Our state school system was in the midst of one of its seemingly endless reorganizations. The previous year, I’d worked in an adjacent district as a learning support teacher. I was going from school to school to work with small groups of children and to provide backup support for teachers who had special education students integrated into their classrooms. Although this program had been in place only two years, the system decided it wasn’t working effectively enough with the bottom-end children. Consequently, a third of the learning support teachers were given permanent classrooms to allow children with more serious and disruptive behaviors to have longer periods of special education placement.
I jumped at the chance to give up the peripatetic lifestyle and have a classroom again, because I enjoyed that milieu enormously and felt it best suited my teaching style. Ending up in Bob’s school was a bonus.
“Wait till you see this room,” Bob was saying as we climbed the stairs. And stairs. And stairs. “It’s such a super room, Torey. From the time I knew you were coming, I wanted to give you someplace you could really work in. Special ed. so often gets the leftovers. But that’s the beauty of this big, old building.” We climbed yet another flight of stairs. “Plenty of room.”
Bob’s school was a hybrid building, part old brick lump from 1910, part prefab extension tacked on in the 1960s to cope with the baby boomers. I was given a room on the top floor of the old building and Bob was good for his word, because it was a wonderful room, spacious with big windows and bright freshly painted yellow walls and a little cloakroom-type niche for storing outerwear and students’ things. Indeed, it was probably the nicest room I’d ever been assigned. The downside was that three flights of stairs and a corridor separated me from the nearest toilet. The gym, cafeteria, and front office were almost in another galaxy.
“You can arrange things the way you want,” Bob was saying as he walked among the small tables and chairs. “And Julie’s coming in this afternoon. Have you met Julie yet? She’ll be your teaching aide. What’s the current politically correct term? Paralegal? No, no … para-educator? I don’t remember. Anyway, she’s only going to be in here half days. Sadly. I couldn’t finagle you more. But you’ll like Julie. We’ve had her three years now. She comes in the mornings as a support person for a little boy of ours who has cerebral palsy, but he goes for physiotherapy in the afternoons. So once she has him onto his transport, she’s all yours.”
As Bob talked I was walking around the room, peering here and there. I paused to check the view from the windows. That girl was still sitting on the wall. I regarded her. She looked lonely to me. She was the only child anywhere near the playground on this last day of summer vacation.
Bob said, “I’ll have your class list up for you this afternoon. The way we’ve arranged it, you’ll have five kids full-time. Then there’ll be about fifteen others who’ll come and go, depending on how much help they need. Sound good? What do you think?”
I smiled and nodded. “Sounds great to me.”
I was trying to shove a filing cabinet back out of the way when Julie arrived.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” she said cheerfully and grabbed hold of the other side. We wrestled it into the corner. “Bob told me you were hard at work up here. Are you getting on all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” I said.
She was a pretty girl – not a girl, really – she had to be older than she looked, but she was slightly built with delicate bones, pale, dewy skin, and clear green eyes. She had thick bangs and long, straight, reddish blonde hair, which was pulled back from her face in a sweet, schoolgirl style. Consequently, she appeared about fourteen.
“I’m looking forward to this,” she said, dusting off her hands. “I’ve been supporting Casey Muldrow since he was in first grade. He’s a super little kid, but I’m looking forward to something different.”
“If it’s ‘different’ you’re looking for, you’ve probably lucked out,” I said and smiled. “I usually do a good line in ‘different.’” Picking up a frieze, I let it drop to its full length. “I was thinking of putting this up over there between the windows. Do you want to give me a hand?”
That’s when I saw the child again. She was still on top of the same wall, but now there was a woman standing beneath her, talking up to her.
“That little girl has been on that wall for about four hours,” I said. “She was there when I arrived this morning.”
Julie looked out the window. “Oh yeah. That’s Venus Fox. And that’s her wall. She’s always there.”
“Why?”
Julie shrugged. “That’s just Venus’s wall.”
“How does she get up there. It must be six feet high.”
“The kid’s like Spiderman. She can get over anything.”
“Is that her mom with her?” I asked.
“No, it’s her sister. Wanda. Wanda’s developmentally delayed.”
“She looks old to be the girl’s sister,” I said.
Julie shrugged again. “Late teens. She might be twenty. She used to be in special ed. at the high school, but she got too old. Now she seems to spend most of her time trailing around after Venus.”
“And Venus spends most of her time sitting on a wall. This family sounds promising.”
Julie raised her eyebrow in a knowing way. “There’s nine of them. Nine kids. Most of them have different fathers. I think every single one has been in special ed. at one point or another.”
“Venus too?”
“Venus, definitely. Venus is way out to lunch.” Julie gave a little grin. “As you’ll get to find out for yourself soon enough. She’s going to be in here.”
“‘Way out to lunch’ how?” I asked.
“For one thing, she doesn’t talk.”
I rolled my eyes. “Surprise, surprise there.” When Julie looked blank, I added, “Elective mutism is my research specialty. In fact, I got my start on it when Bob and I were working together in a different program.”
“Yeah, well, this kid’s mute all right.”
“She won’t be in here.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Julie replied. “Venus doesn’t talk. I mean,doesn’t talk. Doesn’t say zip. Anywhere. To anyone.”
“She will in here.”
Julie’s smile was good-humored but faintly mocking. “Pride goeth before a fall.”
As I ran my finger down the class list, I came to one I knew well. Billy Gomez. Aged nine, he was a small boy of Latino origin with an unruly thatch of black hair, a fondness for brightly colored shirts, and the grubbiest fingernails I’d ever seen on a kid. But while Billy was small, he was not puny. He had the sleek, sturdy musculature of a weasel and a fierce aggressiveness to match. Ruled by an explosive temper and a very bad mouth, he’d gotten kicked out of two previous schools. I’d worked extensively both with him and his teacher the year before, but I hadn’t been particularly successful. Billy still ranted, raved, and fought.
The other three boys I did not know. The fifth child, as Julie predicted, was Venus.
When