A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

It reached everyone. I heard a snort of laughter from the right side of the room, and saw more eye-rolling.

  “In the mornings, he breaks the rules.” Wilson sang the lines as if they were the lyrics to a familiar folk tune, but he sang softly, as if he—almost—didn’t want me to hear.

  “They break the rules. Miss Banks, too.”

  Of course I wanted to know more. Tisha Banks was a student teacher in art. I’d heard that in September Louis Applegate had tried his luck with her and failed. Was it possible that one month later she was intensely involved with Juan Angel Reyes? Why didn’t I know these things—and how did they? And precisely what rules were they breaking in the mornings? Those rules?

  I wanted to say, “Tell all.” But I was the teacher, they were the students, and gossip was neither appropriate—much to my sorrow—nor on the curriculum. So I had to pretend to be as naïve and oblivious as they thought I was and squelch their merriment by giving out the revised exam.

  We’d completed a unit on Greek drama, reading the Oedipus cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. They’d seemed to enjoy and comprehend the plays, and the discussions—until the great sullen freeze set in—were animated and thoughtful, which made any motive behind stealing the exam even murkier.

  Now, as I spoke briefly about the test, the clique’s members, “the team” as they called themselves, exchanged glances, as if reaffirming that they were all there—Erik and Wilson, Nita and Allie, Seth, Jimmy, Mark, and Susan.

  With all their foibles, I loved this group. Even in a school like ours, where the word academic was . . . academic and generally irrelevant, our sports leagues were insignificant in the larger scheme of school athletics. We rated the tiniest notices in the newspaper, if we rated at all. Still, these were our stars, and what they lacked in scholastic ambition, they made up for with good nature and humor—or used to. They played off each other, on the courts or off, and the result was a comfortable sense of goodwill.

  This was why the suggestion that they’d been maliciously conniving sat so poorly with me, and why the sense of subterranean conflict was so upsetting.

  I scanned the room as I spoke. Nobody looked particularly worried or anxious. In fact, at least half a dozen students didn’t even look interested. I would have liked to ascribe this to guilt, to having memorized the pilfered test, but in truth, the combination of apathy and senior cool made displays of anxiety almost nonexistent. One might show hostility, but not fear, be angry with a teacher and her exam, be furious about the way the world worked—e.g., college admissions—but that was not the same as worrying about one’s performance on any given exam.

  They settled down quickly with a final flurry of desk-clearing and pen-retrieving and then sighed and began the exam. I wished I had the leisure to truly study each of the twenty faces in the room as it studied the paper in front of it. Instead, I glanced and scanned.

  Perhaps I did it too obviously. Perhaps the guilty party observed my actions, saw the exam, grasped what had happened, and remained expressionless. But it all looked normal: scowls, sighs, head scratches, and nothing incriminating.

  Nothing, that is, until Nita gave Seth a look of pure fury. He in turn looked startled, then openly confused. Her eyes glanced back to the examination paper, and then to him. And then, with a final slow head shake, her expression a mix of disgust and surprised betrayal, she settled down to the task at hand.

  If I’d been a more Victorian type, I would have swooned. Seth Fremont simply wasn’t the type to steal an exam and, like Susan, Nita, and Allie, he’d have no need. Less need than anybody else in his class, in fact. I looked at my grade book, to unnecessarily confirm what I already knew—that he had an A average so far, and I knew this wasn’t an aberration. He’d always been an outstanding student. Plus, he was captain of the tennis team, and he’d been the star of the student production of Our Town last year. Seth was the real thing, the student you think about on discouraged days. He was here because his parents had recognized that he needed a smaller class size than the public schools afforded, and Philly Prep was an easy walk from his home. So why would he pilfer an exam? To impress his peers? But as far as I could see, he was well liked. He didn’t have to curry favor.

  Was some substance messing with his synapses? I so did not want to think about that.

  I watched as the class concentrated, biting their lips, swallowing hard, looking blankly toward the windows as if asking for divine intervention and, to my painful sorrow and increasing confusion, first Erik, then Jimmy, looked over to Seth, both with expressions that suggested they wanted to strangle him.

  For forty-five minutes, I watched young faces grimace and stare into space. I didn’t know how many of them found their answers, but I do know that I found none, only growing panic about the need for one.

  * * *

  Five

  * * *

  * * *

  The rest of the school day passed uneventfully, but my spirits and energy were low and the minutes seemed made of slowly melting tar. At times, it feels too difficult finding a balance on the periphery of teens’ confusing and confused lives. Sometimes it feels like being a long-term uninvited guest; other times, like being a fellow prisoner.

  Finally, the bell rang and my room emptied with undue speed. The students were obviously having no more fun than I was.

  Juan Reyes’s classroom was on the other side of the hall from mine, and he was passing my room as I left it. I greeted him, considering him in a new way, given the snickers about trysts with the young student teacher.

  His return nod was brisk and businesslike. “Miss Pepper,” he said. I wondered if he’d always been so excessively correct and unbending, or if two months of Philly Prep disappointment had been enough to harden him.

  He wasn’t one to share in the dark humor of the teaching staff. At the end of a bone-tiring day, what else is there to do but laugh, but Reyes had so far never shown even a trace of humor. I wanted to warn the student teacher that no matter how handsome a man is—and Juan Angel Reyes was quite elegantly crafted—he wasn’t going to make a great partner if he had no sense of humor.

  Even if we couldn’t laugh about it, now that I’d been subjected to some of the same whatever-it-was by the seniors, I wanted to talk with him, to commiserate, speculate, and maybe together comprehend what neither of us could manage separately. I smiled and paused, but he passed me.

  Okay, I’d force sociability on him. “Do you have a minute?” I asked as he reached the top of the staircase. I wasn’t certain whether he was a loner—with the rumored exception of the student teacher—if he was shy or awkward, and hadn’t found a way to feel a part of the staff, or if, as his demeanor suggested, he simply had no time for the likes of us.

  He’d have been a wonderful model or department store mannequin. He looked right, dressed beautifully, and was completely appealing until he spoke. And then his manner of delivery and that startling lack of humor erased the possibilities he had from a distance.

  He carried a small stack of textbooks in one arm and held his briefcase with his free hand, but Juan Angel Reyes was nothing if not a gentleman. He struggled to rebalance his load in order to shake my hand. “Please, no,” I said. “The books—”

  My fears were immediately realized as chemistry workbooks toppled to the floor. We both stooped to gather them up, and he apologized profusely. He was U.S.-born and raised, but he had an Old World and, in fact, old century, set of manners.

  “How was today?” I asked when we were reassembled. “Any better?” Selfish of me, but I wanted to know if I’d become part of a spreading malaise, or if the seniors had turned their pranks—I hoped that was all they were—on me, if it was now my turn.

  His lips set, he shook his head.

  No better. I was ashamed to admit that gave me some relief. “The seniors again?”

  “Perhaps it’s because I’m new and they feel like the kings of the mountain. Perhaps I don’t understand how to keep control the way I would
wish and they take advantage. This is not, I realize, a college classroom. Not a place that these people necessarily want to be, and not a subject they necessarily want to learn. Physics, maybe, if I could make them see how it applied to ball games, but other than that, they are too cocky about being important in this tiny fishpond. About being seniors. Nothing is worth taking seriously.”

  “Did something happen today?”

  He sighed. “They talked a lot about Mischief Night,” he said. “It felt . . . it seemed some kind of warning.”

  “Directed at you?”

  He stood even taller and looked ready to deny such a ridiculous idea. But then he exhaled sharply, shook his head, and said, “I’m not certain.”

  “I’m sure the talk was about the party Friday night.”

  He sighed and shrugged. “Yes, I understand. But they . . . I was thinking of attending, to see what this is all about, and then I heard them deliberately . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “They said some people weren’t welcome.”

  “To you?” I was astounded.

  He shook his head. “No, no. Pretended not to have even heard me. They said it to each other, those tennis girls. The ones in charge of everything. But they said it so others would hear, meaning me, I am certain.”

  “Did they say any more?”

  He looked tired, older than his years. “Nothing specific. And I was still angry about the rotating supplies—about the arrogance of that class’s behavior. Today it was pipettes again, but I still don’t know how. I keep my supplies in the back, in the prep room, and students go there only with permission.”

  Or so he had to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.

  “I questioned the class, of course, and you know that blank look?”

  The same look that had me so depressed. I’m not sure fully matured adults can replicate that look. Perhaps you have to feel unfairly subservient, the student facing the teacher, to passively resist by removing your actual self, leaving only the shell.

  “I cannot tolerate this behavior! A chemistry lab has many potential dangers, and ultimately, I’m responsible. No matter what the reason . . .”

  He continued to lecture about student responsibility, the need to grow up—about a whole lot of things that didn’t apply to me. I knew he felt overwhelmed, but I was a peer. I could only imagine what tone he adopted for the students.

  “—discipline needs to be maintained for the good of all and that’s why a strict inventory and safety standards are mandatory, not optional. I—”

  “Mr. Reyes, I understand.”

  He seemed to actually notice me, then, and he stopped midsentence. And then started up again on another track. “What is the justification for a night devoted to mischief?” he asked without slowing for a response. “There was no such night where I grew up, and I find the idea reprehensible. Teens today have enough bad paths to follow without there being an official date on which to misbehave! What’s wrong with this city to have something like that?” He scowled, as if I had created the tradition purely in order to spite him.

  “I think—I know—it goes beyond Philadelphia. It has an ancient origin, the way Halloween does, and had to do with ghosts rising from the dead.”

  “Pshah!” He waved away my words. “Ancient superstition! Is that an excuse for tormenting fellow human beings?”

  “I can see you definitely do feel tormented,” I said. Maybe sympathy and a smidge of psychology would get him to ease up.

  Wrong. He looked even more furious, albeit in his contained, ready to explode way. “Is it my imagination that there was a so-called accident—acid in my briefcase!”

  “That’s awful—how? When?”

  “While I was in the hallway between classes. Aren’t we supposed to be out here? Monitoring the passageways?”

  I nodded, feeling guilty because I so seldom made it outside my room between classes. Somebody was always asking a question, or I was busy writing on the board, preparing for the next class.

  “Right in this briefcase!”

  “Is it—was much harmed?”

  He pursed his mouth again and shook his head. “It’s still intact and nothing was crucially damaged, but it’s the principle. The desecration of property! Who does such things that make no sense?” He cleared his throat and, without moving, seemed to smooth out his clothing and his hair. “Forgive me. It is kind of you to worry about me when you have problems of your own,” he said in a softer, but still flat tone.

  Had he heard about the exam? Or was this simply a bit of conventional speech, part of his ingrained sense of manners? “Not really,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re having such a bad time.”

  “The other classes—also sloppy thinkers, but not malicious. But the seniors . . . all I can think of is to punish the entire class. Maybe then they’ll be sufficiently upset to turn the guilty party over to me.”

  There were many things wrong with his proposed course of action. First, it didn’t go with his professed desire not to dignify their actions by noticing them. Second, it’s pretty much what Stalin and Hitler did to recalcitrant villages, and I’ve never been eager to use them as mentors. And third, on a personal level, I had a teacher who did that when I was in eighth grade, and her actions stuck with me as an example of what might make me hate a teacher. Whatever the lesson was she had in mind, whatever we were supposed to collectively have learned is long lost, but not my outrage for being punished for something I hadn’t done and knew nothing about.

  “I don’t think it would work,” I said. “They’re really good friends. I think they’d rather all go down in flames.”

  “What then? My authority is being undermined. I tried telling the headmaster last week. He was no help and in fact I’m not sure what he actually told me. I couldn’t follow him. It was quite strange.”

  No surprise there. “Unfortunately, the best you could hope for from Havermeyer would be a flurry of meaningless activity resulting in a flyer telling students in semiacademic gobbledygook that it’s bad to steal or to torment people, and that chemicals belong in the laboratory because they can be dangerous. Or maybe an assembly in which he pretty much said the same thing, but took an hour to do so.”

  I’d forgotten again how humor-challenged he was. He solemnly digested my words. “Given those circumstances, what does one do?” he asked gravely.

  Time for me to unbend even if he wouldn’t, to be honest with him, although being around the man was like snowshoeing through the Arctic tundra. I told him about my sense that something was going on, and about my stolen examination.

  “Ah,” he said with great sorrow. Perhaps misery didn’t love company, and there was no comfort in numbers, simply greater depression and confusion.

  I wondered how a man could stand that straight and tall, holding a briefcase and books, and yet look defeated. “Are you familiar with St. Cassian of Imola?” he suddenly asked.

  “I’m afraid saints aren’t my area of expertise.”

  “I’d never heard about him, either,” he said. “And saints were part of my expertise. St. Cassian isn’t widely known. But I got this in my mailbox at noon. I would like to think of it as another prank, although I am sick of that word.” He put his books down on the floor, opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of plain paper, a computer printout with the saint’s name in large letters that had a slash through them, and beneath them, as a sort of correction, THE SPANISH INQUISITOR.

  “I know that’s what they call me, because I gave them a hard test,” he said. “They think they are sly and devious, but I know.” He shook his head. “They also call me Dr. Jar because of my initials. They apparently find that very funny. But The Spanish Inquisitor at least shows some intelligence, a comprehension of history, even though I am not Spanish. I was born in Massachusetts.”

  “Maybe you should continue to ignore all of it and hope it really does have to do with Mischief Night.”

  I knew that what I said was unlikely. The traditio
n was dying out and it was Mischief Night, not Mischief Week, and surely not a two-month torment for a teacher.

  “I went online and looked him up,” Reyes said.

  “Who?”

  “St. Cassian.”

  I’d forgotten about him.

  “He was martyred.”

  “Weren’t all the saints martyred?”

  “He was a martyred teacher.”

  Not good.

  “His students hacked him to death.”

  Really not good. As was the idea that our unscholarly pupils had done research and had ferreted out this martyred teacher so as to torture their chemistry teacher.

  “It’s even worse than that. Nobody was allowed to actually kill him, only to cut. They had to keep their hackings minor, so that death would take longer and be more painful.”

  “That’s . . .”

  “I will tell you what that is. That is what this job feels like to me. Little cuts—more and more little cuts until you bleed to death if you stay long enough. As if it isn’t bad enough trying to teach people who don’t give a damn about learning. Then this—the death of a thousand cuts—that’s what the whole thing feels like. Hack, hack, hack! The lying, the stealing, the false alarms, the covering up for each other—and this threat!” Again, he waved the sheet of paper.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.”

  He seemed ready to protest; then he sighed and nodded. “Maybe not, but it was meant as another nonlethal cut. All I tried to do is teach them.” He shoved the paper back into his briefcase, nodded to me, and walked toward the staircase, but paused again. “Are you sure you are all right yourself?”

  “Me?” I thought about that misspelled note, about the locked-drawer puzzle. “I’m upset, of course.”

  “I would be, too,” he said. “If something like that happened to me.”

  I did a double take. Hadn’t something precisely like that happened to him? “I don’t understand. You told me this morning, and then now—things like the stolen test have been happening to you.”