Okay for Now

by Gary D. Schmidt

  "I know that," I said.

  "Is it reading aloud in front of others that bothers you?"

  "No."

  "Good. Then I'll look forward to a gallant attempt when your turn comes," she said.

  You see how it is? Sometimes things go bad even when other things are going bad.

  I headed to Mrs. Verne's class looking at the next few pages of Jane Eyre. I think that Charlotte Brontë ought to be shot. I mean, who uses words like these? I didn't know half of them.

  Well, most of them.

  Okay, I'm a chump. So what?

  And what was I supposed to do?

  I thought of Jane Eyre standing on her stool, everyone looking at her.

  I thought of the dying gull.

  I hate this stupid town.

  Detention that afternoon was with Mr. Ferris, because the eighth-grade teachers took turns monitoring After School Detention—which probably put them in really good moods. So I stayed in his room after school and waited for the other twisted criminal minds to come join me for ninety minutes of forced study. It didn't help that it was one of those perfect, blue, cloudless days where the trees are starting to golden up and the breezes are cool like they are during a World Series and you could imagine having a catch with Joe Pepitone or Horace Clarke or someone like that but instead you're sitting in the physical science room and it turns out that you are the only twisted criminal mind so you're all alone while Mr. Ferris works on his next Lab Preparation.

  I flipped through the pages of Jane Eyre. Hopeless.

  Somewhere, far away, a dog barked. A happy bark.

  I flipped through Jane Eyre again. Very hopeless.

  Mr. Ferris looked up from his Lab Preparation. "So, Doug Swieteck, what are you in for?"

  "Mouthing off to Coach Reed."

  He thought about this for a minute, his hand on Clarence. "Generally," he finally said, "it is neither wise nor prudent to mouth off to a junior high school teacher. Especially to one who has been a sergeant in the United States Army."

  "Not even if the teacher is wrong?"

  "Consider: Is it Coach Reed or you who is sitting in this somewhat dreary room that smells of vinegar on a beautiful October afternoon?"

  "I see your point," I said.

  "However, since it is you and not Coach Reed, perhaps we can put the time to some good use, as you seem to have given up on Jane Eyre."

  "Have you ever seen the pelican in the principal's office?" I said.

  "Are you trying to illustrate a principle of randomness, Doug Swieteck?"

  "No. Really. Have you seen it?"

  "I have."

  "Don't you think it belongs back in the book it came from?"

  Mr. Ferris rocked Clarence thoughtfully. "I understand it was a gift to him from the Town Council when he was appointed."

  "So you do think it belongs back in the book it came from."

  Mr. Ferris smiled. "In general, I adhere to the notion that things belong in the class to which they have been assigned—which leads us to the periodic table. No, no more about the pelican." He walked over to the glossy chart hanging beside the chalkboard on the front wall. "The periodic table arranges elements according to their physical properties and to what else?"

  "Their atomic number."

  "Good. The table gives us the name of the element—here, hydrogen—the atomic number—here, one—and the symbol—here, H. I know that you know the symbol for hydrogen already, so let's see if you can learn six more. Look at the symbols for the inert gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon."

  I looked at the chart. He might as well have been speaking Ancient Egyptian.

  "All right," he said, and he walked to the other side of the board. "Look at me, and tell me that symbol of the first inert gas, helium."

  I shook my head.

  He looked at me. "Glance back at the chart, find neon, and tell me what the symbol is."

  I looked back at the chart. I shook my head again.

  Mr. Ferris looked at me for a long time, then he walked back over to the chart and pointed.

  "Ne," I said.

  "Good. Try xenon," he said. "It has an atomic number of fifty-four."

  "Xe," I said.

  "Good. Now look over here at the transitional elements." He pointed to element 29. "This is copper," he said. The symbol is..."

  "Cu."

  "Good." He moved his finger down one element. "The symbol for this one is..."

  "Ag," I said.

  "Good." He moved his finger down again. "And this one?"

  "Au," I said.

  He moved his finger over one. "And this one?"

  "Hg."

  "Good," he said. "Doug, of Ag, Au, and Hg, which one is the symbol for silver?"

  I didn't even have a guess.

  "Ag," he said.

  And that was how Mr. Ferris figured out what no teacher had figured out before.

  Terrific.

  ***

  I think Mr. Ferris told Miss Cowper, because in English on Wednesday, we all opened up Jane Eyre and Miss Cowper read her five minutes and then she called on Glenn Thomas, who was probably surprised but he didn't say anything and got right to it.

  And Miss Cowper—and you may think I'm lying here, but I'm not—Miss Cowper didn't look at me until the end of class, just before the bell was about to ring and Jane Eyre was about to leave Lowood Institution.

  "Douglas," she said.

  I looked at her. I had been waiting for something to happen, and I figured that this was it.

  "Douglas, do you think that Jane Eyre should feel guilty for not being able to save Helen Burns from dying?"

  "It wasn't her fault."

  "That's right," she said. "It wasn't her fault at all." She looked at the whole class. "There are some things in this world that we cannot fix, and they happen, and it is not our fault, though we still might have to deal with them. There are other things that happen in this world that we can fix. And that is what good teachers like me are for."

  A general groaning from everyone in the class. But not from me. Miss Cowper and I, we looked each other in the eye. Maybe, I thought, maybe everything is not ruined forever.

  ***

  That day I was supposed to have my last After School Detention with Mr. Ferris again, but when I came in, he told me to report to Miss Cowper's room.

  "How come?" I said.

  "Because I am a mean old crank who is likely to beat you if you don't," he said.

  "I think I better go to Miss Cowper's room," I said.

  "I think you better," he said, and started Clarence rocking.

  Miss Cowper was waiting for me when I got there. "Just the person I need," she said. She held up a batch of dittos. Their blue, alcohol smell fluttered around them. "I've been developing a County Literacy Unit, and I need a student to practice on. Would you be willing?"

  "What do I have to do?"

  "You play the part of the student who is learning how to read."

  Are you a little suspicious here?

  "The student who is learning how to read?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "Miss Cowper, if this is because you think—"

  "Show me what you've been working on with Mr. Ferris."

  I set my books down on my desk. I went up to the chalkboard. I wrote

  Ag

  "This is the symbol for silver," I said.

  She came up to the board and took the chalk from my hand. She wrote

  Silver

  "So is this," she said. "Let's get started."

  I bet Clarence was rocking.

  I bet Clarence was rocking every day for the rest of the week, and every day for the next week, when I stayed after school with Miss Cowper—and not for After School Detention, just remember, but so we could work together on her County Literacy Unit and I could play the part of the chump student who didn't even know how to read. So she took me through the letters and the sounds they made by themselves and the sounds they made when they we
re working with one another. And then we opened up Jane Eyre and picked out words that pretty much looked impossible but we figured them out because of what we were learning about letters and their sounds working together.

  No one ever told me this stuff ! How come no one ever told me this stuff ?

  How come?

  And by the way, in case you want to know, Au is the symbol for gold, which has a hard g and one vowel that's a long o, and Hg is the symbol for mercury, which has two vowels— e and u, even though y is sometimes a vowel in words like my, fry, try, cry, because every word has to have one vowel at least (Did you know that?) and the c is hard, not like in pace or cent, where the c is soft, but like in cure and cur and care.

  How come no one ever told me this stuff ?

  On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I'd practice picking out new words in Jane Eyre, sounding out the ones that needed sounding out—and I'm not lying, there were plenty. "'A new servitude! There is something in that,' I soliloquized." I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to sound out a word like soliloquized ? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word means except that it probably just means "said," which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have said in the first place.

  When I delivered Mrs. Mason's groceries, she saw that I had Jane Eyre stuck under my arm. "Oh," she said, "that was my favorite novel in school."

  "It was?" I soliloquized.

  "Yes," she said. "Have you gotten to the part where Bertha bites her brother and almost kills him?"

  "Mrs. Mason," I said, "I haven't gotten to anything half as good as that."

  "Keep with it. You will." That morning she gave me three powdered sugar doughnuts.

  When Mr. Loeffler saw Jane Eyre, he said, "You poor kid."

  "Did you have to read this in school, Mr. Loeffler?"

  He nodded. "Fortunately," he said, "I got appendicitis in the middle of it and almost died. Best thing that ever happened to me. I couldn't go back to school for three weeks. How are you feeling?"

  "It's a new servitude," I said.

  "If I were you, I'd start thinking about pains in my gut."

  When Mrs. Daugherty saw Jane Eyre, she said, "Do you like to read?"

  "It's complicated," I said.

  She thought for a minute or so, pushing back her kids like they were a tide about to flow out the door.

  "I'm looking for a babysitter for some Saturday nights," she finally said. "But you'd have to like reading since not a single one of these kiddos goes to sleep without a book."

  I looked at how many kiddos there were. I figured she must have had trouble finding a babysitter if she was asking me, the brother of the twisted criminal mind. I looked at the five kids. Three of them had something red dripping all over their hands. I was afraid to ask what it was.

  Mrs. Daugherty was probably desperate.

  "It pays very well," she said.

  She was definitely desperate.

  Now, this is the part where I should tell you something. You know how I'm making five dollars plus tips every Saturday? And we both know that's good money, right? You might remember that my father knows that I'm making five dollars every Saturday morning. And he thinks that's good money too. So he takes it, since I'm supposed to be helping out with the household expenses. "It's about time," he says.

  So I'm living on the tips that I don't tell my father about—which is what you would do too. Don't lie.

  "It's a deal," I said to Mrs. Daugherty.

  "Seven o'clock?"

  "Yup."

  "I'll have the books waiting for you."

  Terrific.

  Up at Mrs. Windermere's house, everything was quiet. No typing. No dinging. She came into the kitchen when she heard me putting things away. "What kind of ice cream did I order?"

  "Mint chocolate chip."

  "That's a good kind of ice cream to eat when the god has fled," she said.

  I guess that means no one was folding his wings beside her desk.

  "What is that book in your back pocket?" she said.

  "Jane Eyre."

  "Ah," she said, as if she had made a great discovery or something. "Come with me."

  I put the mint chocolate chip ice cream into the freezer and followed Mrs. Windermere to her study. She ranged over a bunch of shelves, and then pulled out three smallish, darkish books. She handed them to me. "That," she said, "is a first edition of Jane Eyre."

  I looked at her. I guess she thought this was pretty all-fired important.

  "A first edition," she said again.

  "All three volumes."

  "Wow," I said.

  She sighed. "Skinny Delivery Boy, do you have any idea how hard it is to collect a first edition like that?"

  I looked over all the books on the shelves in her study. "It looks like you're doing pretty well."

  "But this is Jane Eyre. One of the world's great stories. Love. Betrayal. Jealousy. The search for the true and complete self. It's worthy of a play!"

  She stopped, and stared at me. This smile slowly comes across her face and starts to fill it.

  "And there's the god," she whispered, and she rushed to her typewriter. She rolled a page into it and her hands started flying. You already know how.

  I put the first edition of Jane Eyre back on the shelf, and slid all three books in carefully because I guess it was all-fired important.

  I sounded out words from Jane Eyre—the paperback edition, not the first edition—all the way back into town. And I stopped at Spicer's Deli for the really cold Coke that Mr. Spicer always gave me. I would have bought a pastrami sandwich if Mrs. Windermere had given me a tip, but I wasn't getting a tip anymore because the bill was going on her tab, which you might remember, and the other tips weren't enough to cover a pastrami sandwich and leave me much for the rest of the week.

  And I don't want to complain or anything, but a tip would have been nice, since it was me, after all, who brought the god back to her.

  That afternoon when I got to the Marysville Free Public Library, Mr. Powell and Lil Spicer were waiting for me. Mr. Powell was trying to get ahead on his cataloging so that Mrs. Merriam wouldn't fuss at him, and Lil was speeding ahead on Jane Eyre. (She was almost done. Terrific.) We went upstairs together to work on the Black-Backed Gull—or Mr. Powell and I did. Lil helped by letting me know what I was doing wrong.

  "Isn't there too much blood there?" she said when I spread my drawing out.

  "It gives the drawing drama."

  "His wing is slanted off to the side."

  "Point of view," I said.

  "And I think his neck is too far back."

  "It's called composition."

  And on like that until Mr. Powell told us both to hush because he wanted to talk about Audubon's use of the white space around the wing and the contrast in spatial perception that the two wings gave and artist stuff like that.

  Lil hushed for a while, but she started again before too long.

  And do you think I minded?

  Do you think I minded when she leaned in right next to me to point something out?

  Do you think I minded that she smelled like daisies would smell if they were growing in a big field under a sky clearing after a rain?

  Do you think I minded when she touched my hand?

  You remember how I told you that when things are going pretty good, it usually means that something bad is about to happen? This is true. Just ask the Black-Backed Gull.

  About halfway through October, as I was thinking that I'd have to start wearing Joe Pepitone's jacket to school because there wasn't anything else I could wear with sleeves that even pretended to reach my wrists, someone broke into the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store. It happened on a Sunday afternoon. The register got forced open and all the cash taken. There was a bunch of tools gone: a chain saw, a drill set, a wrench set. And a bike too, which made the brilliant policemen of stupid Marysville come to the conclusion that it must have been a kid who broke in.

 
; So guess whose house they came to on Sunday night? And they didn't want any of the thawed hamburgers or German potato salad my mother offered.

  Mr. Daugherty was one of the policemen.

  "Is your son home?" he asked.

  "He's off with his friends," my mother said.

  "Is your son ever home?" the other policeman asked. I think he was a little upset.

  "What's he doing with his friends?" said Mr. Daugherty.

  "Just playing," she said. She said it kind of hopefully.

  Mr. Daugherty looked at me. "Do you know where he's playing?" he said. "We have a few questions. We want to be certain he's all right."

  Sure. That's what they wanted.

  I shrugged.

  "Thanks," said the other policeman. "You've been real helpful. We'll go look for him ourselves."

  They did—and it probably didn't help my brother that when he saw them, he took off on his Sting-Ray and made them chase him about ten miles and he made them crash one—no, two cop cars, and finally they had to call the state police, who ran him down when one of his tires popped because he had taken a sharp turn on one wheel, which was something only a few people knew how to do and he was one of them. He told us all this after Mr. Daugherty brought him home and sat with us while the other policeman searched through our garage and basement and afterward asked my brother about fifteen different ways if he had ever been inside the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store.

  I could tell the other policeman didn't believe him all fifteen times.

  It was harder to tell with Mr. Daugherty, except he said that maybe we should hold off on the Saturday-night baby-sitting until things got cleared up.

  Terrific.

  After they left, my mother asked my brother the same question.

  "You already heard me tell them."

  "Tell me," she said.

  "I didn't steal anything."

  "Did you take anything from Mr. Spicer's deli?"

  "No. Just because Lucas—"

  "What Lucas did is over and done. I'm worrying about what you're doing."

  "You don't have to worry about anything," my brother said.

  "I am worried."

  "You don't believe me?"

  My mother went into the kitchen.