Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

“Good. Okay. PUT YOUR NAME AT THE TOP. Grab your books. I want to see this room cleaned UP! Good work today! Lots of good concepts mastered!”

  “I will be back for homeroom!” said Roxanne.

  “Good, see you then.”

  “I might be back at the end of the day,” said Kimbra.

  “Hope to see you around.”

  “Are you going to be here tomorrow, too?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Noah, can I show you a handshake real quick?” said Jarrett. He shook Noah’s hand and did a little shuffle and a double fist-tap.

  —

  NEXT BLOCK, a tall kid, Jerome, walked in. “Can I take the attendance down?”

  “Yes, but we haven’t taken it yet,” I said.

  “I’m just making sure ahead of time.”

  “That’s so prepared of you,” I said.

  “I know, right?”

  Another kid, Clint, came in, wearing an Apache helicopter T-shirt. “If you need help with the attendance, just ask me,” he said.

  “No, don’t ask Clint,” said Jerome, “he’s the biggest troublemaker in this entire school.”

  Astrid said to Clint, “You got sent out of Ms. Plancon’s room three times.”

  “Don’t bring that up,” said Clint.

  “WELCOME,” I said. I called out eighteen names, checked off seventeen, signed the sheet, and handed it to Jerome. “Okay, PAGE SIXTY-FOUR of this beautiful green textbook that actually matches the carpet. Page sixty-four. These pages are kind of shiny. They’re covered with words. We’re going to be talking about why people migrate. What do you do when you migrate?”

  Brandon’s hand shot up, and then he realized he didn’t know the answer. He pulled his hand down.

  Martha raised a hand. “You’re sleepy and you don’t wake up!”

  I said, “That is an excellent try, but—sleep?”

  “Hibernate,” she said, her hand on her forehead.

  Astrid, who had a loud singing voice, read the beginning of the chapter, and she read it well. We talked about Cuba, about persecution in Europe, about whether Jamaica was pronounced Jamaica or Jameeka, about how tall I was, and about the job description of a demographer. Amber found a definition of demographer in the back of the textbook. She read, “It’s a scientist who studies human populations, including their size, growth, density, distribution, and rates of births, marriages, and”—she smacked her hand down on the page—“deaths.” There were two minutes left before lunch.

  “Can you play basketball?” asked Kent. “Can you jump and turn and dunk the ball?” asked Kent.

  “Oh, I did the flying double axel,” I said. “They called me the Rocket. I was up there!”

  “I’m going to call you Rocket!” said Kent.

  “No, I wasn’t very good at basketball,” I said. “Besides height, you actually have to have skill. Can you palm the ball?”

  “I can,” said Kent.

  I checked the big hand on the clock. “All right, guys, lunch.”

  “Bye, Rocket!” said Astrid.

  “Bye, Rocket!” said Kent.

  Ricky was hopping in place. “Can you let go of my foot?” he said to Dougal. “I can’t go downstairs like this!” He and Dougal hopped into the hall.

  I went to the teachers’ break room to get another snack pack of potato chips. Two teachers, Mrs. Yancey and Ms. Plancon, were eating leftover birthday cake and complaining about kids. Mrs. Yancey said, “I was like, ‘In the future, if you’re standing outside my door because you came to class, you need to not have a full conversation that I can hear from my desk.’ They were like, ‘Bleh bleh bleh,’ while they were waiting at the door.”

  “They’re wound today,” said Ms. Plancon.

  “Why? Why are they wound?” asked Mrs. Yancey. “There’s nothing exciting or fun happening today.”

  I said, “I think they got wound up in my class, and I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, they were wound up from the start,” said Ms. Plancon.

  They resumed an earlier conversation about Jerome. Mrs. Yancey said, “I said to him, ‘Aren’t you a little bit embarrassed? We have a guest in our classroom today. This is the impression that she has of you—that you are that kid? Who makes that sort of comment?’”

  “He doesn’t care,” said Ms. Plancon.

  “We’re starting our argumentative essays,” Mrs. Yancey said.

  “You’d think he’d be good at that!”

  “I actually said that,” said Mrs. Yancey. “I said, ‘Spending all this time with you, I know that arguing is something you do really well.’ So we’re brainstorming all these topics. We had Haskel, who was saying stuff like, ‘You know, I really think that the US military should be paid more, because look how much professional athletes make.’ It was great. And then Ricky said, ‘All hungry people should be fed.’ Really just these neat, insightful social issues that they’re coming up with. And Jerome says, ‘Skechers are a ripoff.’”

  Ms. Plancon laughed. “That’s so . . . !”

  “I’m like, ‘Child, you have no soul!’ They need to learn to think. Marty asked to go to the toilet. I’m like, ‘Again?’ And I’m like, ‘What is taking you so long? What are you doing?’”

  “He’s done,” said Ms. Plancon.

  “Done for the year, or done with the activity?” Mrs. Yancey.

  “I think he’s done with the year,” said Ms. Plancon.

  I chewed a potato chip.

  “I bought this thing called Stress Relief,” said Ms. Plancon. “It’s an aromatherapy thing.”

  “Did it work?” asked Mrs. Yancey.

  “No,” said Ms. Plancon. “But I’m going to pull it out. I am so wound right now.”

  Mrs. Yancey said, “They’d go, ‘This stinks! What’s that smell? Bleh bleh bleh!’”

  “Take care,” I said, softly closing the door.

  My room was quiet. Textbooks and worksheets and backpacks lay on the desks, awaiting the return of seventeen children.

  The school secretary arrived to tell me to call Beth, the sub caller.

  I dialed 8 for an outside line. Beth said that a request had come into the central office for a tutor for a hearing-impaired middle school boy. It was a full-time tutoring job, all day, one on one, to help him catch up with his work, and it paid twenty-five dollars an hour. It went to the end of the school year.

  “Wow, that’s a lovely salary,” I said. “The only thing is I kind of like being in class with these kids. Do you have any advice?” Beth said it was completely up to me. I said I’d call my wife and think it over and get back to her in five minutes.

  I called my wife and told her the situation. She said I should do what I genuinely wanted to do. I heard noise from the hall. “Uh-oh, the students are coming back now,” I said. “Love you. Bye-bye.”

  Clint was making crazy coughing sounds.

  “Bye, Estelle,” said Goldie.

  “Hello! Hello!” I said. “Come on in!” As soon as I saw the kids take their seats and look up at me expectantly—this group of complete strangers that had become, for one day, my boon companions and fellow conspirators—I knew I couldn’t possibly take the tutoring job. What, miss this madness? Did I want to spend all day, every day, forcing a hearing-impaired boy to master a curriculum that I mostly didn’t believe in? No. I was a substitute.

  “I like piggies,” said Goldie. “They go glump glump glump!”

  “Where were we?” I said.

  “How are you doing, Rocket?” said Kent.

  “Do you have any candy?” said Rosabelle.

  Out in the hall, a moving bolus of kids, thankfully not ones from my class, were making a racket. A little boy emerged from a nearby classroom and screamed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! GO TO YOUR CLASSES!”

  I closed the door,
my eyes big. “Did you hear that? That was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Can I read?” asked Philip. Philip read, and then Jerome read. “In the 1800s, many Scandinoo—”

  “Scandinavians,” said Astrid.

  “Oh, well, thank you,” said Jerome good-naturedly. “Many Scandinavians moved to Minnesota and Wisconsin. They wanted their own land, which was scarce in Scandinavia. Some also left to escape religious persecution.”

  “So the Scandinavians were pushed out of their former lands,” I said. “They said, We’re tired of Sweden and we’re tired of Norway, so we’re going to roll up our sleeves nice and high, and we’re going to—”

  Jerome rolled up his sleeves and flexed his arms.

  “Show off our guns,” I said.

  “Locked and loaded,” said Jerome, quivering.

  “And then we are going to move to the United States.”

  “What page?” said Clint. I told him. Clint read about Ireland, and he did it fluently. Then, as we talked about the potato famine, things went off the rails. Martha put her hand up. “Do you think there’s going to be a World War III?”

  The question irritated Jerome. “Why would you be thinking of that?” he said. While I tried to explain urbanization, he could not shut up. His mouth just kept going. Finally I said, “GOD. JEEPERS CRIMINY! BE QUIET. If I could teach you one thing in this class, what would the one thing be?”

  “That I should have had a V8?” said Jerome.

  “Be quiet,” said Astrid.

  I said, “If somebody is waving his arms like an idiot, trying to convey some idea, and you’re sitting there going, ‘I like my dirt bikes, I like my mudding trucks’—no, it’s rude, right? And it causes people to give little speeches. Remember that.”

  “What’s happening in Egypt?” said Dougal. “There’s smoke coming from the cities.”

  “What page is that, sir?”

  “Page sixty-nine,” said Dougal.

  “There’s smoke coming from page sixty-nine, let’s check it out.” I found the picture. “All right, we’ve got a picture. Does anyone want to read the caption?”

  Astrid spun around in her chair and said furiously, “SHHHHHHHH!”

  “Oh my gosh,” I said, impressed. “The spittle was spraying. Do you want to read it?” Astrid read the caption perfectly. It was unhelpful. “Across the world, growing cities face special challenges,” etc.

  “So in Cairo, Egypt’s capital,” I said, “they’re taking mud from the riverside, and what are they doing with the mud?”

  “They’re making homes,” said Astrid.

  “Right. And here’s this modern city behind them. Great. We have blazed through the chapter. And now it’s worksheet time. Who wants to pass out the worksheets?”

  “I do, I want to be a suckup,” said Jerome.

  “I want to grow a beard just like him,” said Kent.

  “And while we’re doing that, who wants to read another random word from the dictionary?”

  Rosabelle flipped through the pages until she found the word egg. “There’s two definitions,” she said. “Egg number one. Oval or round body laid by a female bird, fish, etc., containing the germ of a new individual.”

  “The germ of a new individual,” I said. “Isn’t that beautiful? It’s an egg. Next definition.”

  “To urge or incite,” Rosabelle read, with help from me.

  “This is kind of interesting,” I said.

  “Nuh-uh,” said Clint.

  “The germ of a new baby,” said Jerome. “Looking good in the pan.”

  “Guys, EGG. Crack, birdie comes out. But there’s also the second definition, which is ‘urge.’ I’m going to egg you on! Egg you on. That’s a totally different word. I don’t know why, but it’s true. We just learned it. And now let’s work on the worksheet. Ten minutes to do side one!”

  A few minutes into the worksheet, Jerome stole Rosabelle’s pencil and the class disintegrated. The girls screamed their outrage at the malicious boys.

  Astrid said, “You want me to get them to be quiet? I’ll sing.”

  Ruby said, “I can go get the teacher next door.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?”

  “Yes, because I can’t concentrate,” Ruby said.

  Astrid began singing loudly.

  “Don’t sing,” I said.

  “I can’t concentrate,” said Ruby. She went next door.

  A minute later, Mrs. Ricker stood in the doorway. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I understand you are to be doing a worksheet,” she said. “You are to be seated and silent, doing that worksheet. This door is open. If I hear you I will come back, and it will not be fun for you.”

  “I’m sorry they made so much noise,” I said to her.

  “No, no, it’s fine, sometimes they take advantage,” Mrs. Ricker said. She went back to teaching her class. My class went funereally silent.

  “See, that’s what’s embarrassing,” I whispered. “That’s embarrassing for me.”

  For the rest of the class, I made the rounds, helping kids with Main Idea B and questions 6 and 9. “I need some ideas,” said Goldie. “Some people are too poor to pay their bills?”

  “Put that down, good,” I said.

  They began handing in their worksheets.

  “I’ve finished!” said Ricky.

  “I’ve finished!” said Philip.

  “Good, bring them up. Pristine. Good. Excellent. You are the man.”

  What a disaster. Once again I’d allowed the class to be hijacked by a feud between three of the loud-but-good girls and three of the loud-and-bad boys. I should have been able to shut it down with some kind of timely fierce threat display, but instead I’d tried to joke my way through, and it hadn’t worked. I felt chastened and queasy and incompetent.

  “Mr. Baker,” said Astrid, “we’re one minute late for locker break.”

  “LOCKER BREAK,” I announced. What was locker break?

  “What do you do if you’re not done?” said Rosabelle. “I couldn’t get much done, it was too noisy. Should I do it for homework?”

  “Do you want to do it for homework? Or do you just want to hand it in?”

  She handed it to me.

  “I didn’t finish,” said Amber, who had left some lines blank.

  “Don’t worry about it, you did a good job with it,” I said.

  When they’d gone to their lockers and returned, when all the textbooks were piled and all the worksheets were handed in with names on the top, they made their daily forced migration to their next class. What a bust. I looked at the sub plans. “Now what are we doing, for flip’s sake?” I whispered to myself.

  —

  NEXT. Theresa, a fleshy girl with cropped salmon-colored pants, held an ice pack to her face. “It’s leaking already,” she said.

  “Wow, this is a huge class,” I said.

  “Twenty-two people,” said Theresa.

  “ALL RIGHT, SHHH,” I said to everyone. “Mrs. Ricker’s door is open, and she doesn’t like loud noise, and I don’t either, so be quiet, okay? I’m going to do something really unusual. I’m going to take attendance.”

  I called out seven names. “Are we having fun yet?”

  “Yes,” said Hugo.

  I called eight more names. “You know,” I said, “when they used to take attendance, and I was in class, I was always embarrassed when they would get to my name. My name is Nick. So I hate doing this, but I have to.”

  I called out the last seven names. Only Wesley was absent. “Who knows the way to the office?”

  “Everyone does,” said Avery, raising his hand.

  “All right, you’re the first person I saw to raise your hand.”

  Dede asked, “Why is there a dictionary on the desk?”

 
Because it was random dictionary word time, I said. “Just put your finger down anywhere on this page,” I said.

  “There,” Dede said. Her finger was at flexion.

  “Flexion, that’s a good one.”

  “What’s that?” said Dede.

  “FLEXION,” I said. I made two fists and flexed my arms. “Flexion. Flexion is the bending of a joint or limb by means of the flexor muscles. The FLEXOR MUSCLES.” I snapped the dictionary closed. “All right, today there’s going to be total silence, and total happiness. Total contentment. And total migration, because we are talking about, bada-bing, Why People Migrate. What is migration?”

  Hands went up. “It’s when people move,” said Shannon.

  “Right, butterflies migrate, but we’re talking about people. There’s incredible chatting to this side of the room, I don’t like it. I will take names.”

  “Carson,” said Shannon.

  “I was in a car that got hit by a train and I got brain damage,” said Carson rapidly.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Hugo. “He also said he played with gasoline.”

  “He said he was hit by a sniper,” whispered Shannon.

  I went over to Carson and looked at him. He shook his head rapidly and made a bubbling, laughing sound. “Hello,” I said. He looked up at me with goggle eyes. I turned to a boy near him, Amos, who’d had his hand up. “What were you going to say?”

  Amos said, “Migration is like when people move to different parts of the country, or the world, to get resources or stuff?”

  “Excellent,” I said. “This guy’s good. Textbook, page sixty-four. Have you been reading this textbook, by the way?”

  Yes!

  “Have you been enjoying this textbook?”

  No.

  “Have you been loving this textbook?”

  No!

  “I have been loving this textbook,” said Wendell, embracing it.

  “What page?” said Brody.

  “Six four,” I said. “Was anybody here born not in the United States?”

  “I was born in New Hampshire,” said Shannon.

  I whistled. “You’re an immigrant!”

  “I was born in York Hospital,” said Amos.

  Commotion.

  “Carson, be quiet!” said Hugo.