It must have been the second or third week I was at Bradberry that Mario Zamora brought in his cards. It was after school and I was grading or recording grades when Mario walked through the door to my small bungalow classroom. He was a quiet kid, thin, with sloppy handwriting and an amazing imagination. He usually did half the assignments and the other half of the time he was drawing—doodling, video game characters in the margins of his papers.

He walked over to my desk and stood there, looking over my shoulder.

"Hi, Mario," I said, not looking up.

"Hey, Mr. Dell," Mario said. "You wanna see my cards?" He also had these huge, innocent eyes.

"Cards?"

"Yeah. Cards."

"Sure," I said, my curiosity now pulling me away from my stack of papers.

Mario pulled out a photo album from his backpack. The album was big—enormously large. I wondered how it fit in his backpack. As he handed it to me, it was heavy enough to make my elbow dip.

"Wow," I said. "Where do I start?"

"From the beginning," Mario said, treating me like his younger brother. He flipped open the book and began to point out the different cards.

"This one here, that’s Wolverine. He’s from the X-men. He’s cool. This is one of my favorites. And this one—that’s Wolverine’s buddy, Elektra. She has cool powers and she can, like—she can turn into this monster—like this, see! That’s her when she’s transformed. And this is the bad guy, the X-men’s enemy . . ."

As Mario continued to explain, I looked from the cards to Mario’s face and back again. This was so clearly his passion. The sleepy kid in the back row was now very much awake, very alive. I wanted to tell him never to forget the feeling he had, that feeling right then as he was explaining the different roles of the X-Men, but I didn’t know the words I could use to make him understand.

He flipped through the pages of cards, all baseball card sized. He had special collector’s sheets of plastic with nine little pockets per page and the album was filled. It went from comic book heroes to real people—basketball players and baseball players and hockey players. His only criteria for what to put in the album must have been any card that fit.

As he flipped the pages, I would point out cards that caught my eye or cards I had questions about. No matter what card, Mario had an answer, a story for every card. There was a special hologram Batman card. That was when Wolverine had gotten caught by the bad guy. He traded two other cards just to get this one.

"So did you bring you cards to school to trade?," I asked Mario.

"No way, man. I don’t show these cards to no one here. The kids would try to steal them or get them all nasty."

"So why’d you bring them to school?"

"To show you."

He said it so casually, like this wasn’t his treasure, like he hadn’t lugged the album on his hour-long bus ride to school and hour-long bus ride back, like he hadn’t risked losing what was probably the only thing of value he had any control over. He had brought these cards to show me. It was the first time I understood the power and the depth of what I was doing here as a teacher. It was wonderful and terrifying. I really hadn’t done anything in the first two weeks except be myself and now this eleven year-old had brought his prized possession to show me. I had not felt quite so moved and scared in a very long time.

Mario came every day after school from that day on. His bus didn’t leave until 20 minutes after the last bell of the day rang. He was the first member of what I came to think of as the Mr. Dell Fan Club. There was only one other permanent member and occasional temporary members but Mario was the first. He was the first kid I told that I was leaving Bradberry Middle School. I am sad now that I will not again see Mario running—literally running—up to the door of my room after school.