by Doug Wilhelm
You’re not missing much.
Right as I signed off, the bell rang. Machines beeped and chairs scraped as people signed off, got up, grabbed their backpacks, and crowded through the door. I sat there watching. Finally I got up, walked to the door … and turned back.
I looked at the machines. They were waiting for the next wave. I thought how “Ask Mr. D” came pecking across my screen as Elliot typed it. And then I knew.
Of course!
“I have an idea,” I told Catalina when school ended. “Come with me, okay?”
“Okay.”
I took off walking. Her locker clicked shut; in about three seconds she had caught up and was striding alongside me.
I looked at her. “Some legs,” I said.
She blushed.
“I mean they’re long,” I said, embarrassed. She blushed even more. I managed not to embarrass us any more before we got to the System Server room.
That’s what it says on the door: SYSTEM SERVER. This was always the first place to look for Mr. Dallas. I knocked.
“Come ON in!” said a booming voice. I pushed open the door. Inside, Mr. Dallas swiveled his chair toward us from a blinking screen.
The headquarters of SchoolStream is no bigger than a closet, which is what it was before this year, when they put in the network. There are no windows. Tall metal racks, looking like they’re from grownup erector sets, hold electronic equipment in shelves almost to the ceiling. At desk level are four or five computers.
“RussT! Catli! How are ya?”
Mr. Dallas is a funny guy, mostly in the humorous sense. He likes to call you by your screen name, and he always shakes your hand with gusto. He has a lot of gusto. He rides a motorcycle to work, and he has a crop of gray hair that’s so thick and stiff it looks like he hit a porcupine and it stuck to his head.
Catalina blinked and sort of smiled at Mr. Dallas. I don’t think she had experienced him up close before.
KidNet is Mr. Dallas’s baby. He convinced the school to put it in and let him run it. Before this year he taught science; now he’s always bounding into other teachers’ science classes to give a talk on KidNet, answer questions, and urge us to use it, which he doesn’t have to do, since everyone started using it right away. Mr. Dallas says we’re innovators.
“What can I do for you guys?”
“We’ve got a KidNet question, Mr. D.”
“I love it. Sit down, sit down.” We sat. He said, “What is it?”
I said, “Catalina’s written something.” I pulled the disk out of my pocket.
“It’s a letter,” she said, perching on a swivel chair. “I’d like to send it to everyone in the seventh grade.”
“Is that possible on KidNet?” I said. “Can we do that?”
“Sure! The easiest way is to attach the file to an e-mail message and send it to a distribution list. That’s the network version of a mailing list. In fact, distribution lists go back to the earliest computer networks, when the U.S. government set one up in case of nuclear attack. Users on the network created a mailing list so they could talk about science fiction.”
He leaned back, hands behind his head, and chuckled.
“Imagine some far-flung network of computer nerds holed up in basement labs and bomb shelters after an atomic holocaust, with everyone on-line intently debating some science-fiction story about life after an atomic holocaust.” He looked at us and grinned. “Doesn’t that just say it all?”
I wasn’t sure what all it said, but Mr. Dallas broke out laughing. Catalina and I looked at each other. He suddenly sat up in his chair. “So,” he said, swiveling to a computer, “we have a number of automated lists. Teachers use them all the time. You’re the first students to ask about them.”
He started rattling keys … then he paused.
“There could be some pitfalls here,” he said.
“There could?”
“Well, possibly. I mean, if students start to get the idea about distributing or broadcasting files … it opens up a new dimension of use. It could be a Pandora’s box. That’s … well, actually, that’s what certain authority figures darkly predicted this whole network would become.”
Catalina said, “They did?”
“Well, yes. There were people in positions of authority—one person, basically—who said if we turned a LAN over to the students as an open system, we’d get chaos. Of course, we don’t have chaos—we have use. But I wonder what’ll happen if you start broadcasting files.”
“It’d be innovative,” I quickly said.
“Yeah! It sure would. Well, I’m for it.” He grinned at us again. “Experimentation, communication—that’s what this is about, right?”
Now he lunged forward; his chair almost leaped at us. Catalina hopped backward in hers.
“It is important for you to be careful with this,” Mr. Dallas said. “Okay?”
Catalina gripped her armrests. “Okay,” she said, wide-eyed.
“How should we be careful?” I asked.
“Just don’t do anything irresponsible,” Mr. Dallas said. “But I know you won’t. Anyway, what you do is pull down this menu and choose Distribute. See it? First you’ve created your message. Then, let’s see—Staff access gets you all the lists we’ve created. What does MidStream access get?”
He rattled some keys. The list choices that popped up said Grade 6, Grade 7, Grade 8, All, and Custom. There were other list names, like Hogeboom 7B, but they were in faded gray, meaning you couldn’t use them at our access level.
“Okay. I thought so,” Mr. Dallas said. “You can access what you need. You could create custom lists of your own, if you wanted to. But you just want to send it to Grade 7, right? So, no problem. Just select that and send.”
“All right,” I whispered. I slipped the disk with Catalina’s letter back in my pocket.
“I guess we’ll go try it,” I said.
Mr. Dallas shook our hands with gusto.
“Onward!” he said.
That night I rode my bike to Elliot’s house. I had never been there before.
He said, “You know what I can’t stand?”
I didn’t answer. I was looking around at his bedroom.
Elliot was sitting on his bed, his thickly wrapped ankle propped up on a big yellow pillow. The pillow was, as far as I could tell, the only non-dinosaur-themed item in the room.
His walls had posters from the original Godzilla movie (“King of the Monsters!”), plus Godzilla vs. Mothra and One Million Years B.C (which didn’t actually feature dinosaurs so much as this starlet in skins, with major cleavage), plus pictures of stegosaurus and iguanodon and triceratops and a very wide-angle poster that showed a ferny river scene with volcanoes spouting smoke in the background, tyrannosaurus blasting out of the foliage to attack some panicking duckbills, and a giant brontosaurus off munching in the water. On the shelves he had a battery-powered triceratops, a wooden giant flying lizard skeleton, a plastic dueling tyranno and triceratops, at least thirty realistic little rubber or plastic dino models, a dinosaur diorama, and a webbed dino footprint in plaster.
And he had a bookshelf full of dinosaur books. A chubby, inflated green T-rex was tipped over backward in the corner. On Elliot’s bed was a dinosaur comforter—it had a red duckbill, a blue bronto, a green pterodactyl, a yellow tyranno. They were all smiling. I said that didn’t seem too realistic, dinos smiling.
“Nah,” Elliot said, waving it away, “I got all this stuff when I was a kid. You know what I can’t stand? I’m stuck here and those guys think they won. They probably think, ‘Hey, ma
n, we showed him,’ and I can’t do anything about it.” He lifted his wrapped foot a little, then let it drop.
“Pretty soon, though,” he said, “it’s my turn.” He started to smile, slyly.
“What, are you nuts? They dropped you off a bridge.”
“Yeah. And you know what? I am going to get them back.”
I thought, Who is this kid? What happened to the cautious little Bird Boy? Elliot was sitting up proudly, with his arms crossed.
I sighed. “Well, we need to change our approach,” I said. “There’s no future in getting the crap beat out of us.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I stood up to ’em, didn’t I? Just like you did. They might think twice before harassing me again.”
“Yeah. They think you’re insane.”
“You think so? They think I’m nuts?”
“You were nuts. Totally.”
“Yeah.” He was just beaming. I shrugged. Maybe he was a little nuts. Maybe the concussion …
“Hey,” I said. “Has anybody talked to you or anything? Like the principal or the police?”
“Nah,” he said. “Forget about the principal—I told you, she never does anything. The cops … my mom wanted to make a report but I said don’t. Burke and Blanchette would say they were trying to save me or something. The worst kids are the best liars.” He shrugged. “So what.”
“If it was grownups who did that, they’d be in jail.”
“Well it wasn’t and they’re not. Hey, what’d you do with Catalina’s thing?”
I told him we’d sent it around to the whole seventh grade. We’d gone right from the System Server room to the computer lab, and done it.
Elliot whistled. “I like it! Hey, can you believe those girls made that stuff up, about Catalina and her mom?”
“I told you they did.”
“Yeah. What do you think people will say? I mean when they read what she wrote?”
“I don’t know. They’ll read it. Most of ’em probably already did. And I bet they’ll talk about it. I just don’t know what they’ll say.”
“Tell me what happens, okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll make a report.”
“A lab report,” Elliot said, and he smiled again. “The bully lab lives.”
SOCIAL STUDIES
The next day in social studies we were doing Anne Frank. We were halfway through the book. Ms. Hogeboom said, “People, let’s talk today about Anne as a person. What was she like, do you think?”
The usual heavy silence. Answers came like questions.
“She was bright?”
“She was a prolific writer?”
“Well, yes,” Ms. Hogeboom said. “But do you think she was annoying?”
“Huh?”
“What do you mean, annoying?”
“Well, Anne writes again and again that she is the center of all the tension in the Secret Annex,” the teacher said, perching on her desk and picking up the paperback from beside her.
Ms. Hogeboom has long straight hair and she wears long, loose, peasant kind of dresses. I think she used to be a hippie. Her copy of the book had a lot of bent yellow Post-its sticking up from the top, like a shaggy blond Mohawk. She pulled one of the yellow tabs open to a page.
“How about this? On page 29 she says, ‘Nothing, I repeat, nothing about me is right; my general appearance, my character, my manners are discussed from A to Z.’ Then she says, ‘Am I really so bad-mannered, conceited, headstrong, pushing, stupid, lazy, etc., etc., as they all say?’”
Ms. Hogeboom looked up. “What do you think? Was she?”
There was buzzing and murmuring now.
“People always say that about teenagers.”
“Yeah. It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s stupid.”
“All right. So is she just a normal adolescent who is being typically persecuted and misunderstood? I mean, everyone who’s hiding together in that little apartment has to be pretty edgy, right? Maybe they just take it out on Anne, who could really be the nicest teenage person in the world. Anne Frank has become a hero in our eyes, and for good reason. But … is it at all possible that as a person, at this time in her life, she might have been a little bit exasperating? What if you’d been stuck with her in that apartment? What do you think she was really like?”
There was a lot of murmuring now. Some people were flipping through their copies; some were rolling their eyes, making faces, and whispering to their friends. When you ask seventh graders to share anything, you always get a certain amount of that.
“She was very intelligent,” Leah Sternberg piped up helpfully. Leah talks a lot, always helpfully. She’s involved with everything—Student Council, school newspaper, drama club, soccer and basketball and softball, chorus and band … Whenever there’s an awkward moment in class, Leah will pipe up.
“She was also very sensitive,” she added.
“She was hypersensitive,” said Jake Messner. Jake’s a tall kid who’s good in sports and very smart and serious. He’s actually one of the nicer kids in our class. “She says so herself,” he said. “It’s in here somewhere.” He was searching through pages, frowning.
“She does say she’s hypersensitive,” Ms. Hogeboom agreed, and opened her book, too.
“Well, for god’s sake,” said Allison Kukovna, “who wouldn’t be? I mean, she’s very bright and she’s got all these interests in life, she loves her friends and she even likes school, and now she’s shut up all day and all night with her parents and these other dorky grownups she doesn’t even know who can’t tell each other they really hate each other so they pick apart everything Anne does. And, I mean, if any of them makes one loud noise they could all be dead. Wouldn’t you be a little edgy?”
Allison shut her book with a thump. “It’s not fair to say it’s Anne’s fault.” She crossed her arms and sat up straight, dramatically.
Allison has cascading red hair and she is dramatic. She sang the lead when the chorus and band did a number from Annie in the last school concert. She was funny and good. She could be one of the cool girls, except I think she’s not tense enough.
“It’s being stuck in there,” Jake said. “They’re in those rooms all the time, surrounded by all that fear and danger. It brings out the worst in everybody. I mean, in the beginning she says her family never quarrels—they’re shocked when the other family does. But before long everybody is squabbling like crazy.”
Ms. Hogeboom smiled. “Anne’s got a strong character and she is a teenager. So whenever things get edgy, she’s a magnet for adult disapproval. Is that what you’re saying? People? Is that really what this is about?”
“It’s about what it’s always about,” said a voice in back.
Everybody turned around.
Turner White always sat in the back, and always wore black. He was sort of pale, like he didn’t get a lot of sun.
“Turner?” Ms. Hogeboom said. “What is it always about?”
Turner shrugged. “Isolation,” he said. “What else?”
We just looked at him.
“Well?” he said. “If it wasn’t for the isolation, none of this would have happened.”
“None of it?” Ms. Hogeboom said.
Turner tilted his head like he was waiting for the rest of us to get it. “Think about it,” he said. “The Nazis take over all of Europe and they isolate it, right? Nobody can go in or out. They hate the Jews, so they isolate them. Right? It says in the book no Jews were allowed to visit Christians or go to the movies or the parks or anything. Right? Then they start shipping people off to those camps, where they’re completely cut off. And meanwhile these two families have to hide upstairs in a warehouse with blankets over the windows.”
Turner sat back and folded his arms. “If it wasn’t for the isolation, none of this could have happened.”
There was a silence.
“Well,” said Leah helpfully, “what if the Jewish people had a computer network? I mean, what if the Franks could have sent
messages?”
Somebody said, “What?”
“Well, why not? All over the world. ‘We’re in here. We’re hiding. They’re trying to kill us. Please help.’”
“Then the Germans would have found them and killed them a lot sooner,” said Jon Blanchette. He twisted around, shrugged, and grinned. “Well?”
“It’s a big joke to you, isn’t it, Jon?” said Big Chris, turning to face his friend. “Nothing but a big joke—no matter who gets hurt.”
Jon gave him a funny look, and shrugged.
“But,” said Allison, “what if you could send messages when people started to tell lies about you?”
“Yeah,” said Jake. He leaned forward with a sly expression. “What if you could tell everyone the truth about yourself right away?”
People were shifting in their seats and sneaking glances at Catalina, who sat in the middle of the class blinking behind her glasses. Bethany DeMere sat stiffly in the front row. She didn’t look around.
Ms. Hogeboom was puzzled. “Well …” she said, “Anne was sending a message, wasn’t she? Her book has been read by millions of people.”
“But she’s dead,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“Well, she is. What good did writing the book do her?”
“It’s a good question,” Ms. Hogeboom said. “What do you all think …”
“But what if she could have sent messages to everyone when this whole thing started?” Allison said. “What if they all could have?”
Ms. Hogeboom said, “What do you mean by …”
I said, “The world didn’t believe this stuff was happening at all, right? ’Cause the world didn’t want to know. Sounds kind of familiar.”
“It’s true,” Allison said. “I mean, if a few people persecute somebody, most of us pretend it isn’t happening, right? We don’t want to see it. But what if the person it’s actually happening to could send a message to everyone, like, right away?”
“What is all this about messages?” Ms. Hogeboom asked.
Everyone knew. Nobody said.