Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  The nurse wasn’t in, but the assistant nurse was. “I’m fine now,” said Waylon. His voice was light and soft. “I’ll come back up if I have time.”

  “I hope you do. Good to get to know you.”

  “Thanks, you too.”

  Back in class I told the kids that I’d once had a terrible experience in grade school in a times-table spelling bee. “Total humiliation,” I said. “I went home, and I realized that there were certain times-table moments that I knew, and others that I didn’t. So are there ones that you really know, solidly?”

  “Fives!”

  “Zeros!”

  “Tens!”

  “Ones!”

  I wrote on the whiteboard. “You know the zeros, the fives, the tens, and the ones. So: five times six?”

  Pause. “Thirty.”

  “Okay, so thirty has a little hesitation, but zeroes you obviously know because everything always ends up zero, ten you always know, because you just add a zero, one because it’s the same thing. So you can check these off.”

  “Oh, and elevens,” said Hunter.

  “Eleven times nine is—?”

  “Ninety-nine.”

  “Okay. Let’s move up in a level of difficulty. Let’s try the fours. What’s six times four?”

  Serena started loudly counting by fours; meanwhile Cher said that it was twenty-four, because five times four was twenty.

  “What you’re doing is you’re logicking out,” I said. “You’re outsmarting it. What you have to do is get it to be like pitching a ball, throwing a Frisbee, walking down stairs—something that your mind doesn’t have to think about. So you just hear ‘four times six’ and blip, ‘twenty-four.’ If it’s an automatic thing, then everything else is easier.”

  Hunter began scooting in his office chair. “He’s gone to the time-out corner,” said Roan.

  “This is my diagnosis,” I said. “This is the thing that you could do that would make high school just unbelievably much more easy for you. Get a bunch of flash cards from Hannaford’s, and just do it.”

  “They sell them everywhere,” said Roan.

  “Mrs. Massey has thousands, but she made them herself,” said Hunter.

  Waylon came in. “Hey, good to see you back!” I said.

  “I could make them in noose style,” said Serena.

  “We’re going to really have a talk about this,” I said. “It’s serious. I mean it. I care about this, and I want you to, too. Actually memorize your times tables. They have to be like music in your mind. We could do it as a rap song. ‘Eight times seven is fifty-six. Add another number and get your kicks. Nine times seven is sixty-three . . .’”

  “How do you know these?” said Serena.

  “I swear, all I did was go through the cards.”

  “Seven times seven is forty-nine,” said Serena. “I remember because my fifth-grade teacher said, ‘You are not leaving this room without knowing forty-nine!’ The Forty-niners was her favorite team.”

  “That is your island,” I said.

  Serena and Hunter were doing more chair antics. Hunter said, “My fifth-grade teacher just told me—”

  I said, “Can you not drag him around the room, because I would like to hear what you were saying. What were you saying?”

  “We couldn’t learn anything,” said Hunter, “because the fifth-grade teacher just left me and Serena to sit. And she was annoying.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Serena, remembering. “She told me, Hunter, and Jocelyn to sit at the little table. We had to just sit there. And Issa. And then Issa went into the advanced!”

  “I wasn’t here in fifth grade,” said Claire. “I was in Florida.”

  “I might be getting homeschooled next year,” said Cher. “I’ve learned nothing here.”

  “You’d learn a lot being homeschooled,” I said. “This school, because there are so many people, is sort of inefficient.”

  “I was homeschooled for a little bit,” said Hunter, “I think it was in California, and I didn’t do nothing. Why wouldn’t I do nothing? It’s warmer out there.”

  Serena was scooting in her chair now as well.

  I said, “Guys, I like talking but what I do not like is bumper cars with the chairs.”

  “Californ-I-A!” said Serena, pumping her chair high with a lever. “Watch me shrink.” She sank.

  “Let’s get something accomplished in this hour,” I said.

  “We can do a happy circle next,” said Hunter.

  “Duck duck goose?” said Serena.

  “You can all sit around and we can share,” I said. “We’ll share math facts.”

  “No,” said Cher. “You lost me at the math facts part.”

  “I am being paid,” I said. “You’re not being paid. I know that’s bad. You should be paid to be in this school.” Chair twirling. “Please don’t twirl. We have to talk about math in some way.”

  “If you have us again on our team,” said Hunter, “can we get all the teachers outside, and then can we do—what is it called?—wheelchair drag racing? I actually knew a guy who did that on the street, until he got hit by a UPS truck. I pushed him out in front of it.”

  “Is he all right?” I said.

  “Somewhat,” said Hunter. “It was a year ago.”

  “My dad broke three of his ribs in a motorcycle accident,” said Claire.

  “I broke both my legs in a motorcycle accident,” said Hunter.

  “I got pushed off a cement truck,” said Cher.

  Serena said, “My mommy broke her wrist while she was pregnant with me, falling off a hay . . .”

  “Baler?” said Hunter.

  “No, a trailer full of hay,” Serena said. “My dad shattered his ankle in a car accident right before I was born.”

  “My mom fell off a porch and broke her face,” said Cher, “and I just sat there and stared at her. And my dad was laughing. My dad laughs when bad stuff happens to people.”

  “That goes over real well,” I said.

  “I’m not joking,” said Cher. “Every time I hurt myself, or one of us hurts ourselves, he just laughs. And then he’ll get mad and bring us to the hospital.”

  “He’s crying inside, right?” I said.

  “I don’t know. He starts crying when he laughs.”

  “My hair’s annoying me,” said Serena.

  Cher suddenly remembered something. “Oh, my dad gave a baby a lemon,” she said. “He laughed so hard, I thought he was going to pee his pants.”

  “So, guys, what am I going to tell Mrs. Massey?”

  “That we worked very, very hard,” said Serena.

  “I want to see serious product,” I said. “I want to see output. Seven times seven is forty-nine. All of them have to be like that. I’m giving you a piece of knowledge that will help you.” In high school it would help them, that is. After high school, did it matter? Not so much.

  “I finished my Fast Math,” said Roan.

  “So you’ve got to go to your folder, right?”

  “I don’t have a folder,” said Roan.

  Serena laughed.

  I found Roan’s folder in the stack. “Roan, Roan.”

  Roan laughed. “I didn’t know I had a folder.”

  I turned to Waylon. “You made it through Fast Math?” He nodded. We pulled out a worksheet he was supposed to have finished.

  “It’s really hard,” he said.

  “I WANT SILENCE,” I said. “We’re actually going to be working here.” Waylon and I whisper-worked on a two-digit multiplication problem, while the others murmured. “You start on the far right, right?”

  “Mhm,” said Waylon. “Three times one is three. Five times three is fifteen. And then you put a zero. So it would be ten, eleven. One thousand one hundred seventy-three.”

  “Wow
, your mind is chugging right along.” Waylon and I worked on problems for a little longer, and then Waylon said, “I’m so tired. I woke up last night, really early. It was like one in the morning.”

  “What’s interfering with your sleep, my man?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I should probably talk to my doctor about it.”

  “Do you have any medications that you take that would interfere with your sleep?”

  “No,” Waylon said. “Well, I take some medicine, but I’ve been taking it for a long time and my sleep has been good.”

  I asked if he’d adjusted the dose recently.

  “When I was at the hospital, yes, but that was like two weeks ago, and my sleep has been good. But the last few nights it’s been bad.”

  I said, “It’s probably the meds, because it’s been two weeks. It takes a little time. Is it a higher dose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s happening is your body has now been filled up to that new level, and that’s why it’s interfering with your sleep, probably. Don’t you think? You’re not getting enough sleep. That’s horrible.”

  Waylon sat.

  “I sleep so hard,” whispered Serena to Cher, having overheard.

  “I’m really tired,” Waylon said.

  “I’m sorry, man.” I looked down at his worksheet. “Let’s try this one, it’s simple, and then we can have accomplished something. Five times seven.”

  “Five times seven.” He counted on his fingers. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five?”

  “Good. So you write that down, and you put the little three up there.”

  He yawned. “Yep.” He slowly wrote a little three.

  “So you go five times two is ten. Would you add the three to it?”

  “Yeah, you would.”

  I helped him along. “And then five times four is twenty . . .”

  “Plus one would be twenty-one?”

  “Bingo.”

  He yawned again. “Sorry, I’m just tired.”

  “I hear you. What if you slowly tapered off that stuff, whatever it is?”

  “I can’t,” Waylon said. “That would be bad. I need it for my anxiety. Or else I’d be crying all the time.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s what happened last year. The first day of school, when I moved back up here, I just was crying all day.”

  “It’s partly that you missed your family, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. But I was just crying all the time.”

  “So that’s why the doc said take this stuff?”

  “Yeah, Paxil,” Waylon said. “Have you heard of that?”

  I said I had. “It’s pretty powerful stuff.”

  “I’m on thirty milligrams,” he said. “It’s kind of a high dose.”

  “Time to go,” Hunter announced.

  “We have to leave right now,” said Waylon.

  “Okay, hope to see you again,” I said.

  “We were supposed to leave like a minute ago!” said Serena.

  “Take care, guys, see you around.”

  —

  JUDE, LORRAINE, AND CRIMSON came in for block 2. I handed Lorraine and Crimson their math folders. “Jude, have you got one of these?”

  “No.”

  “That’s so sad,” I said. The sub plans said that every student had at least one folder. I looked through the file cabinet. “Yes you do. You’ve got two of them. Extra bonus file.”

  “Not funny,” said Jude.

  “You never know what you’re going to find in the file drawer,” I said.

  I refiled the folders from last block—distended, goiterous dugongs of arithmetical confusion—and squirted sanitizer on my hands, wiggling my fingers to feel the cool as the alcohol dried.

  Jude asked for some scrap paper. There was none. “I think she actually ran out yesterday,” Jude said.

  “Do you know where the central scrap paper supply would be?”

  “No.”

  Math class without scrap paper. I tore off a piece of paper from my Moleskine notebook and gave it to him. He was working a Fast Math problem: nine divided by one-third.

  “Holy Toledo,” I said. “Do you remember how to do that?”

  “Yeah. Can I steal a pencil?”

  “Pencil shortage,” I said, and handed him a pencil.

  While Crimson slapped away at her keyboard, playing a Fast Math game that involved ladybugs climbing on a vine, Lorraine worked on a math benchmark assessment something-or-other. I sat and stared through the smoked-glass windows at the occasional student in the hall. “Did you get it?” I asked Jude. “Did you bust through to the other side of that fraction thing?”

  Jude said, “Yeah, and then I came up with this one that was like five times ten minus six squared plus five. I was like, What the heck? Simplify it. I tried to, but to do it, there has to be a thirty-one up there. So I just guessed on that one.”

  Just then a tall expressionless fellow named Phoenix slouched in. “I went down to literacy but they sent me up here,” he said.

  “What do you want to do?” I said.

  “I don’t know. They just sent me back up here.”

  Did he, I asked, prefer literacy or numeracy? He didn’t care. I said, “What people are doing in here is Fast Math, where they fling numbers at you. Does that sound like the right thing to do?”

  “Yeah.”

  A man from guidance opened the door and stared irritably at Phoenix.

  Phoenix said, “I went down to them! They said come back up here.”

  “She just called me again, wondering where you were!” said the man from guidance.

  The phone rang. It was the literacy teacher. “Is Phoenix Crowder in your room?”

  “She’s looking for him,” said the guidance person, leading Phoenix away.

  I told the literacy teacher that Phoenix was just leaving numeracy. My four students worked in silence. Blobs of empty time moved slowly through the morning’s digestive tract. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, so I bit off some more of my Winnipesaukee bar. The crinkling of the foil made Lorraine look up. “Busted,” I said, chewing. “It’s coffee chocolate.”

  “What is it?” said Lorraine.

  “It’s just some coffee chocolate. I’m not just sitting here eating chocolate. That would be bad. It’s coffee chocolate, so it’s good.”

  “Must be a lot easier than having to drink coffee,” said Jude.

  “I hate having to go off and mix instant coffee and rush back,” I said.

  “I notice that any time a teacher leaves, it’s just chaos,” Jude said.

  After twenty minutes, Jude left, smiling enigmatically to himself. I looked up the side effects for Paxil, which had a black-box warning about suicidality. It was not supposed to be given to children. Waylon was definitely a child, and he was so drugged that he could barely lift a pencil. Two of the listed side effects were sleeplessness and auditory hallucinations. If a Paxil patient heard voices he was supposed to call his doctor immediately.

  Elaine, the secretary, dropped in to ask if I could substitute across the hall for a language arts teacher on Wednesday. Yes I could.

  Lorraine and Crimson gathered their belongings and said goodbye. Anita, Susanna, and Sutton were block 3’s fresh arrivals. They didn’t speak to each other, and they looked sheepish as I handed them their folders. Their math worksheets had goofy names, like “Mad Minute” and “Five Minute Frenzy.” I asked them, “Do you think it’s helpful to have a special little room where people come to catch up in math?”

  Anita, who was henna-haired and neatly dressed, thought it was. “But it’s kind of weird to say, Oh, we have to leave for numeracy because we don’t know how to do math.”

  I could see how that might be awkward,
I said. “However, you probably have things that you can do better than other people can. I mean, seriously.”

  “I can ride horses better than they can,” said Anita.

  “Yeah, put them on a horse and see what happens,” I said.

  Anita said she owned a Haflinger, which was a strong horse. When she rode her Haflinger, she had to use a special bit. “My aunt has a shire-draft cross and also an Icelandic,” she said.

  The three of them did Fast Math and worksheets for the rest of the hour. Nobody talked. They were smart, undisruptive, compliant students who were no good with figures: having to serve time in a remedial room was a new and mildly mortifying experience for them. They thanked me when they left.

  Block 4 was empty, and then I had a half-hour lunch break. I ate a sandwich slowly at my desk and drank a fizzy water, leafing through a history textbook called The American Republic that I’d found in a stack of discards in the teachers’ break room. People glanced in at me through the windows. I felt as if I was myself serving an all-day in-school suspension. Occasionally there was a shout from the hall. The yellow walls of the numeracy room were bare, the corkboard was bare, and the whiteboard was bare except for the problem of the day—there wasn’t even a taxonomy-of-learning poster to jazz up the place. The bald special ed teacher, Mr. Fields, came by to talk about Waylon.

  He said, “The word on the grapevine was that shortly after we spoke, he had to leave, right?”

  “He did,” I said, “and thank you for alerting me. He talked to me a little bit. I don’t know how much to get into it with you, but . . .”

  “Nobody really knows the answers,” Mr. Fields said.

  “He’s taking a lot of Paxil,” I said. “He said, ‘I can’t sleep’—he just volunteered this—which is a side effect. And there’s a side effect where you hear voices. I’m not a doctor, but it seemed to me like an awful lot of Paxil that he’s taking.”

  “He particularly doesn’t like this particular spot,” said Mr. Fields, pointing at the floor. “He doesn’t like math. So this happens regularly when he comes to school.”

  “He’s a very nice kid,” I said. “I’d be happy to spend time with him. We had a nice chat as we walked down.”

  “Oh yeah, he’s always nice. For all these things that he’s hearing, that are always telling him to do something terrible, he’s never done any of that stuff. When you hear it, you go, Wow, that guy? He just doesn’t come across that way.”