The Other Brother (Chop, Chop Series Book 4)
Page 4
I sat down in front of the computer with Mariah.
“All right, Mariah,” I said. “I want you to tell me a story and I’m going to type what you say. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Once upon a time,” Mariah began, “there was a pretty fairy. She lived at the beach inside of a seashell. One day a crab crawled into her shell and scared her so she flew away. The end.”
“That’s all you want to say?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Are you sure? That’s kind of a short book.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay,” I hesitated. “I guess we can put one sentence on each page, and then you can draw a lot of pictures.”
In a few minutes I had Mariah’s ready and I called Amber over to the computer.
“I wanna be next,” Christian whined.
“Ladies first,” I told him, and then I smiled at Amber.
The first thing I noticed about Amber was that she had a rat’s nest in the back of her hair. How could anyone send a kid to school with a huge knot like that in their hair? I honestly didn’t see how anyone was ever going to get that mess untangled. She sat down in the chair next to me.
That’s when I noticed a second thing about her.
She stank. Or was that stunk? (Maybe I shouldn’t have been helping the kids with their writing after all . . .)
“Hi, Amber,” I said. “I want you to tell me a story, okay?”
She blinked at me.
What was that smell? Stale cigarettes?
“You just tell me what you want to say and I’ll type it for you . . . what do you want me to type?”
Second graders couldn’t have body odor, could they?
Amber didn’t say anything.
“She don’t talk,” Mariah informed me.
Cat urine?
“She doesn’t talk,” I corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
I sighed.
“What do you mean?” I asked Mariah.
“I mean she don’t talk. She don’t never say nothin’.” I let the triple negative slide.
I looked at Amber and took a deep breath (through my mouth). I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. Instead, she folded her hands onto her lap and then looked away, staring at the blank computer screen.
I finished Christian’s story and told Drake we’d start on his first thing the next day. Then I found Mrs. Spell.
“Does Amber ever talk?” I asked her.
“No.”
“How can she not talk? What’s wrong with her?”
“I can’t really get into specifics like that about a student.”
“Well . . . how am I supposed to work with her?”
“I know it’s hard,” Mrs. Spell acknowledged. “Just do what you can. I’m not expecting any miracles.”
~ ~ ~
“HEY, DORITO?” I asked that night at dinner. “You said yesterday that you and Amber are friends?”
“Yep,” he nodded, taking a big spoonful of applesauce.
“Do you two play together?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I play with her all the time.”
“What kinds of things do you two play?”
“Wolf.”
“Wolf?”
“Yep,” he nodded.
“And how exactly do you play that?”
“Well,” he said, “we make a nest in the mulch under the slide, and we catch tigers and stuff and feed them to our babies.”
“Uh-huh. And do you talk to her?”
“Sure.”
That was a dumb question.
“Does she talk to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell me something she says to you.”
“Umm,” he thought for a minute and then he rubbed his hand on his stomach . . . the sign for “hungry”.
“Oh!” I said. “She signs?”
“Uh-huh,” he said again, nodding. “I taught her how.”
The following Monday I knocked out Drake’s story in about ten minutes and then I called Amber over. She laid down her Harry Potter book and walked to me and sat down. Nothing had improved in the hair or body odor department.
“Hi, Amber!” I said. “You know I’m Dorito’s dad, right?”
She nodded.
“He says you guys play together.”
She nodded again.
“He says you use sign language sometimes?”
She nodded one more time.
“Well, you know what? I know sign language too! I thought maybe we could sign together. You wanna do that?”
Okay, she signed.
“Great!” I smiled. “Will you show me some of the words you already know?”
She nodded and slowly started signing: wolf, tiger, ice cream, puppy, baby, love, thirsty, hungry, water.
“That’s GREAT, Amber! Do you know anything else?”
She bit her lip and thought for a moment. Then she shook her head, no.
“Do you want to learn some more?” I asked and she nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, here’s what I think we should do. I think we should make up a story, and I’ll teach you how to sign the words in the story. Then you can read it to me using sign language. Does that sound okay?”
Okay.
“All right,” I said, turning to the keyboard. “Let me think here for a second.”
I started typing.
Once upon a time there were five little puppies.
She pointed at the words. Then she signed puppy.
“You can read that?” I asked her.
She nodded.
I typed again.
Touch your nose.
“Can you read that?” I asked her.
Nod.
“Do it,” I said.
She touched her nose.
Stand up and touch your elbow.
“Do that.”
She did it.
“Wow! You read great, Amber,” I said. “Can you write?”
She shrugged. I handed her a pencil and paper.
“Try to write something,” I suggested. “Write your name.”
She gripped her pencil tightly and bit her lip. She didn’t write anything.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Do you know what your name starts with?”
She nodded.
“It’s a B, right?”
She shook her head at me.
“Is it an A?”
Nod.
“Can you make an A?
Shrug.
“Can you try?”
She gripped the pencil tight again and made a tiny line on her paper. Then she erased it and looked dejected.
“It’s okay, Amber,” I assured her. “Can you find it on the computer?”
She nodded eagerly.
“Show me.”
She typed.
a . . . m . . . b . . . e . . . r
“That’s GREAT!” I said. “Type something else.”
She turned her body to the computer and began punching away at the keyboard. I watched – amazed – as the words slowly formed.
each puppy had a name and a specal coller from its mommy the puppy with the red coller was name coten and the puppy with the blue coller was name razebery and the puppy with the yello coller was name sunny and the puppy with the green coller was name doreto and the last puppy was amber.
“What color was Amber’s collar?” I asked her.
She thought for a moment and then she typed:
purpel
I couldn’t wait to tell Mrs. Spell, but she was less enthusiastic than I’d imagined she would be.
“I see,” she said when I showed her the paper I’d printed out.
“Isn’t this a big deal?” I asked. “I mean . . . she can read and she can write!”
“Well,” she said, “it’s a start, but I don’t think you need to be getting your hopes up too much.”
I must have looked dismayed.
“I mean . . . don’t get me wrong . . . you’ve made more progress with her in two days than anyone else has all year, but . . .”
“But what?”
“She’s a long way from reading and writing at the independent level we’d expect at this age.”
“She wrote this!” I said, waving the paper at her. Mrs. Spell looked at me skeptically.
“You think I don’t know how to spell purple?” I asked her.
“I’m sure you know how to spell purple, but–”
“Come watch, okay? Come watch what she can do.”
She said something to Ms. Amy, her teaching assistant.
“All right, everyone,” Ms. Amy called out to the class. “Let’s all get on the carpet for a story before we go out to recess.”
“Not you, Amber,” Mrs. Spell said. “Would you come over to the computer for a minute?”
Amber nodded and the three of us walked over to the computer.
I typed onto the computer:
Touch your nose.
Amber looked at me, then over her shoulder at Mrs. Spell, then she folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“It’s okay, Amber,” I assured her. “Do it.”
She didn’t move.
“Amber, what’s wrong? Touch your nose.”
She touched her nose.
“See?” I said.
“You told her to do it,” Mrs. Spell said.
“I know, but . . . she can read. You can read, can’t you, Amber?”
Amber shrugged at me.
I glanced up at Mrs. Spell who looked at me doubtfully.
“Amber,” I said, desperately, “type something. Come on. Type some more of your story.”
She looked at me uncertainly.
“It’s okay. Go ahead and type.”
She put her hands on the keyboard and typed:
hfidkfkjkl;p;ffnmmnt
“That’s good, Amber,” Mrs. Spell said, patting her on the shoulder.
“Don’t be discouraged,” Mrs. Spell said quietly to me. “She’s doing great.”
Then she gave me a look that defied me to say anything else about it. I gave her a little nod and she walked away.
I glanced back at Amber who was looking down at her hands in her lap again.
“Amber,” I said. She refused to look up.
“It’s okay, Amber,” I said. “You don’t have to show Mrs. Spell.”
She lifted her head uncertainly and looked as if she might burst into tears at any minute.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t cry. It’ll be our secret, okay? We don’t ever have to tell anyone else . . . I promise. Okay?”
She nodded and looked a little less like she was going to cry.
“Wanna go sit on the rug with me and hear the story?”
She nodded again, and we went to join story time.
“Maybe she can talk, too,” Laci suggested at lunchtime when I told her everything that had happened.
“What?”
“Maybe she can talk, too. She only reads and types when she wants to, so maybe she only talks when she wants to.”
“You really think so?”
“Maybe, I mean . . . why would she not be able to talk? I’ve never heard of someone’s voice box not working, unless they’ve had like cancer or something, right?”
“How can I find out if she can talk?”
“Simple,” she said. “Ask Dorito.”
I picked Dorito up after school.
“Where’s Mommy?” he wanted to know.
“Oh,” I said casually. “I just thought I’d pick you up for a change.”
“Okay.”
“How was school?”
“Good.”
“Good. Anything exciting happen?” I asked.
“Christian killed all our fish.”
“Oh, really? How’d that happen?”
“He pumped a bunch of soap into the fish tank.”
“That was mean.”
“There were a lot of bubbles.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Did he get in trouble?”
“No.”
“Why not?!”
“Because the teacher doesn’t know who did it.”
“But you do?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Well, did you tell the teacher?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not supposed to tattletale.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, so I decided to move on.
“Hey, Dorito?”
“What?”
“Does Amber ever talk?”
“No.”
“Not even to you?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I was just wondering.”
After dinner that evening, I called Mike.
“What’s up, Dave?”
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Actually, I’m on a date with my lovely wife.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll call you back later.”
“No, don’t worry about it. What’s going on?”
“Well,” I said, “there’s this little girl in Dorito’s class and she doesn’t ever talk – I mean, I think she’s mute – and I was wondering what would cause that.”
“And here I thought you were calling to invite me to go pheasant hunting or something,” Mike said, “but NO, once again you’re just using me for free medical advice.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a terrible friend.”
“Yes, you are,” he agreed. “I could charge you, and then you’d just be a terrible patient . . .”
“Deal.”
“Do you know anything about her?”
“Other than the fact that she stinks? No.”
“She stinks?”
“Yes.”
He paused. “Okay,” he finally said, “we’ll come back to that later. Have you seen any scars or evidence of surgery or trauma around her throat or mouth?”
“No.”
“Have you heard her make any sounds? Has she laughed or giggled or anything like that?”
“I haven’t even seen her smile.”
“Here, you’d better talk with Danica,” he said. “This sounds more like something up her alley.”
“Okay.”
“I should warn you, though,” he said. “She charges even more than I do.”
“I really do want to go pheasant hunting sometime . . .”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
I heard him fill Danica in on what I’d told him before he handed the phone to her.
“So apparently she’s mute?” Danica asked.
“I guess so. What would cause that?”
“Well, sometimes people are mute because something is wrong with their larynx or their larynx has been removed, but with children, that’s not usually what’s going on. With children it’s usually an emotional inability to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s no physical reason for it, but mentally . . . something’s keeping her from speaking. Does she talk at all? Ever?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Dorito’s never heard her talk.”
“Has she had the capability before, but now she’s lost it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell if she seems to have normal intelligence?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think she’s smart. Dorito’s been teaching her sign language and I think she’s reading way above grade level and she can type. I can’t get her to write, though.”
“Well, without examining her or knowing something further about her background, anything I suggest is purely conjecture . . .”
“I know,” I said, “but, like, if you had to take a guess, what would you say?”
&nb
sp; “Okay, well, we can rule out akenetic mutism, which is good, because that’s much more severe. I’d say it’s probably one of two things. If she’s not talking at all, I’d say it’s trauma-induced mutism. If she talks in some instances and not others, then we’re looking at selective mutism. But, no matter what it is, you need to understand that she’s probably suffering from a psychiatric disorder. She’s not simply choosing not to talk.”
“Trauma-induced mutism is caused by trauma?” I guessed.
“Generally,” she laughed.
“What about selective mutism?”
“It’s different from trauma-induced mutism. In trauma-induced mutism, usually the subject suddenly becomes completely silent in all situations, usually as the result of some type of psychological trauma. With selective mutism, the subject is capable of speech in certain situations. For instance, she may be silent at school but talk at home. Selective mutism isn’t necessarily the result of trauma, but of course that can’t be ruled out.”
“Do you think she’ll grow out of it?”
“Probably not without intervention,” Danica said. “Selective mutism can progress to the point where the subject won’t speak anywhere and trauma-induced mutism rarely resolves itself without intervention. In both cases, early treatment is very important. Is she under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, hopefully she is, but I will say it’s good that she types and signs. Keep encouraging her to do that. Emailing, texting, things like that are good too. Any way you can get her to communicate with you will help her to become mentally prepared for more direct communication.”
“Okay.”
“And let me know if you get any more information on her and I’ll see what I can tell you.”
“Thanks, Danica. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Tell Mike I’ll call him about pheasant hunting.”
“Yeah,” Danica laughed. “Like he’s got time to go pheasant hunting.”
“Hi, Amber,” I said when she came up to the computer on Tuesday morning.
She looked at me uncertainly.
“You wanna work on your story some more?” I asked.