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 was 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.
Unfortunately, the situation did not mend itself. The next day, too, Lori was kept in during recess and still she lugged her reading workbook in to me all full of errors. She was more resigned. No tears. The day after that was no different either. Or the day after that. If we did not get through the book during our time together, if mistakes still existed at the end of the day, Edna kept Lori after school also. Edna continued to perceive Lori’s mistakes as carelessness. That Lori maintained a sort of gritted-teeth composure throughout Edna’s disciplinary campaign and still did not get her work right convinced Edna it was a battle of wills.
The tension began to show on both sides. In with me, Lori could not concentrate at all. Everything would distract her. As the number of days lengthened, a distressful restlessness overtook her. As soon as she came into the room and sat down, she would have to get up again. Down, up, down, up. While working, she would lean back in her chair every few minutes, close her eyes and shake her hands at her sides to relieve the pressure. Edna was not escaping unharmed either. She redeveloped migraines.
The next Monday things came to a head. At Lori’s appointed time with me she did not arrive. I waited. Over by the animal cages with Boo, I talked to him about Sam in his shell. Yet my eyes were on the clock and my mind on Lori.
I knew Lori was not absent; I had seen her in the halls earlier. Finally when fifteen minutes had passed and she still did not show up, I took Boo by the hand and we went to investigate.
“I sent her to the office,” Edna replied at the door of her first-grade classroom. She shook her head. “That child has had it in this room, let me tell you. She took her reading workbook and threw it clear across the room. Nearly whacked poor Sandy Latham in the head. Could have put an eye out, the way she threw it. And then when I told her to pick it up, she turns around as pretty as you please, just like she was some little queen and says … well, let me tell you, it was a tainted word. Can you imagine? Seven years old and she uses words like that? I have the other children to think of. I’m not going to have them hearing words like that. Not in here. And I told her so. And sent her right down to Mr. Marshall. She earned that paddling.”
I too went right down to Mr. Marshall’s office, dragging Boo behind me because there was nothing else to do with him. There, sitting on a chair in the secretary’s office, was Lori, tears over her cheeks, a mangled tissue in her hands. She would not look up as Boo and I entered.
“May Lori come down to class with me?” I asked the secretary. “It’s her time in the resource room.”
The secretary looked up from her typing. First at me and then, craning her neck to see over the counter, at Lori. “Well, I suppose. She was supposed to sit there until she finished crying. You done crying?” she asked across the formica barrier.
Lori nodded.
“You going to behave yourself for once? No more trouble this afternoon?” the secretary asked.
Another nod.
“You’re too little to be getting in all this trouble.”
Lori rose from the chair.
“Did you hear me?” the secretary asked.
Lori nodded.
Back to me, the secretary shrugged. “I guess you can have her.”
We walked down the hallway hand in hand, the three of us. My head was down as we were walking and I looked at our clasped hands. Lori’s nails were bitten down to where blood caked around the little finger.
Inside our room I let go of both of them. Boo minced off to see Benny. Lori went directly to the worktable while I shut the door and fastened the small hook-and-eye latch I had purchased at the discount store.
On top of the worktable was one of the pre-primers I had been using with another student earlier in the day. Lori walked over to it and regarded it for a long moment in a serious but detached manner, as one views an exhibit in the museum. She looked back at me, then back at the door. Her face clouded with an emotion I could not decipher.
Abruptly Lori knocked the book off the table with a fierce shove. Around the table she went and kicked the book against the radiator. She grabbed it and ripped at the brightly colored illustrations. “I hate this place! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” she screamed at me. “I don’t want to read. I don’t ever want to read. I hate reading!” Then her words were swallowed up in sobs as the pages of the pre-primer flew.
Tears everywhere and Lori was lost in her frenzy. She clawed the book, her nails squeaking across the paper. Her entire body was involved, bouncing up and down in a tense, concentrated rage. When the last pages of the pre-primer lay crumpled, she pitched the covers of the book hard at the window behind the table. Then she turned and ran for the door. Not expecting it to be locked, she fell hard against it with a resounding thunk. Giving up a wail of defeat, she collapsed, her body slithering down along the wood of the door like melting butter.
Boo and I stood frozen. The entire drama was probably measurable in seconds. There had been no time to respond. Now in the deafening silence, I could hear only the muted frantic fluttering of Boo’s hands against his pants. And Lori’s low, heavy weeping.
The class was formed.
Following the incident in Edna’s room, Lori was assigned to me all afternoon, along with Boo. Tim and Brad, my two other afternoon resource students, were transferred to the morning, and now I had Lori and Boo alone for almost three hours. Although officially I was still listed as a resource teacher and these two as simply resource students, all of us knew I had a class.
According to the records, Lori was assigned the extra resource time for “more intensive academic help.” However, Dan Marshall, Edna and I – and probably Lori herself – knew the change had come about because we had come too close to disaster. Perhaps in a different situation Lori could have managed full time in a regular classroom, but here she couldn’t. In Edna’s conservatively structured program, Lori did not have adequate skills to function. To relieve the pressure on both sides, she spent the mornings in her regular class where she would still receive reading and math instruction along with lighter subjects, but in the afternoons when Edna concentrated on the difficult, workbook-oriented reading skills, Lori would be with me.
So there we were, the three of us.
Boo remained such 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 schizophrenic 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.
Our days did not vary much. Each afternoon Boo’s mother would bring him. She would open the door and shove Boo through, wave good-bye to him, holler hello to me and leave. Not once could I entice her