Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  —

  “HOW ARE YOU DOING, MR. BAKER?” said Brock in Mrs. Painter’s homeroom. It was the last day, or half day, of Spirit Week: everyone was supposed to wear green and white, the school colors. Brock, Casey, and Joseph wore black hoodies and sat in a row—I told them they looked like the Supreme Court. The class was still hopped up from Pajama Day and singing snatches of songs. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow!” sang Sunrise, who was dressed as somebody from The Vampire Diaries. She held out a handful of markers and asked me to choose my preferred color. I picked blue. On the whiteboard, she wrote “MR. BAKER IS HERE!” and decorated my name with blue flowers and stylized Smurfs.

  “It smells like that weird hairspray,” said Casey. He was looking at a Vine video.

  The sub plans said, “Students are expected to be working, reading, or socializing quietly. They may use their iPads quietly.” Brittany helped me take attendance.

  “I have another song,” said Sunrise, twirling. “Somewhere, over the rainbow!” Then she stopped. “Mr. Baker, Joseph has to leave, he’s not in this homeroom.”

  “Joseph has to leave?”

  Joseph slowly got up and slung on his backpack, shooting me a dirty look.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, it’s not my rule!” I said.

  “I know,” said Joseph.

  Bong, bong, bong. The PA lady said, “Please excuse the interruption. Please stand and say with me.” Pledge. We sat down. The lunch menu was “shaved turkey and cheese on a roll, wango mango juice or dragon punch, Goldfish crackers, fresh apple, mayo or mustard, and milk.” No milk choices today, just milk. Drama rehearsals and girls’ lacrosse tryouts were coming up. Numeracy students were to report to room 127. “Best of luck to Lee Baskin, who is representing LMS today at the state National Geographic GeoBee.”

  STAR time followed: delightful silence. One whispered question from Evan: “Can I use the restroom?”

  “Of course.”

  The phone rang. Ashley was supposed to be in Mrs. Rivers’s literacy class and she wasn’t. She wasn’t in my STAR class, either.

  After half an hour, Mrs. Elton, the technology specialist, came by, per the sub plans, to do an “enrichment activity.” She was wearing a red jacket with gold buttons over her giant bosom and had gold dangly earrings on her ears and she held a huge cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. She stood in the middle of the room. “Okay, guys, let’s finish up with our reading,” she said. “Today we’re playing a group activity game called Spaceteam. Spaceteam is an app, which we turn our Bluetooth on to use. Who has seen Star Trek?”

  Hands went up.

  “You know when they’re yelling out orders to each other—‘Asteroid!’—and all that? This reminds me of Star Trek. You have to do different things on your iPad to adjust for, for example, an asteroid coming. They ask you to shake your iPad until it’s safe. It’s about taking orders, telling your team what the orders are, and they tell you what the orders are. So it’s more or less about team-building, about direction-following, and a little bit about space.” She divided the class into groups of four and explained the workings of the game. “You have to hold down on the green thing,” she said. “You have to yell out orders to everyone.”

  The class stared at their iPads and began yelling orders to their teammates. Ignite the grid saucer! Disengage the heliocutter! Activate rotogrid! Abort now! Asteroid, asteroid! Shake!

  “Are you guys getting the hang of it?” asked Mrs. Elton. I looked up Spaceteam, billed as a “cooperative shouting game.” It looked like a clever, funny indie game, designed by a former team member at BioWare, but it was premised on rising tension and massive noise, and a class full of four groups of shouting Spaceteamers got unbearably loud fairly quickly. I sat watching the chaos grow, and I discovered that I disliked Mrs. Elton, this untalented gifted-and-talented specialist who had torn into the silence of my STAR class and made everyone play a game that forced them to yell nonsense instructions at each other under the aegis of “team-building.” I wasn’t the only one who was upset. Ms. Nolton from next door poked her head in and said, “Hey, guys—GUYS. Can I have your attention for a quick moment? I don’t want to be mean or anything, but you guys are really loud. I’ve got a couple of people finishing up their testing in here. You guys are working really hard, and I hear good conversation, but since you’re working in groups, can you keep the voices down?”

  “They’re playing an app like Star Trek where they have to yell out orders to teammates,” Mrs. Elton explained. “It’s a yelling game.”

  “Oh,” said Ms. Nolton.

  “We’ll keep it quieter.”

  There was, of course, no way to keep it quieter. Even so Mrs. Elton began shushing everyone. “Girls, girls, quietly. Shh!”

  “Activate saucer,” said Chase.

  “Who has green hair?” Jade said.

  “SHH!” said Mrs. Elton. “What did we just say about yelling? Not appropriate.”

  Ms. Nolton opened her door again to say that her class was done testing.

  “You heard it,” said Mrs. Elton. “They’re done testing!” A noise typhoon followed.

  “Once you get to level six you get to shop and buy things,” Mrs. Elton said, amid the yelling. “This is a good homeroom activity.”

  Class time was running out; iPads were zipped shut. Nobody had made out very well, and they’d had trouble sounding out the technobabble commands. “Okay, you guys pulled it together as a team, nice leadership here!” said Mrs. Elton. “GUYS, I want you to try this sometime, invite your friends to play with you. Some kids tell me they play on the bus. I don’t know how they do that. A couple kids said they were going to play it in homeroom. Remember, if you get up to level six, you get to add more players, and you get to go shopping.” Then she got severe. “I don’t want you to be standing! It’s not time to go yet! Did you have a good time?”

  “Yeah,” said Jason.

  Thomas said, “One thing I noticed is that they sent different commands to both players.”

  “Yep, that is a challenge,” said Mrs. Elton.

  The PA lady came on. “Bridget Rice to the office, please.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Baker,” said Mrs. Elton.

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Elton,” I said.

  “Engage the wormhole,” said Dabney. “We were so close!”

  Ms. Nolton appeared. “Sorry about that,” I said. “They were all totally silent, and then she said, ‘Okay, you’re going to play a game that involves shouting.’ I thought, Oh, okay.”

  “Wonderful,” said Ms. Nolton. “The kid who had to make up his test still improved his score. It wasn’t a huge deal.”

  I had a break from 8:26 to 9:13. I sat and breathed and thought of the way some people walk dogs. Some yank the leash to make the dog heel, and some let the dog smell the smells.

  —

  EVENTUALLY SOME STUDENTS gathered from the hall. I asked Perry what he was doing in Language Arts.

  “We’re making stories.”

  “Adventure narratives?”

  “Um.” He thought. “Fiction.”

  Alexandra and Brittany were discussing the merits of Vaseline as a lip gloss.

  “Can I take the attendance down?” asked Brock. I said he could, but it was early yet. “Did you do the Brainplop, blah blah blah?”

  “No,” said Brock.

  Georgia flumped in. “What are we doing today?”

  “Brainplop, blah blah blah,” said Brock.

  Thomas told me that he’d watched the Keynote the night before.

  A kid named Curtis said, “I’m not sure why I’m in here.”

  “I don’t know why I’m in here either,” I said. “What are you thinking about today?”

  Georgia said, “I’m thinking about how I hate the tech teacher. We just hate each other. On his test today, I wrote I don’t know for half the
answers. And he hates me now, so I hate him.”

  I asked what kind of tech class it was—computers?

  “Engines, cars, robotics, stuff like that,” said Georgia.

  “That could be interesting,” I said.

  “If the teacher was more interesting. Mr. Sterling hates me and my sister, and she’s eighteen.”

  I signed the attendance sheet and sent it on its way. Then I threw my arms wide. “HAVE A SEAT, GUYS, IT’S CHAIR TIME.”

  “Share time?” said Casey.

  “Chair time, green chair time,” I said. “The classification of the entire universe is what we’re looking at—again. And she’s emailed you something exciting.”

  “Is it exciting exciting?” said Thomas. “Or are you just saying it’s exciting so we do it?”

  Joseph said, “It’s boe-ring.”

  “It’s about something interesting,” I said. “It says, List the six kingdoms. You remember those archaebacteria that live in the saline solutions and they can withstand boiling water? That’s pretty amazing. And then you have to do one more thing. You have to list one characteristic that each kingdom has. Like they might be unicellular, or they might be, whatever. That’s for ten minutes. Ten happy minutes of doing the daily warmup from Mrs. Painter. So get the email, and warm it up! Then there’s this thing called the Darwin’s Finch Activity, that will just keep you laughing and happy.”

  William looked confused. I said, “Do you have that sheet that everyone’s been flinging around for days?”

  “This one?” said William, holding it up.

  “Yes.”

  There was jabbering to my right. “She stole my grape,” said Jeff.

  Belle laughed.

  I asked about their daily warmup.

  “I already did that,” said Belle.

  “Did that,” said Jeff.

  “All I can say is, Gasp,” I said. “Why don’t you do six BrainPOPs and a squat thrust.”

  “What are we doing today?” asked Perry.

  “Did you get the email from Mrs. Painter?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you answer the questions?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then basically all you have to do is sit and zone out for the next five minutes till the other people are done.”

  He pulled out a muffin and began eating it.

  “I broke my bagel chip,” said Brock.

  An iPad charging cord took flight. “Nothing needs to fly through the air,” I said. “Just sit and do the warmup. It’s a warmup! That’s all it is!”

  I went back to William. The question he had to answer was Choose two traits that best describe the kingdom Protista. I showed him the section of the packet that described the characteristics of Protista. “Can you graze your eyeballs over that paragraph?”

  “They’re gooey,” said Dana, who’d been listening.

  “What are?”

  “Eyeballs.”

  “They’re like saliva,” said William.

  “The Internet is very slow today,” said Thomas. “I’m waiting for Portaportal to come up.”

  Georgia said, “Wait, what are we supposed to be doing?”

  “The Internet is not working,” said Brittany.

  In a robot voice, Alexandra read: “How—are—fungi—different—from—plants?” Then she said, “Ugh!”

  “Who knows about the Darwin finch activity?” I asked the class. “It’s due today. Darwin owned a lot of finches, and he started measuring their beaks. He was trying to figure out how beaks would change shape based on what they ate. If they had to eat big, hard, hairy nuts—”

  Brittany started laughing.

  “—they had to crunch down on them hard, and they had to evolve a different shape of beak. So there’s an activity where you measure the beak. Does that ring a bell?”

  Timothy said, “I failed the quizlet because I had one spelling error.”

  “Don’t step on my ring!” said Mandy.

  I went over to a table where Jeff, Belle, and Dana were working. “This warms my heart,” I said. “This guy’s doing Darwin’s finch! Measuring the beak!”

  Belle was drawing some lifelike microorganisms, with spikes and squirmy mitochondria. “Whoa, those are some nasty cells,” I said, approvingly.

  Georgia said, “I have a question. Did you use to be a hippie when you were younger? You seem really like the hippie type.”

  In the seventies, I said, in high school, everybody was a hippie. “I had long hair. It’s gone now, but that’s what happens.”

  “Just the way you talk,” Georgia said, “the way you choose to word things—you seem like a hippie. It’s not a bad thing.”

  “Sometimes I get in a mood where I don’t know why certain things are being studied,” I said. “And yet they are being studied, and my job is to make them be studied. And then I get a conflicted feeling.”

  Jeff and Belle started tussling over a shared iPad.

  “No physical struggling,” I said.

  “I wonder how many next assignments I have,” said Belle.

  “A lot,” said Jeff.

  “What happens to your iPad when you miss assignments? They confiscate it and blow it up, don’t they?”

  “They actually do something worse,” said Jeff. “They make it so you can barely use it. This is all I have.” He showed me his iPad, which had three lonely apps left on the screen. “I’m twenty-one assignments behind. It’s because when I had my iPad wiped, I lost a bunch of them. It had a bug and it couldn’t update, so they had to wipe it.”

  “So are you just going to burn through them and catch up, or you going to figure this year’s blown, lost?”

  “Blown,” said Jeff.

  I looked over Alexandra’s shoulder. She’d answered a question correctly with the word invertebrates.

  “Nice going,” I said. I stood for a while, thinking. “It’s amazing. I think that nobody’s understanding, but gradually it sort of happens, like magic.”

  Across the room, somebody said, “Casey, I do not appreciate that kind of language coming out of your mouth.”

  Georgia said, “Thermophiles live in hot springs.”

  “You ate my grape,” said Jeff to Belle.

  “I’m sure you didn’t need it,” said Belle.

  “I needed it for starvation and energy.”

  Thomas was stumped by a question: Name three animals that are classified as platyhelminthes.

  “Flatworms,” I said. “In high school they used to have to cut the platyhelminthes in half, and then they’d watch them grow the other half. That’s the kind of sick stuff you do in high school.”

  “Like when you burn magnesium, to prove a metal can be burnable,” said Thomas.

  Georgia said, “Have you ever listened to the band Never Shout Never? They’re indie. Listen to them. They’re awesome.”

  “We’ve got to get ready to go to the next class,” said Thomas.

  I stood up. “That went by in a twinkling!” I said to the whole class. “Guys, you were so good, you actually got work done, thank you so much!”

  —

  BLOCK THREE ARRIVED. Jade and Caleb were already trading insults. “ALL RIGHT, TAKE IT DOWN, TAKE IT DOWN. Take it all the way down.”

  “Caleb,” said Owen. “Take it ALL the way down.”

  I said, “Mrs. Painter has been kind enough to email every single one of you two emails. One of them says what you’re supposed to do, which is a ten-minute warmup, and one of them IS the warmup. The Darwin finch activity is kind of neat. There’s little green triangles and you get to resize them. Does anyone like resizing little green triangles?”

  “Not really,” said Owen.

  “Well, you might find you do if you try it. Finish it, and you will be content, and we can talk.”

&
nbsp; “Cool,” said Chase.

  “Cool beans,” said Darryl.

  I walked around pointing at people. “Make sense? Everything’s making sense?”

  “I worked on the quizlet for like an hour, just trying to get everything correct,” said Cayden. She opened the kingdom packet. “Oh my god, I’m never going to get this!” I got her going on archaebacteria.

  “I finished the warmup,” said Jade. “I’m a science nerd.”

  Kyle was trying to buy a pair of headphones from Luke with a five-dollar bill.

  “I’m done with my level twos,” Luke said.

  “Are you some kind of a prodigy?” I handed him the book of science questions. “Do me a favor. Pick one question in this book that interests you, and show it to me.”

  “Fungi!” said Kyle.

  “Do you like mushrooms on your pizza?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” said Kyle. “I like steak and cheese.”

  “Animalia is multicellular?” said Jenn, surprised.

  I said, “You’re an animal, right? And you’ve got a lot of cells. So you’re multicellular, bingo.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jenn said. “A worm doesn’t have a backbone?”

  “Right. It’s just pure muscular worminess.”

  Mackenzie couldn’t get on the quizlet. “I got on it yesterday, and I tried again today and I couldn’t.”