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Flinchy. Sam Winchester, the new kid in Molly Morrow’s fourth-grade class, was flinchy. Someone makes a sudden movement near him--which fourth-graders were doing constantly--and suddenly he’s in a defensive posture, ready to fight.
And fight he did, if her students were to be believed. “You’re gonna love the story I heard today,” Racine the nurse said in the teachers lounge at lunchtime, voice dripping with her typical dubiety. “From Ranger and Aaron.”
“Oh, this oughta be good,” Mr. Duke, their third-grade teacher, murmured, sipping hard on his coffee, which might not just be coffee.
“They’re just minding their own business, of course,” Racine began the tale, to many a scoff around the lounge. A lot of these teachers had had dealings with Ranger and Aaron, as kids ran to retrieve any available teacher when the two bullies were up to their usual shenanigans. “Certainly not picking fights. And suddenly Sam Winchester grabs them and--both of them at once, mind you--‘chokes them out,’ in their terms.”
“That little shrimp??” Joe the gym teacher demanded. “What are those kids on?”
“Was there any evidence of this?” asked the principal dutifully, not that he’d be in a hurry to stop any kid from teaching Ranger and Aaron any lessons, since the teachers were barely allowed to enforce any discipline these days.
“A couple of tiny bruises. Coulda gotten them anywhere,” Racine shrugged.
“You should have a look at the new kid, is who you should look over. Maybe he got one lick in before they beat him to a pulp,” Joe went on.
Everyone looked at Molly, who made a mental note to look him over this afternoon. “See if you can get him to pull up his sleeves,” the principal instructed, and Molly nodded.
He seemed fine that afternoon, though Ranger and Aaron were making much of giving him a wide berth and spinning ever more exaggerated versions of the tale they’d told Racine to anyone who’d listen. Sam, meanwhile, sat in his seat, unmoved. Any other fourth-grader would be hysterically trying to do damage control for his reputation--or doing what he could to reinforce the growing impression of him as someone not to be messed with--but that was Sam: he seemed like he was barely there, his mind always far away.
There were plenty of kids who hated school and tried to be somewhere else mentally (and sometimes physically) as much as possible, but Sam was different. When it was time to learn, he actually perked up and focused. He was obedient and diligent about doing his work and following the rules--hardly the kind of kid who would pursue the fourth grade’s most notorious bullies to terrorize them--even if they did start it. Molly had been teaching for fifteen years. She knew every kind of kid by now. Sam just didn’t fit into any category. He wasn’t like any other kid she’d ever met.
Still, Ranger and Aaron wouldn’t drop their story. Aaron’s mother called the school claiming her precious angel had been beat up by Sam. The principal rolled his eyes as he relayed the conversation to Molly. “I’ll get involved if I have to, but for now I think it would be better if his homeroom teacher just made an informal home visit,” he said.
Molly didn’t mind one bit. She was dying to see what kind of family produced a Sam Winchester. “I’ll go after school today,” she said.
She’d already asked Sam directly when no other students were present whether there had been some kind of altercation with Ranger and Aaron. Sam had only shaken his head, not meeting her eyes, and he wouldn’t say another word about it.
Joe and Duke even cheered her on as she left for the day. “Maybe his parents’ll be willing to go up against Aaron’s parents and go on record about what they did and those little psychos will finally be expelled,” Joe said with relish. The bad ones just got worse and worse the older they got unless someone taught them an unforgettable lesson.
Molly had a look around as she got out of her car at the run-down apartment complex: the empty pool, the parking lot that was mostly potholes. It was in a kind of bad area of town. She made her way up to Sam’s apartment and knocked on the door, surprised when Sam himself opened it.
He was just as surprised. “Miss Morrow!”
“Hi Sam,” she said, sympathy oozing from her voice. He was obviously home alone, a latchkey kid. There was a tv dinner on a tray in front of the tv. “How are you?”
“Why are you here??” he demanded, freaked out. He was such an obedient kid at school. Take him out of an environment where he knew the script and evidently all bets were off.
“I ... I hoped to talk to you and your parents, about Aaron and Ranger. They and their parents claim you attacked them. I hoped to sort out what happened.”
“It was nothing!” he said, eyes wide, breathing fast. “It was nothing. They--they actually--they did try to beat me up, but--” She knew it. Sam seemed to mistake her sigh as some sort of disapproval of him and went on, even more shrilly, “I just defended myself, that’s it!”
She froze. Whoa. Could-- could what they’d been saying actually be true?? “By ... choking them out?” she asked carefully.
“No!” Sam said derisively. “Choke them unconscious?! Of course not! Why would I have to do that?! Just until they were ... less ... aggressive.”
Molly had to hold in a sudden urge to burst out laughing. He really did it! If Joe could hear this, he’d be rolling. Could this be the lesson they’d all been hoping might come along to turn Ranger and Aaron from the unfortunate path they’d chosen? She had to tread even more carefully now, though, so with great effort, she kept a straight face. Sam squinted at her, confused, as if ... as if he could tell she was hiding her true feelings. “Well ... are you all right?” she asked, his aloneness striking her again as she got another glimpse of the tv dinner. He was only nine!
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he mumbled.
“If they hurt you anywhere, I need to see it,” she insisted gently.
“It’s fading,” he said, but pulled up his pantleg, where there was a large bruise just going yellow. Molly was shocked. “And ....” He pulled up his shirt in the back, where there were a few other bruises ... and scars. Scars no child of nine had any business having. He let his shirt drop back down, turned around again, took one look at her face, and gasped. “Please don’t call CPS!” he burst out. “Please!”
Molly opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Teaching fourth-graders had become so predictable she had started finding it almost boring. She knew exactly the kind of thing that was going to happen and exactly how to handle it. She knew the mind of a nine-year-old backward and forward. For the first time in fifteen years, she had no idea what to say.
“Please,” he went on desperately. “I know your job. I know you’re supposed to report it. But I don’t want to be taken away again! It’s so horrible! I want to be with my dad and brother! They’re all I have!” Whoa--he didn’t have a mom?? “I will be with them, and it’s where I want to be, so-- can we please pretend this never happened? Please?? I know Aaron and Ranger are giving you trouble. I’m sorry about that. Sorry. I’ll take care of it. Okay? I’ll make their parents stop calling. It’ll all go away. So please, just-- just let this go away, too.” He looked up at her helplessly, tears filling his eyes, and for the first time since the day he arrived in her classroom late that school year, he actually looked like a scared little nine-year-old boy, unsure what to do.
She couldn’t walk away from a bruised, scarred, abandoned nine-year-old, so here she sat on the couch next to him as he anxiously tried to prepare a meal for her, too, despite her protests. “Sam, really, I have plenty of food at home,” she said again, but he continued to fret nervously in the kitchen, where there was so little to eat, in the end, he only managed to bring her a single hot dog cut up covered with a slice of cheese.
“Do you want it microwaved?” he asked her, and she shook her head, her heart breaking as she accepted the meager meal. He saw this, too. “I was going to go shopping soon! I just hadn’t gotten around to it. My dad left me money. Don’t worry.”
She was abruptly much more worried. She’d had it in her head that she’d stay there with him until his dad got home, but .... “You’re dad’s not coming home tonight?”
He turned to her instantly. “Please don’t call them! I’ve stayed on my own a ton of times; it’s nothing!”
“Then ... would you ... like to come stay with me until he gets back?” She tried to stop herself from saying the words even as they came out of her mouth. This crossed into all kinds of nebulous territory, invited all kinds of potential criticism, from favoritism to interference with family business to interference with state business, if they did deem his dad an unfit parent. But she’d been teaching long enough to teach a few kids who’d been taken away from their families. Long enough to know they usually went back, and much more traumatized from having been taken away, however briefly, than from whatever was going on at home, almost no matter how bad it was. Clearly, he wanted to stay with his family. But she could not leave him here alone for the days--weeks? months??--it would take before his family finally returned.
He stared at her, his expression like the one her internal self was making at her, like he couldn’t believe she would offer, like he knew it was a bad idea ... but like he wanted to say yes.
She tried to renege, but she couldn’t bring herself to. “We couldn’t tell anybody,” she said helplessly, knowing fourth-graders always, without fail, eventually told any secret they were privy to.
He nodded silently, mouth open, contemplating. “Especially not my dad.”
He called his dad as soon as they got to her house, spinning some tale about how things had “temporarily gone south” where they were staying and he’d found a new “squat,” whatever that was. He told his dad to page him if he needed to get into contact, and said he’d do the same. The only indication of any parenting his father did during the whole conversation came when Sam said, “Yes, I’m safe,” glancing at Molly. Everything else about the conversation was pure business. Molly’s heart squeezed. This poor child. What kind of family was this?? What had he been subjected to in his youth? What had caused those scars??
Yet Sam was abruptly more cheerful as soon as he hung up the phone. “He bought it,” he said happily, shouldering his backpack and looking up at her expectantly. She smiled back pityingly. He didn’t seem to know what to make of her expression. “I like your house,” he offered, changing the subject. “It’s so ....” He looked around, at the homey kitchen, the sliding-glass door out into the backyard where spring flowers were just coming into full bloom, the cheerful pastel colors and modern floral prints she favored. “It’s so ... nice.” Clearly, he’d never lived in a “nice” place in his entire life.
She smiled. “Let me show you your room." She led him down the hall, hesitating in front of the room she’d intended for him to stay in, before continuing down the hall. “I guess I’ll have you stay in here instead,” she said of a different room, turning on the light for him. “For some reason, that other room is always cold.” Sam looked up at her sharply. “I know this one is a little darker, but--”
“It’s okay. I like it dark,” he said with a genuine smile--the like of which she’d never seen on his face before--putting down his backpack and duffle and promptly setting about opening every drawer in sight to examine their contents. She hid her laughter. This was why she loved teaching fourth graders: they were mature enough to have a true conversation with, but they were completely sincere, utterly artless. Well, except when they were lying, but most of them were terrible at it. Not Sam Winchester, though. Even she would have believed what he told his dad. Maybe he really did choke out Ranger and Aaron.
They weren’t dropping their story, though by now it had morphed into Sam stalking them for days and carving threatening notes into their desks before tying them up ... it was a whole sordid tale, taken mostly from a tv show Molly also watched that was on well after little boys should be in bed. Even Molly videotaped it to watch later so she didn’t have to stay up so late, but she would bet money their parents let them watch whatever they wanted at any time of day or night.
Molly had made Sam promise not to do whatever he meant when he said he’d “make it go away.” She knew he must have kept that promise when the principal requested her presence at a meeting with the parents. He also requested Sam’s presence, and his parents’. “His parents won’t come,” she told him, “but he and I will be there.”
Sam showed none of the surprise or displeasure she expected when she told him about the meeting, simply gathering his things and stuffing them in his backpack, though with a slight air of “I told you you should have let me take care of it.”
Aaron’s parents were about what she’d expected, spoiling him shamelessly. Ranger’s dad was less so: the only parent of Ranger’s present, and he snapped at Ranger often, keeping him on a tight leash--maybe too tight.
It broke her heart to see little Sam sit down beside her, all on his own against the five opposing parties, yet Sam seemed unperturbed, as if ... as if he’d been in this situation before often enough to know what to expect and how to handle it.
After Aaron, Ranger, and Aaron’s parents had gotten done shrilly listing Sam’s crimes, Molly calmly said there was no evidence to support what Aaron and Ranger said. “No desks had any threats carved in them, and they had no notable bruising, although Sam has a large bruise consistent with his story that they attacked him first. Not to mention, I’ve heard them change their story many times. Sam, please show them the bruise on your leg.”
Sam got up and lifted his pantleg. After a brief moment of shock, in which Molly hoped she might at last be willing to see the light regarding the truth of what a bully her son was, Aaron’s mother rallied, insisting, “He could have gotten that anywhere!”
“I suppose so,” said the principal calmly. “Which means it’s their word against Sam’s, and frankly, your sons have been caught in many lies, so I’m inclined to believe Sam.”
“You only haven’t caught him in any lies because he’s new!” Aaron piped up in his typically strident way. Aaron stood up, ignoring Molly and the principal’s orders for him to sit down. “Tell them!” Aaron yelled at Sam. “Tell them what you did to us!”
Sam hadn’t said a word yet, which was working in his favor. Small and slight, he seemed like a helpless nerd next to thuggish Ranger and Aaron. Sam was easily the smartest and most mature kid in class, so Molly thought he knew this and would help her out by continuing to act the part of the victim. Alas. Sam smirked. “Tough guy,” he taunted Aaron. “I guess you really must be a weakling, if I could beat up the both of you at once.”
Aaron pointed at Sam, outraged, looking at all the adults in the room, as if his words proved their story. Now Ranger was getting in on the action, also standing up and shouting, despite his dad hissing at him to sit down. The whole meeting was fast spinning out of control. Aaron was in Sam’s face, yelling at him to admit what he did. The ruckus was so loud, Molly never would have heard what Sam said if she hadn’t been sitting right next to him, but she heard it clear as day--as clearly as Aaron obviously heard it. “A pathetic loser like you could never beat me in a fight.”
Aaron instantly shoved him, hard. Sam’s chair went over backward, though somehow Sam rolled right out of it and was on his feet in the next instant, that defensive posture. As the room erupted and various staff members rushed in to find out what on earth was going on in there, Molly quickly ushered Sam out of the room, shouting that he needed to go to the nurse as Aaron had just attacked him right in front of their eyes. “I’m fine,” Sam protested, but Molly put a finger over his lips, smiling conspiratorially at him, and he went with the receptionist to the nurse, loudly complaining about all the pain he was suffering from Aaron’s cruel attack. Molly watched him go, full of pride. He was such a smart boy. There went her student, Sam Winchester.
Sam skipped up the path to her house as they got out of her car. “Will Ranger get suspended, too?” he asked eagerly.
“That’s up to the principal to decide,” she said.
“He should. He was the worse of the two. He’s more scared of authority, but meaner when no one’s watching.” Sam had accurately summed them up. “They should get expelled, is what should happen.”
“Three strikes and they’re out.”
“Three strikes, huh?” Sam said thoughtfully. “But it’s already April .... I’ll do what I can, but if they’re already suspended ... we’ll probably have already moved to a new place before I have a chance.”
Molly adored him. She admired his can-do attitude, his diligence, his righteousness, how responsible he was. His intelligence, his craftiness, how sure he was of himself. He was the son she’d always wanted. She was crushed to hear he’d be leaving town again, though she’d suspected his family moved around a lot. “You’ll have to leave again so soon?”
“Probably.”
“Do you like moving around so much?”
He considered as he set the table while she made dinner, a routine they’d settled into these past few days living together. “I used to hate it. Mostly I hate it. I hate it right now,” he said, grinning at her. “I hate that I won’t get to live with you anymore.” She turned her face away quickly so he wouldn’t see a couple of tears fall. “But sometimes I’m glad. When things have gone south where we were staying, it’s nice to get to just--” he made a noise “--take off. My dad’s kind of a jerk. He tends to make people mad. My brother’s constantly getting into trouble. And I try not to! But somehow, sometimes something happens--like you saw--and I--even I’m glad, sometimes, that I get to leave it all behind. Most of the time, though, I wish I could have stayed.”
“I’m sorry your dad can’t give you more ... stability. Do you think you’ll ever get to settle down?”
The good cheer so often on display when they were alone together abruptly disappeared. “No.” He thumped the silverware harder on the table for a minute before changing the subject. “What about you? No husband?”
Her good cheer suddenly fell away, too. “Nope.”
“I was surprised. When you invited me to live with you, I expected to have other kids to contend with. Spoiled brats. I was nervous.” He looked at her quickly, as if it had just occurred to him this could offend her, but she was laughing. Fourth-graders. They were the best. “Sorry,” he said anyway. “Just ... I know you’d spoil the hell out of your kids, if you had any. How come you don’t have any?”
She stopped laughing. She kept her back firmly toward him as more tears fell. It was hard to get out the words. “I ... did, actually. I had a husband and a child, once.” She heard Sam grow still behind her. Most kids couldn’t understand how much feeling this brought up for her, the pain. Maybe he could tell just from the sound of her voice. Sometimes nine-year-olds were completely heedless of your feelings, but sometimes they were unexpectedly empathetic.
“What happened?” he asked flatly, as if he expected a particular end to this story, one he’d somehow heard many times.
“Um ... my child, um ... he ... died, and sometimes, when something rocks a marriage like that, you each deal with it so differently that ... it ends the marriage, too.”
“It was his room, wasn’t it? Your kid? The one that’s always cold?”
She nodded, her back still to him. She jolted when suddenly his arms were around her from behind. She set down the ladle and turned to face him. That’s right. He had lost a mother. He got it. She put her arms around him, too. She couldn’t hold it in anymore, no matter how hard she tried. No kid needed to see this. But when Sam turned his face the other way, she saw that he was crying, too, and they just stood there holding each other in her kitchen, weeping.
That night, she got to learn a lot more of what Sam’s life had been like. There were times he got vague, like there were things he still wanted to keep secret, but she heard all about his life on the road with just his strict military father and his troubled delinquent brother. The father and brother seemed to like the lifestyle pretty well, but it was anathema to Sam. Sam liked to study. He wanted friends. He got attached to places he lived, neighbors he met, people he helped, people who helped him ... and then all these things were taken from him again--every few months.
It was criminal, to raise a child like this. Molly seethed with outrage and disapproval. Sam, a natural scholar, didn’t even expect to be able to go to college; he had to carry on the “family business,” whatever that was. He’d never had a mom. He’d never had a home. He had nothing for himself. Yet he didn’t even seem to count among his countless disadvantages having to contend with bullies and hostile parents and--surely sometimes--hostile school administrators all on his own, having to live alone for weeks on end, or whatever caused those scars, which he refused to explain, saying only that things had “gone south” during a “hunt.”
“Sam,” she said softly, “if your dad has ever hurt you ....”
“No!” It was the only time she ever saw him get mad like this, desperate: when he was trying to defend his family. “Everyone always thinks that, and it’s not how it is! He doesn’t beat us! That’s not what happened.”
“You said you wanted to be with them--”
“I said I will be with them,” he mumbled sullenly.
She’d noticed that odd phrasing of his back at his apartment. What exactly did that mean?
“But I want to be, too, or ... I guess,” he went on. “I just don’t want to be put in foster care again. That’s the worst.”
She nodded. She could imagine that must be the case. “Well, maybe those aren’t your only two options. Do you ... Sam, do you think there’s any chance, when your father gets back ... that we could ... talk him into letting you stay here with me? At least until you finish elementary school.” She tried not to judge parents, but tearing kids this young away from place after place ruined their education and did serious damage to their ability to form relationships; she’d seen it again and again with military families.
Sam sighed. He looked so sad. “I really doubt it,” he said glumly.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” She dreaded the day. She could tell Sam did, too.
“Three or four weeks.”
It broke her heart anew, like losing a child all over again. She tried to rally and put on a brave face. “Well, we’ll just have to make the most of them, then.”
“Do you miss your mom?” she asked him over dinner a few days later, figuring she knew the answer, it would just get him talking about it, but Sam Winchester was always surprising her.
“I couldn’t. I don’t remember her. I was only six months old when she died. I just ... miss ... getting to have a mom.”
She nodded, and smiled at him. He smiled back at her hesitantly. Ever since the night they cried together, there had been a shift in their relationship. She was no longer the teacher and he merely her student. To the extent she’d been some sort of mother figure to him, and he the child, this too had morphed into something else. They were more like fellow participants in a support group for people who’d lost a parent or a child. He was too wise beyond his years to be treated as a child, anyway. He was more mature than most adults she knew. She didn’t know what to call this relationship, but she knew whatever it was was healing for them both, so she let it be whatever it was going to be. Sam, at least, was obviously far more comfortable not being treated as a little kid. She’d been afraid he’d feel like she was trying to use him to replace the child she’d lost, but he didn’t seem to feel like that at all. If anything, he seemed to feel like he’d been welcomed into her family, into her heart, as an additional son--not as a replacement, but as very much his own person.
“I mean, I guess what I miss is getting to have a normal family, a normal life,” he said, looking around her kitchen approvingly. She’d always worried her house and décor were too ordinary, but evidently that was exactly what Sam liked so much about them. “A normal life is all I ever wanted! I love it here. Three guys ... too much testosterone. I hate it.”
She chuckled softly. “Well ... I needed a little more testosterone in my life. So that worked out well for the both of us.”
Everything did. Everything about this arrangement seemed to slot right into place, as if it was meant to be. Sam was right, she’d have spoiled her kids rotten. Sometimes when she looked at Aaron and Ranger, she wondered if those would have been her kids, she the parent in the principal’s office shrilly insisting they could do no wrong. Sam, on the other hand, could only benefit from a little spoiling. Sam talked about “orders” and “missions” his father gave him and his brother that they had to fulfill. She’d heard him call his father “sir” on the phone. Sam seemed to find just getting to lie around of a weekend afternoon reading unmolested on a comfortable couch so luxurious. It was a thing so easy for her to provide. “I wish I could live here forever,” Sam often told her. She felt the same.
It was heaven at school without Aaron around for those weeks. Ranger hadn’t been suspended, though Aaron had done his level best to drag him down with him, throwing him under the bus for every misdeed he thought he might be able to pin on Ranger too. Without his partner in crime, now facing ostracism from all the kids he’d been bullying their entire tenure in elementary school, Ranger was suddenly soft, uncertain, almost sweet.
“Am I allowed to ... teach Ranger a lesson?” Sam asked obliquely over dinner one night.
“Will it involve violence?” she asked, also keeping things vague.
“No! No, I think just a few choice words’ll do it.”
She nodded approvingly at him, and as he always did, he bloomed under the approval.
Sure enough, when Aaron briefly returned just before the end of the school year, Ranger was stand-offish with him, seeming not to want to fall back into bad habits. In fact, Ranger spent more time on the playground these days with Sam! Molly saw Aaron observing this jealously, seeming to be formulating plans for revenge ... but maybe Sam had a talk with him, too, because by the last day of school, Ranger and Aaron were hardly speaking to each other ... but they were forming relationships with other kids, and though they were still more prone to obnoxious exclamations than the other kids, they seemed much more ... normal, suddenly, just normal kids. Sam Winchester made her life so much better--everyone's life. He made everyone's life better in every way. If only he could see it that way; he seemed to think of his presence as a burden, an annoyance. She wished she could adopt him and make it official. So many wrong things about each of their lives would become right with that one act. If she ever got a chance to speak with his father, if she had any reason to believe he might be amenable to the suggestion ... she would definitely have to ask.
Sam had asked to see a picture of her son. Once she took it out, she left it on the sideboard. She could look at it these days with more joy than pain, most of the time, since Sam came to live with her. There was a boy in the house, to talk to, to mentor, to love, a son of sorts, so all the pains looking at that photo had brought up in her were currently eased.
She found Sam gazing at it often. “Was there something he really wanted to do before he died?” he asked her abruptly one night when he was done setting the table, looking at it again.
“He was three,” she said. “He wasn’t really old enough to have big dreams.”
“A little one, though? Was there something he really, super wanted to do that he didn’t get to before the end?”
She stopped moving. How did he know?? Wiping away tears as soon as she could, she said, “Um ... yeah, actually. There’s a park on the other side of town that he loved. It has a little train that goes around the park in a circle, and paddleboats .... In fact, we were going to go, even though he was so sick, but ... then it was too late.”
Sam turned around to face her, and she turned to face him. He’d seen her tears before. There was no sense hiding them anymore. “Then let’s go!” he said. “Let’s go, before my dad gets back, and take that--that doll.” Her son’s favorite doll, made with his same color eyes and a head of his very own hair. It had always creeped Sam out for some reason, though she assured him the hair was from when he was still very much alive, so she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to bring it along, until he said, “It’ll be like he’s there with us! Maybe he will be. Then maybe he can be ... er, I mean, you. Maybe you can feel ... better. And maybe ... things will stop jumping off shelves.”
He had such an obsession with that. Had he never lived anywhere where maybe the shelves were a little crooked (her husband, bless his heart, had not been handy around the house) and things sometimes fell off them? “Sam,” she scolded.
“In any case, it’ll be fun, right?? My dad’ll be home soon,” he said. “Can we do it this weekend? Please??”
He had hold of her heart. How could she say no to him? When her son was a baby, she’d envisioned pleas of exactly this sort when he was exactly this age. She’d so looked forward to them, and here, finally, they were, in another form, but in another way, not really. Her son was with them, wasn’t he? He was there, in the photo, in the doll, in their memories. “Yes,” she said, wiping her eyes, then grabbing for a tissue. The whole box probably wasn’t going to be enough. “Yeah, Sam. Let’s do it.”
Sam made a big show of setting the doll between them when they took a ride on the little train and when they paddled around in the paddleboats, though he acted more typically nine when he tried to get her to help him make the boat go really fast, and when he cackled as he made it spin in circles. Well, whatever; surely her son would have loved that, too. Sam also made certain to put the doll in its own chair when they sat down for some ice cream, and he urged her to buy it its own cone. She knew this was surely just his way of getting a second cone for himself, so she did it, yet it just sat there before the doll, melting in the sun, and Sam watched, seeming pleased.
By the end of the day, he was grinning and yelling and running circles around her, just like one of her other students might have--acting like a regular kid for once. “This was the funnest day!” he kept exclaiming. “This was the funnest day I’ve ever had in my whole life!”
Sam was so exhilarated by the time they got home from the park, as he set the table for dinner at record speed, he said with a smile, “I’m gonna do it, Miss Morrow. Next time he calls, I’m gonna ask my dad if he’ll let me stay.” He looked at her hesitantly. She broke into a grin, then he did, too. They beamed at each other across the dining room table.
Sam kept it up with that doll. He started setting a place for it at the table, too, and insisting she serve it a meal. She would come across it sitting on the porch, or in the recliner, or on the bed in her son’s old room. Now she was getting creeped out, but Sam insisted she should do this for a while, until she felt better. He even talked to it! Yet as she paused just inside the screen door to listen to him talking away out on the porch, it actually gave her a good feeling, as if Sam really was a new addition to her little family, and her two sons were getting along great.
She heard it when he asked his dad if he could stay. There was no way she couldn’t have heard it, as it soon escalated to a shouting match. She couldn’t hear his dad’s words through the tinny earpiece of the phone, only that he was yelling, but even the neighbors probably heard everything Sam said.
“So dad, I-- I’ve actually been living with my teacher the last few weeks, and I really like it here, and she points out that moving around a lot can hinder my education, so she-- so I-- so ... we were wondering if-- if I could stay here.” His dad said something. “Just until the end of elementary school!” Sam amended shrilly.
His dad obviously had plenty to say about the idea.
“There’s no danger! Nothing bad has happened at all!” Except his being bullied and called into the principal’s office and being attacked there by his bully, but Sam seemed to consider all this so to-be-expected that it was not even worth mentioning. Sam went on, “Well, there was a little ... lock of hair thing, but I took care of it. In my own way. Not YOUR stupid, mean way, burning everything you’re afraid of to a crisp. And it’s working! I know what I’m doing. I can take care of myself--of both of us. We’d be fine.”
A ‘lock of hair’ thing? What on earth??
“If I’m ‘just a child,’ then why do you leave me to live on my own?? Why do you think I had to come live with my teacher? Because stuff happened at school that YOU were supposed to be there to talk to the principal about, and they came knocking, and found out you left me on my own for weeks on end again! Out there having a good time just the two of you, I guess,” he added sullenly. “Maybe I should fail out of school, too, and then I’d get to come.”
His dad said something. “I DO want to be in school, and that’s the POINT!”
His dad’s tone was becoming, in Molly’s opinion, mean, even menacing.
“She didn’t ‘put ideas in my head,’” Sam snarled. “These are all my own ideas. She just showed me that it’s possible to live a different kind of life--a good life!” His dad said something. “A HAPPY life!”
There was a pause. “Oh, you don’t think I know by now it’s ‘not all about my happiness’??” Sam yelled, starting to cry. “Believe me, you’ve showed me that every single day of my life for as long as I can remember! But can’t it be about my happiness sometimes? A little bit?? Miss Molly cares about my happiness! Dean gets to be happy! Why don’t I??”
After only a couple of seconds, Sam cut his dad off, screaming, “I HATE you! I hate you and Dean so much!! I’m always alone, and always unhappy, and I never get to do anything I want, and you don’t care at all! Someday when I run away, I’ll go someplace you’ll NEVER find me! I hope you spend the whole rest of your life hunting me down and failing and you die the pathetic failure you are!!” He slammed down the receiver.
Whoa. Sam was weeping so hard he was wheezing. That night they cried together in the kitchen ... Sam had considerably more to cry about than she’d ever guessed. Nine-year-olds were simple. They had simple desires and simple needs and simple feelings. They started becoming more complex soon after, but nine-year-olds were still children, nearly all of them. Sam was a breed apart. The half of the conversation she’d been able to overhear was the barest hint of a lifetime of deep resentment and abiding fury. She’d never heard a nine-year-old sob like this. But she had definitely, definitely never seen the kind of thousand-yard-stare on a child’s face that was on his when he finally emerged from the dining room to tell her how it went: “He said no.”
He didn’t even tell her it was his birthday until a week after the fact. His family didn’t even celebrate his birthday? They didn’t even come home for it?? Sam seemed entirely unsurprised by this. He was very surprised that she bought him a present and made him a cake. Yet they ate it in silence, both of them dreading his family’s impending return--only a day or two away.
“You should keep talking to the doll,” Sam suddenly piped up. “Keep setting a place for it, keep feeding it. The room’s warmer, right? And things don’t jump off shelves anymore.”
“It’s because it’s almost summer; the house doesn’t shift much when the temperature changes aren’t so extreme,” she explained patiently, wondering as she did if it was true. She couldn’t remember the last time she had to pick something up off the floor that had somehow fallen off a shelf, though everything else up there was right where she left it. And the truth was, the season of the year had never seemed to make much difference to that or the chill in the room.
“Well anyway, he wants to know that you think of him and love him. He got jealous when I moved in. Just keep him close to your heart--or I mean, say it out loud. He needs to hear it.”
Her heart broke again for poor Sam. Of course he needed to hear his dad say he thought of him and loved him! Every child did! Still, dutifully she promised that she would. “And you’ll always be close to my heart too, Sam,” she assured him, squeezing his hand. He only smiled awkwardly, as if it was a strange non sequitur.
“Okay. Oh, and also, Ranger’s not that bad,” Sam went on. “Turns out he--he and I have more in common than I thought. He doesn’t have a mom, either. And he really likes you. So, you know ... if you see him around, I’m sure it’d make him really happy if you said hi.”
She nodded, wiping away tears. Her Sam was about to leave her alone again. Both of them had spent so long alone. These few weeks had been such a blissful respite from all that, but it was soon to return. It suddenly occurred to her that Sam had been having these exact thoughts, leading him to say that. He was trying to cure her loneliness by shoving another hard case her way, as if any needy child would do, but no one could ever replace Sam. A ten-year-old, doing what he could for his teacher--what he couldn’t do for himself. “Yes, okay. I will. And Sam, call me collect anytime. I mean it: anytime. And any time you come to town, if you’re able--”
“I’ll come see you,” he said, his tone steely, as if he intended to perform an escape worthy of Houdini if necessary in order to accomplish it. “We’ll see each other again.”
“Good,” she said, squeezing his hand harder. “Good. I don’t think I could bear it if we didn’t.”
She was horrified to see the dad and brother drive up in their scary loud black car and get out, dressed like transients. Sam did not fit in with people like that at all. Sam seemed embarrassed of them, too. As he looked up at her, written on his face was exactly what she’d just been thinking: he didn’t belong. He didn’t belong anywhere, if the fact that he seemed to encounter obstacles and bullies and unhappiness everywhere he went was any indication. There was nowhere in this world he belonged, except right here. He belonged with her.
The dad’s smile as he approached them where they stood on the porch was thin and insincere. “Thanks for looking after my boy. I had some business out of town--”
“Don’t bother,” Sam interrupted with a sigh, turning to Molly. “Here. Here’s my pager number, and my dad’s,” he said, pushing a piece of paper into her hand. “If anything ever happens, or you need any kind of help, call, and we’ll come.”
That ... didn’t seem like what these men did. They were hunters, wasn’t that what Sam had said? And the farthest thing from friendly. They did not come across as ‘helpful.’
Still, she said she would. “You too, Sam,” she said, turning to him and looking him in the eye seriously. “If you ever need anything, or a place to stay, or if there’s going to be another long period where you’ll be on your own,” she added sternly, eyeing the dad pointedly, “you can just come right back here, where you’ll always be welcome.”
Sam hadn’t smiled in days, but he smiled at that. “‘A place where I’ll always be welcome,’” he repeatedly softly. “Okay,” he said, squeezing her hand one last time. “I’ll remember that. Thanks.”
She watched them head down the walk to their car, get in, and drive away. Suddenly, she felt like she could feel Sam taking her hand again, and she squeezed the hand back as tears fell, her heart full of sadness and joy, humor and pride. There went Sam Winchester, her student. Her son.