Beautiful Child by Torey Hayden Read Free Book Online Page A

have a protégée, someone I could introduce to my special milieu and help her grow into a competent educator, much the way Bob had done with me. Only a week on, however, and the cracks in this fantasy were already beginning to show.
    For instance, on Wednesday, Shane picked up the fishbowl from the window ledge to bring it to the table. This was something he had attempted to do on two or three other occasions, and each time I’d intercepted him and explained very specifically that it was forbidden to carry the fishbowl around because it was heavy and awkward, which might lead to a nasty accident. Moreover, the fish didn’t like it very much. This time, however, he managed to pick it up without my noticing, and disaster struck. The water sloshed, surprising him, and he dropped it. Water, broken glass, and goldfish went everywhere. Shane immediately started to bawl.
    Julie was closest to him. She smiled, knelt down, and put her arms around him. “Poor you, did that frighten you?” she said in the most soothing of voices. “Don’t cry. It was just an accident.” She took a tissue and dabbed his cheeks. “That’s okay. You didn’t mean to drop it, did you? Accidents just happen.”
    Listening to her, I felt ashamed. My immediate reactionhad been serious annoyance and I would have said to him, probably not too pleasantly, that here was the natural consequence of picking up the fishbowl and, thus, why we didn’t do it. I wouldn’t have comforted him at all. I would have made him help me mop up the water and catch the poor fish. Julie’s response was so much more humane.
    Thus it was with Julie. I found her almost pathologically compassionate. Nothing the boys did seemed to upset her. If someone was perfectly horrid, she’d say, “That isn’t thoughtful,” in a quiet, even voice. Or “I’m sure you didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident, wasn’t it?” when the little devil was looking her straight in the face. So too with Venus. No, Venus didn’t respond any more to Julie than to me, but that was okay. “I’m sure she just needs time to adjust,” Julie would say. “It’s a loud, active environment. I think if we allow her to move at her own pace, she’ll become more comfortable and trust us enough to feel like joining in. Let’s not force anything. Let’s just wait and see.”
    Instinctively, I did not agree with Julie’s approach to Venus, but there still seemed to be logic in it. I could see that. The problem was that it just wasn’t my way of tackling things. I was not a wait-and-see kind of person. I was a do-it-now, a something’s-got-to-work kind of person whose success rested largely on a terrierlike refusal to stop harrying problems until I got what I wanted. Just leaving Venus to sit like a lump on a log was anathema to my whole personality. But I didn’t say this. In the face of Julie’s serene patience, I felt ashamed of my restless need to intervene.After so much failure with Venus, I decided I would go right back to basics; so, I arrived Monday morning with a bag of M&Ms.
    “Remember these?” I said to Bob as I came through the front office to collect my mail. I rattled the bag of candy.
    Bob smiled sardonically.
    Back in our very early days together, Bob had caused something of a scandal in the school district by using M&Ms to reward his students. This was the early 1970s when behaviorism was considered a radical approach and classrooms were still quite formal. In our quiet, semirural backwater no one had yet thought of equating something like candy with learning. Bob changed all that. Like many of us of that generation, he was out to build a better world. In his case, he wanted to show that his ragtag group of unruly, deprived youngsters could rise above their various labels and depressing environments, learn and progress. He started very concretely with the children, giving them M&Ms when they cooperated and worked. Sure enough, he soon had impressive results. He also soon