The Unteachables

by Gordon Korman

  “Weren’t you paying attention? He fought for us!”

  “I can’t figure him out,” I complain. “He hates vuvuzelas. Why would he want us to have them? So he can kill whoever blows one?”

  She throws up her hands in exasperation. “Don’t you see? It’s not about the noisemakers. It’s about fairness!”

  That doesn’t make much sense to me. If life was fair, there would be no such thing as the Unteachables in the first place.

  Ten

  Kiana Roubini

  Bad news from Utah—the equipment trailer got struck by lightning, so production on my mom’s movie has to be shut down for a couple of weeks.

  “Can’t I come back home while you guys are waiting to start up again?” I ask Mom over Skype.

  “That wouldn’t work,” she tells me. “What about school? How can we pull you out of Greenwich when you just got started? And then re-enroll you once shooting resumes here? That would be too disruptive.”

  I have to hold myself back from screaming: There’s nothing to disrupt! I don’t really go here! Jeez-Louise never registered me! I’m not even in a real class!

  Forget it. Mom would be on the phone to Dad in seconds flat—never a pleasant convo. I’d be back in that office fast enough to make my head spin, registering for eight classes instead of just one. Eight new teachers to get used to—who give real assignments and real homework.

  No. My life here isn’t perfect, but it’s designed for maximum bearableness. Why get complicated? I’m a short-timer—just not quite as short as I thought.

  Two extra weeks in Greenwich. Of Dad and Stepmonster. Of Chauncey’s sniffles and fevers and rashes and barfs.

  Two more weeks in the Parmesan House. Two more weeks of the Unteachables.

  Fine. I can handle it. I can do two more weeks standing on my head.

  “Speaking of school,” Mom goes on, “how are you fitting in? I went there, you know—back when it was the old Greenwich High.”

  “Great,” I tell her. “I’ve already gotten picked for this special program.”

  Mom beams. “Special?” I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist the idea of me being exceptional.

  I plow forward. “It’s called SCS-8. Really hard to get into.” I should know. I’m not even really in it. “The teacher is fantastic. He’s super hands-off because he wants us to learn to work independently. Mr. Kermit believes—”

  “Kermit?” she interrupts. “You mean from the cheating scandal?”

  “Cheating scandal?”

  Mom’s brow furrows. “It was an awfully long time ago—the early nineties. I remember I was away at college when it happened. But it must be the same person. Kermit isn’t a very common name.”

  I’m intrigued. “What did Mr. Kermit do?”

  “I don’t remember the details. But the whole town was up in arms about it. I’m surprised he’s still teaching. It was a horrible black mark against him.”

  Wow—Mr. Kermit has a past. The plot thickens.

  Mom adds, “Do you want me to call the school and get to the bottom of it?”

  “No!” I blurt. “I mean, Mr. Kermit’s an awesome teacher now, and that’s the main thing, right? Who cares what happened in the nineties?”

  “But, Kiana—it was a cheating scandal! I don’t want you mixed up in something like that.”

  “Relax, Mom,” I assure her. “I guarantee that there isn’t any cheating going on in SCS-8.” I can say that with total confidence because there isn’t anything going on, period. Why would we bother to cheat when Mr. Kermit never even looks at the few papers he gets?

  Eventually, she agrees to let the subject drop. I end the Skype call, my mind racing. Suddenly, I’ve cracked a mystery that’s been nagging at me from the very first moment I followed Parker’s schedule into room 117: Why would Mr. Kermit want to teach a class like the Unteachables?

  Answer: he doesn’t. He gets a bad class every year because of what happened way back in the nineties. Seems a little crazy that he’s still paying for a mistake from so long ago. But if Mom remembers, other people do too.

  Turns out SCS-8 isn’t just a dumping ground for the rejects of the school. The reject teachers wind up there too.

  So Mr. Kermit is famous. If Mom still remembers what he did way back when, that counts as fame. Okay, it was a bad thing, but so what? On reality TV shows, the biggest stars are always the jerks.

  Besides, cheating scandal or not, I can’t forget how he spoke up for our class to Mrs. Vargas. And how he fought for Barnstorm’s right to stay with the football team. He may not be much of a teacher, but I’m more convinced than ever that he’s one of the good guys.

  I’m almost anxious to get to school the next day, and it isn’t just because Chauncey is barking the house down with whooping cough. When I get to room 117, though, Mr. Kermit is absent. We have a substitute, Mrs. Landsman.

  Mr. Kermit’s not exactly a young guy, but Mrs. Landsman is really old. Rahim does a quick sketch of her, rising from the grave as part of a zombie apocalypse—the kid is really talented. The picture makes the rounds of the class by paper airplane.

  “Dawn of the Dead!” hisses Mateo when the portrait lands on his desk.

  “No talking!” Mrs. Landsman orders.

  Too late. A nickname is born. She’s Dawn of the Dead—Dawn for short.

  She’s grouchy, but we should be used to that by now, our regular teacher being a gold medalist at the Grouch Olympics. It feels different, though. Dawn crabs at us, while Mr. Kermit just crabs because crabbing is his natural state. So when some of it lands on us, we don’t take it personally. We just happen to be in the same room.

  Dawn is yammering on about the Battle of Gettysburg when I hear a power hum, low but growing in volume. At first, I’m afraid the school is about to blow up. Then I realize the sound is coming from the desk next to me—Aldo. His face is almost as red as his hair as he devotes all his breath to maintaining the sound.

  Now the hum is coming from behind me, at a slightly different pitch. I risk a glance over my shoulder. Barnstorm’s doing it too, a look of unholy glee on his face. Next, the noise drops at least an octave—Elaine, buzzing like a bassoon.

  Well, we Californians know how to prank a sub as well as anybody. So I jump right in. Pretty soon, SCS-8 is vibrating.

  Alarmed, Dawn of the Dead puts in a call to the custodian. As soon as Mr. Carstairs comes in, we stop humming.

  “It was happening just a second ago,” the substitute teacher insists. “It sounded like a problem with the wiring.”

  The custodian rakes us with a rueful look. “It’s the kids, ma’am. They’re messing with you. They do it to all the subs.”

  Dawn doesn’t like that. For a minute there, I’m afraid we’re going to have a real zombie apocalypse on our hands. But in the end, what can she do besides yell? She does a whole lot of that. It’s pretty jarring when you’re used to Mr. Kermit, who barely speaks at all.

  We fight back. We do the old drop-a-textbook trick at least twenty times. Barnstorm drums with his crutches on the floor. Elaine pretends to be asleep, which is odd because Rahim stays awake and alert. Mateo speaks to the substitute in Dothraki and does all his written work in Elven Runes.

  That’s right, I said work. Dawn of the Dead is trying to run this like an actual class. Who does she think she is?

  “Take out your math books,” she announces.

  “What math books?” Barnstorm returns.

  “Surely, there are math books.” Her frustration is growing. “How do you study math?”

  “We do worksheets,” Mateo supplies.

  “What worksheets? I don’t see any worksheets! There should be lesson plans—”

  Of course there should—if we had a normal teacher. But Dawn of the Dead doesn’t know Mr. Kermit. Maybe she thinks we ransacked the classroom before she arrived and threw out all the notes on how she was supposed to run the day. Whatever the reason, she’s getting madder and madder.

  With no lesson p
lans to go by, Dawn finds a language arts paragraph in some random book. But then she chooses Parker to read it aloud. So obviously, he takes forever to sound out the first word. And because we’ve been giving her a hard time all day, she picks now to decide that somebody’s yanking her chain—when Parker’s the only one who isn’t. So she sends him to the principal’s office. Sixty seconds later, we hear a pickup truck with a broken muffler start up and peel out of the parking lot.

  “You know, he didn’t do that on purpose,” I tell Dawn. “He has a reading problem and he’s sensitive about it.”

  Miss Fountain comes over and tries to calm everybody down by inviting us for another Circle Time.

  “Circle Time?” Dawn is outraged. “These students are too old for Circle Time—and so are yours.”

  Miss Fountain seems to be about to launch into her speech on how no one is too old for positive reinforcement. But then she takes a good look at Dawn of the Dead, who actually might be. She beats a hasty retreat to her own class.

  When the bell finally rings at three-thirty, Dawn of the Dead tells us we’re the most disrespectful class she’s ever met in her long teaching career, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves. “My son went to this school. He’s a successful journalist today, and he’d be appalled to see what’s become of the place that gave him his education. You students are a new low. I don’t think you’d ever behave for Mr. Kermit the way you behaved today.”

  As we listen to her sensible heels clicking down the hall, a strange quiet descends in room 117.

  “Yeah, well, maybe Mr. Kermit isn’t a cranky old bag, like you,” Aldo tosses after her when she’s too far away to hear it.

  “The thing is, she’s right,” Rahim muses, brow furrowed. “We wouldn’t behave that way for Ribbit. I wonder why.”

  I could have answered that. Because even though Mr. Kermit kind of ignores us, he knows we’re his class and he sticks up for us when we need it. He likes us—in his way. And I’d never be able to explain it to the others, but I think—in our way—we might be starting to like him too.

  When Mr. Kermit enters room 117 the next morning, he’s greeted by a sight he’s never seen before—the seven of us, quiet and attentive, seated at our desks, hands folded, eyes front. Let’s face it, there’s no way Dawn of the Dead said anything good about us yesterday. This, then, is Payback Time, and none of us are looking forward to it. You can feel the tension in the air as we wait for our teacher to let us have it.

  Mr. Kermit sets his newspaper and his coffee down on his desk and looks from face to face. “What?”

  Nobody answers, so he starts handing out the first worksheet of the day. The instant the papers hit our desks, there’s a pen in every hand and all heads are down.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the teacher pull up short, frowning. This is another first—the entire class hard at work, no airplanes circling overhead, no talking. He shrugs and returns to his desk, peering down at the crossword puzzle.

  I turn my attention to the assignment, which is about current events, and I think hard about what I’ve seen lately in the news, on the Internet, and in social media.

  The intercom buzzes to life. “Mr. Kermit,” comes the voice of the secretary, “Principal Vargas is available this morning if you’d like to discuss Mrs. Landsman’s report on your students from yesterday.”

  You can almost hear the jarring sound of a needle scratching across a vinyl record. We all freeze, staring up at our teacher. If Dawn of the Dead filed a report, you can bet she gave us a Z-minus-minus.

  “No,” Mr. Kermit replies. “Thanks anyway.”

  That gets our attention. Is Mr. Kermit so detached from reality that he doesn’t think anything that happened yesterday was bad? Or is it that he never read Dawn’s report, just like he never reads any of our work? The mood in room 117 lightens a little. Whatever the reason, it looks as if we might be off the hook.

  It occurs to me that maybe Mr. Kermit never reads our stuff because none of the Unteachables ever hand in anything worth reading. That’s an easy fix. There’s an essay question on the back of today’s worksheet, and I make up my mind to knock it out of the park. The prompt is about mass transit—subways, buses, and light-rail trains. I believe in that kind of thing anyway—I’m from LA, where our transit systems are a joke, and what do we get for it? Traffic jams and pollution. Pretty soon the entire page is full, and I’m only getting started.

  I approach Mr. Kermit’s desk. Ribbit has pushed his puzzle aside. He’s examining a memo from the office. I catch the heading—REPORT OF SUBSTITUTE TEACHER—across the top. He notices me and I search his eyes for any reaction to what has to be a horrible rundown of her day with a class of unteachable barbarians.

  “Are you really mad at us?” I ask in a small voice.

  He looks like the question never occurred to him. “There are two sides to every story,” he says finally. He reaches down and slides the report into the trash can.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he adds, obviously wishing I would go away.

  “Can I have more paper?”

  His brow furrows. “For what?”

  “My essay. I ran out of space.”

  That causes kind of a stir in our class. In SCS-8, kids do too little work, never too much.

  Mr. Kermit’s back into his puzzle now. It’s almost as if he’s hoping I’ll forget what I asked for and leave him alone.

  “So can I have it?” I persist.

  He looks blank.

  “The paper.”

  “Yes—fine.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  He gets up from his desk and surveys the room, and it’s like he’s suddenly found himself in some strange and exotic location—a place he’s never seen before. He leads me to a storage closet and opens the door. Empty, except for the cobwebs.

  He turns to me, completely helpless.

  “Maybe Miss Fountain has extra paper,” I suggest.

  “I’m on it!” Parker bolts for the door so suddenly that he knocks over his desk and goes flying. He face-plants on the floor, springs right back up, and disappears into the hall.

  The next thing we hear is Miss Fountain’s voice from the next room: “Parker—you’re bleeding!”

  “He has a driver’s license?” Barnstorm sneers. “The kid can barely walk.”

  Parker’s back a few minutes later, holding a wad of pink-stained paper towels to his bloody nose. He hands me a sheaf of lined paper, also pink-stained.

  I fill four full pages before I’m done with my essay, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. I know I’m just a short-timer, but I can’t let my work habits go totally down the drain while I’m here. I’m going to have to be ready to hit the ground running when I get back to my real school in California.

  I march up to the front to hand my paper in to Mr. Kermit. He looks at me like I’ve just presented him with a plate of baby scorpions.

  “It’s my essay,” I reply to the question he probably won’t ask. “I can’t wait to hear what you think.”

  He accepts the papers, places them on the corner of the desk, and goes back to his crossword.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” I press.

  “Of course,” he assures me without looking up.

  Three days later, the pages still sit on the corner of the desk, untouched.

  Parker’s blood spots are turning brown.

  Eleven

  Barnstorm Anderson

  Thanks to Ribbit, I’m still on the Golden Eagles. It’s the nicest thing any teacher ever did for me. Not that I love teachers so much. It’s their fault I’m in SCS-8.

  I’m not unteachable and I’m definitely not stupid. I’m like any other kid—I can learn, but if you give me the choice not to, I’ll pick that. They were totally cool with letting me slide so long as the trophies kept coming. But now that I can’t play anymore, all of a sudden my grades aren’t up to scratch. Funny how that wasn’t a problem last year, when I beasted in three sports. />
  I load up my tray in the food line and hobble out to the cafeteria—it’s not easy to balance a big lunch when you’re on crutches. As I scan the tables, this seventh-grade girl I don’t know—real cute—smiles and waves at me. This happens to athletes a lot. We’re kind of celebrities around school.

  I’m trying to figure out how to wave back without dropping either my tray or a crutch, when her gaze veers off to my left. She’s not looking at me at all! She’s waving to Karnosky, one of my teammates on the Golden Eagles, who’s coming up beside me!

  It’s like a gut punch. Karnosky the scrub, who never even got off the bench before I landed on the injured list! Now he’s somebody and I’m somebody you look right through.

  “’Sup, Anderson,” he mumbles, stepping in front of me. He and the girl connect and take the last two spots at the front table—the best location. Last year, half a dozen people would have scrambled to make room for Barnstorm Anderson. Not anymore.

  I can take a hint. I’m a Golden Eagle, but not really. What have I done for them lately? If I can’t put points on the board today, I’m dead to them.

  Not even Ribbit can change that.

  I keep on hobbling, head held high. I’ll die before I let them see I care. It stinks that just moving across the cafeteria has to be a major operation. The way I could move used to be what made me who I am. I guess that means I’m nobody—at least till next year.

  Another problem: I’ve hung out with jocks for so long, I’ve got nowhere else to go. I set my lunch down next to Aldo and Rahim. As I lean my crutches against the side of the table, one of them tips over and whacks Aldo in the shoulder.

  “Hey!” he barks angrily.

  “Chill out! It was an accident.”

  It wasn’t an accident.

  In my athlete days, my mind was always on the field or on the court, juking and cutting, faking imaginary defenders out of their jockstraps. Now that I’m off sports, I don’t do that anymore, and my poor mind has nothing to focus on. So I spend my time thinking of ways to get a rise out of Aldo. It’s almost too easy.