Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  He kept reading. “Every bone in your body is joined to at least one other bone. Put your thumb and first finger together. Can you see where your fingers touch?”

  Some animals couldn’t do that, I said—for instance, a dog has to pick things up with its mouth. However, he can smell much better than we do.

  “He can smell a lot better,” said Percy.

  I leaned over to the girl sitting near us. “Are we talking too loud for you?”

  “Just a little bit,” she said.

  Percy kept reading, but now he whispered. He had trouble with the word ligaments.

  “That’s one of the longest words so far,” I said. “Ligaments are like rubber bands.”

  “I think I actually know how to spell the word through,” Percy said. “T-H-R-O-H.”

  I typed the word on my computer screen. “The way I think of it is, in order to get all the way through the word, you have to go through this O-U tunnel.”

  He nodded. “I’m a good speller. I actually know if there’s a word that isn’t spelled right.”

  He whisper-read another page. After so many halting readers I’d been helping recently in middle school, it was a joy to hear this gentle second-grader chug right along.

  Mrs. Thurston was explaining compound words like baseball to her “normal” students. Percy told me how he jump-roped. “You have two important joints in your skull,” he read. “I like to swing a lot. Sometimes I actually swing for twenty-five whole minutes straight.” He pulled out his vest.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I wear it three times a day.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I wear it.”

  I pointed to a word. “Do you know this one? This is a tough one.”

  He looked at it. “Cartilage,” he read.

  “Dang!”

  “It is made of soft, rubbery cartilage,” he read. “I’m a good reader!”

  “All right, let me ask you a question. How many bones are in the body?”

  “Two hundred six.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think you did a good job with this book.”

  He looked at the clock. “Wow, recess is in only seven minutes!”

  “Do you like swinging in recess?”

  “Yeah, but I also like playing with Tyler. Unless he owes his whole recess, like he usually does.”

  “Poor guy,” I said. “Where’s Tyler now?”

  “He’s in Mr. P.’s. He’s the one who makes him owe so much recess. He isn’t getting work done. I keep telling him to get his work done.”

  “Well, maybe he has a little trouble with reading.”

  “Yeah, he does. I try to help him out when he reads.”

  “That’s good, because everybody learns at a different rate.”

  “First I sound it out for him, and then he usually knows the word. But he doesn’t sound it out.”

  Mrs. Thurston said, “Eaman, I have a feeling that you should not be sitting anywhere near Jayson. You need to make better choices.”

  I sat back and yawned and whispered, “Holy shit,” to myself.

  I went over to Curtis. He’d learned how to spell difficult, which was one of the spelling words Mrs. Thurston had given them.

  Mrs. Thurston was dealing out punishments to various children. “You already owe some recess time today,” she said. “It’s about the choices we make.” The noise grew. “Uh, you know what? I’m having a really hard time hearing. And I shouldn’t be. Coral, where is your attention focused? Britney, what are you supposed to be doing right now? I’m still hearing chatting from people sitting on the floor. What are you supposed to be doing when you’re sitting on the floor?” Some of the kids had raised their hands, showing that they were ready to line up. She nodded to the hand-raisers to line up at the door. I stood up, figuring that I should.

  Mrs. Thurston said, “Those of you who have more than five things in your folder? You are staying with me as part of your recess.”

  “I only have four things!”

  “AND, if you have less than five things in your folder, you are quietly getting yourself ready.” She pointed to a boy. “Wear your jacket, you can always take it off.”

  “I don’t have my jacket.”

  “Whose job is that?” said Mrs. Thurston. “Whose job is it to get dressed in the morning?”

  “Mine.”

  More hands signaled readiness. I asked Tyler what was up. He was trying to finish his crossword puzzle.

  “I have things that aren’t done,” he said.

  Mrs. Thurston counted the things in somebody’s folder. “Four, five, SIX. Sit down!”

  Tyler said something to me I couldn’t hear, so I sat back down to be closer to him, accidentally sitting on my computer. “Whoa,” I said.

  “One time my dad almost sat on his tablet,” Tyler said.

  “Corey! Come get to work. You’ve lost some reading time. You’re not reading out loud anymore, you’re sitting here. I don’t want you reading anymore to Alison. You’ve lost that privilege. Marnie! You’ve got tons to finish! Focus!”

  Tyler and I murmured our way through another word in the crossword.

  “Um, I’m not going to let the rest of the class go out, because I’m still hearing chatting in the line!” Mrs. Thurston said. “I’m still hearing chatting!”

  Suddenly I realized that the chatting she was hearing was my murmured coaching of Tyler. I looked up.

  “You go out for recess,” Mrs. Thurston said to me.

  “Oh, you’re staying?” I said.

  “I’m staying with them.” She pointed to six sad laggards. She turned to Tyler. “You’re focusing on what you need to do,” she said.

  I got in front of the line.

  “Jayson, you’re standing in the back for your ten minutes,” Mrs. Thurston said. He had lost ten minutes of recess for an earlier infraction.

  I asked her how long recess was.

  “The bell rings,” Mrs. Thurston said. “You’ll know when to come back.”

  She stood beside the line of silent children, near Ethan, the line leader. They began chanting. “WHEN MY HANDS ARE AT MY SIDES, AND I’M LINED UP STRAIGHT AND TALL, MOUTH IS SHUT, EYES LOOK AHEAD, I’M READY FOR THE HALL.” Mrs. Thurston gave a nod. “Ethan, you may go ahead.”

  “My gosh,” I said. “That’s excellent.” I hurried along beside Jayson.

  Jayson said, “We’ve been practicing that for SO LONG we know it.”

  The door leading to a cement sidewalk squeaked as it opened. “It’s so sunny out!” said Jayson. “What are you doing?”

  “I guess I’m on duty,” I said. “Will you explain it to me?”

  “I have to stand on the map.” We walked around the side of the school and Jayson stopped on a ten-foot-wide map of the United States that was painted on the asphalt. Most of the kids sprinted off toward the playground. “Nice jacket,” I said to Jayson, just to have something to say. The snow was gone, the frozen pond was gone; I could see revealed, along with the swingset and various climbing structures and a field of dandelioned grass, a large assemblage of bolted-together tractor tires, over which several kids were already screamingly scrambling.

  “Look at all those tires!” I said. “This is where you have to stand?”

  Jayson nodded.

  A girl ran up and said, “He has twenty minutes,” and ran off.

  “Ten!” called Jayson after her.

  “Just ten,” I said. I turned to him. “That’s kind of a bummer.”

  “Mm.”

  I asked him what had happened, but he didn’t want to get into it. He had a round serious face with straight black bangs and black sneakers and a jacket with white sleeves.

  “Do you want me to go somewhere else?” I said.

  “You have to g
o,” said Jayson. “When my ten minutes are up, you have to come and get me.”

  “Okay, good luck!” I waved and walked toward the tractor tires, setting the stopwatch on my phone so that I’d know when to set Jayson free from his exile in the United States.

  I made a slow wide circuit over the newly green grass, amazed by all the dandelions, and checked in with a young teacher, Ms. Fierro, who was standing in the shade near a picnic table with several discarded jackets on it. I asked if there was any place in particular I should be.

  “You’re supposed to stay with Percy,” she said, when I told her who I was subbing for.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “I’ll hang tight with Percy.”

  “Not too tight, though,” she said.

  I said, “He seems perfectly—”

  “I know!” said Ms. Fierro, shaking her head.

  “He’s got a weighted vest and all kinds of fancy stuff.”

  “And he’s like one of the best students,” she said.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to get things,” Ms. Fierro said. “I don’t get everything, either.” She laughed. I wandered off in search of Percy. A girl fell while she was running. “Are you okay, Sukey?” asked her friend, with two hands on her mouth. Sukey got up and kept running. Percy was standing near the swingsets waiting for his turn to swing. He wasn’t with Tyler because Tyler was inside with Mrs. Thurston. I was hesitant to embarrass him, so I turned and went back to the asphalt United States—I felt sorry for Jayson, who looked abandoned and forlorn.

  “How much time has it been?” he asked.

  “It’s been two minutes,” I said. “I’ll come get you, don’t worry.” I walked the grass some more. A little boy zoomed past me and turned, smiling, hoping I’d noticed. “Wow, that was fast,” I said. A girl called, “Hi, Anna! Hi, Anna!” I loved these kids.

  I walked over to the screamiest place, near the wide shiny slide. A cluster of boys were sliding down the sliding pole. A girl told her friend that her mom had decided to make gingerbread muffins, not gingerbread men. I looked over at Jayson, a tiny figure with white sleeves. I walked back to him and checked my phone. “Special time report,” I said. “Six minutes, forty-five seconds.” I looked down at the map. “You want to know where California is? You’re standing on South Dakota. Over here is California. If you flew across the United States, and you landed right here, this is Maine. This is where we are. What state were you born in?”

  “Maine,” said Jayson.

  A girl came up. “What are you doing on the map?”

  “We’re learning about the United States,” I said.

  The girl tapped her foot on Massachusetts. “That’s Massachusetts,” she said. She tapped on New Hampshire. “This is New York.”

  I showed her Long Island, and where New York State was.

  “That’s so big,” she said. “You know what the biggest state is in the United States? Texas!”

  “Can you find it?”

  She tapped her toe on Texas. “I’ve got to go back,” she said. She ran to rejoin her friends near the basketball hoop.

  Jayson took a step over to Florida. “That’s an interesting one, Florida,” I said. “Florida is where they have hurricanes.”

  “Why is that one an island?” he asked, pointing.

  “That’s Alaska. That’s near the north pole, and it doesn’t fit on the map because it’s not connected to these ones.” I looked at my phone. It said nine minutes and something. Close enough. “And you, my friend, are free to go!”

  Jayson walked off and found a friend.

  I moseyed past two teachers. One was telling the other what to expect. “You’re going to find parents who don’t help their kids, and you’re going to find teachers who are working so hard with those lower-echelon kids, whose situation could be prevented. And the kids in the middle get lost.” Ms. Fierro, who’d told me to stay with Percy, was standing off to one side by herself.

  “Sun, happy children, my gosh,” I said to her.

  “I miss the days when they had two recesses,” she said. “I think they should have two recesses. For the second-graders, this is all they get for the day. It’s over at ten thirty-five, and then it’s all learning.”

  “They’re burrowing away in there,” I said, “doing the parts of speech, jeez.”

  “Yeah, I think next year they’re not going to do this. This is an idea of the administration’s. They thought they could use lunch for motor breaks, but lunch isn’t like being a crazy wild child. You’ve got your head down, you’re eating, it’s very structured.”

  She made a no-no gesture at a boy. “They’ve started playing a game where a boy will hug a girl,” she said.

  I went over to Percy. “How’s it going?” He was waiting for another turn at the swings.

  Marnie walked up, coughing and limping. “I fell on the bench,” she said.

  “You hurt your leg.”

  “Uh-huh.” She coughed and ran off. The sunlit wildness and screaming reached a crescendo and tapered off a bit. The bell rang. Everyone ran toward the asphalt map area to line up.

  A boy held up a sweatshirt. “I found this on the ground,” he said.

  “Do you know what to do with it?”

  “I have to bring it to lost-and-found with another thing I found.”

  “Can I take off my jacket?” asked a girl.

  “Sure, just tie it around your waist,” I said.

  “Can I take off my jacket?”

  The line leaders stood in front of their four lines.

  “I’m a door helper,” said a boy.

  “So when do I tell people to go?”

  “You pick which class to go first.”

  “Okay.” I raised my arm. “Quiet. Hush it up!”

  “QUIET,” said a girl. “The teacher said.”

  I picked what seemed to be the quietest line, and they marched toward the door. The other lines followed. As we turned the corner I could hear Mrs. Thurston saying, “Voices off.” Reed was in the middle of explaining to his friend why he was carrying his shoe. “Reed. Stop. Put your shoe on. Step out of line and put your shoe on. Voices are off in the hallway. Voices off in the hallway.”

  I held the door for a girl, who said, “Thank you.”

  “Oh my goodness, so much talking in the quiet zone,” said Mrs. Thurston.

  It was snack time. Curtis got out a juice pack and poked in a straw. “Do you like peanut butter and fluff?” he asked me.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “It tastes good,” he said.

  Mrs. Thurston distributed Band-Aids and warned a boy not to put his milk on the corner of the desk. “You’ll have spilled milk,” she said. “Reed and Jayson, you should not be talking. You have work to do.”

  “Are you going to be at movie night?” Percy asked me.

  “I’m not. What happens on movie night?”

  Mrs. Thurston looked in our direction. “There’s an awful lot of talking. The only voices I should really hear are Marc’s, Dale’s, and Tricia’s. Everyone else should be quietly working.”

  In a whisper, Curtis asked me how old I was. I told him: fifty-seven.

  “My great-uncle had a heart attack,” he said.

  Percy had a sheet of addition to do. He worked at it steadily. Curtis still hadn’t done his crossword puzzle. Marnie coughed juicily on us.

  “You should probably stay home tomorrow,” I said.

  “Adrian?” Mrs. Thurston said. “You’re not interrupting anyone else’s work, you’re getting to work yourself.”

  Curtis and I whispered over his crossword.

  “FOCUS,” said Mrs. Thurston, to Reed. “Focus, focus, focus.”

  “Focus, hocus, pocus,” said Lila.

  “Focus, hocus, pocus,” echoed Mrs.
Thurston. She indulged the smart ones.

  Curtis figured out the answer to one-down: Monday.

  Mrs. Thurston had written a sentence with misspelled words in it on her easel. “Coral—go sit down and work,” she said. “You have a desk all by yourself. You should be able to find more than one word spelled wrong.”

  Curtis and I sounded out the word including.

  “Jayson, you should not be chatting. Reed, move over, you have more work to finish. Open your folder.”

  “I finished,” said Reed.

  “No, you did not finish. There are like three or four things in your folder. You don’t just stick them somewhere else. You finish them. That’s your goal, during snack time.”

  “I know,” said Reed. He had several markers on his desk.

  “Put those markers away. I took them out of your bucket yesterday. Go put them away where they belong. This is not what we do during snack time.”

  “I already cleaned out my bucket,” said Reed.

  “NO, I DID,” said Mrs. Thurston angrily. “I went through all the buckets, and I sharpened a whole bunch of pencils, and I took all the extra erasers and pencil grips out that were sitting in there. They should not be in there. Markers and crayons should not be in those pencil buckets. Those are for your pencils. The art center buckets are over behind the art center table.”

  Curtis sounded out a clue: Continuing to do something. We are ______ learning our spelling words. We got the answer: still. I whisper-explained why a crossword puzzle was called a crossword: the words crossed.

  Mrs. Thurston began a lesson on apostrophes. “Reed, who do I still hear talking? How many times have I said in the last ten minutes, ‘Stop talking’? Tyler and Percy, that’s not what I should see, that’s why you’re not seated together. Britney, when do I put an apostrophe in a word?”

  “When it’s someone’s,” said Britney.

  “When it’s someone’s. You need an apostrophe-s if it belongs to somebody. So: Mrs. Thurston’s class right now should be sitting quietly on the floor, listening.” She told them about contractions. “You put two words together, and you pop out some letters. Where those letters pop out, you put an apostrophe. You have to find where those apostrophes go. I want you to write the sentences again correctly. There is an apostrophe in every one. I’m giving you a hint! There’s only one in each sentence, not more than one.”