Torey Hayden - Ghost Girl - The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her

“Good morning, Jadie,” Mr. Tinbergen said. “Come on in. This is your new teacher. Your real teacher, not just another substitute.”

Jadie—as everyone called her—glanced up at me briefly and then scuttled by to hang up her coat in the cloakroom. What I noticed immediately was her posture, quite unlike anything I’d previously encountered while treating elective mutes. Hunched over almost double, she had her arms crossed and tucked up under her, as if she were clutching an unwieldy load of books. I made a mental note to inquire about scoliosis.

The two final pupils arrived by bus and so came into the classroom together. Six-year-old Philip was a small skinny black kid with a horsey-looking face. His hair was cut very short and his two front teeth stuck out, emphasizing the equine likeness. Born in Chicago to a mother addicted to hard drugs, Philip had had a very unpromising start to life. He’d been premature, addicted himself, and had failed to thrive throughout much of his first year of life. As he passed through a series of foster homes during the times his mother felt unable to cope with him, his development had been slow, erratic, and often unreported so that when, at age three, he was finally taken permanently from his mother’s care, no one had any realistic idea what Philip was capable of. When he was five, he was placed in a long-term foster home with a local couple who had taken several other “hard-to-place” children and were raising them successfully. Without a doubt, the newfound warmth and stability were good for Philip, but he had made dishearteningly little progress. Although he grunted and gestured, he still had virtually no speech. He urinated in the toilet but would only open his bowels when wearing a special diaper, which had resulted in horrific bouts of constipation and frequently soiled pants. And he had made almost no academic progress in two years at school. A class for mildly mentally handicapped children probably would have been a more appropriate placement for his educational needs; however, Philip’s behavior made him unwelcome. Racked with fears, he was withdrawn and unwilling to approach new situations, and when frustrated, he responded with panicky violence.

The final student was Jeremiah, eight. A native American of Sioux descent, he was the oldest of five children in a family eking out a living doing God-knows-what on a five-acre tract of land littered with rusting car bodies and old stoves. Jeremiah was a fighter. His pugnacious behavior was so extreme, his mouth so foul that the parents in his previous school had banded together to keep him from returning, even with resource help. So he’d ended up here in a last-ditch attempt to save him from custodial detention. I had an irrational love for this sort of kid, for the loud, feisty, streetwise ones who never knew quite how to quit, and the moment I saw him with his black hair stuck straight up, as if it had never seen a comb, and his cocky little rooster strut, I knew I’d found another one.

“Well, children,” Mr. Tinbergen said cheerfully, when everyone had arrived, “guess what? This is your new teacher. Your new teacher. Not just another substitute, but your own teacher. Miss Hayden. Miss Torey Hayden. And she says you may call her Torey. That’s what her other boys and girls have called her. So let’s say hello to Torey.”

All four children stared at me. No one spoke.

“Well, come on, now. Let’s make Torey feel welcome. Reuben? Can you say good morning?”

“Good morning,” Reuben echoed in a singsong falsetto.

“Philip?”

Philip grunted and hid his head in his arms.

“Jeremiah?”

His grunt was not much more intelligible than Philip’s.

“And Jadie says hello, too, don’t you, Jadie?” Then Mr. Tinbergen turned to me. “Welcome to P.S. 168. Welcome to our school.”

I smiled self-consciously.

“And now, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re anxious to get on with things.” With that, Mr. Tinbergen finally went out the door.

Pressing it gently shut behind him, I turned back to the class, to the four of them sitting around the table. “Well,” I said, “good morning. Good morning to you, Philip. And to you, Reuben. And to you, Jeremiah. And good morning to you. Jade—Jadie? Is that what you like people to call you?”

“She don’t talk, so you might as well not make a point of it,” Jeremiah said.

“I can still talk to her,” I replied.

“Oh Jesus,” Jeremiah replied and rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to be one of them teachers, are you? Not one of them always wanting her own way.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” he mimicked perfectly. “Oh Jesus, you guys, listen to her. Listen to that boogy old broad.”

I grinned. Back in the saddle again.

That first morning was hell. No use pretending otherwise. Jeremiah was a nightmare. Every time my back was turned, he bolted out the door. He never went far, usually didn’t even leave the building, but since he knew the building, whereas I didn’t, he had no trouble eluding me. If I left him to his own devices and refused to chase him, he dashed up and down the corridors, banging on the other classroom doors. On one occasion, he got into the office and messed up all the internal mail. On another, he pulled off toilet paper and blocked all the toilets in both the boys’ and the girls’ rest rooms. And one time when I did chase after him, he got back into the classroom when I was out looking for him and locked me out. This was all before 11:30.

In contrast, Philip huddled in his chair and whimpered, cringing away from me every time I approached. When I tried to encourage him to join in the singing or listen to a story, he clamped his hands over his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and rocked the chair frantically back and forth.

Reuben was in a frenzy most of the time. Up, out of his chair, he sailed around the room, deftly touching the wall with his fingertips as he moved and all the while making a soft, whirring sound. Then he’d stop, momentarily mesmerized by a dangling pull on the roller blind or some other odd object, but before I could corral him and try to reorient him, he would shoot off again. And toilet trained he may have been, but twice he whipped down his pants and peed into the trash can beside the bookshelf.

In the middle of all this was Jadie, carrying on as if she were in a completely normal classroom. Without being instructed to do so, she ferreted out her workbooks for math and reading, sat down and completed a few pages, returned them to be corrected, found a spelling sheet on the shelf, did that, handed it into the basket on the teacher’s desk, then sought out a cassette, put it into the recorder, and slipped the earphones on. Occasionally, she would glance in my direction as I struggled with the boys, but otherwise she seemed impervious to my presence.

I felt immense relief when the lunch bell rang. Jeremiah, whom I’d just recaptured, heard it, too, and was out the door and down the hall before I could catch him. The second-grade teacher, whose room was next door to mine, was already out in the hallway lining up her children when I bolted by after Jeremiah. She smiled warmly and put her hand out. “I’ll catch him on the way down,” she said.

“Thanks,” I replied in a heartfelt tone.

I must have looked as overwhelmed as I was feeling, because she smiled again in the same warm, sympathetic way. “Want me to take your others with mine? I’m going down to the lunchroom anyway.”

“That’d be really great.”

Going back into the classroom, I was dismayed to discover that now Jadie, too, had disappeared. I returned to the hall with Philip and Reuben.