Silence.
“I can start calling names,” she threatened, lifting a clipboard from the table, but the odds were still good—almost one in twenty—so they waited. Ms. Owens forced a grin and looked at the roster. “Gregory Hodges?”
A black kid with a square jaw and a tribal tattoo band on his biceps rubbed his eyes. “It’s too early for this shit. Call on somebody else, please.”
“First, watch your language,” Ms. Owens said, but the way she said it let them know that she didn’t care what they did. “Second, everybody is going to participate, so you might as well get it over with.”
“That’s it? I answer and I can go?”
“If that’s all it took, I’d answer the damn question,” Ms. Owens said, chuckling at her attempt at a joke. “No, we’re all here till two.”
That brought the expected groans and mumbled swearing, but it wasn’t news and there was no heart in it.
“So, Gregory—”
“Greg.”
“Fine. Greg. What did you think of the film?”
A half shrug.
“That it?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Did you think it was realistic?”
The other half.
Ms. Owens nodded. “We’ll come back to you,” she said, and looked at her clipboard. “Sara Zeidenberg?”
No answer.
“Okay, no Sara.” She made a mark with her red pen. “Ryan Walker?”
“He’s not coming.”
She looked across the room at the girl with the short blond hair. “And you are?”
“Annalise Tutt. As in King.”
“And you know Ryan how?”
“No, it’s Ryan Walker. He goes to my school.”
“And you know he’s not coming because . . . ?”
“Because his father said this course is a waste of time and against his Eighth Amendment rights.”
“Is that so?”
“He says it’s cruel and unusual punishment,” the girl said. “And that the school lacks legal jurisdiction.”
“We’ll see about that,” Ms. Owens said, grinning like a shark, writing something hard and fast as she said it. “Rebecca Budinger?”
A girl with wavy brown hair stood up and started down the aisle. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Are you Rebecca?”
“Yeah. I’ll be back.”
“Excuse me?”
The girl stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder. “Why, you gotta go too?”
The door closed behind the girl, and Ms. Owens stood there, waiting for the snickers and comments to trail off. Her fake smile was gone. She glanced over at the security guard, who was too busy with his phone to notice, then ran her finger down the list. “Eric Hamilton.”
It figured.
Eric raised a hand, sort of.
“What do you think, Eric? Did the film seem realistic to you?”
“I guess,” Eric said, and watched as her jaw tightened and her one eyebrow quivered. That’s when he knew Ms. Owens wasn’t a real teacher. A few smart-mouthed teens first thing in the morning? Typical Monday in any high school. This woman? She didn’t have the patience to be a teacher. Besides, a real teacher would have started off with some getting-to-know-you, wasting-time type of activity instead of just hitting PLAY and reading questions off a tenth-generation photocopy.
She wasn’t a real teacher.
And that made her dangerous.
If she snapped now—and it looked like a real possibility—Eric knew she’d take it out on him, and that would only mean more problems, and he had enough problems to worry about. But he didn’t want to be the suck-up either, so he played it flat and straight. “It seemed real to me. I don’t know that school, but I guess it could be like that.”
Ms. Owens narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, it could be like that?”
“I don’t know,” Eric said, positive now that she was crazy. “I just guess it could be. It looked like a typical school.”
“Did it look like your school?”
Oh, boy. “A little, I guess.”
Behind him, a girl whispered something, and another held in a laugh, but the woman stayed hooked on him.
“So your school has bullies like the one in the video.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Probably?” Her voice went up in that sarcastic, no-shit way. “I’d say your school has at least one bully, and his name would be Eric Hamilton.”
“I’m not a bully. It’s just that—”
“You wouldn’t be here if somebody didn’t think you were a bully. And that goes for all of you. You did something to end up here, and you’ve got to finish this program to be allowed back in the regular classes at your school.”
Greg laughed at that. “Who said I wanted to go back?”
“I don’t care what you do,” Ms. Owens said. “You can leave right now if you want. Make my life a whole lot easier.”
Greg shifted his legs and leaned forward, but that’s as far as it got.
She looked at him. “If you’re gonna go, go. Don’t be wasting my time.”
He waved her off, mumbling something that made the girl next to him giggle.
“Anybody else?” She scanned the room, making eye contact with those who looked up. “You don’t wanna be here, go. I get paid whether you’re here or not.”
Eric looked at the clock. 8:49. Five hours and eleven minutes to go, with an hour off for lunch. And a half day tomorrow.
He’d never make it.
Eight
THE SECOND VIDEO CLIP WAS AS BAD AS THE FIRST.
The story picked up where the last part had ended, with Matthew, the skinny ninth-grader, getting jacked up by Chip, a senior who liked to snarl and put his finger in people’s faces. Chip’s surprisingly hot girlfriend seemed to get off on watching Chip punch people in the arm, moaning like a porn star when he put Matthew in a headlock.
It wasn’t the over-the-top acting that made it so hard to watch—that was kind of funny—or the out-of-style clothes and haircuts or the twenty-five-year-olds playing high school students or the kid stars he recognized from ’90s sitcoms playing teachers. It was the swearing, or lack of it, that made it so fake. It was hard to take the Chip character seriously when the worst thing he said was “butthead.” And while Eric had never had a locker door slammed on his hand like poor little Matthew, he was sure that if he had, he would have said something worse than “Owie.”
There was nothing in the video even remotely like Eric’s situation. No dark-voiced midnight caller on Chip’s phone, no threats to send out a damning photo to everyone Chip knew, no insane instructions about punking Matthew. Chip was just a regular, old-fashioned bully.
Eric knew he was different.
He didn’t want to do any of it, but unlike Chip, he didn’t have a choice. He did what had to be done, and that’s all. He was paying for it now, which was fine by him since it was over, the caller’s stupid instructions followed to the letter.
Most of them, anyway.
Enough to end the calls.
It had to be.
Ms. Owens waited until the screen said PAUSE HERE before mashing the button on the remote.
“Question one. What did you think of the video clip you just saw?”
After several painful minutes of grunted one-word answers, long silences, and laughable attempts at intimidating, authority-figure stares, Ms. Owens rewarded their apathy with a fifteen-minute break. Instantly, phones were out and the tapping started as everyone caught up on their texting.
Almost everyone.
It turned out his parents weren’t showing off, and they now had his iPhone. But his mother still wanted him “reachable at any moment, anywhere,” so she gave him the phone she had bought for her mother before her mother bought herself a Droid. It was the size of a paperback dictionary, with backlit numbers—each one as big as a dime—and a scratched-up display window that was hard to read. The ringtone was
jet-engine loud, and there was no mute. He was able to transfer his iPhone number to this phone, and while he didn’t expect anyone to call, even if they did, they wouldn’t reach him, since he had accidentally left it on the kitchen table that morning, having waited until his mother went to refill her coffee before hiding it under the sports section of the newspaper.
The nervous kid asked if it was okay to get out of his seat and took Ms. Owens’s mocking laugh as a yes. Several others followed him out into the hall, and after noticing that he was about to be the only one just sitting there, Eric went out too.
The hallway in the community center looked like a school hallway, but without the lockers and the trophy cases and the bulletin boards with reminders about SAT classes and the posters from expensive out-of-state colleges. Even without those extras, it still had that school-building feel—extra-wide stairwells, buffed tile floors, tan-gray paint, fluorescent lights, clocks that stuck sideways out of the wall, windows with wire in the glass. Working in the building would be like going to school forever, and probably just as boring.
The girl with the headscarf was at the drinking fountain. Eric wondered what she had done. She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and it was hard to imagine her intimidating anyone with those big, sad eyes. The goth girl was buying a Diet Coke from the row of vending machines, and next to her, a black kid in a white shirt and tie loaded up on candy bars. Two janitors strolled by, talking over their parlay picks for the early Sunday games, both of them claiming that Buffalo was going to surprise some people. That made Annalise laugh. “Take the Raiders and the spread,” she said, flashing a fake gang sign.
At least, Eric thought it was fake.
The nervous kid paced back and forth, turning to check the clock by the stairwell every thirty seconds. He’d put his hands in his pockets, then take them out, then put them back in, then let them hang by his side, then stuff them in again, the whole time chewing on his lower lip like it was a wad of gum. Whatever the kid had done, Eric decided, that was it, he was never going to do anything bad again for the rest of his life. He couldn’t take it.
The tall kid with a fauxhawk—the one who had come into class halfway through the last video and left before it was over—punched open the men’s-room door, swearing into his phone, telling whoever was on the other end about the dumb-shit losers he was forced to sit with in this bullshit class. He leered at the goth girl as he walked by, saying something about her ass, then bumped the nervous kid out of the way, popping a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket as he strutted down the hall. And it would have been impressive if he had caught it, but he missed, and it landed in front of him, so he had to do a little side-shuffle dance to avoid stepping on it. That brought on more swearing, and when he kicked the crash bar on the exit door, he lost his balance and stumbled forward, the door swinging shut and locking behind him.
Eric laughed along with the others in the hall, the goth girl smiling for the first time all morning. Even the nervous kid stopped chewing long enough to laugh. The fauxhawk? It was easy to see him as a bully. He had that piss-off look down cold, and he obviously liked to hit things. The cigarettes and the skull rings were part of the act.
The others?
Nothing about them said “bully.”
They looked more like victims.
Okay, Annalise maybe, but she was the smart-ass type, a problem for teachers and vice principals, not other students.
The goth girl? The nervous kid? The Korean dude? The girl with the headscarf?
He wondered what they could possibly have done to get themselves sent here.
Then he wondered what they thought about him.
He didn’t think he looked the part, but there he was, officially labeled a bully by the school district.
There they all were.
The security guard poked his head out and told them that break time was over. They started toward the classroom, then heard someone pounding on the exit door.
Pounding and swearing.
The stragglers in the hall looked at each other, waiting, listening, no one moving. Then Annalise grinned. “You heard the man,” she said. “Break’s over.”
They all laughed again and, one by one, filed back in, a group now, whether they liked it or not.
The next session started with a ten-minute clip downloaded from CNN about an antibullying program in Brockville, Ontario. Instead of kids who were bullied, the story focused on the ones doing the bullying, the reporter explaining that “getting these kids to admit that they have a problem is the first step on their long road to redemption.”
PAUSE HERE.
“Question one. What did you think of the video clip you just saw?”
Silence.
Ms. Owens snorted. “I thought so,” she said, pulling a stack of blue booklets from a cardboard box on the floor. Eric knew what was coming next, and by the sighs from others in the class, they knew it too.
She passed around the stack, telling them to take one—and only one—and write their names, directory style, on the line next to where it said NAME on the cover.
“Directory style means last name first, first name last, then your middle initial,” she said, although no one had asked.
Annalise looked up. “So it’s middle initial last, first name second last, and last name third last?”
Ms. Owens shook her head. “Girl, just put your name on the book.”
“I don’t want to get it wrong.”
“You will anyway,” Ms. Owens said, and that got the guard laughing. She gave them five minutes to write their names, then took another minute to call up the writing assignment on the laptop and project it on the screen: What actions did you take (or fail to take) that led others to identify you as a bully?
“You can write in pencil or pen, I don’t care,” Ms. Owens said, “but you’re gonna write.”
The girl with the headscarf raised her hand. “If I fill this book, can I get another?” Eric had expected an accent, something Middle Eastern maybe, or Indian, but there wasn’t one he could hear.
“Girl, if it takes you more than one blue book to answer the question, then you are in a lot more trouble than I thought.”
Somebody in the back said, “What’s the minimum?”
“You start writing. I’ll tell you when to stop. And don’t tell me you ‘did stuff,’” Ms. Owens said, putting air quotes around what they were all planning to say. “Be specific. Give examples. And remember, I have the reports on all of you already, so don’t try to sugarcoat it.”
The same voice asked, “What if I don’t write anything?”
“Then you don’t get credit for the assignment and I get to call your folks and tell them that you can’t go back to school. Which is fine by me. My paycheck will be exactly the same either way. Now, the rest of you had better start writing.”
Eric clicked his pen and opened the cover. An empty page with thin blue lines stared back at him. It was the same type of booklet they used for midterm essay tests, and he could hear every teacher he ever had telling him to rewrite the question at the top of the page because it would help him think of what to write. But he knew exactly what he had to write, the kind of things they were looking for him to say, saying it so it sounded the way they needed him to sound, whether he meant it or not, all those English classes about “knowing your audience” paying off.
He rewrote the question, then skipped two lines and started.
I was accused of—
Accused?
It would be great if that’s all it was.
If he was simply accused of bullying, he wouldn’t be here, his parents wouldn’t be mad, he’d still be on the team, and maybe—maybe—April would talk to him again someday in this lifetime.
But he wasn’t accused of anything.
He was guilty.
Eric crossed out the words, skipped another line, and started again.
I picked on—
Picked on? Cute.
You pick on
your friends, teammates, girls who are one of the guys. It’s what you do when you hang out, the thing that separates friends from strangers, the familiarity that made it funny and forgivable. But Connor wasn’t a friend.
He crossed it out and skipped a line and told himself to just write the damn thing.
I bullied a kid.
He looked at the sentence.
Closer, but still not there yet.
Not “a” kid, a specific one.
A kid who never did anything, who didn’t deserve any of it. A kid with a name.
I bullied Connor Stark.
Okay, how?
I called him names like—
That sounded stupid, and he crossed it out before he finished the thought.
I spoke insultingly to the young man at my school—
That sounded weird and somehow worse. He thought for a moment, then tried again.
I knowingly used insensitive and/or derogatory terms pertaining to sexual orientation to hurt another human being.
Better.
He was surprised he remembered it almost word for word from the LGBT Diversity Education Facilitators’ Handbook.
That had been a great weekend.
April’s older brother helped organize the summer training sessions during Gay Pride week at his college. He’d gotten April and Eric guest passes, even to the parties. They couldn’t drink, but it was still a riot. Garrett wouldn’t let them sleep in the same bed—she’s my kid sister, bro—but they had time alone when Garrett was busy. They didn’t push it, didn’t go any further than they had gone before, but that was okay. It wasn’t like it was his first or anything. Hers, yeah, but there was no rush. It’d happen when she was ready, and even if it didn’t, that was okay too.
Because it was different with her.
Different and better.
Everything changed with April.
Especially him.
And then he’d thrown it all away.
Eric shook his head clear and read the line again: I knowingly used insensitive and/or derogatory terms pertaining to sexual orientation to hurt another human being.
It was accurate. It didn’t say anything, but it was accurate.
Part of him wanted to write down everything he had said, word for word, put it out there in all caps, like it must have sounded when he said it. It didn’t make any difference that he hadn’t meant any of it. He’d said it and April knew it and that was it. And he knew as soon as he had said it that he would always be that asshole, Eric.
Cold Calls Page 4