Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“Is he?”

“Yes, and something’s off about him. He doesn’t even make a passing effort to pay attention in class. You should see his notebooks. I’ve seen fifth-graders turn in better work. Clearly he’s not stupid . I mean, I don’t think he’ll be discovering the cure for cancer, but I’m sure he’s not as… boneheaded as he comes across in my classroom.”

I nodded, then shrugged. “Kids that age. They can be pretty disengaged. Scott’s the same way.”

“I know you’ve spent a lot of time with him lately. Helping him get in his service hours, and all that.”

“Yes.”

Her hands moved in a searching gesture, slowly stirring the air. “Has he—said anything to you? Indicated if there’s a problem at home? Does he seem distressed to you?”

I offered her a small smile. My heart was beginning to settle down from the panic that had trickled into me when Sandy began asking her questions. Now I understood the situation was simple: Sandy wanted me to tell a story. In the Waldorf teaching college we had learned the right way to tell a story, and that way is quite different from the common wisdom. It calls for the teacher to speak in a near monotone, absent of animation, never varying from the script. A story told this way is almost hypnotic, sending the child’s focus to the words rather than the storyteller, allowing her to memorize the tale and grow familiar with it until it is drawn into the heart. This is a very good way to tell a fairy tale, and also an excellent way to explain a complicated lie. I was a master at Waldorf-style storytelling, because I had been using these techniques all my life.

“Yes,” I admitted. “He’s had problems with that girl. Fairen Ambrose.”

“Ah.” Her face rearranged itself instantly into a look of total comprehension. “He told you this?”

“Oh, yes. She plays games with him. Strings him along. I saw it myself on the choir trip to Ohio. Playing footsie, back massages, and then when he pursues it she turns him down. He’s a bit stymied by it. Embarrassed. He covers it up by acting like he doesn’t care.”

“That makes sense. I’m trying to get to know all these kids, but it’s a process. You’ve known most of them since kindergarten, I’ve been told.”

I nodded. “It’s interesting how little they change. Fairen, for example. She’s very bright, but she uses terrible language and doesn’t have much respect for adults. She was the same at five. And of course, since she spends a lot of time at my house and I have a son, there are other things I don’t love about her. To put it politely, she’s very liberated.”

Sandy laughed. “No wonder Zach likes her.”

“Yes, I’d say that’s an ill-advised match for a kid who seems pretty naïve.”

She nodded, then leaned in and said in a stage whisper, “I’ll change my seating arrangements at the end of the term.”

I chuckled. “Good idea.”

“God, isn’t it hell?” she said. “Being that age and dealing with all the romantic drama? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to go back and experience all that again. Remember what it was like?”

I smiled again, the muscles in my face going taut with the effort. I remembered.

“Lift.”

I followed Zach’s command and raised up my end of a folding table, taking a few mincing steps forward as he strode backward. His biceps bulged forward; the tendons in his forearms shifted beneath his skin.

“This weighs about twenty pounds more than it ought to,” he observed.

“Well, it’s pretty old.”

His voice was derisive. “ Everything in this school is pretty old.”

“I beg your pardon.”

He caught my smirk and returned a patient half smile. “Present company excluded, Mrs. McFarland.”

“ Zach . Please.”

He eased the table down into its spot and I gratefully followed suit. Banners were already strung high above our heads, the distinctive Waldorf script lettered in a dusky rainbow of colors by hardworking eleventh-graders. Baskets full of crafts were stacked three high along the walls. Zach’s beautiful playhouse sat at one end of the room as the crown jewel between the two silent-auction tables, its leafy top fluttering slightly beneath the whisper of the heating duct. I thought about my conversation with Sandy the day before, the questions I had answered for her about Zach’s distraction and Fairen’s negligible morals. The devil, it is said, will draw you in with nine truths and one lie.

“Still got a pile of these left to put in place,” he said. “You want me to get one of my friends to help instead?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m stronger than I look.”

He circled around the table and walked a diagonal line across the room to the storage closet. Leaning across a table stored on its side, he shifted his balance forward to remove some obstacle from the floor, revealing beneath his hiked-up shirt a band of skin on his lower back. In the small room, with the door blocking any curious eyes peering in from the hallway, I felt the urge to run my hand affectionately over the bumps of his spine, but restrained it. Since he had gotten well and returned to me, Zach was all business. He was still willing, but no longer warm. It made me anxious, but I consoled myself that it was probably meaningless in the long term. Despite his youth he was a man like any other: he would get over whatever made him petulant, so long as I kept it coming.

Footsteps behind me forced my thoughts back in line. I rested my hands appropriately on the table and turned only when my name was called.

“Phone for you in the office.”

Even over the phone line, the tension in Russ’s voice sounded thick enough to close off his windpipe. “I got a call from Maggie,” he told me. “We need to go up there and bail her out.”

I turned my back to the secretary. “I’m sorry. Did you say ‘bail her out’?”

“They picked her up at a protest. She crossed a line or yelled at a cop or something, beats the hell out of me. I can’t even tell for sure whether they actually set bail or they’re just being pains in the ass and won’t let her go unless we show up to claim her. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the information.”

I grunted an exasperated sigh. “What sort of protest?”

“Something about the impeachment. Some campus group protesting against it, and she was in the group on the other side in favor of it. They clashed, and now we’ve got a two-hour drive ahead of us. I vote we leave her there overnight, to tell you the truth. You want to play, you gotta pay.”

“That’s impossible. The bazaar is tomorrow. I have to be here.” I pushed my hair back with stiff fingers and heard the squeak of tables being dragged around in the multipurpose room. “Russ, can’t you just go get her yourself? They need me here to set all this stuff up.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll kill her.”

I closed my eyes and considered it was probably a poor idea to let him loose on distant roads with his system full of pharmaceuticals. The last thing I needed was two family members in separate jails around various parts of Maryland. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be home in a few minutes. Just—gas up the car before I get there, all right?”

We drove north. Along the way, Russ played his Ken Burns Jazz Collection CDs until I felt tempted to kick the player through the dash and into the engine. At one point, when he changed discs, a snippet of radio blasted through. I recognized the tune, a song Zach frequently sang along to, headphones on, as he worked on the playhouse. She comes ’round and she goes down on me. Filthy lyrics, all sex and hard drugs, a capella in Zach’s angelic pitch-perfect tenor. I tuned out the jazz and let myself drift on the memories of Zach as he moved around the workshop, in those last hours when I accepted that he was completely beautiful and completely untouchable. I longed to turn the car around and go home.