The Boy in Room 6

Ethan

This is my first year teaching at Oakwood Elementary. I arrived in September with a contract signed in August and the undamaged enthusiasm of someone who still doesn't really know what they've gotten themselves into. Fourth grade, twenty-three kids, classroom number six on the ground floor. I had it all written down in a brand-new notebook.

The school secretary emailed me the class roster three days before the year started. I read it several times, trying to put faces to the names. Twenty-two names. But on the first day of school, when I did the headcount, there were twenty-three kids sitting in the room.

The one who didn't belong was in the back, at the last desk in the row by the windows. Still. His hands on the desk. He looked at me when I walked in, or at least I think he did. His face was very pale, the kind of pale that isn't just being fair-skinned but something deeper, like the light hit him differently.

I took attendance. When I got to the end, I looked up and said, 'Is there anyone I didn't call?' The boy in the back raised his hand very slowly. 'Ethan,' he said. Just that. Ethan Miller, he clarified when I asked for his last name. I wrote the name in my notebook and assumed there was a mistake on the list they'd sent me. Those things happen. Last-minute enrollments, systems that don't update. I didn't think anything more of it.

The first few weeks, I focused on getting to know the group and not losing my cool. Ethan was easy to ignore, not in a bad way, but because he didn't make any noise. He never raised his hand. He never interrupted. He never cried at recess or got into fights with anyone. If I asked him something directly, he answered well, in a voice that carried clearly from the back even though he didn't raise it. His answers were always right.

The first thing that caught my attention was recess. The other kids would go down to the playground with their snacks and juice boxes. Ethan didn't go down. Well, I guess he must have, because he didn't stay in the classroom, but I never saw him on the playground. I never saw him eat anything. I thought maybe he had some medical condition that kept him inside, or that he just preferred the library. There are kids like that.

The second thing I noticed was the cold. In October, I started walking around the rows during written work, stopping to look at their notebooks. When I stopped next to Ethan to check his work, I rested my hand on the edge of his desk, and he looked up. By accident, the back of my hand brushed against his. It was like touching the inside of a freezer. Not the cold of someone who's been outside, but a cold without a source, like warmth just didn't exist in him.

I didn't say anything. I looked at him. He looked at me. I kept walking down the row.

His drawings were technically good for his age. Clean lines, decent proportions. But the subjects were strange. While the other kids drew superheroes and animals and houses with yards, Ethan drew empty rooms as seen from the doorway. Leafless trees against a blank sky. Human figures from behind, always from behind, never with faces. He colored them with muted colors: grays, browns, very pale blues. I saved them all in his folder, not really knowing what to do with them.

As for his classmates: none of them mentioned him to me. And that did seem strange, because fourth graders always talk about the new kid. They fight to sit next to them or they openly reject them, but they react. With Ethan, they just seemed not to process him. Like he was there but not quite in their field of vision.

In November, I decided to make the follow-up calls to families. I wanted to talk to all the parents; there weren't any specific issues, it was just the first-quarter check-in. I went down the roster. I got to the M's.

I found the number on the registration form. I dialed it from my cell phone, sitting in my car after school, with the parking lot almost empty. It rang three times. A woman picked up.

'Good afternoon,' I said. 'This is Ms. Vance, the fourth-grade homeroom teacher at Oakwood Elementary. I'm calling about Ethan Miller.'

Silence. Not the silence of someone thinking about how to answer, but the silence of someone who's just heard something they didn't expect.

'Ethan passed away in August,' the woman said. Her voice very low, very controlled, like someone who's had to say that sentence before and has learned to say it without breaking down. 'A car accident. Who am I speaking with?'

I hung up.

I don't know how long I sat in the car. The parking lot lights came on at some point, so I must have been there for a while. I had the phone in my hand and I couldn't put it down. I thought: there's a mistake. Wrong number. There's another Miller family. There's an administrative explanation for all of this. I'd find it the next day.

What I Did Next

The next morning, I got to school before the classrooms opened. I went straight to the front office. The secretary, Mrs. Higgins, had been at the school for fifteen years and knew every piece of paper in every file. I asked her about the registration for Ethan Miller, fourth grade.

She looked at me with the expression people get when they don't understand the question. 'We don't have any student by that name in fourth grade,' she said. She typed on the computer. I waited. She shook her head. 'In any grade. There is no Ethan Miller enrolled in this school this year.'

I told her he had been in my class since September. That I had written down his name myself. That he had turned in work, answered questions, sat at the last desk by the windows. Mrs. Higgins looked at me with a patience I found almost insulting and searched the system again. Nothing.

I went up to the classroom. It was early, the kids hadn't arrived yet. The desk in the back was there, perfectly aligned with the others. Empty. I opened it. Empty too, no books, no pencil case, nothing. Like a spare desk nobody had ever used.

When the students arrived, I waited for them to sit down and asked them, as casually as I could, if any of them remembered Ethan, the new kid who sat in the back. Most of them just looked at me, not knowing what I was talking about. Two girls glanced at each other and said they didn't know anyone by that name. Marcus, who sat in the middle row, frowned for a moment and said, 'The quiet kid in the back?' He paused. 'I don't know. I don't really remember.' And then he didn't say anything else.

After school, I went through all the work folders. I looked at every single page. I have the assignments from September, October, November. I looked for Ethan's name on each one. It wasn't there. I remembered collecting his papers. I remembered reading his answers. I remembered his handwriting was oddly neat, almost calligraphic, like someone who learned to write using a different method. I didn't find anything with his name on it.