Cornered

by Rhoda Belleza

  “Ms. DiNuzzio. One point five inches from the top?” He picks up Toni DiNuzzio’s paper and rips it in two. “Fail. Better luck tomorrow.” I can only see the back of Toni’s head, which is mostly her long black hair, but off to the side of her ponytail I see her ears getting red.

  Kendrick sneezes, and Kruzeman’s head whips around. “Mr. Hazelton!” He yells. “Garbage!” Kendrick gets up and throws a tissue in the trash and starts to return to his seat.

  “Sanitize!” Kruzeman says. Kendrick walks over to the sanitizer and takes a squirt, rubbing his hands together. “Fifteen seconds, Mr. Hazelton,” Kruzeman says.

  Of course he reaches my desk and slaps the ruler down. He picks other people at random, but he’s never missed me. “Mr. Michaels! Your heading is correct! If only you could bring that level of precision to your shoe tying.” I look down. My right shoe is untied. A couple of people titter. I reach down to tie my laces as he walks away, but he flips around.

  “Reaching into your shoe for answers, Mr. Michaels? I’m disappointed, though I can’t say I’m surprised. Fail—” He grabs my paper from my desk and tears it up. “And demerit. Academic dishonesty is a serious offense. You will, of course, be brought up before the dean for an academic tribunal.”

  I grit my teeth. Don’t say anything stupid. Don’t say anything stupid.

  “I was tying my shoe,” I say. “Look.” I take off my shoe and sock. “There’s nothing in there but my foot.”

  Kruzeman looks down at my foot and wrinkles his nose. “Mister Michaels. You must think me an idiot. You know as well as I that you could have thrown your cheat sheet far across the room in the moments when I wasn’t looking. In the meantime,” he gestures down at my foot, “I believe the air quality of this room will no longer be safe for breathing if you do not encase the offending appendage.”

  I look around the room. Nobody says anything, laughs, or even looks at me. They’re all busy being thankful it’s not them, and I don’t blame them.

  I can’t punch him in the face, as much as he deserves it. I can’t cry, even though I kind of want to. So I do the only other thing that makes sense. I remove my other shoe and sock and stretch my bare feet out in the aisle between the desks.

  I take out my iPod, pop the earbuds in, and start blasting the metal backing track I put together on my computer to shred over, as soon as I actually learn to shred on my guitar. It calms me down. My eyes are closed, my shoes are off, my headphones are in, and I just breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

  My fists unclench after a minute or so, and then I open my eyes to see Kruzeman standing in front of me wearing a surgical mask and purple latex gloves. His face is red and his glasses are starting to fog up. Maybe he’s yelling, but I can’t tell. I look at him, but I don’t remove my headphones.

  I glance around the room. Everybody is laughing. I reach down and pause the iPod to hear this muffled-through-the-mask rant. “—cheating, and now violating the school electronic policy as well as endangering the health of your classmates with unsanitary behavior! Put your shoes on and get out of my classroom now! And place your iPod on my desk!”

  I stand up, throw my bag over my shoulder, and grab my shoes and socks in my hand. I start walking toward the door, feeling better than I have in months. As I reach Kruzeman’s desk, I pull the iPod out of my pocket, drop it in a sock, and toss it all on his desk.

  For about ten seconds, I feel fantastic. I stood up to a bully, and yeah, I failed the test, but instead of me getting upset and yelling, he was upset and yelling. And with my sock on his desk, he’s probably going to have to disinfect his whole room.

  • • •

  My big victory lasts only until I get to the guidance office. My guidance counselor, Ms. Williams, gives me the standard lecture about the tradition of Boston Classical High School. “As one of the oldest public high schools in America and one of the very few public schools that still follow the classical curriculum, we have high standards for our students’ behavior as well as their work.” It goes on and on like this. I’m not really sure I get the point, but at the end she asks, “Do you have anything you would like to say in regards to today’s incident?”

  “I wasn’t cheating. I didn’t have any answers in my shoe. He told me my shoe was untied, and I went to tie my shoe. Is it against the rules to tie your shoe?”

  “I think you know it’s against the rules to listen to an iPod and take your shoes off.”

  “Yeah, but I was already in trouble by that point!”

  “Well, right now you’re clearly having some anger issues. Do you think you might benefit from anger management classes?”

  “I mean, when you get accused of something you didn’t do, doesn’t it kind of make sense to get angry?”

  “Well, is anger ever an adaptive behavior in school?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask the guy who was yelling in my face five minutes ago. Now there’s a guy who could benefit from some anger management classes. Have you ever recommended that to him?”

  She sighs, closes the manila folder on her desk, and gets up. “You’re using sarcasm to avoid taking responsibility for your actions. We’ll talk more tomorrow at the hearing. We’re clearly not going to reach each other right now.”

  She walks out of the room and leaves me sitting there for twenty minutes until she finally comes back with a slip of paper in her hand. “So I’ve spoken to your mother. You’ll have your suspension hearing tomorrow at nine in the headmaster’s office.”

  “I thought it was an academic tribunal.”

  She glances at her notes. “Whether that’s happening depends on the outcome of the hearing.”

  • • •

  I guess I didn’t really understand what a hearing was. I thought it was the kind of thing where they would listen to what I had to say. You know, like hear both sides of the story. Not the case. First of all, Kruzeman isn’t even here. He’s sent along a handwritten note, which the headmaster, Mr. Kelly, reads aloud. “Student disrupted class by removing articles of clothing and placing headphones in ear.”

  “Well, this seems pretty clear,” Mr. Kelly says. “Son, do you have anything to say about this? Do you agree that it’s factually accurate?”

  “I mean. It’s not really the whole story.”

  “I didn’t ask you that, son. I asked if the note was accurate.”

  And before I get a chance to answer, Mom chimes in. “I think we need to talk about the circumstances. Mr. Kruzeman mocks my son’s appearance every day, and he tore up his test and accused him of cheating with absolutely no evidence at all!”

  Mr. Kelly looks at my mom, writes something down on the pad of paper in front of him, then looks back up. “Mrs. Michaels. We need to understand each other. I don’t know how you discipline your child at home, but here at Boston Classical, there are no circumstances under which placing one’s bare feet atop a desk while listening to headphones is acceptable behavior. Is that acceptable behavior in your house?”

  Mom’s face turns red. I recognize the look she’s shooting Mr. Kelly. It’s the I can’t say what I really want to say right now, but just wait till later look. “What happens in my home is not at issue here,” she says. “You’ve got a teacher whose behavior is out of control, and—”

  “Whereas, dear, I would say that you have a child who is out of control.”

  “Did you call me ‘dear’? Because you don’t know me well enough to call me that.”

  “Ah. I see. Well, in any case, the facts of Kevin’s behavior are not at issue. He is suspended for three days.”

  I wince, waiting for the explosion, but what comes next is shocking: Mom doesn’t say anything. She gathers up her bag and whispers, “Come on, Kevin.” She doesn’t say anything as we walk down the long hallway, our shoes clacking on the floor. And she doesn’t say anything as we get in the car. We ride home in silence and I’m not gonna lie: I’m scared. Every few seconds I kind of sneak a look at her from the corner of my eye. She’s doing her an
gry clenched teeth thing that makes her bottom jaw stick out a little bit. It always, without fail, precedes me getting yelled at. I keep waiting for it, and it keeps not coming, which makes the whole thing that much worse. We get into the house—okay, apartment—and I say, “Um. I’m sorry, Mom.”

  She looks at me finally. “Oh God, Sweetie. It’s not you. I mean, taking off your shoes and putting the iPod in was dumb, but I know a lot of fourteen-year-olds who are doing things that are way dumber than that. I just—” She closes her eyes, runs a hand through her hair, and gives a long, slow exhale. “It makes me so angry that you get punished for standing up to him, and he gets nothing for being cruel and irrational to you. Does he treat everybody else like this?”

  “Yeah. He tore up Toni DiNuzzio’s paper because she didn’t have her heading in the right place. . . .”

  “See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. That’s not rigorous. That’s crazy. I’m sending out an e-mail right now to all the other parents in your class.”

  I really want to tell her please don’t do that, it’s gonna be embarrassing, but she is already attacking the keyboard like it’s Mr. Kelly’s head, and there is no way I’m getting in her way when she’s like this.

  She sends an e-mail to some ninth grade parents’ group, and by the next day she has ten responses. Three are from people who say they’re glad to be a part of the Boston Classical tradition, and the only problem the school needs to address is retaining too many students who should be allowed to fail out. The other seven are from people, including Toni DiNuzzio’s mom, who think Kruzeman is a whack job.

  In the three days I’m suspended from school, I get all my homework done, and the apartment gets a thorough cleaning. Mom is way angrier at the school than me, but she still wants me to “learn a lesson” about doing stupid things like taking my shoes off during class, so my punishment is annoying but not too severe. She takes the PS3 controllers to work with her and feels the TV to make sure it’s cold as soon as she gets home. Fortunately she doesn’t take the computer or my guitar away, so I spend most of the day flailing away on the seven-string Ibanez that Mom got off eBay for my birthday last year. I don’t really know how to play very well, but I mix up a nice backing track on Garage Band. So that’s good.

  Then it’s the weekend, so I have two more days to worry about what it’s going to be like going back to school. On Monday, Mom drives me in because she and Mrs. DiNuzzio and two other parents are meeting with Mr. Kelly again.

  It’s day three on the block schedule, meaning I have Kruzeman before lunch, so at least I’ll get to eat. I got his homework off his website so I’ll be prepared for the quiz. All I have to do is get through him mocking me when I walk in to class. “Mr. Michaels!” Kruzeman sings out as I walk in, ducking behind the crowd to get my mandatory squirt of hand sanitizer.

  I give a wave and head to my seat, but Kruzeman isn’t having any. “I’m sorry, Mr. Michaels, but I didn’t hear you!”

  I take a deep breath and say, “Good morning, Mr. Kruzeman.”

  “Well, it was until just a moment ago. We’ve had such a nice three days here, but I suppose all good things must come to an end.”

  “And bad things, like his life, just go on forever,” Toni DiNuzzio whispers at me as she walks past. I smile at her and she smiles back, her big brown eyes lighting up. Maybe there’s something not so terrible about this class after all.

  Class starts and I clench my teeth, waiting for whatever torture Kruzeman has in store for me for a welcome back present. I put my heading in the right spot; I practiced while I was at home. My heart pounds as he stands just inches away from my desk for what feels like an hour before slapping the ruler down and seeing that my heading is right. I’m sweating, and I sit there just staring at the pen in my hand. It starts to shake, and Kruzeman moves on to somebody else’s desk.

  The quiz is a normal quiz, except when Eric Bos whispers, “What was the answer to number 3?” as he turns in his quiz. And Kruzeman tells him. Out loud. Even though there are still people who haven’t turned in their quizzes.

  Suddenly Kruzeman looks up at the class. “Who heard what I just said?” he asks, loudly. I look up slowly from my quiz paper and do my best to put a puzzled look on my face. I think I can probably sell it since I sit so close to the back of the room.

  In the front row, though, is Julie Chen, whose hand shoots up. I feel bad for the kid—she doesn’t get it. I don’t know how you could get through nine years in American schools and still believe that hard work and honesty always pay off, but Julie certainly seems to. Kruzeman is about to change her mind.

  “Well, Ms. Chen, you’ll get number three wrong.”

  Now, I’ve been in classes with Julie Chen since the seventh grade. I don’t think I have ever heard her say anything that wasn’t the answer to a direct question. Until now. “What?” she says.

  “I said, you’ll get number three wrong. You heard the answer, so you can’t get it right.” Unless you’re like everybody else in the class who just pretended they hadn’t heard.

  “But—,” Julie Chen starts. “I had the answer right! Look at my paper!”

  “Well of course you’ve got the right answer now,” Kruzeman says.

  “But that’s not fair! You said the answer out loud!”

  Kruzeman laughs and rolls his eyes. “Fear not, Ms. Chen. Your 102 average may dip to 101 briefly, but—”

  And then Julie Chen interrupts the teacher. I take a quick look out the window to make sure no pigs are flying by. “That’s not the point! You’re being unfair! You made a mistake, and now you’re punishing me for being honest!”

  If this were a cartoon, I’d see the red creep up from Kruzeman’s shoes all the way to the top of his head, which would then shoot steam from the ears before exploding. In real life, though, he goes from zero to crazy in like a second. “What did you say?” he says to Julie Chen.

  “I said you made a mistake, and you’re being unfair.”

  This hangs in the air while Kruzeman’s face contorts into a pink mask of rage. “I made a mistake? I made a mistake?!” He screams as spittle flies from his lips. “Who do you think you are, Julie Chen? Do YOU think you can run my class? How dare you? How dare you!?” And Julie Chen, sobbing, runs from the classroom.

  I’m not gonna lie. My first thought is not about how unfair this is, or how I feel terrible for Julie Chen—who’s never even been friends with anyone who got in trouble—or how Kruzeman has really lost his mind. Nope, my first thought is just, Thank God it wasn’t me this time.

  Kruzeman looks at the rest of us. “So does anybody else have anything to say?”

  Nobody does. And like someone threw a switch, Kruzeman is back to what passes for normal. For him, at least. “All right, then. Let’s continue with class, shall we?” For the rest of the period, nobody laughs at a single one of his corny jokes. It’s pretty weak as rebellions go, but I guess it’ll have to do.

  When Mom gets home from work, I ask how was the big meeting was. This is a decision I regret almost instantly because Mom is off to the races. “That Kelly guy is such a jerk,” she says. “He doesn’t care about students. He just yapped at us about the tradition of Boston Classical and not every student is ready for this level of rigor and blah blah. And when Mrs. DiNuzzio told him about Toni’s quiz getting ripped up, do you know what he said? ‘Well, teenage girls have been known to exaggerate.’ Arrrgh!”

  Mom immediately retreats to the computer in a huff and spends the rest of the evening banging on her computer keyboard, sending angry e-mails, I guess. I, however, spend the rest of the evening shredding my own face off with headphones hooked up to my amp. By which I mean slowly picking out one of my favorite solos at one-third speed while hitting like every third note wrong.

  The next day Kruzeman opens class with the following. “You know, it’s come to my attention that certain parents have made complaints about my class. Well, let me just tell you this. The staff at Boston Classical talk to
each other, and we’re all very unlikely to write a college recommendation for someone who makes trouble around here.”

  When he says this, Toni DiNuzzio looks back at me and rolls her eyes. She’s not fazed, but I’m freaked out. So if I go here, I won’t be able to go to college? Is that what this guy is telling me? Because my mom complained about something?

  After class, Toni comes up to me in the hall. She smells good. “You know that’s bullshit, right?” she asks. “My mom’s friends with Ms. Dornbusch . . . you know, the AP Bio teacher?” I have no idea, but I nod like I know what she’s talking about. “They all know he’s crazy. It’s not like he can turn every teacher in the school against us.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess. But still . . .”

  She smiles at me. I notice she has one crooked tooth on the bottom. It’s strangely cute. “But still, only a hundred and thirteen more days of this, and then we never have to deal with him again. And at least the worst is over for the day.”

  That’s what she thinks. I’m just heading into my study period after lunch when my guidance counselor, Ms. Williams, intercepts me.

  “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?” she asks.

  “Um. Well, I’ve got like thirty-five problems for math homework, and—”

  “It’ll only take a minute,” she says and stares at me. So I guess I’m being told rather than asked. Got it.

  I follow her to her office and sit in the chair opposite her desk. She settles into her chair and says, “So. How do you like it here?”

  I look around. “I’m not crazy about the painting. Is that, like, supposed to be the Boston skyline or something? I mean, no offense. It’s okay. It’s just not my thing. The plants are cool, I guess. The furniture, though—”

  “Stop it. I’m being serious.”

  So was I. This chair I’m sitting in is ridiculously uncomfortable, and the painting is hideous. But I knew what she meant.