Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  To Enoch I said, “If somebody doesn’t want to be followed, don’t follow them. You know that. Makes sense, right?”

  He nodded and scuttled off. Some girls found an anthill. A scrimmage of boys screamed.

  “Mr. Baker, I’m a math genius,” said a girl named Hadley. “I know ten times ten: a hundred. Two times two I think is twenty?”

  “Do ticks like big grass?” said Noah.

  “Yes, they like tall grass,” I said. “But you won’t necessarily get a tick just because you walked in tall grass.”

  “We sat in it, too,” said Noah. “I got a tick once. It bited me. Is it time to line up, because I really want to line up!”

  Westin opened his mouth and screamed, “LINE UUUUUUUUUUUUUP!”

  January came over. “They’re chasing me again.” I told her I’d given Enoch a talking-to. She ran off.

  The school secretary came up, saying that January’s dad was there to pick her up for a doctor’s appointment.

  Westin called, “JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANUARY!”

  “Westin, that’s not necessary,” I said.

  “You’ll sleep good tonight,” said the school secretary. We filed back inside; Garrett saw his sweatshirt and made a cry of joy.

  Five minutes into the end-of-day chaos, Jaydon said, “I think I’m going to throw up a pizza bagel. It’s coming back out.”

  “Don’t let it,” I said.

  The bell rang. It was the principal, asking for our attention in order to name the Team Lasswell campers of the week, Marie Ballard and Lewis Hook. “Marie is a hardworking student who exemplifies what it takes to be a good friend. Lewis is a dedicated student in all areas of school, who is always in search of a way to make improvements and progress. Congratulations once again to Marie and Lewis for being named this week’s Team Lasswell campers of the week.”

  Mr. Mullins, a bus conductor, began calling out the digits of bus numbers. “TEN SEVENTY-THREE!” he bellowed. “TEN SEVENTY-THREE.”

  “Mine is thirteen seventy-three,” said Madeline.

  “I’m zero five seven one,” said Garrett.

  Mr. Mullins bellowed, “ZERO FIVE SEVEN ONE! ZERO FIVE SEVEN ONE.” Then he called, “TWO TWO FOUR! TWO TWO FOUR. THIRTEEN SEVENTY-ONE. THIRTEEN SEVENTY-ONE.”

  “GUYS, CAN I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION,” shouted Hadley, the math genius from the playground, in imitation of Mrs. Thurston. “TEN TIMES TEN IS ONE HUNDRED. REMEMBER THAT! OKAY? I DON’T HAVE TO YELL!”

  A girl from the class next door said, “What’s your name?”

  “Mr. Baker.”

  “What color is the sky?”

  “Blue.”

  “What’s the opposite of down?”

  “Up.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Baker blew up!”

  Ava said softly, “Mr. Baker, Westin lied.”

  He did?

  She nodded.

  “Let me tell you something,” I said. “It’s been great having you in class. I like the fact that you can read that Hop on Pop like nobody else. You’re a very interesting person. Keep it up. Do you want me to say something to Westin?”

  “He said I was cutting in the line,” she murmured.

  “THIRTEEN SEVENTY-THREE. THIRTEEN SEVENTY-THREE! TWELVE SEVENTY-ONE! TWELVE SEVENTY-ONE!”

  To Westin I said, “Did you say something you shouldn’t have said about Ava?”

  “No,” said Westin, “Garrett lied about—”

  “THIRTEEN SEVENTY-TWO! THIRTEEN SEVENTY-TWO!”

  That was Westin’s bus. He bounced off.

  “THIRTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR! THIRTEEN SEVENTY-FOUR!”

  That was Ava’s bus.

  “How long did it take you to memorize all those numbers?” I asked Hadley.

  “Five years,” said Hadley.

  “TWELVE SEVENTY-TWO! TWELVE SEVENTY-TWO!”

  Bye! Bye! They were all gone, except Jaydon.

  I walked Jaydon to Y care. He said his parents worked really late. He sat down at a cafeteria table with eight other Y care kids, whose assignment was to write about the best thing that had happened that day.

  My note to Mrs. Price said, “What a pleasure it was to spend the day in your classroom—the kids were attentive, good-natured, and full of ideas! Thank you for letting me sub—Best regards, Nick Baker.”

  I locked the door and signed out.

  “You ready for a nap?” said the secretary.

  “A nap might come in handy, yes,” I said. And that was it for Day Twenty-one.

  DAY TWENTY-TWO. Monday, May 19, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, NUMERACY ROOM

  HE PARTICULARLY DOESN’T LIKE THIS PARTICULAR SPOT

  MONDAY MORNING’S SKY WAS AN ASTONISHING BLUE, and Beth had me going to the middle school to spend the day in the numeracy room, normally overseen by Mrs. Massey. The numeracy room was a quiet, gray-carpeted interior space with ten iMacs on tables, ten expensive-looking office chairs with fabric cushions and rolling wheels, and a bank of six smoked-glass windows that looked out on the second-floor hallway. If you did remedial time in numeracy, every kid on your team knew it. It was like being in an anthropological display in a museum.

  The school district had learned some terrible news over the weekend. Nelson, the ninth-grade boy who’d gone for a walk and disappeared, was found dead, after a weeklong search. He’d fallen while climbing in an abandoned granite quarry.

  Mrs. Yates, a math teacher, unlocked the numeracy room and showed me where the blue student folders were, in the top drawer of the hanging file cabinet. “They’re going to ask you if we’re doing Spelling City this week,” Mrs. Yates said. “We are not doing Spelling City, which is math vocab. Mrs. Massey and I decided that we’re going to stop doing that, because we’re getting near the end of school and they have to concentrate on making benchmark. Even though we have sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students, some of them are at fourth-grade level.”

  Nobody showed during homeroom. Lunch was a hotdog with crisp potato wedges. Information packets for summer girls’ basketball were available at the office. Talent show practice would be held after school. I squirted sanitizer on my hands, ate some Winnipesaukee chocolate, and waited for someone to talk to. The problem of the day, written on the whiteboard, was 1,870 divided by 34.

  Block 1 was Cher, Claire, Serena, Waylon, Hunter, and Roan. Serena’s folder wasn’t in the file drawer. “Waylon’s probably not coming,” said Roan. Serena, tall and black-leotarded, had made a hangman’s noose out of red string that she had cinched around her finger. “I looked up cool knots on YouTube,” she said.

  “She’s going to hang her finger,” said Hunter. “It’s kind of weird. My dad found a noose in our basement.”

  “Hunter’s dad found a noose in his basement,” I said to the class.

  “Creepy,” said Serena.

  Waylon appeared, a droopingly cherubic kid with bags under his eyes. “I’m sorry I was late,” he said. “I forgot about it.”

  “Can we take the day off pretty much?” asked Hunter.

  “Nope, you know what a stickler for detail I am,” I said.

  “There’s an Indian burial ground out there, I swear,” said Cher, waving in the direction of the soccer field. She’d untied her noose and was trying to retie it. “I don’t remember how to do this.”

  “There’s a lot of mathematics to knots,” I said. “I’m not a math person—”

  “Nor am I,” said Cher.

  “—but there are whole departments of universities where they study the mathematics of knots. It’s really interesting.”

  “I would hate that job,” said Serena. She’d retied the noose bigger and made as if to put it over her head.

  “No, no, no, no, please don’t do that,” I said. “That would not be good.”

  She put the noose around her wrist.
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  I asked if everybody had done the Problem of the Day.

  “I can do it, I just don’t really want to,” said Hunter.

  “Why don’t you want to? It just doesn’t call out to you? If it was divided by thirty-six and not thirty-four would you want to? No?”

  “I don’t like division,” said Hunter.

  Serena flipped her noose.

  “You could hang a troll with that,” Hunter said.

  “All you do is ballpark it,” I said, poking at the number 1,870 on the board with the tip of the marker. “Just look at that thing and say, Thirty-four, wow, that’s about halfway between thirty and forty, hm, hm, and I know that five times thirty is one hundred fifty, maybe I could bump it up a notch, maybe not, let’s try five, that kind of thing.”

  “Yuh! Spider-Man!” said Serena.

  “Did you say ‘Spider-Man’?” said Cher.

  “Who’s got a guess for this one?” I said.

  “Two,” said Serena

  “Six,” said Cher.

  “Okay, so you say, I’m going to commit myself to six—temporarily. You try six. You go six times four is—”

  Claire chanted, “Six times four is—”

  “Twenty-four!” said Serena.

  “Good, and then you go six times three is—”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And then you add the two, and oh no! It’s too high! So you know it’s got to be one down from that. One down from six is—?”

  “Five!”

  “Now we’re cooking with propane,” I said.

  “Burning, really burning,” said Hunter.

  We multiplied by five. “Then you draw the line, that beautiful line,” I said. We subtracted. My marker cap fell off. “Then you drop the end of your pen.”

  “And then you do five again, so it’s fifty-five,” said Cher.

  “Oh my gosh!” I said. “Subtract it out. Zero. Check! Do you feel all limbered up?” I looked over the sub plans. “Let’s do some Fast Math!” FASTT Math, with a second T that people seemed to ignore—the acronym stood for “Fluency and Automaticity through Systematic Teaching with Technology”—was a bundle of remedial math games and exercises sold by Scholastic.

  “I don’t do Fast Math here, I don’t think,” said Cher.

  “Cher has to finish her test first,” said Serena. She’d put the noose around her tongue and was tightening it so that her tongue muscle formed a dollop of flesh.

  “I just saw something I shouldn’t have,” I said. “God. Take that off right now.”

  “It’s like a rat, hanging,” said Hunter.

  “That’s mean,” said Cher.

  “Carry on, guys,” I said. “I want to see real math happening.”

  “I feel laughy today,” said Serena.

  Waylon and Roan signed into Fast Math on their computers. “Would that be thirty-six?” asked Waylon slowly.

  I said four times eight was not thirty-six. “It’s close to thirty-six.”

  “Four times eight?” said Roan, listening in. “It’s twenty-eight. No, six and six is twelve. Thirty-two.”

  I pointed at him. “Thirty-two!”

  I went over to Cher and Serena to get them chuffing on Fast Math. “It looks not too bad,” I said. “It’s just little multiplication stuff.”

  Serena pretended to pull up on the tiny noose, flopping her head to the side as if hung. “No, I did not hurt myself,” she said.

  “I must report it,” I said. “No.”

  “Mrs. Ritter, the nurse, already knows,” Serena said.

  “That you tried to hang your finger?” said Hunter.

  “That I made this. I’m friends with her. I saw you walking in this morning when I was in her office.”

  They keyed in passwords and up came the Fast Math multiplication fact grid.

  “Isn’t that a thing of beauty?” I said. “It’s got colors, it’s got numbers.” It did look pretty snazzy.

  “That’s going to take me a long time,” said Cher, “because I’m not very good at these.”

  “I suck at threes,” said Serena. “I don’t know threes for the life of me. Threes and eights.”

  “I started with my zeros,” said Cher.

  “Anything times zero is zero,” said Serena.

  “I know,” said Cher.

  “Threes and eights are tough for you?” I said.

  “And sevens,” said Cher.

  “Can you do three times seven?” I said.

  “Twenty-one.”

  I said, “Okay, that’s a good one. That’s like an island. Think of yourself in a kayak, and you know that you can survive on that island. And then there are some other islands that you actually know.”

  “My cousin’s a tutor here,” said Serena. “I can’t see how people can be smart in math.”

  “It’s a part of your brain that some people have and some people don’t,” I said.

  “You know you only use like ten percent of your brain?” said Serena.

  “That’s what they say,” I said, “but I don’t believe that. I think we’ve got this complicated brain, and we can’t even comprehend how much it’s doing, so we say we’re only using ten percent.”

  “I bet we’re only using ten percent to think, and learn,” said Serena. “The rest of it is feelings and emotions.”

  “Your brain has to decide what to forget and what to remember all the time,” I said. “You create little priorities, and you think, I want to blow this off because it’s tiresome. However, I would like to learn how to make a noose.”

  “You want to?” said Serena, brightening. “It’s real easy.”

  “No, no, I’m saying, as an example.”

  She demonstrated with her red cord. “You do this, and then you lay it down, and then this is up here, and then you do like that, and you fold it over, and you bring it under and you wrap it around to the top—”

  Hunter looked over. “Why are you teaching the substitute how to make a noose?”

  Serena laughed. “And then it just slides.”

  I said, “So you’ve got three times seven. That’s your island. You’re in the kayak—”

  A jovial bald man, Mr. Fields, opened the door.

  “Here’s my noose,” Serena said, holding it up.

  “Do you have a moment?” Mr. Fields said to me.

  “He was explaining an island concept,” said Serena.

  “Beautiful!” said Mr. Fields. “Hopefully you’re listening!” He took me out to the hall, crushed my hand in a handshake, and spoke in hushed tones. “You’ve got a student over there in the orange shirt named Waylon Grant. He has some issues with emotional stability. If he tells you he needs to go to the nurse, you should let him go to the nurse. Because of the audio hallucinations he’s hearing, and the threats that they’re making to him and to others, we should discreetly follow him down to the bottom of the landing, to the bottom of the stairs as he walks his way down to the nurse’s station.”

  “Is he under any medication?”

  “Oh, YUH. He says right now he’s okay. But the voices are talking to him. He’s able to talk them away, but that doesn’t always work. He has not presented a problem to anybody, other than he gets himself all super anxious. Just wanted to let you know that.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  I went back inside. Cher said, “Why do I have to be in here if I only have two wrong on this whole test? Two hundred nineteen times seventy-two! I suck with word problems, and I didn’t even do it.”

  “Well, let’s work on some of that,” I said. “But first of all, I’m just telling you that it would be good to know something like three times eight—right?”

  “Twenty . . .” Cher rolled her eyes, puffed out one cheek, and pushed it with a finger. “. .
. four.”

  “Yeah! Three times nine?”

  “Are you going to be in here tomorrow?” asked Serena.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Aw.”

  “Twenty-seven,” said Cher. “I just did that one with my fingers.”

  “Right. So all this amounts to is making these happen a little more automatically. Right now, you’re doing it, but it’s as if you’re wearing big boots, and the mud is sucking at your boots, and you’re walking slowly up the path. You need to learn it so that it just comes like badoop badoop, and the only way to do that, really, is with flash cards.”

  “I have flash cards at home,” said Serena. “They go all the way up to twelves.”

  “You should try it. I’m not an advocate of massive math education, necessarily—but the times tables are actually helpful.”

  “Lookit, I’ve got no circles on this page,” said Cher, showing her placement test.

  Waylon turned in his office chair. “Can you walk me down to the nurse’s?”

  “Yes, I certainly can,” I said.

  “Did Mr. Fields just tell you?” he said.

  “He said that if you wanted to go to the nurse that yes, I would walk you down. Is it something you really want to do? I’d love to have you in the class.”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll be,” said Waylon. “It might be really quick.”

  I turned to the class. “Guys, my dear friends. You are going to hold the fort totally calmly and responsibly—I’ll be back in two seconds. I’m just walking down.”

  “I want to walk down!” said Serena. “Do you work at the high school?”

  “I bounce around,” I said. “Sometimes it’s kindergarten, sometimes it’s eleventh grade, you never know. But I’ll be back.”

  Waylon and I made our way downstairs. I asked him how his day had been going.

  “Good so far,” said Waylon. “I just have to take a minute.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve, good age! What floats your boat these days? What are you interested in?”

  “Um, video games. I like Call of Duty and Minecraft.”