Her name was Charlotte Williams. She and her family -- parents, brother and sister -- lived an hour from us in a town called Purcellville.
The drive to Purcellville always included a stop at Hill High, which had the best sandwiches I've ever had.
One time, one of those kids had a sleepover party, only it was just for us. I slept in her brother's room, which had its own TV, and I got to watch the Braves game -- after my bedtime. (I think their mother didn't know how long the game would be.) And when she came to see me the last time that night, Charlotte's mother wished me sweet dreams, which seemed like such a nice thing to say to a kid.
I think I smiled pretty hard at that.
And in school, Charlotte needed help when she was called on to read.
Names have been changed.
Charlotte's sister, Felicity, had the longest slightly curly blond hair I'd ever seen. She was in my oldest younger sister's class, and I thought it was sort of sad that those kids had taken such a perfectly nice name like Felicity and called the girl Lise instead.
Charlotte's brother, Max, had about the curliest hair I'd ever seen on a kid. I kind of pitied him for it. On school picture day, he was the kid whose hair wasn't parted, and that just looked strange.
We visited them on the weekend a few times that year -- second grade. I didn't know why we went to see them, but Charlotte was nice to me, which was a welcome change from 17 of the other 18 kids in that class.
Their house was really big, which I never told them because it didn't occur to me that it was big so much as that there were lots of places to put stuff and lots of stuff in those places.
And at the end of the school year, my mother came and found me in the house (ours, not theirs) and told me Charlotte was on the phone and wanted to talk to me.
We gossiped for hours. She told me she was staying behind in second grade to do some things over, and I said I hadn't heard if I was going to go to third grade.
I hadn't really thought about it.
It turned out that you had to be recommended to advance to the next grade. Apparently I always had been, which was a major victory -- one year fewer with those kids.
In a way, I was jealous of her. She'd get to be away from those kids, and I'd keep on with them. She'd be in a class with Haley Rizk, who was about the cutest thing on two legs.
She also told me she had dyslexia, which I had heard of, and which didn't make sense to me -- why would a brain just randomly make it harder to read? That was a pretty silly thing to have happen. But I didn't tell her that.
It wasn't silly funny or silly weird, just silly like putting your shoes on your head. (You couldn't even be a superhero with shoes on your head. With underwear on your head, you could be Underwear Man, but with shoes on your head, they wouldn't stay on your head very long, and then they'd fall off your head and they might land on your feet, which would hurt.)
She told me that Josie Kellerman had a crush on me, and I lied and told her a guy named Walter (you did not call him Walter unless you wanted a donut, which was a kind of punch) had a crush on her.
In school the next day, at recess, Josie furiously denied having a crush on me, and Charlotte looked at me like I was a dummy for even suggesting it.
Also in school the next day, Charlotte made "staying behind for another year" sound really cool. I almost wanted to do it, but the teacher was mean and nothing we'd studied had been hard. And I wanted hard.
Any time Charlotte had gotten called on to read, she'd sit there looking very much like the next word was just on the tip of her tongue. She seemed frustrated that she couldn't get it, never nervous or mad that she'd gotten called on, and she always thanked the teacher for helping her.
Very successful strategies. Very successful distractions.
I didn't know she couldn't read until my Mama told me. Charlotte's mother had told her. All that year, I just figured she had trouble because nobody had told me outright that she couldn't read, and being able to read was like being able to walk -- at a certain point, you could just read, and that was it.
Years after the fact, of course, the coping mechanisms seem obvious. She was always just about to figure out the next word on her own. I imagine she was probably determined to do so in the beginning, but the frustration of being called on a few times a week and coming up empty -- not to mention the fantastic ease with which most of the rest of us figured out which words were in our sentence --
must have been excruciating.
Just, absolutely, torture in every meaningful way. Like your parents told you they didn't love you and it meant you had to miss Field Day (which was an oasis after a year of spending 40 years in the desert with no clothes on).
And nobody ever picked on her for it -- because I think nobody knew. I mean, I was clueless, but I never got the sense that any of those kids knew what was up or they would have pounced on her.
Or maybe not. Maybe they already had their target (take a wild guess), but because Charlotte had a big house and lots of stuff, that was what mattered to them. And having stuff was more important than being able to read.
In the pile of television show episodes meant to help kids handle some element of life that isn't so much fun is an ep of Good Morning, Miss Bliss in which a kid named Deke has to prepare a book report.
Time has taken most of the parts of that 24 minutes of TV from me, but here are the three scenes you should know (as best as I can remember them, and I guarantee they didn't go down exactly like this) for if you ever meet someone like Charlotte:
In Screech's room
Screech: "Hand me the D volume of the encyclopedia, Deke?"
Deke: "Sure." ::hands Screech the L volume::
Screech: "No, the D volume. This is the L volume."
Deke: "Oh, duh. Right." ::hands Screech the R volume::
Screech: "This is the R volume."
Deke: "Yeah, well, why don't you just grab the D volume yourself, then?"
Screech: "Can you read?"
::Deke looks at Screech for a moment, then storms out of his room::
In Miss Bliss' classroom after school
Miss Bliss: "Deke, I've written the names of three presidents on this sheet of paper. Would you read them to me?"
Deke ::looking put upon:: "George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln."
Miss Bliss: "Uncle Ben, Betty Crocker and Sara Lee. That's my shopping list. Deke, you can't read, can you?"
::Deke looks away from Miss Bliss, seeming shamed::
In the classroom during school
Miss Bliss: "OK, Deke, your turn."
::Screech looks uncomfortable::
::Deke walks up to the front of the room with less swagger than normal::
Miss Bliss: "Class, Deke has dyslexia, which means it's harder for him to read. He is going to read his book report, and nobody is going to make a sound."
Deke: "I ... read ... the ... book ... 'The ... Boy ... and ... the ... dog.' It ... is ... about ... a ... boy ... who ... finds ... a ... dog. It ... is ... a ... good ... book. The ... dog ... makes ... the ... boy ... hap-py."
I'm still waiting for someone to deliver a line as omnipotently as Hayley Mills delivered that. God himself wouldn't have said word one.*
Second grade was in 1988-89. That means my conversation with Charlotte was 20 years ago this past June.
I haven't seen Charlotte in 19 years, and I never talked to her at any length after that one day (we were in different grades, and it wasn't cool to be seen talking to me).
But things like knowing her prepared me for my student who was 50 and read and wrote at a grade school level. Things like seeing Deke struggle through monosyllabic words helped me understand that not everyone just gets it. (Years later, any English or otherwise reasonable word I type once stays with me. It's a fun party trick, and it means I don't even lose garbage words like otinfrocpropate, which was a spectacular series of typos a reporter at work managed when he was taking notes during a meeting. He meant to type "to incorporate.")
And with any luck (and piles of hard work), the story of how she learned to read despite dyslexia is now one of those stories for ... kids ... like ... Deke.
*Apparently I remembered this scene as having happened in that episode. It didn't. I know I saw it or something like it, but I seem to have conflated television shows.