to your seats!”
They went.
Gentling her voice, Robin asked, “Ryan, are you all right?”
He gave a jerky nod.
“Please take your seat, too. I’ll talk to you in a minute.”
She marched an unresisting Brett out onto the small, railed porch of the portable building. Mercifully, the porch of the next portable and the covered breezeway into the main building were deserted. When she released him, he put his back to the railing and waited, head bowed and lank hair hanging over his eyes.
“What were you thinking?” Robin asked.
After a minute, he shrugged.
Her heartbeat was slowing at last, but she still felt shaken by the violence of his reaction. Sixth-grade fights were usually…clumsier. She had never seen an attack so purposeful. Given another ten seconds, he would have hurt Ryan.
“I should send you to the principal’s office,” she said. “I won’t hesitate to do so if you ever, ever, start a fight again. Is that clear?”
He nodded.
“What Ryan said was unkind. It was also spoken out of ignorance.”
Brett’s head shot up. He said hotly, “My dad would never—”
Robin held up a hand. “But that isn’t the point. You cannot go through life attacking every single person who thinks something you don’t like.”
“I should just let people call my dad a murderer.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t correct them, or even argue. When,” she added sternly, “the setting is appropriate to do so.”
His face set in stubborn lines.
“Have you ever said to Ryan, ‘My mom left my dad. Just because the cops can’t find her doesn’t mean she’s dead’?”
“Nobody will believe me. The cops don’t.”
He had a point. She gave up on reason and said, “If another kid taunts you, I want you to come to me. I’ll talk to him or her, just as I’m going to talk to Ryan. But violence will only convince them that they’re right.”
Anger simmered in his eyes. “Dad didn’t—”
Interrupting, Robin said, “Right now, I neither know nor care. He’s not in my classroom. You are. He isn’t the issue here, any more than are the parents that I know don’t encourage their children to do their homework or who don’t care enough to come to parent conferences. You are responsible for your own behavior, for how you handle your problems. Parents might be part of the problem, but your response is yours alone.” She waited a moment. “Do you understand?”
Jaw still clenched, he jerked his head once.
“Fine.” She touched his rigid arm. “You may return to your desk.”
Stepping into the classroom, she gestured to Ryan, who took a circuitous route to avoid going anywhere near Brett. Robin steered the other boy outside the classroom door.
“I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”
“Jeez! He was like an animal!”
“You said something deeply hurtful.”
His face became wary.
“Tell me, Ryan, do you know anything about Brett’s parents for a fact?” She waited, then continued, “Or have you been listening to gossip that is no more informed than you were a few minutes ago?”
“Everybody says…”
“Has Brett’s father been arrested? Tried?”
He hesitated, then shook his head.
“Don’t you think the police would have arrested Mr. Lofgren if they had any evidence whatsoever to suggest that he killed his wife?”
“But…”
She overrode him. “In this country, we believe people are innocent until proven guilty. Mr. Lofgren is nowhere near being proven guilty. Perhaps more to the point, in this school, and especially in my classroom, nobody deliberately attempts to hurt another person’s feelings. Am I making myself clear?”
Looking both mulish and sheepish—speaking of animals, she thought with a certain wryness—Ryan nodded again.
“Then this incident is forgotten. You may go back to your desk.”
Of course, she was lying. The incident was not forgotten by either boy, or even by her.
Wednesday, she had her students begin journals, which they would leave in their desks every night.
“I’ll read them from time to time.” She wandered among desks, touching a shoulder here, smiling there. “Not to correct them. I want you to write freely about your experiences, your thoughts, your feelings. I’m checking only to be sure that you are in fact using your time to write. Still, be aware that I may read any particular passage, so in a sense you are writing for my eyes.”
She gave them twenty minutes to open their spiral notebooks and—for the most part—stare into space. Each day it would come easier, until the majority of students actually enjoyed this time, took up where they left off, explored contradictory emotions, forgot that they were writing for anyone but themselves.
On Thursday she interrupted a shouting match between Brett and a pair of boys from April Nyholt’s class. They said, “I’m sorry, Ms. McKinnon,” and retired from the battlefield looking smug. Brett smoldered.
Robin wished he could see that his attitude was most of the problem. Other kids in this school had had notorious parents. Students had buzzed a couple of years ago when a sixth-grader’s mother left her father for another woman. But the girl had had the sense to say, “She’s my mom and I love her, but…it is so-o freaky!” Everybody had sympathized and quickly forgotten. Brett didn’t let anybody forget.
Robin didn’t look at her students’ journals until Friday. She asked that they be left out on the desks. When the room was empty, she walked from desk to desk, flipping open the journals.
Some had only a few lines.
I’m going to my dad’s tonight. I hate going! It is so boring!
Robin smiled at the multiple underlines beneath “so,” even though she felt sad at how many children were shuttled between divorced parents’ houses with no regard for where they preferred to be.
One boy wrote in some detail about a Seahawks game to which his uncle had taken him. The excitement shone through, and that provoked another smile. Several kids couldn’t spell, and she made a mental note of their names. Ryan wrote about “that Lofgren kid” trying to beat the crap out of him. “All I said was…” Robin sighed. Her little lecture had apparently not had much impact.
Perhaps deliberately, her route brought her to Brett’s desk last. She
