When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3)

by Barry Graham

  He was young, had only been teaching at the school for a few months, and hadn’t yet come to hate working hard for so little money. One day, when he handed Laura back her latest composition, she saw a note on it asking her to wait behind after class. She wondered if she was in trouble, but since he’d given her a B she couldn’t imagine why.

  “You know, if you actually did any work, you’d score an A every time,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t ask you to wait behind so I could give you a hard time. If you don’t want to do the work, there’s nothing I can do about that, though I think it’s a big waste. But you’ve already heard that a lot, I’m guessing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you want to know why I wanted to talk with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In your compositions, you show an unusual ability for argument. Do you know what I mean?”

  She shook her head.

  “What I mean is, you actually understand the difference between an opinion and a prejudice. You don’t just write that you think something is a certain way, and that’s it. You actually explain why you think it. You see what I mean now?”

  “Maybe. Kind of. I don’t know.”

  “Okay, a lot of people – not just people your age, people any age – they say, I think that’s wrong. But they don’t say why. And if you ask them why, they say, I’m entitled to my opinion. But if they don’t know why they believe it, it’s not an opinion, it’s a prejudice.”

  “Yeah. That’s stupid.”

  “You seem to me to be very good at looking at facts or experience or whatever, and forming a logical opinion based on what you see.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you think you can do that verbally as well as in writing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good answer. You don’t have an opinion yet, because you haven’t thought about it, so any answer you gave right now would be a prejudice, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So take your time, and think about it, and let me know what you think. Don’t take too long, though, because there’s a reason I want to know.” He waited. She didn’t say anything. “Would you like to know why I want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d like to start a debate club. They have them in high schools, but I think students your age should get to take part in debate too, so I want to get one going here. That’s assuming that I can find enough students who’re interested, and who know how to debate. If you can speak like you can write, I think you’d do well. What do you think?”

  She smiled. “I don’t know.”

  “Good answer.”

  They both laughed.

  “Okay, think about it and let me know. I won’t bug you about it.”

  She thought about it. For the rest of the day, and the next day, and the day after that, she thought about little else. In the week or so that preceded the conversation with Mr. Crossan, she had been thinking mainly about space travel, because she has been reading a lot of science-fiction. The recurring image in her mind had been of herself sitting in a spaceship that was like a car, and as it floated through the darkness of space she was sitting in the back seat while an astronaut – she thought of him as a “spaceman” – sat in the front, steering the vehicle, wearing a spacesuit and helmet. She couldn’t see his face behind the glass of his helmet, and she wondered if he would turn out to be handsome, and they would travel to distant planets together. In the fantasy, she wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, and didn’t need one. She was wearing an elegant dress, and her hair was done nicely.

  But now that vision was gone, and in its place was a vision of herself standing at a lectern, talking, as an audience of her peers listened, shocked by her brilliance. Even though she had never thought of herself as being good at anything, it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be good at this.

  She told Mr. Crossan she’d like to do it. He told her he’d been talking to other kids, and that some of them were interested too, and that he was going to post something on the bulletin board. About a week later, he announced that there was going to be a meeting, open to everybody who wanted to be part of the new debate club.

  About a dozen students showed up for the meeting. Mr. Crossan said that was more than enough, and better than he’d expected, because in each debate there would be six students speaking, three on either side of the issue. Then he asked for volunteers for the first debate. Laura raised her hand. She was the only one who did.

  “Okay,” Mr. Crossan said. “Since we only have one volunteer, I’ll choose five others at random. I assume that everybody here wants to take part in debates, right?”

  Nobody said they did, but nobody said they didn’t either.

  “I hope you’re all going to be more talkative during the debates,” Mr. Crossan said. “Okay, then... Laura... Mark... Todd... Chris... Amy... and... Allen. The first debate will be in two weeks.”

  “What will we be debating?” said Allen.

  “I’m glad you asked. I don’t know yet. I’ll decide tonight, and I’ll post it on the bulletin board tomorrow, and let each of you know which side you’re on.”

  “We don’t get to pick which side we’re on?” Laura said.

  “Nope.”

  “What if we don’t agree with the side we get put on?” said Amy.

  “It doesn’t matter. That’s the whole point of debate – you should be able to see all sides of an issue. Even if you don’t agree with a position, you should understand the position well enough to be able to defend it. It’s not about trying to be right – it’s about trying to understand and not be ignorant.”

  Laura felt a giddy excitement. It was as though everything that was happening now was real, and everything that had happened before was just something she had dreamed.

  The next day, she got to school early and went straight to the bulletin board. There was nothing about the debate.

  The first two hours of classes were only bearable because she didn’t pay any attention. As usual, she wasn’t really there – inside her head, she was at a lectern, winning debate after debate. When recess finally came, she almost ran to the bulletin board.

  Mr. Crossan had posted an announcement. The debate’s motion was to be “Every American Has the Opportunity to Succeed.” Laura was to oppose the motion.

  She thought it would be difficult, because she had never heard anyone deny that anyone in America could make it if they wanted to. She’d heard her father say it since she was very small, and he was still saying it even though he no longer considered himself to be successful. That helped her; if her father believed it, why wasn’t he successful? She didn’t ask her parents, but that was the question she started with, and when she discussed it with Mr. Crossan he gave her some reading recommendations.

  The debate was held at the school on a Saturday afternoon. Mr. Crossan had been worried that there would be no audience, so he’d warned all the kids who were interested that if you wanted to take part in future debates, you had to attend every debate or have a good reason why you didn’t. He needn’t have worried. Word had gotten around that the audience got to vote on whether or not the motion passed, and so people came along to support their friends or vote against speakers they didn’t like. More than forty people were crowded into Mr. Crossan’s classroom. He’d set up two tables at the front of the room, one on either side of his desk. The proposition sat at one table, the opposition sat at the other, and Mr. Crossan sat at his desk between them and acted as chairman. He’d set up a lectern a few feet in front of his desk.

  No parents attended. Mr. Crossan had set that as a rule. The reason he gave was that he didn’t want these novice debaters to feel self-conscious in the presence of adults they didn’t know, but the truth was that he didn’t want there to be an imbalance between those whose families came to support them and those who were alone. Laura had felt glad when he made that announcement, because she knew her pa
rents wouldn’t have come, but she also knew that she wouldn’t have cared much either way. As long as she could speak, and as long as there were people there to hear it, it didn’t matter to her who was in the audience.

  She knew she should feel nervous, but she didn’t. She knew she wasn’t popular, and that kids would probably vote for people they liked, but she still expected to win the debate, and to be the best speaker. She never once thought that anything could go wrong.

  And nothing did.

  She was the first speaker. When Mr. Crossan said her name, everybody clapped but nobody cared. Nobody was there to see her, and she had no enemies as far as she knew. She got up, put her notes on the lectern, and began to speak. She spoke for the required three minutes, and, as the time went on, she got more and more excited.

  Her excitement began with the first laugh she got from the audience. She’d said that patriots had “spewed out enough garbage to fill a city dump” about how great America was, and the image, or maybe just the rudeness, made the other kids snicker. Having started with that, she built the rest of her argument on facts, detailing the privileged backgrounds of America’s most successful people. “So, if success is about how smart you are or how hard you work, are we supposed to believe that nearly all smart, hard-working people are born into rich families?” she said. She ended her speech by describing how her father, having failed badly by his own standards, still believed in something that his own experience had shown to be a myth.

  She didn’t even hear the other speeches, the ones from her side or the other. She sat there, elated, knowing that nobody was going to be as good as her. She watched the audience instead of listening to the other speakers, and she saw that she was right. They didn’t get the laughs, the nods, the annoyed looks, or the applause that she had.

  The other two kids on her team didn’t expect to win, because they knew that most people didn’t agree with them. So Laura was the only person in the room who wasn’t surprised when Mr. Crossan put it to a vote, and more than half of the audience voted against the motion. She knew they were really voting for her.

  She never forgot that day. Talking with Mr. Crossan after the debate, being told how great she was, the other kids telling her how funny she was and how much she knew, how smart she was, and then, when everybody was leaving, how she walked in the heat to the bus stop and rode the bus home, the only person on the bus who wasn’t poor, who went to a private school, who had just won her first debate. Walking into the apartment and telling her parents, and their congratulations before they went on with their day. It didn’t matter to her if they cared or not, because she was good at something now.

  She continued to be good at it, and she got better. Mr. Crossan organized at least one debate every month, sometimes two. More kids had gotten interested and wanted to take part, and so he couldn’t have Laura as a speaker at every debate, but it soon became clear that the audience was smaller if she wasn’t speaking, so he changed the rules to make that possible. He announced that, after the scheduled speakers had finished, he would open the floor to any member of the audience who wanted to speak for a minute and a half. Laura spoke at every debate, no matter what the topic was, and she was always the best there. When she took the floor at such times, the members of the two competing sides would wait in suspense to hear what position she would take, because they knew that, unless the topic involved a position so sacred that people wouldn’t change their minds about it, Laura’s speech would determine which way the audience voted.

  This is not to say that she always persuaded the audience that her position was the right one; most of the audience knew that when she was a scheduled speaker, she didn’t necessarily even believe in the position she was taking. It didn’t matter, because they voted for whoever was the most entertaining speaker, and that was always Laura. There were a few kids who’d roll their eyes in a Here we go again way when Laura would raise her hand in response to Mr. Crossan’s asking if anyone in the audience wanted to speak, but even those people would often find themselves laughing and nodding at what she said. Her presence on a debating side didn’t make victory certain – there were times when she’d be on her best form and still wouldn’t get the vote – but it made it very likely.

  Whenever she told her parents about the outcome of a debate, they told her they were proud of her. But they seldom asked her about it or commented when she would describe what had happened in a particular debate, and they never expressed any interest in seeing her debate. She never had to tell them that parents weren’t allowed at the debates.

  She didn’t feel hurt by their lack of interest. She knew she owned the debate club, and she cared about little else.

  Mr. Crossan cautioned her a few times to be careful not to let it go to her head, not to resort to showboating, to making speeches that were entertaining but empty of substance. She never did, but, whenever Mr. Crossan thought a speech she gave was less substantive than it might have been, even if the audience had loved it, he told her so and she listened.

  She thought about what it would be like to be grown-up and to be Mr. Crossan’s girlfriend. He wasn’t a great-looking man – he was tubby and he didn’t dress well, but he had longish curly hair and large dark eyes, and he laughed a lot, and to Laura he was like a character in one of the novels she used to read.

  Used to. She didn’t read much fiction now that debate club was the center of her world. Instead she read books about politicians and famous lawyers, anybody who had become famous through their ability to argue. She read about the Scopes Monkey Trial and imagined herself as Clarence Darrow. She read articles about Barry Goldwater, and imagined herself as Phoenix’s celebrity politician. She watched T.V. shows in which lawyers were the heroes, and imagined herself saving innocent people from prison as she moved juries to tears with the power of her argument.

  She didn’t consider how unlikely it was that she could be a lawyer or a politician, since her grades were so poor it seemed improbable that she’d get through high school, let alone go on to university. At least, she didn’t consider it until Mr. Crossan brought it up.

  It was after a debate, one of the rare ones when the vote had gone against Laura. She was drinking a can of soda and getting ready to leave, when Mr. Crossan asked her to wait behind. As always, she felt happy to have his attention.

  He sat on the edge of a desk. She sat on the edge of another desk, trying to be like him.

  “Are you bummed that you lost today?” he said. “Does it bother you?”

  “No, I don’t care. I just like debating.”

  “Is that true, or do you just not want to admit that it bugs you?”

  “I don’t like losing. I’d rather win, but I don’t really care. I think I won the argument...”

  “You did.”

  “Yeah, so it doesn’t matter if they voted for me or not. If I win the argument and they don’t vote for me, they’re dumb, and I don’t care what dumb people think.”

  “That’s kinda what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Huh?”

  “What you said about not caring what dumb people think. Not many people care what a dumb person thinks, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You know a lot of people think you’re dumb?”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who. What matters is that you’re a very intelligent girl, and there are people who don’t realize it. There are people who don’t care about you because they think you’re dumb.”

  “Do you think I’m dumb?”

  “You’re not listening to me, Laura. I think your debating skills are failing you right now. Did you hear me say you’re an intelligent girl? Did I just say that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, if I think you’re intelligent, does it follow logically that I could also think you’re dumb?”

  She smiled. “No.”

  “Okay, then. So we can agree that all the evidence suggests that I think you’re very smart. Is that a given?”<
br />
  “Yeah. But you think other people think I’m dumb.”

  “I don’t think they do, I know they do. Can you really blame them? What reason does anyone who hasn’t come to the debates have to think you’re not dumb? You have some of the worst grades in the entire school. Sure, you’ve been doing better in my class, and I think that’s only because you don’t want to make me mad at you, but you’re failing in every other class.”

  Laura didn’t say anything.

  “I told you before that I wasn’t going to give you a hard time about your grades. I don’t think it’s my business. My business is to teach people who want to learn, not to try to force anyone to do anything. But, like I told you months ago, I think it’s a big waste. Do you ever think about what you’re going to do when you finish school?”

  She couldn’t tell him her fantasies, so she just said, “Not really.”

  “Look, you’re a brilliant girl. I think you can go as far as you want to. If I ever had a student who might end up as President, you’re the one. But you need to go to college. Don’t you want to?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Do you ever worry about your future?”

  “Not much. Not really.”

  “Well, all I’m saying is, think about it. I think you’d enjoy college debates.”

  She thought so too, but it was too far away for her to take seriously. She made a small effort to work harder in class, but she found it too dull and her attention always wandered into daydreams, usually about debates and about impressing Mr. Crossan. As Mrs. Cole, the math teacher, talked to the class, Laura wrote diligently in her notebook, and Mrs. Cole was glad to see that she seemed so focused. She didn’t know that Laura was writing:

  “Old Queen Cole is a boring old soul

  and a boring old soul is she

  and this is true –

  she smells like poo

  and two plus two equals three.”

  Eric Crossan liked to hang out at Durant’s. He couldn’t afford to eat there, but could manage a few drinks, and the reason he liked to go there was a bartender named Carrie.