“I can’t do it!” Olympia shoved the tablet away from her and slumped forwards on the table. “The words don’t make sense!”
I took the tablet and, after bookmarking her place approximately halfway through chapter one, pressed the button on the side to shut it off. I put it back into its place inside the padded cotton sleeve and sat back in my chair.
Speaking to her now wouldn’t help. She was tired and overwhelmed, and nothing I could say would make her feel better.
So I would wait.
I would wait until she felt better and wanted to talk again.
Several minutes passed before Olympia raised her head and looked over at me. Her large blue eyes, so like her father’s, were hesitant and a little afraid.
“Are we feeling better now?” I asked gently.
“You…” Her voice was tiny. “You aren’t angry?”
“Whyever would I be angry with you, Olympia?” I slumped down on the table so I was eye-to-eye with her, although she was staring decidedly at a point over my shoulder.
“Because I can’t do it.”
“Well, you’re perfectly wrong about that. Just because you can’t do it today, doesn’t mean you can’t do it at all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s hard today, and that’s all right. Lots of things are very hard at first. Dancing, playing football, writing, even walking. It takes babies a long time to learn to talk and walk.”
“I’m not a baby.” Olympia shifted in her chair.
“No, you’re not. You’re quite right. But you are trying to learn something that is very difficult for you, and it isn’t going to happen immediately.”
“But I want it to.”
“I’m sure you do, honey, but that isn’t how it works.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, I had to go to school for a lot of years to be a teacher. All the normal school, two at college, and then four at university, and there was some training after that, too.”
She frowned. “That’s a lot of school.”
“It is, but it was worth it. It was very hard at first,” I said, looking at one of the paintings on the opposite wall. It was of dogs having tea and biscuits while wearing hats and, honestly, the most random thing I’d ever seen, but it was nice to focus on something without making Olympia feel uncomfortable. “I had to learn an awful lot and it didn’t all come at once. Some things were easy, but some things were very, very hard and took a long time for me to learn them.”
“Like the words.”
“Like the words,” I replied gently, reaching over and touching her shoulder. “I know many things can be very difficult for you, Olympia. I will never be angry with you for trying your hardest even when you’re struggling.”
“You won’t?” She looked at me for a second. “Granny gets angry sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m sure she doesn’t. Sometimes adults can seem angry when they’re really upset or frustrated with themselves because they don’t know how to help. You know your dad struggled with words, too, when he was a little boy?”
“He told me.”
“Your granny didn’t know how to help him when he was a little boy, and Gabriella told me that was very difficult for her. I think she finds herself in the same position with you, honey. She gets rather upset with herself, not with you.” I let my hand fall to take her little one in mine. “Wanting to help someone and not knowing how can be very tough sometimes.”
Olympia looked down at the table and fidgeted with the edge of a piece of paper, flipping it back and forth between her fingers until I worried that she was going to get a papercut. “I want to try again.”
“Reading?”
She nodded. “I want to finish that chapter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
I unlocked the tablet and slid it back over to her. It was open to the page she’d left off on. Olympia picked it up, then paused, and got up and walked over to the armchair. She tucked herself into a little ball in the chair by the window and gripped the edges of the tablet so that her knuckles turned white, and I watched her for a moment before turning away.
If she was more comfortable reading there without being watched, then she could carry on.
I opened my laptop and updated our plan. Maybe a whole chapter book by the end of the summer was too ambitious, but then again, maybe she just hadn’t found the book yet.
Everyone had the book. The one that made them fall in love with reading.
Maybe she just needed to find hers.
“I finished it!”
I turned around and grinned at her. “See? I told you. I knew you could do it.”
The sparkle in her eyes matched the brightness of her smile, and I held out my arms to hug her. She giggled and squeezed me tightly.
“What do you think of the book?”
“Um.” She leaned into me. “I don’t know.”
“Would you like to try something else tomorrow?”
“I think so.”
“Okay.” I checked the time. “We still have to do some writing practice, but I think we can take five minutes to search for a new book.” I pulled up the e-book store website on my laptop as Olympia pulled a chair over. “Let’s see… what about this one?”
“What’s it about?”
I read the sumFlorence to her, and she shook her head, but I added it to a list just in case. We went through several books until one about fairies in a far-off land caught her attention, and after I’d checked to make sure it was appropriate for her reading level, I purchased it using the card Alexander had given me for her supplies.
I was a little jealous of her book budget.
“Are we done now? Is Mrs. Berry here? Can I see the bunnies?” Olympia asked, fidgeting.
“Nope.” I slid her the handwriting workbook and a pencil. “Mrs. Berry won’t be here for another thirty minutes. Until then, we’re doing some work on your penmanship.”
She sighed. “This is silly. I can type on a computer.”
We’d had this argument for the last four days. She always lost, but it didn’t stop her from trying.
“You can type on a computer,” I agreed. “But you can’t type everything, and handwritten notes and letters are far more personal than those written on a machine. At some point, you’ll need to write someone a note, and you’ll need a pen and paper for that.”
“Okay, okay.” She changed seats and sipped from her water bottle. “How many pages?”
“We’ll see. I’d like you to work on joining letters today.” I opened the book and flipped to a page with ‘th’ written in numerous ways, some solid and some dotted for her to trace. “This is a common combination and a good start, plus it’s quite an easy one, look.” I took another pencil, turned it upside down, and moved it in the motion.
“What if I get it wrong?”
“Then you keep trying until you get it right.” I patted her shoulder. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
“Okay.” She looked at the page. “Then can I see the bunnies?”
“Then you can see the bunnies.”
***
I didn’t spend as much time tutoring Olympia as I’d thought I might. She got overwhelmed and stressed out easily, and that usually meant we had to split our work into two sessions. That hadn’t been the case today, and she’d enjoyed the writing so much that she’d continued on past the allotted half an hour.
Mrs. Berry, her nanny, was a kindly older woman whose own children were grown and in university, and she was one of the genuinely kindest women I’d ever met. She loved Olympia as if she were her own flesh and blood, and when she’d come into the room to take over from me, she’d made a big fuss of Olympia’s writing.
The look on Olympia’s face made the hard work worth it.
After visiting the baby bunnies, they’d both gone into the village to get some cake for lunch. Mrs. Berry had insisted that such good writing deserved such a good treat, and I’d smiled the entire time as they left.
Olympia loved cake.
Mrs. Berry rewarding her today would make my job easier tomorrow—she’d be more responsive to writing if she thought there was cake at the end of it. It was a slightly dangerous precedent to be setting, but hey.
Sometimes, you had to do what you had to do.
They’d invited me to join them, but I’d politely declined. Teaching Olympia could be tiring, especially when she was in a distracted mood like she’d been until the very end of our lesson today. Anything from a speck of a dust to a plane flying overhead could throw off her focus, and that was part of the reason why I’d declined cake.
Who in their right mind declined cake?
A woman on a mission, that was who.
I had friends who worked with children with extra needs, and I knew there would be some I could contact who might know of resources I could access for Olympia. Focusing and calming exercises were the ones we needed most.
I emailed a few of my friends and then went on my own search. Of course, what Olympia truly needed was her autism assessment. There was no doubt in my mind that she would be diagnosed, but her problem was that she was a girl.
Diagnosing girls with autism was one of the most difficult things in the world.
So many girls slipped through the net because they masked their symptoms and struggles. They didn’t always have the issues boys had making friends—in fact, a great deal of their signs were vastly different to boys, and the diagnostic criteria was based on studies carried out on boys.
Girls were being left behind, and that was why it’d taken Alexander this long to get her diagnosis. He’d been fighting for five years for someone to listen to him, and I hoped they’d get their answer by the end of the summer.
I found a few calming exercises including an app that had meditative music on. That was touch and go with Olympia’s sensitivity to noise, but it was gentle and soft enough that she might just find it helpful.
Besides, I wasn’t sure it applied to music.
The girl was always listening to music, but she couldn’t do that during lessons. We’d tried. We’d ended up having an impromptu dance party.
When the app downloaded to my phone, I took to my lesson plan to work on that for the remainder of the week. It was hard to make things like reading and writing exciting, but I hoped I was doing it.
“Oh, you’re here.”
I jolted at the sound of Alexander’s voice and pressed my hand to my chest. “Goodness, you scared me.”
He chuckled and walked into the living room. “Sorry. Am I interrupting you?”
“No, I’m just planning out some things for our lessons.” I saved what I was working on and closed my laptop down. “How was your meeting?”
“About as exciting as a bout of haemorrhoids,” he replied dryly. “I did get a call from the psychologist, though. About Olympia.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Good news?”
“Yes. They’re visiting next week to conduct the assessment.” He rung his hands together. “It’s a very strange feeling.”
“I imagine it is after so long, but it’ll help her so much, Alex.”
Sitting down, he nodded slowly. “I know. You’re doing a wonderful job with her. You have no idea how much I appreciate it.”
I smiled. “Well, you’re not paying me to do a shoddy one.”
“That’s true.” That put a smile back on his face. “Where is she, by the way? How was your lesson today? Did she behave herself?”
“That’s a lot of questions.” I laughed, tucking my feet beneath my butt on the sofa.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself laughing. “Yes, she was perfectly behaved. Our lesson went very well—she did great with her writing, and she actually finished a chapter of a book despite stopping halfway through and having a moment.”
“She went back to it?”
“Of her own accord. She isn’t a fan of the book, though, so we did take a gratuitous five minutes to find her something she was more interested in.”
“Well, if she went back to a book she wasn’t enjoying, can you imagine what she might do with one she is?”
“Exactly. Although I do rather suspect we’ll be hearing about fairies and talking rabbits for the next two weeks.”
His lips curled up. “We hear enough about baby bunnies as it is. I doubt ones that can talk are that much of a stretch.”
That was very true. The baby bunnies she loved so much were a happy accident in that both rabbits Alexander rescued for her were supposed to be female.
Evidently, one was not female.
Poor Annie the male rabbit. She wouldn’t change his name, either.
“So where is she?”
“Oh. Believe it or not, she was enjoying writing so much she did an extra page when Mrs. Berry arrived, so she took her for cake for lunch as a treat,” I said.
Alexander tilted his head to the side. “That seems like a dangerous precedent to be setting.”
My thoughts exactly.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
“Mine?” I asked.
“Is there anyone else here?” He smirked.
“I suppose not.” I snorted. “Nothing. I was considering taking myself for dinner, but it seems like a lot of work.”
He leaned back on the sofa, his lips still curved up into that annoying little smirk. Honestly, the man was far too bloody handsome for his own good, and I was going to need him to stop wearing white shirts with rolled up sleeves.
It was affecting my sleep.
There were only so many times one could dream about ripping them off him before it became quite improper.
“Olympia wanted to go to the aquarium. Why don’t you join us?” Alexander offered, undoing the top button of his shirt. “She’s been begging me for days, and since my meeting got done earlier, I think today is as good a time as any.”
“Oh. I’ve never been to the aquarium here.”
“It’s been a while for us, but she likes the jellyfish. She asked for some for Christmas last year and it took some explaining that Santa can’t bring those on his sleigh.”
“What was her response to that?”
“That me and Granny buy her gifts, too, so why can’t we get her some?”
I bit my lower lip and held in a laugh. That was exactly what I’d expected him to say. “And what did you say?”
“Pet shops didn’t sell them but she could have a goldfish.”
“She doesn’t have a goldfish.”
“I know. It was jellyfish or bust, apparently.” He shrugged and rested his arm across the back of the sofa. “Will you join us? She’ll probably talk me into getting something extremely unhealthy for dinner where there’s likely to be ice-cream.”
“Oh, ice-cream? Now you’re talking.” I pushed my hair back from my face. “Sure. I haven’t really been out much since I got here, and that sounds nice. Plus, it might give me some ideas for future lessons to engage her.”
“No. No working.”
“Sorry, I can’t turn this off.” I tapped my brain. “Unless I have to write some on my book, then it won’t turn on.”
His laugh was low and worthy of a thousand belly butterflies. “How is your book going?”
“I was in a wonderful mood until you asked that.”
“Sorry. Should I not bother asking you about the book?”
“It depends. If it’s the first ten thousand words, it’s amazing and the book is amazing and I’m the greatest author ever. After that, it’s all a pile of bloody rubbish that should be burnt at the stake, except for that one line that’s pure magic and can stay.”
“That sounds like a terrifying rollercoaster.”
“It is. And that’s just the first quarter. Don’t even bother asking about the rest. It gets worse.”
He looked down, laughing, and shook his head. “You really do need to get out, don’t you?”
I sighed. “I really do.”