Chapter 7

Chapter 7 introduced us to a new character, Tomaso. Tomaso is a new student in Torey's classroom who has an abundance of behavior issues. He is a "migrant child" who has been moving from foster home to foster home and has had a very unstable academic career. At one school he was enrolled in 3rd grade, then in 2nd grade at another school, and so on. He is very disruptive for Torey, Boo, and Lori as he seems to try to make people mad. Something he said in this chapter that really stood out was when he was trying to provoke Torey with little to no success. Tomaso said, "What's the matter with you? Why don't you go ahead and hate me like everybody else does? What makes you think you're so special?" This gave a lot of insight as to why he acts the way he does, being that he feels like everyone hates him so that's the kind of attention he is used to and needs. Since he never gets positive attention, he will try to provoke any kind of attention, even if it is negative.

Something else that came into play was Tomaso's family history. In this chapter Tomaso said, "I don't really belong in a class like this. My real father, he'll come get me pretty soon. He knows I'm waiting." When he originally said this there was already a realization that Tomaso came from a broken family and that there was some sort of abandonment by the father. When Torey actually went through his file, she found out that his father had been FATALLY shot by his stepmother and that Tomaso WITNESSED it happen. This was a huge shock to me as I was reading because I could not imagine what it would be like to have to deal with a situation like that: A child in denial about his own father's death.

Tomaso is very unkind to everyone in the classroom, but when Lori volunteers certain information about himself he starts to 'somewhat' come around. Lori tells Tomaso that she too was in a foster home. When he asked why she told him that it was probably because her parents were just sick of having her. This interests Tomaso and he asks how she knew, to which she responded, "I just did." After this conversation Tomaso tapes of Lori's folder that he had previously ripped apart, and tells her that she looks "a little Spanish". Lori says she doesn't think so, but Tomaso insists. I really enjoyed this part because Tomaso uses his ethnicity to separate himself from people, and as soon as he figured out that he was able to relate to someone, he was going to attribute it to the fact that they must have something else in common with him too (in this case, being Spanish).

This chapter probably brought about the most emotional story. Of course they are all very emotional, but Tomaso's background is so traumatizing it makes my heart break for him and for any other children who have behavioral issues but are judged because people don't know their story.