A List of Cages(12)
It took a few meetings with our reading buddies before I realized that kindergartners were a lot like manic-depressives, vacillating between euphoria and despair with terrifying speed. It was overwhelming to a lot of us, and one time Charlie got sent to the office for saying “This is hell.”
But I got lucky. Julian never cried or threw fits or peed on me. He was just a naturally cheerful kid—always singing and wearing those crazy glasses you’d get at joke shops—so we spent our time in the library playing superpowers and having fun.
Well, that was until Mrs. Nethercutt demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I told her that Julian and I felt we’d been misled. We’d been promised reading games; instead, we just got reading.
She ignored my totally valid concerns and ordered me to make Julian read aloud from one of the kindergarten primers at the center of our table. I promised I would, and I had the best of intentions, but Julian’s pockets were full of distractions—coins, paper clips, a gooey hand on a long gooey string—all the kinds of things my mom made sure I didn’t have in my possession before she’d let me out of the car in the morning.
Mrs. Nethercutt eventually got fed up and said if we didn’t get to work, she’d assign me a new kindergartner, or even worse, Emerald would get two, and I’d have to sit alone and still. Emerald and her partner were seated right across from us, so when she overheard the threat she gave me a severe frown. Maybe she was still annoyed because I’d messed up her perfect hair with the gooey hand.
I didn’t have much choice, so I got serious and told Julian no playing—just reading. The kid who was always singing and smiling dropped his dark head onto his outstretched arm, looking miserable, and kicked his little feet in the air.
I could totally sympathize. The books we had to choose from weren’t exactly page-turners. Every line of every story was practically the same. Boy plus verb plus ball. Girl plus verb plus cat.
Completely out of self-preservation, I brought an old picture book from home. Julian took one look at it, sniffed with very adult disgust, and said no, he didn’t want to read at all. I pleaded, telling him it was my favorite book when I was in kindergarten. He huffed that he wasn’t in kindergarten. He was a second grader. He’d said this before, and I’d figured it was just little kid posturing. He was always trying to impress me—like telling me that when he was at home he could fly and move things with his mind.
“If you’re a second grader, then why are you here?” I asked.
“I have dyslexia,” he said. “I’m in Reading Improvement.”
Hearing that, I felt like a jerk. I knew how much it sucked to be separated from your class for something you couldn’t control.
I glanced over my shoulder to find Mrs. Nethercutt watching us with narrowed eyes, and I hastily promised Julian it was an awesome book—my favorite in second grade too.
This seemed to pique his curiosity, so he looked at the cover—a little boy with dark hair and round eyes standing on a giant sailboat—and tried to sound out the title. “E-e-el—”
“Elian Mariner.”
“He has a ship? Like Swiss Family Robinson?”
I’d never heard of Swiss Family Robinson, but he was actually looking interested now, so I said, “Yeah, just like that. But Elian’s ship is magic. It can go anywhere.”
The next time I saw Julian, he sauntered into the library, beaming, his little arms weighed down with a stack of Elian Mariner books. He said his dad had gotten them for him because he was a good reader now. He went back to being cheerful-humming-Julian till the end of the year, when our buddies had to write an actual book report.
He glared at his blank page, refusing to write. After a while, I got impatient, took the glasses off his face—ones with eyeballs dangling from Slinkies—and pushed a pencil into his little fist. Sulking, he crossed his skinny arms over his chest.
I got bored and turned away, watching my friends help their buddies, till Julian tapped my cheek. “How do you spell Elian?”
“Elian? That’s easy for you.” I pressed my forefinger to cover up the E on the book’s cover. “What do you get if you put J-U here?”
He frowned in concentration, then looked comically stunned. “That’s my name!” He began to write, and he had the worst handwriting I’d ever seen. Staggered, backward letters—hieroglyphics, not English.
After a couple of sessions of working steadily, he read his paper aloud to me, since I couldn’t make out any of it. Right away I was in, just like when my mom read me actual books. At some point he must have been pretending to read, because it was way longer than the single page he’d written, but I didn’t care. His story was good—not just little-kid-good, but really good.
I said as much, and for some reason that moment—right after I told him—is frozen in my head like a photograph. His smile was enormous, and his eyes were shining like he was blowing out the candles on his birthday cake. But sometimes that smile is superimposed onto the face I saw the next time he was assigned to me. The day his parents died.
Dr. Whitlock smiles like she’s truly glad to see me, but the intensity of her gray gaze is hard to hold. Her eyes are more curious than friendly, and she’s dressed not like a teacher, but like a lawyer or a businesswoman.
“How have you been?” she asks, folding her hands in her lap.