Standing Up to Mr. O.

by Claudia Mills

  “Sure. After school on Monday?”

  “After school on Monday.”

  * * *

  It helped that Ms. Kocik was Maggie’s social studies teacher and her second-favorite teacher, after Mr. O. Was Mr. O. still Maggie’s favorite teacher? Maggie didn’t know. She only knew that she got a lump in her throat every time she thought about how things used to be.

  Ms. Kocik was in her mid-forties, Maggie guessed, with frizzy, faded-blond hair and sharp, intelligent eyes.

  “Two more intrepid seekers after truth!” she said when Matt and Maggie presented themselves at her classroom door after the final bell. “Come on in, you two.” Maggie hardly felt intrepid.

  They took seats in the front of the room. Maggie waited for Matt to explain why they were there. He didn’t. So, without looking Ms. Kocik in the face, Maggie said, “It’s about the essay contest. I know everybody couldn’t win. I know lots and lots of people entered, and everything. But—I thought my essay was—well, I really thought it was the best essay I’ve ever written. And usually my essays turn out pretty well, so I was just wondering…” She trailed off.

  “I thought your essay was truly outstanding, Maggie,” Ms. Kocik said gently. “I would have liked to see it as one of our winners. I don’t think I’ll be crossing any line I shouldn’t cross if I tell you that yours was one on which the judges disagreed, rather vehemently, I might say. And our procedure this year was set up so that no essay could advance to the finalist stage unless all three judges selected it. In hindsight, I think this system didn’t end up being a fair one; it gave too much power to any judge who strongly disliked a particular essay, for any reason.”

  “Was it Mr. O.?” Maggie hadn’t expected to put the question so bluntly, but it just came out.

  “Oh, Maggie. Try to think of it this way. How old are you, Maggie—twelve?”

  “I’m almost thirteen.” She’d be thirteen in another two days, to be exact.

  “All right, you’re almost thirteen, you decide not to do dissections, and you write an essay denouncing animal dissections as immoral. And, by implication, you denounce anyone who does dissections as the moral equivalent of a murderer. Now imagine that you’re in your forties, and you’ve spent twenty years of your life doing dissections and helping others to do them. For twenty years you’ve thought you were doing something positive, helping others to learn about the hidden mysteries of life. Now someone comes along and condemns this work, condemns you as morally monstrous. How would you respond?”

  “I wouldn’t blackball her essay for a contest because I disagreed with it,” Matt said.

  How could Matt know what he would do if he were Mr. O.? How could he be so certain that he would always do the right thing? Though maybe he would. After all, Maggie’s essay had indirectly denounced Matt, too, and yet he was sitting here beside her.

  “All I’m saying is, try to understand,” Ms. Kocik said. She got up from her desk. The discussion was clearly over.

  “Thank you,” Maggie said. “For being willing to talk to us.”

  “Well, I think it’s only fair that you understand. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat anything I said here.”

  Maggie nodded. Matt looked too angry to speak. Once they were out in the hall, he said, “So much for freedom of speech in Grand Valley Middle School. And now that we know there’s no such thing as free speech here, we’re supposed to shut up and pretend everything is all hunky-dory. ‘Don’t repeat anything I said here.’ What if we did tell? What if for once people discovered an injustice and didn’t roll over and play dead?”

  “Don’t.” Maggie’s eyes pleaded with Matt. “We can’t say anything. We’d only get Ms. Kocik in trouble, and she’s been so nice to us. Besides, she didn’t come right out and say it was Mr. O.”

  “She all but did. Do you have any reasonable doubt who it was?”

  “No,” Maggie said softly. Somehow, after talking to Ms. Kocik, she didn’t feel angry at Mr. O. anymore, if she ever had. She just felt terribly, terribly sad.

  “All right,” Matt said. “I won’t spill any beans. The absence of any meaningful freedom of speech at Grand Valley Middle School will be our dirty little secret. But one thing I am going to do: I’m going to write a letter to Kocik, Bellon, Bealer—and to Mr. O.—and I’m going to refuse their award.”

  “Are you going to say why?”

  “I don’t need to,” Matt said. “They already know.”

  * * *

  High on top of the bleachers after school on Tuesday, Jake and Maggie sat planning the liberation of Froggles. The frog dissection was only three days away.

  It was a cold afternoon, overcast, with a raw wind that whipped Maggie’s hair against her face. There was probably no windier spot than the top of the bleachers, but that was where they always sat, so that was where they sat now. Jake seemed to share Maggie’s strong sense of tradition. Maybe the more some parts of your life changed, the more you wanted other parts to stay the same.

  Still, it was cold enough that Maggie could hardly think for shivering. “It’s too windy here,” she said. “Let’s go sit in our tree.”

  She didn’t have to say which tree. Jake stood up and, still holding on to Maggie’s mittened hand, led her down the bleachers. Then, hand in hand, they ran across the street to the park, and Jake boosted Maggie again onto the lowest branch of the tree.

  A gust of wind rattled the branch on which they were sitting. “I’m still cold,” Maggie said.

  For answer, Jake kissed her. Maybe he hadn’t kissed her since the first time because they were under some enchantment that required them to perch in the winter-bare branches of an oak tree. Or maybe it was the tree that was enchanted. The wind died down, at least for the moment. Maggie almost expected the sun to come out, and buds to appear on the branches, then burst into new green leaves.

  “So,” Jake said when they finally pulled apart from each other. “Frogs.”

  “Frogs,” Maggie repeated, trying to focus.

  “The only real question is where to hide. The worst place is in the johns. The janitors clean there first. I think our best bet is backstage in the auditorium if nothing else is going on there, which I don’t think it is.”

  “How will we know when to come out?”

  “It’ll be tricky. The custodians take a dinner break about five-thirty. We can sneak out while they’re on break.”

  “What if one of them sees us?”

  Jake shrugged. “Then one of them sees us.”

  Maggie couldn’t see that this plan was any better than the plan of just scooping up Froggles after class when everybody was streaming out of the room and Mr. O. had his back turned. That plan would have been risky; Jake’s plan sounded riskier still. But Jake seemed to be drawn to the high drama of an after-school stakeout. Talking about it, he came alive in a way that Maggie hadn’t seen before. And if they ended up saving Froggles, it would all be worth it.

  * * *

  Maggie’s birthday was Wednesday. She was thirteen—a teenager. She could see the teen years stretching ahead, one after the other: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. She was on her way to being twenty. The thought made Maggie feel very old. She couldn’t help thinking: That was it? That had been her childhood?

  It wasn’t just her birthday that made Maggie feel childhood was now behind her. It was everything that had happened in the past few weeks between her and Mr. O. It was thinking people you loved were perfect and then having them turn out to be flawed. Her perfect best friend was a coward; her perfect teacher was unfair. These were the truths Maggie now had to face.

  Her mother found Maggie almost in tears when she came in to rouse her for her birthday breakfast.

  “Maggles! You can’t be sad on your birthday. Happy birthday, dearest one.”

  Maggie hugged her mother tighter than usual. You weren’t too old if you could still hug your mother. For breakfast her mother actually made waffles—real waffles on
her old waffle iron. They were delicious.

  At lunch Alycia presented Maggie with a birthday cupcake and a small square present topped with a large, polka-dotted bow.

  “I hope you like it,” Alycia said.

  Slowly, Maggie unwrapped it, slitting the tape with her fingernail so she could slide the paper off without tearing it. She always felt shy opening gifts in front of the gift-giver.

  Inside the wrapping was a small white box. Maggie lifted off the top. There, on a soft bed of white cotton, lay a gold and silver bracelet, simple and beautiful in design, a strand of silver intertwined with a strand of gold.

  “I love it!” Maggie put it on her wrist to admire.

  Beaming now, Alycia pulled up her sleeve to reveal a matching bracelet on her own wrist. “I got one for me, too. They can be like friendship bracelets. Like, I’m the gold and you’re the silver. Or you’re the gold and I’m the silver. Whatever. The way they’re linked together made me think of friendship. Of you and me.”

  “I love it,” Maggie said again, holding her arm out next to Alycia’s.

  She did love it. Yet, at the same time, she felt that wearing Alycia’s friendship bracelet was a kind of lie. Maggie had so many secrets from Alycia now, secrets that best friends wouldn’t keep from each other. Alycia didn’t know that Maggie and Matt had checked up on the contest. She didn’t know that Maggie and Jake were going to rescue Froggles, or that Jake had held Maggie’s hand, and called her on the phone, and kissed her twice. Maggie and Alycia weren’t intertwined anymore like gold and silver in a friendship bracelet. They were drifting further apart every day, as two people were bound to drift apart when one was willing to stand up for what she believed in and one … wasn’t.

  13

  Maggie had her piano lesson after school that day, so her mother was home before her when Maggie arrived there at five o’clock. They were going out to the Thai restaurant for dinner, for some birthday eggplant and tofu.

  As soon as Maggie came into the living room, she could sense from the tension—the anger?—in her mother’s face that something was wrong. Had her mother had a fight with Alycia’s dad at work? Was Maggie in some kind of trouble she didn’t know about? Maggie had a sudden uneasy thought: Had Mr. O. somehow discovered the Froggles plot? But he couldn’t have.

  “The mail came,” her mother said abruptly. “You got a birthday card. From your dear old dad.”

  As Maggie stood motionless, her mother went on, “Go ahead, open it.”

  Maggie looked down at the pale green envelope lying on the coffee table. She still recognized her father’s handwriting. Even though it had been six years since she had last heard from him, it had been only a few weeks since she had reread the cards hidden in her shoe box.

  “I’ll go away so you can read it in privacy.” Her mother stalked off toward the kitchen.

  Maggie picked it up. The same card that was in her hands now had been in her father’s hands two days ago. She read the return address: Wayne McIntosh, 2314 Orchid Lane, Silver Spring, Maryland. He had moved sometime in the past six years. The last card had been sent from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  As carefully as she had opened Alycia’s present, Maggie broke the seal on the back flap of the envelope and took out the card. It was a pretty one, with a picture of an old-fashioned girl sitting on a bench by a waterfall. The words printed on the front said “Happy Birthday, Daughter.”

  Inside, she made herself read the printed message first:

  Although we’re far apart today

  You’re in my heart, you know.

  You’re always close within my thoughts

  However far you go.

  But she hadn’t gone anywhere: he was the one who had gone.

  Finally, she read the signature: Love, Dad. The other cards had been signed Daddy. In six years Daddy had become Dad. Below he had written, “I miss you. Write to me and tell me how you’re doing.”

  That was it. That was all. Maggie counted his words: fourteen, like birthday candles, one for each year of her life and one for luck.

  He wanted her to write to him and tell him how she was doing—but he hadn’t told her how he was doing. Did he have other children? Another daughter?

  Anger, sudden and sharp, stabbed through Maggie. She would never write to him, never ever ever, not if he came crawling to her across the sands of the Sahara, not if he wrote a ten-page letter to her every day for the rest of her life, not if he left his new life and new wife and new children as cruelly and coldly as he had once left her.

  She started to rip the card in half, planning to shred it as violently and savagely as her mother had done the wedding photos from the pages of their album. But at the first tear in the picture of the pretty, old-fashioned girl, Maggie’s own heart tore within her. She couldn’t rip up this card, not after she had saved the other ones so faithfully, for all these years. She wouldn’t write to her father, she couldn’t, but she would keep his card in her shoe box with the rest of her pathetic souvenirs. Tears stinging her eyes, Maggie stumbled toward the desk for a piece of tape.

  Her mother had come back into the living room. “Oh, Maggie, Maggles, my poor, poor, darling baby.” Her mother held her as if she were four years old again and her father had just left. But that time he had left her. This time she was leaving him.

  * * *

  On Thursday, Mr. O. didn’t say a word as he handed Maggie her pass to go to the library during Friday’s frog dissection. This time he handed one to Jake, too. Maggie waited to see if Alycia would ask for a pass, as well. Of course, she didn’t.

  Mr. O. gave more details about the pithing procedure. The point of it was supposed to be to cut Froggles’s central nervous cord so that they could see exactly how the nerves were connected to the muscles, and how different muscles could be twitched by manipulating different nerves. It sounded even more cruel and barbaric to Maggie this time. Were the others really planning to sit there and watch as Mr. O. cut off Froggles’s head?

  But Froggles wasn’t going to be there tomorrow to have his head snipped off. At least, Maggie hoped he wasn’t. The plan seemed fantastic, impossible. How would they pass the long hours until the school was empty enough for them to make their move? Wasn’t someone bound to see them loitering so late and give the alarm?

  At lunch, Maggie threw away her sandwich, uneaten. “I’m tired of peanut butter and jelly,” she said in response to Alycia’s inquiring glance.

  “Do you want to share?” Alycia offered, holding out a plastic bag with cookies that the two girls had baked together the previous weekend: thick, chewy cookies with fruity centers.

  Maggie shook her head. “I’m not that hungry.”

  “How was the rest of your birthday?” Alycia asked then.

  “All right,” Maggie said. She and her mother hadn’t mentioned the card again during dinner, and the curried tofu and eggplant had been delicious.

  Maggie glanced down at her new bracelet, lying cool and smooth against her wrist. “I got a birthday card from my dad.” She had to tell Alycia something about her life if they were still pretending to be best friends.

  Alycia’s eyes widened. “From your dad?” She looked uncertain how she was supposed to respond. Then she said, “That’s great! I mean, isn’t it?”

  “You think so?” The suddenness of her fury caught Maggie off guard. “One card in six years? One card with fourteen words written on it? It doesn’t sound that great to me.”

  “Well, but at least it’s something. It shows he still cares about you.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot of caring to buy a dumb card and stick it in a dumb envelope. His new wife probably bought it for him.”

  Maggie knew it wasn’t Alycia’s fault that Maggie didn’t have a father and Alycia did, but the force of all her accumulated anger was so strong she couldn’t stop. “What would you know about it, anyway? You have a father. You have everything. And you sure do your best to hang on to it, too.”

  Alycia looked as if she had be
en struck. “What are you talking about? Look, Maggie, I didn’t mean anything. You’re the one who brought it up. You said you got a card from your dad, and I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my head. I didn’t want to make you mad.”

  Stop it! A small voice inside Maggie’s head commanded her. Stop it now!

  Instead, she said, “I’m talking about dissections. I’m talking about your precious, perfect biology grade. You don’t care how many animals get pithed, do you? You don’t care how many frogs get their heads cut off, so long as you get to win the essay contest and you get to keep your record of nice, neat straight A’s. Isn’t there anything that you would stand up for? Isn’t there anything that’s almost as important to you as being Miss Perfect?”

  “If that’s what you think of me”—Alycia’s voice was trembling—“that all I care about is prizes and grades, then why do you want to be my friend?”

  Maggie didn’t say anything. Right then she didn’t want to be friends with someone who was a hypocrite and a coward. She stood up from the table and walked away from the best friend she had ever had.

  * * *

  By eighth-period math, Maggie felt almost physically sick with terror over the imminence of the frognapping with Jake. Her throat felt dry and swollen, even as her palms were wet with clammy perspiration. And all through the afternoon she kept remembering how Alycia’s face had crumpled—how she had reduced Alycia, who never cried, to tears.

  Too soon the final bell rang. As planned, Maggie and Jake met at Jake’s locker. Even Jake looked nervous. He was paler than usual, and his hair needed washing. Maggie felt no desire to brush back his greasy bangs with her sweaty hand.

  “The important thing is to act natural,” Jake said in a low voice. “You can get away with anything if you act natural. That’s how shoplifters get themselves caught: they act like they expect to be pounced on any minute. The plainclothes cops watch them creeping around all jittery and shifty-eyed, and, bingo, they pounce.”