Sadie is talking about how Jonah isn’t struggling with the words so much as with the feeling of being the kid who struggles.
“The trick,” she says, “is finding the thing he already cares about and making that the vehicle. For Jonah it's science. Dinosaurs, yes, but also space, volcanoes, how things work. He's a kid who wants to understand the mechanism behind everything.” She taps her pen on the counter. “And somewhere in the middle of figuring out how a volcano works, he forgets he's supposed to find reading hard.”
“You’re gonna be a great teacher,” I tell her.
She looks up at me, surprised. Like she’s checking to see ifI’m being sarcastic.When she understands I’m not, her cheeks go a little pink and she drops her eyes.
“Thank you,” she says.
She's looking at her notebooks but not writing anything. Maybe I should leave her to her work, not distract her, but I’m finding it hard to pull myself away from her.
I want to know everything that made her who she is. The teaching instinct, the stubbornness, the way she talks about kids like they're worth every ounce of effort. I want to know where it all came from.
“What made you want to be a teacher?” I ask.
“I’ve always loved words and learning. I had some teachers who made a huge difference in my life. School was my escape.”
“Your escape from what?”
My blunt question sends her guard straight up.
“My home life wasn’t easy,” she says. “School was better.”
She doesn't look at me when she says it. She's looking at the counter, at her notebooks, somewhere that isn't my face.
I have to tread carefully here. The urge is to keep drilling down. To open her up. Examine everything that made her the way she is until I can make sense of it. Make sense of her.
Or maybe it’s that protective instinct I tend towards. It’s that concerned parent alarm going off inside me when she gives me that opaque “home wasn’t easy” line.
There's a whole world of hurt packed into that one sentence.
One of the things you learn as a songwriter is how to say the most with the fewest words. How it can be more powerful to leave some things unsaid entirely.
I steer us back to safer ground.
“Bet you were a much better student than I ever was,” I say. “I swear, I tried to be good. For about fifteenminutes. Then I discovered girls and the guitar and realized I was a lot more interested in all that than algebra.”
That gets a small smile out of her. Still not looking at me, but the tension in her shoulders drops a fraction.
“Somehow I'm not surprised,” she says.
“My eleventh grade chemistry teacher told my dad I was either going to be famous or end up in prison. Dad said probably both.”
She shakes her head, but she's smiling now. A real one. Nothing like the fake-sweet smile she aims at me when she's being a brat. This one she doesn't know she's giving me. Those are my favorite ones.
“At least you never ended up in prison,” she says.
“Well.” I rub the back of my neck, feeling a little sheepish. “There was this one incident. Ended up spending the night in Marble Falls’ lone jail cell. Sheriff called Dad to come pick me up. Which he did. The next morning.”
She stares at me. “He left you there all night?”
“Said it would build character.”
“Did it?”
“Debatable.”
She laughs. A real one, surprised out of her. “How old were you?”
