fairly superfluous to things. All her attention appeared focused on physical movement, relentlessly going around and around in the tiny room. After some twenty minutes of this frantic action, she’d stop, say she needed to go home, unlock all the doors again, and in the process fold back into the hunched crab of a girl we were used to.
More than two weeks passed. Then there was a sudden variation in the theme. After arriving and locking the doors one afternoon, Jadie straightened up. I was expecting her coat hook calisthenics, when, abruptly, she screamed. It was a playful scream, a high-pitched, ear-splitting girlish squeal, and the small room resounded with it. Jadie spun around, a grin from ear to ear, and screamed again. And again. And again. I sat, deafened.
Jadie danced, head thrown back, arms out. Around and around in a circle she went and she continued screaming. This must have gone on for five minutes or more before a knock came on the cloakroom door that led out into the hallway.
“Torey?” It was Lucy’s voice, sounding alarmed. “Is everything all right in there?” She turned the doorknob, but, of course, being locked, the door did not open. Jadie, who had frozen at the sound of Lucy’s voice, let out an audible sigh when the door remained fast.
“Yes, we’re okay,” I replied.
“You sure? Do you need a hand with anything?”
“No, it’s okay, Luce.”
Muffled sounds came from beyond the door. “Well, all right,” Lucy said uncertainly. “If you’re sure.” Then she departed.
Jadie remained stock-still until she was certain there was no one outside the door. Then she turned her head to look at me, and covering her mouth with her hand, she giggled. “She heard my voice,” she whispered.
“Yes, she did, didn’t she?”
“She heard me scream.”
“And you’re still safe, aren’t you?” I said.
Jadie bolted off across the room. Making three or four circles of it within seconds, she ran her fingers lightly along the walls and jumped with nimble feet up onto the benches and down again. On the third time around, she veered off unexpectedly and approached the vertical pipe. As so many times before, Jadie wrapped her arms and legs around it in a tight hug, but after clinging to it a few moments, this time she actually did shinny up. Before I realized what was happening, Jadie had reached the two smaller pipes traversing the room along one side and was out onto them, like a gymnast kneeling on parallel bars. Alarmed because she was a good six feet off the floor, I rose from my chair.
“Jade, those pipes weren’t made for climbing on.”
She laughed heartily.
“I’m not sure they can take your weight, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself, so come down now.”
She made no effort to get down off the pipes.
Grabbing the desk chair, I maneuvered it over and prepared to climb up to get her. This prompted a swift response. Jadie scurried out of range, still laughing, then, clutching one pipe, she let herself down off it backward, swung a moment or two in midair, and then finally dropped the last couple of feet to the floor.
In the classroom it was as if none of this had ever happened. Jadie’s days continued to be spent in nearly total silence, her body hunched over, her head down, her arms pulled up. I had to repeatedly quash the feeling that somehow I was making up those after-school visits, that I was the one with hallucinations. Indeed, during one bleak moment, I wondered if perhaps this hadn’t been June Harriman’s experience with Jadie, too. For the most part, I disciplined myself away from contemplating June Harriman too much. Not knowing her personal circumstances, but sharing her class, it was too easy to extrapolate from what we had in common to form opinions that might be wildly inaccurate and equally destructive. However, as I glanced across the classroom at Jadie, contorted in her chair, it struck me that perhaps this was why June Harriman had committed suicide—driven to believe that somehow she was the crazy one. It was just a one-off thought, but it was dagger sharp. An ideal script for a horror film.
On Friday of that week, I decided to attempt collage making with the children. Coming in with a large collection of old magazines and a box containing a huge assortment of riffraff—everything from feathers and chunks of sponge to bottle caps and uncooked pasta—I tried to explain the elusive nature of a work of art. We had been studying a loosely constructed unit on emotions, and I hoped to relate their collages to this, saying that when everyone was finished, we’d talk as a group about their work, about what feelings the collages generated in the people looking at them, and what feelings had gone into making them.
The boys dived into the box with lively abandon and set to work immediately.
Reuben loved the pieces of fabric, particularly the bits of silk and velvet. Picking each one up tenderly from the box, he stroked them against his upper lip and flapped his hands in excitement.
Philip, in the chair next to Reuben’s, had a Montgomery Ward catalogue out and was enthusiastically cutting out pictures of toys and pasting them down.
“What have we here?” I asked, pulling a chair up and sitting down beside him.
“Haaahhh,” Philip breathed. His whole vocabulary consisted of heavily breathed syllables, most of which were unintelligible to me.
“Toys?” I inquired.
He gestured wildly.
“That’s his Christmas stocking,” Jeremiah said from across the table. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you. Ain’t it, Phil? Him and me are making up pictures of what we want in our Christmas stockings.”
I thought it best not to point out to Jeremiah that this was the twenty-ninth of March.
“And Jadie, too,” Jeremiah said, expansively gesturing to include them all. “Jadie and me and Philip are doing that for our collage. What Santa’s gonna bring us.” Jeremiah was pasting down pictures of Jaguars and gold bullion bars.
Fact was, Jadie was doing nothing. She sat humped over in her chair, her chin almost on the tabletop. She stared morosely at the blank piece of paper in front of her.
“Having a hard time getting started?” I asked.
No response.
“You know, of course, you don’t have to do a Christmas stocking. That was Jeremiah’s idea. If he’d like to fill his paper with a collage of things he’d like to find in his Christmas stocking, that’s lovely, but you can choose to do something else. You can make your collage any way you want it.”
Silence.
“An important thing with art is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just look in the box and see what catches your attention.”
A pause. I regarded her. “You know how we’ve been talking about emotions lately? About that place way down inside you where your feelings are? Look down there and find out what you’re feeling. Right now. See if you can make a collage of what you find.”
I went back to the boys and left Jadie alone with her blank piece of paper. She usually did very well with tasks that were rigidly laid out, such as her academic work, but she always seemed to have trouble with ambiguous projects. Consequently, I didn’t
