I hadn’t expected a follow-up, and my palms started to sweat.
“I open this question up to everyone,” Mr. Kaplan said.
At first I thought he was simply saving me from my misery, but then I realized he really did want the others to jump in. He waited, and the silence was even more excruciating than before. Was he faltering? If so, he recovered immediately.
“No one has any suggestions? No advice about how we can display our unique minds? No methods for showing your extremity—your distinction from the group?” Mr. Kaplan shook his head. “It seems,” he said, beginning to pace, his shoes squeaking against the linoleum, “that rousing you from your collective stupor is going to require an anathematic approach. A test of your courage. A display of your difference.” He halted and turned to face us, his eyes glowing, crazed.
Maybe he was bizarre, but I didn’t care. Murrow was the only other person I’d heard speak about individuality and courage in this way. In Boston, I had sometimes lain awake, listening to his old broadcasts, absorbing his words, their sounds and images nutrition for my mind. Most people no longer spoke like Murrow or lived by his standards. But once in a while, you came across somebody who surprised you. Like Mr. Kaplan. Or Dalia. Tears rose behind my eyes for no good reason, and I forced my face into the See It Now stare.
The rest of class was all business. Mr. Kaplan explained the syllabus. Class participation, including daily exercises in the Socratic method, made up nearly half our grade. In addition to tests, there were interactive experiments and long-term projects. Mr. Kaplan was a young PhD, obviously brilliant, so maybe that was how he’d received approval for this unusual curriculum. But if he was a prodigy, why was he teaching high school?
I was mulling this over when a scream ripped through the room. We jumped out of our chairs and rushed out the open door. The hallway was empty save one startled girl gasping outside the bathroom door. Mr. Kaplan pushed by and walked into the girls’ bathroom without hesitation. We followed, only to stop short. Looking down on us from the mirror above the sinks was a horrific face with four eye sockets and a sinister, smiling mouth.
The face was nothing more than a rough sketch, but it was drawn in red dripping paint. I thought I could hear the creature’s deep cackle echo across the tiles. Mr. Kaplan’s face, so assured just a moment before, was white. Everyone started talking at once. But I just stood there, looking at the ugly image, unable to shake the feeling that it was laughing at me. Its eyes were locked on mine, just as Mr. Kaplan’s eyes had been at the ice cream social. I glanced at him to check his reaction, but he was no longer there. He’d slipped away as though fleeing the scene of a crime.
The following week, I put on a business suit and went to see Ms. Mallory, the college counselor. All Mariana sophomores must choose an academic major to impress the colleges, but waiting a year made little sense for my own four-year plan. Before I’d snapped open my briefcase, however, Ms. Mallory eyed my suit with disapproval and said, “Iris, I’m afraid we don’t offer a journalism major here. Besides which, all the local papers are closing. Wouldn’t you be better off going into PR?”
Defecting to the Dark Side was more like it.
“In any case, Iris, it’s only the second week of school. Get acclimated. Have some fun.”
“Ms. Mallory,” I said. “At twenty-one, Edward R. Murrow was elected president of the National Student Federation of America. He believed students should care more about current events than ‘fraternities, football, and fun.’”
Ms. Mallory looked nonplused. “Are you talking about that terrific George Clooney film? That’s what I mean, Iris. Go to the movies with your girlfriends. Gossip about movie stars. Be young!”
I could see Joseph Pulitzer having a postmortem conniption fit. But I’m a professional, so I thanked Ms. Mallory for the advice, picked up my briefcase, and walked out.
As I changed back into my school uniform in the third-floor handicapped stall, I thought about Murrow facing off against McCarthy, and decided not to let the newspaper naysayers deter me. There were far too many reasons to preserve the print media: the sharp, sweet newsprint smell and the sound of crinkling paper; the experience of reading words printed on a page. I love blogs and web news, of course: the constant stream of new information, the democratic nature of everybody having a say. But there’s something comforting about words that stay put. Words that, a day later, will be exactly where you left them. Unlike the news, the newspaper is consistent. Even if you go to bed reeling, it’s okay, because by sunrise the paper’s there waiting for you.
Journalism major aside, I’d already decided to take up the cause of newspaper preservation at Mariana. Think revolution, Murrow had said. And that’s what I was doing. The Oracle had no online presence, no multimedia interface, no investigative team. If I was going to implement these things before I graduated, I’d have to be named editor-in-chief ASAP.
Unfortunately, my prospects didn’t look good. Murrow had been president of his high school, a star member of the debate team, and a basketball phenom. But at the Oracle’s first staff meeting of the year, I was given the position of staff writer’s assistant. (Having the word “assistant” on my resume is like saying, “I suck; don’t hire me.” Right now, even I wouldn’t hire me.) Worse, I quickly learned that Mariana’s paper is little more than an instrument of the state, an outlet for rah-rah instead of reality. In most schools this would be expected, but Mariana is supposedly run by its students. There are no proctors in the rooms during tests and no teacher monitors in the refectory. The handbook has an entire chapter dedicated to the student-elected Community Council and how it runs all clubs and helps adjudicate disciplinary infractions. Given all this, I’d have expected the paper to be the indispensable opposition. Instead, the Oracle’s editor-in-chief, Katie Milford, doubles as the Community Council’s senior class delegate. (God forbid that one of the Watergate Seven had been E-I-C of the Washington Post!)
At the first meeting, Katie gave the news team an uninspiring spiel and then assigned stories on the refectory’s vegan dessert bar and the lobby’s new smart monitors. The only topic of controversy, which Katie and the senior staff haggled over for half an hour, concerned whether America was now a “postracial” society, and if so, couldn’t the paper quit using PC qualifiers like “African American”? At the meeting’s end, new reporters finally received their assignments. In addition to me, there was Russell Murphy, who only wanted to cover sports (he pitched an article on whether the electronic tennis team should be eligible for athletic funding), and Sophie Richie, who only wanted to cover fashion (she pitched a retooled version of the Sunday Styles piece on accessories!). I’d written up a beat note the first week of school and pitched pieces on Mariana’s egregiously consumptive carbon footprint, the economics of the school uniform (“From Cotton Bale to Collared Shirt”), and a Best Teachers package, with service-oriented sidebars on how to pick the best classes.
Katie shot down every one of my ideas. “I’d like to start you off with an obit,” she said. “Mrs. Kringle, the school secretary, is close to kicking the bucket, and we have to plan for her demise.”
I cringed. “Why not write a story on Mrs. Kringle’s life? Wouldn’t that be—”
“Obit,” Katie said, and turned away with a dangerous whip of her ponytail.
I left the meeting aching with indignation. Aren’t my pitches good? I thought to Murrow. What did I do wrong? But Murrow was a realist. These are the trials all reporters face, he thought back. Get used to disappointment.
He was right. And I had other problems to worry about, namely Mr. Kaplan. Even though I’d boldly committed social seppuku in front of our class, Mr. Kaplan spent the week ignoring me. Over the weekend I’d given serious thought to the situation: analyzing my body language and whether I appeared standoffish or overly inviting; wondering if I smiled too much or too little. Perhaps this was my first experience of a man playing hard to get, not in a romantic sense, but in the game of mental tag we wer
e engaged in.
My mind frequently jumped back to our first interaction at the ice cream social. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Patrick was right and I really was becoming hyper-anxious. Or maybe Mr. Kaplan had a strange ophthalmologic condition that caused him to give people the Sauron Eye. My classmates had obviously made up their minds about him. They joked about his enormous hair and his tie that was constantly askew. They mimicked his cold glare and wild gesticulations. But they did these things, I could tell, because they were afraid of him. I hadn’t been at Mariana long, but it was clear to me that no teacher had dared be a smart-ass to any of them before. No teacher had Mr. Kaplan’s fierce energy or snapped around the classroom like a live wire. And for all of these reasons, I believed Mr. Kaplan and I shared something profound. The way he looked at me that first day had been like a challenge: Could there be a link between us? Are you perceptive enough to uncover it? There could, and I was.
Luckily, I had a guide—Lily’s book, Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology. It was uncanny that the universe had handed me a veritable textbook on Mr. Kaplan’s academic specialty, a tome that resembled the kind of encyclopedia God might have used to create the world. Not that Mr. Jonah Atheist Kaplan would buy this scenario. Still, I could just imagine the Almighty sitting around thinking, “I’d like to make something slimy and poisonous with three antennae and seven eyes. I think I’ll consult Marvelous Species.” And bingo—there it was on page 783, complete with assembly instructions in English, Swedish, and Japanese.
The book contained chapters on extreme-loving organisms, adventuring scientists, and philosophical musings on the natural world. Though I was already bombarded with schoolwork, I carved out a mandatory reading period each night to study it. It was like running my own independent study, and I hoped that somehow it would lead me to uncover a link between Mr. Kaplan and me.
Jonah
September 2012
AT THE END of my second week teaching biology, Headmaster Pasternak gave me an assignment: keep the freshmen out of College Night. This event is a Mariana Academy tradition and a downright Jacobin one. Back when I was a student, we used to call it the Night of Terror. And for good reason. For two hours, students are forced to hear representatives from the nation’s most prestigious universities explain why their 3.9 GPA, near-perfect SAT score, and accomplishments as viola virtuoso, editor-in-chief, star thespian, and/or math whiz don’t give them a fighting chance at Harvard.
Still, Mariana provides its pupils with reason to hope. The school has one of the nation’s highest Ivy League acceptance rates, so it’s not surprising that our students rev their stress levels like particle colliders. I’d only been teaching freshman biology for two weeks and already my students were biting their nails down to the stubs and, if their eyebrows were any indication, suffering from trichotillomania. My twin brother and I spent our adolescence inside this academic crucible—I was Mariana class of ’02—so I shouldn’t have been surprised when, on the night in question, a slew of freshmen did try to march through the auditorium doors. I simply shook my head and sent them packing.
Meanwhile, the blazered panel from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were taking their assigned chairs on the stage. (The delegate from Tufts sat at the end of the table, which by her expression might have been Siberia.) I turned to see Iris Dupont moving briskly toward me, her long brown hair swinging behind her tiny body, her breasts bouncing, a wide smile on her little mouth. Iris walked through life like she was leading a marching band. She had a picture of Edward Murrow taped to the front of her binder, and she often sat through an entire class with a pencil tucked behind her ear. Of all my students she was the most eager, the most enthusiastic, and, unfortunately, the most exasperating. If there was one member of this adolescent elite who wasn’t going to sit back and passively accept the spoils of her trust fund, it was she. I recognized in her my own teenage intensity. But on the very first day she’d foiled the unity of opposition I tried to foster within the class. I had intended to create an alliance against the despot (me) that would eventually mature into respect as my subjects (the students) worked harder and harder to meet my demanding standards. But Iris bounded across the picket line and disrupted my planned student unity before it coalesced. I needed to regain the upper hand and return Iris to her place in the proletariat. But I had to tread carefully. That girl had ambition like the young Clark Kent had strength, and like Kent, she didn’t yet know how to harness her power.
Iris walked straight toward me, and for a moment I was sure she was about to salute. I prepared to bar her way, but then her parents strode up, seemingly out of nowhere, clearing her a path through the doors. The Duponts presented as a nondescript pair in their well-tailored suits, but their simple looks were deceiving. I knew from frequent mentions at the last faculty meeting that these two were Superparents: parental mutants whose excess of money and social clout made them myopically bent on their child’s protection and success.
As Mr. Dupont walked by, he looked me over like he was appraising a watch. As Iris passed, she smiled, but I returned the uncompromising frown that was quickly making me notorious among the student body.
On the auditorium stage Headmaster Pasternak had stepped up to the lectern, his body rickety but implacable, like a battered fence that refuses to fall down. He’d been my junior-year English teacher, and even then he was a crusty old man who didn’t teach so much as creak. I remember him churning through the hallways, scattering students to their classrooms with all the force of a manual lawnmower. He was appointed assistant headmaster after I graduated, and when Elliott Morgan, the previous HM, retired, Pasternak took over the post.
“I am delighted to see such a strong turnout for tonight’s event,” Pasternak intoned.
As if a single junior or junior parent would pass on the opportunity to soak up even a droplet of sweat perspired from the foreheads of these panelists. And Pasternak knew it. He’d done everything in his power to cement Mariana’s place as the paragon of New England prep schools, including a new College-Based Education Initiative geared to giving Mariana students the upper hand in a college admissions system that had spun out of control. Not only would students declare academic majors, but standard courses like biology would also have specializations, such as microbiology. When Pasternak learned that I was involved with the UMass entomology project (the man has spies scouring half the educational institutions in the Northeast), he offered me a position and a hefty salary for my trouble.
My UMass grant was pitifully small and the work didn’t even start until spring, so I welcomed the money. But there was another reason I agreed to come. As a student I’d never been given a fair shot at this school, and I liked the idea of returning with total immunity. So here I was, exonerated from my boyhood improprieties and energized as I hadn’t been in ages. If the classroom was a cell, then I was its nucleus. The feeling thrilled me.
“As we all know,” Pasternak announced, raising his arms as though he stood before the waters of the Red Sea, “Mariana is committed to helping Jimmy Cardozi battle his leukemia through the Jimmy Get Well campaign.”
Cardozi was a scholarship kid whose parents couldn’t pay his medical bills. The school had set up a lockbox in the lobby for donations, and two student clubs had formed to raise money—the Leukemia Sux Society and Students Against Fatal Diseases. Noble efforts, but I worried that the kids didn’t understand their mission. As far as I knew, not a single member of either club had visited Jimmy Cardozi in the hospital. And the fundraising had become competitive, with both groups announcing their contribution totals at every assembly. They’d even begun hanging up negative ad campaigns accusing each other of pocketing contribution money. Pasternak had ordered the clubs to quit their adversarial practices, but the battle just transitioned from the school hallways to the Internet. Pasternak couldn’t be happy about this, but he was taking an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the matter. It seemed to be his current modus operandi. He’d sa
id nothing about the bathroom vandalism (the demonic image had appeared on half the school’s mirrors by midday), and after nobody came forward to snitch, he had the janitor clean off the paint.
“Our school is an emblem of selflessness and generosity,” Pasternak bellowed to the juniors, their parents, and the lone freshman, Iris Dupont. “And the reason, as you all know, is our Community Code: Brotherhood, Truth, and Equality for All.”
Perhaps, but from what my colleagues in the science department had told me, the pressure to succeed academically and socially was so intense that kids also kept covert spreadsheets of each other’s SAT scores and conducted shady business deals to obtain coveted refectory real estate. And, as in my own student days, we still had an underclass of kids who were taunted, shunned, and generally denied desirable positions on teams and clubs because they were socially awkward or refused to conform. Every school has such an underclass, but not every school claimed to champion equality and brotherhood the way Mariana did.
And not every high-profile prep school had porn addicts on its staff. Rumor had it that my predecessor, Mr. Franks, was fired for masturbating to anime porn on his office computer. Apparently, over the summer, somebody sent Headmaster Pasternak photos of him in medias res. I doubted the veracity of these rumors. Still, I’d already swapped out my desk chair for one in the supply room and wiped down my keyboard with disinfectant.
When Pasternak stepped down, the college reps began introducing themselves. I was supposed to stick around for the meet and greet afterward, but I needed to listen to these scarecrows like I needed a shot of sulfuric acid in the eye. I slipped into the hallway. As I passed the back stairwell, I paused. At the bottom of these stairs was a black door, and behind it the Trench. The Trench once housed the office of the Academic League, a Jeopardy-like quiz bowl team that had defined my student life at Mariana. Along with my brother, Justin, our friend Hazel Greenburg, and the rest of the AL team, I’d spent all my time there. The Trench had been closed for a long time, and though I was curious to revisit my old habitat, I was also wary of opening locked doors. Besides, all the people who had once made that place home were gone.
The Year of the Gadfly Page 3