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And she left him to his boots and his mother and his sudden, bursting desire to know who Marlowe was.
The Kingdom of School is guarded by a peculiar breed of demon-wights called Report Cards. As I have special privileges concerning all the belongings of Thomas Rood, particularly the secret ones, I shall snap my fingers and summon one of these cruel beasties to guide us out of the gates of the realm:
REPORT CARD: THOMAS ROOD, GRADE 1
Mathematics: Good
Language Skills: Excellent
Penmanship: Poor
History: Fair
Science: Excellent
Deportment: Very Poor
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Rood:
I am writing to share my concerns regarding your son, Thomas.
Thomas is a bright and intelligent child, although we might perhaps wish he were less bright and intelligent at the end of a long day with him. We all think your son is going places! However, I have reason to be worried by his classroom behavior. Thomas, as I’m sure you’re aware, is extremely talkative and inquisitive, which has become quite disruptive. Last week, when asked the sum of 3 + 1, young Mr. Rood responded with the following: When Carbuncle, the Emperor of the Deeper Trolls, was exiled from the Citadel of Gullion, she took with her three wishes granted her by the Elk-King of Mottleworst, and only one arrow for her bow of stone, making her treasures four and her soul bereft.
Thomas is six years old! I haven’t the faintest idea where he gets these notions, and I certainly am not a cruel enough teacher to have put such words as bereft and carbuncle on the spelling tests of first graders. He simply cannot answer a straight question—yet he blurts out his ridiculous troll trivia without so much as raising his hand.
More important, the level of influence Thomas has among his classmates is highly disturbing. On his first day, I made the mistake of assigning him to a desk which had a spot of vandalism on it. Nothing profane, I assure you; boys will be boys and school boards will be school boards and school boards never replace anything that can still be held together with a rusty nail and a prayer. Well, children miss nothing—they caught him straightaway whispering to his desk, calling it Humphrey, being generally peculiar, and sticking out, which is a hard suit of clothes to wear on your first day, as I’m sure you know.
Now, I felt for the boy. There is always some sensitive soul in every class who is too imaginative and gentle for his own good, and I thought little Tommy was this year’s poor lost lamb.
But not a bit of it! By the next week all the children had found some way to carve a name into their desk—and not a one their own! I’ve a classroom full of desks called Genevieve and Victor and Frankincense and Secretariat, and I’ll be an old maid in Heaven if I didn’t catch Annabelle Bosch whispering to hers during Quiet Reading! What’s more, they’ve all started addressing me as Queen Wilkinson, and I can’t say as I like it. Additionally, he is destructive toward school materials when frustrated (please see enclosed bill for the classroom planetarium) and insolent toward his teachers.
Mr. and Mrs. Rood, I think you can agree this is not normal behavior for a little boy. We don’t like to use words like “deranged,” but what is one to say when a child of six insists that the library is alive? When he convinces other, well-behaved children that the wind is red—Mr. and Mrs. Rood, they believe it so wholeheartedly that when they come in from any stormy recess, all sopping wet and filthy, the whole class babbles on about how “red” they are. Should this behavior persist, I would recommend special schooling for Thomas, as his presence is impeding the progress of other students, who are currently more adept at reciting the genealogy of King Goldmouth the Clurichaun than geometry.
I am trying to run a classroom, and it is quickly becoming a little Bedlam. Please see to your child!
Mrs. May Wilkinson
1st Grade
CHAPTER VI
TAMBURLAINE
In Which a Baseball Makes a Fateful Decision, a Boy Makes a Perfect Pitch, a Girl Breaks Her Leg, and Thomas Sees Something He Should
In the end, everything that happened happened because of a baseball and a pencil. If not for the pair of them, you and I should be having a lovely chat about old Mr. Rood who lives in the brownstone next door and how his grandchildren are just the noisiest things living but his geraniums are prettier than three sunrises and a baby parakeet.
Whether we ought to thank the baseball and the pencil or scold them remains to be seen.
Come along, then! We must run a little faster to catch up with our boy. We must chase him down through second and third and fourth grade, past fifth and sixth, all the quick years of primary school, which do not obey the usual rules of time and space, as any mother could tell you. School-time runs separately from usual time, like a certain country on the other side of the Equator, or the other side of a dream. School-time spins up and sputters and whirlwinds, all hopped up and in a hurry. Only once Summer comes round again, with its bindle full of adventures and bendings of rules and unwatched, unfettered, unending days in the sun does time return to its favorite pace, slow and golden and warm. But with the seasons, Summer disappears, off on its own wanderings and exploits and love affairs with the Equinoxes.
Let us run, run far and fast over the Summers and Autumns and inches grown until we can catch Thomas Rood at being twelve years old.
Thomas had not yet grown up particularly big or strong. He was thin and dark and looked all the time as though he had just received some secret, grievous wound—unless he smiled, and then he looked like everything in the world turning out all right at once. But he didn’t smile often. When you have a smile like that in your back pocket, you learn to use it like a little knife: at just the right moments, when it can do sudden, mortal work.
Thomas walked tall down the halls of the Kingdom of School, still in his Troll’s Mantle, which nearly fit him now. But it did not look much as it did when our boy wore it through the iron gates for the first time. By begging and pleading and offering every chore he could think of, Thomas had wheedled dozens of old necklaces and bracelets and earrings out of his mother, old, tarnished, broken things she did want any longer, broken clasps, broken pendants, broken chains. And with his book of trolls open before him, now split and torn and barely keeping spine and page together, he sewed them onto the shoulders of the beaten leather jacket until the golden chains and jewels and cameos and hoops and empty settings like little sharp crowns hung down his arms and back like a real, proper troll, like Carbuncle and Tufa and Jargoon and Porphyra and all the other legendary troll-lords in his books.
When he walked down the halls of the Kingdom of School, Thomas did not walk alone. There were no more Other Children, only Max and Frieda and Olive and Ronald and Polly and William and Franco and Susan.
