by Tracy Kidder
That night Chris woke up gritting her teeth again. She imagined Clarence's mother telling him about Alpha. That was his mother's job, but Chris wondered if she shouldn't have told him first.
Thursday morning, Chris felt as if she were holding her breath when Clarence came in and got to work on penmanship.
"Clarence? Come here, dear."
He leaned on the edge of her desk, his legs spread and far out behind him, his about-to-be-frisked pose for pleasant talks with Mrs. Zajac.
"Did your mother mention anything to you last night? About school?"
"No." He shook his head. He looked at her, his mouth slightly ajar. "Why?"
"Just wondering," said Chris.
So she'd have to do that job herself. She needed time to think.
That afternoon, when the children had gone to gym, Chris sat at her desk and read over some papers of Clarence's. She looked off at nothing. The papers proved again how far he was behind most of the rest. Maybe, she thought, he would be a star at Alpha. That was the main reason she hadn't fought against it, she told herself.
She guessed she'd have to tell him tomorrow.
7
Friday morning Clarence sat right down and asked her if he could work on his essay instead of penmanship. So he really planned to enter the essay contest. He might be gone, she thought, before the contest was judged.
She felt tired. Her daughter had been up half the night with stomach flu. Her own stomach felt as if it were drifting from its moorings. She felt grateful for her morning chores. But when she got to the attendance sheet, she stopped. She dropped her pen, let her shoulders droop, and gazed off at nothing, one hand covering her mouth. "I don't know how to tell him," she thought. "Oh, God."
"Clarence, come here a minute."
Clarence took his usual stance, leaning on the edge of her desk. Pitching her voice low for this private talk, she said, "We had a meeting about you last week, and I was therrrre and some other people were therrrre..." She heard in her own voice the exaggerated cadence adults use to coax little children off to sleep, a voice that rarely works, of course. Perhaps the strangeness of her cadences put Clarence on his slowly turning wheel. He was standing sideways to her by the time she had managed to tell him that he was going to a new class.
She had her old voice back at least. "So anyways, I don't know when you're going there, but I want you to know that's where you're going. I also want you to know that you're not going there because of the way you've behaved or anything like that. Mrs. Zajac isn't sending you there for a punishment. She's sending you there because I think it's going to help you. I think you'll like it, as a matter of fact. You'll probably like it more than this school, because there's only twelve kids in the room and the teacher will be able to give you more attention. What do you think of that?" She waited. He didn't answer.
"Think you're going to want to go?"
He shook his head.
"Why not?"
He wouldn't speak. His eyelashes fluttered. No other part of him moved.
She tried for a while longer, and then she said, "Well, if you have any questions about it, you come up and ask me. Okay? Maybe you can think of some when you're sitting back down. As I said, it's not going to happen on Monday or anything like that. I don't know when, but I'll let you know. Okay?"
He walked slowly back to his desk. He sat staring at the board, mouth ajar. Then, in a flurry of movement, he pulled out pencil and paper and started working on his essay for the contest. A moment later, with the quickness of a woodland creature, Clarence turned his head toward the doorway just as Courtney, arriving late, appeared. Clarence looked at Mrs. Zajac. "Courtney!" he whispered.
By the end of math, Chris's ears were clicking. All day her illness expanded, and as it did, she grew markedly gentler, as she always did anyway on Friday. At the start of the day's last hour, she led the children down to the library to do research on their astronomy reports. She sat at a table a little distance away from them and didn't even try to work. Now and then children came up to her.
"Mrs. Zajac, there's lava on the moon!" said Felipe.
Ashley came up. "Mrs. Zajac, a comet is a fuzzy star."
Chris smiled. Her eyes were puffy. Her words were full of the sound of the letter b. She watched Clarence while holding tissues to her nose. He sat several tables away. He was pretending his chair was a horse. She smiled. She ached too much to try to do her duty by him. In sickness, she felt better than she had for days. All week the room had seemed to harbor the secret of Clarence's banishment. Now the feeling of intrigue had been swept away. The worst was almost over, and the revelation that had lain in front of her for the last six days, like a figure in the carpet, was not impossible to face. She had waited all week for the old Clarence to return. He had not. He had been trying to make up in a week for all the lessons he had missed in his six years of school. He looked happy now and mischievous, rocking in his chair and chewing gum openly, and she was glad. How frightened the boy must have been this past week and a half! she thought. And what amazing instincts he had.
Since the core, there had been important differences between what Chris knew and what she told herself and friends. She was relieved to feel so weak and aching that picking up a book was hard, and to blame microbes and not herself. Maybe she'd been coming down with flu all week, she told herself, and then she made a face. She gazed at Clarence. She wished she could think that others had made the decision to send him away. She had tried to believe that all week. Well, in fact, they had. She had not argued for Alpha. But she hadn't really argued against it. Only she had made the decision not to try to prevent the decision. "I let him down in a way," she thought. "That's why I can't sleep." There. She'd faced it all.
"Every hundred and fifty years Pluto moves into Neptune's orbit," Judith said to Alice in a loud voice a few tables away.
This week's scary gloom might not have come entirely from Clarence. In any case, Chris thought it was a warning. Maybe she was getting stale. She'd take her usual countermeasure and make a change. Al had asked her to teach sixth grade next year. That would mean new colleagues and a new curriculum. She'd have to spend a lot of summer vacation working on new lesson plans. But that would be fun. She liked that part of education, she thought. She was glad that she still did.
Chris was sick all weekend, and she slept and slept. She called in sick on Monday. The substitute, a college freshman on spring break, had it easier than Pam, because Clarence was still behaving fairly well.
When Chris walked in on Tuesday morning, her face was pale. At the start of math, Manny bickered with Horace.
"Just a minute!"
Chris stood before the low math group with her arms folded on her chest.
"Whether you realize it or not," she said to them, "Mrs. Zajac is back!"
They quieted down. In a moment, though, Manny started whispering to Jorge. Mrs. Zajac advanced on Manny. He stopped and lifted his eyes to her.
"Do I look like the sub who was in here yesterday?" she said to Manny.
Manny leered up at her. "No," he said. "She was younger."
Color moved up the nape of Mrs. Zajac's neck. She laid a hand flat on her breastbone and, tilting her head back, let loose her high-pitched, raspy laugh. The members of the top group stopped their work and turned around to see what they had missed.
8
On the Tuesday she returned, Chris got word that Friday would be Clarence's last day. She would tell him so at the end of school on Wednesday. She'd wait until Friday to tell the class and find a way to explain it to them. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the old Clarence rematerialized. He hadn't done his homework, wouldn't do his penmanship or stop whispering during the spelling lesson, tried to bolt before the other walkers at dismissal, and wouldn't look at Chris when she tried to talk to him after school. At the outer door, Clarence yelled at her, "I hate this school," and ran. But Wednesday morning, Clarence went right to work on penmanship. He had done his homework. He knew he was going to the Alpha
class now. She knew that he was trying to prevent it. She would make it through this week somehow.
The clock did not move quickly Friday. When Clarence came in—the new Clarence, the one who went right to work on penmanship—she saw that he was dressed differently. Yesterday she had reminded him that he would visit his new class today, and today, instead of the usual T-shirt, he wore a white oxford shirt with a button-down collar, a little frayed in back. He had buttoned the top button but not the ones to the collar. She imagined Clarence choosing his own best clothes that morning and dressing himself.
And no sooner had he started his penmanship than he turned around to her again and said, "My mother said I was goin' to a special class. Why am I goin'?" She took him to the hall and put her hands on his shoulders, so he couldn't turn around. He did avert his face. "Clarence, as much as you're going to miss this class, we're going to miss you. It was a very hard decision. I had to think what's best for Clarence."
The counselor arrived around this time and made cheerful talk to Clarence about his new class, and Clarence just slowly shook his head. Chris sent Clarence back to the room.
"They're all like that," said the counselor to Chris. "Scared to leave, you know?"
"No," said Chris. "The problem is, I'm a witch, and he likes me. He's used to witches." She added, "He got dressed up today. My heart is breaking."
From her desk, she kept a Clarence watch. He batted his eyelashes. He left his mouth ajar. He knew she was watching him, she thought. But when he thought she wasn't, he tried to trip a classmate. His grin blossomed. Then he saw her and it vanished. The pattern was familiar to her after all these years among little boys. When he knew she was watching him today, he would extract every thrilling tickle of sympathy he could, and she would let him have what he wanted.
After the spelling test—he had studied for it this time—Clarence went away with the counselor, to visit the Alpha class. In the car, the counselor chattered away at Clarence, invoking visions of picnics and roller skating parties at the Alpha class. Clarence sat in the back seat, gazing out at the melting, muddy March landscape as the car ascended through Holyoke, Clarence answering by saying "Yup" over and over again.
At the outer door to his new school, Clarence fingered his collar button. He bent down and smoothed the cuffs of his pants.
The desks in the Alpha room had high partitions on three sides. It was a small class, just ten, all boys. An aide and a counselor hovered in the rear. The teacher was young and she seemed calm. During breaks, she allowed boom boxes, but only one at a time. Rap was the music of choice. "I hate that music," she said, smiling. She had gotten her class to make up their own rap song, on the theme of the multiplication tables. She did a verse for the Kelly School counselor, putting on the emphatic, equally accented syllabication that gives rap music its air of threatening drums: " Two! Times! Two! Is! I! For! Get!"
"He is coming into a notorious group of troublemakers," she explained. "We tell them when they go to the cafeteria or out in the halls, 'Don't go out there wearing a sign on your head that says Alpha.' We need to tell them what their reputation is, and we need to get them to work against it." She thought that many had made progress. "Sometimes they'll see mainstream kids running in the halls and say, 'We don't do that.' " For all of that, the Alpha teacher thought it would be better to leave the children in regular classes and to use people like her and her aides to help the regular teachers cope.
The teacher had chosen an escort for Clarence, a small, wiry white boy with a crew cut just growing out—it had the look of an untended garden. He showed Clarence the behavior chart, pointing at the various symbols. "That's good. That's good. That's not good." There was a classroom store, stocked according to the children's wishes, budget permitting. Accumulated points for good behavior earned an Alpha student treats from the store. Clarence's escort said he had won a plastic figure of the wrestler André the Giant. He hadn't done too well since then. "I had a hundred and sixty-one points? And then I went to zero. Now I got thirty-five points. Say if you get ten points, and you get a check, then you got five points in your bank account."
Clarence nodded. He didn't say much. He fingered objects, such as the passes a student had to get in order to leave the room. "Yup," he said. He followed the white boy around the room. The white boy said, in singsong cadence, "It's pretty nice. The teacher gives out crackers and stuff. We do a lot of stuff. Sometimes we have birthday parties. My birthday's comin'." Then, with adult-looking thoughtfulness, the Alpha veteran said to Clarence, "People don't like us. Because we're special."
"See you Monday, Clarence," said the teacher after the tour.
"Yup," said Clarence.
"I love him already," said the teacher.
There was mud on the playground. Recess was indoors. Returning from lunch, Chris looked at the board. Clarence had written in huge letters: CLARENCE THE BEST!
"Clarence the best, huh?" said Chris.
Robert had a green stuffed dinosaur in his shirt pocket. He'd carried it there all day.
"Robert, put that on my desk. It's starting to get in the way of your learning."
He must have been waiting for that command. He said about his stuffed animal, "He's learning, too-ooo."
This was Friday afternoon, when she always anticipated missing them a little over the weekend. She said mildly to Robert, "Well, he can learn as well on my desk as in your pocket."
She read aloud a long time. "Awww"s when she closed the book. So she opened it and read some more. Clarence pulled his chair up tight against his desk, against its bulging contents. He had stuffed his desk so tightly with books and old papers and notes he'd never taken home to his mother, it looked as if they'd need a crowbar to empty it. As Chris read, Clarence watched Mariposa industriously copy over her story. The other day during this quiet time, he had cut a piece out of Mariposa's sweatshirt, just trying out the scissors. (He had said he was sorry afterward and had offered to let Mariposa cut off a piece of his sweatshirt.) Now, as Mrs. Zajac read, he drew his sleeves over his hands. He watched Mariposa, gazed at the stapler on her desk, reached over and fingered it, turned it sideways. He watched his fingers stroke the cool gray metal. He opened up the stapler, and Mariposa finally made an angry face at him. He grinned. Now he wanted to go to the bathroom, the game of bothering Mariposa forgotten. His elevated hand yearned toward Mrs. Zajac. He wiggled his fingers at her.
"We're going to take our journals out. Yes, Clarence, you can go to the bathroom."
Clarence walked to the door, got outside, and started his stiff-ankled, untied-sneakers run.
"Clarence is leaving the class today," she said to the children when Clarence had jogged off out of earshot. She leaned back against the front table, nails drumming lightly on the cover of the novel. "He's going to another class."
Robert applauded briefly.
Chris glanced at him and went on calmly, fingers drumming on the book. "Not for a punishment, but because that's where I think he'll do better. Clarence isn't all that pleased about going, just like none of us would be. I thought it would be nice if we made a little card for him, just wishing him good luck, and signed our names to it."
Mariposa distributed the journals.
"That might be one of the things you might want to write about in your journals," Chris added. "How you feel about Clarence leaving. And when he's leaving today, I want you to make sure that you do say goodbye to him. I don't want to make a big deal in front of the class, because he isn't that thrilled about it."
"He says it's you that he's leavin'," crowed Robert. He grinned.
"It's me that he's leaving," she repeated flatly.
"No!" piped up Felipe. "He said the reason he's leaving is because you told them to."
"Well, there were a lot of people involved. We all thought it was the best thing for him. So anyways, that might be one thing you'd want to write about in your journals, about him leaving."
She walked among the desks. She stopped at Juanita's an
d said to the shy girl, "If you want to complain about what a creep Mrs. Zajac is, you can do that."
Juanita smiled up at Mrs. Zajac.
Chris bustled around, talking fast. Clarence would return any moment. She got Judith to find that good, heavy white paper Chris knew was somewhere in the room. She asked Felipe to design the card.
"Clarence, we're writing in our journals."
He walked in slowly, eyeing the room in general.
Chris went to his desk and, bending over him, whispered, "Since this is your last day, you might want to write how you feel about it." She went back to her desk and watched Clarence.
After a while, he said, without turning to her, "I don't know what to write."
"Come here, dear." She leaned across her desk and whispered, "You could write about leaving."
"No."
"Then write about why you don't want to. Write that down."
The remedial reading teacher came to the door to pick up some children. Chris called to her, "Can I keep them for today?" The whole class should be here.
Plan book open, pen in hand, Chris laid the back of that hand across her mouth. She stared at Clarence. He had begun to write. She stared over his head toward the door. Only an hour now and the walkers would line up there. Routine would carry her the rest of the way.
"All right, you can put away your journals."
"Ca ca ca can I keep working in mine?"
"Can you keep working in your journal, Clarence? Yes."
Story rewriting time. "I don't got no more paper," said Kimberly.
Chris lifted her eyebrows, smiled, and made one hand into claws. The children cried "No!" covering their ears and grinning as they cried. Clarence dropped his pen and did likewise.
Clarence went back to his journal. "Mrs. Zajac, how do you spell 'through'?" In a little while, he carried his opened journal to her. He sat down at his desk and watched her read.
