In the hour before the first bell, Miss Callan sat in the teacher’s lounge of Charles Wallace Elementary, sorting self-portraits from her kindergarten class. She carefully examined each drawing, counting fingers on hands, noting details of facial features and clothing. These, she knew, told the story of each child’s developing view of him- or herself and the world.
There were two piles on the table in front of her: “On Track” and “Needs Help.” Miss Callan smiled down at Olivia’s picture. Olivia certainly knew that she had curly yellow hair. On Track. Sophie – late summer birthday, Miss Callan recalled – still had circles for hands and two small dots for eyes. No mouth, no nose, no hair. Miss Callan made a note to speak with Sophie’s mother again. Needs Help.
A hand reached over Miss Callan’s shoulder and plucked Sophie’s drawing from the table. Miss Callan stiffened.
“Pathetic!” said Mr. Donner, dropping into a chair next to her. Mr. Donner taught fifth grade.
“I swear kids get stupider every year,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, slurped his coffee, and regarded the paper in his hand with disdain.
“Is this one of your pee-ers? I hear you’ve got a couple of kids who can’t get through a day without peeing their pants. Mummy and Daddy can’t be bothered to toilet-train them. Pathetic.” He tossed the drawing back onto the table and looked around the room to see whether anyone had brought in doughnuts.
Miss Callan retrieved Sophie’s drawing and placed it carefully in the correct pile, smoothing it out a little. Donner gave a snort of laughter.
“Don’t look so aggrieved, Callan. This is just your first year. Wait ‘til you’ve been here ten or twenty years. See how much of that self-righteous caring you still have then!”
Miss Callan did not reply. Mr. Donner was a wasp. If she kept very still and didn’t react, he would go away. She kept very still and waited. He gave her a long look, then he pushed his chair back and strolled out of the teacher’s lounge, his hands in his pockets, his cup of coffee abandoned on the table behind him.
The last drawing in her stack was Micah’s. She frowned. Micah had not wanted to do the assignment.
“We already did that, Miss Callan. Remember?” he had said.
“But you’ve grown so much this year, Micah! I need a new picture of you.”
“How about an elephant? Or a dinosaur? I’m good at dinosaurs.”
She had smiled warmly and insisted: today’s art lesson was a drawing of himself. She had coaxed him back to the table and pushed the plastic bin of crayons a bit closer to him. He had sighed heavily and given her a look that made her feel she had disappointed him, but that he was too polite to say so.
Now she stared transfixed at what he had produced. She glanced at the wall clock. Fifteen minutes until the bell. Elinor should be in her office by now. Miss Callan secured each of the two piles with a black bulldog clip and dropped them into her bag. She hoisted the bag onto her shoulder, grabbed Micah’s drawing, and hurried out the door and down the hall.
“Is this the kid you mentioned to me a while back? Something about a penguin?” Elinor Rice, school nurse at Charles Wallace Elementary, sat on the corner of her desk, sipping a cappuccino. She studied Micah’s drawing. Miss Callan was hovering near the two cracked vinyl cots used by children with headaches and upset stomachs. Just yesterday a child had not made it to the bathroom in time: the air hinted at vomit and disinfectant.
“Yes, that’s him,” she said. “It was a standard exercise in developing fine motor skills. They were supposed to color the penguin, then cut it out and glue it onto another piece of paper. Some of the kids really struggle with scissors, you know?”
Mrs. Rice smiled, now remembering Micah’s objection.
“He said it made more sense just to leave the penguin on the original page, right? You have to admit, that’s pretty—”
But Rachel Callan wasn’t listening. She was reliving the moment.
“He said it was dangerous for penguins to move when they didn’t really have to. Dangerous! When I asked him to please follow directions, he did, of course. He’s a sweet boy and he’s actually quite good with scissors. But he cut off that penguin’s foot. Deliberately cut it off. And then he glued it onto the page a little way from the penguin’s body with a trail of red crayon leading to it!”
Miss Callan closed her eyes. Micah’s mother had actually laughed when Miss Callan had called her.
“Yeah, he told us about that at dinner last night,” his mother had said. “He said an orca had attacked the penguin and that the penguin had been lucky to escape with only minor injuries. Orcas will happen, I guess.”
Miss Callan pointed at the drawing in Elinor’s hand.
“And now this! I’m worried, Elinor. Something isn’t right with this little boy. I’m with these children all day. I know them. We’re trained to detect problems. We have a responsibility to intervene! If we don’t fight for them, who will?”
Elinor Rice touched her hand lightly to her friend’s arm. “Every kid should have a teacher like you,” she said.
When the last of her charges had boarded the bus for home that afternoon, Miss Callan returned to her desk. She pulled Micah’s file and laid out the three self-portraits he’d drawn over the course of his kindergarten year. In September, he’d been enthusiastic and eager to please: he began with a thin strip of green along the bottom of the page and a lot of blue sky. His was the classic stick figure, but he already had three fingers on each hand and a pretty good face. She had happily put him in the On Track pile. His family had gotten a puppy just before Christmas break and he had included the dog in his January drawing. He had also given himself hair, eyes, a smile, and all five fingers, as well as blue pants and a red shirt, but that had been the same week as the Penguin Incident, so she’d worried about the meaning of the red shirt. On Track, but she’d attached a red flag Post-it to the drawing.
Micah’s drawing from this week had much taller grass. No dog in this one, but there was a tree and a big sun and what looked like a small dinosaur near the tree. Three birds soared in the blue sky between fluffy white clouds. In the lower left-hand corner of the scene stood Micah. Same blue pants, but this time his T-shirt was yellow. Atop the yellow shirt was a solid brown oval. Completely blank: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Nothing.
Miss Callan propped her elbows on her desk and rested her forehead in her hands, staring at the brown oval. What had happened to Micah? What had she missed? How had this sweet, happy boy come to see himself as faceless, invisible in a brightly-colored world?
She tapped a pencil on her desk, pondered speaking with Mr. Thomas, then dismissed the idea. He’d been a principal so long he was completely out of touch with current thinking on children and their unique psychology. He’d been more concerned about Micah not following directions than he was about the crayon blood and the dismemberment of the penguin.
“Boys will be boys.” He’d actually said that. No. She and Elinor would handle it.
The next morning, Miss Callan took Micah’s hand and walked him down to Elinor’s office while the rest of the class headed out for recess.
“I’m not sick,” he said.
“I know you’re not, Sweetheart,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Mrs. Rice just wants to talk to you. That’s okay, right?”
“I guess so.” Micah settled in the chair and looked around the nurse’s office with interest.
“Smells like barf,” he commented.
Miss Callan had done her best to prepare Elinor for this interview.
“It’s important that Micah feels safe and that he can trust you,” she had said. “You can’t just ask him what’s wrong. You must coax it out of him. Children are complex.”
Elinor had laughed nervously.
“Ticking time-bombs in elastic-waist jeans and Batman sneakers,” she had said.
Miss Callan frowned, remembering this. Mrs. Rice was really more suited to boo-boos and band-aids and – as Micah had so elegantly put it – barf. But Miss Callan would need a second opinion if she was going to Take Steps.
Now she withdrew to the corner of the room nearest the door, out of Micah’s field of view. Elinor folded her hands on her desk and smiled her most encouraging smile. Micah sat across from her, his hands tucked under his thighs, his feet swinging, his brown eyes trained on her expectantly.
“So! How are you, Micah?”
“I’m not sick,” he repeated.
“That’s good,” she said. “How do you like school?”
“It’s pretty good. Miss Callan is nice. She reads good stories to us.”
“I’m glad. So…you’re happy at school?”
Micah shrugged. “I guess.” His attention drifted to a poster on the wall over one of the cots. It was a picture of a grizzled old man grinning around a half-smoked cigarette. His teeth were brown and two of them were missing. The poster read “Smoking is very sophisticated.”
“Is that your grandpa?” Micah asked her. Mrs. Rice followed his gaze.
“No!” she said. “That’s—”
“He shouldn’t smoke,” Micah told her. “People shouldn’t smoke.”
“Um…that’s true,” said Mrs. Rice, vaguely. In the corner, Miss Callan rolled her eyes. Amateurs.
Mrs. Rice pulled a box of crayons and a tablet of paper from a drawer and placed them on the desk.
“Would you like to draw?”
Micah hesitated. “Draw what?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Anything you like.”
“Okay.” He opened the box of crayons, selected an olive-green one, and pulled the tablet closer.
“How are things at home, Micah?”
“Okay. My mom barfs a lot.”
“That’s too bad. Is she…sick?”
Micah was adding horns to the olive-green creature in his drawing. He did not look up.
“No. She’s going to have a baby in a while.”
Over in the corner, Miss Callan perked up. This was news to her. Now we’re getting somewhere! He’s about to be replaced in his parents’ hearts.
“That’s a pretty scary-looking monster you’ve drawn there,” Mrs. Rice ventured, exchanging a glance with Rachel.
Now Micah did look up at her. He looked perplexed. “It’s a triceratops. They were plant-eaters. Who’s scared of a plant-eater?”
Mrs. Rice blushed. Micah put down his crayon. His brown eyes held hers and his voice was earnest, worried.
“Is Miss Callan mad at me? Is it ‘cuz I sometimes talk too much in class? I really try not to. My brain wants to tell about all these great ideas I have, but then my other brain tries to remind me about the rules so I’ll be quiet. But it’s hard sometimes, you know?”
Mrs. Rice was startled. “You have two brains, Micah?”
He looked at her a moment longer, then pulled a blue crayon from the box and started in on a lake for the triceratops. “No,” he said. “I have another one that’s just for math. And my favorite brain thinks up all the great ideas in the first place! I have four brains. My dad says I’m really lucky.”
Miss Callan and Mrs. Rice cornered the principal in the front office during first lunch period. Micah sat in a plastic chair against the far wall, looking bewildered. They had begun calmly enough, Miss Callan explaining in a low voice the significant tenets of abandonment issues and children’s overall fragility. Mr. Thomas, however, was reluctant to call in child services and Miss Callan was losing patience with him. When Pete Donner yanked open the door and dropped his morning’s paperwork on the secretary’s desk, Miss Callan saw the sudden relief in Mr. Thomas’s eyes. She whirled to face Mr. Donner.
“What’s going on?” he asked, glancing over at the little boy.
“What do you care?” she hissed.
Mr. Donner shrugged. “True enough.” He turned to go, but Miss Callan was in high dudgeon and glad of a new target. She stepped close to him; her voice quiet and angry.
“Why are you even here? You don’t care about children. You don’t believe in them. How can you call yourself a teacher?”
Mr. Donner raised his eyebrows at this but did not reply and Miss Callan felt a little shiver of triumph. She turned away from him, crossed the room, and crouched in front of Micah. She gripped the boy gently by both shoulders.
“Micah,” she said. “You are Special and Important. You know that, right?”
The boy looked uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said.
Pete Donner gave one of his derisive snorts. “What is going on?” he asked again. Rachel Callan sprang back to her feet and crossed to the front desk. Picking up Micah’s self-portrait, she thrust it at Mr. Donner.
“This is what’s going on! Nothing you would have noticed, of course.”
He took the paper, gave it a quick scan. “What’s the problem?”
She jabbed a finger at the solid brown oval that should have been a face.
Mr. Donner rolled his eyes. “Oh, for the love of—” He moved closer to her and dropped his voice even lower so the boy wouldn’t hear him. “Maybe the kid isn’t very smart. Did you ever think of that? I’m betting he just isn’t very smart.”
He crossed to Micah, bent down, and held the drawing in front of the little boy. “Hey, kid,” he said, not unkindly. “What’s with your face, here?”
Micah glanced at the drawing, then up at Mr. Donner.
“I’m looking the other way,” Micah said.
There was a silence in the room. Miss Callan pressed her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Mrs. Rice turned a little away from her friend and looked at the ceiling. Mr. Thomas coughed.
Then Pete Donner was laughing. His laughter filled the front office of Charles Wallace Elementary and was all the more startling because it carried none of its usual scorn. He handed the drawing back to Miss Callan. He gave Micah a jaunty salute and a delighted grin.
“I stand corrected,” he said.