Standing Up to Mr. O.

by Claudia Mills

  Maggie didn’t ask how Jake knew so much about the psychology of shoplifters. She concentrated on acting natural, knowing that if there had been any plainclothes cops in Grand Valley Middle School, they would have pounced on her already.

  “There’s no rehearsal today,” Jake said as they walked together toward the auditorium. “I asked in the office.”

  Maggie couldn’t even imagine the nerve it would take to make an inquiry like that in the school office, under these circumstances. Excuse me, could you tell me if anybody is using the school auditorium today? Because my friend and I want to hide there until the coast is clear and then sneak out and steal the classroom frog from Mr. O.’s room. It’s free? Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. But Jake was obviously better at acting natural than she was.

  The auditorium was dark. Maggie and Jake felt for each other’s hands. They shuffled down the sloping aisle to the stairs that led up to the stage, then groped their way past the heavy velvet curtains that hid the backstage area from audience view. Maggie’s eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark now, and she could dimly make out the shape of a couple of straight-backed chairs, some cardboard cartons, and a heap of drop cloths.

  “Here,” Jake said. It was the first word either of them had spoken since they entered the auditorium. Jake pulled Maggie down next to him on the soft pile of tangled fabric against the wall. “This isn’t too bad.”

  He kissed Maggie, proving that they weren’t bound by magic to kiss only in the oak tree. But this time Jake’s kiss lasted too long. Maggie suddenly dreaded the next two hours alone with him in the dark. She pulled away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Maggie decided to tell the truth. It was easier to tell the truth to someone when you couldn’t see his face. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of me? Of this? Of what we’re going to do?”

  “Of everything.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you. I’d never hurt you.”

  Maggie couldn’t believe Jake. She believed that he believed what he had said, but she didn’t believe that what he had said was true. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could promise to someone else. I’ll never hurt you. Once she would have thought that she could never hurt Alycia, and yet she had said the most hurtful things she could think of to her a few hours ago. For all Maggie knew, her father had thought the same thing about her and her mother.

  “Have you heard from your dad?” Maggie asked. You could ask anybody anything in the darkness.

  “Yeah. He called last week.”

  “Where is he?”

  “San Diego.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “‘How are you? That’s good, I’m fine, too. You know, this doesn’t have anything to do with you and me. It has to do with your mother and me. Everything between us is still the same. I don’t know when I’ll be able to call again. Take care of yourself. Bye.’”

  Maggie let Jake’s words settle. Then she said softly, “My dad left, too.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “A long time ago. When I was four. I haven’t seen him since. But I got a birthday card from him yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was your birthday?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You didn’t tell me. I would have gotten you something.”

  Maggie tried to think what kind of present Jake would pick out for a girl. “What would you have gotten me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A frog.”

  “Coming right up.”

  Even though Maggie couldn’t see Jake’s face, she could tell he was smiling. Then she could feel his smile fade.

  “Did your mom ever marry anybody else?” he asked.

  “No.” Maggie’s mom never even dated anybody else. And yet her mother was young, for a mother, and pretty. But Maggie’s mother knew how to keep her distance from men. You could tell that she viewed them all as potential Mistake Number Threes.

  “Did your dad?” Jake asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any kids?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “If I ever get married and have kids,” Jake said, “I’m never going to leave.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m not going to get married unless I know I can stay forever, and that she’ll stay forever.”

  “Me too.” Maggie reached out for Jake’s hand and intertwined her fingers with his, to make up for pulling away from his kiss. “On the card? My dad said I should write to him, tell him how I’m doing.”

  “That was big of him.” Jake’s scorn was reassuring. Maggie shouldn’t think it was “great” that her dad had “at least” sent her “something.”

  “I’m not going to,” Maggie said, in case Jake thought she was wavering. “If he wanted to know how I was doing, he shouldn’t have left. He probably doesn’t care how I’m doing, anyway. It was just something to put on the bottom of the card.”

  “If my dad calls again, I’m hanging up on him,” Jake said. “Not that I expect him to call anytime soon. I’m a pretty low priority in his life right now, compared to the twenty-year-old babe he left me and my mom for.” Jake’s grip tightened on Maggie’s hand. “I hate his guts, Maggie. I hate what he did to my mom. I even hate myself for having half my genes from him.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re anything like him,” Maggie said softly, hoping it was true.

  “We look the same. I want to spit in the mirror sometimes, my face looks so much like his.”

  “I like the way your face looks.”

  It came out sounding like a cue for a kiss. But Jake didn’t kiss Maggie again. All he said was “Yeah. You like everything, though. Having you like me doesn’t count.”

  Maggie didn’t contradict him. The conversation had turned too sad, almost scary. She didn’t want to talk anymore about Jake’s dad, but other topics seemed silly and shallow after the things Jake had said.

  For a long time they waited side by side in silence, leaning up against the hard cement-block wall. Jake’s breathing was so slow and regular that Maggie wondered if he had fallen asleep. She came close enough to sleep herself that Jake’s voice seemed to call her back from a great distance.

  “It’s five-thirty.”

  “How do you know?” Maggie had lost all sense of time.

  Jake held out his glow-in-the-dark watch. “The custodians should be on break now. It sounds pretty quiet out there.”

  Hand in hand, Maggie and Jake retraced their steps and slowly pushed open the heavy auditorium door to the hall. The lights were off, except for the two security lights that glowed at both ends of the long corridor. The silence itself seemed to make a sound, the sound of an enormously quiet, pulsating presence.

  Upstairs in Mr. O.’s room, they had to turn on the lights. The sudden brightness made Maggie feel exposed, caught in the accusing beam of a policeman’s spotlight. If the custodians walked by, they would notice the light right away. Not that a stray light in a classroom was all that suspicious. Perhaps some teacher had returned to school to work late. Did teachers ever come back to school in the evening to work alone in their rooms?

  Did Mr. O.?

  “Hurry,” Maggie whispered urgently, not that they needed to whisper when there was no one else in the room to hear.

  Froggles gave one small croak. “Hush!” Maggie told him. Jake held open the sack as Maggie reached into the terrarium and lifted out the frog. “Everything’s all right now,” Maggie told him softly. “You’re not going to be pithed tomorrow.”

  She turned to Jake. “Let’s go.” If you could shout in a whisper, Maggie was shouting.

  Jake made no move to leave. “There’s no hurry. I want to look around.”

  Deliberately, Jake sauntered over to Mr. O.’s desk and sat down. He opened Mr. O.’s drawers, one by one.

  “Here’s a picture of him with his wifey-poo.” To Maggie’s horror, Jake spat at it, the way he
had talked about spitting in the mirror. The sight of the thick gob of spittle dribbling down the glass of the frame turned Maggie’s stomach.

  “Don’t. We have no right to touch his things.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me!”

  “He has a right to murder frogs, he has a right to screw you over for your contest, but we have no right to spit in his face?”

  “I want to go!” Maggie pulled at Jake’s arm. He shook her off, his face dark with anger now, as if it were her fault that he hated Mr. O., hated his father, hated himself.

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  Maggie didn’t know if she was more afraid of walking out through the dim, silent halls by herself or of leaving Jake alone to do—whatever he was going to do.

  “Jake, please.”

  “I’m not through.”

  Finally Jake got up from Mr. O.’s desk. He walked over to the windowsill, where all the classroom microscopes sat lined up in an orderly row.

  “Do you want a microscope?” Jake asked Maggie.

  “No!”

  “Neither do I.”

  Jake leaned over the sill and pushed up the second-story window. A surge of icy wind stung Maggie’s flaming cheeks.

  “Bye-bye, microscope,” Jake said, in a voice more chilling for being so cheerful.

  Maggie tried to drag Jake away from the window, but he was too strong for her. He sent the microscope crashing to the pavement below. Maggie heard herself scream.

  “Jake! Maggie! What is going on here?”

  There, in the classroom doorway, stood Mr. O.

  14

  Maggie hurled herself into Mr. O.’s arms. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had pushed her away. But he didn’t. He held her close, her face pressed against his jacket, her cheek squashed against the cool metal of the zipper tab.

  “What is going on here?” Mr. O. repeated. This time he was speaking only to Jake. “One of the custodians called me and asked if I had any students doing work for me after hours. Believe me, I was over here in three minutes flat.”

  When Jake didn’t answer, Mr. O. released Maggie and turned her toward him so he could see her face.

  “We wanted to save Froggles,” Maggie whispered in a choked voice. “But then…”

  “Then our young vandal here, whose protests against dissection were never very convincing, decided to use this as an opportunity to destroy valuable school property. Is that right?”

  It was right, and it wasn’t right. Jake had cared about saving Froggles—or at least Maggie hoped he had. Right now she wasn’t certain about anything. Jake had so much anger in him, about so much more than dissections.

  “Saving him was my idea,” Maggie whispered. The least she could do for Jake was take her fair share of the blame.

  “I’m sure it was.” Mr. O. quickly scanned the room. “And rifling through my desk and vandalizing school property was his idea.”

  “So what are you going to do? Call our fathers?” Jake gave a short, hard laugh.

  “I’m going to call your parents, yes. And then I’m going to call the police.”

  “You think I’m going to stick around for that? I’m outta here, mister.” Jake gave one last, anguished look at Maggie, and then he bolted from the classroom, leaving the sack with Froggles in it, still plaintively croaking, behind him on Mr. O.’s desk.

  Mr. O. didn’t run after him. “I’m not chasing any teenaged punks,” he said, as much to himself as to Maggie. “He isn’t going to get far.”

  Maggie waited for Mr. O. to pick up the phone on his desk. Instead he sat down on top of one of the lab tables and motioned to Maggie to sit on the table facing him.

  “Maggie.” The old kindness was back in his voice, mixed with a new pain. “How’d a sweet kid like you get mixed up with a creep like him?”

  A creep. It was the same word Jake had used to describe Mr. O. And, as she had that other time, Maggie said, “He’s not a creep. He’s just upset about a lot of other stuff in his life.” She hesitated, then said, “His dad left, too.”

  “That doesn’t justify what happened here tonight.”

  Maggie knew that it didn’t.

  “Are you ready to drop this dissection thing now? Maggie, I realize you feel deeply about this. When you’re young, you feel deeply about a lot of things. But feeling is one thing, acting is another. Your actions tonight—look what they led to. A valuable microscope has been destroyed. I’ll have to file a police report on both of you—required procedure for any destruction of school property. You’ll almost certainly get some kind of suspension. Tell me, Maggie, was it worth it?”

  A police report. Suspension. The magnitude of the punishment that she was facing overwhelmed her: Maggie McIntosh, teacher’s pet, had never even had a detention. And Froggles was going to be slaughtered, anyway. If only Jake had taken the sack with him when he fled. What if Maggie seized it and ran? But she couldn’t, now that Mr. O. was talking to her again as if what happened to her really mattered to him. Yet she couldn’t give up her fight against dissections, either.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said, her voice coming out stronger and more sure than she had thought it would. “I still think it’s wrong to kill animals.”

  “I’m afraid I disagree.”

  “My essay—for the contest—”

  “You think I didn’t vote for your essay because I took issue with its conclusions. Believe me, Maggie, I bent over backward to be fair. I probably rated your essay too highly because I was so careful to correct for what might be bias against your point of view. But in the end, I didn’t think your arguments were very good ones. I’m sorry, Maggie. I had to vote according to my own best judgment.”

  Did he believe what he was saying? If he didn’t, he was lying to Maggie, but if he did, he was deceiving himself. Maggie knew now, as surely as she had ever known anything in her life, that Mr. O. had been unfair. He had treated her unfairly, both in the judging of the contest and in the overly harsh penalties for her conscientious refusal to dissect. Mr. O. had told her that if she didn’t do dissections, she’d leave him no choice but to fail her. But that, too, was a lie. If other teachers let students do simulated dissections on the computer, or watch dissection videos, why couldn’t Mr. O.? If other teachers could teach biology without forcing students to violate their consciences, why couldn’t he?

  “You’re really going to pith Froggles.” Maggie said it as a statement, but she meant it as a question.

  “Painlessly, Maggie. I’d say that he’s a heck of a lot more upset in that sack right now than he’s going to be at any point tomorrow. Want to help me put him back where he’s more comfortable?”

  Maggie shook her head. It was better to be cramped and crowded in a sack on the way to freedom than to luxuriate in your own private cell on death row.

  Mr. O.’s face registered disappointment at her refusal, but his disappointment didn’t wrench Maggie’s heart the way it once had. She was as disappointed in him as he was in her.

  As if sensing the unspoken change between them, Mr. O. got up from his perch and began pacing in the front of the room.

  “Maggie,” he finally said, “I have to continue to give you failing grades for the dissections. But it doesn’t seem fair to fail you for the whole trimester. Maybe you can write an extra-credit report to make up for the labs. Would you be willing to do that?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said over the lump in her throat. Did he really not remember that Maggie herself had suggested this two weeks ago and he had refused? “Thank you,” she made herself say. She knew that, for her sake, Mr. O. was going as far as he could.

  Even further.

  “Oh, Maggie.” Mr. O. put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her tear-filled eyes. “Does all this really mean so much to you?” He must have thought she was still thinking about dissections; he didn’t know that her tears now weren’t only for Froggles but for her, and for Mr. O., and for what they had once had and could never have aga
in.

  He turned away from Maggie, staring toward the chalkboard as if memorizing every name in the Light Bulb Hall of Fame. Then, slowly, he picked up the sack with Froggles in it. “This isn’t fair to the rest of your classmates, but—here.”

  Mr. O. pulled out Froggles and held him on the palm of his hand. “Take him. Set him free, turn him into a pet, let him sleep on your pillow. He’s yours. I only hope your classmates won’t get cheated out of other chances to do this kind of experiment.”

  Mr. O. dropped Froggles into Maggie’s outstretched hand. She cupped her other hand around him, joyfully, protectively, so he couldn’t hop away.

  “And now,” Mr. O. said, “I have to call your mother.”

  * * *

  It felt like the middle of the night, but it was only six-thirty when Maggie’s mother arrived at school to get her. The school was locked, so Maggie and Mr. O. were waiting outside for her in the parking lot.

  Mr. O. drew Maggie’s mother aside, out of Maggie’s hearing. Maggie didn’t know what he was telling her, but she couldn’t imagine that it was anything that would particularly gladden her heart after a long, hard day at the university.

  “All right, Maggie, let’s go” was all her mother said once the conference was over. She sounded infinitely weary.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said in a small voice as she slid into the passenger seat. She could still hear Jake’s voice echoing in her ears. “Do you want a microscope?… Neither do I … Bye-bye, microscope.” And then the sickening sound of the crash …

  “So what do you have to say for yourself?” her mother asked.

  “I didn’t know it would turn out like this,” Maggie said. “I just didn’t want Froggles to get killed.”

  Maggie felt for Froggles, safe in her pocket. She hoped he hadn’t made any frog poop in there during the long wait for her mother. Despite everything that had happened, Maggie was fiercely, triumphantly glad that she had saved him. Saving Froggles was the one thing Maggie wasn’t sorry about.

  “Did Mr. O. tell you that he has to report this to the police? And that you’re probably going to get suspended?”

  Maggie turned away so her mother wouldn’t see how close she was to tears.