Somebody Else's Kids (2 page)

“He’s not having a fit, Tim,” I hollered over Boo’s screams as I tried to lift him from the floor. “He’s okay. Don’t worry.” But before I could say more, Boo broke my grasp. One frenetic whirl around the room. Over a chair, around a bookcase, across the wide middle area I had cleared. To the door. And out.

“B
oo? Boo?” I was in the hallway. “Boo?” I whispered loudly into the silence and felt like a misplaced ghost.

I had made it to the classroom door in time to see him career squawking around the far corner of the corridor, but by the time I had gotten down there Boo was gone. He had disappeared entirely and left me booing to myself.

I went into the primary wing of the building. Wherever he had gone, he had ceased to scream. The classrooms were empty, the children had gone out for recess. All was quiet. Eight rooms in all to check. I stuck my head first in one room and then in another. That miserable rushed feeling overcame me. I knew I had to capture Boo and get him back, check Tim’s and Brad’s work, calm them down a bit about this odd boy before they went back to their class, and finally prepare for Lori, my next resource student. And all that time I needed to be with Boo.

“Boo?” I looked in the third-grade rooms. In the second-grade rooms. “Boo, time to go back now. Are you here?” Through the first-grade rooms.

I opened the door to the kindergarten. There across the classroom under a table was Boo. He had a rug pulled over his head as he lay on the floor. Only his little green corduroy-covered rear stuck out. Had he known that this was a kindergarten room? Was he trying to get back to Marcy’s? Or was it no more than coincidence that put him here, head under a rug on the floor?

Talking all the while in low tones, I approached him cautiously. The kindergarten children were returning from recess. Curiosity was vivid on their faces. What was this strange teacher doing in their room under their table? What about this boy in the green corduroy pants?

“Boo?” I was saying softly, barely more than a whisper. “Time to go to our room now. The other children need this room.”

The kindergarteners watched us intently but would not come closer. I touched Boo gently, ran my hand along the outside of the rug, then inside along his body to accustom him to my touch. Carefully, carefully I pulled the rug from around his head and extracted him. Holding him in my arms, I slid from under the table. Boo was soundless now and rigid as a mannequin. His arms and legs were straight and stiff. I might as well have been carrying a cardboard figure of a boy. However, this time he did not avert his face. Rather, he stared through me as if I were not there, round eyed and unblinking, as a dead man stares.

A small freckle-faced boy ventured closer as I prepared to take Boo from the classroom. He gazed up with blue, searching eyes, his face puckered in that intense manner only young children seem to have. “What was he doing in our room?” he asked.

I smiled. “Looking at the things under your rug.”

Lori stood outside the door of my room when I returned carrying a stiff Boo in my arms. Tim and Brad had already gone and had closed the door and turned off the light when they left. Lori, workbook in hand, looked uncertain about entering the darkened room.

“I didn’t know where you were!” she said emphatically. Then she noticed Boo. “Is that the little kid you told me about? Is he going to be in with me?”

“Yes. This is Boo.” I opened the door clumsily and turned on the light. I set Boo down. Again he remained motionless, while Lori and I went to the worktable at the far side of the room. When it became apparent Boo was not going to budge, I went back to the doorway, picked him up and transported him over to us. He stood between the table and the wall, still rigid as death. No life glimmered in those cloudy eyes.

“Hello, little boy,” Lori said and sat down in a chair near him. She leaned forward, an elbow on the table, eyes bright with interest. “What’s your name? My name’s Lori. Lori Ann Sjokheim. I’m seven. How old are you?”

Boo took no notice of her.

“His name is Boo,” I said. “He’s also seven.”

“That’s a funny name. Boo. But you know what? I know a kid with a funnier name than that. Her name’s Maggie Smellie. I think
that’s
funny.”

When Boo still did not respond, Lori’s forehead wrinkled. “You’re not mad, are you, ’cause I said that? It’s okay if you got a funny name. I wouldn’t tease you or nothing. I don’t tease Maggie Smellie either.” Lori paused, studied him. “You’re kind of small for seven, huh? I think I’m taller than you. Maybe. But I’m kind of small too. That’s ’cause I’m a twin and sometimes twins are small. Are you a twin too?”

Lori. What a kid Lori was. I could sit and listen to her all day long. In all my years of teaching, Lori was unique. In appearance she was for me an archetypal child, looking the way children in my fantasies always looked. She had long, long hair, almost to her waist. Parted on one side and caught up in a metal clip, it was thick and straight and glossy brown, the exact color of my grandmother’s mahogany sideboard. Her mouth was wide and supple and always quick to smile.

Lori had come to me through evil circumstances. She and her twin sister had been adopted when they were five. The other twin had no school problems whatsoever. But from the very beginning Lori could not manage. She was hyperactive. She did not learn. She could not even copy things written for her. The shattering realization came during her second year in kindergarten, a grade-retention born out of frustration for this child who could not cope.

Lori had been a severely abused child in her natural home. One beating had fractured her skull and pushed a bone fragment into her brain. X-rays revealed lesions. Although the fragment had been removed, the lesions remained. How severe the lasting effects of the brain damage would be no one knew. One result had been epilepsy. Another had been apparent interference with the area of the brain that processes written symbols. She also had many of the problems commonly associated with more minimal types of damage, such as difficulty in concentration, an inability to sit still and distractibility. The bittersweet issue in my mind, however, was the fact that Lori came away from the injury as intact as she did. She lost very little, if any, of her intelligence or her perception or her understanding, and she
was
a bright child. Nor did she look damaged: For all intents and purposes, Lori was normal. Because of this, I noticed that people, myself included, tended to forget she was not. And sometimes we became angry with her for things over which she had no control.

The prognosis for her recovery was guarded. Brain cells, unlike other cells in the body, do not regenerate. The only hope the doctors had given was that in time her brain might learn other pathways around the injured area and tasks such as reading and writing would become more feasible things for her to accomplish. In the meantime Lori struggled on as best she could.

But there was no kid quite like Lori. Her brain did not always function well, yet there was nothing wrong with Lori’s heart. She was full of an innate belief in the goodness of people. Despite her own experiences, evil did not exist for Lori. She embraced all of us, good and bad alike, with a sort of droll acceptance. And she cared. The welfare of all the world mattered to her. I found it both her most endearing and annoying trait. Nothing was safe from her: she cared about how you felt, what you thought, what your dreams were. She involved herself so intimately in a world so hard on those who care that I often caught my breath with fear for her. Yet Lori remained undaunted. Her love was a little raw at seven, and not yet cloaked by social graces, but the point was, she cared.

Boo was of great concern to Lori.

“Doesn’t he talk?” she asked me in a stage whisper after all her attempts at conversation had been ignored.

I shook my head. “Not too well. That’s one of the things that Boo came here to learn.”

“Ohhh, poor Boo.” She stood up and reached out to pat his arm. “Don’t worry, you’ll learn. I don’t learn so good myself so I know how you feel. But don’t worry. You’re probably a nice boy anyways.”

Boo’s fingers fluttered and the vacant eyes showed just the smallest signs of life. A quick flicker to Lori’s face, then he turned and faced the wall.

I decided to work with Lori and leave Boo to stand. There was no need to hurry. “I’ll be right here, Boo,” I said. He stood motionless, staring at the wall. I turned my chair around to the table.

Lori flipped open her workbook. “It’s dumb old spelling again today. I don’t know.” She scratched her head thoughtfully. “Me and that teacher, we just aren’t doing so good on this. She thinks you oughta teach me better.”

I grinned and pulled the book over to view it. “Did she tell you that?”

“No. But I can tell she thinks it.”

Boo began to move. Hesitantly at first. A step. Two steps. Mincingly, like a geisha girl. Another step. I watched him out of the corner of one eye as I leaned over Lori’s spelling. Boo walked as if someone had starched his underwear. His head never turned; his arms remained tight against his sides. The muscles in his neck stood out. Every once in a while his hands would flap. Was all this tension just to keep control? What was he trying so desperately to hold in?

“Look at him,” Lori whispered. She smiled up at me. “He’s getting himself to home.”

I nodded.

“He’s a little weird, Torey, but that’s okay, isn’t it?” she said. “I act a little weird myself sometimes. People do, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Now concentrate on your spelling, please.”

Boo explored the environs of the classroom. It was a large room, square and sunny from a west wall of windows. The teacher’s desk was shoved into one corner, a repository for all kinds of things I did not know what to do with. The worktable stretched along below the windows where I could have the most light on my work. The few student desks in the room were back against one wall. Another wall housed my coat closet, the sink, the cupboards and two huge storage cabinets. Low bookshelves came out into the room to partition off a reading corner and the animals: Sam, the hermit crab; two green finches in a huge home-made cage; and Benny the boa constrictor, who had taught school as long as I had.

Boo inched his way around the room until he came upon the animals. He stopped before the birds. At first he did nothing. Then very slowly he raised one hand to the cage. Flutter, flutter, flutter went his fingers. He began to rock back and forth on his heels. “Hrooop!” he said in a small, high-pitched voice. He said it so quietly the first time that I thought it was the finches. “Hrooooop! Hrrrroo-ooop!” Both hands were now at ear level and flapping at the birds.

“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,” he began, still softly. “Ee-ee-ee-ee. Ah-ee. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.” He sounded like a resident of the ape house at the zoo.

Lori looked up from her work, first at Boo and then at me. She had a very expressive glance. Then with a shake of her head she went back to work.

Boo was smiling in an inward translucent sort of way. He turned around. The stiffness in his body melted away. “Heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee!” he said gaily. His eyes focused right on my face.

“Those are our birds, Boo.”

“Heeheeheeheeheeheehee! Haahaahaahaahaahaa! Ah-ah-ah-ah!” Great excitement. Boo was jumping up and down in front of the cage. His hands waved gleefully. Every few moments he would turn to look at Lori and me. I smiled back.

Abruptly Boo took off at a run around the classroom. High-pitched squeally laughter lanced the schoolroom quiet. His arms flopped widely like a small child playing at being an airplane, but there was a graceful consistency to the motion that made it unlike any game.

“Torey!” Lori leaped up from her chair. “Look at him! He’s taking
off
all his clothes!”

Sure enough Boo was. A shoe. A sock. A shirt. They all fell behind him as he ran. He was a clothes Houdini. His green corduroy pants came down and off with hardly a break in his rhythm. Boo darted back and forth, laughing deliriously, clothing dropping in his wake. Lori watched with horrified fascination. At one point she put her hands over her eyes but I saw her peeking through her fingers. A goofy grin was glued to her face. Boo made quite a sight.

I did not want to chase him. Whatever little bit of lunacy this was, I did not want to be a party to it. My greatest concern was the door. Within minutes Boo had completely stripped and now capered around in naked glee. I had not enjoyed chasing him the first time when he had been fully clothed. I could just imagine doing it now. This was a nice, middle-class, sedate and slightly boring elementary school without any classes of crazy kids in it. Dan Marshall, the principal, swell guy that he was, would have an apoplectic fit if some kid streaked down one of his corridors. I would hate to be the cause of that.

Boo laughed. He laughed and danced from one side of the room to the other while I guarded the door. I longed for a latch on that door. That had been one of the small things my classrooms had always had. Locks, like all other things, are neither good nor bad in themselves. There are times for them. And this was one. It would have been better if I could simply have latched the door and gone back to my work. As it was now. Boo had me playing warden, trapped into participating in his game. It gave him no end of pleasure.

For almost fifteen minutes the delirium went on. He would stop occasionally, usually not far from me, and face me, his little bare body defiant. I tried to assess what I could see in those sea-green eyes. I could see something but I did not know what it was.