Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Why can’t you start fresh today?”

  “She’s never been this mean to me since third grade. It’s usually when there’s a substitute. And I’m tired of it. She distracts me from my work.”

  “You distract a lot of people,” I said. “You’ve got a thing about getting a little wild. I want you to go over and say, ‘I’m sorry you think I was bullying you.’”

  “I have ADHD,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you have ADHD,” I said. “You can control it. I see you’re smart. You can write. You can do stuff.”

  “Okay, I’ll go say I’m sorry.” He marched over and said, “Juniper, I’m sorry you thought that I was mean to you.” He marched back and sat down.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  To Juniper, I said, “I know that doesn’t make it better, but at least it’s a start. Okay?”

  Juniper nodded.

  “I’m hoping today could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I said, then chuckled at the remoteness of that possibility. Juniper laughed and wiped her face.

  The sub plans said it was time for “Enrichment.” An ed tech arrived with a cart full of laptops. She took Micky off to a Title I class. Juniper went to a reading class. Isaiah gave me a story of his to read. “It may be a little gross,” he said. He’d read it aloud to the class a few weeks ago.

  I read Isaiah’s story aloud softly: “I split my nose open one time when I was doing flipflops on my bed.” He hit the metal frame, he wrote, and blood came out like water from a squirt gun. This was when he was six. “My brother ran around the room freaking out. It looked like a crime scene. Blood was on the floor, and my nose was hanging. My dad picked me up and scurried to the phone.” At the hospital they put three needles in Isaiah’s face. “They shot them in my nose to keep it from falling off.”

  I moaned at the horror of it. “You’re a survivor. Put it there, man.” I shook hands with him.

  “I still have a scar and it’s kind of disformed a little bit,” said Isaiah, holding his nose. I could see no sign of injury.

  “It looks good,” I said. “They did a good job—you’re back together.”

  “Mr. Baker?” said Camille. “When I was five, a light fixture fell on my face, and I had a eighty stitches right here.” She pointed to a scar at her hairline.

  “No kidding, and you look perfect,” I said. “You guys are amazing survivors.”

  Isaiah put his story away. Mattie gave Lewis an eraser cap.

  “Whoa, this is a good class,” I said. “Enrichment. Who’s enriching their minds?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stacy. “But I have to go to the bathroom.”

  With Micky out of the class, I didn’t have to tell anyone to be quiet. Some added to their essays about Brian’s adventures in Hatchet. Some pulled out their unfinished math packets. Odette showed me a division problem, 3,315 divided by 22, and we did it together. There was something soothing about doing one arithmetic problem slowly and carefully—just one. Emma and Hallie worked on their Wordly Wise notebooks. They quizzed each other, imitating the voice of the woman on the Wordly Wise website, on the meaning of shun, furious, coax, clutch, caress, and prefer. “You’re building some serious vocabulary there,” I said. Emma said that the reason Micky was in Mr. Seaborg’s class was that Mr. Seaborg could control him, and they had a love of baseball in common. Mr. Seaborg was crazy about the Red Sox. “If you say Yankees in this class,” said Hallie, “it’s a swear.”

  Soon a troupe of fifth-graders arrived for a laptop software session, and many of my fourth-graders left—it felt like a whole new class. I rebooted an unresponsive laptop and handed a boy a box of tissues. Suddenly it was perfectly still.

  “It’s so quiet,” I whispered. “It’s wonderful.”

  “It’s never like this,” Stacy whispered back.

  “Did you cast a spell over them?”

  The fifth-graders were doing advanced math on IXL, and they were having trouble. Evan needed help finding the height of a cube whose volume was 729. We trial-and-errored it. Megan wasn’t able to figure the height of a rectangular prism with a volume of 560 yards, a height of 8 yards, and a width of 10 yards. We got that one, too. Then Phil came up, wanting to know the length of a side-leaning shaded triangular area of 49 square inches and a height of 7 inches. I stared at the illustration for a long time. My mind ceased to function.

  “She might know,” Phil said, pointing to a small blond girl with a pointy mouth.

  “Are you super good at triangles?” I said.

  “I can try,” she said.

  “Mr. Baker, can I go get a damp paper towel?” asked Sierra. Yes.

  I gave the blond girl, Tracy, the triangle worksheet. “Oh,” she said promptly. “I would imagine that you would have to divide forty-nine by fourteen.” I didn’t believe her, but she was right: the answer was 3.5. A green checkmark appeared on Phil’s laptop’s IXL screen.

  Phil put a fist in the air. “She’s one of the smartest kids in our class.”

  “You’re light-years ahead of me,” I said.

  The room’s back forty became loud and jokey, so I went over there and asked them about their whispering skills.

  “I don’t have whispering skills,” said a boy. “I have football skills.”

  “Can you play whisper football?” I said.

  “Blue forty-two,” he whispered, “hut, hut, hike.”

  “I got it right!” said Megan, across the room.

  “Praise the lord,” I said.

  “I don’t like math,” she said.

  The laptops went back in the cart, each with a dangling MagSafe charging cord, as a logjam of my fourth-graders returned. I asked Juniper what Micky had been doing during recess to bully her. “He wouldn’t let me play the game that everyone else was,” she said. “And he kept saying, ‘Guys, everybody, Juniper doesn’t know how to talk.’ I don’t really know how. I say aminal and emeny.”

  “That’s so cruel, and so silly,” I said.

  “Mr. Seaborg says he’s just trying to get a action out of me. A ride. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to say a lot of words.”

  “You seem to be doing pretty well,” I said. “I’ve noticed good words coming out.”

  The computer cart was closed and its padlock twirled. Vance’s mustache bag reappeared. With five minutes to go, I put on “Imagine.”

  “Why are you playing music?” asked Juniper.

  “Because it’s been a long day,” I said.

  Isaiah said he liked country music—he liked Luke Bryan, doing “That’s My Kind of Night.” I’d never heard of Luke Bryan, but I found the song on YouTube and played it.

  “This is my favorite song,” said Isaiah.

  “This is my mom’s favorite song!” said Odette.

  They sang along with Luke Bryan: “I got that real good feel good stuff, up under the seat of my big black jacked-up truck.”

  “This is my sister’s favorite song!” said Mattie.

  A bell rang and a grandmother in a flowered muumuu appeared at the door to pick up Aiden. We switched to Luke Bryan doing “Drunk on You.” Four kids, crouching around my laptop and dipping their knees, knew the lyrics: “I’m a little drunk on you, and high on summertime.”

  The four-note gong sounded, calling kids for first-wave buses. Bye, I said. Lewis told me he liked a Christian song called “Do Something” by Matthew West. When I put it on, three kids knew it. “It’s not enough to do nothing,” they sang. “It’s time for us to do something.” Second wave was announced and in a fingersnap they all were gone.

  “You survived another day with us!” said the secretary. “We’re thankful.”

  Heck, I thought, I love this.

  End of Day Twenty-five.

  DAY TWENTY-SIX. Wednesday, June 4, 2014

 
LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, ED TECH

  I KIND OF BREAK MY OWN SPIRIT SOMETIMES

  BETH SAID I HAD A CHOICE: I could either teach first grade at Lasswell, or be a roving ed tech at the middle school. I slapped together some sandwiches and hissed northward through a rainy mist to the middle school—past a striped VW Beetle for sale, past a pile of stripped logs at a lumberyard, past a dead lump of a porcupine on the road.

  “Everybody’s out today,” said Pam. I reported to room 232, special ed math, where a girl was eating a bagel. Mr. Fields, the bustling gent who had first told me about the voices in Waylon’s head, was my dispatcher. I was going to do a tech block first, with Mr. Walsh, he said. “So, Nick, you’re kind of tall. How tall are you?”

  “Six four and change,” I said.

  “You were probably six five and change in your younger days,” Mr. Fields said. “You haven’t shrunk yet? You’re over forty, aren’t you? Heh heh.”

  “I’m fifty-seven,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re a puppy!” Mr. Fields said. “Did you play basketball in high school?”

  Actually, I said, there was no basketball team at my high school.

  “Cut it out!” said Mr. Fields, amazed.

  Cheryl, in the corner, asked for tissues, but the box was empty. Mr. Fields said, “You can use a paper towel, Cheryl, and when you come back we’ll have tissues, so you don’t have to report us to the tissue police. See that look? Cheryl always gives you that look when she doesn’t like what you said. Judy, beside her, is always a gentle soul. Beside her is Kelly, another gentle soul. Tyna, over there in the corner, is a very gentle soul, and Glenn, beside her, is something of a Mexican jumping bean. Over here we have the quiet duo of Billy and Gene, who are just enrapt in their video games. Hey, fellas, it’s coming up on seven thirty-five, you know you should be off those contraptions. Thank you.”

  The principal came on the PA system. “Can I have your attention, please?”

  “Yes you can, boss!” said Mr. Fields. “Hey, Gene, you should have that thing away. You can break the spell, do it!”

  The class pledged its allegiance. Lunch was a hot meatball sub with shredded cheese. Band would meet from 9:55 to 10:40. A pair of glasses were found outside by the buses. The seventh-grade boys’ lacrosse team had made a good effort as they faced the Falmouth Yachtsmen the night before. All library books were due back by June 10. “Please check your lockers, your closets at home, your bedroom, all other places where those library books may be hiding.” Two students came on to announce a Team Orinoco dance, with special guest DJ Blake Burnside. “Enter to win an iTunes fifteen-dollar gift card and party like it’s 1999 at our beach party, with drinks, food, and a lot of fun tattoos and leis.” That concluded the announcements.

  Bong, bong, bong. I followed Judy down to tech class. “WALK ON THAT STAIRWAY, BOYS,” said an ed tech. “THAT’S VERY DANGEROUS.”

  Mr. Walsh, a compact baldie with a mustache, shook my hand and said I was supposed to work with Dana, who wore hearing aids. “He pretends he doesn’t hear a lot.”

  Mr. Walsh called out names for attendance and I sat on a stool in the hot, bright room. There were a dozen educational robots arranged on a table. “Dana’s not here,” said Mr. Walsh to me. I said I’d just float around.

  Mr. Walsh addressed the class. “OKAY! What we did yesterday was we did the Yucca Mountain sheet, explained the controls, gave you an opportunity to work a robotic arm.” He had the loudest voice I’d heard yet in school. “We’ll have a little competition today, to see who does it the quickest. We’ll do that first, and after that we’ll do the Fryeburg Fair.”

  “Caca or Yucca?” asked Jackie.

  “Yucca,” said Mr. Walsh. He turned to the whiteboard, which said CACA MOUNTAIN ACTIVITY. “Somebody changed that on me.”

  The class paired up, and each team of two picked out a robot arm and two “casks”—cylindrical wooden blocks meant to represent sealed containers of nuclear waste. The robot arms were black and yellow, and they made a high, revving, whining sound when they moved, like tiny chain saws. “I’ll give you two minutes to practice,” said Mr. Walsh, “and then we’ll start the competition.”

  I read the Yucca Mountain activity sheet, which was professionally laid out, with copy furnished, so it seemed, by some sort of a pro-nuclear lobbying group. Maine’s nuclear power plant, Maine Yankee, was closed in 1996, said the sheet, after 26 successful years of electrical generation—not mentioning that the plant was shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because it had falsified safety records. Nuclear waste was held in crash-resistant casks, the sheet explained, specially designed to hold radioactive materials safely. It briefly told the story of Yucca Mountain, the underground site in Nevada where American nuclear waste was supposed to go. As of 2008, construction was stalled and at this time, it appears as though the depository under Yucca Mountain will never be built and millions of dollars will be wasted. A callout offered reassurance: You would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure that you get from a single diagnostic medical x-ray. I wondered what the residents of Fukushima would say about this activity sheet.

  “I’d like to have everybody put their shoulder up to start with,” Mr. Walsh said—meaning the robot’s shoulder. “SHOULDER UP, ELBOW OUT.” The students worked their controllers with their thumbs. “If you should drop a cask, you need to put it back on the circle.” He checked his stopwatch. “READY. SET. GO.”

  The clumsy machines swiveled and joggled and eventually took hold of their dangerous spent-fission cargoes, while their operators cursed and laughed. The object was for each team to lift two casks and place them into a plastic box and close the lid. Several casks fell on their sides.

  “Be nice to James, he’s special,” said Forrest.

  “You do it, I can’t!” said Anna.

  One cask rolled off the table onto the floor. “You just exploded the Earth,” said Tucker.

  The winning time was one minute, fifty-one seconds. “ALL RIGHT, WE ARE GOING TO MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ACTIVITY,” said Mr. Walsh. I liked Mr. Walsh, who had discovered that the only way he could survive as a middle school tech teacher was to develop a voice like a union activist’s and shout all talkers down.

  “How many people have been to the Fryeburg Fair?” he asked, handing out an activity sheet. Many hands went up. He read to us from the sheet: the fair was the largest in Maine, with oxen pulls and wood-chopping contests and pigs and chickens and rows of porta-potties. “ALL RIGHT,” said Mr. Walsh. “YOUR TASK. In this activity, you are an employee at Blow Brothers and your boss has told you to load four porta-potties into the back of the truck body. These are going to be your porta-potties, right here.” He held up a handful of gray plastic cylinders, narrower than the wooden nuclear waste cylinders.

  “Those are really skinny porta-potties,” said Vicky.

  “WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO DO—is you’re going to have to put them in one of the five holes,” Mr. Walsh said. The holes were drilled in wooden blocks, representing the porta-potty trucks. “You need to be careful. They’re kind of difficult to stand up. And if I see anybody tipping the table, or shaking it, you’ll be going somewhere. So don’t be shaking the table. ALL RIGHT?”

  He gave the class a few minutes to practice, and then the race began. Robots clenched and whined and dropped porta-potties here and there. “I just spilled my bucket of pee all over you guys,” said Tucker. “She’s covered with it.”

  “I’m done, because I don’t want to do any more,” said Anna.

  “Gavin cheated,” said Jackie. The winning time, by a two-girl team, was two minutes, thirty-five seconds.

  “LISTEN UP, WE’RE GOING TO STOP,” Mr. Walsh said. “Bring the porta-potties up to me, put the robots in the middle of the table, and take your sheets with you.” Tomorrow, he said, they would be doing robotic hea
rt transplants, pretending to be cardiac surgeons at Maine Medical Center. When everything was put away, ready for Mr. Walsh’s next group of roboticists, he said, “ALL RIGHT! I guess you guys can go. HAVE A GOOD DAY.”

  Back at math special ed headquarters, Mr. Fields described some of the students I might be asked to help that day. “Diane wears kind of like a red fleece and pulls her hair back, very plain girl—nice kid, works hard. Bobby Bowman is this big solid kid—”

  “Kind of crew-cutty,” said Ms. Quinn, one of the other ed techs.

  “Crew cut, dark-rimmed glasses,” said Mr. Fields. “He’s a nice kid. He can do everything fine—he just kind of like daydreams a lot. He needs a little bit of ‘Hey, hey!’” He banged a file cabinet with his fist. “‘Are you in there? Anybody home?’”

  “Don’t hit him, though,” said Ms. Quinn.

  “No, he’s very gentle, he doesn’t take much of a prod. Another guy, Frank Wood. He’s a shorter guy, about yea big and about twelve pounds. Tends to wear T-shirts, short brown hair, kind of goes in every direction.”

  “I thought it was reddish,” said Ms. Quinn.

  “Brownish blond, strawberry blond, something like that. Nice kid, very quiet, but he’s not a real good reader, or a good writer, so he might need some help.”

  I had a free block, and I went out to the car and ate a sandwich until it was time to check in with Mr. Fields. He told me about more special ed students I might encounter. “There’s one girl named Katy, or it could be her friend Lynda,” he said. “We call the two of them the Katy-Lynda, because they’re basically alike. Little kiddy girls. There might be a guy named Adam, and there’s a guy named Shawn—he’s a blond-headed kid. They might need help with the writing. Adam can do pretty much everything, he’s just got to have a nudge. The girls are kind of helpless. But they can do more than they predict.”

  Health class was my next destination, taught by a long-fingered, tough-but-kind woman named Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Just hang out,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to me. I sat down at a table on the side of the room, near Katy and Lynda and the pencil sharpener.