Bud’s calm was broken. He looked at Azalea for the first time as “teacher.”
“Can you, now?” he asked.
She threw open the schoolroom door, showed the children where to put their hats and ran to the blackboard.
“You must tell me your real name,” she said. “Surely it isn’t Bud?”
“No’m. It’s Laurence Babbitt Coulter.”
“Laurence Babbitt Coulter,” she wrote on the blackboard in very plain letters. “Can you write that, Bud?”
“No’m.”
“Do you know your letters?”
“When I don’t forget.”
“By the end of the week,” said Azalea with decision, “you will know your letters and you will be able to write your own name. Then you can do something that Mr. Simms can’t do.”