Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  Ms. Accardo said, “My friend never left a note. So we can only assume what her reasons are.”

  She talked about some other figures of speech: “I could kill myself!” and “My mom’s going to kill me!” She asked, “Is your mother really going to kill you?”

  “It depends on what you do,” said Haley. “I mean, not all mothers are the same. I ruined my sister’s new white jeans, and I said, ‘My sister’s going to kill me,’ and she put a knife to me, literally. That was like seven years ago. Brand-new white jeans. She doesn’t live at home anymore, so I’m good.”

  A sleepy boy, Wesley, lifted his head. “What just happened? I totally missed that.”

  Ms. Accardo summarized. “She ruined her sister’s jeans, and said, Oh, no, my sister’s going to kill me, and then her sister held a knife to her.”

  “Literally,” said Haley.

  “Man,” said Wesley.

  “I’m glad you are now safe,” said Ms. Accardo. We moved on to what things you should and shouldn’t do. Show you care. Do not argue. Do not offer simple solutions. Do not promise secrecy. Do not try to forcibly remove a gun from somebody. “There’s a guy that doesn’t have a jaw on this whole side of his face because of that particular situation,” said Ms. Accardo. “He grabbed a shotgun.”

  “Ooh,” said the class.

  “He’s alive—but.”

  “That’s what happened to my next-door neighbor,” said Jacob. “He tried flipping his truck. He drank constantly. He tried six or seven times. We could hear him every morning puking.”

  Maria asked Haley where she lived.

  “Geary Hill,” said Haley. “Middle of nowhere.”

  “Seems like all the towns here are in the middle of nowhere,” said Maria.

  “All right!” said Ms. Accardo. “Go to role-play three.” Everyone looked through the suicide packet till they found role-play three. It was about Christopher and Alexa. Christopher is a straight-A student and a varsity athlete. His parents are strict and want him to be perfect. But he got an F on a research paper, bringing his grade down to a C. Alexa finds Christopher in the library staring at his homework. Alexa asks Christopher if he’s been crying. He says he’s fine. “Are you sure you’re okay?” says Alexa. Christopher says, “Actually I feel a lot better! Now that I’ve decided not to do this test, I feel great! In fact, I’m not going to do homework anymore. I’m tired of being perfect. Tired of doing what other people want me to do. And tired of my life.” Alexa says, But you’ll go to a good school and get a good job and make a lot of money. Christopher says he doesn’t care. Alexa says that she’s here for him. “I admire all the work and effort you’ve put into school and sports. You can always talk to me.” Christopher says that Alexa is just saying that because she feels bad for him. “I’m done,” he says. “The only way I can make my life my own again, is to take it from my parents.”

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  “We’ll do scene two, role-play three next class,” said Ms. Accardo. “Remember you can always come talk to me if you need to or want to.”

  I walked slowly back to the main building. A girl was laughing. “There’s a button on that guy’s butt!” she said.

  A boy said, “I don’t flip out on people!”

  “Do you know what passive-aggressive is?” asked a girl.

  Ms. Day, the history teacher, was giving her class a multiple-choice quiz to do on their iPads. She got everyone logged in. “So at this point, nobody should be talking,” she said. I was supposed to keep an eye on Sebastian. He quickly tapped the answers to a set of vocabulary questions about isolationism, fascism, and militarism. “Wow, you’re good,” I whispered. I sat back and let him work. The class was silent. Ten minutes went by. “So, everybody’s done?” said Ms. Day. “Awesome. Today we’re going to watch a movie. We’ve been talking a lot about how it’s hard for us to imagine now how a group of people followed Hitler. This movie is a true story of a similar thing happening. Keep in mind it is a true story.”

  The movie was called The Wave. “The people selected for extermination by the Nazis were herded into concentration camps all over Europe,” says the history teacher in the movie. “The life expectancy of prisoners in the camps was only two hundred seventy days. They were worked, starved, tortured, and when they couldn’t work anymore they were exterminated in gas chambers, and their remains were disposed of in ovens. In all, the Nazis exterminated over ten million men, women, and children in these concentration camps.”

  A girl in the movie asks, “How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them, and say that they didn’t know anything about it? How could they do that?”

  Good question, says the teacher. He begins, in succeeding classes, to act like an SS officer, barking orders at students and haranguing them. They chant the motto “Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action.” Louder and louder they chant it, as the ominous music swells. Gradually they’re brainwashed and turned into modern-day Hitler Youths, members of a movement called “the Wave.” The teacher starts to get caught up in his own experiment. “You wouldn’t believe the homework assignments,” he says to his wife. “They do what I give them, and then they do more.”

  His wife is unhappy. “You’re becoming a guinea pig in your own experiment,” she says.

  A female student resists the Wave; her boyfriend throws her down on the grass. The Wave members gather in the auditorium for a rally and chant their motto. “In a moment, our national leader will address us,” says the teacher.

  Ms. Day stopped the movie. “All right, guys. We’re going to call it quits there. There’s like five minutes left, we’ll finish it on Monday. What did you guys think, so far?”

  “Are you going to become that guy?” asked Mark.

  “No,” said Ms. Day. “Last class I said, ‘Please don’t ever chant at me, that looks terrifying.’”

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  I walked back to the modulars, but one of the ed techs said I should be on break, so I went to the teachers’ lunchroom to make some instant coffee. The PA system came on. “The annual Swanson Academy college fair will be held on Thursday, April seventeenth. The LHS guidance office will be providing a bus for any junior interested in going. The field trip runs from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty and is a great way to start your college search. Permission slips are in the guidance office. Permission slips are due back by April tenth.” I ate a sandwich and sighed, then I splashed cold water on my face to wake up.

  In the hall, a girl said that a boy had sent her a picture of him wearing a hippie shirt and a bandanna. “He was like, Should I wear this?”

  Her friend said, “He asked me, too. He always sends me pictures of outfits and asks me if they’re gay.”

  The first girl laughed. “Bye, Molly.”

  “Bye.”

  Mr. Domus appeared and unlocked his classroom. We trouped in. Gerald, who was a sharp-eyed kid with crazy red hair, said, “I’m tired. I went to a dubstep concert in Boston last night.”

  Lauren, a popular girl, said, “You just randomly went to Boston for a concert?”

  “No, my mom—”

  “Had you been planning on going? Why didn’t you tell me? Wait, your mom went? She likes dubstep?”

  “No,” said Gerald.

  “I was going to say that’s pretty cool.”

  “My uncle works there, so we got free tickets,” said Gerald. “They put Xs on our hands, if you’re younger than eighteen, for drinking and stuff like that.”

  “How long was it?” asked Lauren.

  “From eight till twelve o’clock.”

  “When did you get home?”

  “Two.”

  “And you came to school?”

  “I slept for two hours in the car driving back,” said Gerald. “My e
ars were ringing.”

  “Dubstep messes with the head,” said Lauren.

  Gerald said there were over a hundred subwoofers on the stage.

  “You must have been feeling it in your chest.” She looked up—her flirty acquaintance Garth had arrived. “Hey, Garth!”

  Mr. Domus said, “Guys, look at me. How many groups are not done?” Hands went up. “Monday’s your presentation, so you have to be done. Don’t leave it for the weekend, because we know that’s not going to happen. Right, Gavin, old boy?”

  “Last time I did it,” said Gavin.

  “I was just saying hi,” said Mr. Domus.

  “No you weren’t,” said Gavin.

  “Yes I was!”

  “No!”

  “If you’re a good boy, after lunch, I’ll give you a mint,” said Mr. Domus. “Spence, you can come get yours now.” Spence had finished his presentation. “All right, make this happen. You guys don’t want to have to do work over the weekend, I can guarantee that.”

  Kevin was clapping his hands near his friend Wyatt’s ear. Mr. Domus pointed. “Hey, I’m going to slap both of you in a second.”

  “Do it!” said Artie, the kid from remedial math.

  “And then I’m going to email Mom and Dad and let them know, because they’ll be fine with it.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “The kids over there are the low-performing kids. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing to go over there every once in a while and see how they’re doing.” The antebellum reform project had changed slightly, he said. “We’re not making them find the three primary documents. That really threw the kids. Last trimester they struggled with that, and it was to the point where they weren’t getting the other things done. So we’ll tackle that in later projects.”

  I went over to Gerald and asked him what he was up to. “I’m doing the temperance movement,” he said. He pointed to a picture of Carrie Nation. “I’m just looking up who she is.” Artie and George, both wearing baseball hats, were supposed to be working with Gerald on temperance, but George was deep into a video game and Artie was quietly surfing for bikini women.

  “Let me know if you need help,” I said.

  I read up on the temperance movement so that I could help Gerald.

  “Mr. Domus, I have a really stupid question,” said Allison. “When does the Civil War start?”

  “Sixty-one. Eighteen sixty-one. No, that’s not a stupid question.”

  “There are never stupid questions,” said Brody.

  “Yeah, there are stupid questions,” Mr. Domus said. “I disagree. There are. Garth asks them all the time.”

  Allison said, “You’ll probably realize that I ask a lot of them.”

  “No, dates are hard to remember,” said Mr. Domus. “I can’t remember a lot of dates, believe me.”

  There was another computer problem: Chris had sent a bunch of pictures to himself for his project and now his email wasn’t working.

  I went back over to Gerald, Artie, and George, and told them about the American Temperance Union and Lyman Beecher. “The state of Maine was the first state to go dry.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Artie.

  “Terrible mistake,” I said. “They thought if they made it illegal, people would stop drinking.”

  Artie didn’t agree that prohibition had been a mistake. “Why is there a seatbelt law?” he said. “Why did they think people were going to wear their seatbelts?”

  “People will actually do something as simple as wearing a seatbelt,” I said. “But stopping drinking? People have been drinking for ten thousand years. In fact, they used to feed kids beer, because the beer was more sterile than well water. Prohibiting alcohol is totally unnatural. But they thought that if they could eliminate drink, they’d have a beautiful society.”

  “It wasn’t a success,” said Gerald.

  “Right,” I said, feeling myself getting carried away. “If everyone is forbidden to have liquor, only criminals will have it to sell. So the Mafia comes to power. That’s why we had the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—they were fighting over turf, over the right to sell liquor.”

  Gerald showed me his first Keynote slide. “Should I put ‘American Temperance Movement’ or just ‘Temperance Movement’?” he asked.

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “I don’t think there’s ever been any other country that’s gone so whole hog into temperance, has there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gerald.

  Garth was passing out Pringles. “I stole them from my stepsister this morning. She was like, I got Pringles. Nope, now you don’t.”

  I got Gerald to look up “antebellum temperance facts” on Google and we found a good encyclopedia article with some primary sources. Together we read a quote about suppressing “the too free use of ardent spirits and its kindred vices.” Gerald began cutting and pasting.

  Allison said that she’d gotten a bunch of irrelevant Google results for Lady Antebellum, a country music group.

  I went back to my chair. Mr. Domus circulated. “I’m so tired,” Gerald said to him.

  “You look tired,” said Mr. Domus.

  “I went to a concert last night,” said Gerald.

  “Oh, did you?” said Mr. Domus. “Who’d you go see?”

  “Xcision, in Boston.”

  “It’s dubstep,” said Lauren.

  Garth said, “All dubstep is is robots getting it on.” He asked Lauren for her phone number.

  “You’ve been asking for my number since Wednesday!” said Lauren.

  “I don’t feel good,” said Piper.

  “I have a little headache,” said Gerald.

  “I always have headaches,” said Garth.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Lunch break. After the kids were out, Mr. Domus told me that George was diagnosed as autistic. He played video games a lot, and sometimes he got so deep into them that he took on the behaviors of the characters in the game. “Just so you know,” he said.

  I raced to Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a coffee and got back just in time for the resumption of history class. Mr. Domus said, “Okay, guys, you’ve got, oh, twenty-three minutes. You want to wrap this up before you go. You don’t want this over the weekend, kind of dangling over your shoulders.”

  “This week went by slow,” said Gavin.

  “I think the week went by fast,” said Mr. Domus. “Last week was dreadfully, dreadfully slow.”

  “The week went by slow but today went by well,” said Gavin. “Today’s been good.”

  Mr. Domus was pleased. “The pace has been good?”

  “Yeah. That’s how I feel,” said Gavin.

  When the bell bonged, Mr. Domus put on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and blasted it. The whole class sang along. “We’re halfway there! We’re living on a prayer!”

  —

  BACK TO BIOLOGY. Ms. Bell was out that day, replaced by a slow-moving, slow-thinking sub named Mr. Nelson, whose red plaid shirt was neatly tucked into his pants under his pumpkin belly. “Oh my god,” said Cayley when she saw him.

  “See, I told you you’d say that,” said Cole.

  Drew showed up, carrying a plant that he’d grown in a little pot: a four-leafed clover.

  Two kids, Ralph and Nicholas, had drumsticks out and were tapping out rhythms on the tables.

  “All right, guys,” said the sub. “LISTEN UP. I got like five different packets to hand out. Let me pass them back. Can I get somebody to help?” Nobody volunteered, so I substituted as the paper passer.

  “Are you guys drummers?” I asked.

  “I’m in band, he’s in percussion,” said Nicholas.

  “Worksheets are flying everywhere,” I said.

  “We already did this,” said Paige, who had big arms and big cheekbones.

  “Screw that, we ain’t doing that
again,” said Cameron, sliding one of the worksheets away from him on the lab table.

  Riley began a thorough pencil-sharpening session; I gestured to the drummers to put away their sticks.

  “Do we just work?” asked Brooke. She had a ponytail and a scarf with horses on it that went with her pale blue pants.

  “Hang on!” said Mr. Nelson.

  More aggressive pencil sharpening, more drumming.

  Mr. Nelson was a very deliberate man, and it took him a long time to take attendance. He handed me a folder with IEP plans for Drew and the two other special ed students whom I was supposed to be helping. “I think that’s your crew,” he said.

  Cameron balled up a piece of paper into the smallest ball he could make, squeezing it and squeezing it.

  “OKAY, WE’RE GOING TO GET STARTED,” said Mr. Nelson. “This first packet, ‘Phenotypes and Genotypes.’ What’s an organism?”

  “A living thing,” said Paige.

  “Right, okay. An organism is a large collection of phenotypes.” He turned to the drummers. “Guys, stop. Who can tell me the difference between a genotype and a phenotype? Anybody.”

  A blond kid named Aiden answered, “Phenotype is characteristics, and genotype is the genes, pretty much.”

  “Yep. Did you all hear that? Do you all know what DNA is? It’s up on the ceiling right there. DNA is made up of codes, or nucleotides, which code for proteins. We call those genes. When we talk about simple genes, we have a dominant and a recessive on each one. Two different genotypes can have the same phenotype. Phenotype is what you can see. Like big nose, blue eyes, big feet, whatever. It’s what’s expressed. So that’s the difference. So we’re going to take a poll, basically, of all these different traits, and see what’s in this population here, which ones are dominant. Who wants to be my tally person?”

  Brooke raised her hand and took a position at the chalkboard. She was a take-charge girl; she wanted to stand in front of the class.

  “You’ll be my scorekeeper,” said Mr. Nelson.

  Drew yawned hugely.

  “All right, guys, listen up. Who can roll their tongue?”

  “Caleb can roll his tongue,” said Brooke. Others could, too. Brooke counted eleven tongue rollers. She wrote the number on the board.