The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman

by Ben H. Winters

  Care to wager?

  17

  BETHESDA FIELIDING, MOUNTHAIN CLIMBER

  A((righ. Let’s start with an easy one tonight. Who was the primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence?”

  “Oh. Shoot. Wait.” said Tenny slowly. “I think I might know this.”

  “You do.”

  “Okay.”

  “You definitely do.” Pause.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Tenny. It rhymes with Fefferson.” “Oh. Okay … um …”

  Bethesda scrunched up her face and moaned. “Jefferson, Tenny. The person who drafted the Declaration of Independence was Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Oh.”

  “Benjamin Franklin edited it.”

  “I thought Benjamin Franklin was the traitor guy.”

  “No! No, that’s …” Bethesda willed herself not to get upset and offered her best encouraging smile. “You know what? Let’s come back to it.”

  In her imagination, Bethesda fixed her gaze on a distant mountaintop, reshouldered her heavy pack, and kept climbing. She had been tutoring Tenny Boyer in American history for three weeks, and they hadn’t made much progress. Bethesda had decided that her task was a mountain, and she was a mountain climber. A brave mountain climber! A dauntless mountain climber! Audacious! Steadfast! Intrepid! (She had looked up brave in the thesaurus.) She was counting on the mental imagery to inspire her, hoping that if she just worked hard enough, Tenny would finally start getting this stuff.

  And he better start getting it; as of today it was March, and that meant it was open season for the Floating Midterm. It was usually later in the spring, but with Melville you never knew. One day, when they least expected it, first period would end with Mr. Melville suddenly, offhandedly announcing, in his rough growl of a voice: “Oh, by the way, little geniuses, tomorrow is test day.”

  So here she was, the brave and dauntless and audacious (etc.) mountain climber, at the foot of Mount Everest, where Tenny Boyer knew absolutely nothing about early American history, gazing up at the summit, where he knew it all.

  “Name one of the main events that led to the passage of the Stamp Act.” “The what? ”

  “The Stamp Act? You know this! I know you know this,” Bethesda pleaded. She threw back a swallow of her kiwi-lime Snapple and looked desperately at Tenny, thinking hard about what led to the Stamp Act—French and Indian War, French and Indian War, French and Indian War—because maybe if she thought it hard enough, she could will him to know.

  “I, uh … let’s see.”

  “Come on, Tenny. The Stamp Act? The buildup to the Revolution? We made a whole flowchart for this!” “Oh, yeah,” said Tenny weakly.

  “Okay.”

  Pause.

  “Wait, what’s a flowchart again? ” Bethesda the Mountain Climber watched as the peak of Everest disappeared behind cloud cover.

  * * *

  “Honey? Hi.”

  Pamela Preston’s mother nudged open the door to her daughter’s bedroom, bearing a tray of premium organic snack crackers, sliced locally grown apples, and a cup of warm nonfat milk. Pamela looked up, irritated.

  “You’ve been holed up in here all evening.” Pamela’s mother smiled gently. “Pam-Pam, darling, are you having boy trouble?”

  “What? No.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. I’m trying to solve a mystery.”

  “Oh, I know, dear, I know,” answered her mom, lightly placing the snack tray on Pamela’s bedside table and settling down on the bed. “Boys can be a mystery.”

  Pamela turned around in her desk chair to glare at her mother. “No, Mom. I’m trying to solve an actual, important mystery.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “So I would appreciate some peace and quiet.” “Very well, darling.” “Thank you.”

  As her mother rose, Pamela glanced up. “Leave the crackers.”

  Pamela waited until her mother pulled the door shut and returned to her careful examination of the clues she had arranged in front of her. She’d gotten Bethesda’s notes with just the teensiest bit of trickery: She called to say how much she admired Bethesda’s Special Project, and how embarrassed she was that hers was such a nightmare—and could she borrow Bethesda’s notes to just, like, try to figure out how she had done it?

  Bethesda had seemed sort of touched, actually, which made Pamela feel bad for about one half of one second. Until she remembered what was at stake. As in, the whole entire universe.

  Pamela bent over Bethesda’s notes, idly running a finger through her blond curls as she tried to make sense of it all. A bunch of old articles from these magazines no one had ever heard of. Some notes in Bethesda’s irritatingly careful handwriting, describing her conversation with Ms. Zmuda about the tattoo.

  And the so-called set list.

  Pamela studied it carefully. Was it really just a set list? Maybe Bethesda was wrong. Maybe it was a secret code after all! A code that had to be cracked. Some sort of message—but from who?

  Oh my god, she thought suddenly. Aliens. Ms. Finkleman is an alien!

  And then she thought: Pamela! Enough with the stupid aliens!

  Downstairs, Mrs. Preston settled into a living-room chair and smiled lovingly at her husband, who was engrossed in a mystery novel called Murdered … For Good.

  “What? ” he said finally, without looking up.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said with a wistful sigh. “Our little Pamela is having boy problems.”

  18

  “ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!”

  By mid-March, Project SWT was under way almost every night, meaning that Bethesda was hanging out with Tenny Boyer more than her best friends. Of course, if they told people they were studying together they’d have to say why: it would give away the whole secret arrangement. So at school, they remained strangers. Bethesda still had lunch with the Schwartz sisters and Violet Kelp, and Tenny still had lunch by himself, listening to his iPod and bobbing his head, reading a magazine or scrawling ideas for the rock show in a spiral notebook.

  The only thing was, when Tenny and Bethesda passed each other in the hallway, he gave her this tiny little nod, and she gave him a tiny little nod back. Like, for example, every day when Bethesda was on the way from third period to fourth period and she passed Tenny at the Hallway C water fountain going the opposite way.

  One day she lingered by the water fountain for over two minutes, waiting for him so they could nod, but he never walked by. (That night he explained that Mrs. Petrides had held him after because he fell asleep during a vocab drill.)

  Oh, well, she thought glumly as she sat down for fourth period.

  She really liked the little nod thing.

  “Oh my god—it’s her! Wait, is that her?”

  “Yeah! Whoa!”

  “Are you sure? She looks so … boring.” “I know!”

  Ms. Finkleman kept walking, keeping her head down.

  The revelations, about her “secret past” and the new plans for the Choral Corral, had spread through the school like a fever. Ms. Ida Finkleman, aka Little Miss Mystery, was the subject of every conversation, and her Band and Chorus room the epicenter of a great continuous whirl of excited speculation. The details about the rock show were a closely held secret, and students traded rumors about what songs were going to be in the show, who was playing what, and (as one particularly electrifying rumor had it) who would be biting the head off a live chicken during the finale.

  And so Ms. Finkleman, the timid little agouti who for so long had survived in the jungles of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School by remaining nameless and faceless, a total unknown, had suddenly been plucked from the protective obscurity of the underbrush and thrown out into the harsh sunlit glare of the savannah. Everywhere Ms. Finkleman looked, someone was staring, looking her up and down, taking her measure. As she emerged from her teal Honda Civic in the faculty parking lot, kids ran up, took furtive cellphone pictures, and ran away. As she traveled the hallways, student
s pointed at her and giggled nervously, whispering behind their hands. Every time she entered the teachers’ lounge, she discovered her colleagues having animated conversations that ended abruptly as soon as she came in.

  Even the Band and Chorus room, long her private sanctuary in the howling wilderness, was no longer safe. Yesterday Principal Van Vreeland had “popped in to offer support,” but the principal’s support was not terribly supportive, especially when she just stood in the back of the room, dancing. Ms. Finkleman could imagine nothing more distracting than having the school’s highest official doing her bizarre, gyrating, snakelike dance moves—unless it was when she was joined by the assistant principal, Jasper, who stood next to her, clapping his hands at odd intervals and shifting back and forth like the Frankenstein monster.

  The day before that, it had been Mr. Darlington, the lanky, awkward science teacher, who stopped by midway through their rehearsal period.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I just needed to, uh, borrow a, uh, music stand for an experiment we’re doing,” said Mr. Darlington, adjusting his black horn-rim glasses on the bridge of his nose. “On the chemical properties of, uh …” Mr. Darlington trailed off, smiling lamely. “Music stands.”

  “That’s fine,” Ms. Finkleman said impatiently, motioning toward the cluster of music stands in the back of the room. But instead of fetching one and leaving, Mr. Darlington grabbed a clementine off her desk and folded his spindly frame into a student chair to watch Half-Eaten Almond Joy practice “Livin’ on a Prayer”—while, presumably, his sixth-grade chemistry students watched a filmstrip.

  “One! Two! One, two, three, four!”

  Tenny called out the tempo, played the opening lick, and the Careless Errors started in on “Holiday.” Ezra McClellan clabbered away at the drums, carefully counting to himself as he played, muttering under his breath to keep himself on rhythm. Lisa Deckter, who was a violinist, really, and still getting the hang of guitar, stared at her fingers as they churned out the rhythm riff that drove the song. Pamela Preston looked totally bored, shaking her maracas with obvious distaste.

  Bethesda Fielding began to sing, nervous and tentative, pushing a loose strand of reddish tannish hair away from her mouth. “Let’s go away for a while,” she sang, “you and me, to a strange and distant land …”

  With each phrase she moved a little closer to the microphone, and then a little farther back, unsure of how close you were supposed to stand. The mike was set too tall for her, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it closer to her mouth. When she got to the end of the third line (“Where they speak no word of truth”), she somehow took a big step forward with her right foot just as she jerked the stand up with her left hand, and it smacked her in the tooth. “Ouch!” she said, really loud and right into the microphone. The sudden noise totally messed up Ezra’s rhythm.

  Only Tenny Boyer, coloring the spots between vocal lines with fills (basically little mini-guitar solos) was completely comfortable. Eyes half shut, head thrown back, lips slightly parted, he looked like a rock-and-roll superstar.

  Bethesda recovered her equilibrium in time to stammer out the words of the chorus (“Holllllllliday! Far away!”). As the song chugged forward, Bethesda looked at Tenny with awe. He’s like a totally different person.

  “All right, folks,” said Ms. Finkleman, clapping her hands sharply as soon as the Careless Errors managed to get to the end. “Let’s move on.”

  Ms. Finkleman sounded different these days. Her kids noticed, of course, and figured it was only natural. They assumed that this new voice—icy, tough, unemotional—was that of the punk-rock lady who had emerged from within the nerdy band teacher. The truth was a little more complicated. There had been a time in Ms. Finkleman’s life when rock and roll had been the most important thing to her. But now, to hear these songs, this music, was the last thing she wanted. So to protect herself, she didn’t let herself hear it: She listened to the practice sessions without hearing. She watched without seeing. She stood with arms crossed, trying her hardest to experience no emotion at all. And she spoke in the voice of a woman who was there in the room, but at the same time a million miles away.

  Let Tenny pay attention, she thought as the Careless Errors set down their instruments and went back to their seats. Let him be in charge. Just get through this, and then life will go back to how it’s supposed to be.

  “Okay,” she said. “‘I Got You’ folks? You’re up.”

  “One! Two! One, two, three, four!”

  Chester Hu clicked his sticks together as he called out the groove, and Band Number One lit into “I Got You.” Victor Glebe played the bass with his eyes shut tight, trying to see the next note with his mind, like a Jedi. Bessie Stringer blew feverishly into her baritone sax, her eyes wide, her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk. As he drummed, Chester mumbled the words of the song, because he had timed his snare hits to the lyrics; Rachel Portnoy, the singer, glanced at Chester every once in a while because she kept forgetting the words.

  But all of them were happy.

  Unlike their teacher, the students of sixth-period Music Fundamentals were having a great time. The Choral Corral, their moment in the spotlight, was still over a month away, but their lives had already been transformed. Every time a teacher “stopped by” to watch them in awe, every fresh rumor that made the rounds, further confirmed their status as the new celebrities of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School. And nor were they celebrities for something school related, like Lana Pinfield, that girl from Grover Cleveland who came in fourth in the National Spelling Bee three years ago. No, the students of sixth-period Music Fundamentals were rock celebrities, and no one could imagine anything cooler.

  Chester had been carrying his drumsticks everywhere he went, their tips poking from the inside of his coat like twin badges of honor. Carmine Lopez was inspired to carry his guitar case everywhere he went, even to gym class, where it was mildly dented by a flying dodgeball.

  “Hey, aren’t you in Ms. Finkleman’s sixth-period class?” kids would say to them, rushing up to the Schwartz sisters or Rory Daas or Hayley Eisenstein or whoever. “That is so awesome.”

  They even had their own language. Once, during one particularly raucous practice session (when the members of Half-Eaten Almond Joy had finally played “Livin’ on a Prayer” all the way through, while all the others improvised a praying-themed group dance), Lisa Deckter had suddenly called out, “That is so R.” And when everyone looked at her, she said, “You know—R. As in, Rock? ”

  Soon they were all ranking everything—pencils, lessons, teachers, movies, food, whatever—by its relative rockfulness. Something that was good was R. Something that was really good was WR, or Way Rock. Something that was so good you couldn’t stand it was Totally Way Rock, or TWR.

  “This macaroni and cheese is WR! ” the kids of sixth-period Music Fundamentals would say. Or “A pop quiz? That is so UR! ” (As in, Un-Rock.) Or “Hey, the cafeteria was damaged in a grease fire—so they’re ordering pizza for school lunch! That is TWR! ”

  And, as late March moved inexorably toward April, Ms. Finkleman’s students got better and better at rock.

  “One! Two! One, two, three, four!”

  Kevin McKelvey counted in “Livin’ on a Prayer.” As Half-Eaten Almond Joy played, Tenny sat in the back of the room, watching, his eyes flickering from deep inside his blue-hooded sweatshirt. If anyone glanced over, they’d think it was just good ol’ Tenny, spacing out as usual. You’d never guess his mind was whirring like a motor, clocking mistakes, listing corrections.

  He noticed that Carmine Lopez’s chording was woefully imprecise. He noticed that Rory Daas kept messing up the chorus, which only had about six words in it. He noticed that Hayley Eisenstein’s bass strap was in serious need of adjustment.

  But somewhere along the way, Tenny realized something: This is gonna be good. This is gonna be really good.

  As he played chords with his left hand, Kevin McKelvey sawed the air with his
right, keeping time. The blue-blazered Piano Kid had emerged as the leader of the eighties rock band, and the others all looked to him for tempo. When he was satisfied that they were with him, Kevin brought both hands back down on the keyboard. His fingers leaped aggressively across the keys.

  Kevin had easily mastered “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Actually, he had moved on from “Livin’ on a Prayer” to mastering all the other songs of Bon Jovi. As he learned each number, he studied the way the band’s keyboardist, David Bryan, handled them. What had seemed easy at first now seemed extraordinarily clever, the work of a virtuoso musician finding small trills and little pockets of melody to make simple songs glorious.

  From there, Kevin kept going. He had been using his hours and hours of daily piano practice to conduct a self-guided tour of all the greats of rock piano, from Little Richard to Billy Joel to Fiona Apple to Ben Folds. He had discovered that rock was about more than musicianship—it was about facial expression and physical contortion and, and, and … attitude.

  Kevin McKelvey had been working on his attitude.

  Now, on the final chorus of “Livin’ on a Prayer,” he did something he had been meaning to try for a while. He kicked one foot out from under the keyboard, slipped off his tan loafer, and played a concluding glissando with his toes.

  The class burst into applause. “Whoa!” everyone yelled. Chester Hu, as usual, yelled loudest of all. “That is TWR!”

  Kevin gave a little salute and slipped back into his loafer.

  Little Miss Mystery rapped her baton on the music stand, cutting off the applause. “Let’s do it one more time.”

  “Hey,” said Ellis Walters, Half-Eaten’s drummer, as he rubbed sweat off the back of his neck with a paper towel. “Maybe it’s time for you to practice singing the song with us, Ms. Finkleman. I mean, that’s still going to be part of the show, right? ”