I went back to my desk and tried the center drawer. Still locked. I took out my keys and unlocked it, and there were the tests. I counted them. All there.
I’d put them there Friday afternoon, locked the desk, and hadn’t unlocked it until now. The key had been with me since I turned it with great satisfaction at the end of last week.
How about that: a locked-drawer mystery.
Maybe Reyes had been right, and something was seriously out of kilter with the seniors. I had been able to tolerate the idea when it was directed at him. He was new, he was rigid, he was unconcerned with their welfare, but now the malevolence was directing itself at me. Did I fit any of those categories? What did this mean? And what do you do to undo something that couldn’t have happened in the first place?
* * *
Four
* * *
* * *
I didn’t go downstairs but instead ate my hard-boiled egg and apple at my desk, working on a revised exam, obsessed not only with making up new questions for the seniors but on asking them of myself. Who could have stolen the exam and how could they have done it, and who was my semiliterate confidante who ratted?
I came up with no answers, but I did come up with new questions and I went to the office to see about duplicating them. Harriet had her faults, but inefficiency wasn’t one of them, nor was an unwillingness to help the staff. “I’m in a bit of a rush,” I said. “I had to change the exam at the last minute. Could I have the copies for next period?”
Past experience made my stomach quiver after asking a question like that.
“Of course!” she said. “These things happen.” She stood up and headed toward the copier.
During the reign of Helga the Office Witch, nothing was ever duplicated in less than three days, and only after begging and pleading one’s case for urgency, and then it was accomplished with a scowl and a clear message that asking her to push the button on the copy machine—which faculty could not use—was a nearly insupportable outrage.
Harriet’s amiability seemed nothing less than miraculous. I watched her place the sheet and press the required number and set the machine humming—and it was obvious how a student could get a copy. “Do you do all the duplicating yourself?” I asked. A student aide could simply print out an extra when he manned the machine.
“Exams? Definitely,” she said. “Too tempting to the students otherwise, don’t you think?”
That was wise, and a comfort, but I was sad to lose my easy solution.
“I love your wedding band,” she said as the pages piled up. I looked down at my finger. The ring was still an unadorned gold band. I, too, loved it, but couldn’t imagine what was remarkable about it.
“We’ve been looking, too,” she said, and now I knew that what had appealed to her had little to do with rings. She felt we had a bond, were soul sisters, both paired with what she referred to as “scholars” who also moonlighted in order to stay afloat. Her scholar, however, was often derailed from his part-time day jobs due to the rigors of taxidermy and the irrational behavior of his various employers.
We had so much in common. Both of us were helping with our guys’ tuitions. “They don’t give scholarships for taxidermy,” she said, shaking her head at the madness of financial aid distribution. “And the specimens are so expensive. His wolf-rug specimen cost over six hundred dollars!”
I often couldn’t bear hearing what was being killed so as to be stuffed and made to look as if it were still alive. There was a hideous contradiction in the lifelike dead things concept, but it seemed to have escaped Harriet and Erroll.
“It would be less expensive if he could bring his own specimens, but road kill isn’t any good, and where would Erroll find a wolf or mountain lion on his own?”
I pictured lion-vendor stands ringing the school of taxidermy. Run! Mountain lions, run! I mentally telegraphed, wherever they’d managed to still be alive. Luckily, Harriet couldn’t hear my thoughts, only the small noises I made in an attempt to signify amazement and wonder. I thought of them as my Harriet sounds because they satisfied her need for approval without my ever saying I approved.
The test pages had long since popped out of the printer, but it seemed rude to grab them and run.
“I can’t wait till he graduates,” Harriet said. “You can’t imagine how well they do—not that he’s in it for the money. He’s in it for the art. It’s nice that it also affords a comfortable living.”
Except, of course, for the poor, stuffed animal. Frankly, given his history of delaying marriage while he flirted with careers, Erroll didn’t seem in much of a rush to become as one with Harriet. Taxidermy was already taking much longer than anticipated. He’d had to repeat the fur course, she’d told me, because he’d gotten the flu, and prior to the groundhog tongue issues, he had difficulties with the bird course. Turkeys, she’d informed me solemnly, were difficult. “Not the fat kind we have for Thanksgiving. But with the wild ones, the body making isn’t easy, and he had problems with it. He has to try again with a new bird, poor man.”
Run, turkeys, run! Or better still—you’re birds—fly! Could those infamously ineffective brains—I’d heard that when it rains, they look up to check the weather, and drown—could those brains anticipate danger?
I did not want to become emotionally involved with the fate of wild turkeys, so I reverted to her other topic: her marriage-in-waiting. “Wedding bands, eh? Does this mean Erroll’s about to . . .” I wasn’t sure if people graduated from taxidermy school or received any sort of degree. “. . . finish?”
Her tolerant chuckle implied that the idea of completing such a difficult course of study in a matter of mere years was so naive, one could only laugh. “His licensing is a way off—but looking can’t hurt, can it? Did I tell you about when he won an interschool competition? He stuffed a raccoon with amazing results.”
Run, raccoons, run!
“You mark my words—he’ll be a master taxidermist soon.”
I never knew how to respond to these anecdotes. Taxidermy school was apparently very hands-on, and Harriet had related an unending series of triumphs with everything from a vulture—apparently the body work on vultures was a snap compared to wild turkeys—to a dog. “Euthanized, the poor old thing,” Harriet had said. “The owners were quite pleased, and Erroll topped the class once again.” The taxidermy school sounded close to a sweatshop, using students to offer cut-rate pet preservation services.
“Will he . . . when he’s finished studying—will he be on his own?” I couldn’t recall ever passing a taxidermy shop. Where was the vast reservoir of need for such services?
“We simply don’t know that yet,” she said. “People come recruiting, but we haven’t decided.”
I envisioned sober-faced men going to interviews, their briefcases filled with small, stuffed creatures—the fur of which Erroll would have finally learned to make glossy and natural-looking. I pictured a résumé stuck with hair and bristles.
“Oh look! I so enjoy talking with you I didn’t realize they were done, so here they are!” Harriet handed me the stack of revised exams and the master. She was a great school secretary, and for that I’d listen to anything she wanted to say about Erroll’s bright future, and the decimation of wildlife everywhere.
En route back to my classroom, I saw Nita Kloster and Allie Deroche once again in a huddle not far from my—locked—classroom door. What was it about that spot? Their heads were close and their hunched shoulders and hand gestures suggested an intense conversation about something less than pleasant. Either a romance was breaking up, which would necessitate endless analysis and conferencing, or they were disagreeing about details of Friday evening’s school party. They were the co-chairs of the committee and maybe there were unresolved issues such as whether Mischief Night had the same orange-and-black color scheme as Halloween.
They saw me and stopped talking. “You’re early for class,” I said. “Everything okay?”
They glanced at each other. �
�Sure. It’s too noisy in the lunchroom,” Allie said.
I agreed, but nobody under thirty had ever thought so before. “Everything going smoothly with the party?” I asked.
They stared at me and then at each other, as if I’d been unintelligible. I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t easy making conversation with them, finding topics other than “Hey, did you steal my exam? And if you did, why on earth would you show it to your classmates? Was it all just to get me?”
Nita and Allie were pretty and poised and part of what constituted the A-list, the elite at Philly Prep. But despite being in the ruling clique, they weren’t stereotypical mean-spirited queen bees as far as I could tell. They were amazingly energetic on behalf of the school, and lavished creativity on sport and social events.
Before today, whenever I’d had occasion to mention the party with them, they’d been apt to roll their eyes and list all the logistical problems they were having, so my question seemed natural. Their reaction did not.
“I was wondering,” I said, “who’s welcome and who’s not. I mean I know outsiders will be there—people can bring dates from other schools, right? But can people who don’t go here show up on their own? Are there any ground rules?” I wanted to find out if Pip could come, but I didn’t want to ask them outright and make them feel obliged to break rules for me.
I expected their usual no-nonsense responses—these are the rules, period. Instead, they looked even more startled, as if now I’d gone from unintelligible to threatening.
Their eyes widened, their brows lowered. “Why are you asking?” Nita finally asked. “Did somebody say something?”
Now I felt as if we were speaking separate languages.
Allie smiled artificially. “Oh, I heard about Ms. Parillo being sick and you’re subbing for her. So you must mean your—husband! Of course you can bring him.”
“Well, I actually meant . . . but if there aren’t any problems about extra guests, people who don’t go to this school, then okay. Thanks.”
Nita still looked troubled, unsure of what I meant. Allie seemed to tilt toward me, as if to hear more clearly. Or even, I thought, to hear what I wasn’t saying.
“And how’s it going?” I asked. “The preparations and everything?”
“You know,” Nita said. “Something always goes wrong.”
Allie relaxed her posture. “Nita’s such a drama queen. Everything’s fine.” She wagged her finger and pursed her mouth in mock-condemnation of her best friend.
Nita smiled and said nothing. “Absolutely.”
We were involved in a charade, only they knew what the actual answer was, and I hadn’t a clue.
I looked at my watch. “Showtime,” I said.
They groaned. They always groaned, and they were among the best students. “Is the test hard?” Allie asked.
“Not if you paid attention in class and did the assignments.” We all smiled ferociously. “Actually, you’ve still got a few minutes left.” I unlocked my door and left the smiling, lying duo in the hallway. It was an effort to not turn around again, to see if—or more likely, to verify that—they were again into the agitated conversation I’d interrupted, a conversation I was sure could explain why my innocuous question about the party had upset them.
The test, of course, still nagged at me. I thought back over who’d had my keys. Nita had gone to the book room for me last week, taking along my ring of keys, most recently when I’d been short one copy of Oedipus. She could have duplicated the desk drawer key for future use. It was a big city and we were in the heart of it. There’d be a locksmith somewhere nearby, and I so seldom locked my desk that I wouldn’t notice the missing key for days. But logically, since I had never locked up a test before this weekend, and nothing else of value was in my desk, why would she—a good student—or anyone, in fact, go to all that trouble?
She’d gone to the book room for me several times, but so had other students in this and other classes. In fact, I was no longer sure she was the one who’d gone for me last week. And if somebody had, in fact, duplicated the key in advance, how long had this idea been building? And why? Panic over grades as college applications approached was real, and parental expectations were always insanely out of touch with reality. I understood the pressures, but how would this help?
Maybe I’d never locked the drawer. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe before I’d locked the drawer I’d left the room between periods, or during lunch, and somebody had spotted the opportunity, in which case it could be anybody.
I wished I’d said something more about the exam to Nita and Allie, just to see their expressions, their reactions, but now it was too late.
As they entered, the seniors had the sideways-glancing, vaguely frowning faces of a class facing a major test. I wanted to study their expressions as they read the questions—wanted to see who looked shocked or dismayed.
Maybe no one would, because the note itself was a hoax.
Then I laughed at myself, thinking back to today’s discussion of A Separate Peace, in which Finney refuses to believe World War II is really going on. I was pulling a mini-Finney—and he wound up dead. Literature can be so instructive.
I watched them, making mental notes, and I realized I was preparing a dossier on each student to share with Mackenzie, to get his fix on who the culprit might be.
Two of the students, Erik Steegmuller and Donny Wilson, by chance Allie and Nita’s boyfriends, had seemed particularly grim and worried lately. Normally, they considered physical, not necessarily mental, attendance sufficient. Their brains were seas of hormones, with a few basketballs and tennis balls afloat in there.
They weren’t history-making stars on the courts, just fine athletes, and in any case, this wasn’t the sort of school scouts canvassed. And neither Erik nor Wilson, as he was known, came from families that could generously endow or gift a university. That they were going to have to gain admission by their records alone was apparently a thought that hadn’t occurred to them until a few weeks ago. I knew they were now working feverishly with independent college advisors to find a school so desperate that it would want them—in essence, the collegiate equivalent of Philly Prep. But even with such a school, they couldn’t afford to fail English.
Today, they seemed cocky, overly self-assured, elbows into the other’s side and winks as they found their seats. I’d like to think that was the body language of the insufficiently gifted who might well balance the scales by stealing an exam, except that it was also their normal behavior. They were like ill-trained puppies, only not as cute.
“It isn’t fair, you know,” redheaded Susan Blackburn told me in a sweet voice that barely masked the steel within it. “I think it’s against the rules.”
I wondered if someday I’d find out that Susan had become a lawyer. Philly Prep didn’t have that many rules, but she could quote each one of them from memory—especially when it suited her side of the argument. “We just had a test with Dr. Ja—I mean Mr. Reyes.”
This semester, the headmaster had instituted a master calendar with the objective of having the staff stagger the schedule of major exams. Apparently, parents had been protesting the burdens on their overworked offspring. Given that this was the least academic private school in the Delaware Valley, possibly in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, possibly in the solar system, the complete fiction of our students being crushed under the weight of assignments verged on the ludicrous. Nonetheless, nonoverlapping exams were the new rule, and bad luck if you and the math teacher both finished units and wanted to test and move on.
Where is the No Teacher Left Behind program?
Our students, consistently underestimating the faculty’s intelligence, played us off one another, behaving like children ferrying back and forth between parents. “Dad said we could do it if you said it was okay,” and so forth. “We already had a test with this other teacher, and the rules say . . . !”
This had been going on since the start of the semester, and it was growing old.
I knew they were lying. Of all the faculty, Juan Angel Reyes would be the last person to break a rule, or to suddenly change his mind and give a test he’d told me he was not giving.
“What kind of exam?” I hoped I sounded only mildly interested.
“Chemistry, of course!” Susan’s righteous indignation was over the top. Her zeal and tone of desperation made it obvious she was toying with the truth.
“No, I meant that it was a pop quiz, wasn’t it?” Susan’s jaw dropped enough to please me. She was bright and did well, and I didn’t even know why she’d protest, except for the sport of it. Definitely going to be a lawyer. I wondered if she already knew that.
Seth Fremont, across the aisle from her, raised his eyebrows and looked amused by the entire performance. Clearly, her plan of attack had been announced in advance. His eyebrows and grin clearly said, “I told you it wouldn’t work.”
Susan grimaced at him.
Nita, who’d been watching carefully, turned her head so that the back of it was to Seth.
I eyed her carefully. Was she the test thief? She seemed hyperattentive, but I knew her writing, and she surely wasn’t the semiliterate tattler.
Maybe nobody I taught was actually that poor a writer. Maybe the note’s illiteracy was a disguise.
Maybe Nita had taken the test to help out her boyfriend, Erik. She didn’t need to steal anything, but love does strange things to people.
Still, it bothered me even more to think that the brightest students in the class were the ones behaving most oddly. “Mr. Reyes wouldn’t break the rules,” I said, pushing my advantage.
Allie’s eyebrows shot up and she rolled her eyeballs up as close to the brows as she could get. She looked like a comic-book drawing of incredulity. “Oh, yes he would. He breaks the rules a lot.” Her words—a challenge, a taunt—were spoken in a stage whisper designed to reach me.
A Hole in Juan Page 4