It was after school and Sheila and I had returned to The Little Prince yet again. Snuggled down in the pillows of the reading corner together, we had just begun the book. I had come to the part where the little prince demands that the author draw him a sheep.
“A sheep—if it eats bushes, does it eat flowers too?”
“A sheep,” I answered, “eats anything in its reach.”
“Even flowers that have thorns?”
“Yes, even flowers that have thorns.”
“The thorns—what use are they …?”
The prince never let go of a question, once he had asked it. As for me, I was upset over the bolt. And I answered with the first thing that came into my head:
“The thorns are of no use at all. Flowers have thorns just for spite!”
“Oh!”
There was a moment of complete silence. Then the little prince flashed back at me with a kind of resentfulness:
“I don’t believe you! Flowers are weak creatures. They are naive—”
Sheila laid her hand across the page. “I want to ask you something. What’s ‘naive’ mean?”
“It means someone whose ways are simple. They haven’t much experience with the world,” I replied.
“Do I be naive?” she asked, looking up.
“No, I wouldn’t say so. Not for your age.”
She looked back down at the book. “The flower thinks she has experience.”
I nodded.
“But the prince knows she doesn’t.” She smiled. “I do love this part. I love the flower.”
We read on:
So, too, she began very quickly to torment him with her vanity—which was, if truth be known, a little difficult to deal with. One day, for instance, when she was speaking of her four thorns, she said to the little prince:
“Let the tigers come with their claws!”
“There are no tigers on my planet,” the little prince objected. “And anyway, tigers do not eat weeds.”
“I am not a weed,” the flower replied sweetly.
“Please excuse me …”
“I am not at all afraid of tigers—”
The door to the classroom opened and the secretary stuck her head around the door. “Sorry to interrupt, Torey, but there’s a telephone call for you in the office.”
Handing Sheila the book, I rose and went down to take it.
It was the call I was dreading. The director of special education was on the other end of the line: a vacancy had come up in the children’s unit at the state hospital. Sheila’s time in my classroom was over.
To say I was devastated diminishes the enormity of the emotions I felt at that news. Whatever her difficulties, Sheila in no way belonged in a mental hospital. Intelligent, creative, sensitive, perceptive, she belonged here with us and, eventually, back in a normal class in a regular school.
I moaned, I pleaded, eventually I raged. The director listened. We got on well, he and I. I had always counted him among my allies in the district, the sort of man I relied on as a mentor, and this, if anything, made his call harder to take.
“It was settled long before any of us got into it, Torey,” he said. “You know that. There’s nothing we can do.”
Pathetic little flower, I thought, so proud of her fierce thorns, and when the tigers really came, the thorns gave no protection at all.
I simply couldn’t let it happen without a fight. When she had arrived in January, she had presented as bleak a case as I had ever encountered, and if they’d come for her then, I might have accepted it. But now …? The very thought of a child of Sheila’s caliber ending up institutionalized at six froze me to my soul.
That evening when I was home, ostensibly watching television with my boyfriend, Chad, a plan formed in my mind. I had so much evidence of both Sheila’s intelligence and her progress that I wondered if there might be a chance of changing things. It would have to be approached in a formal, unequivocal manner to be taken seriously and it would have to be undertaken rapidly. I glanced over at Chad. He was a very new junior partner in a law firm downtown and was spending much of his time as a court-appointed lawyer to those who couldn’t afford their own legal advice. So he knew the ropes.
“Is there a legal way to contest what they want to do with Sheila?” I asked cautiously.
“You fight it?” he replied, sensing the meaning under my words.
“Someone has to. I’m quite sure the school district would support me. The school psychologist has been in to administer IQ tests. He had evidence of her giftedness. And Ed knows.”
A pause. A few mutterings. I was the sort of person inclined, as Chad described it, “to get the bit between my teeth and run,” so I think he could guess the obsessive nature of what was going to happen.
“Would you take it on for me?” I asked.
“Me?”
Yeah, him.
And so it was. With admirable solidarity, the school district did back me fully. They even paid for Chad’s services. I marshaled together the videotapes I’d made of Sheila in class, her schoolwork, the psychologist’s evaluations and whatever other examples I could find to support Sheila’s steady improvement. The weakest link in the chain was Sheila’s father, who had been in and out of so many institutions himself that he didn’t seem to believe there was any point to pursuing a different life for his daughter. He was deeply suspicious of us because we did. Beneath his boorish behavior, I felt he did genuinely love Sheila, but it took several rather beery evenings between us to convince him we were right.
The hearing was held on the very last day of March, a dark, windy day that promised to bend the daffodils down yet again with snow. Sheila had had to come along, still dressed in her T-shirt and now badly outgrown overalls. They were clean and I had managed to get her father to accept socks and mittens for her from our church donation box, but that was the best I could do. She sat outside the courtroom with an attendant, in case we needed to call her in.
Inside, I saw the parents of the little boy whom Sheila had abducted and set alight. It was the first time I’d encountered them. Up to that moment, the incident that had placed her in my class had seemed distant to me. In truth, I suppose I had kept it distant in my mind in an effort to make such an act of calculated cruelty unreal. Sheila certainly had done some outrageous things and she had done plenty of them in my presence, so I’d always felt I had a realistic picture of her, but for the first time I had to confront the veracity of another point of view. This upset me, if for no other reason than that I had so desperately wanted to feel a hundred percent right in what I was doing just then. In a way I still did. Revenge would not undo the harm done to their son and it would cripple Sheila for life. This was the only right route for this girl. Yet the hearing brought home to me the enormity of what she had done.
The judge ruled in Sheila’s favor. She was to remain under Social Services supervision, but the order for detainment in the children’s unit was rescinded. Joy broke out in the halls of the courthouse, and afterward, Chad and I took Sheila out to celebrate.
It was a magical evening, one of those times when the experience is greater than the sum of its parts. Still high from our success, we went for pizza in a place Chad and I haunted frequently, full of smoke and jazz music and people speaking Italian. Sheila had never had pizza and took to the new experience with animated delight. Indeed, she took to Chad, and he, likewise,