The Paramedic Who Knew My Name

Marcus Deel. Room fourteen. The fall of the year two thousand.

He was a skinny boy with a cowlick and a plaid flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top, in a week in September when it was still eighty degrees. He sat in the second row by the window. He raised his hand to answer almost every question I asked out loud, and he never once raised it for anything I’d written on the board.

That was how I caught it. It took me about three weeks, which I am not proud of. A boy that quick with his ears and that slow with his eyes has a trick, and his was a very good memory. He would listen to the other children read a page and hold it in his head word for word. When his turn came he looked at the book and recited, turning the pages at the right time. For three weeks I thought he was the best reader in the room.

Then one day I changed the order. I called on him to read a page that no one else had read yet. He looked down at the book for a long time. I watched his ears go red, then his neck, and then he said very quietly, “I forgot my glasses.”

Marcus Deel did not wear glasses.

I let it go. I said, “That’s all right, we’ll try it again tomorrow,” and I moved on to Katie Brandenburg, and I watched him out of the side of my eye the rest of the hour. He sat with his hands flat on the desk, pressing down, as if the desk might float away.

I’ll tell you what I knew about him, which was little. His mother worked nights at the nursing home, and his grandmother, a woman who ironed his shirts and wore a church hat to parent conferences, raised him in the house on Harrison Street. He had changed schools twice, and somewhere in the shuffle somebody had decided he was a behavior problem. The file said “inattentive and avoidant.” Nobody had written down that he could not read a word.

I kept him in from recess the next day and gave him the choice. I remember I said, “Marcus, I’m not mad, and I’m not going to tell anyone. I’d like to know if reading is hard for you.”

He looked at the floor for a very long time. And then he said, “How did you know?”

“It’s my job to know.”