Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her

Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her Torey Hayden A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination never to abandon a child in need from the internationally bestselling author of ‘One Child’ and No. 1 bestseller ‘Ghost Girl’.Seven-year-old Venus Fox never spoke, never listened, never even acknowledged the presence of another human being in the room with her. Yet an accidental playground 'bump' would release a rage frightening to behold.The school year that followed would prove to be one of the most trying, perplexing, and ultimately rewarding of Torey's career, as she struggled to reach a silent child in obvious pain. It would be a strenuous journey beset by seemingly insurmountable obstacles and darkened by truly terrible revelations. Yet encouraged by sometimes small, sometimes dazzling breakthroughs, as a dedicated teacher, Torey remained committed to helping a 'hopeless' girl, and patiently and lovingly leading her toward the light of a new day. Torey Hayden Beautiful Child Contents Cover (#uf25cd905-8084-5ec1-865b-ce46fe602ac0) Title Page (#u51fa434e-60ab-552d-9796-80a06451d20c) Chapter One (#ud26175f2-1758-553c-9ac1-e5887a22ceba) Chapter Two (#u64dcbbc9-ac2f-5a7e-9971-da045b6e7c37) Chapter Three (#ua8c9670a-91b7-515a-b6db-5b1f9c513517) Chapter Four (#u5375a4cb-a720-5872-b547-4f31479af9e9) Chapter Five (#u3114f22c-345e-54a7-b60c-1c895e2d99b1) Chapter Six (#u5ba15416-f274-5dd5-b3af-2a7a6f19fd67) Chapter Seven (#u5b955b9b-1a26-5feb-963c-b1fdcfbbb828) Chapter Eight (#ud702c7ef-bddc-5371-807a-4a1004dffddb) Chapter Nine (#u2a107ba6-f4d4-59a8-906f-ce121ceca43c) Chapter Ten (#u9bc3b886-6dce-574f-a21c-512af9aeca92) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Exclusive sample chapter (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Other Work (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names and some identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters. Chapter One (#ulink_006ef62f-77a6-5274-9cfc-0c9a4db391f1) The first time I saw her, she was atop a stone wall that ran along the west side of the playground. Lolling back with one leg outstretched, one drawn up, her dark hair tumbling opulently down behind her, she had her eyes closed, her face turned to the sun. The pose gave her the aura of some long-forgotten Hollywood glamour queen and that’s what caught my attention, because she could, in fact, have only been six or seven. I went on past her and up the walk to the school. Seeing me coming, the principal, Bob Christianson, came out from the school office. “Hey, darned good!” he cried heartily and clapped me on the shoulder. “Great to see you. Just great. I’ve been so looking forward to this. We’re going to have good fun this year, hey? Great times!” In the face of such enthusiasm I could only laugh. Bob and I had a long history together. When I was just a struggling beginner, Bob had given me one of my first jobs. In those days he was director of a program researching learning disabilities, and his noisy, casual, hippy-inspired approach to dealing with the deprived, difficult children in his care had alarmed many in our rather conservative community at the time. Admittedly, it had alarmed me a little in the beginning too, because I was newly out of teacher training and not too accustomed to thinking for myself. Bob had provided me with just the right amount of encouragement and direction while bullishly refusing to believe anything I claimed to have learned from my university course work. As a consequence, I spent a heady, rather wild couple of years learning to defend myself and finding my own style in the classroom along the way. At the time it was an almost ideal working environment for me, and Bob almost single-handedly molded me into the kind of teacher I would become, but in the end he was too successful. I learned not only to question the precepts and practicalities of the theories I was taught in the university, but I also began to question Bob’s. There was too much insubstantial pop psychology in his approach to satisfy me; so when I felt I’d grown as much as I could in that setting, I moved on. A lot of time had passed for both of us in the interim. I’d worked in other schools, other states, other countries, even. I’d branched out into clinical psychology and research, as well as special education. I’d even taken a couple of years away from education altogether. Bob, meantime, had stayed local and moved in and out of the private and public sectors, in and out of regular and special education. We’d stayed in touch in a rather casual way, although neither of us had kept close track of what the other was doing. As a consequence, it had been a delightful surprise to discover Bob was now the principal of the new school I was being sent to. 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.” Chapter Two (#ulink_2846d124-ae0b-503e-a6d9-263524ff72c6) 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 I arrived the next morning, Venus was again up on her wall. “Hello, Venus,” I said as I passed. No response. She didn’t even turn her head in my direction. I stopped and looked up. “Venus?” There was not even the faintest muscle twitch to indicate she was aware of being spoken to. “I’m your new teacher. Would you like to walk into the building with me?” Her failure to respond was so complete that the first thing I thought was she must have a hearing loss. I made a mental note to check on what tests she had had. Waiting a few minutes longer, I finally gave up and went on into the school alone. The first student to come into class was Billy. “Oh no! Not you!” he cried and smacked the center of his forehead with his palm. Hard. He almost fell backward with the blow. “Oh no. No, no, no. I don’t want to be in here. I don’t want you.” “Hi, Billy. I’m glad to see you too,” I said. “And guess what? You’re the first person here. So you get your pick of any table.” “Then I pick the table in the cafeteria,” he said quickly and bolted for the door. “Hey ho!” I snagged him by the collar. “Not literally any table. One in here.” Billy slammed his things down on the nearest one. “I don’t want any of these tables,” he said gloomily. “I just want to get the fuck out of here.” I put a finger to my lips. “Not in here, okay? You’re the oldest in here, so I need you to set a good example of how to talk. Do you think you can watch your tongue for me?” Billy put his fingers into his mouth and grabbed hold of his tongue. “I’ll try,” he garbled around his fingers, “but I don’t think I can pull it out far enough for me to watch.” “Billy, not literally.” Billy laughed hysterically. So much so, in fact, he fell off his chair. Just then Bob appeared, shepherding in two little boys with the most startlingly red hair I’d ever seen. It was red. Bright, copper penny red, worn in a floppy style over small, pointed faces that were generously splattered with raindrop-size freckles. “This is Shane,” Bob said, putting a hand a little more firmly on the boy to his right. “And this is Zane.” Shane and Zane? God, why did parents do this to their kids? They were identical twins, dressed in what I can only describe as ventriloquist’s dummy style: polyester pants, striped shirts, and, quite incredibly, bow ties. Billy was as amazed by their appearance as I was. “Are they Dalmatians?” he asked incredulously. Before I could respond a heavyset African – American woman wearing a bright, flowery dress appeared and pushed forward a slender, almost lanky-looking boy. “This here’s Jesse,” she said, keeping both hands on the boy’s thin shoulders. “This here’s Jesse’s classroom?” Bob stepped aside, and the woman propelled the boy into the room. “You be good for Grandma. You be special for this here lady and Grandma’ll hear all the good things you done today.” She kissed him soundly on the side of the head. The boy flinched. Then she departed out the door. “Here,” I said. “Do you want to take a chair here?” The boy tossed his belongings down with an angry-sounding thud. “Oh no, you don’t. Not here. You’re not sitting here,” Billy cried. “No ugly black kid’s going to sit here, because I’m sitting here. Teacher, you put him someplace else.” “You want to fight about it?” Jesse replied, making a fist. The boys lunged at each other right over the tabletop and went crashing to the floor. I leaped in, grabbing Billy by the collar and pushing Jesse aside. Bob grinned with rather evil relish. “I see you have everything in hand, so I’ll leave you to it,” he said and vanished out the door. “I’m not sitting with him. He’s crazy,” Billy said and grabbed his stuff from the table. “I’d rather sit with the Dalmatians. Come here, you guys. This here’s our table. That ugly kid can sit alone.” I grabbed Billy’s shoulder again. “For now I think everyone’s going to sit alone. One person per table. You sit here. Zane? Are you Zane? You sit here. Jesse, there. Shane, over here. Okay, these are your tables. And your chairs. So remember where they are, because I want your bottoms glued to those chairs unless you have permission to be somewhere else.” “Glued on?” cried Billy and leaped up. “Where’s the glue?” He was over to the bookshelves already, rummaging through a basket. “Got to glue my bottom to that chair.” “Billy, sit down.” “But you said ‘glued on.’ I’m just doing what you said.” “Sit down.” With a cheerful smile, he sat. “We got whole tables to ourselves?” he said. “These are our tables?” “Yes, those are your tables.” “Wow,” he said and smoothed his hand over the wood surface. “Cool. My own table. Wonder where I’m going to put it when I get home.” “Billy!” “Is there only going to be four of us in this here class?” Jesse asked. Suddenly I remembered Venus. The bell had rung, and she wasn’t in the classroom. I crossed to the window. Venus was still on the wall, but below her was Wanda, arms reaching up. Gently she lifted Venus down. I saw them approach the school building. Wanda came all the way up to the classroom door with her sister. She was a big, ungainly girl, at least thirty pounds overweight, with bad acne and straggly hair. Her clothes were wrinkled, ill-fitting, and noticeably smelly. “Hello,” I said. “Her come inside now,” Wanda said in a cheerful manner. “Come on, beautiful child. Time to go to school.” Venus looked up at me with a full, open gaze, making unabashed eye contact. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back; she just stared. “Here.” I offered my hand. “Shall I show you to your table?” “Her no talk,” Wanda said. “Thank you for your thoughts,” I replied, “but now it’s time for Venus to be in school.” I kept my hand outstretched to Venus. “Time to get started.” “Her no come to school.” “I don’t think you go to school, do you, Wanda? But Venus does. Come on, sweetheart. Time to find your seat.” “Go on, beautiful child,” Wanda whispered and put her hands on Venus’s back. She pushed the child gently into the room. “Good-bye, Wanda,” I said. “Thanks for bringing her. Do you want to say good-bye to Wanda, Venus? Shall we say, ‘See you after school, Wanda’?” “Bye-bye, beautiful child,” Wanda said. Then she turned and ambled off. “Beautiful child” was not the epithet I would have given Venus, now that I had a chance to look at her up close. She was neither clean nor well cared for. There was the dusky cast of worn-in dirt to her dark skin, and her long hair hung in matted tendrils, as if someone had tried to make dreadlocks out of them and failed. Her clothes were too big and had food stains down the front. And like her sister, she smelled. “Okay, sweetheart, you can sit in this chair.” “How come you’re sitting her at the Dalmatian’s table?” Billy asked. “How come you don’t make her sit with that ugly black kid. You should put all the black kids together.” “Actually, Billy, we don’t sort people by color in here, so I would prefer it if you stopped going on about it,” I replied. “I’d also prefer it if you’d stop saying ‘Dalmatian.’ He’s not a dog. He’s a boy and his name is Zane.” “My name’s Shane,” the boy said in an annoyed tone. “And you shut up, stupid kid.” “I’ll tell you who’s stupid!” Billy shouted angrily. “You want me to punch your lights out?” Before I knew what was happening, Billy lunged at Shane. But no quailing from Shane. He lunged back. “Yeah! I wanna beat your head in!” he shouted. “I’m gonna pound you to a bloody little zit on the sidewalk and then step on you!” “Yeah!” Zane chimed in. “Me too!” And I was thinking, Gosh, this is going to be a fun year. I was pathetically glad to see Julie when she showed up at one o’clock. The morning had been nothing but one long fistfight. Shane and Zane, who were six, had arrived in the classroom with a diagnosis of FAS – fetal alcohol syndrome – which is a condition that occurs in the unborn child when alcohol is overused in pregnancy. As a result, they both had the distinctive elflike physical features that characterize fetal alcohol syndrome, a borderline IQ, and serious behavioral problems, in particular, hyperactivity and attention deficit. Even this glum picture, however, was a rather inadequate description of these pint-size guerrillas. With their manic behavior, identical Howdy Doody faces, and weird, out-of-date clothes, they were like characters from some horror film come to life to terrorize the classroom. Jesse, who was eight, had Tourette’s syndrome, which caused him to have several tics including spells of rapid eye blinking, head twitching, and sniffing, as if he had a runny nose, although he didn’t. In addition, he obsessively straightened things. He was particularly concerned about having his pencils and erasers laid out just so on his table, which was not a promising road to happiness in this class. The moment the others realized it mattered to him, they were intent on knocking his carefully aligned items around just to wind him up. Also not a good idea, I discovered quickly. His obsessiveness gave Jesse the initial impression of being a rather finicky, fastidious child. However, beneath this veneer was a kid with the mind-set of Darth Vader. Things had to be done his way. Death to anyone who refused. Compared to these three, Billy seemed rather tame. He was just plain aggressive, a cocky live wire who was willing to take on anyone and everyone, whether it made sense or not; a kid whose mouth was permanently in gear before his brain. Permanently in gear, period. I’d been forced to more or less ignore Venus over the course of the morning because I was too busy breaking up fights among the boys. She didn’t appear to mind this inattention. Indeed, she didn’t actually appear to be alive most of the time. Plopped down in her chair at the table, she just sat, staring ahead of her. I’d offered some papers and crayons at one point. I’d offered a storybook. I’d offered a jigsaw puzzle. Admittedly, all this was done on the run, while chasing after one of the boys, and I’d had no time to sit down with her, but even so … Venus picked up whatever it was I’d given her and manipulated it back and forth in a sluggish, detached manner for a few moments without using it appropriately. Then, as soon as I turned away, she let it drop and resumed sitting motionlessly. Once Julie arrived, I gave her the task of refereeing the boys and then took Venus aside. I wanted to get the measure of Venus’s silence immediately. I wasn’t sure yet if it was an elective behavior that she could control or whether it was some more serious physical problem that prevented her from speaking, but I knew from experience that if it was psychological, I needed to intervene before we developed a relationship based on silence. “Come with me,” I said, moving to the far end of the room away from Julie and the boys. Venus watched me in an open, direct way. She had good eye contact, which I took as a positive sign. This made it less likely that autism was at the base of her silence. “Here, come here. I want you to do something with me.” Venus continued to watch me but didn’t move. I returned to her table. “Come with me, please. We’re going to work together.” Putting a hand under her elbow, I brought her to her feet. Hand on her shoulder, I directed her to the far end of the room. “You sit there.” I indicated a chair. Venus stood. I put a hand on her head and pressed down. She sat. Pulling out the chair across the table from her, I sat down and lifted over a tub of crayons and a piece of paper. “I’m going to tell you something very special,” I said. “A secret. Do you like secrets?” She stared at me blankly. I put on my most “special secret” voice and leaned toward her. “I wasn’t always a teacher. Know what I did? I worked with children who had a hard time speaking at school. Just like you!” Admittedly, this wasn’t such an exciting secret, but I tried to make it sound like something very special. “My job was to help them be able to talk again anytime they wanted.” I grinned. “What do you think about that? Would you like to start talking again?” Venus kept her eyes on my face, her gaze never wavering, but it was a remarkably hooded gaze. I had no clue whatsoever as to what she might be thinking. Or even if she was thinking. “It’s very important to speak in our room. Talking is the way we let others know how we are feeling. Talking is how we let other people know what we are thinking, because they can’t see inside our heads to find out. They won’t know otherwise. We have to tell them. That’s how people understand each other. It’s how we resolve problems and get help when we need it and that makes us feel happier. So it’s important to learn how to use words.” Venus never took her eyes from mine. She almost didn’t blink. “I know it’s hard to start talking when you’ve been used to being silent. It feels different. It feels scary. That’s okay. It’s okay to feel scared in here. It’s okay to feel uncertain.” If she was uncertain, Venus didn’t let on. She stared uninhibitedly into my face. I lifted up a piece of paper. “I’d like you to make a picture for me. Draw me a house.” No movement. We sat, staring at each other. “Here, shall I get you started? I’ll draw the ground.” I took up a green crayon and drew a line across the bottom of the paper, then I turned the paper back in her direction and pushed the tub of crayons over. “There. Now, can you draw a house?” Venus didn’t look down. Gently I reached across and reoriented her head so that she would have to look at the paper. I pointed to it. Nothing. Surely she did know what a house was. She was seven. She had sat through kindergarten twice. But maybe she was developmentally delayed, like her sister. Maybe expecting her to draw a house was expecting too much. “Here. Take a crayon in your hand.” I had to rise up, come around the table, grab hold of her arm, bring her hand up, insert the crayon, and lay it on the table. She kept hold of the crayon, but her hand flopped back down on the table like a lifeless fish. Picking up a different crayon, I made a mark on the paper. “Can you make a line like that?” I asked. “There. Right beside where I drew my line.” I regarded her. Maybe she wasn’t right-handed. I’d not seen her pick up anything, so I’d just assumed. But maybe she was left-handed. I reached over and put the crayon in the other hand. She didn’t grip it very well, so I got up, came around the table, took her left hand, repositioned it better and lay it back on the table. I returned to my seat. Trying to sound terribly jolly, I said, “I’m left handed,” in the excited tone of voice one would normally reserve for comments like “I’m a millionaire.” No. She wasn’t going to cooperate. She just sat, staring at me again, her dark eyes hooded and unreadable. “Well, this isn’t working, is it?” I said cheerfully and whipped the piece of paper away. “Let’s try something else.” I went and got a children’s book. Putting my chair alongside hers, I sat down and opened the book. “Let’s have a look at this.” She stared at me. It was a picture dictionary and the page I opened to was full of colorful illustrations of small animals driving cars and doing different sorts of jobs. “Let’s look at these pictures. See? They’re all in a bus. And what are they? What kind of animals are they? Mice, aren’t they? And there’s a police car, and look, one of the policemen is a lion. What kind of animal is the other policeman?” She stared up at me. “Here, look down here.” I physically tipped her head so that she’d look at the page. “What’s this other animal? What kind of animal is he?” No response. “What is he?” No response. “What is he?” No response. Absolutely nothing. She just sat, motionless. “Right here.” I tapped the picture. “What kind of animal is that?” I persisted for several minutes longer, rapidly rephrasing the question but keeping at it, not letting enough silence leak in to make it seem like silence, taking up the rhythm of both sides of the conversation myself, all with just one question: what animal is that? Bang! I brought my hand down flat on the table to make a loud, sudden noise. It was a crude technique but often a very effective one. I hoped it would startle her over the initial hurdle, as it did with many children, but in Venus’s case, I was also interested just to see if it got any reaction out of her. I hoped to see her jump or, at the very least, blink. Venus simply raised her head and looked at me. “Can you hear that?” I asked. “When I bang my hand like that on the table,” I said and banged it suddenly on the tabletop again, “can you hear it?” “I sure can!” Billy shouted from the other side of the classroom. “You trying to scare the shit out of us over here?” Venus just sat, unblinking. Leaning forward, I pulled the book back in front of me and started to page through it. “Yes, well, let’s try something else. Let’s see if we can find a story. Shall I read a story to you?” Eyes on my face, she just stared. No nod. No shake of the head. Nothing. There was very little to denote the kid was anything more than a waxwork accidentally abandoned in the classroom. “Yes, well, I have an even better idea. What about recess?” She didn’t react to that either. Chapter Three (#ulink_286a07eb-29a5-5581-9150-01db116ff618) “All right,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee in the teachers’ lounge, “joke’s over. What’s wrong with Venus Fox?” I looked pointedly at Bob. Bob took a sip from his mug. “That’s what you’re here to tell me, I believe.” “So far I’m still working on whether she’s alive or not.” “Oh, she’s alive all right,” Bob replied. A moment’s silence intruded. Julie was making herself a cup of tea over by the sink, and she turned to look at us when the conversation paused. “My first impression is that she’s deaf,” I said. Bob took another swallow of his coffee. “Has anyone had her tested?” I asked. “Because it would be a shame to put a kid in my kind of class, if she’s actually hearing impaired. I don’t sign well at all.” “She was sent to an ENT specialist at the hospital last year,” Bob replied. “Apparently they had such a hard time testing her that they ended up giving her an ABR.” “What’s that?” I asked. “Auditory brainstem response,” Julie answered. “It’s a test that tells whether the brain is registering any sound. The test measures the brain’s response to sound stimulation, so you can determine if someone is hearing, even if they aren’t verbal.” “And?” I asked. “And she seems to be hearing fine.” “Oh,” I said and a faint sense of dismay settled over me. After working with her, I’d become so convinced that Venus’s problems stemmed from hearing loss that I’d felt I pretty much had a handle on her. We’d make arrangements for hearing tests and off she would go for the appropriate equipment and, eventually, the appropriate classroom. I looked around, first at Julie, then back at Bob. Really, I hadn’t expected that answer. One of the other teachers, a third-grade teacher named Sarah, looked over. “I think what we’re going to discover with Venus is that she just doesn’t have much. Up there, if you know what I mean.” Sarah touched her temple. “Venus looks blank because, basically, she is blank. It’s a family thing. Every one of the Fox kids. They’re all…” Her voice trailed off and she didn’t finish the sentence, but then she didn’t have to. I knew what she was saying. Bob sighed. “I’m hoping that’s not going to be the case, but no, it’s not a bright family.” Noise of a tremendous commotion on the playground began to filter in through the window. For just the briefest moment all the teachers in the lounge paused, alert, before going to the window to see what was happening. I didn’t bother with the window because I knew immediately it was one of mine. An identifying factor of disturbed children, I’d discovered, was the uninhibited scream. Ordinary kids could yell, shout, or squeal loudly with delight, but by six or seven, they’d been pretty much socialized out of screaming in that peculiarly high-pitched, desperate way. Not so my kids. So, I didn’t bother peering out the window. Setting down my coffee, I zipped out the door and down the hallway to get to the playground. There on the far side beneath the spreading sycamore trees were the two playground supervisors, prying kids apart. Recognizing Billy’s brightly colored shirt amid the fray, I sprinted across the asphalt. As well as Billy, there was Shane (or Zane) and – the two teachers were battling to separate the kids, so I couldn’t immediately tell who the third one was – Venus! Venus, all right. Venus, as a virtual buzz saw of arms and legs, whizzing fiercely at Billy. More shocking yet, it was Venus who was making most of the noise. And what a weird noise it was – an eerie ululating sound, so loud and high pitched that it made my ears hurt. She kept at it, screaming and thrashing, until she broke free of the teacher’s grip and threw herself viciously at Billy, who already had a bloody nose. The other teacher was holding on to both Billy and Shane; but when Billy saw Venus coming at him again, he pulled himself free and started running. Venus went in hot pursuit. I took off after the two of them, as did Julie, who had just come out of the building, as did Bob and another teacher. We were like the characters in the children’s story “The Gingerbread Boy,” all chasing one after another after Venus, who was after Billy. When Billy reached the wall at the end of the playground, Venus cornered him and started to pummel him with unrestrained fury. She wasn’t ignorant of us bearing down on her, however, because the moment I came within touching distance, Venus scurried up and over the wall. Spiderman, indeed, I thought. With a not-too-graceful leap, I hoisted myself up and over the wall too, leaving Bob and Julie and the other teacher to scrape what remained of Billy off the pavement and put him back together. Venus had the advantage of knowing where she was going while I did not. She bolted out through the underbrush, cut across someone’s backyard, and ran down the alley. I pelted after her, doing the best I could to keep up with her. She was surprisingly lithe when it came to getting over or under things, but I had the longer legs. About half a block from the school I finally outran her, catching her by snatching hold of the material of her dress. “Stop! Right there!” She tried to jerk away, but I had a good hold of the fabric. With my other hand, I grabbed her arm. For a moment we just stood, both panting heavily. Venus had scraped knees but otherwise looked none the worse for her altercation with Billy. She eyed me carefully and there was a lot more life in her glare than anything I’d seen earlier. “This isn’t how we do things when you are in my class,” I said and secured my grip on her arm. “Back to school we go.” She dug her feet into the grass. “No, we’re going back to school. It’s schooltime. You belong there.” Venus was not going to cooperate. There seemed no alternative but to pick her up and carry her back. Realizing what I was trying to do, she exploded into a furious array of arms and legs, hitting and kicking. As a consequence, we made very slow progress getting back to the playground. The total distance was about two blocks and she made it impossible for me to carry her for more than a few yards at a time before I had to set her down and get a better grip. Finally Bob came to my rescue. Seeing me struggling up the street, he joined me and took hold of Venus’s other side. Together, we frogmarched her back into the building. Venus hated this. The moment Bob touched her, she began to scream in her odd, high-pitched way again. She struggled, screamed, struggled more. Finally we managed to get her into the school building and all the way up the stairs to my classroom. Bob, between pants, said, “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, putting you way up here.” Once we reached the room, Bob let go, but I kept hold of Venus’s arms. Julie was in the classroom with the other children and they all watched us warily. Bob, seeing the situation was more or less in hand, bid good-bye, closed the door, and left me to sort things out. There wasn’t a lock on the door, so I told Julie to stand in front of it. Hauling Venus across the room, I tugged out the chair assigned to be a “quiet chair” with my foot. I plopped her in it. “You sit there.” She screamed and struggled. I held her in the chair. “You need to stay here. Until you can get control again and not fight, you need to sit here.” Very cautiously I removed my hands, expecting her to dart up and run for the door, but she responded just the opposite to what I’d anticipated. The moment I let go, Venus immediately fell silent. She slumped forward in the chair, as if she were very tired. “In this room we do not hurt others. We don’t hurt ourselves. That’s a class rule.” “That’s two rules,” Billy piped up from his table. “That’s one rule, Billy,” I said fiercely. “The rule is: we do not hurt. Anything.” “Not even flies?” Billy asked. “We’re not allowed to hurt flies in here?” Julie, recognizing a flashpoint situation when she saw one, quickly intervened, ushering Billy over to join the other boys, who were working with clay. I turned back to Venus, who remained sitting in the time-out chair. She was watching me carefully, her heavy, hooded eyes so unreadable as to be virtually vacant. “I’ll set the timer for five minutes,” I said. “When it rings, you may get up and rejoin us.” Putting the ticking timer on the shelf in front of the chair, I backed off carefully, half expecting her to make a bolt for the door when my back was turned. Not so. Venus didn’t move. The timer rang. Venus still did not move. “You may get up now,” I said from the table where I was working with Jesse. No response. I excused myself from Jesse and went over to her. “This is the quiet chair. It’s for when you get out of control and need a quiet moment to get yourself back together again. But once you’ve calmed down, you don’t have to sit in the quiet chair anymore. Come on. Let’s get you started on the clay. We’re making pinch pots. Have you done that before?” Venus gazed at me. From her look of total incomprehension, I might as well have been speaking Hindi to her. I put a hand under her elbow and encouraged her to rise from the chair, which she did. I guided her over to where we were all working with the clay. “Here. Sit here.” She just stood. Gently, I pressed her shoulder with one hand to get her to sit in the chair. I pulled out the adjacent chair and sat down. Picking up a ball of clay, I showed it to her. “Look, what’s this? Clay. And see? See how Jesse’s doing it? You just push your thumbs into the ball of clay…” Her eyes didn’t even move to the clay. They stayed on my face, as if she hadn’t even heard me. Did she hear? It seemed hard to believe. I’d come across a lot of kids with speech and language problems in my time but none so unresponsive as this. Was this ABR test really accurate? Could there be some kind of failure between the brain and the ears that they hadn’t noticed? I rose up. “Come here, Venus,” I said. Which, of course, she didn’t. I had to go through the whole rigamarole again of getting her up out of one chair and over to another part of the classroom. Guiding her to the housekeeping corner, I sat down on the floor and looked through the toys. My sign language was rusty and what little I did remember seemed primarily to be signs for abstract concepts like “family” or “sister,” but here was a concrete word I knew. “Doll,” I signed and held up a baby doll. “Doll.” Venus watched me, her brow faintly furrowed, as if she thought I was doing something really odd. I signed again. “Doll.” I made the sign very, very slowly. Reaching over, I lifted her hand. Putting it on the doll, I made her fingers run over the plastic features of the toy. Then I endeavored to make the sign with her fingers. I held the doll up. I signed again myself. “Doll.” The last twenty minutes of the school day passed thus. Venus never responded once. At last the end-of-day bell rang. Julie escorted those who went by bus down to their rides while I saw out the ones who walked home. Then I retreated to the file cabinets in the main office to have a better look at the children’s files. I pulled out Venus’s and sat down. Julie came in, carrying mugs of coffee for us both. She took out a chair on the other side of the table and sat down. “Well, that was an experience,” she said. “I’d like to think this is first-day jitters and everything will settle down.” I looked over. “Has that happened with Venus before, do you know? Have you seen her attack kids before?” A pause, a hesitancy almost, and then Julie nodded. “Yes. Truth is, I think that’s more why she’s in this class than because of her speech. Last year they ended up having to keep her in during recesses because she does nothing but pick fights.” “Oh great. Five kids, all with a mission to kill.” “Kind of like being in the OK Corral in your room, isn’t it?” Julie said rather cheerfully. I looked up. “Didn’t you notice all the cowboy names? Billy – Billy the Kid. Jesse – Jesse James. And Shane. And Zane. And everything’s shoot ’em up.” She laughed. “I don’t remember any cowboys named Venus.” “Well, not cowboys,” Julie said. She considered a moment. “Her name doesn’t fit,” I said. Julie gave a slight shrug. “Neither does the kid.” Venus’s file made depressing reading. She was the youngest of nine children fathered by three different men. The man who fathered the four eldest children, including Wanda, had been committed to the penitentiary for grievous bodily harm, had been released, had robbed a bank, had been jailed again, released again, and finally died three years later while in detention on drug-dealing charges. The second man, who fathered the next two children, had beaten Venus’s mother so severely when she was pregnant that the baby was stillborn. He was convicted of abuse toward three of the children, released, then later charged on animal cruelty for throwing a puppy onto a freeway from a bridge. The third man fathered the remaining three children, including Venus. He had a string of burglary convictions and other crimes related to drug and alcohol problems, but had also been charged with pedophile activity. He was currently out of prison and living elsewhere, as he’d been banned from having any contact with the children. Venus’s mother had a long history of prostitution and had been in and out of detox centers for drug and alcohol abuse. She now lived with seven of her nine children, three of whom had been officially labeled as mentally defective, and all of whom had been in one form of special education or another. The eldest, a son a year older than Wanda, was now in prison. A fifteen-year-old son was in a juvenile detention center. The next eldest daughter, who was seventeen, had suffered a seizure while in police custody the previous year and was now brain damaged. Two other children, boys aged nine and twelve, were mentioned as having serious communication problems and were receiving speech therapy. There was actually very little in the file that was specific to Venus herself. I think the general opinion was that by including her family history, Venus’s problems were self-evident. There were no notes on pregnancy or birth complications, nothing to denote whether or not her early development was normal. She had first come to the attention of the authorities when she reached age five and was registered for kindergarten. It was noted at this time that she was almost totally silent and, in general, very unresponsive. Except on the playground. Except when challenged or threatened. Then Venus seemed to call on an inner strength of almost comic book proportions. She screamed. She shouted. Some people even thought she swore. The idea would have seemed almost laughable – silent, unprepossessing seven-year-old girl metamorphoses into vicious little killing machine – if I hadn’t witnessed it for myself. I flipped the file shut. Chapter Four (#ulink_f465b50a-22e8-578f-9d02-eee3ec8aa3de) When I arrived the next morning, Billy was already there, sitting in the classroom. “What’s this?” I asked in surprise. “It’s only eight-ten.” “I gotta come early. My god-damned bus don’t come no later.” I put a finger to my lips. “My god-darned bus don’t come no later.” “How about just ‘darned.’ Darned bus doesn’t come any later?” He curled his lip up in an irritable snarl. “So why aren’t you out on the playground?” I asked. “The bell doesn’t ring until eight-thirty-five.” “Fucking girl’s out there.” I put a finger to my lips again. “We’ve got to remember. You’re oldest in here. I’m depending on you to set a good example for the others.” “I don’t care. Fucking girl’s out there and I’m not gonna take my chances. Ain’t no teacher out there guarding us poor kids. Fucking girl’s gonna knock the shit out of me again.” “Did she say that to you?” Billy didn’t answer. “Did she tell you she was going to beat you up?” I asked again. Head down, he just shrugged. “She’s just got a crazy look in her eyes. Girl’s a fucking psychopath or something. That’s what she is. Like in one of them movies. Like maybe she’s Freddy’s little sister from Elm Street or something.” “Well, just for this morning you can stay in. But not every morning, Billy. The school rules say that everyone must be outside until the bell rings.” “You’re not outside.” “All the children stay outside. You know what I meant. We’ll sort something out so that you don’t feel threatened.” Billy flopped dramatically across his table and sighed in a world-weary way. “I hate this school. I hate being here so much. Why did I have to come here anyway? Why couldn’t I stay at my other school? My brother’s there. My brother’d never let me get beat up by some psycho girl. This is the worst thing in the whole world that could have happened to me. I’m so unlucky. I’m the unluckiest kid in the world.” “If you work hard in here, Billy, and get your mouth and your temper under control, then maybe you can go back to your old school.” “Really? Is that all I got to do?” He said this with friendly surprise, as if no one had ever mentioned his behavior to him before. “Well, I can do that. I’m gonna be good as gold.” “That’d be super. I’d be very proud of you. For now, however, I’d be satisfied if you just got off that table. Please take your seat.” Cheerfully Billy leaped up and grabbed his chair, swinging it gleefully over his head. “Take my seat? Okay, sure, anything you say, Teach. Here it is. Where you want me to take it?” The next to arrive in our doorway was Jesse, accompanied by a woman I recognized as one of the school bus drivers. She had him by the collar. She pushed him ahead of her into the room. “This kid isn’t going to last long,” she said testily. “What happened?” “Well, on my bus you’ve got to take your seat, stay seated, and keep your hands to yourself. Those are about the only three things he didn’t do.” “He was sticking his head out the window and swearing at people,” Billy added. “You weren’t there, Billy, so please don’t interrupt.” “He was doing that,” the bus driver said. “And he wouldn’t stay in his seat. That kid can’t keep something you tell him in his head for more than three seconds. I told him. I told him to sit down and shut up and quit bothering everybody. He tripped one of the first graders when she got on and then when she tried to get up, he pushed her down again. I said, ‘Keep that up, mister, and you’re going to walk,’ and what he said back, I’m not going to repeat. So I told him when I get him here, his life wasn’t going to be worth living.” I nodded. “Okay, sit down over there, Jesse.” In burst Shane and Zane. “Oh fuck, here come the damned Dalmatians again,” Billy cried. Shane didn’t even pause to put down his things. He shot across the room and bashed into Billy, thunking him soundly over the head with his lunch box. The crack was audible and Billy let out a howl. “You girl,” Jesse sneered, as if that was the worst possible insult. Zane joined the fray, kicking hard at Billy. Jesse leaped from his seat to join in. Recognizing discretion to be the better part of valor, the bus driver stopped her complaining and left immediately. All four boys were in a tangle of flailing arms and legs by the time I reached them and the noise level in the room was absolutely deafening. I was shouting as loudly as anyone else. Throwing myself in among them, I grabbed one of the twins by his leg and pulled him out. I ripped off his shoes, because shoeless he couldn’t hurt so much when he kicked, and I slammed him into a chair. “Stay there.” Billy was next. He was screaming, half in pain, half in rage. I flung him into another chair. “Take your shoes off.” He howled. “Take them off !” I demanded. Then I grabbed the other twin by the waistband of his pants and lifted him right off the floor. Wrenching his shoes off, I tossed them, one after the other, out of reach. I pushed him into a chair. Last was Jesse, who was just so angry that there seemed no way to control him other than pin him to the floor until he calmed down. Once he’d stopped thrashing, I took his shoes off too. “Okay, the four of you,” I said and stood up. Three of the boys were in chairs in a ragged semicircle. Jesse was still sitting on the floor. “From now on, wearing shoes in this room is a privilege, not a right.” “What do you mean?” Billy asked. “I mean, I’m not going to be kicked black and blue. Shoes aren’t for kicking. Until everyone knows how to behave when they are wearing shoes, no shoes.” “You’ve got shoes on,” Billy said. “Yes, that’s right. Because I’m not going to kick anyone with mine. But until you earn that privilege by showing me you aren’t going to kick anyone, shoes will go off at the door when you come into the room and shoes will not go back on until you leave.” “You can’t do that,” Jesse said. His facial tic had started – blink, blink, blink, squint, jerk of the head – and it made it hard for him to speak clearly at the same time. “Watch me,” I said. Picking up a large plastic box, I crossed the room and collected up all the shoes I’d thrown over there. “I’ll tell my mom!” Zane shouted. “I’ll tell her you’re taking our shoes away and she’ll make you give them back!” “I intend to give them back when you go home. But in here, they’re off and they’re going to stay off. They’ll be right here in this box.” I put the box up on top of a tall cupboard. “She’ll make you give ’em back,” Zane cried. “They’re my shoes. My mom bought them for me!” “They’re still your shoes. And your mom will know I’m doing the right thing.” Zane rose from his seat. “No, Zane, you sit,” I said. “You too, Jesse. Get up off the floor and get in that chair.” Zane paused a long moment, clearly weighing the odds that I’d do something unpleasant if he didn’t obey. My look must have been enough, because he plopped back down in the chair. Jesse rose and took the chair I’d indicated, but his body posture, his movements, even the air around him was heavy with barely controlled anger. Pulling out a chair from the adjacent table, I sat down. We all sat, the boys fuming quietly or not so quietly, in a straggly semicircle. A minute passed. Another minute, then another. “How long we got to sit here?” Shane asked. “Until everyone is calmed down.” “I’m already calmed down,” he said. “We going to have to sit here all day?” “I was never upset,” Billy added. “It’s him over there. Jerky Face. He caused all the trouble. If you’re going to punish someone, you punish that ugly black kid.” “I never hit you!” Jesse retorted. “It’s him that started it,” he said and pointed at Shane. “You’re all fuckers,” Billy muttered angrily. “I wish I wasn’t in this fucking class. I wish I hadn’t even heard of it.” “Yeah, me too,” Jesse said. “Me too,” said Shane. “And me,” Zane added. “Well, at least everyone agrees on one thing,” I said. “No sir,” said Billy, “’cause you don’t agree and you’re part of everyone.” “Truth be known, Billy, I’m not very keen on this class at the moment either. I kind of wish I’d never heard of it,” I said. Billy’s eyebrows rose, and an expression of genuine astonishment crossed his face. “But you gotta be in this class. It’s your class.” “Yes. And it’s yours too.” “But you’re the teacher.” “But it isn’t much fun this way, is it?” I said. “I don’t like the way things are at the moment any better than you do. So what are we going to do about it?” This seemed to puzzle the boys. Shane and Zane exchanged quizzical glances, but Billy, ever the class spokesman, offered his take on the matter. “Maybe you’ve gone nuts.” “What about that girl?” Jesse asked. And that was the first moment I remembered Venus. She wasn’t in the classroom. The bell had rung while we were having our group fight – which had been almost fifteen minutes earlier. Rising so that I was still facing the boys, I edged carefully toward the window and glanced out. Sure enough, there was Venus on her wall. “Don’t you think we got enough problems already?” Billy said to Jesse. I knew I couldn’t go get Venus. I didn’t dare turn my back on the boys, much less go out of the room. I had to just hope someone in the front office would notice her and get her off her wall, because it was more important that I get things settled down in here in the classroom first. I came back to the circle and sat down. “So,” I said, “what are we going to do about things in here to make it better?” “What about that girl?” Jesse asked. “That girl’s out there and you’re in here. I’m talking to you. And you and you and you. I don’t want every day to be one long fight. I don’t want it to be like now, where I’m making everyone sit in chairs until they calm down. Billy’s right. This is definitely no fun. Nobody would want to be in a class like this, not even the teacher. So how are we going to change it?” “Get rid of that ugly black kid,” Billy said. “Get rid of you, girlie.” “Get rid of everybody,” Shane added. “Blow up the whole world.” “Yeah, kapow!” Zane shouted gleefully and threw his hands up in the air. “Keep your bottom glued to that seat, Zane,” I said. “Glue! Glue! Got to get the glue!” Billy cried and jumped up. “Billy!” About ten minutes into my not-very-successful efforts to have a class discussion, the door swung open and Wanda loomed in with Venus trailing behind. “Got to take her shoes off!” Billy shrieked. “Got to take your shoes off, psycho! Can’t have shoes in here. Teacher says.” Wanda looked bewildered. Venus looked blank. I went to the doorway. “Come on in, sweetheart. And thank you, Wanda, for bringing her up.” “Her don’t want to come to school,” Wanda replied. “No, me neither!” Billy hollered. “It’s a jail in here. Just like being sent to jail.” “Oh, shut up, would you, butthead?” Jesse muttered. My feelings exactly. Billy was undeterred. “Take off her shoes, Teacher. You got to take off her shoes. That girl’s a psychopath.” “Billy, wherever did you learn a word like ‘psychopath’?” I asked as I closed the door after Wanda. He shrugged. “Just know it, that’s all. Just a brain, that’s me. But if I ever seen a real psychopath, that girl’s one. So make her take off her shoes.” The morning proved absolutely ghastly. There seemed to be no way to keep the boys from fighting. The minute I relaxed my guard, they were at it again. I’d wanted to have everyone help come up with some ideas on how to handle all this aggressive behavior, but the entire time before recess was spent “sitting on chairs.” I normally had a special “quiet chair” for disciplinary purposes, but in this room I very shortly had four. By 10 a.m. I had been forced to move the furniture so that there was one table in each corner of the room and two in the middle. The only way to maintain any kind of peace was by keeping everyone as physically separate as possible. Venus repeated her previous day’s performance. She sat, completely oblivious of the boys. When the recess bell rang, the four boys leaped up and dashed for the door before realizing that none of them had shoes on. “Hold it!” Billy cried. “What we gonna do?” I lifted down the box with the shoes in it and started taking them out. I handed Shane his sneakers. “Can’t tie,” he said. I looked at Billy. “Please tie Shane’s shoes for him.” “Huh?” “He’s not touching my shoes!” Shane cried. “And Jesse, you tie Zane’s for him.” “No way!” “Well, I guess nobody’s getting recess then,” I said and put the box back up on the cupboard. Loud shrieks of protest. “You can’t go out, if you haven’t got your shoes on.” “Not fair,” Billy cried. “I didn’t do nothing.” “Neither did I.” “Or me!” “Well, you four figure it out among you then. No one’s going until Zane and Shane have their shoes tied.” “You tie them. You’re the teacher,” Jesse said. “No, I’m going to help Venus put her shoes on. When you’ve come up with a solution, let me know.” I grabbed Venus’s shoes from the box. “Go outside without shoes,” Shane suggested. “Nope, sorry, that’s not an option.” “Oh fuck,” Billy said in a most world-weary way. “Give me the god-damned shoes then.” I put a finger to my lips. “I don’t care. Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I didn’t say anything but I pointed to the clock to indicate the passing minutes of recess. “Okay. Give me the god-darned shoes then,” Billy said. “Come here, poop face. Let me tie your stupid shoes.” I lifted Shane’s shoes out and gave them to Billy. Then I took out Zane’s. “Jesse?” With a heavy sigh, Jesse accepted the shoes. Defeated, the boys finally left for six minutes of recess. But all was not over. As we hurried down the stairs for what remained of recess, Shane accidentally bumped against Venus. Big mistake. She metamorphosed right then and there. Grabbing him by the shirt, she flung him down the remaining stairs, then, fists flying, she launched herself after him with the vicious grace of a leopard. Fortunately, it was only a few steps, so he was not hurt, and a passing sixth-grade teacher was able to help me subdue Venus and get her into the school office, where she spent the rest of the break sitting stonily in a chair. When class resumed after recess, I made everyone take off their shoes again, collected them in what became known as the “shoe box,” and put them back on top of the cupboard. I knew better than to try a group activity at this stage, so I endeavored to introduce the children to their work folders. Because I had always taught children who were at different levels academically, I was accustomed to putting each child’s work for the day in a file folder. At the start of class I handed out the folders and the child did the work in it. While they were working, I circulated among them and gave help as needed. The system worked well once everyone figured out what was expected, but often during the first few weeks of a new school year there were teething troubles, usually because some children were not used to working independently. I explained the system and let the children look through their folders, but I didn’t want to push the itty-bitty bit of order we’d managed to create in the ten minutes following recess. Consequently, I suggested that for today they might want to decorate the front of the folder with their name and things they liked so that I’d know whose folder was whose. The boys all tucked into this activity with relish, and because I had them so far apart, they managed to start it peacefully enough, if a little noisily. Venus, however, just sat. I came over to her table and knelt down beside the chair. “Did you understand what you were supposed to do?” Blank look. She wasn’t even looking at me this time. Just staring into space, the same way she did when sitting outside on the wall. “Venus?” No response. What was up with this kid? If she could hear, then why did she not respond? Not even to her name? Was she brain damaged? Did she hear but not process what was said to her? Or did she hear, process, and then not be able to turn it into action? Or, as I was beginning to suspect, was she so developmentally delayed that she wasn’t really capable of much response? “You and I are going to work on something else,” I said. I pulled out the chair next to hers. I picked up a red crayon. I put the crayon in her hand. Venus didn’t even pretend to take it. The crayon dropped through her fingers to the tabletop. “Come on, now, Venus.” I picked up the crayon again. “Here, put this in your hand.” I uncurled her fingers and placed the crayon into it. Holding my hand over hers, I drew a straight line down the paper in front of her. “Can you do that?” I asked. Venus let the crayon drop through her fingers to the tabletop. Taking the crayon myself, I made another line. “Now, you try.” Venus just sat. I leaned very close to Venus’s face. “Wake up in there.” I said it quite loudly. “Woo! What you doing back there?” Billy cried, whirling around in his seat. “I’m talking to Venus.” “Well, I don’t think you got to shout. She’s right in front of you.” “I’m trying to get Venus to take notice.” “I can do that!” Billy said cheerfully, and before I could respond, he’d bolted out of his chair and trotted over. “Ah-ah-ah!” he screamed in Venus’s face and bounced up and down like a chimpanzee. “Billy, get back in your seat this minute!” “Look at me, psycho girl! Look at me! Ah-ah-ah-ah!” He was shouting at the top of his lungs and pulling stupid faces. Venus responded to that all right. She went shooting right over the table after Billy, who hooted with fear and tore off. Stimulated by the excitement, the other boys leaped up. Shane and Zane ran, shrieking loudly, their movements wild and uncoordinated. Jesse, seeing a chance to get even, tripped Billy up as he ran by. In a split second, Jesse was on top of him pummeling him. A few seconds later, Venus was on top of both of them, ripping at Jesse’s shirt, biting his hair. Wearily, I pried everyone apart and forced them into chairs. Chapter Five (#ulink_8ce28d15-e4e8-5037-82f3-0eed6807530f) The rest of that week passed in relentless chaos, and I spent most of it in damage control rather than teaching. Every time the children came into the classroom, they had to remove their shoes. Of course this made getting ready for recess, lunch, and going home a pain, as only Billy and Jesse could tie their own shoes. However, it gave me the first small way to force bonding upon them because I made Billy and Jesse responsible for tying the twins’ shoes and nobody could leave until it was done. Fortunately Venus usually wore slipon shoes. I wouldn’t have trusted her to let anyone help her. For the first time in my career I was maintaining not one “quiet chair” but five – one for each student – because they all had a knack for getting into one big fistfight together. Not a single day went by that week without my needing to use all five simultaneously at some stage. Indeed, most of the first three days were spent “sitting on chairs,” as Billy termed it. Bemused by having four feisty boys with cowboy names, I decided I’d capitalize on that in my efforts to bond us together as a group. I decided we’d become a cowboy “gang.” We’d think up a name and a code of behavior and some fun things to do together to denote our “belonging-ness” and that would be the beginning of group harmony. Unfortunately, no one told the kids that was the point of it. I realized my mistake immediately. While cowboy gangs meant belonging and being loyal to an agreed code of ethics and sticking up for one another, they also meant guns and shooting and lots of macho behavior. In a word, outlaws. Not something I needed to encourage! It was Jesse who first noticed this. We’d be an outlaw gang, he said brightly when I was talking about us being a “gang.” I said, no, that wasn’t the idea. We weren’t going to be outlaws. Billy, ever being Billy, then chirped up, “Oh? Does that mean we’re going to be in-laws?” I quickly quashed the opportunity to live out violent fantasies. The boys were thus left to come up with something different for our “gang.” In the end, they chose to become “The Chipmunk Gang,” which seemed ironically meek to me, but they were happy to make up rules about how to be a good Chipmunk. Billy really got into this. He wanted a pledge and a secret handshake to denote membership. Jesse then suggested that it ought to be a secret society and we could have other special signals too, to let one another know we were Chipmunks. By the end of the week, the Freemasons had nothing over on us. Throughout all of this, Venus remained a world apart. She did nothing. Almost catatonic in her lack of response, she had to be physically moved from place to place, activity to activity. However, an accidental bump would result in her coming alive with such unexpected fury that it was almost as if someone had pushed an “on” button. Once in “on” mode, Venus screamed like a wounded banshee and indiscriminately took after anyone within range. There seemed to be no coherence to her rage. It was unfocused, all-embracing, and dangerous. I tried to include her. Whenever we brought our chairs into a circle to talk about something, I always made sure Venus was there, although this involved moving her chair for her and then moving Venus. In the afternoons, when Julie was there to look after the boys, I endeavored to spend some time alone with her. To do what? I was never sure. Just get a reaction, I think. One day I tried coloring. She would do none of it herself. Another day I tried dancing. I put music on and pulled her through the motions. “Pull” was the operative word. On yet another day I piled building blocks up in front of her and stacked them one by one on top of one another to make what I felt was a very appealing tower. It just asked to be knocked over. Could she knock it over? I challenged. Nope. No response. I lifted her hand for her and knocked over the tower. It fell. Venus didn’t even blink. I built the tower partway up and put a block in her hand. Could she add it to the stack? Nope. Her hand just lay there, the block loose in her fingers. I finished building the tower. Then again. And again. Each time I lifted Venus’s hand and knocked the blocks down again. She didn’t even so much as give an impatient sigh of boredom. Perplexed and frustrated by Venus’s behavior, I took my troubles with me into the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t really expect anyone to give me answers when I moaned about what was going on in my classroom. Indeed, I wasn’t even upset, just frustrated. Being a rather noisy person by nature, this was my way of coping with the pressure. It was also a way of thinking for me. I’d go down to the lounge, complain about what was happening, and in the process of hearing myself articulate the problem, I’d often come up with alternatives. Julie, however, appeared unsettled. “You’re feeling really angry about Venus, aren’t you?” she said to me one afternoon after school when we were alone. Surprised, I lifted my eyebrows. “No. I’m not angry. Why?” “Well, you just seem angry. In the things you say. You’re always complaining.” “It’s not complaining. Just letting off steam, that’s all.” I smiled reassuringly at her. “That’s different from anger. I don’t feel anger at all.” Julie looked unconvinced. I was having to face the fact that I’d rather misguessed Julie. Her small size, her sweet face, her long hair with its thick bangs and girlish, beribboned styles gave the sense of someone young and, well … naive and impressionable. I’d rather arrogantly assumed I’d have a prot?g?e, someone I could introduce to my special milieu and help her grow into a competent educator, much the way Bob had done with me. Only a week on, however, and the cracks in this fantasy were already beginning to show. For instance, on Wednesday, Shane picked up the fishbowl from the window ledge to bring it to the table. This was something he had attempted to do on two or three other occasions, and each time I’d intercepted him and explained very specifically that it was forbidden to carry the fishbowl around because it was heavy and awkward, which might lead to a nasty accident. Moreover, the fish didn’t like it very much. This time, however, he managed to pick it up without my noticing, and disaster struck. The water sloshed, surprising him, and he dropped it. Water, broken glass, and goldfish went everywhere. Shane immediately started to bawl. Julie was closest to him. She smiled, knelt down, and put her arms around him. “Poor you, did that frighten you?” she said in the most soothing of voices. “Don’t cry. It was just an accident.” She took a tissue and dabbed his cheeks. “That’s okay. You didn’t mean to drop it, did you? Accidents just happen.” Listening to her, I felt ashamed. My immediate reaction had been serious annoyance and I would have said to him, probably not too pleasantly, that here was the natural consequence of picking up the fishbowl and, thus, why we didn’t do it. I wouldn’t have comforted him at all. I would have made him help me mop up the water and catch the poor fish. Julie’s response was so much more humane. Thus it was with Julie. I found her almost pathologically compassionate. Nothing the boys did seemed to upset her. If someone was perfectly horrid, she’d say, “That isn’t thoughtful,” in a quiet, even voice. Or “I’m sure you didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident, wasn’t it?” when the little devil was looking her straight in the face. So too with Venus. No, Venus didn’t respond any more to Julie than to me, but that was okay. “I’m sure she just needs time to adjust,” Julie would say. “It’s a loud, active environment. I think if we allow her to move at her own pace, she’ll become more comfortable and trust us enough to feel like joining in. Let’s not force anything. Let’s just wait and see.” Instinctively, I did not agree with Julie’s approach to Venus, but there still seemed to be logic in it. I could see that. The problem was that it just wasn’t my way of tackling things. I was not a wait-and-see kind of person. I was a do-it-now, a something’s-got-to-work kind of person whose success rested largely on a terrierlike refusal to stop harrying problems until I got what I wanted. Just leaving Venus to sit like a lump on a log was anathema to my whole personality. But I didn’t say this. In the face of Julie’s serene patience, I felt ashamed of my restless need to intervene. After so much failure with Venus, I decided I would go right back to basics; so, I arrived Monday morning with a bag of M&Ms. “Remember these?” I said to Bob as I came through the front office to collect my mail. I rattled the bag of candy. Bob smiled sardonically. Back in our very early days together, Bob had caused something of a scandal in the school district by using M&Ms to reward his students. This was the early 1970s when behaviorism was considered a radical approach and classrooms were still quite formal. In our quiet, semirural backwater no one had yet thought of equating something like candy with learning. Bob changed all that. Like many of us of that generation, he was out to build a better world. In his case, he wanted to show that his ragtag group of unruly, deprived youngsters could rise above their various labels and depressing environments, learn and progress. He started very concretely with the children, giving them M&Ms when they cooperated and worked. Sure enough, he soon had impressive results. He also soon had the whole school board down on him too, irate that he should be bribing children to learn. From then on, the term “using M&Ms” became a code among staff at our school for any kind of subversive behavior. Initially I’d been very impressed with Bob’s M&M system because it did work so effectively. It appealed to the kids on such a basic level that virtually all of them responded positively to some degree, and as most of them had already been labeled “unteachable” or “hopeless,” I felt the end justified the means. Moreover, I liked the obvious practicality of it all. Consequently, even though I didn’t know much about the theory behind behaviorism, I participated happily during the time I worked with Bob. Later, however, as I became more experienced and better educated, I could see flaws in such a system and now seldom used behavioral techniques in their stricter forms. However, I still knew them to be effective tools when used judiciously, and I was never someone to throw away something useful. When Julie came in that afternoon, I had her supervise the boys while I sat down with Venus. This involved the whole cumbersome process of moving Venus to the table, putting her into a chair, and pushing it in. She did none of it herself. I took the chair across the table from her. Lifting up the bag of M&Ms, I waggled it in front of her. “Know what these are?” “I know what they are, Teacher!” Billy shouted from clear over on the other side of the classroom. This made all the other boys look up. “Yes, and if you get your work done, you can have some afterward, just like Venus,” I said. “If you get your work in your folder done. But for now I need private time with Venus, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt.” Julie endeavored to reorient the boys. I reached across the table and moved Venus’s face so that she was looking at me. I shook the bag in front of her again. “Do you know what this is?” I had hoped for a spark of recognition in her eyes, but there was nothing. She stared through me. “Candy. Do you like candy?” Nothing. I opened the bag and spilled several colorful M&Ms across the tabletop. No response. She continued to stare at my face. Picking up one of the candies, I reached over and pushed it between her lips. I did it cautiously because I didn’t want to set her off and I feared that if she felt threatened by my movement, it might. The M&M just sat there, hanging half in, half out of her mouth. “Hooo!” Billy cried gleefully. “Look at psycho! She doesn’t even know what to do with it. It’s candy, stupid! You’re supposed to eat it. Here, Teacher, give me some. I’ll show her.” And before I could respond, Billy was galloping across the room toward me. “Me too! Me too!” Shane and Zane cried, almost in one voice. They too bolted from their chairs. Only Jesse remained behind. “I’m not supposed to eat candy,” he said prissily. “It makes me hyperactive.” Billy lunged forward, grabbing up the M&Ms on the table between Venus and me. “I love these,” he said cheerily and popped a handful in his mouth. “Here, girlie, see? You eat ’em. Crunch, crunch, crunch, like this.” He made a big, open-mouthed show of masticating. Billy hadn’t touched Venus. He hadn’t even bent close, but something in his behavior must have seemed threatening because Venus suddenly erupted. She let out a loud, ululating shriek and leaped up from the chair. Grabbing hold of Billy by the throat, she crashed to the floor on top of him. Bits of half-eaten M&Ms flew everywhere. Billy fought loose, got up, and tore off in terror. Venus leaped to her feet and took after him, all the while screaming her singular, high-pitched scream. Julie and I took after both of them. Chairs fell. Tables screeched as they were pushed aside. The twins, manic with excitement, joined in the chase, screaming and yelling too. Convulsing with tics, Jesse leaped up on top of the bookshelf. “She’s gonna kill me! She’s gonna kill me!” Billy shrieked. “Billy, stop running. Come here. Don’t keep running; you’re making it worse.” “No way I’m gonna stop!” “Zane, sit down! Shane!” The noise level in the room would have drowned out a jet engine. At just that moment I was extremely glad we were not down near the office where we could be heard. At last Julie caught hold of Billy. Venus flung herself against them, and I grabbed her, pulled her back in a bear hug. Venus reacted violently to this. She fought against my grip, rocking back and forth rapidly, knocking her head repeatedly against my chest. She kicked viciously back at my legs. In an effort to force her into a sitting position so that she couldn’t hurt me, I sank down to my knees. Even though I was much taller and heavier, I had a hard time bringing her into a sitting position. “Julie, help me,” I said. Leaving the frightened boys over by the windows, Julie crossed to where Venus and I were struggling on the floor. “I need to stop her legs. Take hold of them.” Tentatively, Julie reached forward. “You’re going to need to be more forceful than that,” I grunted through the effort of keeping hold of Venus. “Just grab them and push down until they’re against the floor.” Again, Julie reached down hesitantly. “Help me. I’m going to lose my grip in a minute. Just grab her legs. Sit on them, if you must. I need to stop her kicking.” Julie managed to catch hold of Venus’s legs. She leaned forward, pinning them to the floor. This made things worse. Venus screamed louder and struggled harder. “Calm down,” I whispered in her ear. She shrieked. “Calm down, Venus. When you stop screaming, I’ll let go. Until then, I need to hold you.” Louder still she went, so loud, in fact, that I could feel my eardrums vibrating. “No. You need to stop screaming. When you stop, I’ll let go.” Still she hollered painfully loudly. “Calm down. Quietly, quietly.” “I can’t do this,” Julie moaned. I couldn’t tell what she meant, but assumed she had chosen a wrong position and didn’t have a good grip on Venus’s legs. “Just hang on. It’ll be okay in a moment.” “I’m hurting her.” “No, you’re not. You’re fine. Just keep her legs against the floor.” “I’m really uncomfortable with this, Torey.” “Just hang on. Please. Just a little longer.” Throughout this exchange, Venus screamed nonstop. “Come on, sweetheart,” I said, bending close to Venus’s ear. “Come on, now. Calm down. Quietly, quietly. Then I’ll let go.” But as it turned out, the decision wasn’t mine to make. “Torey, I just can’t do this,” Julie said. “I know I’m hurting her and it just feels wrong.” And she let go, rising up and backing away. That was all Venus needed. The small shift in balance was enough for her to break free of my grip. In an instant she was to her feet, to the door, through it, gone. For a long, stunned moment I just stared after her. Then I glanced around quickly at the boys and Julie. “Look after them,” I said. Then I took off out the door myself. Chapter Six (#ulink_00253873-aed0-5821-8ab4-eef7ff2bd4ae) Feeling panicky at losing Venus when she was so upset, I trotted through the school hallways, listening carefully for sounds of her. After the loud shrieking so close to my ears, I was finding it hard to hear properly. As I tried, all I could distinguish were the normal noises of a school in session: muffled voices, chairs moving, occasional coughs, teachers speaking. I ran down the stairs, down, down, down until I reached the ground floor. There was no sign of anything unusual. I opened the door out onto the playground. There was Venus up on top of her wall. She was not in her normal relaxed glamor-queen pose but perched warily, poised to spring. Below her stood Wanda. I approached very cautiously, fearful that Venus might bolt off if she saw me coming too close. The most notable thing to my mind – indeed, the most intriguing thing – was her wariness. Venus had not clocked out this time. She was watching me intently, not unusual in itself, but this was no vacant stare. The other interesting thing was that she did not appear upset. She had made a remarkable recovery from the incident in the classroom. “Hello, Wanda,” I said. Wanda had a plastic baby doll in her arms. She smiled brightly. “Beautiful child.” I didn’t know if she was referring to the doll or to Venus, who was definitely not being very beautiful at the moment. There was something atavistic about Venus’s pose. She remained crouched, hands and feet on the wall, as if she’d spring off at me any time. With her wild hair and intent, rather fierce gaze, she reminded me of a drawing I’d seen once of a Neanderthal child, hunched over a kill. “Venus’s upset,” I said to Wanda. “Do you suppose she will come down from the wall if you ask her?” Wanda turned her head and looked up at her sister. “Her no come to school.” “She came today. She’s upset now because we had a disagreement, but that happens sometimes, doesn’t it? Sometimes we disagree. But no one is angry. And I’d like Venus to come back to the classroom.” Wanda turned her attention back to her doll. She hugged it, nestling it against her breast. “Venus?” I asked. “Will you come down, please?” Venus remained just as she was, tense, alert, and silent. “I’m sorry if I upset you.” She watched me. “Let’s go back to the classroom.” “Her no go to school,” Wanda interjected. I looked at the older girl only to realize that she was talking about the doll. At least I think she was. Lifting the doll up, she squeezed it tightly, then she turned it over clumsily. The doll slipped out of its blanket and dropped headfirst onto the ground. “Oh dear,” Wanda said. Without thinking, I bent down to pick up the doll. When I stood up again, Venus had disappeared off the other side of the wall. “Oh dear,” I said to Wanda. “She’s gone.” “Beautiful child go home,” Wanda replied and smiled blandly. It seemed pointless to pursue Venus. The school day was only about fifteen minutes from being over; Venus was keyed up, and no doubt any attempt on my part to bring her back would only make things worse. So, I left Wanda to follow her home and went back inside. Julie’s efforts to calm down the boys, who’d clearly been distressed by the brouhaha, had been largely unsuccessful, so I returned to the classroom to find them running around chaotically. Feeling frustrated at having lost Venus in the manner I did and annoyed with Julie for her part in it, I was too irritable to deal calmly with them myself. So, in the end I decided we might as well do something to release all this pent-up emotion everyone was feeling. “Let’s have music,” I said and went to lift down the box with cymbals, triangles, and tambourines in it, as I, for one, felt like bashing something. The rest of the day passed effortlessly, although it had that walking-on-eggshells feel to it. The boys were remarkably well behaved for them, not even becoming overly boisterous when I gave them the chance to clash along to the music. Instead, they sat listening intently for the right places to play their instruments and so performed the song – an inane ditty about an amorous Mexican tomcat named Se?or Gatos – with the seriousness of a Bach mass. After the bell rang and the boys were seen off, I returned to the classroom, where Julie had remained to clean up. She was reshelving books when I came in. “Look, I’m really, really sorry,” she said before I could speak. “Yes, we had a bit of a problem, didn’t we?” “I just found it really hard to hold Venus like that, Torey. She was so upset.” “I know it looked alarming,” I said. “I know it looked like I was being too forceful with her, but I wasn’t. She was seriously out of control. As the adults around her, our job is to bring order out of chaos. And that was chaos.” Julie regarded me. I didn’t want to get defensive over this, but I could see it wouldn’t be hard. The problem with what I was doing with Venus was that it was gut-level stuff. I’d felt secure in my actions while I was doing them. Despite how it appeared, my sense was that this was a power issue. Venus appeared out of control, and on a cognitive level, she probably was. I doubt she had been knowingly thinking, “I want to impose my will on this woman and take control of this situation.” However, on a deeper level, I sensed Venus was using her unresponsiveness and violent behavior to control her environment. For whatever reasons they might be occurring, the fact remained that they were inappropriate, inefficient ways to cope, and my responsibility was to help her change them into something more beneficial. Unfortunately, to do that, I had to begin by imposing my will over hers. But it looked awful. And unaccountable. Because how did I explain “Well, this is what I sense about the situation,” when “sense” could in no way be proven? Julie lowered her head. “I’m really sorry, Torey. I know I let you down. But I was so scared we were hurting her. She was struggling so hard.” “It was forceful, but we weren’t hurting her. It was physical, but we – you and I – were in control of what we were doing, so we weren’t going to hurt her. That’s the difference between what we were doing and what Venus was doing. At no time was I going to cross the line and hurt her, but she didn’t have the same controls. That’s why I needed you to hold her legs. Because I didn’t want her to hurt herself. Or one of us.” Julie didn’t respond immediately. She kept her head down, but I could see a frown playing itself out across her features. “I know you’re not going to want me to say this,” she said when she finally did look up, “but I don’t think what you’re doing is right. I’m still really uncomfortable with this, because I just don’t agree it’s the way to do it.” “What do you think we should do?” “I don’t know. Just not that. We’re scaring her so much,” Julie said. “It’s hard for me to see that’s right.” “Yes, I think we are scaring her. To be honest, it scares me. But … sometimes we need to get in and do hard things. I have to have control in here, Julie. I have to be the one who sets the boundaries, not any of the children. Up until now Venus has been using these behaviors to control her world, and they haven’t led to a happy life for her. It’s my task to help her find other ways of doing things. But I can’t do that until I’ve gained control of the situation. And to do that, I’m going to have to get down and dirty.” “Why can’t you just wait? Just give her time to adjust to being in your class? Golly, we’re only in the second week of school here, Torey. Can’t you give her time? I mean, most of these kids come out of violent homes already. How can you justify using violence against them in the classroom?” “I don’t think it was violence. I was restraining her. It was controlled. I was simply setting the limits.” Julie nodded in a faint, unconvinced way. A pause. Julie let out a long, heavy sigh. “Okay, yeah. You’re the one who’s trained in all this. You’ve got the experience. I’m nobody really. Just an aide…” Another sigh. “But I still feel really uncomfortable with this ‘means justifying the ends’ kind of approach. Know what I mean?” She looked up at me. “I’m not kidding, Torey. This girl comes out of a nightmare home situation. I know, because I’ve been at this school for a while and I’ve seen what she and her siblings live like. I can’t believe it’s right for us to be horrible to her too. Ever.” “I don’t think it did fall under being ‘horrible to her,’” I said, “but I take your point.” There was a pause. “I guess the only thing left to say is that in the future, it’d probably be better if you told me ahead of time when you don’t want to do something rather than give up halfway through it. That way I’d cope better.” “Yeah, I’m just really sorry, Torey. It’s a principles issue. I hope you understand.” The awful thing was that I did understand. And in my heart of hearts I agreed with Julie. In an ideal world people in my position should never have to force their will on children like Venus. But then in an ideal world there would be no children like Venus. In this pathetic, ignoble, real world we were stuck in, however, I could see no other way to bring order out of chaos. Before anything could be done to help Venus – or the boys either, for that matter – limits had to be set to achieve the secure environment necessary for growth. These were unhappy, out-of-control children, which was why they’d been placed in this room to begin with. They had to be certain I was more powerful than any of their worst urges or most horrible feelings, that I would not cave in, give up, or in any other way abandon them to those things in themselves they could not control. Only with that security could they then risk change. The academic necessity of doing this, however, and the gritty reality of putting it into action were quite different things. Moreover, there was always the agonizingly fine line between the right amount of force and too much. And the fact that each child was different. And each circumstance. There was never a formula. In my heart of hearts I dearly wanted to be the kind of person Julie believed in, the kind who could change the world simply by being loving enough. I felt it was crucial to keep such ideals alive, to keep believing that good would triumph over evil, that love could conquer anything, that no one was hopeless, because while the world might, in reality, not be that way, its only chance of changing was if we believed it could. Consequently, I ended the day on a low note, going home more bothered by my encounter with Julie than by my encounter with Venus. This was such a hard position for me to defend. The truth was, I was on Julie’s side, not mine. Chapter Seven (#ulink_599485a9-fd4b-5652-8138-479fa4c35acf) The next morning Venus did not come to school. At recess time I went down to the main office to phone her house. “Hullo?” answered a thick, sleepy sounding voice. I said who I was and why I was phoning. Was Venus there? “Huh? What? Dunno,” the voice at the other end replied. Then the line went dead. I dialed again. Again, the same sluggish, sleepy voice. I couldn’t actually tell if it was male or female. Female, I guessed, but not Wanda. Once more I explained I was Venus’s teacher and I was concerned because Venus was not at school. I said we’d had a disagreement the previous day and I was worried that Venus might still be upset. “Is this Venus’s mother?” I asked. The person at the other end was incoherent. Drunk possibly. Whatever, I couldn’t make sense of the call. As a consequence, I decided to visit Venus’s house after school. Normally I didn’t do this without giving the parents ample warning, but I was more than a little concerned about having allowed her to leave the school premises the day before in the state she was, and I wanted to see for myself that Venus was all right. Moreover, I wanted to make it perfectly plain to whomever was in charge at her house that unless she was ill, Venus had to attend school. This wasn’t a choice Venus or Wanda could make. It was the law. Julie came with me. Venus and her family lived about five blocks from the school down one of the seedy side streets between the railroad and the meat-packing plant. Although it was now known as an area of crime and drugs, a century earlier when the town had been founded, it had been laid out with broad sidewalks and boulevards planted with elm and cottonwood trees. The elms had long since succumbed to disease and been cut down, but the cottonwoods had thrived, heaving up the decaying sidewalks and casting the whole area into dense shade. Most of the houses had been built between the two world wars. None of them were large houses, but most had porches and broad lawns. Now, however, the porches were broken-down and unpainted. Many houses had boarded-up windows, and the lawns, unwatered and too shaded by the big trees, were worn largely to dirt. Venus’s home was not a house but a trailer set back on an empty lot. It was old and fitted permanently to a concrete foundation. The screen door was hanging open, and a man sat on the doorstep. I parked the car and got out. He was a skinny, small-built man, probably two or three inches shorter than I was. His hair was that nondescript color somewhere between dark blond and light brown and it was rather wavy, rumpled almost, as if he hadn’t bothered to brush it when he got up. He had a thick growth of stubble and a very hairy chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt. He sat, smoking a cigarette and watching us come up the path to the front door. “Hello, I’m Venus’s teacher from school.” “Well, hi,” he said in a distinctly lascivious manner that made me very grateful for having Julie along. “Is Venus here?” He considered this a moment, as if it were a difficult question, then smiled. “Could be. You want a seat?” “Is she?” A slow, rather insolent shrug. “I reckon.” “Venus didn’t come to school today. I’m concerned about her. It’s very important that Venus come every day, unless she’s ill. So, is she here?” “Why? You want to see her?” he asked, but before I could respond, he leaned back and called over his shoulder, “Teri? Someone here about Venus. Teri?” There was no response. The man smiled at me in a casual way. “Are you Venus’s father?” “You think all these black bastards are mine?” A woman, perhaps in her late thirties, appeared in the doorway behind him. She had shoulder-length hair, corn rowed neatly into small braids, and looked as if she just woke up, despite it’s being three-thirty in the afternoon. She blinked against the late summer sunlight. “Who are you?” I explained again who I was and why I was there. “Oh fuck,” the woman said wearily. “Wanda?” she shouted over her shoulder. “Wanda, what the fuck you done? Didn’t you take Venus to school again?” Wanda stumbled to the doorway. The woman turned. “What you done, you lamebrain. Why didn’t you take her to school today?” “Beautiful child,” Wanda said and smiled gently. “Yeah, I’ll ‘beautiful child’ you one of these days. Why didn’t you take her to school?” “Her no go school,” Wanda replied plaintively. “Yes, her do go school, you big fucking idiot. How many times you got to be told? You’re good for nothing.” The woman raised her arm as if to hit Wanda, but she didn’t. Wanda scurried off. The woman turned back to me. “Look, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” “Are you Venus’s mother?” “Yeah.” She ran her hands through her hair, pushing the braids back. She was a rather pretty woman in a tired sort of way. “Could I talk with you a moment about Venus?” “Why? What’s she done?” “She hasn’t done anything. I was just wondering … could we chat a moment? I was hoping you could fill me in a little on her background.” The woman rubbed her face in a weary fashion and backed aside. “Yeah, come on in, if you want.” I stepped gingerly by the man, still sitting in the doorway. Julie, who was wearing a skirt, pressed it to her legs as she edged by. The man grinned up at us. Inside there were two teenage girls and a boy sprawled over the furniture in front of the TV. Beyond, there was a built-in table with bench seats on either side. Wanda sat on one. She was doing nothing but staring at her hands. “Get out of here, you guys,” the woman said. “Turn off that fucking box. I told you half an hour ago to turn that off.” “Shut up, bitch,” the boy said. He must have been about twelve or thirteen. The woman raised her foot and kicked his leg none too gently. “Get moving.” He muttered crossly, got up, and went outside. “Teri?” the man called from the doorway. “Get me another beer while you’re at it.” “Get it yourself,” she replied. “Frenchie? Hey, Frenchie, get me a beer.” I didn’t know which one was Frenchie, as there was no response from any of the people in the room. “Wanda?” he called. “Wanda, get me a beer.” Lumbering out of her seat, Wanda plodded to the refrigerator. She yanked the door open so hard that cans of beer tumbled out and went rolling across the floor. Teri swore at her. So did the man. Heaving a discouraged sigh, Teri flopped down on the couch. She gestured for Julie and me to sit. “Just don’t tell me you come about problems,” she said wearily, “’cause there’s nothing I can do. I got too many problems to deal with already. You can see that just looking around. So please don’t say you’re here about problems.” I could sense she was telling the truth there, that she really didn’t have the resources to cope with much more. I felt sympathy for her then. “Is Venus here?” I asked. “Dunno,” Teri said. She was obviously tired. She rubbed her hand over her face again. “Do you suppose we could find out?” I asked. “I’d like to see Venus.” Teri lifted her head and scanned around the trailer, as if perhaps she’d overlooked the child. Then she turned her head and looked back at Wanda. “Wanda? Where’s Venus?” Wanda ambled out of her seat. She wandered down the narrow corridor and into one of the rooms at the end of the trailer. Several moments passed in expectant silence. Julie and I had our necks craned to see where Wanda had gone. Teri leaned forward and removed a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it and took a long, slow drag, giving a relieved-sounding sigh at the end. Wanda meandered out of the back room carrying something. As she came up to us, I could see it was the plastic doll, wrapped in a receiving blanket. It had been dressed in old baby clothes. Wanda smiled shyly at me and cuddled the doll. “Beautiful child,” she said and smiled again. “Wanda,” Teri cried in exasperation when she saw the doll.“Venus, you asshole. I said go get Venus, not your fucking doll.” But Wanda never did get Venus. Indeed, we never managed to see Venus at all. Instead, Wanda wandered off with her doll into another part of the trailer and never returned, while I was distracted by the realization that Wanda needed intervention every bit as much as Venus. Venus returned the next day as if nothing had ever happened, so I decided to pick up where I left off. During the time before school, I’d rearranged the classroom furniture to give me a small, cubiclelike space screened off from the rest of the room. This way I could work alone with Venus without constant interference from the boys. That afternoon, after getting the boys settled with their folders and leaving Julie in charge, I took Venus around the corner of the file cabinet and into my little cubicle. I’d added a small table and two chairs. I sat her in one chair and positioned the other on the opposite side of the table. I sat down. I got the feeling of a faint sense of alarm from Venus when I took her into this private area, but it was just a sense. Nothing about her facial expression changed much, and she sat without a lot of encouragement, but there was a slight glance around the small area and a springy lightness to her shoulders that I was coming to recognize as the precursor to movement. She didn’t move, however. Within a minute or two, she’d settled down to stonelike stillness. Opening the package of M&Ms, I took out a small handful and held them out. “Remember these? We had these day before yesterday. Remember?” To look down at the candies in my hand, she only moved her eyes. I let the M&Ms spill onto the table between us with a satisfying clatter. Bright and colorful, they lay scattered across the tabletop. I left them like that for several moments and did nothing, hoping Venus might be tempted enough to take one of her own volition or at least register an interest in them. Not so. “Candy,” I said. “Do you like candy? Most children do.” She stared at me, her face immobile as wood. “We eat them,” I said. I put one in my mouth. “Mmmm. Really sweet. Chocolate-y.” She kept staring and I got the feeling that she thought I’d gone stark raving mad. This made me smile and eventually laugh. “Here, you have one,” I said. I picked up a red M&M and put it between her lips. It hung there, so I took a finger and pushed it the rest of the way into her mouth. Nothing. “Can you taste it?” Nothing. “Try chewing it.” Venus just sat. “Chew.” I reached over and moved her chin with my hand while making exaggerated chewing movements myself. I was reminded, as I did this, of a scene from a Star Trek program where a member of the starship crew was trying to teach the fine art of eating to a woman who had spent most of her life as a sort of living machine. Not so unlike Venus. This didn’t seem to have an effect, so we both just sat. The chocolate would melt in her mouth eventually and she would taste it whether she wanted to or not. I watched her, waiting to see her swallow. Eventually she did. “Nice?” I asked. “Do you want another?” I reached over and shoved a green M&M between her lips. Venus and I spent forty minutes doing that. During this time I pushed a total of twenty-two M&Ms into her mouth. Nothing changed over the course of that whole time. She just stared at me as I pushed the candy into her mouth, waited for it to melt, waited for her to swallow, and pushed the next one in. She never looked down at the candies, never appeared to chew them, never tried to get them more quickly, never even acknowledged they were there at all. All this time I kept up a quiet patter, largely about the taste of the candy and the sensation of eating them, but Venus responded to my words no more than she did to the M&Ms. When the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, I got up, put the candy away, and brought Venus around the corner of the cubicle to join the other children. Wanda was at the door to take Venus home. Julie charged by, trying to keep up with the boys as they raced for their buses. I beckoned to Wanda. “Will you come talk to me a minute, Wanda?” “No talk to strangers.” “Have you been told that?” I asked. “Yes, that’s a sensible rule, isn’t it? But I’m not a stranger. I’m Venus’s teacher. I’ve been to your house. Remember? I came and saw you the other day after school.” Wanda was carrying the baby doll wrapped in the receiving blanket again. She held it close to her chest. “I’d like to talk to you about Venus. Won’t you come in and sit down?” “No go stranger house.” “Here. Would you like some M&Ms?” I asked. It was dirty of me, because I was probably undoing all the efforts to keep Wanda safe from strangers, but it did the trick. Wanda ambled into the room happily as I poured the candies on the tabletop. “Is that your dolly?” I asked as Wanda sat down. “Beautiful child,” she said and caressed the molded plastic hair. “Yes. You like to take care of your doll, don’t you?” “Beautiful child. Her no go to school.” “No, your dolly doesn’t go to school, does she? But what about Venus? Venus goes to school, doesn’t she?” “Beautiful child.” Wanda caressed the doll again. “Can you talk to me about Venus? What does Venus do when she isn’t at school?” “Beautiful child.” “Here, have some more M&Ms.” Unlike her sister, Wanda had no inhibitions about eating. She stuffed the candy into her mouth by the handful and chomped messily. “When I came to your place the other day, where was Venus then? I didn’t see her. Remember, you tried to find her. Where was Venus?” “Her no go to school.” “No, I know that. But what does she do at home? Can you tell me?” “Eat.” “Venus eats?” “Eat!” Wanda said more insistently, and I realized she meant she wanted more candy. The package was almost empty. I poured what was left onto the table. Wanda scrabbled it up with both hands. I looked beyond her to Venus, who stood beside the doorway. She wasn’t watching us. She was just staring into space. “Go home now,” Wanda said when the candy was gone. “Wait,” I said. “Go home now.” She got up. “Beautiful child. Go home, beautiful child,” she called to Venus. Before I could stop her, she was to the door and out with Venus in front of her. It was only after she’d left that I discovered the doll in its receiving blanket, forgotten on the floor. Chapter Eight (#ulink_c1ef9e9d-ee63-5668-992d-b4b689d80bb1) I had one activity I’d always done with all my classes. Indeed, I’d used it occasionally in therapy with individual children as well. I’m sure it has some proper, formal name and probably proper, formal rules, but my version grew out of desperation one rained-in recess many years back when I was a student teacher. The children couldn’t go outside to play and were wild with pent-up energy, so I decided to take them on an imaginary journey. We all sat down in a circle on the floor and closed our eyes. Then I told them to look inward, to envisage a deep-sea diving bell, because I was going to take them on an adventure trip under the sea. This worked fantastically. I had the children first imagine their diving bell – what it looked like, what was in it, how it felt and smelled – then they imagined the descent down deep into the water. Then we started looking for things and I asked different ones to describe what they saw. If their descriptions were sparse, I queried gently to make a more complete picture. No one had to contribute but everyone did. We stayed in the circle, our eyes closed, and wandered around under the sea for about fifteen minutes. When we finally emerged back into the classroom, the children were delighted. We made pictures of it to put on the wall in the hallway and talked about our trip for a long time afterward. Indeed, for many it became the single best memory they had of my student teaching. From then on, I made imaginary journeys regularly. As I became more experienced, I knew more about what I could do on the journeys. If the children needed to relax and calm down, we visited quiet places and spent a lot of our time listening and feeling the atmosphere. If the children needed a change of scenery, as during that rainy recess, we went somewhere exotic. If the children needed cheering up, we visited a circus or a zoo or a carnival. Once we had an imaginary birthday party. At Christmastime we went to the North Pole. I found it a particularly useful activity with attention-deficit children, who often had a hard time calming themselves down. The act of sitting together on the floor with our eyes closed seemed to help them block out enough other stimuli so they could focus well. Thus, this seemed like it would be a useful technique for my Chipmunks. I felt Jesse, in particular, would benefit. Because he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, he was often jerking and twitching involuntarily. It also caused him to make sudden noises. He didn’t shout out obscenities, the Tourette’s tic popularized in the media, which is actually rather rare; however, he did make a sharp yelping sound, rather like a startled bark, and he did this quite a lot. He also had a noisy, stylized sniff that went along with his facial tic, and this produced a piggy kind of noise. All considered, the others were tolerant about these tics, or at least they didn’t single out the tics as a reason to fight with him. Nonetheless, the tics were disruptive and occasionally alarming, if you didn’t expect them. So I felt the guided journeys might be of benefit to Jesse, because his tics always became worse under stress. I was hoping that the journeys might provide a relaxing alternative in his day that would calm the noise and motion a little bit. I also hoped they would help Billy. My goal for him was that he develop awareness of his thoughts before he did something, so that he had a better chance of intervening. At the moment, Billy just did and then coped with the aftermath. I was sure he wasn’t even conscious there were any “before” thoughts affecting his actions, so constructive use of imaginary journeys seemed like a good place to start helping him develop an understanding of thoughts as something you produced yourself and could control. Thus, Monday after morning recess, I said, “Okay, gang, we’re going to do something different. Once you have your shoes off and in the box, I want you to come over here and sit down in a circle on the floor.” This elicited excitement. Though somewhat uncontrolled and chaotic, this group was also enthusiastic, which made them fun to work with when they weren’t killing one another. “Okay, I want you sitting, but get comfortable. Shane, keep your hands to yourself, please. Venus, sit down.” I had to rise up again and direct Venus into place. “Zane? Sit. No, sit. “Everybody ready? Now, we’re going to take a journey. Right here. Right now. And since we’re Chipmunks, I think we should visit the woods. Ready?” All the boys nodded. “Close your eyes then. Not tight. Just gently, so you’re comfortable. Keep them closed. Get yourself comfy.” I closed my eyes too at the beginning and leaned forward, forearms on my knees. “Now, we’re off. We’re walking toward the woods. Can you see? Look ahead.” I opened my eyes and checked on everyone. “No, Zane, keep your eyes shut. Look ahead inside your mind. There’s the woods. See the trees? Everybody look in their minds. See if you can see the woods ahead. Can you?” “Yeah!” Billy said enthusiastically. “See if you can tell what kind of trees they are. What kind of trees are in your woods? Does anybody know?” “Yeah,” said Billy immediately. “Pine trees!” “You’re seeing pine trees. Does everyone see pine trees? Or does someone see something different in their woods?” “I see the kind that’s got big flat leaves,” Shane said. “Okay. Good. Pine trees and the kind of trees that have flat leaves. The kind that lose their leaves. We call them ‘deciduous trees.’ So, look at your trees carefully. What kinds of trees are in your woods?” “I see trees with leaves and pine trees,” Jesse said. “My forest has got them both.” “Yeah, me too,” Billy said, not wanting his imaginary woods to be without something someone else saw. “Are they tall trees?” I asked. “Have they got thick trunks? Look around? Do you see any young trees there too?” “Mine are big!” Billy cried. “Can you put your arm around one of them, Billy? Everybody. Go up to one of your trees and try to reach around it. Feel the bark. Feel it with your fingers. But put your face against the tree too. You’re trying to stretch your arms all the way around. Feel what it feels like.” I opened my eyes again slightly to see the boys, all of them with their hands stretched out in the air, reaching to feel imaginary trees. I peeked over at Venus. She too had her eyes shut tight. She didn’t have her hands up in the air like the boys did, but her fingers were splayed out on her knees and twitching slightly, as if possibly she was feeling for an imaginary tree of her own. “Mine’s got knobbly bark!” Billy cried with unexpected loudness. “Quietly, Billy,” I said. “You’ll scare away the animals.” “Knobbly bark,” he whispered. “Yeah, mine too. I can feel it on my cheek,” Jesse said. “What about you, Zane? What does your tree feel like?” “It’s a pine tree. It’s rough.” “Can you smell it?” He nodded and smiled slightly, his eyes still closed. “Yeah.” “I can smell mine!” cried Billy, still a little loud. “Shut up, Billy, you’ll scare the animals away,” Jesse said. “Oh look,” I said. “Something’s moving through the trees over there. What is it? Look carefully. Over there in the distance. Going through the trees. Do you see it too?” “A deer!” Billy positively shouted. “You stupid pisser!” Jesse cried. “You keep hollering. You scared the deer away!” And before I knew what was coming, Jesse punched Billy in the mouth. This, of course, rather rudely pulled us all out of our imaginary visit to the woods. Not expecting to be hit, Billy burst into tears. Jesse got up and stomped off, twitching and yelping. Zane and Shane were on their feet, shouting, “That’s not fair! They wrecked our time. We weren’t done! They wrecked it! They ought to go in the quiet chair!” I felt sorry for Billy, innocent victim of his own enthusiasm, because I knew he hadn’t meant to wreck things. He had simply been enjoying himself and, as ever, had lost control. I gave him a cuddle and rubbed his chin. And while I could hardly condone what Jesse had done, I didn’t want to punish him. He too had simply been caught up in the imaginary journey. So I walked over and put an arm around him afterward, saying I was sorry Billy had disturbed things for him and I understood how it made him feel angry but reminding him for the millionth time that I couldn’t allow hitting and please would he try to remember that? Shane and Zane stood forlornly. “Can we do it again? It wasn’t fair. They wrecked it. Please, can we do it again?” Zane asked. “Yes, we will. But not just now,” I said. “We’ll do it tomorrow at the same time.” “Noooo,” Shane moaned. “I want to do it now. It’s not fair.” “I know. You feel disappointed. Tomorrow we’ll do it again.” “Pleeeeeeeese?” “Tomorrow.” “This afternoon. Okay?” Zane begged. “Pleeeeeeeese?” “We can’t this afternoon. Julie comes then and we’re getting a new girl, so we need to do other things. Tomorrow after morning recess.” The twins stomped off, disgruntled, to their tables. I turned to look for Venus. And there she was, still sitting cross-legged on the floor, her eyes still tight shut. I regarded her. Why was she like that? Again, my first instinct was to believe she couldn’t hear us and thus had not realized we’d stopped the activity. But then, if she couldn’t hear, she wouldn’t have known we’d started the activity. Or what we were doing during the activity. So why was she still sitting with her eyes closed? Did some part of her brain not register that we’d stopped? Or not want to register we’d stopped? Or was it just plain resistance? Coming over, I squatted down directly in front of her. “Venus?” No response. I was a little reluctant to touch her, in case she wasn’t expecting it. “Open your eyes, Venus. We’re done with the imaginary journey. We’re doing something else now.” Slowly, she opened her eyes. I smiled. “You stayed a little longer in the woods than the rest of us, huh?” She looked at me. I looked back at her. Her expression was so enigmatic that she could have been an alien child sitting there. That day the part-time students were due to start coming. Up until that point we hadn’t been much of a cohesive group, as chaos had always been too close at hand. However, the arrival of “them other kids,” as the boys chose to call them, brought out the team spirit. “They ain’t gonna be Chipmunks, are they?” Shane asked during morning discussion as I prepared them for the arrival of our first new student. “No!” Billy cried. “No, Teacher, they can’t be Chipmunks. Okay? Please? ’Cause just us guys get to be Chipmunks.” “What do you think about that, Jesse?” “Yeah, just us guys who live here.” “All right then,” I replied. “I think we ought to have a special signal,” Billy said. “You know, something that makes us know we’re Chipmunks.” It was said as if this were some elite society we were speaking of. “Something to help us keep our spirits up when we got all these other geezers in here to put up with.” “Let’s go ‘Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip,’” Zane suggested. “Don’t you think that might get a little noisy?” I asked. Of course, this meant all the boys had to do it. “And not too discreet.” “What’s discreet mean?” Billy asked. “Discreet means when you keep something kind of private and don’t make a big show of it,” I said. “Something like a hand signal might work better.” The conversation pursued this vein for several minutes with the boys trying out various movements and gestures that they thought could serve as this special signal. I watched Venus as they talked. She was sitting at her table, as were the boys sitting each at their individual tables, as we’d not yet progressed to the point of being able to sit peaceably next to one another. Given my big, booming voice I had no trouble being heard when the kids were scattered all over the room, and the boys’ personalities were all so loud and expansive that the distance among them still helped more than it hindered. They could jump up, swing their arms around, and be their usual, lively selves without crashing into anyone else. In this respect, the distance was useful for Venus too, as she did not explode unpredictably simply because someone had inadvertently invaded her space. However, it also made it easier for her to isolate herself. I could tell she was completely tuned out of this conversation. Leaning slightly forward, arms crossed on the tabletop, eyes blank and unfocused, she was as motionless as the furniture itself. And, indeed, that’s how the boys responded to her. Venus, for all intents and purposes, was not there. “Well, what I think,” Zane said, “is that we should wiggle our feet. Like this.’ Cause we’re the ones who don’t got no shoes on. If you don’t got shoes on, you’re a Chipmunk, huh? And so you can wiggle your toes.” “Hey, way cool!” Billy cried, whipping off a grubby sock and sticking his bare foot up on the table with a thud. He wiggled his toes. “Billy, remove it,” I said sharply. Billy didn’t take his foot down but instead burst into a spontaneous rendition of a children’s ditty, “Stuck my head in a little skunk’s hole! Little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul! Take it out! Take it out! Take it out!’” Zane and Shane chimed in with him, “REMOVE IT!” One of the children coming to me for extra support was a little girl named Gwen, although everyone called her Gwennie. Gwennie was eight, a very attractive little girl with shiny, straight, bobbed blonde hair and unexpectedly dark eyes. She had originally been diagnosed as having HFA, which stood for high-functioning autism. Like many autistic-type children, Gwennie was a bright child, doing well academically. Her reading skills were excellent and her math skills were good. However, social skills were another matter altogether, because Gwennie took everything literally and at face value. She could not interpret the nuances of speech, of other people’s facial expressions or their behavior, nor could she understand how to adjust her own behavior to that of those around her. As a consequence, she was unpopular with the children in her class because she often said blunt, hurtful things or barged in on games or activities. The social inadequacy was further hampered by her interests. Intensely pursued special interests are common in perfectly normal children of this age group and seem to be part of a healthy developmental process. Hence, the typical “collecting” stage, where acquiring trading cards or toys becomes a fascination for most school-age children, and for some, at least momentarily, a real fixation. As is typical for children with autistic tendencies, Gwennie raised these childish obsessions to a whole different level. For example, she collected pencils. While pencils themselves weren’t an unusual object of desire and a lot of the kids collected them, particularly the pretty, shiny ones or those with vivid designs or strangely shaped erasers, Gwennie was fascinated by plain old standard-issue yellow ones. She routinely carried about twenty of them around with her at any given time, and despite the fact that they all looked just alike to the rest of us, Gwennie knew each of these pencils individually. She liked to feel and examine them regularly and to lay them out on the tabletop and then line them up in ascending order from the longest to the shortest. Every time she went into a new classroom, she insisted on knowing if there were any other yellow pencils in there and couldn’t settle down until she found out if there were and if so, how many and how well used. Each time she saw one, her little eyes just lit up. This all paled, however, compared to Gwennie’s big obsession: foreign countries. Gwennie had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and loved nothing better than telling you about the geography of Indonesia or the population statistics of Belgium. The problem was, this was all she really wanted to talk about. When I first found out she was due to spend time in our room, I was curious because her academic skills were so good. After half an hour of listening to her, however, I quickly came to suspect it was not so much a matter of giving Gwennie the benefits of my room as it was giving Gwennie’s teacher the benefits of a break from her. We all soon discovered just how tiring she could be. She came through the door Tuesday just after lunch. “Hello, Gwennie,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you where you’re going to sit.” “The total land area of Sweden is four-hundred-forty-nine-thousand, nine-hundred-sixty-four square kilometers. Its capital city is Stockholm and Stockholm is also the largest city. Sweden is bordered by Norway on the north and Finland on the east. It is one of the five Scandinavian countries. The others are Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The people are chiefly of Germanic ethnicity with a few ethnic Finns. The other major cities are Gothenburg, Uppsala, Sundsvall, ?stersund.” “Okay, Gwennie, thank you. Would you sit here, please?” “Have you been to Sweden?” “No. Here’s your folder.” “Have you been to France? France has five-hundred-forty-three-thousand, nine-hundred-sixty-five square kilometers and the capital city is Paris. About thirty-four percent of French land is cultivated.” “Hooo,” Billy said softly under his breath, “this one’s cuckoo.” Jesse raised one socked foot and wiggled his toes. As Gwennie was going to come three afternoons a week, I decided that here would be an ideal partner for Venus. She and Gwennie could work on social skills together, which even I realized was pretty much of a long shot, as both girls were virtually at nil in this department. But I felt that having two was better than my working individually with them, as they could model for each other in a way I never could. The first day I sat the two girls down together, which, of course, meant maneuvering Venus into position like a doll, and corralling Gwennie, who was trying to tell Jesse about South Korea. I chose just about as basic an activity as I could. I had cut out pictures from magazines and pasted them onto index cards. Each showed a person with a very definite facial expression – smiling, laughing, crying, frowning – and I’d collected about four examples of each. “Can you tell me how this girl feels?” I asked Gwennie and showed her a picture of a girl beaming at a little puppy. Gwennie looked at the picture. “How does she feel? Look at her face. See what her lips are doing? What does that tell you?” “Do you know the capital of Belize?” “Gwennie, we aren’t talking about countries just now. Look at the picture, please. What is this expression? It’s a smile, isn’t it? What does a smile tell us about this little girl? What does it tell us she is feeling?” “Most people in Belize are Roman Catholics. Are you a Roman Catholic?” “Gwennie, we aren’t talking about that just now. Look at the picture, please. What does this girl’s smile tell us about the way she is feeling?” Gwennie leaned forward and studied the picture intently. “What does this picture tell you?” Gwennie looked up, her eyes wide. “Maybe this girl’s Finnish?” Of course, doing this activity with Venus was even more fun. I showed her the same picture I had showed to Gwennie. “Look. See this girl?” Venus stared blankly at my face. “Down here, Venus.” I reached over and gently tipped her head down enough to see the card with the picture on it. “Look. She has a puppy in her arms. And look at her face. See. See how her lips go up. She’s smiling. She sees that puppy and she obviously likes holding him, because look how much she is smiling at him. Can you make a smile for me?” Venus stared blankly at me. “Here. Like this.” I made an obvious smile with my own lips. “Can you do that?” “I can do that,” Gwennie interjected. “Good girl. Look at Gwennie. She can smile. How are you feeling when you smile?” “Ill,” Gwennie replied. “You’re feeling ill?” I asked with surprise. “How are you feeling? Ill,” Gwennie said and smiled expectantly, and I realized she was simply parroting back a response she had heard somewhere before. This was conversation as far as she was concerned. Each question had a specific, invariable answer. “Can you make a smile like that, Venus?” No response. “Here. Like this,” Gwennie said and made an exaggerated smile. She leaned toward Venus. Whether Venus was about to go into attack mode or not, I couldn’t discern, but she shifted in her seat when Gwennie had suddenly moved toward her. “Not too close. Venus feels nervous when someone gets unexpectedly close,” I said and put an arm out to separate the two girls. “Is she an Eskimo?” “No.” “Eskimos live in the Arctic. Their proper name is Inuit. It means ‘real people.’ They speak more than six different languages.” “No, Venus is American, just like you. Only she doesn’t always feel like talking.” “Perhaps she is a Carmelite nun,” Gwennie responded earnestly. Chapter Nine (#ulink_089d986c-00b3-5ada-8678-ad695df07f74) The next afternoon started off badly. Billy got into a fight with a child from another class during the lunch break and was banished to the principal’s office. Bob gave Billy the expected lecture and then made him sit in one of the “principal’s chairs,” which were lined up in the hall outside Bob’s office. This was where the “bad kids” sat until Bob told them they could return to their classroom. Billy was incensed. As ever, he couldn’t see how anything that had happened was his fault, and when he came back to my room after the bell rang, his face was red with indignant anger, his voice on the edge of tears at the unfairness of it all. Everybody hated him. Everybody treated him unfairly. It was this stupid school and why did he have to come here anyway? He wanted to go home right then. He wanted his brother. He wanted to go to school where his brother was, because then people wouldn’t keep picking on him. Fortunately, Julie was there, so she could take the other kids, because I wanted to spend time alone with Billy. My gut feeling was that what he really needed was sympathy and a cuddle, and I knew if I was nice to him, it would make him cry. I wanted to spare him the humiliation of bawling in front of the others, particularly Jesse, who didn’t have a lot of patience with Billy anyhow. This would have worked out, if I hadn’t forgotten about Gwennie. I was in the hallway with Billy when she came up the stairs. “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “How come he’s crying?” “None of your business!” Billy snapped back. “How come he’s crying? What happened? Did he fall down? I fell down. Yesterday. Look. I was on my bike and my bike fell over.” She showed us two scraped knees. “Make her go away,” Billy pleaded. “I got a Raleigh bike. It came from England. England is one of –” “Gwennie, could you just go on into the classroom, please? I’m talking to Billy just now.” “Yeah, it’s private!” Billy said. Gwennie didn’t move. She just stared at us. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked me, as if Billy weren’t even there. “Has he got something the matter?” “Yeah, you!” Billy cried and swung an arm out at her. Gwennie wasn’t as out of it as she appeared because she quite gracefully stepped back out of his swing. And just stood there. “Gwennie, please. Julie’s waiting for you.” It was no use. I gave up, opened the door, and took both Gwennie and Billy into the classroom. Julie was only just coping. Shane and Zane had gotten into an argument about who was supposed to use the cassette recorder first and Jesse barked his nervousness. “I remember being a baby,” Gwennie suddenly announced. “I remember my mother putting me in a little chair outside.” “That’s nice,” I said hurriedly. “Now could you find your chair in here, please? You too, Billy, time to start your folder. You find your chair as well.” “Oh? When did my chair get lost?” he queried. “I mean, sit down in it.” “I was sitting in my little chair and I saw a bird,” Gwennie said. “A bobolink. Bobolinks live in the Great Plains. Some live in Canada. The capital of Canada is Ottawa. Canada’s a very big country –” “Gwennie.” I pointed sternly to her chair. That’s when I noticed Venus was not at her table. “Where’s Venus?” I asked Julie. Julie, looking decidedly harassed, glanced around quickly. “I think she went to the bathroom. She was here. I’m sure she was here.” I went over to the window. There was Venus, lounging on top of her wall. I had no idea if she had ever come in from lunch or not. “We can’t have this,” I said. “The amount of time that kid misses because no one notices she isn’t here. I’ll go get her.” “No,” Julie said with unexpected feeling. “I’ll go get her.” I could hear the unspoken plea not to be left alone in charge of the others. Over the previous few days, I was becoming increasingly aware that I was expecting a bit too much of Julie. While she was experienced in the classroom, she was not a teacher and had no pretensions to be. Obviously, my room had come as a shock after her experiences as a support person to Casey, who was hardworking, sweet-tempered, and confined to a wheelchair. So while Julie went down to the playground to charm Venus off her wall, I got everyone started on their work. Or at least she tried to charm Venus. Minutes passed. Five, ten. I glanced out the window and Julie was still down there, standing beside the wall, talking up to Venus, who appeared to be ignoring her completely. About twenty minutes later, Julie returned. She didn’t say anything, but the look of defeat said it all. “I’ll go get her,” I said. “Everybody here is busy. They can do an activity of their choice, when they’re done with their folders. If you run into problems, call Bob up.” I think when I said that I knew I wasn’t coming back up myself, at least not for a long time. Down in the empty playground, I crossed to where Venus was sitting on the wall. “Venus, it’s time for class. When you hear the bell ring, it’s time to come in.” No response whatsoever. She was in her glamour-queen pose, reclined back with her arms behind her, supporting her weight, head back, eyes closed, one leg up, one leg outstretched along the wall, long hair tumbling down. “Venus?” I stood below her. The wall was about six feet high, so it was really a very inconvenient height to bring her down from. She totally ignored me. “Venus? Do you hear me? It’s time to go in. It’s time for class.” I knew I’d crossed the Rubicon. By coming out onto the playground myself to get her, I’d played into her game. The only way to make it my game was to ensure she went back with me. I couldn’t back down now and give up. At the same time, I knew whatever I did had to be well gauged. If I reached for her and missed or did not get enough of a grip, she would be over the wall onto the other side and off, the way she had done the other time. I stood a moment longer, trying to figure out the best way to tackle the problem. It was difficult because the wall was taller than I was and Venus, of course, was on top of it. I didn’t want to lose her but I didn’t want to hurt her either. Nor myself. Was she aware of me? This was the question that always lurked in the back of my mind. How much awareness was in this incredibly inert child? On the one hand, I felt much of it had to be within her control on some level. There was the definite feel of a power struggle to much of her behavior, certainly during moments like this. She didn’t want to come in and she was accustomed to not having to do what she didn’t want. Like a possum playing dead, if she remained motionless long enough, she was left alone. On the other hand, it was such total unresponsiveness. This gave it the feel of something physical, something so globally wrong that it was beyond her control, like brain damage or hearing loss or a very low IQ. And because I didn’t know, because I hadn’t encountered a child like Venus before, I was left feeling scared of doing the wrong thing. But inaction never accomplished anything. With one sudden move, I jumped up and grabbed hold of her leg with one hand and her dress with the other. She hadn’t been expecting that. I quickly pulled her off balance and she came down off the wall and into my arms. Venus sprang to life then. She shrieked blue murder and fought furiously against my grip. I held on. I tried to sit down to keep her from kicking me, because, of course, being outside, she had her shoes on. Venus screamed and screamed and screamed. Teachers and children came to the windows of their classrooms. Indeed, I saw someone come out of the house across the street and peer over their fence. I wrapped my arms around her in a tight bear hug and sat down. Venus came down with a thud into my lap. She kicked and screamed and struggled. Bob galloped out of the building. “Do you need help?” “Hold on to her legs. I just want to get her controlled.” Bob grabbed Venus’s legs and pinned them to the asphalt. “Calm down,” I said in a soft voice to her ear. Venus screamed and struggled harder. She disliked Bob holding her legs intensely and directed most of her energy there. “Calm down,” I said again. “I’ll let go when you’re calm.” She continued to fight fiercely. Minutes ticked by. She still screamed in a high-pitched, frantic manner. Minutes. Minutes. Minutes. It was hard to hang on to her. Bob grimly kept hold of her legs. My arms hurt with the tension of keeping her against me. How much worse it must have been for her. Everyone could hear us. There was an embarrassment factor I hadn’t expected. Normally this was the kind of gritty activity that went on behind closed doors. I kept talking to her, almost whispering in an effort to get her attention. “Calm down. Quiet. Quiet now. I’ll let go when you’re quiet.” Over and over and over again. A small eternity spun itself out over the playground. I had no idea how long we were there because I couldn’t raise my arm to see my watch, but I was afraid we were going to run into recess. Would the other teachers think to take their children to a different part of the playground? I dreaded the idea of other children surrounding us, watching. Once started, I felt the need to see this through to its conclusion, particularly after the last time with Julie, when Venus had managed to fight long enough to win her freedom. This was a power struggle I needed to win, if I wanted Venus to start playing the game my way. Venus went hoarse with her screaming. “Calm down,” I said for the hundredth time. Then suddenly she screamed, “Let go!” Bob and I exchanged surprised glances. “Calm down. I’ll let go when you’re calm.” “No! No, no, no!” “Yes. No screaming. Quiet voice.” “No! Let go!” So, I thought, she can talk. About twenty minutes passed before Venus actually did start to calm down. Exhaustion was taking over by then. She’d almost lost her voice. Her muscles quivered beneath my grasp. Indeed, mine were quivery too. “Let go!” she cried one last time. “Quiet voice,” I said. “Let go.” It was said softly, tearfully. So, I did. I loosened my grip and stood up. Bob let go of Venus’s legs. I lifted her to her feet but still kept hold of her wrist because I expected her to bolt. “Wow,” Bob murmured as he dusted off the pants of his suit. “It’s been a while since I did that.” Venus was still crying, but they were child’s tears. Kneeling on the asphalt, I pulled Venus against me in a hug. She cried and cried and cried. Finally I picked Venus up in my arms and carried her into the building. We started up the stairs but when I hit the first flight, I didn’t go on up. Instead, I took her down the hall to the teachers’ lounge. As I hoped, the room was empty. I went in and closed the door behind me. I set her down. Indeed, for the first time, I risked letting go of her altogether. “Why don’t you sit there,” I said and directed her toward the sofa. Venus did as she was told. I took money out of my pocket and put it in the pop machine. “I’ll bet you’re thirsty after all that, hey? Do you like Coke?” Venus was watching me. I thought perhaps there was the slightest hint of a nod. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking on my part. I picked the can out of the tray and opened it. “Here.” For the first time Venus responded of her own accord. She reached out and took the Coke from me and drank deeply of it. “That was hard work, wasn’t it?” I said and sat down across from her. “I’ll bet you’re tired. I am.” She watched me closely. “Let’s not have to do this again, okay? Next time the bell rings, please come in. The bell says ‘Time for school.’ So you need to come into the building when you hear it ring. That’s the better way. I didn’t like having to do it this way.” Venus lowered her eyes. She regarded the can of Coke for a long moment. Then she leaned forward and placed it on the coffee table. For that brief moment she looked like any kid. Then she sat back, let out a long, slow sigh, and the shade lowered again. I could see it happening. It was almost a physical thing passing over her. Venus went blank. Moving that Coke can was the last spontaneous movement she made for the rest of the afternoon. Chapter Ten (#ulink_19815645-2301-56f3-a98e-f18b6087368a) As exhausting and traumatic as the day had been, I went home that night in a buoyant mood. Suddenly, there seemed possibility. Venus could talk. Venus could respond. Now all that was left was finding a way of drawing her out, of making her want to communicate with us. But what way was this going to be? I spent the whole evening preoccupied with this question. I cast about my apartment, looking for something to stimulate her, some idea that might work. Pulling out drawers from my file cabinet that contained teaching materials and work from students in years gone by, I forgot about having supper as I sat on the floor and went through folder after folder, looking for inspiration. Two separate memories kept intruding as I searched. One was of the very first child I had ever worked with. Her name was Mary and she was four at the time. I was a college student, working as an aide in a preschool program for disadvantaged children. Mary was my first experience of elective mutism, where the individual, usually a child, is able to speak normally but refuses to do so for psychological reasons. In Mary’s case she had been badly traumatized by what I now suspect was sexual abuse, although this was back in the days before such things were generally recognized. Whatever the etiology, she was terrified of men and spent much of her time at school hiding under the piano. I was charged with the job of developing a relationship with Mary. Like Venus, Mary had been very unresponsive too, although not to the degree Venus was. She had also refused all the staff ’s usual methods of involving her in classroom activities. I was inexperienced and idealistic, so I’d never considered the possibility that Mary was too damaged or had too low an IQ to respond. I’d crawled down on my hands and knees under the piano day after day, talking to her even though she never talked back, reading to her when I finally ran out of words. It was a long, slow process over many months, but in the end Mary did form a relationship with me and eventually she did start talking again. I mulled back over the memory, reliving those long-ago moments spent under that piano that even now stood out in my mind for its unusual color – it had been splatter painted, a zillion white points of paint on a dark turquoise background, like snowflakes against the winter twilight. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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