“Did he back you up?” No telling with Lipton.
“He did side with me, but that didn’t stop Rose from begging for extra credit work, nagging me every day, sometimes crying in class. I’ve tried to help her but she just won’t buckle down and study for the tests.”
“I’m so sorry.” He looked so distressed; I wished I could smooth out the worried folds in his forehead.
“It happens. Some students just don’t like to take responsibility for their own grades.”
His cell phone buzzed. Carl picked it up from the kitchen counter, and as he listened to the person on the other end, he frowned.
“Not a problem. I’ll take care of it right away,” he said, clicking off the phone.
“What’s wrong?”
“That was my friend, Ed Jensen, the truant officer. He’s sick today, and there’s a student he says needs immediate attention. I told him I’d check on her.”
“Really?” I was a little disappointed that our holiday festivities were going to be curtailed. This wasn’t the first time Carl had assisted the truant officer during off hours. The guy never seemed to be off-duty.
“Would you like to come with me?”
“Why not?” I’d yet to do a home visit with any of my students, although I knew many teachers considered it part of their jobs.
A half-hour later, we were driving through a rundown residential area chockablock with wood-splintered shotgun houses. Several lots were littered with stained mattresses, old clothes, and rusting refrigerators. Every now and then we’d see a rare, brave house with signs of civility: a tidy lawn, pansies encircling a mailbox, healthy potted plants on the porch. I hoped one of the better residences belonged to the kid we were checking on, but I doubted it.
Carl parked in front of a house that looked uninhabitable. The peeling siding revealed a rotting gray inner skin, and a bright orange sign pinned to the door said, “Unlawful to Occupy.” The windows were black, as if someone had covered them up with tarpaper.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?”
Carl cut off the engine, and we both sat motionless, listening to it tick. “It’s the address I have.”
I knew there were some rundown neighborhoods surrounding Harriet Hall, but I’d only experienced them from behind the window of a moving car. I’d definitely never strolled around in one.
We got out of the car, and it was eerily quiet, no bird sounds, no shouts of children playing. Our shoes sounded loud on the pavement. I felt like we were being watched, but I didn’t see anyone around. Then I noticed two men in their twenties lounging on a dilapidated porch on the house next door. Their jaws looked set in stone, their eyes blank as if no one lived behind them.
Carl must have noticed the men too because he slipped a protective arm around my waist. His shoulders broadened, like a toad puffing up to three times its size. He was sending the men a message: “Don’t mess with us.”
We crossed a weed-choked yard glittering with broken glass. I could feel the men’s gaze crawling all over us. A cold drizzle dripped from the sky, stinging our faces. Just as we were about to descend the stone steps, bang, the front door opened.
A young woman wearing mismatched pajama tops and bottoms plodded out on the porch, holding a tin bucket. A vacant-eyed toddler, garbed in only a sagging diaper, hung onto her leg. The woman dumped the contents of the bucket off the side of the porch, and the smell of human waste rose up.
“Excuse me,” Carl said. “I’m looking for Janey Jefferson. Someone said she might live here.”
I tightly squeezed his arm and Carl said, “What’s wrong?”
“Janey’s my student.” She’d been out of school for several days in a row. In order to keep up my ninety-five percent attendance rate, I hadn’t reported her absences to the truancy office.
The woman scratched her belly and glared at us. “What do you want?”
“We’re teachers from Harriet Hall,” Carl said.
He climbed the steps to the house, and I trailed behind him.
“My sister be sixteen in two days,” said the woman, her hair sticking out from her scalp in haphazard tufts. “She don’t have to go to school if she don’t want to.”
“Do you think I could talk to her?” Carl said.
The woman considered his request for a moment. “You got five dollar?” she said.
I rummaged in my purse and opened my wallet. “Here’s twenty,” I said and handed her the money. She tucked it into her waistband.
“Come on,” she said, motioning us to follow her.
I didn’t want to go inside. The entrance looked like the dark maw of an animal. My shoes felt like they were made of concrete. Carl must’ve noticed my reluctance. “You want to wait in the car?”
I thought about the two men next door with the dead eyes.
“I’ll come with you,” I said quickly. Janey was my student, not Carl’s. I needed to buck up.
We crossed the porch, sidestepping stacks of yellowed newspapers, empty Domino’s Pizza boxes, and Taco Bell wrappers. The screen door slapped behind us, loud as a gunshot. The front room was cloaked in gloom and reeked of rotting food and an ominous chemical smell. A stack of ketchup-stained plastic plates rested on an eviscerated couch.
What was Janey doing in this terrible place?
We zigzagged our way around holes in the floorboard and pieces of broken furniture until we reached a back bedroom, windowless and dark. Inside a figure was curled up on a bare mattress and clinging to a pastel blue sweater.
“She sleep a lot,” Janey’s sister said. “Janey, get up. You got company.”
Janey didn’t respond; she lay so still I was terrified she might be unconscious or even dead. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The woman kicked her lightly on the shin. “Your teacher here, girl. Get up.”
I found my voice. “Janey. It’s me, Ms. Wells.”
Janey’s eyes flew open, and she slowly lifted up her head.
“Mr. Rutherford and I came by to check on you, and see why you haven’t been in school.”
I glanced at Carl for guidance. A current of disquiet passed between us. I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing: Grab Janey and run.
“Would you like to have a little lunch with us?” Carl said.
Janey rose to her feet with great effort like a creaky old lady.
“If you going, you need to be back at the house in an hour,” said her sister. Her voice was raspy as if she did a lot of yelling. She picked up the listless toddler and hefted him on her hip. “Need you to look after Deon.”
Janey, who usually couldn’t stay quiet for more than a few seconds, had yet to say a word. She slipped her skinny arms into the cardigan sweater she’d been holding. Mother of pearl buttons marched down the front; it looked like something an older woman would wear.
“Is that your grandmother’s sweater?” I said.
Where was Beulah Jefferson, and why she’d let her granddaughter stay in this house of horrors?
When Janey didn’t immediately answer, her sister said, “Our granny passed almost two weeks ago.”
“I’m so sorry.” I hugged Janey’s bony frame but she didn’t hug back. It was like embracing a hat stand. Maybe she was mad at me for allowing her absences to go on so long without finding out the reason. How long had she been out? I thought it might have been at least a week. I’d called her house once but I hadn’t gotten an answer.
When we arrived at my condo, I asked Janey if she wanted to watch television. She obediently sat in front of my flatscreen, staring at the images, still not uttering a word. While she was in her TV trance, Carl and I conferred in my kitchen.
I knew most of my students were poor, but up until then I hadn’t understood what poverty really was. I’d conveniently airbrushed out the filt
h, the stench, and the choking hopelessness.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that house before,” I said to Carl. I couldn’t shake the grimness of that scene. It had nested into my pores, fouled the air in my lungs.
“Wish I could say the same,” Carl said. He, of course, already knew all about poverty; he’d been in the thick of his students’ lives for years, while I’d been loitering on the sidelines.
“Should we call DFACS? Someone needs to snatch that toddler away from Janey’s sister. He can’t be getting proper care.”
“I’ve dealt with cases like this before. Certainly we’ll report it to DFACS, but that doesn’t mean anything will be done. We’re going to have to hound them.”
“It’s a condemned house. People can’t live in condemned houses, especially babies.”
“Sadly they do it all the time.”
“Well then, if I have to, I’ll pay for them to rent an apartment.” Not that I had the money, but somehow I’d have to raise it.
Carl laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I know you want to help, but you can’t just throw money at the problem. Who would sign the lease? And when Janey’s sister trashes the apartment or turns it into a drug den, who’s going to be liable for those damages? You?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice thin with frustration. “I just don’t want Janey or that little boy living like animals. Worse than animals.”
“I understand your frustration, but we have to go through certain channels.”
“Janey can’t go back.”
“I agree. But we may have to take her to a temporary shelter.”
“No! She’s already too traumatized. I’ve never seen her like that before. So lifeless. If worse comes to worse, she’ll have to stay here with me.”
“Sorry, babe. That’s not a viable solution. Teachers can’t take in their students. Against policy.”
While I was wallowing in feelings of helplessness, Carl lured Janey into the kitchen and spoke gently to her. It took a half-hour or so, but she started to open up to him. All the perkiness was drained from her voice. She was mostly monosyllabic and monotone, but at least she was talking again.
In halting sentences, Janey told us that after her grandma died, her sister Tameka and her boyfriend Flea sold everything in the apartment. The only thing Janey was allowed to keep was Ms. Jefferson’s sweater. She said she hadn’t been going to school because her sister made her watch Deon while Tameka went out to score crystal meth. In exchange for babysitting duties, Janey got a roof over her head—albeit a leaking roof—and food.
“Mostly canned ravioli,” Janey said, her eyes dull as mud. “That was Thanksgiving dinner. It was cold because we ain’t got a stove to fix it on.”
I winced.
Carl continued to quiz her, and discovered she had an older cousin named Minnie in Beech City, South Carolina, thirty miles away. She’d seen Minnie at her grandmother’s funeral and the cousin had offered to take her in. Janey chose to go with Tameka, mainly because she didn’t want to switch schools. She hadn’t any idea of what she was getting into.
“Minnie’s probably changed her mind by now,” Janey said. “She’s already got three of her own.”
The pizza we’d ordered arrived, and while Janey was eating, Carl called the cousin, who said the offer was still good.
“So long as Janey doesn’t mind sleeping on the fold-out sofa,” Carl said after he hung up the phone.
Better than a filthy mattress on the floor of a condemned house, I thought. As soon as Janey was finished eating, we drove her to South Carolina.
Minnie’s modest living room was strewn with Legos and Matchbox cars and smelled of cabbage, but both Carl and I got a good vibe from it. Minnie enveloped Janey in her fleshy arms and kept repeating, “Bless your bones.”
I tucked my phone number into Janey’s blue jean pocket and told her to call if there were any problems. Before leaving I hugged her again, but she still didn’t return the embrace. Was it possible she sensed how terribly I’d let her down?
On the way home Carl said, “Glad Janey had that cousin. I hate leaving kids at shelters. Now if only she can get Deon too.”
We’d told Minnie the situation, and she said she’d also be willing to take on the toddler.
I was deeply ashamed of my negligence. Janey was like a completely different person and it was my fault. Would she ever go back to being the bubbly girl I remembered?
“You were so good with Janey,” I said to Carl. “A student whisperer. Thanks so much.”
“Thanks to you. You were the one who sent the report to the truant office.”
Wrong, I thought as he turned out of Minnie’s subdivision. In reality, I was a terribly negligent person, not fit to kiss Carl’s boots, much less his lips.
I hated myself for lying to him. Another teacher must have reported her absences, maybe her art or P.E. teacher. Thank God someone did.
I’d always known it was wrong to be slack about keeping up with my students’ attendance, but I hadn’t fully understood how much it could hurt them. I vowed that from now on, when any of my kids were absent, I was going to find out why, even if I had to make a home visit myself.
Not only that, I was not going to give up on teaching these kids, no matter how badly they acted. It might take weeks or months before they accepted the changes in our classroom, and I would probably get extremely frustrated, but I had to persevere. No matter what.
Twenty
After the Janey episode, I had an overwhelming need to confess my sins to Joelle. I wanted to tell her the whole sordid story: my arrangement with Dr. Lipton, the countless ways I’d deceived Carl, and the five-million dollar deal with my aunt.
Unfortunately, even though I left her several messages, Joelle didn’t return my calls. In fact, I had to write on her Facebook timeline three times before she got in touch. It was almost as if she was avoiding me. Was it possible she thought I wouldn’t fit into her new, glittering circle of friends?
I immediately chided myself for not giving Joelle enough credit. Our friendship was one of the few things in life I’d always felt certain about.
It took me over a week but I finally caught Joelle on her cell and pinned her down to a lunch date. Monday was a teachers’ workday, and because I didn’t have any students, I was able to leave campus for lunch.
“How about Sybil’s?” Joelle said.
Sybil’s Café was in Savoy Center, Rose Hill’s most affluent shopping destination. The clientele consisted almost exclusively of perfumed and expertly coiffed women, most with a collection of shopping bags at their feet. The cuisine was uninspired—a variety of limp and skimpy salads—and the service so lackadaisical your tongue would shrivel up before you’d ever get a water refill. But you didn’t go to Sybil’s for food or the service; you went there to be seen.
“Sure,” I said, wanting to be agreeable. “Sybil’s it is.”
I’d just have to remember to eat a big breakfast.
When I arrived to meet Joelle, the prosperous jewel-box shops of Savoy Center were dripping in tinsel and holly for the holidays, and the parking lot was filled with luxury vehicles. I parked my motorcycle between an Escalade and a silver BMW X6 and headed to the restaurant.
A scrawny blonde woman stood near the entrance of Sybil’s, flagging me down. I had to get close before I realized the walking skeleton with cotton-white hair was Joelle.
She lightly touched cheeks with me. Usually we hugged. Was cheek-bussing going to be our new greeting?
“Hi there,” I said. “Gosh, you look…”
Emaciated. Malnourished. Like someone who’d been subsisting on lichen and berries.
“You look…hungry. I am too. I could eat a cow.” Sadly I was at the wrong restaurant for that.
“What do you think?�
� Joelle patted her hair, which looked like it could be spun into a cone and sold as cotton candy. She was also wearing a new string of pearls. I suspected they’d be gritty against my teeth, indicating they were the real deal.
“Blonde, very blonde. But I’ve always liked your red hair.” Not that bright red was her natural color either. Nature had given her dark brown hair, but Joelle was too lively of a person for such a plain-Jane color.
“Trey has a weakness for blondes. It’s a small concession to make him happy. He’s been doing so much for me. Did you know he’s been paying my house payment and most of my bills for the last couple of months? He doesn’t want me to work so many long hours anymore.”
“Seems like you’re getting serious pretty quickly,” I said warily.
“That’s the way it happens when two people are right for each other,” Joelle said, fingering her pearls. “They just know.”
“So what does your family say about him?”
“They like him fine.” She didn’t meet my eye which meant she was lying. Trey was too soft for the men in Joelle’s family, who were all tall and strapping and spent their weekends doing manly stuff like hunting wild boar or chopping firewood.
“Any day now, I’m expecting him to pop the question.”
“Oh?” I said softly.
“Is that all you’re going to say?” she said. “Just ‘oh?’ I’ve never been so happy in my life. Would it kill you to share that with me? I’ve always celebrated all your tennis triumphs.”
I wasn’t used to Joelle being so snappish with me, and, contrary to what she claimed, she didn’t look happy. I also knew she didn’t want to hear one word against Trey or her possible marriage to him. “Of course, I’m thrilled for you,” I said.
Girl Meets Class Page 16
