Beautiful Child

by Torey Hayden

  “Who says you’re the boss?” Shane muttered and half rose out of his chair.

  I sliced my hand through the air meaningfully. Shane sat immediately. Gwennie eyed me a long moment, but then she sat too.

  “Okay, good. Thank you. Now,” I said, “I know what just happened is scary.”

  “It’s not scary! It’s exciting!” Billy shouted and shot off his chair, punching his fists like a boxer. “Psycho Girl Kills a First-Grade Baby! Pow! Bang!”

  “Shut up!” Jesse screamed and in a second he was off his chair and onto Billy, knocking him to the floor, pummeling him. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, you dickhead blabbermouth! I wanna stop hearing your voice all the time!”

  At this degeneration into fisticuffs, Julie’s shoulders sagged. She looked at me, and there was defeat in her expression. I have to admit, I was sort of short of spirit myself at that point.

  “Boys?” I didn’t bother to get off my chair. For just that moment I felt, well, if they wanted to slug it out.... “Boys?”

  The two grappled a minute or more on the floor but my lack of intervention seemed to perplex them. There was hesitation. Billy glanced in my direction. Jesse took advantage of Billy’s moment of inattention to pin him to the floor.

  “Are you quite finished?” I asked.

  Jesse was sitting astride Billy’s back. Billy started to cry when he found he couldn’t get up.

  “I said, are you quite finished?”

  Jesse looked over. He nodded and started to rise. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Jesse replied.

  “Yes, I know how you feel,” I said, “but that’s not how you do it.”

  Billy was indignant. “You’re suppose to be protecting me,” he snuffled. “Not letting some bad-ass black kid beat me up.”

  “She’s supposed to be shutting you up for once,” Jesse retorted.

  “Sit down. Billy, sit in your chair and be quiet. Jesse, you too.”

  Both boys did as they were told. Now, how long did I have before the next outburst? Thirty seconds?

  “Who saw what happened out on the playground?” I asked.

  “Me,” said Shane.

  “Me too,” Zane said.

  “I did! I did! I did! Call on me, Teacher!” Billy was jumping up out of his chair, waving his hand about six inches from my eyes.

  Jesse was eyeing Billy. I eyed Jesse. “Did you see, Jess?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “That girl—”

  “She has a name, Jesse. She’s been part of our class every day since school started, so let’s call her by her name.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” Billy interjected, “ ’cause she ain’t coming back. I heard Mr. Christianson say. Said she’s gonna have to go on homebound. I went on homebound. Last year. It sucks. ’Cause like you can’t do anything except stay at home. And my brother said I was lucky. He wanted to stay at home all the time.”

  “Jesse?” I asked, craning around Billy who was out of his chair and standing right in front of me.

  He shrugged. “Just what she always does. Kinda walking around on the playground looking mean. And then this kid comes up. Guess he must of bumped her or something. Dunno. Wasn’t watching. And then she just got chasing him and kept chasing him till he got up to the top of the monkey bars and then she pulled him off. Like I said. She was just doing what she always does. Beating kids up.”

  “Well, me, I’m glad she’s gone,” Billy said with feeling. “I’m glad Mr. Christianson’s making her go away. ’Cause she was psycho, even if you said she wasn’t. I didn’t like her in our class.”

  “Would you want someone to talk about you like that, Billy, if you had to go away?” I asked.

  “Well, if I was psycho like her, yeah. I wouldn’t mind. She was bad, Teacher. You were pretending she was ordinary all the time, but you weren’t a kid. If you were a kid, you would have knew she was bad.”

  After school, I was putting away things from my briefcase and came across the children’s books and the She-Ra comic I’d brought in for Venus. So, that’s it, I thought. End of that. I felt sad. It had ended before it’d even had a chance to get started. But that’s how it went sometimes. I put the two books on the reading shelf for the other children. The comic? I could see no point in keeping it. The character was out-of-date and not too exciting to start with. None of the kids would be interested. I leaned forward and pitched it toward the trash can sitting beside my desk. It fell in with a thump.

  So, we picked up and carried on without Venus.

  School had been in session almost eight weeks by this point, so I concentrated on bringing this little band of renegades closer together—mainly, if truth be known, so that I could get shoes back on them before the cold weather set in, because we were still at the stage of needing to remove shoes every time they came into the class.

  I found a sense of unity was one of the most crucial aspects of my type of milieu and a key to my success in working with these sorts of children. For many of them, particularly those who came with histories of disruptive, antisocial behavior, it was their first experience of “belonging,” of being part of any kind of positive, cohesive group. Once they felt this sense of belonging, the children often behaved better and demonstrated higher self-esteem than I could have inspired on my own. So I felt it was important to achieve this “group identity.” The challenge each autumn was how.

  In the normal course of things, eight weeks was more than enough time to “settle a class in.” During this period the children became accustomed to me and to the limits I set, to my forms of discipline, my expectations and the kind of work I gave out, and they became used to the dynamics of the group and how each person in it functioned. So by the end of this time, I expected all the kids to have a sense of the class as “us,” to feel a part of it and to find safety and security in knowing its rules.

  However, with this group it wasn’t quite as simple as it had been in other years. Eight weeks in and we were still without shoes, still sitting in tables at opposite corners of the room, and still routinely degenerating into fistfights. The Chipmunk society was a small help. The boys had developed a good sense of “us” in contrast to the other kids who spent time in our room—including, unfortunately, Gwennie, who spent enough time with us to be a part of the main class—but they had it only as in “us” versus “them,” which wasn’t really the idea. They liked wiggling their toes at one another, but they did it more to express antisocial feelings toward the part-time kids than as a show of unity.

  Consequently, I arrived one morning with a big wooden box that I had used in previous classrooms. In those days, it had been the Kobold’s Box, and I often made up stories for the kids about the “Kobold,” a little invisible gremlin who lived in our classroom and watched out for good behavior. When he saw someone behaving well, he wrote a little note describing the kindness and put it in the Kobold’s Box. But because the Kobold soon got writer’s cramp from so much good behavior, he needed help. So I asked for the children themselves to be on the lookout for kind behavior and when they saw it, to write notes and put them in the Kobold’s Box. This seemed a little cheesy for my rough-and-tumble group, so I told them it was the “Chipmunk Spy” box.

  “We’re going to do something different,” I said during morning discussion. “We’re going to see who’s the best secret agent in this group.”

  “You mean like James Bond!” Billy shouted. This called for instantly jumping out of his seat and up on top of the table. He pointed his finger like a gun and made shooting noises. Of course, this meant the other boys had to join in.

  I stood there and said nothing. This would eventually annoy them into sitting back down to find out what I was going to say next.

  So I explained the plan to them. At the beginning of the week, they would draw names to find out who their intended “victim” was. Then, each day they had to do something nice for that person—a good deed—but, and this was a big “but,” they were
secret agents! So, they had to do it secretly, so the other person didn’t know it was them. And at the end of the week, we’d try to guess who our secret agent was.

  I explained that each day the secret agent would have to come to me to confirm he had done a good deed. Then he’d write down what he had done for his “victim” and put it in the box. I said at the end of the week I’d read each of them out. To add a bit of gusto to the proceedings, I told them we’d have treats on Friday while we were doing the box, and the people who had managed to do a good deed every day for their “victim” would get a spy badge. I also suggested that if they wanted to be extra clever at being a secret agent, they could do good deeds for other people too, and that way they’d throw their “victim” “off the scent.”

  It wasn’t as straightforward as doing the Kobold’s Box. Indeed, all this “secret agent” business was rather complex, but that, I suspect, was what appealed to the boys. They were of the age to want to be in gangs and clubs, but they didn’t have the social skills to smooth the way. So, activities that involved lots of rules to be learned and challenges to master were very popular.

  “What about Gwennie?” Jesse suddenly asked.

  “What about Gwennie?” I replied.

  “Is she going to get included?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s not going to do it. If she’s someone’s secret agent, they won’t get no nice things done for them.”

  “But she’s part of the group,” I said.

  “Just in the afternoons,” Shane said. “So she ain’t a Chipmunk. Not really. We never said nothing about no girl Chipmunks.”

  “What about Venus? She was a girl,” I said. “She was a Chipmunk.”

  “Venus ain’t here no more. She don’t count,” Shane said.

  “Besides,” Billy added, “if we counted Gwennie, it’d be an odd number. This is only going to work if there’s an even number of us.”

  “But it would be Friday afternoon when we do the box and have treats. Gwennie is here on Friday afternoons,” I said. “It wouldn’t be fair not to include her.”

  “But she won’t do it,” Zane said. “She’d forget. That person wouldn’t get no secret stuff done to them.”

  I raised my eyebrows in an exaggerated expression of perplexity. “Perhaps we better not do it, if we can’t include Gwennie. Perhaps it was a bad idea.”

  “No, no, wait,” Billy cried. “We want to do it.”

  “What do you think we should do then?” I asked.

  The boys looked at one another. Billy shrugged. Jesse shrugged. This made the twins shrug in unison.

  I stood, silent, and waited.

  “Just leave her out,” Shane said finally.

  “I can’t do that. We have to come up with something that includes everybody.”

  Shane shrugged again. Again, there was a complete round of shrugs.

  “Maybe you could do Gwennie’s part,” Jesse said at last.

  “Yeah!” Billy cried. “Good idea, Jess! Teacher can do Gwennie’s part.”

  “Would that work?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Shane said. Zane nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Whoever Gwennie’s person is, I’ll give her a hand.”

  “Oooh, cool!” Billy cried. “A secret agent teacher!”

  Chapter

  12

  The week before Halloween, we had a visit from Ben Avery, the school psychologist. As part of a districtwide assessment and placement program, he was giving achievement tests, plus the WISC IQ test to all special education students in restricted placements, which included the children in my class. So this meant Ben was with us for four days.

  For the most part, I wasn’t in favor of all this testing. The accuracy was affected by so many things, such as cultural differences or socioeconomic factors, that they seemed a waste of time. I would have much preferred someone of Ben’s caliber contributing to the classroom environment for four days rather than closeting himself away with standardized tests. But it wasn’t my choice. So, one by one, he took the kids away.

  The first two days were spent on Shane and Zane and the results were, sadly, pretty much what I expected. Shane scored an IQ of 71 and Zane a score of 69—both right on the borderline of mental retardation. Both had severe reading problems. Indeed, Zane was still at the “prereading” stage of identifying shapes and letters. Shane was only just beginning to recognize the alphabet and a few simple words. Their math was a little better, but only just. Ben spent a lot of time with me afterward, discussing the wisdom of changing them over to a class for mildly mentally handicapped children, because he thought this might meet their needs better. Except for their difficult behavior.

  In the end I felt they were better staying with me. Jesse and Billy, who both came out of seriously deprived socioeconomic backgrounds, were not doing much better academically, so Shane and Zane were not dragging down what I could do in the class.

  The next day was Jesse’s turn and he, in fact, did better than I’d expected. He scored a full-scale IQ of 109, which was average. This was in contrast to his reading skills. The reading achievement test put him at a low first-grade level, which was close to where he was working in class. Ben’s other tests revealed serious weaknesses in auditory processing and visual integration, so Ben and I talked a long time that afternoon about learning disabilities and about how Jesse’s Tourette’s syndrome might be affecting his academic skills. I thought I would try to concentrate more on finding ways to make learning easier for Jesse. I’d done quite a lot of work with learning disabilities early in my career, so I decided to go home and check what materials I might have to help me assess what kind of learner he was and which of his senses were stronger. That way I hoped to bring his academic skills up closer to his ability level.

  As usual, Billy turned out to be the goat among the sheep.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Ben said when he came into my room after school the next day.

  Julie and I were sitting at one of the tables, making lesson plans. We both looked up.

  Ben pitched Billy’s WISC test, Frisbee-style, toward us. It spun in smooth circles the six or more feet until I caught it between my hands. I turned the paper over and lay it on the table.

  Verbal score: 145

  Performance score: 142

  Full scale IQ: 142

  “You’re kidding,” I said when I saw it.

  “Knowing Billy, he probably cheated,” Julie said.

  “Well, I didn’t see any crib notes up his sleeve,” Ben replied. “Nothing written on his palm saying ‘The definition of catacomb is …’”

  “Catacomb?” both Julie and I said in unison.

  “This can’t be our Billy,” Julie said. “I don’t think he’s ever completed a worksheet since he arrived.”

  Ben said, “This kid has definitely hidden his talents.”

  I was thinking more along the lines of alien abduction.

  Pulling the WISC score sheet over in front of me, I read it. A big surprise, certainly. Especially from a boy who was behind in everything and had never shown any academic inclinations whatsoever. But … the more I thought about it … it did explain a lot. We just hadn’t noticed it, because that wasn’t what we were looking for.

  The days passed. Then the weeks. Halloween came and it was celebrated with gusto in our room. Everyone wore their costumes, except for Gwennie, who hated it all. Shane came as Spiderman and Zane came as what I suppose one would call Spiderman II, as he had exactly the same costume. Jesse’s grandmother had made him a rather sweet black-and-white dog costume, and he arrived with long, floppy black ears attached to a headband and a shiny black nose painted over his own nose. I thought he was supposed to be the cartoon character Snoopy and praised his idea only to be told indignantly, no, he was “just a dog.” Billy opted for typecasting and came dressed as a red devil.

  Wild as the kids still were, I didn’t dare have a proper Halloween party, like other class
es were having. Instead, I made up little goody bags of candy and we had cookies and punch right after the afternoon recess. Even so, it was more chaos than fun. Because the kids were overexcited by the change in routine, there were lots of fights, crying, shouting, screaming, and “quiet chair” time, and Gwennie threw up on the rug in the reading corner because she ate too much candy. Nonetheless, I was glad we did it. We would have felt we’d missed out, if we hadn’t.

  Then came November with its long, gray, overcast days and cold, gusty winds.

  Venus never really left my mind during all this time. I kept checking the wall along the playground, half expecting to see her there. And half hoping. But I didn’t. She had vanished as completely as if she’d been nothing more than a mirage I’d seen, when I’d arrived at school that first day.

  Two of her brothers continued to attend the school. They were both in upper grades and both receiving extensive learning support, so I’d dawdled a bit in the teachers’ lounge when the learning support teacher, Mary McKenna, was there. I didn’t know Mary very well. She hadn’t been part of the district team when I’d been an itinerant learning support teacher. She was an older woman who gave the impression of being competent and efficient and she was friendly enough, but not openly so. Consequently, I found it hard to drop questions about Venus naturally into conversation with her. Moreover, I was self-conscious when Bob was in the room, because Bob knew immediately what I was doing.

  “Mary doesn’t have Venus,” Bob said to me out in the hallway after overhearing me one afternoon.

  “No, I know, I was just—”

  “Venus has a special homebound teacher. Someone from district eight. Homebound is all she does.”

  I nodded.

  There was a pause.

  “I was just wondering how she was doing. Wondering if her brothers had maybe said anything … I was just … I mean, have you heard any news?”

  Bob shook his head.

  “Nothing about how she’s getting on? If she’s talking? Or … anything?”

  Bob shook his head again.

  Then he clapped my shoulder in a reassuring, almost fatherly way. “Well, we weren’t ever going to get very far with her anyway.”