Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway Read Free Book Online

intercepted me and said that Emmett Furth needed help with his reading comprehension, so I gave up trying to catch Dawn’s attention and went over to pull out the little chair at the little table in the corner where Emmett was sitting.
    Back then what set him apart from the other kids, besides his behavior, were his buzz cut and his granny glasses with violet-tinted lenses. I’d always assumed the glasses were Pam’s mistake, but one day, probably wanting to assure me she’d had nothing to do with them, she told me that Emmett had refused even to consider any glasses other than the purple ones. By the time he got to middle school he’d switched to contacts, and he looked just like any regular troublemaker. I was secretly sorry to see those glasses go.
    As silly as it sounds, the memory of those glasses was the main reason I’d never been able to take Rud Petty’s attorney very seriously when he suggested it might have been Emmett who came into our house that night and attacked us in our bed.
    In the classroom that day I tried to smile at him as I sat down, even though he had already made a reputation for himself—at such a young age—as a neighborhood pest. But he was in no mood for preliminaries, or maybe it was just that he felt embarrassed when he recognized me as one of the ladies whose yard he’d trampled on his bike. In any event, he ignored my smile and got right down to business. The instructions were for him to read passages aloud to me from the workbook, after which we would look at the comprehension questions together.
    Craig and his father bought a bird feeder. They studied their backyard to find a good place for it. When the feeder was set up, Craig filled it with birdseed. Then he and his father began watching the feeder every morning.
    “Bird feeders are stupid,” Emmett said, after reading the story. “They can just eat nuts from the trees.”
    I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to engage him in conversation, so instead I just pointed at the text and, as the directions instructed, asked him which sentence described what most likely happened next, based on the paragraph we had read. “A., Craig and his father will eat the birdseed.”
    “Ha!” Emmett liked this answer. “They’re gonna eat the birdseed!”
    “B., Craig and his father will watch the birds eating. C., Craig and his father will knock the bird feeder to the ground.”
    “They kick it, they punch it, they knock the stupid thing over!” He rose up in his chair and gave the air two fierce jabs with his fists, so hard that his glasses almost fell off.
    Eventually I got him to settle down, and I pointed again to the choices on the page. “So, Emmett. Which is it?” He sat there for a long time, looking at the options. I tried not to fiddle with my pencil or shift in my seat. I could see that Dawn was still looking out the window, and I made a mental note to ask Joe that night whether we should bother scheduling another conference with her teacher. Finally, Emmett said, “I don’t think it’s any of those. A cat might come over and scare the birds away. That, or squirrels might jump up and eat all the seeds.”
    Those things could happen, I admitted. But I reminded him that they wanted him to pick an answer from the list.
    “No.” Emmett was firm in his refusal, and I remember thinking that as exasperating as he could be, part of me admired the way he stuck to his guns. “These are stupid questions, anyway.” He pointed to the workbook, where the words Inferences and Conclusions danced in jazzy letters across the top. “How can you know something’s gonna happen until it does?”
      
    The bird feeder example in the workbook reminded me of my own garden, where I had spent so many of my best hours. When we moved into our house before I became pregnant with Iris, the backyard was overgrown and ugly because the previous owners had let it go. But within a few seasons I’d transformed it into the green and blooming sanctuary my