I smiled. “You’ve been positively brilliant so far,” I said. “Why pretend that writing your thoughts down is so much harder than saying them?”
Next period was a necessarily dry lesson about suffixes and prefixes, but in a way, the unemotional and mechanical nature of that lesson helped push the morning’s events into the background. Also, this class barely asked for updates or clarification about the morning. Juan Reyes had had his fifteen minutes of fame and he was no longer a front-page story.
Class ended, lunch was here, and I felt as if I’d accomplished something major, but happily, I did not try to define what it was.
I looked up to see Lucas, one of the second-period tenth graders, back in my room, standing next to my desk, impossibly small for his age. He was a quiet boy who often looked as if he wanted to be part of the discussion, but was shy and fearful. I’d been giving him time, hoping he’d feel sufficiently secure to speak up soon.
Now, he stood there swallowing hard. I smiled, tilted my head and said nothing, hoping he’d feel pressured to fill the silence.
“I!” He gulped, looked down at his feet and took a few breaths. “I have to confess,” he said in a rush. His skin was scarlet, as if he’d been in the sun too long.
“Confess? To what?”
What else was there? I saw the blood again, felt the impact of the explosion—and looked at tiny Lucas and could only think no-no-no-no!
His shoulders hunched. “I was dared.”
“Oh, Lucas.” Oh, what a world of things to say about dares and macho games, all too late.
“It was supposed to be a prank. Only a prank.”
“A prank,” I repeated. I tried to keep my voice soft, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded.
He nodded and without turning, waved to the vagueness behind him. “Nicky dared me, but I’m the one who did it. Only me. Then he said he was only joking, but that was later, after I did it.”
I looked behind him and indeed saw Nicky, a tenth grader twice Lucas’s size, standing in my doorway, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Lucas,” I said. “Please—what exactly did he dare you to do?” I tried to envision this undersized boy as a mad scientist, arranging a mysterious concoction to avenge a teacher he couldn’t know well. Tenth graders did not take chemistry. Why a grudge against a teacher you didn’t know?
“Take the grade book.”
“What? The—” Of course. Not the explosion at all. Nothing malicious. Not part of whatever teasing, taunting, threatening bloody war was being waged against Reyes. I knew it was selfish and self-centered and narrow-minded of me—but I felt a ridiculously powerful wave of relief.
They didn’t hate me! It had been nothing more than a boy trying to prove himself.
“I meant to put it right back—five minutes, that was all I was going to keep it. I wanted to put it back right after you started looking for it—it was a joke!” He looked as if he was fighting back tears. “To scare you. But then you went into the hallway and blocked the door while you talked to Mr. Reyes and I couldn’t, and everybody else left the school, and if I’d come back in with it, you’d have seen me, and I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to just leave it out after you left. Somebody could really take it. I’m really sorry. Am I in big trouble now?”
At this, his co-conspirator Nicky looked up, his features an exaggerated cartoon depiction of woe.
I remembered now—a glimpse of Lucas at the end of the day, the thought he wanted to ask me something—and then no Lucas in sight. And I’d thought, just as I did almost daily in class, that he’d changed his mind and that I needed to protect his painful shyness by not going after him.
“It wasn’t much of a joke,” I said, making sure I looked at Nicky as well as Lucas. “Did you think I’d find it funny?”
He looked at his toes and shook his head.
Of course he hadn’t. It was a dare, an initiation rite, a route into the world of the bigger, stronger, less awkwardly shy boys.
“I didn’t touch it, I swear,” Lucas said. “I mean I touched it, sure, I had to take it home, but I didn’t change anything. I didn’t even—I barely even looked inside it.” He looked directly at me, and I was startled by the color of his eyes—a dark jade green. “I’m really sorry.”
“Are we going to be suspended or . . .” Nicky let the word expelled float off, unsaid.
I was torn. Angry about the hours of having a missing roll book, aware of the potential seriousness of the prank. “Do you realize this is a legal document?” I asked, holding the roll book out. Why that should impress them more than its being the holding pen for their academic futures, I don’t know, but perhaps the hint that the force of the law was concerned with my records would matter to them.
I was angry, but I was also sorry for Lucas, and aware that Nicky, who’d only instigated the prank and hadn’t actually done anything, had included himself among the guilty, asking if both of them would be expelled. That meant that Lucas had passed the test, pulled the sword from the stone, and had a friend and ally, and a relatively ethical one at that. And Lucas’s shamefaced confession suggested he wasn’t swapping being an outcast for being an outlaw.
“I appreciate your coming to tell me about it,” I said. “That must have been a hard thing to do.”
“It . . .” His sigh was Herculean. “Yes.”
He triggered a memory. I put my hand atop Lucas’s. “Did you phone me last night as well?”
His skin, if possible, went from scarlet to vermilion, and he nodded. “I tried . . . I thought . . . I couldn’t . . .”
I took my hand away. “Okay, then. I understand.” I kept my expression solemn, my message serious, and felt obliged to talk about learning a lesson from this about accepting dares—or making them.
“And for the next month, you’ll be on Anserine Probation.” I had wanted to use that word for a long time, but it isn’t easy to work in something meaning “of or resembling a goose, as in behaving stupidly.” “You understand?” I asked.
Of course they didn’t, but they looked quite solemn as they nodded.
“No further violations, or . . .” I sighed. That seemed enough of a threat.
They were excessively grateful, and when they went off, the tall and husky and the runt, walking together as if they shared shackles, I felt I’d played my part well.
So aside from that bit of trouble in the morning, Mrs. Lincoln, I thought the day was clipping along rather well.
* * *
Ten
* * *
* * *
I stopped in the office before going to the lunchroom. I was hungry, and the real or imagined aroma of my sandwich nearly made me salivate, but I had to find out about Juan Reyes. I grabbed the junk that had accumulated in my mailbox since morning and greeted Harriet.
“Oh!” she said with real surprise in her voice. “I was just coming to find you. What a day!”
“Thanks, but he found me.”
“He? Who?”
“The policeman. He must have gotten my whereabouts from you.”
She inhaled raggedly, then nodded. “Yes. He wouldn’t tell me why. Is everything okay?”
I shrugged. “I guess they routinely talk to people who were at the scene of an accident.”
“And you were, weren’t you? He already talked to you—or somebody did?”
I shrugged again. “Anyway, I wanted to find out whether you’ve heard from the hospital.”
She looked completely confused. I realized she hadn’t been in search of me about either the policeman or a medical update. I sincerely hoped she hadn’t been en route with a hot news flash about stuffed wildlife. “Mr. Reyes,” I said. “Have you heard from the hospital?”
“Well, that wasn’t—but yes. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. He is in critical condition, in intensive care. Apparently, the glass cut an artery—or was it a vein?—and he lost a lot of blood, and his throat’s injured, and possibly an eye, and so he’s . . . and there are the other cuts as well and the b
ig problem—if he regains consciousness and lives, of course. The glass . . .” She averted her own glance, as if to soften the message. “They aren’t sure about his sight. That jar!”
I did a double take, thinking she was using the chemistry teacher’s nickname, but she simply meant the glass that had so mysteriously and profoundly exploded.
Still, I spent a moment pondering whether a jar had so injured Dr. Jar.
“But Miss Pepper—”
“Amanda.”
“Amanda. That wasn’t why I was coming to see you.”
I tensed, waiting to hear about Erroll’s latest taxidermical triumph or tragedy.
“I had to tell you that the headmaster wants to see you as soon as possible.”
That was never good news. Even Erroll and groundhog tongues were preferable. I glanced over at his office door, thought about my egg salad sandwich. “Is it really urgent?”
She leaned close. “I don’t know what it’s about, of course, but yes, he said as soon as possible. He said it should be during your lunch hour. Those were his words. He said it was”—she lowered her voice to a reverent near-whisper—” ‘a matter of some gravity.’ ”
I glanced at his closed door again. He’d never once called me in to congratulate me or praise something I’d done, only to enumerate my perceived failings, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of what I’d done wrong lately.
Maybe he wanted to commiserate about Juan Reyes.
Or, more likely, he knew about Tisha Banks. Maybe an observant student had told him about her. I started planning my defense of not telling him about the hijinks in the chemistry lab.
“He’s waiting for you now,” Harriet said.
It seemed best to get it over with. He periodically grew annoyed with me and I guess it was time once more. There seemed a cyclical order I hadn’t yet deciphered, but in general I knew my crimes before I was summoned.
Had I annoyed any families by giving a low grade or suggesting any area that could use improvement? I couldn’t think of any looming disputes, not that I ever knew I was overstepping my bounds—by their lights—before one of those confrontations. On the other hand, Havermeyer had once been apoplectic because my window shades weren’t perfectly aligned.
I was fairly certain that window shades were not the problem today, and I was right about that much. Harriet ushered me in to Maurice Havermeyer as if I were an invalid, and as if I couldn’t make the trip myself.
His splendid office always made me feel as if I were about to receive a detention rather than what I should have felt like—a colleague, a peer here for a discussion or consultation. But that would have implied that the honest exchange of ideas or working through of problems had a chance of happening inside its paneled splendor.
As always, I wished I could creep closer to the framed diplomas on the wall. Their writing was illegible, the language in which they were written strange—neither Latin nor Greek, and certainly not English, and the degree-granting institutions’ names unintelligible—purposely, I thought. But as usual, my headmaster blocked access to his academic credentials.
He waved me into the chair facing his desk while he sat behind its empty expanse, his hands folded above his chest, as if he’d been praying and had grown weary, so he rested his chin—one of his chins—on his fingertips. “I’m afraid we have a serious conflagration,” he said gravely.
No. First of all, he wasn’t afraid about anything. He was quietly gloating. And second, we’d had our conflagration before school even began. If there was another fire in the building, was this the way to handle it?
He sighed, lowered his hands, raised his head, and looked at me directly. “This is a matter that needed your attention,” he added. “Your immediate attention, which it did not get. Now we are forced to close the barn door after the chickens flew the coop.”
It wasn’t the moment to correct him. Or maybe he meant this wasn’t an enormous problem, chicken- rather than horse-sized.
“I believe in creativity and the arts as much as the next man,” he said.
I nodded, because that seemed the response he wanted, although I would have wanted to know who, precisely, that next man might be and what creativity had to do with my failure to mention Juan Reyes’s inamorata.
“I am, after all, an educator.”
Again, I did not feel it was the time or my place to correct him.
“And being an educator, I am committed to encouraging the creativity of our young people.” He paused. “Would you not say that was so?”
“Excuse me?” My mind was still preparing my defense, sure that Tisha Banks was the missing subject line in his message. She was, after all, art and creativity incarnate—even without her early-morning striptease. “Yes, of course,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I’d agreed to, but I was close to sure his words had gone full circle. He believed in creativity because he was an educator and therefore believed in creativity.
And most of all—so what? I wished he’d cut to the chase.
“I’m glad we’re on the same page with this,” he said solemnly.
I was now worried that he’d already cut to and been dwelling in the chase, but whatever our game, he’d forgotten to tell me its name, let alone its rules.
“You must agree that there are limits,” he said, his voice low and grave. “Call them boundaries if you like, of good taste, of discretion, of common sense.”
He said I must agree. Must I? “Perhaps.”
“Societal mores, Miss Pepper. Or should I now call you Mrs. . . . ?”
I shook my head. “Miss Pepper is fine.”
He nodded and cleared his throat. “A culture establishes spoken or unspoken agreements so that its people can live in harmony.”
If this was his idea of clarification, I had news for him. I knew about societal mores. I’d had sociology. So what?
“We live in difficult times.” He had swiveled his desk chair halfway, and was apparently speaking to the window that faced the street, now rain-free. Across the way, in the Square, students enjoyed their lunch hour. I envied them.
“Children to all intents and purposes just like those,” he said, waving at the panorama of adolescent life. “Children in fact precisely like our students pick up machine guns and decimate their schoolmates. People drive planes through buildings on purpose, murdering thousands. These are not our parents’ times, and neither, therefore, do we live with the same sense of security as they did.” He paused, expectantly, swiveling back to face me more directly. “Don’t you agree?”
I gave him the minimal nod possible, my neck muscles so tight movement was difficult. Of course those horrific things had happened. How could I or anyone disagree? But I was suspicious of arguments that began with those ideas, that asked for agreement on simple, verifiable facts. They felt like traps: You agree to the facts because they are facts, and they happened, and then you were supposed to agree with whatever followed, with specious logic apt to leap miles into a foggy void. I wanted to agree to a point, and to that point only, so I kept my nods barely perceptible.
“Given that many of our worst nightmares have in recent years become actuality, when you have a student advocating violence,” he said, “you must agree that it is imperative that one should put a stop to it.”
Tisha? Advocating violence?
In fact—anybody I knew advocating violence?
Havermeyer waited. He’d told me I must agree, and he was waiting for me to do so. “Of course,” I stammered, “I suppose, if in fact—”
“And you must agree that it is your responsibility as an educator and a citizen in these perilous days to report it to me.”
I felt as if I had stumbled into a political rally, one whose politics terrified me. What was I was supposed to report? What did “advocating violence” mean? Somebody saying, “drop dead” to another student? A kid with an automatic rifle? “I suppose if it ever—”
“Then why haven’t you?”
If he’d taken a large ma
llet and pounded my head, I couldn’t have been more surprised or disoriented. “Dr. Havermeyer,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster, “I thought we were speaking theoretically. In theory, of course, I agree, I think, but in reality, I haven’t reported anything to you because happily, I haven’t had a single encounter with a student who advocates—”
“Indeed? That is not consistent with the facts. Not only did you not report it to me, as the administrator and proper authority, but you opted to broadcast it to every student in this school.”
And finally I got it that Tisha Banks was not the topic, and Havermeyer was not speaking in metaphors, but literally. Our innocuous, terrific, poetry reading. The one thing I’d done here lately that had met with everyone’s approval had somehow become a wrong thing. Now that I knew what he meant, I could sit up straighter and speak more directly. “I can’t imagine what you’ve heard, but the fact is, none of my students advocate violence.”
“That is not what I was told.”
“By whom? Because it is what I am telling you. In fact, we taped it, so I could show—”
“I have had the opportunity already to view your production.”
“And? Surely, you saw—you didn’t see anything frightening.” Nobody had read a Columbine-type work, not even close. Nobody had even opted for the violence of a typical rap poem, not that I would have censored it had they. Could he be offended by the dumb-dog poem? Was that suddenly anti-American? And then there was the one about the dead grandma. Was there too much death and dying in that? This was ludicrous, except for Havermeyer’s expression, which was solemn and annoyed.
“Cheryl Stevens.” He spoke her name with the gravity of one sharing the secret of existence.
“Cheryl? Cheryl’s against violence. That’s the entire point of her poem. It’s an antiwar poem.”
A Hole in Juan Page 10