strode past the fire station, two firemen sitting out front in a couple of lawn chairs nodded to her. She smiled. As far as she could tell, there was no such thing as an early evening fire in this town. She’d seen them every day at the same time, sitting in exactly the same spots, for the past four months.
New Bern.
Her life, she realized, had taken on a strange simplicity since she’d moved here. Though she sometimes missed the energy of city life, she had to admit that slowing down had its benefits. During the summer, she’d spent long hours browsing through the antique stores downtown or simply staring at the sailboats docked behind the Sheraton. Even now that school had started again, she didn’t rush anywhere. She worked and walked, and aside from visiting her parents, she spent most evenings alone, listening to classical music and reworking the lesson plans she’d brought with her from Baltimore. And that was fine with her.
Since she was new at the school, her plans still needed a little tinkering. She’d discovered that many of the students in her class weren’t as far along as they should have been in most of the core subjects, and she’d had to scale down the plans a bit and incorporate more remedial work. She hadn’t been surprised by this; every school progressed at a different rate. But she figured that by the end of the year, most students would finish where they needed to be. There was, however, one student who particularly concerned her.
Jonah Ryan.
He was a nice enough kid: shy and unassuming, the kind of child who was easy to overlook. On the first day of class, he’d sat in the back row and answered politely when she’d spoken to him, but working in Baltimore had taught her to pay close attention to such children. Sometimes it meant nothing; at other times, it meant they were trying to hide. After she’d asked the class to hand in their first assignment, she’d made a mental note to check his work carefully. It hadn’t been necessary.
The assignment—a short paragraph about something they’d done that summer—was a way for Sarah to quickly gauge how well the children could write. Most of the pieces had the usual assortment of misspelled words, incomplete thoughts, and sloppy handwriting, but Jonah’s had stood out, simply because he hadn’t done what she’d asked. He’d written his name in the top corner, but instead of writing a paragraph, he’d drawn a picture of himself fishing from a small boat. When she’d questioned him about why he hadn’t done what she’d asked, Jonah had explained that Mrs. Hayes had always let him draw, because “my writing isn’t too good.”
Alarm bells immediately went off in her head. She’d smiled and bent down, in order to be closer to him. “Can you show me?” she’d asked. After a long moment, Jonah had nodded, reluctantly.
While the other students went on to another activity, Sarah sat with Jonah as he tried his best. She quickly realized it was pointless; Jonah didn’t know how to write. Later that day, she found out he could barely read as well. In arithmetic, he wasn’t any better. If she’d been forced to guess his grade, having never met him, she would have thought Jonah was just beginning kindergarten.
Her first thought was that Jonah had a learning disability, something like dyslexia. But after spending a week with him, she didn’t believe that was the case. He didn’t mix up letters or words, he understood everything she was telling him. Once she showed him something, he tended to do it correctly from that point on. His problem, she believed, stemmed from the fact that he’d simply never had to do his schoolwork before, because his teachers hadn’t required it.
When she asked a couple of the other teachers about it, she learned about Jonah’s mother, and though she was sympathetic, she knew it wasn’t in anyone’s best interest—especially Jonah’s— to simply let him slide, as his previous teachers had done. At the same time, she couldn’t give Jonah all the attention he needed because of the other students in her class. In the end, she decided to meet with Jonah’s father to talk to him about what she knew, in hopes that they could find a way to work it out.
She’d heard about Miles Ryan.
Not much, but she knew that people for the most part both liked and respected him and that more than anything, he seemed