“A delivery for you, Miss Katie,” the secretary said, and handed the bouquet to Katie. “Somebody sure thinks you’re special,” she added, and then left the room.
Katie carried the vase to her desk. Her hands were shaking as she took out the card, although she knew in her heart who they were from before she read it.
Beautiful flowers for a beautiful lady. Have the best day ever.
Sam
She grabbed her phone before she thought and sent a reply.
Sam. Oh my God. Thank you.
Then she remembered she wasn’t supposed to use her phone for personal reasons during school hours and put it back in her desk.
Her class crowded around her table, all wanting to be a part of the unexpected arrival, and with the bouquet came the questions.
“Who are they from?”
“Who sent you flowers?”
“Is it your birthday?”
“Did you win a prize, Miss Katie?”
“My mother is ’llergic to flowers.”
“My daddy buys my mama flowers when he messes up.”
The twins eyed the flowers, pointing without touching, trying to sniff the blooms to see what they smelled like.
“They’re so pretty, Miss Katie,” Beth said.
“They are, aren’t they?” Katie said. “Now, boys and girls, did you clean up where you had your snack?”
“Yes, Miss Katie,” they said.
“Okay, then everyone get out a pencil and paper and take a seat. I’m going to write three words on the whiteboard, and I want you to write the same words on your paper.”
The scramble began to get paper and pencils, and they were finally settled, except for a little boy named Freddie.
“Miss Katie, I ain’t got no paper or pencil.”
“Not ‘ain’t,’ Freddie. I do not have any paper or pencil.”
“Then ain’t neither one of us got any,” Freddie said.
Katie stifled a laugh. “Never mind for now. I’ll get some for you,” she said, and tore a sheet of lined paper from a tablet on her desk, took a pencil from the pencil holder, and laid both in front of him. “Here you go, Freddie.”
Then Katie moved to the overhead projector aimed at the whiteboard and turned it on. Lines appeared on the whiteboard, like the lines on tablet paper. “Now everyone watch how I write the words.”
She began with the word my and showed them how to move the pencil up and down on the paper without picking it up to make an M and how to make a Y by making two marks.
Then she wrote the second word: name.
Then the third word: is.
Then she wrote the whole thing in a sentence. “My name is…” to show them how connecting words can make a sentence. And at the end, they were to write their own names.
“Now you can begin and if you need help, please hold up your hand.”
Eighteen little heads bent to their papers.
Eighteen little hands gripped their pencils.
Donny Tiller wrote the whole sentence in a few seconds, then held up his hand.
“Yes?” Katie asked.
“I finished. Do I bring it to your desk?”
“Yes. You can put it in the basket,” Katie said, pointing at a wire basket on the corner.
She saw the neat writing, that he’d stayed within the lines, and that he’d capitalized the first word in the sentence. And he’d done it all in such a short space of time that she was guessing his reading ability was likely as good as his math and spelling. “If you’ve finished, you can pick out a book from the library to look at until it’s time to go to lunch.”
Only Donny didn’t pick out a book to look at. He picked out a book to read, and Katie made a mental note to remind Susan again to get this child on a testing list.
One by one, the children turned in their papers.
Beth and Evie’s looked identical except for their names…like one of them had written both papers, right down to the way they dotted the i.
Thor Dooley drew a guitar on the bottom of his paper, still wanting to be like Daddy.
Freddie’s paper was illegible, and he drew a stick figure of a man with a club in his hand.
Ree’s writing was so small Katie could barely see it. She didn’t know anything about her family, but something was amiss. The child was afraid of faces on crackers and doing her best to stay invisible—both symptoms of something bigger being wrong in the little girl’s world.
“Now that everyone is finished, I want to remind you about talking when you’re supposed to be listening. Evie…are you talking or listening?”
Evie blushed. “I’m talking, Miss Katie.”
“Can you please wait to talk until I’m finished?”
Evie nodded.
“Thank you,” Katie said. “I don’t like loud voices or loud noises, so it’s nicer when I don’t have to talk loudly to be heard.”
No sooner had she said that than there was a loud boom and the sounds of crashing metal outside their window.
“What was that?” Freddie asked.
“Sounded like war,” Thor added.
“Somebody wrecked,” a little girl added.
Katie was shaky as she walked to the window and looked out. The trash truck was driving away. She breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nope! Nothing bad. Nothing dangerous. Just the trash truck emptying the dumpster. Now! Where was I?” she said.
Evie held up her hand. “Telling me not to talk!”
Beth nodded. “Not to talk.”
Katie wanted to laugh—both from the relief of identifying a normal sound and the innocence of children who had yet to learn the art of the lie.
She looked at her bouquet again, tenderly touching the petals of a pink rose as tension eased within her. Thank you, Sam…for the reminder that there is beauty in the world.
“Class, we still have some time before lunch, and this is the first day of school, so let’s have some share time. Today, let’s share our favorite game. What is your favorite thing to play? Who wants to go first?”
Hands went up. Katie scanned the room. “Freddie, what is your favorite game to play?”
He looked surprised that teacher had called his name, and then he grinned.
“Me and my brothers like to ride our bikes out in the woods behind our house. Daddy cleared us a real dirt-bike trail. I like that best.”