All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

“Wavonna!” Lisa stood at her desk, scrambling for something to say. “We are not allowed to hit.”

In the time-out desk at the back of the room, Wavonna seemed indifferent to punishment. With nothing to do, she didn’t fidget or lay her head on the desk. Given worksheets, she did them without complaint. During the planning period, while the kids were at PE, Lisa reevaluated the scrawled note on Wavonna’s registration form: Don’t try to touch her.

At the end of the day, after the kids left, Stacy, the other third grade teacher, came by to chat. She was a few years older than Lisa and the closest thing to a friend Lisa had found in Powell.

“You got the Quinn girl in your class,” Stacy said.

“Do you know her?”

“Not her. She transferred here from out of state. Her mother, though. I was in the office when she came to register the little girl for school.”

It was a story Lisa would hear several times in the next few weeks.

Valerie had been drunk or stoned. She slurred her words and could barely hold the pen to fill out the registration paperwork. She paid with a hundred dollar bill—registration costs were only twelve dollars for the year—and walked off without her change.

Her hair was a crazed rat’s nest of knots and she’d been wearing what one person described as a nighty. With black peek-a-boo stiletto pumps.

And she stank. The assistant principal added that detail: “I mean, really stank. Like she hadn’t bathed in weeks.”

Wavonna did not stink. Her homework occasionally came back smelling of cigarettes, but there were other kids in the class with less care at home. Children who came in the same clothes three days in a row with sleep gummed in their eyes and their teeth unbrushed.

Then there was Wavonna’s refusal to eat lunch. The fourth day of school, she wasn’t with the rest of the class when Lisa went to escort them from the cafeteria. Wavonna sat at the teacher’s table with a tray in front of her and Mrs. Norton watching her.

“Is there a problem?” Lisa said.

“I have one rule for lunch. Everyone has to try a bite of everything. She won’t.”

Lisa disagreed with rules like that, but in her first week of teaching, there was no way to disagree with a thirty-year veteran like Mrs. Norton.

“When will you send her back to class?” Lisa said.

“After she tries a bite of everything.”

At 2:55 p.m., just before the release bell, Wavonna returned to class with a note from Mrs. Norton. Rather than try a bite of each item, she preferred to sit in the echoey cafeteria while the janitor cleaned.

PE was also a dead-end. While the other kids ran around, screaming and laughing, Wavonna sat on the bleachers and read. Take away her book and she would sit on the bleachers staring at nothing.

She was stubborn, but at least she was smart. Her reading was above grade level and she rarely scored less than 100 percent on her math worksheets. She was a problematic student, but she was less trouble than most.

Then the first cold of the season went through school, and Wavonna stayed out sick. Three days later, she returned to school with a severe-looking woman, who marched into the classroom and said, “Who’s the teacher here?”

“I’m Miss DeGrassi.”

“I am Valerie Quinn.” The woman was tall and slender, with brown hair, but this Mrs. Quinn didn’t stink or slur her words. She was dressed in a white turtleneck, white slacks, red pumps, and she wore her hair pulled back from her bare face.

“How often do you disinfect the desks?” Mrs. Quinn said.

“I’m sure the janitor does it regularly.”

“You’re sure? How are you sure? Do you see the janitor do it? Or do you just assume that he does it?”

Lisa started to say, “I trust that the janitor is doing his job,” but she never got to finish.

Later, when she told the story, she found there was no way to exaggerate it for more laughs.

“It has to be every day. Every day. Say it with me: the desks have to be disinfected every day. Children are germy. They are covered in germs. These, these, these sweet little angels—” At that point in the story, Lisa swept her arm around her audience, one finger pointed accusingly at them, always aware that she would never master Valerie Quinn’s contemptuous gesture. “—are disgusting disease factories. These little angels are going to the bathroom and not washing their hands. They are bringing their germs back to this classroom and smearing them over every surface.”

The diatribe lasted until the cafeteria lady sent Mr. Bunder, the PE teacher, to see why Lisa’s students were late to lunch. He found them in the thrall of Mrs. Quinn’s unrelenting account of their hygiene failures.

Mr. Bunder was able to convince her to come down to the front office, where she unloaded on the principal and the janitor and the school nurse, too. When it was over, Mr. Bunder sacrificed his planning hour to keep Lisa’s students in the gym, while Lisa went back to her room to recover. Alone, she sat at her desk and cried. When she lifted her head, she found Wavonna sitting on the bench under the coat rack, reading a book. She had been there all along, while her mother rampaged.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Lisa said. Without looking up, Wavonna nodded. It made Lisa wish there were something worth calling Child Protective Services over. A suspicious bruise, an appearance of malnutrition, anything to get that little girl away from her crazy mother.

Mr. Bunder’s take on the situation was slightly different. After having Wavy in his PE classes for two months, he suggested having a kid like that would make you bonkers. “Which came first? The crazy chicken or the crazy egg?” he said.