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A Better Place to Grow Up (Chapter 14)
CHAPTER 14
The good books
Maybe this is a passing fancy, like Pokemon cards. Maybe his interest will fizzle when summer begins to sizzle. But at the moment, nothing has fifth-grader Howard Small quite so absorbed as a couple of paperback books.
Howard carries them wherever he goes, reading them in the back seat of the car, in the tub, under the covers late at night with a flashlight. When it gets noisy around the apartment, Howard pulls a lamp into an upstairs closet and settles in with his books.
He's still a scamp. His teacher, Mary Spencer, had Howard move his desk to the far corner of Room 201 and face toward the windows so he would be less likely to clown around with classmates. But when Howard finds he can't be the center of attention he's content to knock down another chapter in one his books.
The books have been a godsend to Howard's mom, Toni McNeal. McNeal hasn't been able to put in the time she knows she should with Howard and his studies. She's supposed to read with Howard for at least 20 minutes every weeknight. That's a critical factor in Jefferson's Success for All reading program.
But McNeal can't always summon the energy. Her day starts at 4:30 a.m. when she gets ready to drive busloads of kids back and forth across the city; it ends with baby-sitting duty for her daughter's 10-month-old while the daughter works the late shift as a nurse's aide at DePaul Health Center in Bridgeton. Since her mother died at the beginning of the school year, McNeal has taken on more than she's used to handling.
Fortunately, it's been a lot easier this year to keep Howard busy. He stays after school most weekdays to take part in activities that the Center of Contemporary Arts has brought to Jefferson School. On Mondays and Wednesdays, he builds a personal Web site as part of a computer arts program. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he practices backflips in COCA's gymnastics program. He can take African dance, creative writing, music or ceramics, if he's so inclined.
But nothing has captured his attention like this book that Mary Spencer had them reading in class. Spencer copied the chapters and assigned every student in Howard's reading group to play a character. There was Dudley Dursely, the piggish bully, and Voldemort, the evil wizard; Hagrid, the friendly giant; and the hero of the tale, a skinny kid named Harry Potter, who keeps slipping into and out of trouble. All the kids experimented with different voices to bring their characters to life.
Spencer got so wrapped up in the reading that she neglected to start the egg timer to signal the end of read-aloud segment. So they kept right on going.
But not far enough for Howard. He came home one day in March demanding that his mother take him to the store right away so he could read ahead.
When they got to the store, Howard talked his mom into buying not just the first Harry Potter book, but the second.
McNeal enjoyed a quiet ride back home. Howard had already begun to read.
