haunted

It might be a gift that I can’t remember the boy’s name. I’d be tempted to look him up, and I might find him. We’ll call him Charles. He was small for a 10^th grader. Shaggy brown hair swept across both eyes, lean frame, maybe five feet tall. He slipped like air, like silence, between our halls and walked into my room in that first week of September when all seems possible.

It’s been 10 years since I last saw him, but I see him. He haunts me.

I was talking about him this week with my friend, Chris Crutcher, who spent decades as a child abuse and neglect therapist. I told him about how often teachers don’t know how to help. Teaching is work that feels like failing so much of the time.

Ah, the irony. We preach about the importance of working hard, of succeeding in school; but we look across a room and confront all the ways we fail. I like to think failure is not my fault, but then Charles walks in the door with his empty backpack which he drops on the floor at the back of the room. He sits at a small table facing a bulletin board.

“Hey—that’s not a desk. I don’t want you to sit back here by yourself,” I gesture to the room as I meet his eyes.

“This is where I’m sitting.” He takes me on with a cold stare. He waits. He’s small yet completely unafraid. He sizzles; don’t get too close.

“Uh…I’m Mrs. Kittle. What’s your name?”

“Charles.” He sits. I love this cone of silence between us, but I break it.

“Okay for today,” I say, smiling as I walk away. I’m a coward. Challenging Charles is not how I’m going to start my class, but think about that stupid phrase: okay for today, like I’m in charge here.

He agrees to find a book he is willing to read, and I’m willing to let him sit away from all the other kids. I don’t know his story—but I expect I’ll figure it out. For now, he’s reading. He reads all hour. He doesn’t open the notebook I place beside him; he doesn’t pretend to follow my lesson or join in talk with others. He sits. He reads. He’s out the door when the bell rings.

A week, two weeks, nothing changes. I have conversations with him. He likes his book, he says. He isn’t mean. He just refuses to write. He says, no, that’s all.

And here’s what I don’t do: I don’t threaten him. I don’t preach the study-hard-and-you’ll-succeed speech. I won’t use promises to manipulate a teenager into compliance. Of course, fighting, cursing, taunting, or hurting anyone is intolerable, and I’m quick to intervene with any of my students. You are mean and unruly to my substitute when I was out? We’re having lunch. Nope, stop talking. This is not a negotiation. Tell me all about it at lunch. I’m not a pushover.

But I’m also not a believer that kids just need to try hard and their lives will make sense. By high school it’s clear that the pleading and negotiating doesn’t inspire many young people. Some are waiting us out, doing as little as possible to escape school. I tell them reading and writing are indispensable ways to explore, to imagine, to escape, to wonder...to capture all the joys of life. I work so hard to convince them one by one to believe me.

Charles is having none of it. Nope, not writing.

I’m relieved when our school counselor schedules a meeting with his teachers. I’m alone in a small office the next day with three counselors, including one from the county. I explain our standoff: he won’t write. He won’t try. I ask for ideas. The county counselor says, “He stays in your room. Yours is the only class where he stays in all period. You should be proud.”

Proud?

“What else can I do? I need him to write.”

“We don’t know.”

They tell me Charles lives with his grandparents. Maybe ask them?

The haunting begins in that one phone call.

I’m in the teachers’ room on the second floor that has the only working microwave. It’s slow. I’m on my second two-minute blast of last night’s take out when I remember I need to call. I figure this will be quick.

The grandfather answers. He’s come in for his own lunch, from repairing his truck, he tells me. It’s a 1950 GMC pickup, he says with a smile. A real beauty.

He’s glad I called. He wants to help. He and his wife aren’t quite sure what to do with Charles. They lost their only child, their son, when their daughter-in-law was pregnant with Charles. She tried to raise him for the first few years, but Charles looks just like his dad, he tells me. It was too much. She was angry. Charles was angry. She asked if the grandparents would take him for a while, and then one day she was gone. They haven’t seen her in ten years.

The microwave beeps its raspy, I’m done call, and I lean against the wall, listening.

“We’re trying,” he assures me. I can hear his gentleness, his concern, his confusion.

I say, “Charles won’t write, and I am just hoping he might help me figure out how to make that happen. I can’t pass him in English class if he won’t write.”

Grandpa understands. “Charles loves working on that truck with me. I told him when we finish, he’ll get his license and it will be his.” He hesitates. “Do you think I should take that away from him?”

“God, no.” I say, “I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be disrespectful, it’s just, if that’s the only thing he loves, please don’t take it away.” We both sigh. I have no idea how he can help me.

You know how the rest of this story goes. Charles fails English class. Again. I can’t stop thinking about this small boy whose mom never comes back. Who lives in the woods on a dirt road far from town. Who has failed many classes already. How small school is in the landscape of his life.

The next semester he has an introductory auto course taught in our Career and Technical Center just a right turn out the door of my classroom. It is taught by an incredible man who reads, who fills his office with books about cars that kids are willing to read. Jim is patient with every kid. He is firm. He is wise. He is one of my go-to colleagues. We share stupid pictures of our dogs holding books. We stand in the hall and laugh some days.

Charles loves him, of course. School makes sense, at least one period a day.

Jim tells him to enroll in night school to make up his English credit. Jim knows I’m teaching that semester. Charles doesn’t. He meets my eyes at the door, gives me a head nod and takes a seat at table at the center of the room. Thank you, Jim.

There are soon more than a dozen kids with me, each one a story. Each one hesitant to try again. But we start that night with a chapter from King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher. I read it aloud.

There’s a scene in that story when Chris, in a group therapy session, has a client stand against the wall in time-out, which this client had boasted was teaching his stepchildren respect. Force and manipulation are powerful tools. The threat of adult vs. child. Chris’s expert storytelling held every one of us in that moment. Not a single student moved as I read aloud. We’ve all felt rage hold us. We’ve all felt almost out of control. This is a story that raises your heart rate.

This was Crutcher’s story—but it is also my story and your story, somehow. Charles held that book like a force field.

I finished reading. I told the students to take a break and come back to class in ten minutes. Walk. Don’t smoke. Get some water.

I went to my desk to enter attendance and check email. Charles sat at his table. He picked up his notebook, opened it. He stared at the page. The next time I looked up, he was writing.

He passed.

I didn’t have him in another English class. I don’t know if he graduated. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if we reached for the same box of cereal in the grocery store this week. What haunts me is how many kids like Charles are in every class. How individual and hard this work is all the time. The sound of his grandfather’s voice on the phone. What should I do?

I still don’t know.