Lucy pulled out one of the tiny chairs and sat down, then pulled out a second one for Christopher. He sat with a tired groan.
“Are too. I think you’re cool. Sock hunt.” She grabbed his ankles and put his feet on her knees for her daily archaeological excavation into his shoes to dig out his socks. Did he have weirdly skinny ankles or unusually slippery socks?
“You don’t count,” Christopher said. “Teachers have to think all kids are cool.”
“Yes, but I’m the coolest teacher’s aide, so I know these things.” She gave each sock one final tug up his leg.
“You aren’t.” Christopher dropped his feet onto the floor and clutched his blue backpack to his stomach like a pillow.
“I’m not? Who beat me? I’ll fight her in the parking lot.”
“Mrs. McKeen. She throws pizza parties every month. But they say you’re the prettiest.”
“That’s exciting,” she said, though she didn’t flatter herself. She was the youngest teacher’s aide, and that’s about all she had going for her. She was, at best, average in every other way—shoulder-length brown hair, wide brown eyes that always got her carded, and a wardrobe that hadn’tbeen updated in years. New clothes required money. “I’d better get a certificate that says that on Award Day. You have any homework?”
Lucy stood up and started cleaning again, wiping down the tables and chairs with Lysol. She hoped the answer was no. He didn’t get much attention from his busy foster parents, and she tried to make up for what he didn’t get at home.
“Not a lot.” He threw his backpack onto the table. Poor thing, he looked so tired. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his shoulders drooped with exhaustion. A seven-year-old child shouldn’t have eyes like a world-weary detective working a particularly grisly murder case.
She stood in front of him, cleaning bottle dangling from a finger, arms crossed. “You okay, kiddo? You sleep any last night?”
He shrugged. “Bad dreams.”
Lucy sat back down next to him. He laid his head on the table.
She laid her head on the table and met his eyes. They were pink around the edges like he’d been trying not to cry all day.
“You want to tell me what you dreamed about?” she asked. She kept her voice soft and low and gentle. Kids with hard lives deserved gentle words.
Some people like to talk about how resilient kids are, but these were people who’d forgotten how hard everything hit you when you were a kid. Lucy still had bruises on her own heart from the knocks she’d gotten in childhood.
Christopher rested his chin on his chest. “Same thing.”
Same thingmeant the ringing phone, the hallway, the door open, his parents on the bed seemingly sound asleep but with their eyes wide open. If Lucy could have taken his bad dreams into her own brain, she would have done it to give him a good night’s sleep.
She put her hand on his small back and patted it. His shoulders were thin and delicate as moth wings.
“I still have bad dreams, too, sometimes,” she said. “I know how you feel. Did you tell Mrs. Bailey?”
“She told me not to wake her up unless it’s an emergency,” he said. “You know, with the babies.”
“I see,” Lucy said. She didn’t like that. She appreciated thatChristopher’s foster mother was taking care of two sick babies. Still, somebody had to take care of him too. “You know I meant it when I said you can call me if you can’t sleep. I’ll read to you over the phone.”
“I wanted to call you,” he said. “But you know…”
“I know,” she said. Christopher was terrified of phones, and she didn’t really blame him. “That’s okay. Maybe I can find an old tape recorder and record myself reading you a story, and you can play it next time you have trouble sleeping.”
He smiled. It was a small smile, but the best things came in the smallest packages.
“You want to take a nap?” she asked. “I’ll put down a mat for you.”
“Nah.”
“You want to read?”
He shrugged again.
“You want to…” She paused, tried to think of anything that would distract him from his dreams. “…help me wrap a present?”
