without a sound as she rubbed with trembling desperation at the sidewalk. 'What's the matter, Dismey?' I asked, squatting down by her, the better to see. 'What are you doing?' 'My mama,' she choked out, 'I hurt my mama!' 'What do you mean?' I asked, bewildered. 'I stepped on a crack,' she sobbed. 'I didn't mean to but Bannie pushed me. And now my mama's back is busted! Can you fix a busted back? Does it cost very much?' 'Oh, Dismey, honey!' I cried, torn between pity and exasperation. 'I told you not to believe Bannie. `Step on a crack and break your mother's back' isn't for true! It's just a singing thing the children like to say. It isn't really so!' I finally persuaded Dismey to leave the sidewalk, but she visibly worried all the rest of the day and shot out of the door at dismissal time as though she couldn't wait to get home to reassure herself. Well, school went on and we switched from fairy tales to the Oz books, and at story time every day I sat knee-deep in a sea of wondering faces and experienced again with them my own enchantment when I was first exposed to the stories. And Dismey so firmly believed in every word I read that Michael and Bannie had her terror- stricken and fugitive every time a dust devil whirled across the playground. I finally had to take a decisive hand in the affair when I found Michael struggling with a silently desperate Dismey, trying to pry her frenzied hands loose from the playground fence so the whirlwind could pick her up and blow her over the Deadly Desert and into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West. Michael found his Levi's not impervious to a ping-pong paddle, which was the ultimate in physical punishment in our room. He also found not to his liking the Isolation outside the room, sitting forlornly on the steps by our door for half a day, but the worst was the corporate punishment he and Bannie had visited upon them. They were forbidden to play with each other for three days. The sight of their woebegone, drooping figures cast a blight over the whole playground, and even Dismey forgave them long before the time was up. But her tender-heartedness left her only more vulnerable to the little devils when they finally slipped back into their old ways. We finished the first of the Oz books and were racing delightedly into the first part of The Magic of Oz, and there it was! Right on page 19! We all looked at it solemnly. We wrote it on the board. We contemplated it with awe. A real live magic word! All we had to do now to work real magic was to learn how to pronounce the word. Therein lay the difficulty. We considered the word. PYRZQXGL. We analyzed it. We knew all the letters in it, but there were no vowels except `and sometimes Y.' How could you sound out a word with no vowels and no place to divide it into syllables? Surely a word that long would have more than one syllable! 'We'll have to be careful even trying to say it, though,' I warned. 'Because if you do find the right way to pronounce it, you can-well, here it tells you`. . . transform any-one into beast, bird or fish, or anything else, and back again, once you knew how to pronounce the mystical word.' ' 'You could even change yourself. Wouldn't it be fun to be a bird for a while? But that's what you have to watch carefully. Birds can talk in the Land of Oz, but can they talk here?' The solemn consensus was no, except for papkeets and myna birds. 'So if you changed yourself into a bird, you couldn't ever change yourself back. You'd have to stay a bird unless someone else said the magic word for you. So you'd better be careful if you learn the way to say it.' 'How do you say it, teacher?' asked Donna. 'I've never found out,' I sighed. 'I'll have to spell it every time I come to it in the story because I can't say it. Maybe someday I'll learn it. Then when it's Quiet Time, I'll turn you all into Easter Eggs, and we'll have a really quiet Quiet Time!' Laughing, the children returned to their seats and we prepared for our afternoon work. But first, most of the children bent studiously to the task of copying PYRZQXGL from the board to take the word home to see if anyone could help them with it. It was all as usual, the laughing, half-belief of the most of the children in the wonderful possibilities of the word, and the solemn intensity of Dismey, bent over a piece of paper, carefully copying, her mouth moving to the letters. The affair of Bannie and Michael versus Dismey went on and on. I consulted with the boys' parents, but we couldn't figure out anything to bring the matter to a halt. There seemed to be an irresistible compulsion that urged the boys on in spite of everything we could do. Sometimes you get things like that, a clash of personalities-or sometimes a meshing of personalities that is inexplicable. I tried to attack it from Dismey's angle, insisting that she check with me on everything the boys tried to put over on her before she believed, but Dismey was too simple a child to recognize the subtlety with which the boys worked on occasion. And I tried ignoring the whole situation, thinking perhaps I was making it a situation by my recognition of it. A sobbing Dismey in my arms a couple of times convinced me of its reality. Then there came yesterday. It was a raw blustery day, bone-chilling in spite of a cloudless sky, a day that didn't invite much playing outdoors after lunch. We told the children to run and romp for fifteen minutes after we left the cafeteria and then to come back indoors for the rest of the noon period. I shivered in my sweater and coat, blinking against the flood of sunlight that only made the cold, swirling winds across the grounds feel even colder. The children, screaming with excitement and release, swirled with the winds, to and fro, in a mad game of tag that consisted in whacking anyone handy and running off madly in all directions shrieking, 'You're it, had a fit, and can't get over it!' It didn't take long for the vitality of some of our submarginals to run short, and when I saw Treesa and Hannery huddling in the angle of the building, shaking in their cracked, oversized shoes as they hugged their tattered sweaters about them, I blew the whistle that called the class indoors. The clamor and noise finally settled down to the happy hum of Quiet Time, and I sighed and relaxed, taking a quick census of the room, automatically deducting the absentees of the day. I straightened and checked again. 'Where's Dismey?' I asked. There was a long silence. 'Does anyone know where Dismey is?' 'She went to the restroom with me,' said Donna. 'She's afraid to go alone. She thinks a dragon lives down in the furnace room and she's scared to go by the steps by herself.' 'She wuz play tag weez us,' said Hannery, with his perennial sniff. 'Maybe she go'd to beeg playgroun',' suggested Treesa. 'We don' s'pose to go to beeg playgroun',' she added virtuously. Then I heard Bannie's high, embarrassed giggle. 'Bannie and Michael, come here.' They stood before me, a picture of innocence. '`Where is Dismey?' I asked. They exchanged side glances. Michael's shoulders rose and fell. Bannie looked at his thumb, dry of, lo, these many weeks, and popped it into his mouth. 'Michael,' I said, taking hold of his shoulders, my fingers biting. 'Where is Dismey?' 'We don't know,' he whined, suddenly afraid. 'We thought she was in here. We were just playing tag.' 'What did you do to Dismey?' I asked, wondering wildly if they had finally killed her. 'We-we-' Michael dissolved into frightened tears before the sternness of my face and the lash of my words. 'We didn't do nothing,' cried Bannie, taking his thumb out of his mouth, suddenly brave for Michael. 'We just put a rock on her shadow.' 'A rock on her shadow?' My hands dropped from Michael's shoulders. 'Yeth.' Bannie's courage evaporated and his thumb went back into his mouth. 'We told her she couldn't move.' 'Sit down,' I commanded, shoving the two from me as I stood. 'All of you remember the rules for when I'm out of the room,' I reminded the class. 'I'll be right back.' The playground was empty except for the crumpled papers circling in an eddy around the trash can. I hurried over to the jungle gym. No Dismey. I turned the corner of the Old Building and there she was, straining and struggling, her feet digging into the ground, the dirt scuffed up over her ragged shoes, her whole self pulling desperately away from the small rock that lay on her shadow. I sawor thought I saw-the shadow itself curl up around her knobby, chapped ankles. 'Dismey!' I cried. 'Dismey!' 'Teacher!' she sobbed. 'Oh, teacher!' I had my arms around her, trying to warm her stiff little hands in mine, trembling to her shivering, wincing to
