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card from the choices she’d set in front of me. Then I’d point to the color blue on my board.
    “Huh?” she asked.
    When she played a selection from Bach, I’d point to the correct composer, then once again touch the color blue on my board. I also touched purple.
    She looked confused. I searched around for the right words to explain what I meant. I wanted her to understand that music was colorful when I heard it. I finally realized that even Mrs. V couldn’t figure out everything in my head.
    We kept going.
    Sometimes she’d play hip-hop music, sometimes oldies. Music, and the colors it produced, flowed around her as easily as her clothing.
    Mrs. V took me outside in all kinds of weather. One day she actually let me sit outside in the rain. It was steaming hot, and I was sticky and irritable. It must havebeen about ninety degrees outside. We were sitting on her porch, watching the storm clouds gather. She told me the names of all the clouds and made up stories about them. I knew that later she’d have the names of every kind of cloud on word cards for me.
    “Big old Nimbus up there—he’s black and powerful and can blow all the other clouds out of the sky. He wants to marry Miss Cumulus Cloud, but she’s too soft and pretty to be bothered with such a scary guy. So he gets mad and makes storms,” she told me.
    Finally, old Nimbus got his way, and the rain came down around me and Mrs. V. It rained so hard, I couldn’t see past the porch. The wind blew, and the wet coolness of the rain washed over us. It felt so good. A small leak on Mrs. V’s porch let a few drops of rain fall on my head. I laughed out loud.
    Mrs. V gave me a funny look, then hopped up. “You want to feel it all?” she asked.
    I nodded my head. Yes, yes, yes.
    She rolled me down the ramp Dad had built, both of us getting wetter every second. She stopped when we got to the grass, and we let the rain drench us. My hair, my clothes, my eyes and arms and hands. Wet. Wet. Wet. It was awesome. The rain was warm, almost like bathwater. I laughed and laughed.
    Eventually, Mrs. V rolled me back up the ramp andinto the house, where she dried me off, changed my clothes, and gave me a cup of chocolate milk. She dried off my chair, and by the time Dad came to pick me up, the rain had stopped and everything was dry once more.
    I dreamed of chocolate clouds all night.

CHAPTER 7
    When I sleep, I dream. And in my dreams I can do anything. I get picked first on the playground for games. I can run so fast! I take gymnastics, and I never fall off the balance beam. I know how to square-dance, and I’m good at it. I call my friends on the phone, and we talk for hours. I whisper secrets. I sing.
    When I wake up in the morning, it’s always sort of a letdown as reality hits me. I have to be fed and dressed so I can spend another long day in the happy-face room at Spaulding Street School.
    Along with the assortment of teachers we’ve had inroom H-5, there have been more classroom aides than I can count. These aides—usually one guy to help with the boys and one lady to help with the girls—do stuff like take us to the bathroom (or change diapers on kids like Ashley and Carl), feed us at lunch, wheel us where we need to go, wipe mouths, and give hugs. I don’t think they get paid very much, because they never stay very long. But they should get a million dollars. What they do is really hard, and I don’t think most folks get that.
    It’s even hard to keep good teachers for us. I guess I don’t blame them for leaving, because, like I said, we’re a tough bunch to handle sometimes.
    But once in a while we get a good one. After squeaky Mrs. Hyatt for kindergarten and game-show Mr. Gross for first grade, Mrs. Tracy breezed into our room for second grade.
    She figured out I liked books, so she got some earphones and hooked me up with audiobooks on CD. She started with baby stuff, like Dr. Seuss, which my father and I had read when I was two, so after I tossed