Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “So if you were writing a story about your day, the main conflict would be that you did not want to get out of bed?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  By then the class had dissolved into eight separate conversations. I couldn’t blame them: I was doing a lousy job of teaching this English class. Raising my voice to a shout, I said, “SO WRITE A DRAFT OF THE ESSAY.”

  “Can I take attendance?” said Melissa.

  “Yes.”

  Melissa began checking off the names of everyone who was there. I asked her to look over the previous sheet, for homeroom, and try to remember if anyone had been absent. Jessica helped her. “Can I bring a buddy when I go to the office?” Melissa asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What if I get lost?”

  Kimberly, dressed as Wonder Woman, handed Aaron one of her earbuds. “Put this in your ear,” she said.

  Payson explained to me how they were supposed to write an essay. First they had to fill out several pages of something called an organizer, and in the organizer they were supposed to write their thesis statement, which had to appear in the essay’s introduction.

  I said, “That sounds really—”

  “Hard?” said Payson.

  “Theoretical. So did you get a first sentence?”

  “I do not have a first sentence,” said Payson.

  He showed me his paper. At the top, he’d written “The Snipper.”

  Shelby read it aloud: “The Snipper.”

  “That’s a very different story,” I said. “About a madman with some scissors.”

  Payson handed me his copy of “The Sniper,” by Liam O’Flaherty. I read the first sentence aloud. “The long June twilight faded into night. Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds. I’m in it already. So what do you think you’ll have for sentence one?”

  Payson said, “For sentence one I’d probably say, ‘My story is about “The Sniper.”’ And then I’d do my introduction. That would be on the upper line. I’d put my name, and then I’d put my story below that.”

  “Boom, you’re on it,” I said. “The name, then the date.”

  “But we have to use the organizer,” Payson said. “My organizer is in my locker.” He went out to the hall to get his organizer.

  I asked Shelby what his story was. “I’m doing ‘Thank You, Ma’am,’” he said. “It’s about this boy named Roger. He tries to steal this big woman’s purse, but then he trips. She grabs him and brings him to her apartment and talks to him and makes him dinner. Makes him wash his face. Gives him money to buy shoes.” It turned out to be a story by Langston Hughes.

  Kimberly was reading through a piece of paper filled with her neat writing.

  “You’ve already gotten it written?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. She was working on an extra-credit question: predict how a character in her story would react to a different conflict, using evidence taken from the text. “This is to get you a score four,” she explained. “The essay only gets you a score three.” She was writing about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “I like Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “He was kind of messed up,” I said. “But it worked out for him.” I found an apple in my jacket pocket and took a bite of it. I kept circulating.

  Payson came back with his organizer. On one sheet he was supposed to list examples from the story that demonstrated four different kinds of conflict: character vs. self, character vs. character, character vs. nature, and character vs. society.

  “Are you ever conflicted with yourself?” I asked him.

  “Um.”

  Behind him, Aaron was lobbing balls of paper at the trash basket.

  “How many times are you going to miss?” I said.

  “That was like my second time!”

  Payson scoffed. “Second time! That was like your fifth time.”

  “Just put it away,” I said.

  “We used to get yelled at all the time last year for doing that,” said Payson.

  I looked away for a moment. Aaron took one last shot and made it.

  I made my way to the back of the class and asked May, who was wearing a denim dress and a cable-knit sweater, what a good first sentence would be.

  “You just write what you wrote on the graphic organizer,” said May, showing it to me. “The graphic organizer sets up how your essay is supposed to flow. Introduction, and then your Claim One, your Claim Two.” She’d filled the organizer’s boxes with tiny, elegant writing.

  “That’s really good,” I said. “Let me ask you this, because you seem to know what’s going on. Say writers grew up in a world where there were no middle school classes that taught the idea of conflict. Could they still write short stories?”

  “I think most fiction stories have conflicts anyway,” said May. “The writer doesn’t necessarily need to know what conflict he or she is going to put into it, but the story will have it.”

  I said I guessed it was sort of like people who grow up and learn to speak and read well, but they may not know grammar.

  “Yes,” May said. “I believe that many people, when they’re writing short stories, don’t exactly know that they’re creating conflict, but it naturally occurs.”

  “That’s really helpful, thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I walked over to Victor. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” said Victor. He’d chosen to write about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “I also saw the movie,” he said.

  “Which is scarier, the movie or the story?”

  “It depends. There are two versions of the story.”

  I asked Victor if he had a first sentence; he didn’t. He still had to fill out the graphic organizer, he said. All he had was a thesis statement.

  Christopher interrupted, asking to go out in the hall because the people near him were stressing him out. I told him he could go if he came back with a finished draft.

  I turned back to Victor. “What if you didn’t fill out the organizer?” I said. “What if you just started, and said, ‘In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe blasts wide open the knowledge of the inner demons we confront, blah blah blah.’ Don’t use the blah blah blah.”

  “I want to use the blah blah blah,” said Harley.

  I read John’s thesis statement, which was, The vulture eye is really a weird part of the story. I didn’t remember the vulture eye. “What is it?”

  “A guy kept shining a light on a vulture eye,” said John. “It was really weird, because he just kept mentioning it.”

  I said, “It’s sort of a random terror element?”

  “Is it sort of like a random tattoo that kills people?” said Aaron.

  “The Killer Tattoo,” I said. “That’s a really good idea.” I told Aaron about Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. “He’s tattooed all over his body, and when people look close, the tattoos start to move.” I turned back to John. “So now that you’ve got the thesis that you want to prove, why don’t you just go out on the surfboard and just write the damn thing. Just wing it!”

  He couldn’t, he said. He had to finish filling out the organizer first. Rodney appeared. “I’m coming to help,” he said.

  “We don’t want you to help,” said Aaron.

  Payson called out, “I can’t feel my legs!”

  I went over to James. “How’s it going?” He flipped his iPad over so I wouldn’t see that he’d been playing a game.

  “It’s going well,” he said. His voice was just changing, and he had braces and a twinkle in his eye.

  “You’ve got the worksheet?”

  “I do.”

  “And it’s looking good?”

  “It is looking good.”

  “Gold plated?”

  His eyebrows went up. “Silver?
Or maybe copper? Can I get a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” He hurried off, the inquisition over.

  Some crumpled paper flew past my head.

  “Did something just fly by?” I asked.

  “He threw it,” Harley said, pointing to Payson.

  “What!” said Payson. “Did not!”

  “Okay, I did it,” Harley said. “It just hit my foot and I got angry.”

  I asked Harley if he was having an insightful and productive day. He said he was. He was wearing a black Batman cape.

  Rodney said something in a black-accented falsetto that turned out to be from The Cleveland Show.

  “Do you get your homework done at school?” I said.

  “Most of the time,” Rodney said. “I went from fifty to twenty-five missing assignments. I did nineteen the other day.”

  “Nineteen assignments in one day?” I said. “You must have been smoking!”

  “Smoking what?” said Aaron.

  Rodney explained what was at stake. “If you’re over five missing assignments you get your iPad locked up. You can’t buy apps, you can’t play games.” YouTube wasn’t blocked, though.

  “And it’s weird,” Aaron added, “because sometimes I’ll try to look up some information for a project, and half the sites come up restricted. It’s a pain because even if you do finish up all your work, it’s a long process to get it unlocked again. You have to have all your teachers sign a paper saying that you got caught up.” Both kids were using blocked iPads.

  I said, “Well, now you’ve got to write an essay. You’ve got to just motor through it.”

  “I’m tired,” said Rodney. “I’m always tired, and I’m always hungry. I wake up at five in the morning, and I don’t get on the bus till seven o’clock.”

  Why did he wake up at five?

  “I have a bunch of crap to do every morning,” Rodney said. “I put my stuff in this one place every day, and I wake up the next morning, and it’s everywhere, scattered through the house. I have two little sisters.”

  Aaron and Rodney began rehearsing pickup lines they’d gotten from websites: “Girl, did you just sit in a pile of sugar, because you have a sweet ass.” And: “‘Did it hurt?’ Girl: ‘Did what hurt?’ ‘When you fell from heaven.’” “I’ve used that one so many times,” said Rodney.

  I told them to get writing. “How hard is it to write a sentence? I mean, seriously. Come out all guns blazing! ‘In Edgar Allan Poe’s mind-blowing festival of terror, comma, the conflict expresses itself as boom biddly boom bang boom.’”

  “I typed a story,” said Rodney. He began explaining it and Christopher, who’d returned, tried to interrupt.

  “Shut up, Chris,” Rodney said. “I have so many people in this story. Shut up!” He held many single-spaced typed pages, maybe ten pages.

  “Wow, when did you write this?” I said.

  “Last month,” said Rodney.

  Aaron said he’d written a story, too, seventeen pages about Somali pirates, on his iPad, but the iPad died when he was updating it, and the school’s tech person fixed the problem by doing a clean install, so he lost the whole story. The teacher told him he had to write it all over again.

  Meanwhile Rodney had been silently rereading his opus. “There’s a lot of mistakes on this page,” he said. He handed it to me. It was a story about the adventures of a kid named Fat Andrew, who was always hungry. “It’s a good thing I bought a Twinkie!” Fat Andrew said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-eaten Twinkie with dirt and hair all over it. “You still Big Daddy’s little angel, you creamy pumpkin!” he said.

  “I want you to read this one part,” Rodney said. “Read from A to mermaids.”

  I read: A car approached Fat Andrew and stopped. The man in the car started to scream and shout. His whole car started to shake. He started to rip his hair out. He reached over the dashboard and punched through the windshield. “What’s that guy doing?” said Fat Andrew. The man got out of the car and ripped the door off. He bit all the tires till they were completely flat. Ripped the engine right out of the car. Then he ran away into the ocean and swam away with the mermaids.

  I congratulated Rodney. “Lot of good writing in there,” I said. “Damn! Darn, I mean.”

  “It’s all right, we won’t tattle,” said Rodney.

  Did everyone in the class have to write something like that? They nodded.

  “Mine was really good till they had to reinstall the iOS,” said Aaron.

  The wall phone rang. The secretary was looking for a student who wasn’t in the class. I hung up, discovered I was still holding my apple, and took another bite.

  Katylynn and Tamara were quietly looking at pictures of animals on their iPads, trying to find out which one had the longest lifespan, as part of an assignment for science class. They’d found a kind of lizard that lives for a hundred and forty years. “I want to be a koala bear,” said Katylynn. “I would be an urchin in the sea,” said Tamara.

  Katylynn reconsidered. “No, I would be a small dog. Like a Yorkie. One of the really cute small dogs, that would have a preppy dog life.”

  “I would be a golden retriever,” said Tamara.

  “Well, I would be a bigger dog,” said Katylynn, “but they don’t live as long. I’d be one of the smaller dogs that they’d carry in their purse.”

  I told them that I had a corgi at home.

  “They’re adorable,” said Katylynn.

  Tamara was Googling. “The oldest person in the world is a hundred and fifteen years old,” she announced.

  “I thought it was a hundred and twenty-eight,” said Katylynn.

  “No,” said Tamara, “now the oldest living person is a hundred and twenty-three years old, Bolivian.”

  “They would just be a vegetable,” said Harley. “They’d have to have people to do everything for them.”

  Tamara said, “In class, Prentice was like, ‘I will die proudly at seventy.’”

  “I want to live to ninety-five,” said Katylynn.

  Harley disagreed. “What if all your friends had died and you’re just sitting there?”

  Tamara said, “I wouldn’t want to die alone for the simple fact that what if no one notices you’re gone? You just stay there until someone finally notices. They open it up and there’s a body there.”

  “I’m just going to live in an RV,” said Katylynn, smiling sadly. “No one will notice me, and I will just—die.”

  They began talking about when the science project was due. I looked at the clock. Eight minutes to go. I went back to the cluster of jokers and sat down. They were listening to a metal band, Disturbed, and comparing more pickup lines. Aaron read one: “I think I’m a firefighter, because you’ll find me where it’s hot and wet.”

  Rodney said, “I don’t know, I think the chicken tender one is better. I said it to one of my good friends yesterday, and she thought I was serious. ‘Girl, you’re like the dipping sauce for my chicken tender, but not in a rude way, in a honey mustard way.’”

  I said, “So what would Mr. Monette be doing right now?”

  “He’d probably be yelling at us,” said Aaron.

  “Does he yell a lot?”

  “Only when people are loud like this,” said Rodney.

  Rodney said, “If I turn and look at Aaron like this, and say, ‘How’s your day going?’ Mr. Monette will separate us.” He waved at the girls who were laughing. “They can be as loud as they want and he doesn’t do anything.”

  “He’s got you targeted,” I said. “Is that because you’ve got homework assignments due?”

  “Yeah, those people do a lot of work,” said Aaron, “so they can fool around.”

  I lowered my voice and asked them what the secret was to maintaining order in a classroom.

  “It’s fine li
ke this right now,” said Rodney, “but when everybody’s talking, it’s just bad.”

  “Be a friend,” said Aaron.

  “But see, that’s what you’re not supposed to do,” I said. “If you become a friend, then supposedly you lose your authority.”

  “Allow people to have fun,” said Rodney, “but don’t let them carry it away.”

  Aaron said, “As long as they’re doing their work, they can do whatever they want.”

  I said, “The problem is, I like talking to people. This is what I like doing. But getting you guys to actually finish an assignment is a whole different thing. Because you don’t want to do it. And I don’t—” I stopped. I didn’t want to say that I really didn’t care whether they wrote the conflict essay or not—that I didn’t think doing it would improve their writing one bit—because that wouldn’t make life any easier for them.

  Rodney picked up my iPhone, which was on my desk. It was cracked and it had clear packaging tape on the back holding it together. He said, “I took one of the other substitutes’ phones and I started taking random pictures of myself the other day. I spammed his phone. I used up all his memory. He laughed.”

  One table over, Christopher said, “Ow,” and fended off a pencil attack from Harley.

  “Guys!” I said. “How important is it to stab people in the head?”

  I looked at the clock. It was 8:48 a.m., end of block 1. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said.

  “You’re here all day, right?” said Rodney. “I’ll be back.”

  —

  BLOCK 2 WAS IN MOTION. Frederick walked in and pointed at me. “I remember you!”

  “I remember you,” I said. “How’s it been going?”

  “Good. Baseball tryouts this week.” He said he liked to play catcher and second base. “I can play anything. I can play the outfield, I can hit. But I’m best at catching.”

  I asked him how he learned to play.

  “I played catch with my dad. He taught me how to throw. And then I started playing T-ball, and then it just came to me, and I learned to pitch.”

  “I can’t pitch at all,” said Raymond, wearing a polo shirt.

  “It’s hard,” I said. “I’m not so good at it. It’s a gift to get the ball going fast.”