Among School Children by Tracy Kidder Page B

to the fourth-grade-level reading group. Arabella had now become its star. She was blossoming under Chris. Then again, Chris reasoned, a teacher who couldn't teach Arabella belonged in a different line of work.
    One of Chris's secret pastimes was to pick out a boy and a girl from her class who, if she adopted them, would improve the Zajac household. She imagined bringing Arabella, sweetness and light, home. Chris would snap at the girl, "Your room's a mess. Go make your bed."
    Arabella would smile. Arabella would chirp, "Oh-kay."
    The boy Chris chose for imaginary adoption was Dick, who came from the upper-class Highlands. Dick was very quiet. All the other children liked him. At the first parent-teacher conference, Chris had told Dick's mother what a nice boy he was, and Dick's mother had said, "He
loves
you."
    Chris's neck had turned bright red.
    An incident summed up Dick for her: the day when he came up to her desk and said softly, "Mrs. Zajac, I'll help Pedro with his spelling." Two heads, Dick's white-skinned and sandy-haired and Pedro's dark and eager, hovered side by side over the spelling book. Back on the first day of school, Dick had guessed North America when Chris had asked the class for the name of their country. But Dick always got A's in social studies now. He had come some distance, too. "He better do well," she murmured to herself as she began correcting Dick's paper. Her pen scratched C's all the way down the page and on to the other side. She paused to read his essay. He had written about John Hancock. He had closed, "And on the Declaration you'll see a large..." Below, Dick had inscribed a neat facsimile of the patriot's famous signature. Chris laughed aloud, and with a quick flick of the wrist, scratched a big red C across the essay. Turning back to the first page of the test, she wrote, "100 = A + Super."
    Next came Mariposa's test. For her nurse when she grew old, Chris would choose Mariposa, who lived in a part of the Flats, a stretch of Center Street, that some of her classmates avoided when walking home. Mariposa's father lived in Puerto Rico, Mariposa had said, and he didn't know where she and her mother and little brother were. Her mother had run away from her father. "My father was making trouble with her."
    Mariposa was tiny, with corkscrew curly hair and an incongruously grown-up manner. One pair of her earrings nearly reached her shoulders. They looked like miniature chandeliers. Her experience with teachers had included being hugged fairly often and being entrusted with such chores as washing the boards. She would sigh happily and get to work. Mariposa liked to help out her teachers. Most of them, she believed, weren't very well organized. She was always helping Chris find things. She got only a 65 on the test. Chris let out a long breath. "She should do better than that." Mariposa loved to read, though. Just a little slump, Chris figured.
    Cheered up by Dick and Arabella and Mariposa, Chris was ready for Felipe's test. Felipe came from the Flats, but dressed in clothes that he could have worn to a country club. Dapper, with jet-black hair—Indian hair, perhaps a mark of Taino blood. Felipe was too young, in the psychological sense, to be as consistently kind as some of the others. His face came to her in two versions. In one, Felipe's skin had changed color from light to dark brown, under lowered brows, and his mouth had tightened and would spit invective at her if he dared. In the other, Felipe grinned, crying out an answer to her question, wanting to be the first to respond whether he knew the answer or not. Often, after Chris reprimanded him, Felipe started limping. But he was a wonderful artist, even considering that Kelly, like all elementary schools, was full of wonderful artists. And Felipe was easily the most imaginative story writer in the class. On the other hand, he hated to rewrite.
    Chris had to watch herself with Felipe. When he went into one of his sulks, she felt tempted