Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card Page A

can’t always be home when your kids need you. That’s the way it is, if we’re going to have food on the table and a roof over our heads.”
    Stevie said nothing. DeAnne had never seen him so unforgiving. In fact, she had never seen him act unforgiving at all. Maybe what happened at school today really was awful, so awful that Stevie couldn’t forgive his father for not being there to protect him.
    Well, she’d find out soon enough now. “Come on, Stevie,” she said. “Let’s go to your room and you can tell me what happened.”
    â€œNot in front of Robbie,” he said.
    â€œOK, we’ll go to my room,” she said. “Step, if you can’t wait for supper, fix yourself something, but if you wait I’ll poach some eggs or something.”
    Step nodded, learning against the bookshelves. As she followed Stevie out of the room, she thought she had never seen Step look so bent, so broken , in all the years she’d known him. It made her want to go to him and hold him and comfort him . . . but she knew that Step would understand, would agree that it was more important for her to be with Stevie. The child’s needs always took precedence over the adult’s. That was the way it had to be, when you had children. That was the contract you made with the kids when you chose to call their spirits from heaven into the world, that as long as they were young and needed you, you did whatever you could to meet their needs before you did anything else for anybody else.
    They sat next to each other on her side of the queen-sized bed that Step’s parents had given them as a wedding present. “What happened today, Stevie,” said DeAnne.
    Almost immediately, his face twisted up and the pent-up tears flowed again as they had flowed in the car. “I couldn’t understand them, Mom!”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI couldn’t understand what they said! To me, I mean. I could understand them mostly in class, when they were talking to the teacher, but when they talked to me I didn’t understand hardly anything and so I just stood there and finally I said, I can’t understand you, and they called me stupid and retarded. ”
    â€œHoney, you know you’re not stupid. You know you’re a straight A student.”
    â€œBut I couldn’t understand anything.” He sounded fierce now; much of his anger, she realized, must have been from the frustration he had felt, being unable to communicate with the other kids. “I asked them what language they were speaking, and they said ‘American,’ and then they started making fun of the way I talk, like I talked wrong or something. But I didn’t say anything wrong!”
    â€œHoney, you’ve got to understand, this is a school in a fairly rural part of Steuben. A country school. They just have thick southern accents.”
    â€œWell they understood everything I said.”
    â€œBecause you talk normal American English. Like on television. They all watch TV, so they’re used to understanding the way you talk.”
    â€œThen why don’t they talk that way?”
    â€œMaybe in a couple of generations they will. But right now they talk in a southern accent. And besides, you did understand some of what they said, or you wouldn’t have known they were calling you retarded and stupid.”
    He began to cry harder. “I made this one girl write it down for me. That’s how I knew. And then they all wrote it down. Retarded and stupid. They wrote it on papers and gave it to me. All day. I didn’t read them, though. I mean after the first couple.”
    â€œThat was very wise of you,” said DeAnne. “And very cruel of them.”
    â€œBut when I was leaving at the end of school I left all those notes on the table and Mrs. Jones made me go back and pick them all up and take them with me.” The humiliation of it made him shudder.