Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  Sunrise spoke up again. “No!” she said. “The school day is not going to begin at eight. It’s going to begin at twelve, and end at twelve oh one!”

  I found a marker and, after inspecting it closely to be sure that it was a dry-erase, I wrote numbers on the board. “We’ve got one minute, one hour, four hours.”

  “I’d probably go with an eight-hour day every day,” said a studious boy, Dana, who wore hearing aids.

  “You’re crazy,” said Owen.

  “The thing I’ve noticed,” I said, “is that people mean well, but there’s only so much you can do in a day. It seems like everybody shuts down after a time. You could compress what happens from, say, eight to two into half the time and still get learning done.”

  “You’re right,” said Thomas.

  “So why do you think they leave the day this long?” I said. “There’s something else to consider, isn’t there?”

  “Specials?” said Laura.

  “Lunch?” said Caleb.

  I said, “What about your parents?”

  “They have to work,” said Owen. “Daycare!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “All right, good. What else should we talk about?”

  “Something fun,” said Sunrise.

  “Boys,” said Darryl.

  “I think we should talk about what our dream vacation would be,” said Mackenzie. “My dream vacation would be going to Disneyland, meeting One Direction, going on rides with One Direction, and . . .” She trailed off.

  Caitlin, another alpha girl, said, “My dream vacation would be getting dressed and then playing on my phone all day.”

  I asked them what One Direction was.

  “It’s a band,” said Thomas, shaking his head.

  “It’s a big thing,” said Caitlin.

  “They’re terrible,” said Thomas.

  “They’re not terrible!” said Mackenzie.

  “They are terrible,” said Thomas. “Listen for yourself.” He tapped play on a YouTube video. It didn’t play, it was loading. Wi-Fi was slow again.

  “They aren’t even from America!” said Owen, who claimed to like thrash metal.

  The music came on, One Direction playing “Story of My Life”; several girls sang along.

  “Turn that off!” said Caleb.

  The class began bad-mouthing Justin Bieber. A boy in the back named Regan was playing a video game.

  “I was just looking to see if I was dead or not,” he said when I asked him about it. “But I’m not.”

  “You are dead,” said Max, the kid next to him.

  Darryl said, “Did you know that if you get a blood transfusion from a twenty-five-year-old you can get his energy?”

  “No,” I said.

  “My grandmother had a blood transfusion,” she said. “She couldn’t walk or anything, and then the next day after she got it she was painting walls and standing on ladders.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “Has anyone been to the hospital recently?”

  “I was, last night,” said Caitlin. “I choked on something and it got lodged in my throat.”

  “You were rushed to the hospital last night?” I said, startled.

  “Not really rushed,” said Caitlin. “My mom was driving really slow. I’m not eating chicken ever again.”

  Max said, “I almost died while eating ramen noodles.”

  The bell rang and everyone surged toward the door. “Are you guys coming back here afterward?” I said.

  “Yes!”

  “Good. Have fun at lunch,” I said.

  I ate a sandwich. Underneath my lunch bag I discovered the stack of twenty copies of the inequalities test, neatly paperclipped. Students were supposed to write a sentence describing the difference between an inequality and an equation—not an easy task—and they had to graph inequalities like x > 49. I watched a video from Khan Academy concerning the four quadrants of the coordinate plane. The bell rang again. My hardy band of educational reformers returned.

  “Did you work at a college?” Mackenzie asked me.

  “So what shall we talk about?” asked Thomas.

  “I skinned my fingie,” said Caitlin.

  “I skinned my shoe,” said Owen.

  I flapped the batch of inequality tests in the air. “I found these things that she wanted you to do,” I said.

  “I’m sad,” said Regan, as I passed the tests out.

  “What are you sad about?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, things.”

  I said, “Life is weighing down on you? Remember this: Sing a happy song.”

  “Oh, can I sing?” said Sunrise. “Can I sing for you guys?”

  “No,” said Regan.

  I waited for them to find their pencils. “This is actually a test situation,” I said.

  I walked around the room giving whispered hints, and then, when it seemed that a number of kids didn’t remember how to graph an inequality, I asked Thomas to go to the board and give a demonstration. “Good job, Thomas,” said Mackenzie. Memories refreshed, people labored away quietly. I took a bite of an apple. “Owen just blew on my face,” Caitlin whispered. People began handing in their tests.

  I looked at the clock. “Two minutes to go,” I said. “And by the way, I really enjoyed having you in class. You guys are great. You’re quiet and you’re funny and you’re charming—and you’re delightful.”

  Owen laughed. “You’re ‘delightful,’” he said to Caitlin.

  “Yes I am!” said Caitlin.

  “Can you sub for us again?” said Thomas.

  The bell triple-bonged.

  “Bye, Mr. Baker!”

  “Be our sub again soon, please!” said Laura.

  “Have a good one.”

  “You, too!”

  “Bye!”

  The next class poured in and slumped down, waiting for something to happen. I took attendance. “I hope you’re having a good day today,” I said.

  “I’ve been having an interesting day,” said Georgia.

  There was a loud bang from the far corner.

  I spun around. “A sudden incredible sound just ripped the air wide open,” I said. Somebody had dropped a textbook on the floor.

  “It was Evan,” said Brock, apple-cheeked and beaming.

  “No it wasn’t,” said Evan, who wore a football jersey. “Brock does this all the time.”

  “Why does he do that?”

  “Because he’s Brock.”

  Lots of giggling.

  I said, “What grade are you guys in?”

  “Seventh!”

  “Eighth!”

  “Fourth!”

  “Just ignore Brock,” said Travis.

  I passed out the half sheet on quadrants of the coordinate plane. “Do you know how to label the quadrants?”

  “No.”

  “Kind of.”

  I went around to various desks, explaining number lines and Cartesian coordinates. It happens that each of the four quadrants on the Cartesian plane is designated by a Roman numeral—I, II, III, IV—and the Roman numerals go counterclockwise, for some reason. Valueless, instantly forgettable knowledge for most people, but these thirteen-year-olds had to know it.

  “You have fifteen plump, beautiful minutes to do this lovely assignment,” I said, and I bent with a flourish to pick up a sock eraser that somebody had thrown across the room. Instantly I knew I was in trouble: I had a bloody nose. Right when things were going well, too. I sat at my desk dabbing at myself with a napkin, hoping nobody had seen, hoping the bleeding would stop. How pathetic, I thought—I’d often gotten winter nosebleeds in school, because of the dry, overheated air, and now, back in school, I was getting winter nosebleeds all over again.

  “Can we work in the hall?” asked Lily and Cheyenne.


  “I think it’s just as good to work in here,” I said from behind my napkin. Somebody sharpened a pencil. I watched people explaining quadrants to each other. Alec walked up. “I don’t know how to do any of these,” he said.

  “Just put your name at the top,” I said. I took the napkin away from my nose and watched two fat, dark drops of blood fall. One landed on the top right corner of the sub plans, and one in the margin of a completed test from last period. Sniffing furtively, I quickly tore off the blood-dropletted bits of paper. I stuffed the scraps in my pocket. My nose seemed to have stopped bleeding.

  “Quit it!” said Georgia.

  Brock was causing a ruckus in the back.

  “It was not me,” said Evan, “it was Brock.”

  I walked over. Lily said, “If you have a problem with someone, write their name down or send them to the office.”

  “Why does everybody always blame me?” said Brock.

  I stood in the middle of the room. “I WANT IT TO BE SILENT!” I said, in a ship captain’s voice. “There are still a couple of kids working.”

  “I don’t have any computational skills,” said Cheyenne.

  I looked at Brock’s worksheet. “Are you done?”

  I began collecting papers. The effort of shouting made another drop of blood fall somewhere on the blue-gray carpet.

  “Oh!” said Trinity, who’d seen the drop fall.

  “I’m sorry, I have a bloody nose,” I said.

  I covered my face again with the napkin. “I’m just going to talk to you like this.”

  “Just don’t get it on any of the papers,” said Trinity.

  “You should go to the nurse,” said Lily.

  “I’m too old to go to the nurse.”

  “No you’re not,” said Lily. “I had a teacher that went to the nurse, and then she went home sick.”

  I handed the last stack of worksheets to her to pass out—the one with the jackhammer cartoon on it. I circulated, I explained the order of operations, I shushed, I joshed, I handed out compliments, but I was a wounded wildebeest of a teacher now. My inner sense of authority was compromised by the nosebleed, even though only a quarter of the class was aware of it. “Seriously, you’re an atheist, you really are!” said Cheyenne to Luke, the boy next to her. I stopped by the chair of one string-bean of a student, Timothy, who hadn’t made a noise. He was bent with his face inches from the desk, clutching his pencil with four fingers. “How are you making out?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Timothy said, “is this right?” He’d filled a page of notebook paper with tiny numbers, some of them worked out to several decimals, some in the hundred thousands. It looked like something in A Beautiful Mind, and it was all wrong.

  “I think you may have made a little technical mistake up here, maybe with the fraction,” I said, pointing. “But you did some great calculations.” Timothy began erasing.

  “Aw, sugar!” said Georgia. She also began erasing.

  “Sugar,” said Brock.

  Trinity, tall and full of casual sass, handed me her paper and turned to Devin and Mandy, who were sitting close together, sharing a pair of earbuds. “Are you guys like an old married couple?” she said.

  “Shut UP!” said Mandy.

  “Can I go get food from my locker?” Brock asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I said. But that gave me an idea. I told the class I’d be back in a second, and I hustled around the corner to the boys’ bathroom to wash my face. I looked at the wild-eyed bleeder in the mirror. My shirttail was untucked and my substitute badge had flipped around on its lanyard so that it was blank. “You hopeless jackass,” I said to my reflection, and laughed, tossing out the paper towels. I went back to class.

  The noise level had not appreciably risen. I told Evan and Brock to go on IXL and finish up their word problems. Luke, who was caught up, had assembled a pretend gun out of three dry-erase markers, rubber bands, and a plastic ruler. “That’s just wrong,” I said. He took it apart.

  Cheyenne got up on a chair. “There’s a pencil in the light,” she said.

  I waved for her to get down. “That was meant to be there,” I said. “When they designed this building they said there’s going to be a pencil in the light.”

  “I put it there last trimester,” Evan said.

  “Are you lying?” said Trinity.

  “No, I threw it, and it stuck into the tile,” Evan said. “Then it fell. So I put it in the light.”

  “Why would you tell a sub that?”

  I said, “You have made a difference in this school.”

  “Dude, your own mother hates you,” said Travis to Brock.

  Lily handed in her paper. “Mr. Baker,” she said, “they’re not allowed to have their hoods up in school.” She gestured toward Brock, Evan, and Travis, all of whom had their iPads tilted against their backpacks so that I wouldn’t see that they were playing video games. The three of them had their hoods up.

  “Luke, honey, I need your help,” said Trinity. Luke was quick with math. He went over to help her with fractions.

  I walked Mia, who was bookish, through some minor algebra. “You want to get that x all by its lonesome self,” I said, “so you first want to multiply by six.”

  It got quiet. I sat down and yawned. Some people sat by the heating register on the floor. “Five minus four is what?” Devin said to Mandy, prompting her. Cheyenne started brushing her hair. Eight minutes to go in the period.

  Eventually I ambled over to the hooded boys. “I got work done!” said Brock.

  “I’m so glad,” I said. All three of them had quickly tapped their Minecraft games off their iPad screens.

  “He’s always like this, don’t worry,” said Evan.

  I pulled up a chair and sat down. “What’s your vision of the future?”

  “Death,” said Brock.

  Travis and Evan laughed, and I did, too.

  “Your life is huge,” I said. I asked what Ms. Nolton was like.

  “She’s short,” said Brock.

  “She’s nice,” said Georgia, from several desks away. “She doesn’t like Brock because he doesn’t do his work. She yelled at us on Friday. She made Brock do pushups, and then she made Evan do squats.”

  “Georgia, that’s my lotion!” said Cheyenne.

  “She wants you to rub it on her back,” said Brock.

  “No!” said Cheyenne.

  “Fifty pushups,” I said sternly to Brock. “No, just do the opposite of whatever you want to do. Hoods are forbidden, as you know.” I raised an eyebrow at the three of them.

  “I look terrible with my hair,” said Evan.

  I said, “The thing that’s interesting to me is that it’s like you guys want there to be a rule so you can break it. If they had no rule about hoodies, nobody would care. It’s not even that much fun to wear a hoodie.”

  “I know, but my hair’s too long,” said Evan. He pulled down his hood. A huge disorderly pompom of hair ploofed out.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Brock said, “I’m like a ninja at night, when I play Manhunt.”

  I asked them whether manhunt was a video game or a physical game.

  “It’s a physical game,” Lily explained.

  “It’s like hide-and-seek in the dark,” said Brock.

  “It’s like hide-and-seek but with guns and clubs,” added Evan.

  Brock said, “Once I put on my hood, I’m like a ninja.”

  There was a commotion near my desk. Cheyenne, Georgia, Lily, and Mandy were arguing over the bottle of Aveeno hand lotion. “Mandy, I need that!” said Cheyenne.

  “I see there are lotion problems,” I said. “Unfortunately whatever lotion problems there are, they must be solved in the next two minutes.” I pointed at the clock.

  Backpacks were zipped up; iPads were
put away in their cases and swung around like medieval maces. Lily and Mia began working together on their science homework. Travis went around the room gathering all the markers and the sock erasers.

  Boop went the PA system. “Good afternoon,” said the secretary. “Can I please have your attention for the end-of-day announcements.” On Tuesday the swim team was victorious over Salter Creek Middle School, she said. She read off the first-place finishers. A pair of slacks were found on the stage in the cafeteria, and there were messages in the office for five students. “That will conclude afternoon announcements. Have a great afternoon.”

  Brock explained about chair-stacking. “The homeroom kids do the chairs once they come in,” he said.

  “There are kids coming into this class now?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Brock.

  “Oh my god.” I’d assumed, because of the end-of-day announcements, that the day was actually over, but it wasn’t. I studied the infernal sub plans one last time. “Students are expected to be working, reading, or socializing quietly,” I read. “Absolutely no running around.” There was a list of kids I should keep an eye on. They began arriving.

  “I WILL ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE!” sang a small, scrappy boy named Kyle, swinging his iPad case.

  Luke stood in the middle of the room with his arms out. “We’ll spin you around,” said a girl. Luke turned slowly in place.

  Chairs began going up on the desks.

  Boop. More loud announcements, adding to the mayhem. “Dakota Cooper to the office for dismissal, please. Missy Tremain to the office for dismissal, please.”

  “Stop twirling,” I said. “Stop twirling, stop twirling. STOP TWIRLING, otherwise you’re going to fall down.” Luke stood still. He looked woozy.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. After a while I have to sit down.”

  He sat down.

  “Is this normal?” I asked, meaning the level of end-of-day noise.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I broke my thumb,” said Sydney, the girl with a wrist brace.

  I asked her how.

  “Reffing a wrestling match.”

  “BWAHAHAHA,” said Kyle.

  Boop. First-wave buses were announced. “Bye, first wavers,” said Luke. The room suddenly became calmer.