adoptedwriter

Slight, willowy blue-eyed boy

Freckled, faster than lightning 

60 pounds soaking wet. 

Dashes from one side of the room to the other. 

“Chris, time to sit down and start your language arts.”

I’m his intervention substitute for the day. 

His alluring but troubled eyes dart left and right.

He grabs the back of a classroom chair, turns it around abruptly and hops onto the seat like a frog. 

I’m braced for the chair to topple over, but somehow it doesn’t. 

He squats on the seat and grabs his book placed on the kidney-shaped table. 

“I read this already,” he states.

He hops out of his seat and lands on the floor feet first. The impact between his sneakers and the linoleum creates a sudden clap. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he demands.

When he looks at you it’s troubling; troubling and sad.

He’s only eight; a bright but tortured soul, and he’s just a little kid.

There’s a sweet, needy human in that lean stature wanting to be let free from the mind and body that will not rest, that will not think and focus in an orderly way, that never feels calm and peaceful. 

He landed on his feet today, but what about his future?

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Seven years later, wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt, he enters the classroom with a running vault like a gymnast. The art teacher cringes. Too many breakable objects in the area. 

Chris doesn’t care. He has proof that he’s physically fit and has flexibility, strength and speed.

Oh, yes…he has speed. 

I’m just the aide in this room with my charge, The Golfer, but I instantly recall this kid from my substitute teaching years. 

Chris is taller but still lean, freckled with the same soulful, piercing blue eyes filled with angst, annoyance and restlessness. 

The one-man-tornado interrupts the teacher, he spins in his chair and he knocks papers and books around. To say he is disruptive is an understatement.  Chris makes sarcastic, edgy remarks and off-color wise-cracks about news events, art images, directions for completing assignments and even other teachers in the building.

He thinks he’s funny.

He sort of is if we weren’t in school,  but,…

I also feel the need to protect The Golfer who is unable to understand Chris’s attempts at humor and his execution of sudden Spider Man-like moves in the doorway. He literally climbs the walls. 

Chris is as tormented as he ever was only he’s older, bigger, more knowledgeable, and aware of the world. The art teacher feels exasperated. 

One week Chris is absent. There is tranquility in digital art once more. 

He was suspended for spray paint vandalism on a public concrete wall with messages about blowing up the school. Authorities found threatening texts to some cohorts on his phone and iPad. Now he’s a felon and he’s only a 15. 

Chris becomes The Criminal overnight. 

My boss (principal) made a deal with me a year ago when he turned me down after applying for another position in the school building. “You’re first on my list if we ever need a home bound tutor ever again.”  

Right before Christmas I email my boss regarding some random unrelated topic. He replies quickly and adds, “By the way, would you please stop by my office when you get a chance? I have an opportunity you might be interested in.” 

I become the intervention tutor for Chris the Criminal; the kid with profound ADHD for whom I subbed in 2015; that kid with the face of a bewildered, angsty angel who never stops fidgeting and believes the darnedest things are real and / or are untrue.  Testing shows he has been blessed with a brilliant mind with creative tendencies off the charts. 

He’s sad and sleepy, manic and mysterious all at the same time. He’s hard to teach and reach. His limitations and abilities are sporadic and never the same two days in a row. 

I am committed. I will get him through to the end of this school year. Then he qualifies for vocational school as long as he passes. I’m walking a fine balance negotiating between colleagues who would be his actual in person teachers with assignments and his parents plus administrators. At a time when my career would be otherwise waning, I’m proud and thrilled to have this challenge/ opportunity to work with this weird, wild-spirited man-child. Sometimes The Criminal is judged harshly for his transgressions. Sometimes he is shown compassion. Sometimes he is ignored so as to avoid glorifying certain behaviors. I admit I’ve done all three at various points. He’s said and done some scary, wrong things. He’s also made insightful, out-of-the-box, not false comments because he’s never afraid to admit that life is messy, inconsistent, and fucked up at times. 

I can’t help but wonder though, next year, what will he do?  What will he study? Can he fight the inner urge demons that claw at his brain to stay out of trouble? What trade can he pursue one day?  In some ways he has the intellectual skills to lead armies or manage medicines, but he wants to scale the walls of buildings, assemble bizarre toy parts like Sig from Toy Story and create gaming stories and drawings about mythical warrior-like beings all night and then sleep all day. 

I can get him through the month of May and turn him into an official high school junior so that he can start trade school in the fall, but then what?