The High Wire

It was my second year teaching fifth grade. I had two classes with around 30 students in each. In one of my classes, there was a small, ten-year-old girl named Jessie. She had shoulder-length twists, sometimes with beads, catlike slanted eyes, a cupid’s-bow mouth, and rectangular glasses. She was always perfectly maintained – not in the desperate, showy way of parents who get the child every new trend in an attempt to demonstrate their dedication – but in the loving manner of a mom who cared for each perfectly arranged hair on her daughter’s head, each perfectly ironed uniform item, each pore of her skin, neatly vaselined all winter long.

But what really stood out about Jessie was her behavior. She seemed sweet, quiet, somehow simultaneously spacey and dialed in. She stared at her desk, out the window, at the bulletin board, but never quite seemed to focus on me or the board during instruction. However, her occasional contributions in class bubbled to the surface and revealed that she was actually brilliant beneath the seemingly inattentive demeanor. This contradiction confused me. One day she made a thrillingly clever remark in class in her nasally little voice, and the next she seemed not to be on our plane at all. One day, while students worked independently, I circulated among the rows to check work and provide feedback. Several neat rows of fifth graders worked silently, reading with their pencil in hand, quiet classical music playing in the background. As I passed Jess’s desk in my slow progression, a diminutive hand shot out and grasped my wrist.

I crouched down next to her desk.

“What’s up, Jessie?” I whispered.

“I…” she was still clutching my wrist.

I nodded encouragingly.

“I like your bracelet,” she murmured, looking at my wrist she was clutching. “I have one like it.”

“Oh,” I replied, surprised, “thank you.” I looked at her work, offered a check mark or two, and continued on my way, baffled. What was going on with this spacey little weirdo?

I can’t remember exactly when I found out, but at some point it came to light that Jessie was battling pretty acute Sickle Cell Anemia. At this revelation, I began to understand why I would see her sitting on the bench outside the office so frequently, waiting for her mom to come pick her up, or simply folded in upon herself, suffering silently, her little ankles crossed neatly below her crisp khaki uniform skirt. The pain was pervasive and intense for her that year, and she missed countless days of school.

Sometimes she was just in too much pain to come to school; other times, she was in the hospital. Her doctors were trying to determine an effective medication to cope with the symptoms. Once I understood this, the foggy days made more sense to me – why talking to this ten-year-old sometimes felt like the rambling, unfocused conversation I might have with the person next to me in the beer line at a Grateful Dead show. She didn’t seem like she was high – she was.

Sometimes I would see her sitting on that bench, and I would go sit with her, put my arm around her small shoulders. I’d ask if she was not feeling well and usually get a nod. I’d tell her I was sorry, my little sick puppy, and sit with her as long as I had time. Her body would melt into me and we’d sit together on the bench until my next class. Pup began to take hold as a nickname. It was horrible to see an innocent little child suffer like that. And it was strange to see her sometimes absent for days, then in a drug-induced haze, floating throughout the school day, then occasionally surfacing and making one of those incredibly lucid and clever observations in class, then slipping back beneath the surface, with no pattern or rhyme that I could discern.

After I began sitting on the bench with her, Jess saw me as a sympathetic friend. All the teachers liked and cared about her, but I felt we had a special bond. Sometimes in class, I would feel that little hand shoot out and grab my arm again. She would just be feeling unwell and would reach out to hold my hand or just let me know. Sometimes she could barely speak.

At the end of the year, we did a trip to a camp near Bear Mountain, where the kids stayed in cabins for a couple of nights, hiking, canoeing and doing other outdoor activities during the day. I was shocked when I learned that Jess was signed up to attend. How could a child who struggled so much on a daily basis manage hiking on a mountain? But she and her mother were insistent she be able to give it a try. It was only a couple of days. The nurse on-site would have her meds and be able to attend to her needs, should they arise. Still, I couldn’t imagine how she’d manage.

When we arrived, the busloads of city kids were excited, maybe a little intimidated, and bursting with energy. The camp counselors did a great job welcoming the kids and getting them settled in their cabins– they were thrilled – and doing team-building activities. They ate dinner in a camp mess hall and learned that the evening activity would be a night hike. They would be challenged to experience the woods in the dark and learn to use their different senses to perceive their surroundings.

By that point in the day, Jessie was exhausted. She was not up to hiking after dinner, and I volunteered to stay back at the cabin with her. I gave her some space to get herself settled and then went to check on her in the bunk she was sharing with a friend. She’d gotten into her pajamas and covered her twists in a silk bonnet. She was curled up on her bed.

“How’re you feeling, Jess?” I inquired.

“It hurts,” she told me feebly.

“Oh honey, I’m sorry,” I said, “Can I do anything for you?”

She told me, “I think I need my Oxycodone.”

I did my best to hide my shock. How could such a small child be routinely taking such a strong narcotic? And this meant her pain was even more dire than I realized.

“Don’t worry,” I replied, “I’ll call the nurse.”

Jess got her medication and managed to get some rest that night, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what I now knew: her suffering was so much more intense than I’d even realized. And yet, she had intrepidly taken the chance to come here, outside of her normal realm of comfort and safety, to have a shot at what all the other kids could do, knowing it might be hard.

The following day, the counselors brought the students to a ropes course high up in the trees and explained about the harnesses and helmets they’d need in order to ascend and cross the various obstacles. Some were excited; some outright refused.

They got each child suited up and demonstrated how to complete the first challenge: You had to climb a little ladder up the base of a tree, and then some large staples in the side of the trunk to reach the first platform, about 20 feet up. You then had to walk across a wire cable connecting that platform to another, attached to a different tree. There was a moving handle to hold onto, but it was only attached to a cable above, so the task required some balance, core strength and courage. Of course, there was no real danger because everyone was in a harness with a belayer ready to prevent them from falling if they lost their balance, but for a bunch of kids from Brownsville, Brooklyn, this was an unfamiliar situation, not to mention an opportunity to embarrass yourself, every middle schooler’s worst nightmare. Even some of the most athletic among them were nervous.

The other teachers and I watched, laughed, and shouted encouragement as one child after another took a few tentative steps and got scared as soon as the ground was more than four or five feet away. One girl couldn’t even climb off the little stepladder, instead clinging to the tree shaking and crying. It was quite an ordeal just to get her down, even though she was only a few feet up.

When it was Jess’s turn, she stood by the base of the tree, looked up at the wire high above, and smiled. With a confidence and steadiness I could never have predicted, she made quick work of the ladder. One foot after another landed squarely on each staple, her hands expertly reaching up to grasp the next rung. In no time at all, she was scrambling onto the platform. Adults and children alike cheered with wide eyes from below.

“Go, Jess, you’ve got this!” we called to her, but she knew it.

We watched her take a breath and, grasping the handle hanging from the cable above, step on the tightrope. She held on with one hand and extended the other out to the side to help her balance and began placing one foot in front of the other. In stunned silence, I watched her cross the cable steadily and touch the tree on the other side. It took her a matter of seconds. Her face broke into a huge grin. The children watching below burst into applause and cheers. Jess extended both arms like she was spreading her wings, and continued to smile as she floated to the ground to receive her hugs and high-fives.

“Wow!” I exclaimed, “Jess, that was amazing! How do you feel?”

“Fine,” she smirked, “That wasn’t hard.” The other students couldn’t believe it.

When I thought about this extraordinary moment afterwards, I realized maybe it wasn’t really so shocking. Jess had experienced so many scary things in her short life, had been routinely pulled from her comfort zone and placed in harrowing situations with no choice, that a situation like this was mild for her. For a moment, she got to enjoy a thrill as a child does, knowing that there was no real danger, that she was safely supported and that no one would let anything bad happen to her. She got to enjoy the unique sense of safety and comfort that many of her physically-well peers enjoy regularly. And in the process, she got to traverse the treetops and for a moment, feel like she was flying.

I am happy to report that I taught Jessie again as a seventh-grader, and by that point, her doctors had had much more success managing her symptoms. She was alert and present in class, continued to impress me with her brilliance, and made more friends. Before Thanksgiving, my school had a tradition in which students would write notes of gratitude to a teacher of their choice. Jess wrote me a sweet note acknowledging that I cared about her and my students “dearly” despite being “really strict.” It’s nice that she showed her gratitude, but what a gift to witness her progress over her years at my school, a wise and courageous child who knew when it was time to take care of herself and when she was ready to embark on a dazzling feat.