, that they lost some of that beauty as they took on ordinary interactions, as if we had in some way sullied them. But as for Boo, thus far I had failed to touch him, and his beauty lay upon him with the shining stillness of a dream.
Once long ago when I was a very little girl I told my mother that when I grew up was going to be a witch and marry a dinosaur. At four that seemed a marvelous plan. I adored playing witch in the backyard with my friends and I was passionately interested in dinosaurs. There could be no better life than one in which I could do what I loved doing and live with one I found immensely fascinating.
I haven’t changed a lot in that respect. Somewhere deep inside there is still a small four-year-old looking for her dinosaur. And there was no denying that the single hardest task as my career progressed had become synchronizing life with the kids with the remainder of my life outside school.
The task did not seem to be getting any easier. I know I did not help things much. I loved my work profoundly. It stretched me to the very limits of my being. The time spent within the walls of my classroom had formed fully my views of life and death, of love and hate, of justice, reality, and the unrestrained brutal beauty of the human spirit. It had given me my understanding of the meaning of existence. And in the end, it had put me at ease with myself. I had become the sort of person who got home Fridays and waited anxiously for Mondays.
That kind of intensity was hard to compete with. I tried to step back from it and appreciate the slower, less rabid hours that I spent outside school but I knew my appetite for the extreme, both mentally and emotionally, made me a complicated companion.
Tomaso glared. His shoulders pulled up under the black jacket. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t hate you. We don’t even know one another.”
Abruptly Tomaso jerked around and grabbed a chair. Twirling it briefly above his head, he then let loose and sent it flying across the room and into the finches’ cage. The birds fluttered as the cage swayed wildly, but it did not tip over. Lori squealed in surprise. Boo dove under the work table.
This reaction seemed to please Tomaso. He set off on a rampage. Tearing from one side of the room to the other before I even had a chance to move from the door, he flung books off the shelves, cleared the top of my desk with a swoop of his arm, ripped Lori’s work folder into quarters and threw it into the air like confetti. Another chair went flying. Luckily it only grazed the west wall of windows and fell harmlessly to the floor. Once he started, I remained against the door and did not move. I was fearful of inciting him further. Or letting him get loose outside the room.
Tomaso stopped and turned back to me. “There. Now you hate me, don’t you?”
“I’m not precisely in love with you for doing that, if that’s what you mean,” I replied. “But I don’t hate you and I don’t like your working so hard to make me do so.”
“But you’re mad, aren’t you? I made you mad, didn’t I?”
Cripes, what did this kid want? I had no idea what to say to him. I was not mad. I did not hate him. Terror was more along the lines of what I was feeling right then, but I was not going to admit that either. My palms had gotten cold and damp and I wiped them on my jeans. Birk did not prepare me at all for this one.
“I bet you think I feel sorry I done that,” he said. “Well, I don’t. Here, let me show you.” He grabbed a potted geranium off the counter and crashed it to the floor. “There.”
Still with my back to the door to keep him contained in the room, I did not move. My mind was going at the speed of light, trying desperately to sort out viable alternatives before the kid wrecked my entire room. Or worse, decided to hurt someone. My inaction was not so much from indecision as it was from fear of consequences if I made the wrong move. I did not reckon this boy gave much opportunity for replay.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” he said. “Cat got your tongue? Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you get mad? Aren’t you normal or something? Are you some kind of fucking crazy teacher?”
“I’m not going to let you make me angry Tomaso. I don’t want to feel that way.”
“You don’t? You don’t?” He sounded outraged. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go ahead and hate me like everybody else does/ What makes you think you’re so special?”
“Tomaso, sit down. Take off your jacket and sit down. It’s time we got started on the afternoon’s work.”
Reaching down for a piece of the broken pot, he lofted it at me. Not a serious throw in my opinion. I imagine if he had meant it, he would have hit me. We were not that far apart, and I doubted that he missed when he aimed.
“What are you going to do about me? Are you going to suspend me? Are you going to get the principal?”
“No, I’m just going to wait until you decide it’s time to work.”
“Hey man, I ain’t never gonna decide that, so you might as well just give up.”
I waited. Sweat was running down along my sides and I pressed my arms against my body to stop it.
“At my other school they called the police. They took me to juvie. So you can’t scare me.”
“I’m not trying to scare you, Tomaso.”
“I don’t care what you’re trying to do. I don’t care about anything.”
“I’m just waiting, that’s all.”
“you can send me to the principal, if you want. And he can give me whacks. You think I haven’t had whacks before? I’ve had a million of them. And you think I care?”
I waited without saying anything. My stomach reminded me of the price I was paying for a calm exterior.
“I could bite your titties off”
My back against the coolness of the glass in the door, I waited.
“Hmmf. Mmmmmmph. Pphuh.” Tomaso was full of noises when I would not talk back to him. He was not ready to give in yet. Still too much pride at stake. And God only knows what else.
My gut feeling was that Tomaso did not really want to leave. No single thing I could put my finger on told me that, but I felt it. I studied him carefully.
Sometimes I think I missed my calling. I should have been a swindler. In the end, my best defense always seemed to come down to the good con game I play. My gut told me this boy was hot air. That was enough to go on. I pushed myself off the door and walked by him to the other side of the room. Righting chairs and slinging paper back onto my desk, I sat down at the work table. Reaching under, I pulled Boo out and sat him down in a chair. Then I beckoned Lori over and took out her L and O flashcards. My stomach was doing the cha-cha, a surefire clue to the extent of my concern for winning this game of psychological bunco. If he chose to walk out the door I would have no alternative but to go out and physically drag him back in. That would be a really lousy way to start any relationship. All I was operating on was a hunch. A hunch about a kid I did not even know.