Five(38)

Babe, she says, what am I going to do with him? That school doesn’t get him. He’s always in trouble.

I trust you, Babe, he says to her, in her heart. Our little rebel.

At parent-teacher evening she is told that Sonny likes to climb a particular tree in the corner of the playground and that he refuses to come down when break is over and the bell rings. That he won’t stop spinning the water cups at snack time even when he is asked to repeatedly. That he enjoys show-and-tell but that he tells stories about aliens and narwhals that he met over the weekend instead of talking about real objects and events because he likes to make his classmates laugh. That this behavior is disruptive. That she should encourage Sonny to prepare show-and-tells that are grounded in reality.

“Well, in reality, his father is dead,” Luna says. “Would you like him to talk the kids through childhood grief next week?”

Good one, Babe, Graham says, sitting next to her. Really lean into the death.

“Of course not, no, I’m so sorry, perhaps you’ve misunderstood what I meant,” the teacher stammers and shifts in her seat.

“No, I understand you perfectly,” Luna says, “and I think you understand me too.”

A month later, she receives an email. They have completed reading assessments and Sonny is reading below age-related expectations. She must come in for a meeting.

The teacher shows her the phonics reader, an anemic story from the Biff, Chip, and Kipper series. She turns to the first page and reads its single sentence. “Look at me, Mum,” it says, with a picture of a boy on a bicycle. Graham taught Sonny to ride a bicycle without training wheels before he was four, far younger than any other children they knew. Of course Sonny was bored by Biff on a bike. And what the hell kind of name is Biff anyway.

“He barely got through the first two pages and just wouldn’t—or couldn’t—move on,” the teacher explains, with a raised eyebrow of concern underscoring every word. “I think he may have been shutting down to mask his confusion about phonics. He said it was boring and just got up and went to the block corner,” she says, expecting Luna to be appalled, and confused that she is not.

“Interesting,” Luna says, waiting to feel her husband beside her. “Age-related expectations,” she ponders the term, and then she hears him, Let’s do this, Babe.

And before the teacher can respond, Luna says, “Have you tried giving him something more challenging if he’s bored, to keep his attention? Let’s see what he can do, shall we?”

Steady on, woman, he says, beside her.

Luna brings Sonny in from the corridor where he was sent to wait. She takes a copy of Charlotte’s Web from another child’s desk. The pink spangled pencil case on the desk reads, Amelia. She knows the child, and her insufferable parents who cannot contain their pride at how “advanced” their daughter is. “She’s already read Charlotte’s Web independently, so we’re moving on to Harry Potter, even though she’s only just turned seven,” she heard her mother say faux-discreetly to her friend at pickup, as though Amelia had just discovered the cure for cancer and they were waiting for the call from the Nobel committee.

“Read this sentence, would you, Sonny?” Luna says, opening the book to the first page.

Sonny sits on her lap and makes her hold the book so he can spin a rubber band on his finger while he reads, slowly, stumbling here and there, but accurately: “?‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘one of the pigs is a runt. It’s very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it.’?”

“That’s bad, Mum,” Sonny says. “They’re going to kill him because he’s small.”

“Yes, but don’t worry,” Luna says, looking at the teacher, “They’ve underestimated Wilbur. He’ll be okay in the end.”

When Sonny is playing out of earshot in a corner of the room, Luna says, “I know he’s loud and he asks too many questions and he doesn’t listen and he moves a lot so you assume the problem is him, and not this boring nonsense you gave him to read. It’s easier for you to say that he’s not engaged than it is for you to do your job and engage him. Instead, you want to raise your eyebrows at me and expect me to defer to you and apologize. You’re going to have to adjust those expectations too.”

Targeting the eyebrows, that’s stone-cold, lass, Graham says.

But Luna is not as confident as these exchanges with the teachers suggest. As time goes on, she knows that Sonny is struggling to focus and falling behind. She sees that children like to be around him because he’s fun and quirky but that once he goes off on a tangent they’re not sure what to do or say. When they can’t keep up with his banter and his imagination, they tell on him. They have learned from the teachers that if they don’t understand him it must be because he’s done the wrong thing rather than just the different thing.

Teachers label him hyper, overactive, unfocused. They discount his ability and intelligence. He is the first suspect in every classroom disruption, the first name blurted out when other children look for someone to blame. When he responds to an unjust accusation from a teacher, it is called answering back. When he defends himself against an unfair judgment, it is called being disrespectful.

Words like diagnosis, medication, disorder, end every meeting she attends about Sonny. And while she researches these words and considers what to do for her creative, imaginative, talented boy, she also asks, at every meeting, “Yes, but what does he do well? And how does he excel?”