Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  Thin pink filaments of glue hung off Sebastian’s bridge. “It’s like a Spider-Man bridge,” he said.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  He let the glue dry and looked at his worksheet. He wrote a few answers, scribbling them at high speed. “Mrs. Prideaux?” he said.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  “I just have a question,” said Sebastian.

  “Done!” said Pete. He sighed with relief.

  More pencil sharpening. This particular pencil sharpener was an expensive one, higher pitched than the middle-school pencil sharpener.

  Taylor sketched a rectangle. Mr. C. measured the angles with a protractor. “Check this out,” he said to me. “All ninety degrees.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “I just drew it,” said Taylor.

  “Freehand,” said Mr. C. “Now the area.”

  Taylor carefully added up the length of all four sides.

  “Nope,” said Mr. C. “That’s perimeter.”

  “Oh, area.”

  “Okay, folks,” said Mrs. Prideaux, “I’m going to give you a few more minutes, actually three minutes, and then we’re moving right into the next section.”

  One of Sebastian’s recently glued Popsicle sticks fell loose. He glued it back in place.

  Mrs. Prideaux went over to Pete, who had his iPad out. “Put that away,” she said. “This is your one warning. You’re texting.”

  “It’s not texting,” said Pete.

  “It looks like you’re texting to me, or you’re on Facebook. I don’t care which it is.”

  “It was a blog.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “There’s a difference, Mrs. Prideaux,” muttered Sebastian.

  “You don’t do that in class!” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  “I’ve done all the stuff you wanted me to do,” said Pete.

  “It doesn’t matter! You could move right on to your core curriculum standards, or catch up on some of the old stuff that you haven’t done.”

  “A blog!” said Sebastian, chuckling.

  Taylor made an elephantine yawn.

  “What the hell was that for?” said Sebastian. “The loudest yawn?” He stood up and stretched, quoting Eminem: “‘Music is like magic, there’s a certain feeling you get, when you’re real and you spit and people are feeling your shit.’” Then he said, “Mrs. Prideaux, what’s my grade in this class?”

  “I’m not going to look that up right now,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  “It’s right here!” said Taylor, pointing to her computer screen. “Look it up for yourself.”

  Mrs. Prideaux and Sebastian went over to the computer. “Eighty-one,” she said. “I hope you’re not looking at the other grades. Taylor, you’re missing a whole big grade in there. Sebastian, back in your seat.”

  Taylor raised a ruler and pretended to measure Sebastian’s skull with it.

  “Today is not the day you want to hit me with a ruler,” said Sebastian. “Once I get more than three hours of sleep, I’ll let you know.”

  Mrs. Prideaux stopped by Pearl’s desk. She said, “When you measure the four angles of a quadrilateral together, they equal . . . ?”

  I asked Sebastian how he passed the time at night.

  “I listen to my music and read, basically. I don’t play games. I have better things to do than assault my mind with that stuff.” He leapt up and walked across the room again.

  Mr. C. was showing Mrs. Prideaux a parallelogram that Taylor had just drawn. “He drew it freehand,” he said. “It’s right on the money all the way around.”

  “Sebastian! Back over, sit down,” said Mrs. Prideaux. She grabbed a piece of chalk. “Now, I want everyone’s attention up here. Taylor!”

  “Wha?” said Taylor, pretending to be startled.

  “I want your attention up here. We’re going to do polygon areas today.” She drew an octagon, with sides that were ten inches long. “To calculate the area of an octagon, we need to know what the perimeter is. So what is the perimeter of this octagon?”

  “Eighty,” said Dave.

  “Nice job, Dave,” said Sebastian.

  “Yep, it’s eighty,” Mrs. Prideaux said. “Now the other thing that you will get is the apothem.” She had an idiosyncratic way of pronouncing apothem: it sounded as if she was saying opossum, but with a lisp. “The opossum is a measurement from the side of the polygon to the center. So I’m going to say that this polygon has an opossum of thirteen.” She wrote the formula on the board: “One-half times the opossum times the perimeter equals the area.”

  “So half the opossum?” said Sebastian.

  “Yes, so I would put one-half times thirteen times eighty. And I will get—”

  “Five twenty,” said Dave, checking his calculator.

  “Is it five twenty? Good.”

  “You’re amazing, Dave,” said Sebastian.

  “So the area of this octagon is five hundred and twenty units. If I said it was inches it would be square inches.” She drew a hexagon and asked Pete to figure out the perimeter. He was very nearsighted, so he went up to the board and peered at it.

  “Have you gotten your eyes checked lately, Pete?” said Pearl.

  “Yeah, I have. I’m getting contacts soon.”

  “Soon’s not enough,” said Sebastian.

  “Why don’t you wear glasses?” said Dave.

  “Because with my luck, they would break in a week,” said Pete.

  “If you can’t find your phone, how are you going to find a frigging contact that’s about as big as your fingernail?” said Dave.

  Mrs. Prideaux held up a handout. “I want everyone to find this page,” she said. “We’re almost done with this standard.”

  I made a pop-eyed face to entertain myself.

  “Hiccups?” said Sebastian to me. “You’ve got hiccups?” He held out some Tic Tacs for me.

  “I was just making a stupid face, sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t judge.”

  Zeke snapped a pencil in two.

  “Zeke!” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  A teacher came to the door to talk to Mrs. Prideaux.

  “Zeke’s a troublemaker, don’t make him mad,” said Sebastian. “He will kill you. He’s been to jail. Zeke! How many times have you been to jail? Don’t lie!”

  “Like, once,” said Zeke slowly.

  “That’s one time too many, Zeke,” said Sebastian. He began working on the handout.

  “You’re into this stuff,” I said to Sebastian.

  “I hate math,” Sebastian said. “Hate math altogether. Hate geometry. I can do it but I hate it. Don’t tell Mrs. Prideaux I said that.”

  Mrs. Prideaux was back, and circulating, helping people calculate the area of the first polygon on the handout.

  “Can you do a polygon area on no sleep?” I asked Sebastian. “That’s your challenge.”

  Sebastian looked at the problem, did some multiplying in his head, came up with the number eighty-four, then burped. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Mighty mango,” I said. I used my calculator and, with some prompting from Sebastian, came up with the same number, eighty-four.

  Taylor left the room. “Taylor, come back!” said Sebastian. “He leaves for hours, then he comes back and doesn’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Next,” I said, tapping the paper.

  Sebastian counted the sides. “This one’s a decahedron,” he said. “Four point six two times thirty times one-half. Sixty-nine point three.” Correct, check.

  Sebastian and I began to race each other. I made a mistake and Sebastian pointed out where I’d gone wrong.

  “What can I say, you’re better than me,” I said.

  “Nah.” In the middle of doing one problem, Sebastian heard someone across the ro
om say the word douche. “Hey,” he said. “No one says douche anymore.”

  Pete pointed at the figures on the chalkboard. “How am I supposed to remember that?”

  “You are supposed to use the formula,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  “Even with the formula I’m going to get confused,” said Pete.

  “But the formula is just one-half times the opossum times the perimeter.”

  My math sparkplugs were badly corroded, and I forgot to multiply by 0.5. Sebastian corrected my error. We got the same answer for the next one. “I was actually right,” I said. “Praise the holy maker.”

  “The baby Jesus,” said Sebastian.

  We got to the bottom of the page. I sighed with relief.

  Sebastian’s hand shot up. “Mrs. Prideaux, I finished it.”

  “All right, good. On the back there’s another whole page of fun and excitement.”

  Sebastian flipped over the paper to reveal several more complicated polygon problems involving square roots. The sample problem had an error on it. The area of an octagon that fit neatly within a square with four-inch sides could not be twenty-one square inches, because the area of the entire square would only be sixteen square inches. Sebastian went to Mrs. Prideaux and showed her the mistake. “You’re right, it should be half,” said Mrs. Prideaux. “Why did they do that? Why do they do these things?” She began telling the other students about the error in the example on the second page of the handout.

  “Mrs. Prideaux, I finished it,” said Sebastian.

  “Very good,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  I asked him what they were reading in Language Arts, now that they’d finished Shawshank. They were on to The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.

  “Potato salad,” said Taylor. Zeke was abusing a yardstick. Mrs. Prideaux said, “When you get that yardstick in your hand, it gives you a feeling of power. It’s not really a good thing to have.”

  “I’ll take this to my next class,” said Zeke. “I want to whack everybody. I just want to bash Tucker’s face in.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Zeke’s a killer,” said Sebastian. “Zeke has that face of killing. Mass murderer.”

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  Mrs. Prideaux held the worksheets that she’d collected as the special ed students went off to their next class. “I don’t know why they can’t have nice simple little numbers,” she said.

  “All those radicals!” said Mr. C. “I won’t be back till the end of the day. I’m teaching chemistry.”

  “That should be fun,” said Mrs. Prideaux. She shook my hand. “Thank you, it was nice to meet you.”

  “A pleasure to be in your class,” I said.

  —

  “GOOD MORNING, AGAIN,” said Ms. Gorton in Mr. Bowles’s room. She was handing out candy from a plastic bag. “Can you have chocolate?” she asked Charles, one of the two kids I was in charge of for that block.

  “I can have chocolate, but not peanut butter,” he said. He had black hair sticking out from under a blue baseball hat.

  “Can you have Skittles?” She handed him the bag.

  “Oh, I like Kit Kats,” he said.

  I sat down next to Roland, my other responsibility, and introduced myself. Roland had a low voice and a baseball hat pulled low on his solid face. He looked about twenty-five.

  Charles found some Zombie lip balm in his backpack and used it on his lips.

  It was a sunny day, and I looked out the window at the brown, empty courtyard in the middle of the school. There was a robin on one of the benches. I turned to Roland. “Can anybody go out there? Or do we just look out sadly at the bird?”

  “That’s the honors courtyard,” Roland said. “The next one is the teachers’ courtyard. And the furthest one down is the senior courtyard. Technically. They’re all shut down.”

  “Soon,” said Ms. Gorton.

  “Nobody knows,” said Roland.

  Charles said, “They told us this year that nobody was allowed in there. There was shenanigans. Littering.”

  I opened the window.

  “We haven’t had air in like three months,” said Charles.

  “These computers are up for grabs,” said Ms. Gorton, piling up her binders in readiness for her next block. “Bye, guys, happy morning.”

  “Bye,” said Charles. “Thanks for the candy.”

  He was working on a sculpture of a man kneeling, made of a soda bottle and coat hanger wire.

  “Nice,” I said. “Are those arms?”

  “Yeah.”

  I pulled out an apple.

  “You better bring food with you during school,” said Charles, “because if you don’t, you’re going to be screwed.”

  “I just ran three miles,” said Roland.

  I asked him why.

  “I have gym.”

  Charles said, “I couldn’t run three miles if somebody bribed me.”

  “You’ll probably have to at some point,” I said.

  “Nope,” said Charles. “I’ve been postponing the inevitable for a very long time.”

  Roland said, “Waiting for the zombie apocalypse, when we’re all going to die?”

  “I’ll be able to fast-walk,” said Charles.

  “The place that’s safety will be exactly three miles away,” said Roland, “and you’ll have to run there.”

  “The place where it’s safety is about seven miles away,” said Charles. “My house.”

  I asked him if he had a zombie-proof air raid shelter.

  “It’s not really an air raid shelter,” Charles said. “If we had a nuclear explosion, I wouldn’t be fine.”

  “Your hamster?” said Roland.

  “Actually, no one would be fine,” said Charles.

  I said, “I don’t think we’re going to get anything like that, do you?”

  “No, no,” Charles said. “A zombie apocalypse maybe. They have an animal-testing facility right in the middle of Kansas. That’s where we get most of our food and it’s Tornado Alley.”

  I said, “So the tornado releases the animals that are being inhumanely tested, they’re pumped up on antibiotics, they’re huge chickens, they leap out and they start terrorizing the countryside?”

  “Yeah,” said Charles, “and then we pretty much get the swine flu epidemic.”

  “I see,” I said. “That’s not good.” I took a bite of my apple. “I know there’s a lot of corn in the middle of the country.”

  “Pretty much you should grow your own food,” Charles said.

  Roland said, “I don’t really care if there’s a zombie apocalypse.”

  “Really?” I said. “I don’t even like watching those damn shows. I can’t stand these people staggering around half dead, I hate it.”

  “Walk normal!” said Roland.

  Charles laughed. “I look at it like this. If you’re prepared for the zombie apocalypse, you’re prepared for almost anything.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “But I don’t even know how to shoot a gun. On those shows, they’re always having to take them out somehow. I think I’d be the first casualty.”

  Charles asked me if I knew how to fire a cannon. I didn’t.

  Roland said, “You clean it, you pack it, stick the wick in. It’s not that difficult.”

  A third kid walked in and sat down. He had long bangs and tired eyes and his name was Patrick. “Are you a new teacher here?”

  “No, I’m filling in for Mr. Bowles. I’m Mr. Intestine. No, that’s stupid, never mind, move on.”

  “You mind helping me with my test?” said Patrick.

  “By all means. What’s your test in?”

  “History.” His teacher was Ms. Hopkins.

  He handed me the t
est packet. On page 1 it said, Fill in the blank line with the correct ism. The choices were fascism, militarism, isolationism, and totalitarianism:

  Japan

  Always prepared for war

  Foreign policy of United States after World War I

  System run by a dictator having complete power, includes extreme nationalism, and often racism

  Connected to the Soviets

  Focus of growth on industry and military, low standard of living, shortage of food and consumer goods

  “Death is the safest place,” said Roland, still musing on the zombie apocalypse. “No, Canada is the safest place.”

  “Canada is not the safest place!” said Charles.

  “They have no crime,” said Roland. “The zombies would just look at the border and go, ‘Nope,’ turn around and walk away.”

  Patrick said, “My notes are on the computer. May I get a computer?”

  “Let’s just do it,” I said. I pulled up a chair next to him. “So, Japan. They were very devoted to military life. The ism connected to Japan would be which one? Isolationism is what we were doing, saying we don’t want to be bothered, right?”

  “Yeah. So . . .”

  “The Japanese were very militaristic,” I said. “They were building submarines like crazy, they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. You gotta admit that.”

  “That’s true,” Patrick said.

  I took another bite of my apple, waiting for him to figure it out.

  He tapped his finger on the word militarism. “So that would be—Japan?”

  “Bingo.”

  We looked at the next question, “Always prepared for war.” The best match for that one also seemed to be militarism. “Hm,” I said. “I guess you can reuse them?”

  Patrick went off to ask the history teacher whether you could reuse the isms.

  I went back over to Roland and Charles. “What’s been happening over here?” I said.

  “Basalt zombie stuff,” said Charles. “My grandfather, up north, gets them all the time.”