City Kid. Mary MacCracken

days to a school year. Two years and half of this one. Four hundred and fifty days altogether and Luke had missed over a hundred of them – over half a year. Had he been out more days this year than last? I tried to read the dates, but the carbon print was smudged and illegible. I sighed and put the pink slips back in the folder.

      There was another large pile of white typewritten pages. I began to leaf through these and realized they were descriptions of Luke’s arrests. Twenty-four pages, a separate sheet for each arrest. Last November he had stolen over ten dollars’ worth of toy guns and army men from the five-and-ten. The previous April, a woman’s purse and gold earrings from the local department store, and before that, a cigarette lighter and aspirin and cough medicine from the drugstore.

      The accounts of fires were more numerous. Luke had set both small and large street fires, and there was one major episode on the hills on the edge of the city during a dry spell. The fire had gotten out of control and it had taken the entire Fire Department two days to put it out.

      My stomach felt queasy. The reality of the folder hit me harder than the report Mrs. Karras had given us the day before. But the mismatch between this file and Luke of yesterday was the hardest to understand. How had all this started? Why? I searched the folder for a social history or background information, but there was none. Only a signed permission slip from Luke’s mother, agreeing to his being part of the program, and the intelligence test Mrs. Karras had mentioned.

      I studied the test form closely, trying to decipher the psychologist’s handwriting and remember what Jerry had explained about the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). He had felt that there was some bias against culturally deprived children on all verbal sections of intelligence tests, but that the performance sections, made up of puzzles, pictures, and mazes, were more accurate. I could see that there was a great deal of difference in Luke’s subtest scores. He had given mainly one-word answers or no answer at all to verbal questions, but on the performance part of the test, where he had to arrange pictures sequentially or build block designs from patterns, his score was far above the mean of ten. I made a mental note to discuss all this with Jerry at our next meeting.

      I glanced at my watch. I’d spent over twenty minutes going through Luke’s file. No more time to think about the past. Now I needed to think about today.

      I took the file back to the office and hung my jacket and scarf in the closet in the music room and then stood looking around the room. We were not going to have much in the way of books, or any kind of equipment; at least I wanted to keep my coat in our room. It was going to be difficult to work in a room that wasn’t mine. For the past six years I had tried to build a room for children where they could feel physically and emotionally safe. I was convinced that all children needed a safe place somewhere in their lives in order to grow. A place where they knew they were listened to, accepted, and cared for.

      I had filled my room at school with books, records, pictures, and plants, with scraps of bright carpet sewn together for mats, old pillows covered with soft prints, fish tanks, and homemade games. There would be none of this in the bare, drab music room of School 23, only cold metal furniture and an old piano.

      Yet somehow I was sure Luke could grow. The pink truant slips and typed arrest sheets faded from my mind. That was last week, last month, last year. Now the image of yesterday’s Luke hunched over his lion picture filled my mind. Suddenly I knew what to do. I took Luke’s lion picture from the file cabinet where we were to keep our records, data sheets, and tests on the children and wrote down his story as nearly as I could remember it; then I went back to the office and typed it on a white unlined piece of paper. I wrote the title in capitals.

      THE LIONS

      There were four lions. A mother lion with fur around her face and three baby lions. They lived in Africa. A zoo keeper caught them and put them in a big field with a big, BIG fence around them. They lived happily ever after.

      by Luke Brauer

      As I typed, I thought of Luke’s picture. Was there any relationship between the baby lions and Luke and the large space between the lions and their mother?

      Careful, I warned myself, don’t read in too much.

      In the music room, I cut a file folder in half to make front and back covers, punched the picture, the story, and the covers with a three-hole punch, I put Luke’s story and lion picture between the two halves of the folder and laced them all together with some red yarn from the materials drawer. With Magic Markers, red, yellow, and blue, I wrote LUKE’S BOOK on the front cover.

      Painting was over by the time I got back to Lisa’s room. They were cleaning up, to use the word euphemistically, accompanied by Lisa’s shouts. “… Dump the water in the sink, for Pete’s sake. Not on the floor. Pick up the papers!”

      Lisa looked up at me. “I swear I don’t know why I do it. It’s not worth the mess.” Then she smiled. “Well, maybe it is. Look at this.” She pointed to what was obviously a picture of School 23, grimy red bricks outlined in black, gray stone steps, even a lady with a whistle in the yard beside the school.

      We smiled together. “It’s worth it,” I said. “How about Luke? What did he do?”

      “God! You know, I don’t know. He’s so quiet. The other twenty-nine are so noisy, it’s like he’s not there. But I know he did something – I would have noticed that at least.”

      Lisa wiped her hands with paper towels at the sink.

      “Luke,” she called. “Come here.”

      Luke’s body crouched lower over his desk.

      “Luke Brauer. Do you hear me? Come over here.”

      Lisa’s voice was not mean. Just loud.

      Reluctantly, Luke stood up as the class watched with interest.

      “Come on over here. Now what did you paint?”

      Oh, Lord, I thought. Why had I asked? I never wanted him to be singled out like this.

      Luke stood in front of Lisa. Paint was smeared on his shirt, his face, his hair.

      “Well,” she said, “what did you paint?”

      Luke shrugged.

      “See,” Lisa said. “That’s all he ever does.” She hunched her own shoulders in imitation.

      “I’ll ask you once more, Luke. What did you paint?”

      Luke kept his eyes on the floor.

      “All right. All right. I give up. Go on with Mary.” She shook her head at me. “Maybe you can get something out of him.”

      Lisa turned to the class as Luke and I headed for the door.

      “Get out your phonic workbooks.” The class groaned and then shouted its objections as Luke and I left.

      I walked down the hall toward the music room with Luke beside me, not talking, wanting only to give him some space to let the humiliation dissolve a little.

      When we got to the music room, Luke crawled up onto the same metal chair of the day before. I sat beside him, turning a box of crayons in my fingers.

      After a while I said, “I thought maybe you might be tired of drawing or painting. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe we could read a little.”

      Luke’s expression never changed, his eyes stared straight ahead. He had yet to speak to me today. Still, I might as well try; there certainly was nothing to lose.

      I pulled the file folder toward us and turned it over.

      “I made this while you were painting. The cover isn’t too good, because I made it very quickly. You can make another one sometime, if you want.”

      “Luke’s Book,” Luke said.

      You are wonderful, Lucas Brauer, I wanted to say, remembering my other children and how it often took months to get a single spoken word. You talk. You read. But I’m sure you startle easily. I kept myself silent, my