Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Sixty-three,” said Jacqueline.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Can I clean the whiteboard, please?” said Erica. She erased the bad tiny words that Jacqueline had written.

  Deke brought up his completed pi worksheet.

  “Look at that!” I said. “Deke, nice job!”

  “I know! Thank you.”

  “Can we play games?” said Sloan.

  “Can we go for a walk in the hall?” asked Jacqueline.

  “We’ve got four minutes left,” said Deke. He lifted my green mug. “Hey, is this your cup? How did you do that?”

  “It came in the store that way,” I said. “It’s called a crackle finish. At a certain moment, in the furnace, the glaze cracks and then changes color.”

  “It’s cool,” said Deke.

  “Thanks,” I said. I tried to make another speech but coughed instead. “I’m starting to really cough and hack, but I think you’ve done a wonderful job. I know I’m a bore, and I don’t actually care about math personally, but I am the substitute math teacher, and I’m telling you, once you get those sevens down, the world is an easier place. Nine times seven.”

  “Thirty-six,” said Jacqueline.

  “Flip them around.”

  “It’s time to go,” said Deke.

  I said, “You’ve got one and a half minutes to chat, share stories. How was your weekend?”

  “I was sick all weekend,” said Erica. “I had the flu.”

  “You seem healthy now.”

  “I saw her over the weekend,” said Sloan, pointing to Jacqueline. “At Walmart. I almost bought candy, but I didn’t.”

  They handed in their papers. “Well, that went just about as well as can be expected,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Jacqueline. “Have a wonderful day.”

  “You, too.”

  I tried to open the drawer to pull out the next set of folders, but it was locked.

  I poked my head out in the hall. “Guys! Somebody locked the freaking drawer on me.”

  “Not me,” said Jacqueline.

  “Did Deke do it?” said Jacqueline. “He was over there.”

  “If you see Deke, will you send him to me?”

  I struggled with the locked file drawer for a while. “Fucking torture chamber,” I muttered. In the back of the top drawer I found a tiny key that fit the lock. Good. I got through ten seconds of “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” before the first of the last set of students slumped in. Block 6, block 6, block 6. The first girl was Livia. “I have a team meeting today, so I have to leave early,” she said. “Can I have a cap eraser?” She found a stash of erasers in a lower drawer of Mrs. Massey’s desk and took one.

  Kent came in. “Remember, I called you Rocket?” he said.

  I found Astrid’s folder.

  “Okay, I’m logged in,” said Kent.

  “Logged in to the matrix,” I said. “What have you got? A fact grid. That’s a joyous sight.”

  “Dude, I’m a master at this stuff,” said Kent. “I’m so good, they call me the Monster. When they call you Rocket, they call me the Monster. I’m working on the twelve times table, and eight times four. Eight times four, thirty-two. Twelve times four, thirty-six. I’m a beast!”

  “I’m almost done,” said Jarrod. “I’ve just got a couple more papers.”

  “You’re not almost out of here,” said Rebecca. “Just kidding.”

  “I’m the closest,” said Jarrod.

  “Didn’t you say you played Call of Duty?” said Kent.

  “I don’t want to talk about that now,” I said.

  They began slapping at their keyboards, doing their times tables. “You suck, Kent,” said Jarrod.

  More mad keyboarding. “Done!” said Kent. “First one done! One time, I was on fire. They had to call 911, I was so hot. I’m dead serious.”

  Jarrod began a geometry sheet. I read him the instructions in a Dr. Strangelove accent: “Describe each triangle below by both its sides and its angles. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jarrod said.

  “Whose pencil is this?” Kent said. “It’s my pencil now.” He, too, embarked on a geometry sheet, which asked him to discriminate between equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles. I couldn’t remember what a scalene triangle was, having never taken geometry in high school. “Scalene has no equal sides,” Kent explained.

  I pointed to a triangle. “That one has seriously equal sides,” I said. “So I would hesitate before you write ‘scalene.’” To give him a hint, I sang, “Isoscelee-hees, but I did not shoot the deputy.”

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” Astrid asked.

  A kid named Bode brought up a placement test he’d taken. “What do I do now?” he said.

  “I think you’re done,” I said. “You did Fast Math and you did this thing. I think you can read something, or check in with life, daydream. Is that permitted?”

  “I guess so,” Bode said.

  “Can I check this?” said Kent. I showed him how to look up the answer key to sheet F-51 in the answer book. He wanted to know if I’d played Call of Duty on a PS3 or an Xbox. Livia needed help figuring out which were composite numbers in a long list. Seven was prime, but twenty-one and seventy-nine were composite.

  Astrid returned from the bathroom and began talking quietly to Jarrod about whether a certain girl liked him. “She likes me as a friend,” said Jarrod.

  Kent said, “I play PlayStation Three, and I play Black Ops Two, or GTA Five, or I play Minecraft. And I have a YouTube channel. My name is hummertime. And I have a live stream, it’s like an hour video I do of gameplays.”

  “Sounds like you take this very seriously,” I said.

  “This summer,” said Kent, “I’m going to set up this thing where every view I get on my video I get a penny. If I get really popular and I get a million subscribers, that’s kind of a little bit of money. Just from making videos.”

  “Pumping the traffic,” I said.

  “Do you know Adam Larousse, in eighth grade? I game with him and his brother. Me and him make Minecraft videos and crap.”

  “Minecrap?” I said.

  “Never heard of that,” Kent said. “Do you like my new kicks?” He showed me his Hyperdunk Nikes. “I got them customized, blue and black. Do you know the Dallas Mavs basketball team?”

  “Can I have an eraser?” said Astrid.

  I pulled out the bag of eraser caps from the drawer and made one disappear with the Chinese egg drop.

  “I’m going to show you a magic trick,” said Kent. “I’m going to make this eraser dissolve in my hand.”

  “With stomach acid?” I said.

  “No, it’s going to go through my skin, into my blood.” He started rubbing the eraser cap vigorously against the palm of his hand.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” I said. “Looks like there’s a little bit of a red mark.”

  “It happens.” He rubbed and rubbed. “It’s going to take a little while.” He palmed the eraser and pretended to scrub it against his palm some more. Then he pulled the eraser out of his neck.

  Bong, bong, bong.

  When everyone was gone, and I’d written a note for Mrs. Massey, I went to the nurse’s office, to tell someone in authority that I didn’t think Waylon should be taking thirty milligrams of Paxil every day. Nurse Ritter was smiley and kind-faced, absorbed in braiding a girl’s long beautiful red hair. “At some point I’d like to talk to you about Waylon,” I said.

  “Will you be in tomorrow?” she said.

  I said I’d be in Wednesday.

  “Let’s talk then.”

  I drove home thinking about the dark circles under Waylon’s eyes, and the soft, faintly despairing way he spoke. He’d seemed like a normal, articulate, polite kid going through his life in a Paxil trance, not s
leeping and hearing voices. Why? Because he’d cried about having to go to school. Math made him anxious. Did Waylon need all this arithmetic in his life? Of course not.

  Day Twenty-two was a wrap.

  DAY TWENTY-THREE. Wednesday, May 21, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, LITERACY ROOM

  HOW DO YOU SPELL JUICY?

  MRS. WALLACE’S SIXTH-GRADE literacy intervention room was brightly lit, windowless, airless, and hot. I spent a long Wednesday there, goading “struggling readers” to work on a complicated assignment involving a book called Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, about a girl who leaves Mexico to make a new life in the United States. Each chapter of the book was named after the Spanish word for a fruit, a vegetable, or a nut, and the students’ task that day was to pick one of these chapter titles and make a Keynote presentation about it on their iPads. They had to come up with at least five slides about, say, las uvas (grapes), and each slide had to contain at least three sentences. The first slide was to be an introduction, which described the qualities of the grape, employing words taken from a list of about a hundred and thirty food-related adjectives. The second slide was the “Why?” slide, about why people like grapes and what they make with grapes and what health benefits were derived from eating grapes. The third slide was the “Where?” slide, in which was revealed where grapes were grown and related information; the fourth slide was the “When?” slide, wherein you discussed the growing season of the grape and whether grapes were available year-round in Maine and how much they cost; and the fifth slide was the conclusion, which was supposed to be in two parts: What did you learn that you hoped others learned about your fruit/vegetable/nut? and Do you think that you will try anything new that you learned about your topic? In bold at the top of the sheet was a command, complete with typo: MUST HAVE CORRECT SPELLING, PUNCTUATION, AND CAPTILIZATION.

  In the first block, a smart, funny struggling reader with braces named Kayley dozed off. “I’m so tired,” she said. “And I’m hurt. I was on my bike. There was this girl and she was hogging the whole road. I went so fast down the road I had no control, trying to get a bug out of my ear. One hand on the bike, one hand trying to get the bug out of my ear, and then I fell. I slid.” She showed the bandage on her hand. “And I slid on my hip, too.”

  Kayley eventually made an informational slide about papayas and gave me her student IEP log to sign. Had she been organized, focused, and respectful? I checked off the yes boxes and signed it.

  When the next class came in, I asked them what happens to Esperanza in the book.

  “She gets eaten by her undead father,” said Aspen, another supposedly struggling reader. She managed, by the end of the hour, to create two slides about papayas.

  Carson, who liked to make blubbling, blithering sounds, was in my third class of the day. “Puh-puh-puh-puh PAYA!” he said, in a goofy cartoon stutter.

  “Let’s pick one,” I said, holding flat the list of chapter titles for Carson to look at. “Do you like nuts, berries, carrots? What do you like?”

  “Carson, do you like nuts?” said Jeb.

  Carson made a raspberry sound and giggled.

  I pointed to las papas. “Do you like potatoes, Carson?” I asked. “Do you like french fries?”

  “I love french fries,” he said, in a normal voice. “I throw them out the window to give to the squirrels.”

  We broke for lunch; when Carson returned he began by making faux spastic noises. “GUHNEEP! MEEEEEP! MIGGA MIGGA NIGGA NIGGA!” He laughed explosively.

  “You’re having some trouble, man,” I said. “Do you get sent down a lot?”

  “No,” he said, in his real voice. Then, giggling, he pulled out a handful of broken french fries from his pocket and stuffed them in his mouth.

  “Ew, yucky, gross!” said Whit.

  “I’m going to puke!” said Bronson.

  “Sit yourself right down here,” I said to Carson. “I want to hear how you read.”

  “I’m a potato,” said Carson. “I don’t read that book.”

  “Just start,” I said. “Do what you can. The first word.”

  “Ethperantha!” he said, in what sounded like a saliva-rich Sylvester-the-cat accent.

  “Okay, but do it in an American accent,” I said. “Esperanza . . .”

  He continued to read in his Sylvester accent: “. . . almotht never left Mama’s side. She thponged her . . .”

  “So you actually know how to read,” I said.

  “SpongeBob!” he said.

  “She sponged . . .”

  “. . . her wiff cool watta.” He read another line, and I realized he was imitating a disabled kid with a severe speech disorder.

  “Peaches are awesome, yay,” said Noelle, who was trying to concentrate.

  Carson cleared his throat noisily, turned to Noelle, and then said, in a Southern accent, “Tryin’ to read here, ma’am.”

  I asked Carson how old he was.

  “Fifty-eight,” said Carson.

  I asked him again.

  “Twelve,” said Carson.

  “Why are you so keyed-up?”

  “BLIP!” He read a little more, using his disabled-kid accent. He was a good sight reader: he didn’t hesitate when he came to the phrase extra layers of newspaper. I told him to read in an even, pleasant voice.

  “Okay, then I’ll talk in French,” he said. “Jigga jugga bigga bugga. Vitta, vutta.”

  “Can we turn off the lights?” said Noelle.

  I didn’t answer; Carson had begun crawling under the desks. “UH UUUUUUUH!” he bellowed.

  “Carson, do your work,” said Jeb.

  I told Noelle to have a look at her slides. “I’ve already done five slides,” she said, which wasn’t true.

  “Then get your book out and read a page.”

  “I can’t read that book,” Noelle said. “All it is is gibberish! Half the words are gibberish.”

  I said, “If you know the word gibberish you can probably read the book no problem.”

  “It’s Spanish,” said Jeb.

  Carson switched to making dog-panting noises and snorts. Finally I lowered the boom. “Take the book, find a page, read it, and don’t make a sound,” I said. “If you make another sound in the next five minutes, I’m going to send you directly downstairs. Just pull it together. You obviously can read. All of this is just an explosion of ridiculousness, right?”

  “Yes,” Carson said, nodding.

  “Five minutes of silence,” I said. “Otherwise you’ll go downstairs, and that’s no fun. People will fuss at you and you’ll have notes written on your log, and everybody’s unhappy.”

  “So, kind of like this?” said Carson. “YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK.”

  Enough. I stood. “All right, you’re going down,” I said.

  “I’m going to read a book,” said Carson, in his normal voice, picking up a random book.

  “No, you’re not,” I said, “you’re coming down with me. I said do it, and you didn’t do it. Let’s go.”

  “Whenever a substitute’s here he’s always like this,” said Noelle.

  Carson and I walked together down the long hall to the stairway. “Tell me everything,” I said to him. “Are you messing up like this because you enjoy getting in trouble?”

  “I have ADHD,” Carson said, in his normal voice.

  I said, “Whether or not you have ADHD, it’s something you have to control.”

  Carson began walking downstairs backward, very slowly. “Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp, bloomp,” he said with each step down.

  “GET DOWN THE STAIRS,” I said, pissed. “You’re in some serious hot water.” It made me nervous to have left the class unattended.

  “Some serious what?”

  “Hot water. Come on down.”

  He finally reached the first
floor. “I’ll just go back up in five minutes,” he said calmly. His one goal seemed to be to make the substitute teacher mad. Well, he’d succeeded.

  I walked down the hall. “Stay with me,” I said.

  “You’re walking too fast for me,” he said, dragging.

  I swatted a copy of Esperanza Rising against my leg. “You STAY with me! You are sad, man. You are sad.”

  We arrived in the doorway of the guidance office, where two aides were talking and laughing. “You can leave Carson right here,” one of them said. I loped back to my class. They’d all been sitting quietly.

  “How do you spell juicy?” said Whit.

  “You give it the J, give it the U—”

  Noelle interrupted. “J-U-I-C-Y,” she said loudly.

  “Shhh, we’re having calm,” I whispered. “Peacefulness now.” I wrote juicy on the board.

  “Can we turn the lights off?” said Noelle.

  “Yes,” I whispered, “I love it when the lights are off.”

  The iPads glowed in the murk of the room, and there was silent Keynoting and reading for fifteen minutes. Because I’d walked Carson downstairs, my power over the class had increased. But I felt trembly and ashamed of myself for having lost my temper with him. If there was ever a person who needed a different setup, it was Carson. He needed a sympathetic tutor at home for an hour a day, paid for with public money if necessary. In a few years, his brain would calm down and he’d be fine. All middle school offered him was the giggly rapture of disruptiveness, the brief adrenaline surge of seeing which accents and forms of noise from his proven toolbox of chaos would drive a given teacher over the edge.

  When Noelle and Whit began feuding, I had everyone in the class read aloud a few sentences each from Esperanza Rising. They all read surprisingly well—all except Margo, who refused to read anything because she was embarrassed. Sometimes they stumbled over a word like clinging or temporary. At the end of the hour, Carson returned to get his backpack. He held out his behavioral log sheets. “Sign these,” he said, in his real voice.