We thought everything was going along all right."
"It is," said Stevie. "Except for that."
"So you have friends at school?"
"No," said Stevie.
"Then it's not all right, is it?"
"How can I have friends when Mrs. Jones said for nobody to talk to me?"
How far did this go? "You mean that she actually told the other kids never to speak to you?"
"A couple of them tried to at recess but she yelled at them and said, `Let's not bother Mr. Fletcher, please.
He's thinking higher thoughts and we wouldn't want to disturb him."'
Step held him closer. "Oh, Stevie, I didn't know, I didn't guess. How could I know this?"
"Jaleena talks to me sometimes," said Stevie.
"Is she one of the girls?"
"She's the black girl so Mrs. Jones doesn't really care what she does. But she doesn't talk to me much because it really is hard to understand her. She has to talk slow. And so she doesn't talk to me much."
So that was what Stevie's two months in second grade in Steuben had been like. Isolation. Ridicule. Utter loneliness. And he hadn't breathed a word of it at home. No sign of it except his reluctance to go to school.
"But you're still doing your schoolwork," said Step. "You are learning things."
"We did most of it in my old school," said Stevie.
"At least you had fun doing your project, didn't you?"
Stevie nodded.
"Son, I'm going to have a talk with Mrs. Jones."
He leapt from Step's lap and stood on the floor in the middle of the room, his eyes wide with fear. "No!" he said. "Don't talk to her! Please, Dad! You can't! You can't talk to her! Please!"
"Son, parents talk to teachers. That's how the system is sup posed to work."
"You can't, you just can't do it. It'll get worse if you do, she'll be worse!"
"Stevie," said Step. "I promise you this. I absolutely promise you. Things will get better after I talk to her.
And if they don't, I will keep you home from school."
"Yes!" he cried. "Keep me home!"
"Only if things get worse after I talk to her," said Step.
"No, keep me home now!"
"Stevie, I can't just keep you home now. There's a law that says that you have to go to school, and in North Carolina they're very strict about it. If I keep you out of school, it could mean going to court. Or moving again."
"Let's move back to Indiana!"
"Son, I can't afford to. If we moved, we'd have to move to Utah, to live in Grandma and Grandpa Brown's house. I'd lose my job. I'm just telling you that I'll do all those things if I have to, if talking to Mrs. Jones makes things worse for you. But I think when I talk to her things will get better, do you understand? The last month of school won't be so bad. I promise you."
"A whole month," said Stevie, his voice sounding dead.
"Think of it this way" said Step. "Think of it as if you had been convicted of a crime you didn't commit.
You aren't guilty, you didn't do anything wrong, but the system worked wrong and you got convicted for it and now there's nothing you can do except hang on and live through the last month of your sentence. And then you'll get out and you'll never have to see Mrs. Jones again. And next year you'll be in the middle school and there'll be a whole bunch of new kids from other schools-everybody will be new, not just you. Next year will be better. You just have to live through this year."
"Don't talk to Mrs. Jones," said Stevie. "Please."
"Trust me, Stevie," said Step. "When I talk to Mrs. Jones, I will make things better."
Clearly Stevie did not believe him. It frustrated Step, made him almost angry, that his son didn't believe that he could do it. But Step had taken a good little while before he believed in Stevie, too. Turnabout is fair play.
When he left Stevie's room a few minutes later, he found DeAnne leaning against the door of the room they shared, right across the hall. She looked grim as she opened the door and led him inside. She closed the door.
"You heard?" asked Step.
"I couldn't stand not to listen," she said. "I've been so worried."
"Well, then, you know everything." He laughed bitterly. "At least now we know why he was so desperate to believe Sister LeSueur's flattery. If the kid's been hammered at school, he's got to be starved for praise."
"Do you really believe his story?" asked DeAnne.
"I think so," said Step. "Partly at least. I've got to."
"But what about the librarian? Step, I know the librarian wasn't lying. She's the sweetest woman, she sounded like she really loved Stevie. She talked about how he comes in during recess every day and reads, and she talked about his project with such pride." Then DeAnne stopped herself. "Listen to me. I'm standing here telling you that I would rather believe a woman I only met this morning than my own son."
"We don't believe something out of loyalty" said Step. "We believe it because it sounds plausible to us.
And Stevie's story didn't sound plausible until he told so much more of it that it began to fall into place. For instance, why should the librarian have been lying? Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe Stevie's project did win first place, and maybe Mrs. Jones simply lied to her class about it."
"Oh, Step, she couldn't possibly imagine that she could get away with it, could she?"
"Who knows?" said Step. "There are a lot of crazy people in the world."
"But not teaching school."
"Why not? I mean, all those crazy people in mental institutions, they weren't born there. The day before they were in the asylum, they were outside the asylum, and a lot of them probably had jobs, and some of them were probably teachers. You don't think teachers could go crazy? Heck, they probably have a higher percentage than most, when you think of what they go through. So maybe she's just three months away from getting committed because she has come to hate children so deeply. Like a disease inside her. And this year she found a scapegoat, somebody she could pour out all that bile and venom onto, and it was Stevie."
DeAnne shook her head.
"It's possible," said Step. "I've at least got to find out."
"You made a promise to Stevie that you can't keep," said DeAnne.
"Oh, I'll keep it," said Step. "One way or another."
"How can you stop her from punishing him even more as soon as you're through talking to her?"
"If necessary I'll go to class every day."
"She'd never permit that. The school would never permit it."
"A parent, observing his child's class?"
"You'd lose your job."
"I'll quit the job!" said Step, and to his own surprise he was talking loudly, angrily. He brought his voice back down, spoke quietly, intensely. "I will quit the job. I hate the job. The job is keeping me from being a decent father to my children. The job is killing me and my family. Screw the job."
DeAnne visibly recoiled from him. "Step, please," she said.
It made him irrationally angry, to have her get upset at him for his language when he was talking about something that actually mattered. "Oh, don't you like the way I said it? The word screw is too rough for you?
It's a euphemism, DeAnne. You can't get mad at me for using a euphemism! I mean, I could have said-"
"I'm not mad at you for saying screw, you dunce! I'm not mad at you at all, and don't be mad at me either, I can't stand it!" She burst into tears. "You were about to say the f- word! You were about to say that to your own wife."
"What is this about?" asked Step. "You were mad at me, I know you well enough to know what it looks like, you were mad at me for saying screw and-"
"So I was! For one stupid second! And then I realized it was stupid and I'm sorry, I can't help getting some look on my face for one split second, I don't deserve to have you swearing at me!"
"What are we doing?" said Step. "Why are we fighting?"
"Because our son has been tormented in school and we didn't do anything to help him-"