Somebody Else’s Kids

“What’s wrong with that kid?” Tomaso asked. He had come closer. I could sense him just inches off my right shoulder. “How come he does that with his hands?”

“Sometimes he does that when he’s frightened or unsure about things. It makes him feel better or something, I guess. I don’t really know. He doesn’t talk yet so he can’t tell us.”

“It makes him look weird. What kind of freaky place is this anyway? What’s wrong with her?” He indicated Lori.

“Nothing’s wrong with me!” she replied hotly.

“Lor,” I said.

“Well, nothing is.”

“I know it. But Tomaso is new. He doesn’t know us yet and he has questions.”

“Well, he shouldn’t ask them. They aren’t polite.” Anger gave a petulant edge to her voice. “He comes in here and calls us names and then he goes and wrecks our stuff and you don’t do nothing. He called Boo a nigger and that’s nasty, don’t you know? And he tore up my folder and it had all my good work in there to show my dad.”

“Lor,” I said softly but firmly. “Not now. I’ll get to you later on it, but hang on to things for the moment, okay?”

She slapped the tabletop.

A tremendously long silence loomed up. I had no idea where it came from but all of a sudden we were in it looking at one another. My mind was blank. Tomaso came around and sat down in one of the chairs. Boo dropped his head to the table and loudly sniffed at it. I put a hand out to stop him.

“Boo. Here,” I said and tried to distract him with the flash cards.

“Boo?” Tomaso said. “What kind of crappy name is that? No wonder the kid is crazy. He sounds like a goddamn ghost. Shit.”

Lori was angry still. She glared across the table at Tomaso.

“What are you staring at, kid? Jesus, you look at me like I got three heads or something. Didn’t no one tell you it ain’t polite to stare?”

“How come your dad lets you say words like that?” she asked. “My dad would spank me if I talked like that.”

A strange expression changed Tomaso’s features. “I could pound you right into the bloody ground. Smash your dumb-looking little face right in, I could, if you don’t shut up.”

“Don’t your dad care?”

A fragile pause.

“Fuck off, would you? Sheesh, you’re a nosy kid.” He turned his chair so that he would not have to look at her. “She’s wrong, you know,” he said to me. “My father cares. My real father. He’s down in Texas. When he finds out they got me in a foster home up here, and how they stuck me in some fucking baby class, he’ll come take me away.”

I nodded.

“I don’t really belong in a class like this. My real father, he’ll come get me pretty soon. He knows I’m waiting.”

Over the recess period I had two aides take the three children out to the playground while I went down to the office for a quick look at Tomaso’s folder.

Not much of a file. Tomaso was one of the hundreds of migrant children who pass through our part of the state every year. His schooling had been sketchy. No one had made a serious attempt to find out what had happened when he was elsewhere, or for that matter, what had happened here.

The only notable thing in the folder was his family history. Even that was all too similar to the stories of many other children who had worked their way to me. He had been born down south, Texas, it said, although in truth it was probably Mexico. His mother had died when he was an infant. His father had remarried. A million little details clouded my mind as I read, the agonies I had come to know lives like Tomaso’s held. When he was five, his stepmother had fatally shot his father and older brother in a family argument. I stopped. Reread: Fatally shot his father. Tomaso had witnessed the occurrence.

After the father’s death, the stepmother was imprisoned, and Tomaso, the sole surviving member of the family, was placed in the custody of the state. Seven foster homes followed. All this had happened in the Southwest. Then a paternal uncle showed up and took Tomaso off to live with him. Authorities in Washington state found Tomaso at age seven picking strawberries in the fields. He had never been in school. Then child abuse in Colorado, and Tomaso was removed from the uncle’s care. Into foster homes again. Three of them this time. He never stayed very long. “Antisocial personality,” “unable to form attachments” was scrawled over and over again along the way. Back to the uncle’s care after a four-month separation, north to our state. The next time Tomaso was heard from, he had been sold to a couple in Michigan for $500. Finding him unmanageable, the couple tracked down the uncle to get their money back. Unable to get it from him, they contacted authorities. The uncle was arrested. For some reason I could not determine, Tomaso was returned to our state. Back into foster-home placement.

His school career, to say the least, had been erratic. Between the late starts and the frequent moves, Tomaso had never been in any school longer than four months. Nor did anyone seem to know in what grade to place him. In Washington they put him in first grade, second and third in Colorado, second grade here, third in Michigan and fourth here again. An IQ test administered in Colorado gave Tomaso a full-scale IQ of 92. The group test in Michigan gave him an 87. All his academic skills were delayed. In math he was more than a year behind the rest of the children in his class. His reading skills were hardly above that of a first grader.

However, it was not his IQ or his attendance or his lack of skills that had brought Tomaso to my room that November. What had was obvious. After numerous attempts to keep him mainstreamed in a normal classroom in his home school, the teacher had finally given up after coming across Tomaso strangling a younger pupil on the playground. The routes of suspension, whacks and even being sent to juvenile hall with a parole officer did not markedly affect Tomaso’s behavior. Having no full-time classroom for severely disturbed children in the district, the authorities placed him on homebound instruction. However, at this the foster parents protested. They would turn Tomaso out if he were made to stay home all day. The only alternative had been my room. Still on homebound in the mornings, Tomaso became my new student in the afternoons.