by Michelle Kuo
The wall was decorated with pendants representing the colleges that teachers had attended: Notre Dame, Colby, University of Arkansas, University of Michigan, Hendrix, Rhodes. The list went on. The colorful felt triangles pointed unanimously in one direction. Nor was the wall perfunctory: I overheard a pair of girls, both in the ninth grade, gazing upward and discussing the benefits of Hendrix, which “got small class size” and wasn’t “too far from home.”
Surreptitiously, I looked up the Spanish word for boat on my phone.
—
THE NEXT DAY, before Patrick and I had even greeted each other, he handed me his assignment, as if to preempt my hostility or disappointment.
“Good, you did it,” I said. My tone was more gentle. Why, I thought, should he care about homework? Homework had mattered to me—had been central to my childhood—because it was the only task my parents had really expected of me. For him, teachers at Stars didn’t bother assigning homework, because they didn’t expect students to do it. Come to think of it, I hadn’t bothered to assign much, either. I bent my head down to examine his paper, asking absently, “How are you?”
It was a shock. The writing looked crazed. The blue ink was heavy and smeared. The cheap ballpoint pen I’d given him didn’t help; pressed too hard, it leaked dollops of ink that blotted the page. The letters looked like jagged marks that happened to cross one another, scratching the page. They were arbitrarily sized and haltingly drawn.
I did not recognize his handwriting at all.
Hey cherry i know im not in your life it be my fault. it hurt me i aint there wit you. Here people be argurring about nothing tring my pasiens. Siting here doin nothing but how I messed up an thinking of you.
Love Youre Daddy
I tried to maintain an impassive look. Was it so bad? Yes, it was. Capitals, apostrophes, spelling…His English had never been this poor in my class. And beyond its errors, the message was no good for a child. It reminded the child that he, the father, was absent. It stated that he was at fault for the absence, raising the question of what he had done. It alluded not indiscreetly to his pain. This was not a letter that would make a child feel safe.
But wasn’t it natural also for a father to want to apologize to his daughter? At least he was honest and loved her. Maybe the problem wasn’t the letter itself but the fact that the letters were likely to repeat themselves: I’m sorry; I wish I were there; I should be there for you but I’m not. I had thought homework could help him escape from his feeling of failure, but it wasn’t enough. We needed something that would help him step outside himself.
“I know there be all them mistakes,” he said. “I get confused, Ms. Kuo.”
In a casual tone I asked, “How long has it been since you’ve picked up a pencil?”
“I don’t know. A couple years.”
Where to start? I had no idea.
I leafed to the back page of a notebook that I had brought, pretending that I knew what I planned to write.
At the center of the page I wrote, GRAMMAR.
And below:
I’m im
“See,” I said. I pointed to im. “This is what you’ve been writing.”
Patrick looked, the muscles on his face tensing in thought.
“Do you know what’s wrong with this?”
He was silent.
“There are two little things—can you see?” I circled the I and the apostrophe.
Patrick nodded.
“What’s the difference between your I and mine?”
“Yours be capitalized.”
“Do you see how you wrote it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you make it right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Patrick bent down. His hand was unused to the pen; he gripped it too hard.
He wrote:
I’m Patrick.
“Okay,” I said. “Good job.”
We worked all afternoon. As I put on my coat and scarf to leave, I said cheerfully, “Ready to do your homework for tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said quickly.
Patrick’s obedience made me sad, as if I had done something wrong. Who was I in his life—a person whose role it was to widen the world of things to be ashamed about?
“Look,” I said, “let’s make a deal. You keep doing your homework; I’ll bring you those cigarettes you wanted.”
At this Patrick lit up, astonished.
“Aw, for real, Ms. Kuo?”
I laughed. “For real.”
“You do that for me?” Then, perhaps afraid I’d change my mind, he said, “Get me them Buglers.”
“What? Where?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “You ain’t never smoke a cigarette, Ms. Kuo?”
“Not really.”
“Like tobacco leaves, you know, you roll them. There’s a place right next to the Dollar General. Before you get to the Walmart, where my house be. If you go past Walmart, you gone too far.”
“Okay. I’ll get them. And give them to you. When you do your homework.” We smiled at each other.
—
PATRICK’S CENTRAL HIGH School transcript was a white space interrupted by a lone column—F, F, F, D, D, F—that represented, in total, one semester of high school.
I had wanted to see the transcript for myself, because he wouldn’t tell me what his grades were. I’d trekked to the school secretary’s office, thinking that perhaps he’d exaggerated and maybe even pulled off a B in his English class. Then I thought of all my other students. How, I wondered, had they fared? “Do you have the list of dropouts?” I asked the shrunken secretary, Ms. Smith. “For the year 2006?” This was the year I had left.
The printer was noisy and archaic—dot matrix, not laser. Its paper had perforated vertical ends, which as a kid in the eighties I tore off to form bracelets.
The document was titled STUDENT DROPOUT REPORT. But there was no report—just names. Because the sheets were attached to one another, the list unfolded like an accordion that extended to the floor. Unbelievable, really, that this list constituted only a year of dropouts.
Name after name I recognized. Tamir, Miles, Kayla. William, Stephanie. My stomach dropped, and I wanted to sit down. It was a shock. Who had lasted? Years ago, these names had been gathered in my grade book, in my handwriting. Now they were in cheap automated type.
Who is a person who changed your life?
Had I changed them? The paper in my hands told me no.
My face was warm with shame.
Next to each name was a number that designated the reason for dropping out. Some had been designated as moved; others, lack of attendance. But the reasons were not correct. The list stated a number of students, including the girls who’d gotten pregnant, as moved out of state. Patrick was listed twice: lack of attendance (correct) and moved out of state (incorrect).
“It gets worse every year,” Ms. Smith said in a raspy voice. “I just don’t remember anybody dropping out thirty-five years ago. Nobody dropped out. You quaked in your boots if you got sent to the principal.”
Ms. Smith explained the school procedure on absence. Each morning, teachers got a form where they marked a student’s status as P, T, or A: present, tardy, or absent. Under state law, after ten consecutive days of being absent, the transformation was complete: A student officially became a dropout. Ms. Smith’s office sent a memo indicating teachers could delete the student’s name from their grade books.
“Who looks at this?” I asked.
“You.”
It was terrifying. Students dropped out and that was it, game over. Nobody looked for you; nobody stopped you. Nor, it seemed, did people document, correctly, why you dropped out.
Ms. Smith showed me official reasons permitted for absences:
A doctor’s note
An obituary or funeral program for a death in the family
A court document
Proof of incarceration
; Suspension
School business
A parent note approved by principal
Students were allowed fourteen unexcused absences, she explained. This included parent notes, in addition to any other unexplained absences.
“What a joke. They’re allowed fourteen days of parent notes—it doesn’t matter what reason, what excuse. What are they really doing? Who knows. I think they just don’t want to be here.”
As if on cue, a mother and her teenage daughter came in. The mother looked sleepy—she was wearing pajamas. “We overslept,” the mother said simply.
“You need a note,” Ms. Smith said to the daughter, ignoring the mother.
The daughter rolled her eyes.
The mother asked for paper.
Ms. Smith handed her paper.
The mother asked for a pen.
Ms. Smith handed her a pen.
The mother scrawled something and left. The daughter went to class.
Ms. Smith gestured at the clock meaningfully—the school day was nearly half over.
I said, “So if Patrick’s parents had written parent notes for those fourteen days, he could have come back to school?”
“Exactly.”
I looked stricken, which gratified her.
But we were thinking different things: Whereas Ms. Smith thought it was ludicrous that Patrick could come back, I thought it was ludicrous that his parents hadn’t tried to write a note to get him back in.
Helena employed one person whose job was to contact families and inform them that their child was a truant. But it would have made little difference for Patrick: Everybody in his family knew he’d stopped going.
—
“LORD ALMIGHTY, IT’S Ms. Kuo!” said Ms. Riley as she gave me a hug.
Now that Stars was shut down, she was in charge of ISS—“in-school suspension,” all-day detention—at Central. It had been tough to find her: The ISS room was isolated on the other side of a hill, like a hermitage. Ms. Riley was playing a computer game at her desk. The bell had just rung and her students had disappeared.
She motioned for us to go outside and I followed her to her car, so that she could smoke.
“Ms. Kuo,” she said, lighting a cigarette and getting straight to the point, “Stars be gone to the dogs. It be worse than a doghouse. They threw everything to the curb, all the new good books you ordered—they just threw it away. Or they left it down there like they was nothing. They just so wasteful.”
I thought of my students’ graffiti inside the covers, how they wanted other kids to know they’d read the books.
“I miss our children,” she said.
“What happened to them? It seems like most of them dropped out when they got here.”
“This place is a joke. Central is a joke. The teachers are intimidated by the kids, so they don’t teach anything. Kids be hollering, howling. I could just cry seeing them, pants hanging down by their butts. When they’re outside”—she gestured to the campus—“nobody keeps them or watches them, no teachers or nothing.”
Ms. Riley’s new tone of bleakness disoriented me. At Stars she had greeted me daily by saying, “God is good, God is good.” At Stars she had wielded real power. Incoming teachers like me looked up to her; students behaved for her. What she lacked in teaching certification, she’d made up for in moral authority. Now she’d been exiled along with the students. She was trying to build a fort on quicksand.
“I tell them, ‘Don’t come in here with no foolishness.’ You know me, Ms. Kuo. I got my gospel music, I got my Bible on my desk, I say to the kids, ‘Better shut up and hush.’ But that village is down; they killed it. Where is that village, where is that village? Ms. Kuo, I remember when I was growing up, you could sleep with your windows up all day long—I don’t care how low on the ground they were. You could leave food on our stove and say, Hey, neighbor, hey, Mary, hey, Joanne, I left my neck bone on the stove and got to run off to the store and get some potatoes. She’d say, Okay, I got you. And I tell you, Ms. Kuo—your food wouldn’t burn. Your food wouldn’t burn. That’s how close people were.”
I told her I’d gone to see Patrick.
“The devil got him, Ms. Kuo,” she said. “Once the devil gets you, he don’t let go.”
She threw away her cigarette. “The things that are happening with our people, the devil just seem to have all the control, all the control.”
—
THE TOBACCO STORE was a drive-in, my first. “Buglers?” I asked, unsure if I’d gotten the name right. The woman at the window grinned, showing a gold tooth; when she turned to get the tobacco, her dice earrings rattled. The package was baby blue, with a pretty logo of a man with a trumpet.
The next morning Patrick greeted me enthusiastically. “I did my homework.”
“Two days in a row!” I said. “That’s great.” On cue, I began to scrounge around my bag, signaling that I’d brought his tobacco and made good on my end of the deal. Patrick poked his head out into the hallway, checking for guards. He nodded.
I passed him the package and he deftly made it disappear. The stealth of our exchange and the way he stowed the package inside the folds of his jumpsuit made me distrust him for a second.
From my bag, I retrieved a book: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I read this again over the weekend,” I said. “It’s so good that I almost started crying at the end.”
“You, Ms. Kuo?” he said. “Crying?” He shook his head, smiling at the idea.
I handed him the book.
It was a light paperback, but Patrick reached for it with both hands, as if I were handing him something heavy and fragile.
He bent down, examining the colorful illustration on the cover. I was nervous that he’d be offended it was a children’s book. Yet he seemed curious. Perhaps he was thinking about his daughter or his own childhood; I didn’t know. He traced the illustration’s outlines with his fingertips.
“What do you see?”
He stared for a long time. “I see two little girls. Look like they dancing with the lion.”
“What does the lion look like to you?”
Patrick hesitated.
“There’s no right answer, you know,” I said.
“Like a beast, but they having fun in a field. It look like a sunset.”
I nodded and then pointed to the page for him to start.
Patrick read:
“To Lucy Barfield”
“Who do you think Lucy might be?” I asked.
Patrick looked hard at the words, as if the answer would appear if he stared long enough. He got agitated. “I don’t know, Ms. Kuo. I don’t know about none of this.”
“Hey,” I said. “My bad, I didn’t explain. You’re not supposed to know. We’re just guessing.”
In his panic, he didn’t seem to hear me.
“My dear Lucy,” I began, ignoring him. “Now you read.”
My heart pounded. I was afraid he’d refuse to continue.
He cleared his throat.
“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.” He continued until he reached the signature: “Your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”
Patrick’s reading was awkward. His words rushed together in a flow barely impeded by punctuation.
I asked, “So who do you think Lucy is?”
Patrick leafed to the front cover, checking the name. “It be his goddaughter.”
“Yes.” I nodded emphatically. “That’s exactly right.”
“So he wrote this for her?” he asked. “Like a gift?”
“Yes. Like a gift.”
And then we began to read.
“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy,” I started. “This story is about…”
The room was just big enough for our purposes, with one table and two chairs. We sat facing each other, each with our own book, and took turns reading aloud. (“See here?” I said. “This is where the p
aragraph begins. And where the chunk of words ends—see that space?—that’s where the paragraph ends.”) When it was my turn to read, he relaxed, his finger following the words as I spoke, as if assuring himself that each word were properly tended. And as I approached the final sentence of my paragraph, his shoulders stiffened; his turn was coming.
“ ‘This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!’ thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room….But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold.”
“Have you seen snow?” I asked. He said he didn’t think so.
“Well, you’re about to,” I said cheerfully. At this Patrick looked perplexed but encouraged.
—
JAILERS MOVED PATRICK from cell to cell without warning, and I didn’t want his homework papers to be scattered, so I had decided that a single composition notebook would be the repository for all his work. Assignments included vocabulary (sentences), a lesson from the day (say, on apostrophes), journaling, and responses to the reading. The reading questions were sometimes specific: Why do you think the creatures tortured Aslan? And sometimes open: Write a letter to Lucy from Edmund. The journaling was mostly open—observations, for instance, about jail: What is one thing you’ve noticed about jail?
Patrick’s homework made me happy and filled my days. Part of it was, of course, teacherly satisfaction: He was being useful; he was doing something with himself. What teacher wouldn’t be pleased with his quick grasp of irony: It is ironic to know Calvin comes back to jail after being released a week earlier. It takes discipline and patience to use one’s mind, and here was tangible proof of both. Part of it, too, was my writerly sadism, which I had always inflicted on others who sent writing my way: I regarded my brutal editing as a sign of care. And so I thrashed through his words, circled errors, barked orders. I battered the page so thoroughly that sometimes it was difficult to see what he had originally written. Sometimes I shouted. (APOSTROPHE!) Every forgotten comma was noted (I circled the space where the comma should be and wrote, What’s missing?), every run-on sentence was marked (Where should this sentence end?). If a pattern of mistake emerged—crying spelled as cring, trying as tring—I assigned extra homework to eliminate future mistakes. I also tried my best to take note of what he was doing right. If he used their correctly, as opposed to there or they’re, I wrote, Good job, that’s the right one!
