Ms. Bixby's Last Day

by John David Anderson

  There were other things, too, little things. Like how she always chose The Hobbit as the class read-aloud and had different voices for every character. How she could be strict when she needed to be and sweet when she wanted to be and kind of a smart aleck all the times in between. But mostly there was the way she listened to you, giving you her full attention. All the other teachers, they’d keep looking around the room when you talked, but Ms. Bixby fixed you with her eyes and waited for you to finish no matter how long it took you to figure out what you wanted to say.

  None of that mattered at the time, of course. At the time, all I cared about was that I would be in the same class as my friends. That was the cake. Ms. Bixby was just the icing.

  There was no way of me knowing what would happen between us, after all.

  There was supposed to be a party. That was the problem, really, because if there had been a party, I could have said what I needed to. If there had been a party, I wouldn’t have this hole right in the center of my chest, threatening to eat away at me from the inside out. I wouldn’t feel like throwing up every time I walk into room 213 and see that quote on the wall, the last one she left there, just for me. The sub tried to erase it, but I wouldn’t let her. I knew what book it was from.

  It was supposed to be a “sort of” farewell party. Sort of, because she insisted she’d be back. Probably not till next year, but she’d be back. It was a temporary good-bye. More of a “see you later.” The party was scheduled for Friday. Her last official day. It was to take place during lunch. She was going to order pizza for the whole class, and McKenzie’s mom was bringing cupcakes. We had leftover juice boxes from our Valentine’s Day celebration a few months ago. There would be a more professional gathering with coffee and pound cake in the teachers’ lounge after school, a chance for Ms. Bixby to say “see you later” to the other teachers, but this party was just for us.

  Except it didn’t happen.

  That Monday, with only five days left until her last day, we all shuffled into the room to find someone else waiting for us beside Ms. Bixby’s desk. It was Principal McNair, wearing a navy business suit, black hair corralled into a bun, purple bags under her eyes. “I’m sorry, kids,” she began. “But I’m afraid Ms. Bixby isn’t coming in today. It looks like she won’t be back for the rest of the year, in fact.”

  Standing beside me in his stupid Gap sweatshirt, Kyle Kipperson blurted out, “Is she dead?” I turned and glared, wanting desperately to punch him square in that giant, upside-down-lighbulb nose of his. Principal McNair looked like she was about to have a heart attack.

  “Oh heavens, no!” she choked. “No. Not at all. She just isn’t feeling well. And we all thought it best if she started taking her leave of absence early and concentrated on taking care of herself.”

  There were groans from all over. Most of them were for Ms. Bixby, though I’m sure some were just disappointed that there wouldn’t be a party. Part of me just wanted to scream at them. Topher told them all to shut up, which raised the principal’s eyebrow but at least stopped the groaning.

  “You should know that she fought us over it, but we insisted,” Principal McNair continued. “She wanted to be here. She even recorded a message for you.”

  Principal McNair turned around and fumbled with Ms. Bixby’s computer for a moment, trying to get the smartboard to work. She wiggled the mouse and the screen flashed to life, revealing Ms. Bixby, looking much the same as the Friday before, except like she’d just woken up, her eyes not as bright. She smiled that smile of hers, though: The one that lets you know that she knows what you’re really up to. The one that I’d gotten more than once.

  “Hello, class,” prerecorded Bixby said, pulling the pink strand behind her ear, her face filling the camera. “Sorry to leave you all in the lurch like this, but it turns out Principal McNair doesn’t want me hanging around the school anymore. She’s afraid I’m contagious.”

  “Absolutely not true,” the flustered principal whispered, but we all hushed her so that we could hear the rest of Ms. Bixby’s message.

  “Turns out I’m going to take my time off a little earlier than expected. Relax in my hammock with a good book and some mint tea, catch up on my to-dos, and, of course, get healthy. But before I leave, I want you all to know how proud I am of you. It has been wonderful getting to know you and watching your minds evolve and expand, and I only hope that you’ve learned as much from me as I’ve learned from you.” Video Bixby paused, looked down and then back up. “I will be back next year,” she said finally, “and you will all come back and visit me, I’m sure, and we will have that party we planned on. So be good for Principal McNair and the sub, and thanks for being such an awesome class. Remember me and smile, for it’s better to forget than to remember me and cry. Au revoir.”

  The picture froze and Principal McNair hunched back over the computer. In a blink, Ms. Bixby was gone. The room was completely silent. It was a long time before anyone made a move or a sound. Even Kyle Kipperson managed to keep his big mouth shut for once. Then finally Sarah Tolsen timidly raised her hand.

  “What about The Hobbit?”

  Principal McNair looked confused. “What about The Hobbit?” she asked back.

  “Ms. Bixby’s been reading it to us after lunch. We only have twenty pages left,” Sarah explained, pointing to the hardback copy sitting on the desk. “We were supposed to finish it this week. We have to know how it ends.”

  Principal McNair smiled unconvincingly. “I’m sure the sub can finish reading the book to you.”

  “But will she read it like Ms. Bixby reads it?” Carlos Menzanno asked.

  “Yeah, will she do the voices?”

  “And what about our field trip to the duck pond? Ms. Bixby said she’d take us on Thursday.”

  “And we never got around to finishing our unit on the coral reef.”

  “Is there a chance she’ll be back before the year ends?”

  “Can’t she just come back for the party at least?”

  It was a flurry of questions. Everybody was just shouting them out, nobody bothering to raise their hand. Even with the principal in the room, the class soon dissolved into a muddle, twenty uncertain voices burbling at once. I didn’t raise my hand. The questions I had, I was sure Principal McNair couldn’t possibly answer. Neither Topher nor Steve raised their hands either. The principal looked from one face to the next, clearly overwhelmed, reaching out to steady herself against the desk. Then I heard McKenzie ask if she should still bother to bring in cupcakes on Friday.

  Next thing I knew, Principal McNair was walking quickly out the door, one hand over her face, just leaving us alone in the room with a blank screen, an unfinished book, and so many questions.

  I’m no genius, but there is one thing I do know: I know that Ms. Bixby isn’t coming back this year. I know a thing or two about hospitals and medical procedures and recovery times. I know that sometimes it’s easier to tell somebody what they want to hear or tell them only part of the truth.

  There’s a difference between the truth and the whole truth. The truth is Ms. Bixby is sick and she is leaving. The whole truth is that I have something I need to tell her. Something she already knows, but I feel like I have to say it out loud, in person, just in case she’s forgotten, because she needs to hear it just as much as I did.

  Which means, somehow or another, I’ve got to see her again.

  Topher

  DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 7. TIME: 0730. LOCATION: Outer perimeter of Fox Ridge Elementary School, just south of the bus drop-off, and unfortunately behind some bushes with potentially poisonous berries and prickly thorns.

  Special Agent Sakata and I have snuck behind enemy lines. The drop zone is clear; no sign of enemy patrols. Agent Sakata is armed with a Carhartt multitool, complete with pliers, unworkable scissors, and Phillips head screwdriver. I have my sketchbook—don’t leave home without it—and a regulation-size box of raisins. The raisins are almost gone. The air is sharp with the smell of diesel and mown
grass. We are already five minutes behind schedule. Special Agent Walker is late.

  “Where is he?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Agent Sakata answers.

  “What’s his bus number?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “But you know everything!”

  “I don’t know what bus he rides. I’ve never even been to his house!”

  I shrug, letting Steve off the hook. It’s true. Neither of us has been to Brand’s house. Not because we wouldn’t go. Only because we’ve never been invited. He’s been to both of our houses tons of times in the past year (mostly mine—we aren’t allowed to run on Steve’s carpet because we might mess up the vacuum lines, so we don’t go there much, and my parents are usually too busy to care what we’re up to). Brand says he can’t invite us over because his father doesn’t like guests. It seems like every group of friends has one kid whose house you never go to. Plus I’ve heard a few things about Mr. Walker. I know about the accident and everything. I guess I’m not in any hurry to get an invite.

  “If he’s not here in the next five minutes, we should give up,” Steve says, looking at me nervously.

  “What, you mean abort the mission and go to school?”

  Agent Sakata shrugs.

  I peer out from the hedge, spreading the branches carefully—it wouldn’t pay to get stuck by a thorn and bleed out here on the school lawn before this operation even got underway. It’s business as usual out on the Ridge. The convoy is dropping off load after load: platoons of half-dead zombies marching in line, filing through the blue double doors in a shuffle step. I see lots of faces I recognize, but not the one I’m looking for. Special Agent Walker is MIA.

  “I told you this wasn’t a good idea,” Steve says.

  I give him a dirty look, but he’s probably right. This mission is already fritzled. That’s a Brand word, but we all use it. It’s one of the words we use so we don’t get in trouble for using other words. If something is really fritzled we say it’s gefragt, which Steve says is just the German word for “asked,” but it certainly sounds like something that is screwed up beyond repair. We aren’t all the way to gefragt yet, but if Brand doesn’t show up soon, we will be.

  It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. We had a plan. The plan was for Saturday. The plan was to lie to our parents and say we were all meeting each other at the park to play Frisbee. The plan was not to skip school. Of course, that was before we intercepted a key bit of intel between two high-ranking officials. Intel that called for a revised plan.

  “I think I might vomit,” Steve says, holding his stomach, though I know it’s just for dramatic effect. I’ve only seen him blow chunks once, and that was coming off the Whiparound at the state fair.

  “Pull it together, Agent.” I slap him on the back and use my tough-guy voice, even though I feel the same. Neither of us has ever skipped before. It’s against regulations. We could be court-martialed. Thrown in the brig. Taken before the principal. If found guilty, we might even be executed. At least, Steve might. His parents are pretty strict. Like marine-drill-seargeant-meets-Catholic-nun strict. I don’t want to think about what would happen if they catch him skipping school.

  “There’s still time,” he says shakily. “The buses are still unloading. We can make it before the tardy bell and just forget the whole thing.”

  I grimace and shove my last handful of raisins in my mouth, chewing them determinedly and thinking I probably should have rationed them, just in case we get stranded deep in enemy territory or something.

  “Besides, we can’t go without Brand. He’s bringing the blanket,” Steve adds.

  It’s true: Agent Walker has the blanket. Our load-outs were issued the night before. Brand was in charge of the blanket. I would bring the map, the directions, and the paper plates. Agent Sakata had the music. We would all contribute the funds necessary to complete the rest of the mission, which explains the big bag of change weighing down my backpack. Most of the stuff we really needed, we still had to acquire on the way. That was the plan.

  “We can do without the blanket,” I say. The blanket wasn’t a necessity. We could sit on the grass if we needed to.

  Agent Walker was the necessity.

  This was all his idea, after all.

  Brand’s idea, though I guess it was actually the sub who started it. The same temporary sub who we had had the whole week. Mrs. Brownlee was her name. Like brownie, she told us, except it sounded more like her ancestors just couldn’t choose between last names. A nice enough lady, but ditzy, and a rambler, and, like all teachers, a huge gossip. You can’t walk down the halls of Fox Ridge for ten seconds without hearing one teacher whispering to another about what “What’s her bucket” said to “What’s her face.” Except Mrs. Brownlee had no one to gossip with, so she confided in us, room 213. She told us everything she knew the minute she showed up that Monday: namely that Ms. Bixby was not at home reading novels and sipping tea in her backyard. She was in the hospital, earlier than expected, undergoing a “rigorous course of treatment,” whatever that meant. And she would likely be there for a while. Maybe weeks. I looked over at Brand and saw his face had gone white.

  We were silent for a moment, and then Susan Sonders said, “We should make her a card.” Mrs. Brownlee thought that was a great idea, so out came the construction paper and the glue that we hadn’t used since the first week of school, and we got to work as a class, making two dozen Get Well Soon cards, complete with self-portraits and bad poetry. Steve’s was a little awkward, consisting of a checklist of everything Ms. Bixby should and shouldn’t eat (apparently broccoli was in and fried chicken was out, which made me feel even worse for Ms. B.). I drew her a picture—a scene from The Hobbit. Then we stuffed the cards into a big manila envelope, and after a phone call to the secretary, Mrs. Brownlee scrawled an address on it, hospital room number and all. Steve volunteered to carry it down to the front desk. He memorized the address on the way; it’s one of his things. When he got back, Mrs. Brownlee reluctantly started trying to teach us how to divide fractions but quickly gave up when she realized nobody was paying any attention—we were all thinking about Ms. Bixby in the hospital and what “rigorous treatment” meant—and sent us out to recess early.

  That’s when it happened—the plan. Brand was draped over the monkey bars, looking down at Steve and me through the spaces, both of us sitting in the mulch, throwing pieces of it, trying to get them into each other’s collars and down each other’s shirts. It was a stupid game, and notoriously one-sided as Steve had terrible aim, but the slides were all too crowded and none of us had the energy to play kickball. I had scored my third goal when Brand spoke up.

  “We should go.”

  I looked at Steve, who was emptying the mulch out of his shirt, then back up at Brand.

  “To the mall? To the moon? Back to bed? Where are you headed with this, Shakespeare?” I sometimes call Brand Shakespeare because of the making-up-words thing. We had to learn a little bit about the Bard this year. Namely that he made up words, wrote poems, and was in desperate need of a comb-over.

  “To the hospital,” Brand said, still talking to us upside down. “To see Ms. Bixby. I want . . .” He paused, licked his lips, and took a deep breath. “I think it would mean a lot to her if we paid her a visit.”

  “I’m not sure they would let us,” Steve said, scratching at his neck. “Not the whole class.”

  “I don’t mean the whole class,” Brand replied, looking out over the playground. “I just mean us. The three of us.”

  “The three of us?” Steve repeated. It was clear he wasn’t too hot on the idea.

  “I don’t think it’s enough to send her a stupid construction-paper card, do you?”

  Brand looked at me when he said it.

  “Actually, my card was pretty good,” I said, thinking about my drawing of Bilbo and his ring, but I knew exactly what Brand meant. It didn’t feel like enough to me either. It felt like a shortcut. Just somet
hing you do because you feel compelled to do something. Ms. B. deserved better.

  Brand flipped down from the monkey bars and joined us in the mulch. “I feel like—after everything we’ve been through this year—we owe her, don’t you?”

  Steve made a face, but I nodded. “What do you have in mind?” I asked, thinking that it should be the other way around, that Brand should be asking me for ideas. I was the creative one, after all. But he clearly had given this some thought already.

  “Do you remember a few months back, we had that one prompt on the board? With the french fries? The day I called Trevor a butt zit?”

  I snapped my fingers. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and not just the butt zit part, though it was hard to forget the look on Trevor’s face. Ms. Bixby had us write in our journals at least once a week for fifteen or twenty minutes. Sometimes we got to write about whatever we wanted, but most of the time she scrawled a prompt on the board for us to respond to. Describe a time when you discovered something surprising about yourself or Tell me about a person you admire. Sometimes they were Would you rathers and sometimes they were just off-the-wall suggestions, like Pick a new flavor of bubble gum that you think nobody would ever want to chew and then write an ad for it. (I picked pickle.) I knew exactly which prompt Brand was thinking of. It made perfect sense, and it made me a little jealous that I hadn’t thought of it first.