by Doug Wilhelm
Turner sat back, and shrugged. “Yeah. That’s life all right.”
“But,” Ms. Hogeboom said, “the school invested thousands of dollars in this network.”
“Yeah,” said Jake, “until we started using it. So now we’ll only be able to get stuff on the system that the school wants us to get.”
“Like homework assignments,” said Allison, nodding.
“And stuff from the library,” said Chris.
“Well. A lot of materials, actually,” Ms. Hogeboom said.
“Oh sure,” Jake said. “We just won’t be able to talk to each other. What’s that about?”
“Oh, come on—we talk to each other all the time,” said Leah Sternberg. “We are not like hiding in secret annexes. We have telephones, we have computers, we still have the Internet. We have plenty of choices.”
“But this one was a little too powerful,” Jake said.
“It was too connected,” Turner added from the back. “Look, they’ve got a brand-new CD-rewritable machine in the computer lab. You can put 640 megs of multimedia on a disk—words, pictures, sound, video, whatever you want. They want you to use that. Just as long as you stay plugged in by yourself. See, that’s safe. It’s like a glorified Game Boy.”
The class didn’t say anything. Finally, Ms. Hogeboom said, “Well, I think that’s a very challenging viewpoint. And I don’t mean to cut things off, but I think that’s a good place to stop. We still have twenty minutes, and I happen to have this twenty-minute historic film about Amsterdam and the legacy of Anne Frank. If someone could just get the lights—wait, let me plug this in. Okay. Lights?”
And then we had darkness, and the old, flickering black and white.
In the hall after class, Bethany and Burke were together. She whispered something to him. He looked up to see me.
“Hey, smart boy,” Burke said. “What you got to say now?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Gee,” said Burke, “I don’t see your tough-guy friend anywhere. Do I? Actually, I don’t see your weenie friends either. Where’d all your friends go, smart boy?”
Bethany was behind him, smirking at me.
“Don’t have much to say, huh?” Burke said. “Well, you know what? Neither do I. I just want to make sure you understand that you are right back where you belong, you and your friends. If they’re still your friends.”
He stood in my way. “This is the natural order, kid,” he said. “You’re on the bottom—and this time, you are going to stay there.”
He stepped away. Bethany started walking down the hall with him. He said something to her and she laughed.
At lunchtime, Catalina was sitting with Allison and her friends at their table, in the middle of everything. Elliot was at our old table with Big Chris Kuppel. I could hardly believe it. Elliot looked up when he saw me, but I walked away. I went and ate my lunch by myself.
THE DUMPSTER
In afternoon detention we weren’t allowed to talk, which was fine with me. Catalina did homework. Elliot sat and read a dinosaur book. I did nothing. Detention was in Ms. Hogeboom’s room that day and I looked at stuff on the walls, stuff I’d read a million times before and never paid much attention to. Like the banner above the blackboard that said, in big letters: NEVER SETTLE FOR LESS THAN YOUR BEST. Uh-huh. There was also a poster for Mr. Dallas’s Creative Science Fair. And there was a section of the bulletin board that was crowded with political cartoons, headlines, pictures of people in the news. Above that stuff more big letters said: WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
Nice try, Ms. Hogeboom.
When three forty-five came, I hadn’t done a thing. Ms. Hogeboom said we could go. Elliot and Catalina picked up their stuff and left.
Ms. Hogeboom was looking at me.
“Russell,” she said, “I imagine this has been a tough couple of days for you.” I started gathering up my stuff. She said, “I wouldn’t be surprised or blame you if you were upset. I just wonder if you’d like to talk about it.”
I shook my head.
“It’s okay if you talk about it,” Ms. Hogeboom said gently.
I didn’t want to. But then I heard myself whisper, “It’s … just over. That’s all.”
“What?” she said. “What’s over?”
I shrugged. “Everything. We got beat. We are beat.” I zipped the backpack. I couldn’t say any more.
She came around and sat on her desk. “Why?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Why are you beat?” she said.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was looking past her, at Mr. Dallas’s poster.
A “Little Bit More Challenging” Science Fair, it said. The fair was in four weeks, the poster said. So what?
“I know this decision about the network was a disappointment,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “And I know you feel responsible.”
I did not want to hear this. I read the poster instead.
“But who says you have to be beaten?” she was saying.
The poster said, The Challenge: Create something that tests an original hypothesis.
“Beaten—that means ground down, doesn’t it? Defeated. Depleted. Pretty much used up. Are you really used up? Russell? Russell, could you look at me?”
She was leaning sideways to catch my eye. “You’re just beginning your life,” she said. “Why should you feel used up?”
I didn’t answer.
“May I tell you what I’ve seen?” she said. “I’ve seen three promising kids who had each been unconfident, unsure—in fact, isolated. Definitely. And so they got picked on. This happens, I know. It breaks my heart, but I see it all the time. I see that it happens when young people have, among their peers, a lack of stature.
“But then these three kids got together. That was a big thing, wasn’t it? Just that they got together. I saw that. And you know what? That made other things possible.”
The poster said, What do we mean, “original”?
“These three kids started doing something,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “They started to share their experiences. And they found a way to put those experiences in front of every student in the seventh grade.”
“The whole school,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“We put them in front of every kid in the school.”
“Oh. Well, that’s even better.”
We mean YOU thought of it, the poster said. The more unique, the better.
“Anyway, the next thing anybody knew, other kids were sending in their stories,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “Everybody was reading these stories, and something very subtle was beginning to happen. Just in the atmosphere of the school. I don’t know how to put it, exactly …”
What do we mean, “create”? the poster said.
Ms. Hogeboom snapped her fingers. “Here’s what I think it was. A lot of the time middle-schoolers are not very compassionate toward each other—especially to those who don’t have stature. But all of a sudden I saw a humanizing. I think students were starting to look at each other a little bit differently. It was like a small revolution.”
She smiled.
“Maybe that’s a bit much,” she said. “But I really felt that students were actually starting to treat each other differently.”
We mean when you’re done, the poster said, something exists that didn’t exist before.
“And now you three had stature,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “You were making an impact every day. You actually had power, all of a sudden. Maybe that didn’t please everyone—maybe it even made some people nervous. Maybe they wanted to stop you, or knock you down. Or maybe you just made a mistake. I don’t really know. But meanwhile, this other thing, this more general humanizing thing, has been happening.
“If you let yourself be beat, Russell,” she said. “Russell? Hello?”
I sat up. I still wasn’t looking at her.
“If you are defeated,” she said, “I wonder—will this
other thing be defeated, too? Will some kids go right back to victimizing other kids, with that same old arrogance and impunity? Will everyone else go right back to not really seeing, and not really caring? Will my heart start to get broken again?”
Note: the poster said, This fair will be judged by real scientists and technology professionals. Advance human knowledge! MAKE something—whether weirdly wacky or totally technical—that opens people’s eyes!
“Russell? Hello?”
“Huh?”
Ms. Hogeboom sighed.
“I guess you better go, Russell. Is someone here to pick you up?”
“No. I walk home.”
“All right.” She stood up. She thought for a second. Then she reached back on her desk, picked up a book, and tossed it to me. I missed it, and it fell to the floor. I picked it up.
It was her copy of Anne Frank’s Diary. It still had that Mohawk shag of yellow Post-its across the top. The book had been read and reread and used so much that its cover had all these white cracks, its corners were rounded and swollen, and the spine had totally come apart. She had tape holding it together.
“I would say nobody is truly isolated unless they cut themselves off, Russell,” she said. She nodded at Anne Frank’s book in my hands. “That is one choice she never made.”
Ms. Hogeboom held out her hand. I put the book in it.
“And now we have something we never had before,” she said. “We have this.”
Walking up Chamber Street and then through the parking lot, I was almost hoping the dark figure would be there. When I saw him leaning against the white wall of Convenience Farms, I was almost glad.
I came walking up. He nodded. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
I leaned up alongside him. I just stood there. I could feel him glance over at me.
“I read that letter,” he said. “I heard what happened.”
I looked down. “It was a setup,” I said. “We got played.”
“Yeah? By who?”
“Couple of kids.”
“Huh. So, what are you gonna do about it?”
I scratched my foot in the gravel. “What can we do about it? We lost.”
Richie stood out from the wall.
“Says who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Says you. Right? Says you.”
“No, the kids who played us. They said things are meant to be this way. I mean, the principal said it.”
“Oh, so that’s it? A couple dirtball kids and that hot-air bag say you’re done, so you’re done?”
“Well what else can we do?” I was getting mad. “There’s nothing we can do, all right?”
“No. That’s not all right.” He was staring at the ground. Then he looked right at me. “You’re just gonna cave? I mean, you stand up to me, then a couple midgets trip you up and you’re gonna lie there?”
“I don’t know what to do!” I was yelling. “All right? Everybody thinks it was our fault!”
He shook his head. “I don’t. So that’s not everybody. Right? That’s a big not everybody.”
I shrugged.
“So,” Richie said, “now you figure out how to clue in everybody else. What’s so hard about that?”
“For the last time, Richie, I don’t know what to do!”
He started looking around. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “See that thing over there?” He was pointing toward the back.
“The phone booth?”
“No, not the phone booth. There.”
“The Dumpster?”
“Yeah. The Dumpster. You cave now, you give up now, where’s the rest of your life going? Any guesses?”
“But I don’t …”
“You don’t always have to know what to do! You just have to know who you are. So who are you? Huh?”
He shoved me. Backward.
“Don’t push me,” I said. “I’ve had a bad day.”
“I’m gonna push you right in that damn Dumpster. You want to go there, I’m gonna put you there.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not? You’re just gonna take it, right?” He pushed me again. I stumbled back. He pushed me again.
I stopped stumbling and launched myself at him. I shoved him in the chest, right in his stupid black jacket. He stumbled backward himself.
“You’re just a damn bully, you know that? You think every answer is just to shove someone around. It’s not that simple, Richie, all right? It’s not that easy!”
I stuck my face in Richie’s. His eyebrows lifted, but that’s all. I said, “I can’t solve an incredibly complicated problem just because you act like a tough guy and tell me or else! I mean, or else what?”
Slowly, Richie turned up his open palms.
“Or else nothing, man. That’s just it. Or else you got nothing.
I turned and walked away. But my mind was working—I will say that. All day I’d been numb and dumb and feeling stuck. But Richie got me thinking again.
That night I was so tired, I went to bed early. Then, when I was almost asleep, I sat straight up in bed.
I was wide awake. There in the dark, all the pieces came together, and I got it.
I got it!
In that instant, I knew what we could do.
DOUBLE CLICKS
“So what’s this?” said Jake Messner.
“Take a look,” said Elliot, sliding the mouse his way.
We three watched as Jake slipped into a chair and double-clicked. He leaned forward and looked at the screen, while behind him dozens of other kids milled around the gym.
A big yellow banner on the wall above the blue hanging mats said, WELCOME TO THE CREATIVE SCIENCE FAIR! There was a buzz of noise and a bubbling-up of laughter as all the kids who’d just been let in circled the gym, eyeing the exhibits as they shuffled by and peered from safe distances, cracking smart comments from their little moving groups but usually, unlike Jake, too self-conscious to be the first to stop and actually look.
The three of us had already wandered around. Because our exhibit was easy to set up—just a computer and a simple sign—we’d had time to make the circuit before the general student body was admitted. Some of the projects were fairly funny, like “The Answer Guys.” That was a refrigerator box three eighth-graders had painted silver, with an opening the shape of a TV screen cut out at face level. Below the “screen” was a button and a sign that said PUSH—THEN ASK ANY QUESTION.
When you pushed, a guy popped up, and no matter what you asked, he would loudly intone a serious-sounding answer. Then another kid at a table asked you to fill out a survey, which had only one question: “Did you believe your answer?” Every exhibit had to be based on a hypothesis, and this one’s was: “A majority of people will believe you if you sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
Three sixth-graders had mummified a pig. They had used “ancient Egyptian methods,” according to a pretty cool brochure they had created on the computer with their picture (not the pig’s) on the cover, “to reconstruct the art of mummification.” It was a prenatal pig, actually—unborn, but real. The brochure explained their methods: filling the “body cavities” with salt, soaking the body in baking soda, and filling the gut area with herbs mixed with Calvin Klein cologne. Their hypothesis was that mummification worked, but I figured they’d need to keep the pig around for a few years to know for sure.
Then there was “The Class Gas-O-Meter.” This was a Plexiglas box containing a carbon-dioxide meter that was connected to a buzzer alarm. The hypothesis was that high levels of CO2 (“Human Exhaust,” the explanation panel explained) in school classrooms are “at least partially responsible for general discomfort, drowsiness, and increased perception of body odor experienced in school.” The kids had tested several classrooms. They had a chart showing their results—which were that three out of five classes tested above the maximum CO2 level set by the state, which was 1,000 parts per million.
That was probably the coolest exhibit, next to o
urs.
There was also “The Hamster Trainer Maze.” This was one of those wooden skittle mazes where you spin a top and hope it makes it through several openings in the little walls to the goal. Only these kids had put a blob of peanut butter at the goal, and they kept letting a hamster go where you usually start the top. Their hypothesis was that you could train a hamster to find peanut butter in a maze. So far, though, they hadn’t. I don’t think they really got the idea of creating something new.
There were about a dozen other exhibits. Right in the middle was us.
Behind Jake, the tide of kids started to slow down. Some kids were stopping to look as our welcome screen swam up on the monitor:
Welcome to The Bully Lab
An Interactive Scientific Investigation
Created and assembled by: Catalina Aarons, Elliot Gekewicz, and Russell Trainor
School survey conducted and report written and narrated by: Catalina Aarons and Allison Kukovna
Reenactments featuring: Jon Blanchette, Elliot Gekewicz, Christopher Kuppel, and Richard C. Tucker
Interviews conducted by: Russell Trainor
Direction and videography by: Turner White
Project adviser: Claire Hogeboom
Technical adviser: Jerome Dallas
True stories contributed by: 42 students of Parkland Middle School
Stories collected via: Parkland School Local Area Network (LAN), running SchoolStream 3.0 communication software, with (formerly) open student access
Jake clicked up the menu:
I. Hypothesis
II. Research Methods
III. Research Report
IV. Video Reenactments
V. Video Interviews
VI. Gallery of Nasty Notes
VII. The Stories