Becky got started immediately. She’d always liked writing, and it was certainly easier than focusing on Mr. Marcus’s back, pretending to not notice the baleful looks coming from around and behind him.
At the edges, Becky could hear some resistance to the desk work and some grudging participation, but all of that got easier and easier to ignore the deeper she got into the process. She started with her typical brainstorming web with interlocking circles—and flower shapes in the corners—and wound up scratching out a poem of sorts. She finished in about five minutes, looked it over, fixed this and that, and finally came to the conclusion that it basically sucked. She was just putting down her pencil when Mr. Marcus addressed the room.
“Ok,” he said. “Mr. Hatcher will start us off. Give us your paragraph.”
Bully-boy pressed his fingers against his chest all innocent, like. Me? Golly-gosh, then sat up in his chair with a smile that was mostly scrunched up in his nose. He flicked out his wrists and let out a big “A-hem!” Then he said,
“My name is Cody, and I live in Scutters Falls. The end.”
Some laughed a bit with him. He bowed his head a couple of times like “Thank you, thank you,” then looked back at Mr. Marcus as if daring him to criticize. Marcus stared back, and it got quiet fast.
“Tabitha Messersmith, read for us, please.” He said it all soft and scary, still staring down Cody Hatcher who was holding his ground, staring back.
Somehow, Tabitha Messersmith didn’t see Marcus baiting her. She huffed and puffed, bottom lip out, and shoved her paper forward with the heel of her hand.
“I like reality television,” she said. “The end.”
“Yeah, ‘Jersey Girl’ rocks!” someone added.
“Quiet,” Mr. Marcus said.
“Oooohh,” Cody Hatcher tried, but Mr. Marcus stopped him fast.
“That’s enough from you,” he said. “If I need your back-up, I’ll send you a memo. You want to ooohh and ahhh, then go to the circus. Here in my class, you’ll keep your mouth shut unless I tell you otherwise.”
“But—“
“This isn’t a two-way conversation,” Mr. Marcus hissed. “So go ahead and text home about it. You want to bring in your mommy for a little chit-chat, I’m there. You want to go crying to the principal, I’ll follow you down.”
The room had gone silent again, and Mr. Marcus started to pace from one side of the ‘U’ to the other.
“My name is Cody and I live in Scutters Falls,” he said, as if the words themselves had an odor. “That’s the first impression you give of your writing?” He glanced over at Tabitha Messersmith. “I like to watch reality television.” He walked in front of her desk and made her look up at him. His voice went down to a whisper. “I’m not angry, Miss Messersmith. I’m disappointed.”
He shot his glance back at Cody Hatcher and barked, “Now go ahead and say something!”
Hatcher jumped a bit in his chair. Mr. Marcus had played the dynamics perfectly.
“Mr. Marcus,” Becky said.
“What!” He was still looking at Cody Hatcher, he who was not staring back anymore, but rather making an intensive study of his fingernails.
“What?” he repeated, lowering his tone and turning a bit.
“I want to read,” Becky said.
For a moment, he considered. She had clearly screwed his timing, clipped his moment. But he was not the only one who could play a long pause, and Becky didn’t wait for permission, she just stood and held her paper before her, trying to keep her hands from quivering. In truth, she didn’t know why she had done this. She certainly wasn’t sucking up, at least she didn’t think that she was. Maybe she just wanted to be brave for once in her life. Maybe she just liked writing a little.
“Baseball,” she said in a small voice. “By Becky Michigan.” She looked up to a sea of eyes. Mr. Marcus had his arms folded. She glanced down at her paper, barely seeing it she was so nervous.
“I like baseball and freshly cut grass,
I like the scoreboard, and I like the stands,
A slugfest is nice on a hot summer’s day,
Capped off with an out-pitch low and away.
I like old announcers and hot dogs and swags,
I like crazy mascots and peanuts in bags.
Ice cream is best in a helmet-shaped cup,
And I get a chill when they say, ‘Batter up!’
I like statistics and fantasy teams,
And how chalk lines are always some kid’s
field of dreams.
Other things in life are exciting, that’s true,
Until the bottom of the ninth when the count’s
three and two.”
Becky sat. Mr. Marcus didn’t miss a beat.
“Comments?” he said.
Oh Lord, Becky thought.
Cody Hatcher raised his hand. Mr. Marcus looked over his glasses at him.
“Yes?” Clearly, Cody was being given a leash, and a short one.
“I didn’t like it.”
There were murmurs of general approval around him, but Mr. Marcus put up his hand like a stop sign.
“If you deconstruct the work of another student you don’t use playground language. Begin with the phrase ’I would argue.’”
Cody shifted in his chair, but his hands were folded, his jaw set and determined.
“I would argue,” he said, “that the assignment was supposed to be a paragraph about yourself, and she wrote a poem about baseball. I would also argue that her first stanza was weak, because “grass” doesn’t rhyme with “stands,” and the chalk line-field of dreams line was clunky and overly metaphorical compared to the rest of it.”
Mr. Marcus didn’t say anything for a moment, and Becky’s glance slowly fluttered down to her desk. Why didn’t the clichés ever hold true? Bullies weren’t supposed to be smart, and good guys like her were never meant to underestimate them. And why wasn’t Mr. Marcus jumping to defend her? Wasn’t his primary job to reward those who had taken him seriously from the get-go?
“I liked it,” a voice said.
Everyone hushed. Mouths dropped open and a couple of girls folded their arms across their stomachs as if in sweet agony.
Becky’s heart knocked in her chest like a little trip hammer. It was him. The blond boy from yesterday, standing before the door that had closed just behind him so quietly that no one had heard him come in. He had on a retro Phillies t-shirt with the big maroon ‘P’ and straight-leg jeans. His hands were in his pockets, all cool, a ream of copy paper under one arm, and those eyebrows and cheekbones were more arched and drawn and gorgeous than ever. His hair had a little curl in the front today, and he definitely looked like he could be in a story or on a poster. He glanced at Mr. Marcus and said, “The office sent this.”
Mr. Marcus didn’t really acknowledge him, so the boy walked it over to the desk and put it on the corner. He glanced at the class, all of them kind of frozen in place, and then he looked back at Becky.
“My name’s Danny,” he said. “I was looking for you this morning.”
Becky’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Danny smiled, put his hands back in his pockets, and made for the door.
“And don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve got other tournament jerseys.”
He slipped through the door, and everyone started talking at once. Mr. Marcus quieted them down rather quickly, and Becky stood up.
“May I go to the bathroom please?” she said.
Miraculously, Mr. Marcus nodded her on, and she tried not to literally run for the door looking desperate.
She burst into the hall, and it was empty. She jogged past the office, then back tracked down past the band room.
Nothing.
When she re-entered the classroom, students were writing, heads down on arms, jaws resting on the heels of hands, toes curled around the chair legs. There was a new prompt on the board that read,
‘Deconstruction. A form of analysis through which we br
eak down where and why something does not meet certain criteria. In-class writing, five paragraphs. Deconstruct last week’s September orientation process. Make each body paragraph focus on a different aspect. One half hour. I am collecting.’
Marcus had one of those old fashioned black boards, rather green boards, and the demand written in chalk looked like a judgment. He was old-school, he wasn’t kidding, and Becky sat and bent to it. Twenty minutes later, someone who had been using the back end of last year’s notebook asked for more paper, and Mr. Marcus claimed the office hadn’t yet given him his month’s due of supplies.
Startled, Becky looked to the corner of the desk, noticing it up close for the first time since her return from ‘the bathroom.’
Her heart started racing again.
There was no ream of copy paper sitting there.
Chapter Five
It was the most elaborate practical joke in the history of high school. It just had to be, or else Becky had to admit that she was utterly, totally insane. Not only was the whole class in on it, but Mr. Marcus had it planned all along with Cody Hatcher and Tabitha Messersmith! Worse, ‘Baseball Boy,’ or ‘Danny,’ or whoever he really was, had actually planted the beet juice. And worse than that, he had stalked her back to her house, watching from the bushes or something as her dad burned the shirt. So was her father a part of this too? He’d sure done a good acting job, drinking like a fish. Maybe he filled the bottle with colored water or something. But what about those red eyes? And that smell coming from him wasn’t ammonia.
Also, when you got right down to it, Becky found it hard to believe that Mr. Marcus would be in on any razzing of any sort with anyone. He frightened her, actually, and she found it doubtful he would have any interest in these games, no matter how artful they seemed. And ‘Danny?’ Deep in her soul, she didn’t believe for a minute that he was trying to hurt her. There was just something about him that rang true, that made her want to hug him and cry, that raised in her a deep desire to tell him her life story.
So how did he disappear so fast from the Health room out in the trailer? He’d been standing right in front of her, and had vanished in the time it took her to slip a shirt over her head. And, now that she thought about it, there had been no sound of his retreating cleats. Then there was today’s English class—copy paper on the desk, then copy paper gone. Of course, she couldn’t challenge Mr. Marcus directly, but right after class she had stopped the quiet girl with the red librarian glasses who sat at the end of the ‘U’ by the windows, spending most of the period playing with the ends of her hair and looking at the tufts in front of her face with her eyes crossed.
“You did see him bring in the copy paper, right?” Becky had said. They were in the hall and students pushed past them. The girl’s expression was blank.
“What?”
“The boy. The blond boy who brought in the copy paper. The one who said he liked my poem.”
The girl just stared back for a moment, and Becky wondered if she had a hearing problem.
“No one liked your poem,” she said finally. She pulled the straps on her book bag and firmed it against her back. “And I’m not stupid enough to fall for your tricks, so keep your blond boy stories to yourself. If you’re so creative, maybe you should be in honors where your buddy Cody Hatcher really belongs. You’re both lunatics.”
Miss Personality lost herself in the crowd. Of course. Cody Hatcher was in the college prep track instead of honors because of his behavior problems. It had nothing to do with his intellect or lack thereof. That explained his surprisingly coherent criticism of Becky’s poem, the reference to metaphor, and his comment including the word ‘stanza.’ And Becky always wound up in these middle-tracked classes as well, because she had test-taking anxiety.
But this insight was no comfort whatsoever. Here was another player in this strange drama denying the presence of ‘Danny-boy,’ and Becky had picked her at random.
Maybe she was a lunatic after all.
In art class they got to experiment with oils on paper canvases, and besides Mrs. Pierce reaming out some junior who had painted a vagina, the class was uneventful at first. Becky painted her usual, a dilapidated farm house with moss and ivy spreading up from its base. The shutters were weather-worn, the one on the left hanging off a hinge, and the big barn doors were warped and splintered. There were shingles missing from the roof and weeds surrounding the hitching post to the side. Becky had been drawing this for longer than she could remember. It was her stand-by, her old faithful, the thing she doodled when she was bored and thinking of other things. She thought that maybe once she had dreamed it. And she only painted it now, because she couldn’t think of anything else. After all, she was no artist. Neither was the girl sitting next to her, whispering to herself and shaking hair out of her face, scratching out this bizarre cartoon that looked like a mountain road leading to a castle sitting below a three dimensional star.
Everyone had their doodles, their fail-safes.
Becky was just turning back to her own ‘masterpiece’ when something moved in the window in her painting. It was the opening all the way to the left, the one with the broken shutter. Becky started, then blinked and focused. The window in question was blackened like it usually was, but from the corner of her eye she could have sworn something had darted past from the left to the right, something fast, something pale.
Nothing now. Just a darkened window.
Becky gasped.
The barn doors, the huge double doors, warped and splintered, now stood open a crack, the one to the left angled ever so slightly, not quite flush with its twin, tossing a bit of a shadow to the foreground from the inside of the structure.
She had not drawn it that way, not today, not ever. Those doors had always been closed, and she’d never quite mastered, nor cared to master, all the high level stuff like proportion and shadow.
Becky Michigan asked to be excused and burst out into the hallway like a mental patient for the second time in two periods. This time, she made a beeline straight for the Principal’s office.
A little bit of the fire was gone by the time Becky walked through the doors with the old-fashioned wood framing and marbled glass, and the urgency felt silly, actually, when she tried to piece together a plea of sorts there under the bright office lights. Everything in here was so business-like, so serious, so normal. There were a lot of bins with papers in them, and computers and files, and the three receptionists looked like mannequins with deeply carved expressions of sober courtesy.
And there was a line: two girls who looked like twins with what appeared to be botched schedules, a parent standing next to a skinny kid with a foot cast, and a teacher mulling over some sort of bill or pay stub. By the time it was Becky’s turn, she was drained, and when the woman behind the counter said, “Yes?” the phone still cradled in her ear, Becky felt guilty about wasting everybody’s time.
“There was a boy,” she said meekly.
“One moment,” the woman said softly into the mouthpiece. She covered it with her palm and looked at Becky closely. “Counselor’s office is one floor down.”
“No,” Becky said. “It’s not like that. Well, maybe it could be, but it isn’t yet, and I only want to make sure he was there, like whether or not I really saw…” She looked up at the ceiling in frustration, and when she looked back down, the receptionist’s eyes had not wavered.
“The counselor’s office is one floor down. His name is Mr. Elliot,” she said. “I think you should make an appointment.” Becky stuck out her chin.
“I want to see the Principal.”
“I’ll call you back…yes, I have the number,” the woman said into the phone. She set it in its cradle and gave her head a slight toss, making her hair do a soft little cascade. It was nice hair, ash blonde, layered Bob style, fine and daringly long for that cut. Salon hair. The toss was practiced. No, this lady wasn’t Miss America, but she knew how to work the counter. And Becky knew for sure that she wasn’t getting to
see the Principal, not today anyway.
“He’s in a meeting with the Superintendent,” the woman said.
“Can I wait?”
“What’s this about, honey?”
Becky felt as if her face had gone scarlet.
“I want to know if there are surveillance cameras in the hallways,” she managed in a rush. “I want to see the film from first period outside my English class. There was a boy. He was there, even though everyone acts like he wasn’t.”
The woman stood.
“Do you want to fill out an incident report?”
Becky shook her head and walked out of the office, heart pounding. The last thing she needed was documentation of this proving she was off her rocker. When she got back to class, Mrs. Pierce didn’t ask where she had been, but rather gave an extra-long stare as she took her seat, indicating that she had used up her one long trip to the hallway counting the wall tiles and if it happened again, there would be consequences.
Her painting was there waiting for her.
The heavier strokes at the corners had bled a bit and spread before drying.
And the barn door was closed like it always had been.
Chapter Six
After school, Becky heard a strange kind of dialogue going on when she got to the driveway, and while she couldn’t quite make out what her mother was saying exactly, it was clear things weren’t quite right in the house.
It smelled like liver. Becky got a whiff of it ten paces from the door. That was Daddy’s comfort food, and since his Pontiac wasn’t here yet, she knew something had happened at work that sucked bad enough for him to call home about. Mother was cooking ahead of time, and was probably freaked out because she was due at the Super Fresh by five p.m.
Of course, Daddy would never in a million years tell her to cook before he got home, he probably hadn’t even suggested the meal. But Ma, always with the best intentions, went the extra mile, actually inconveniencing you, inconveniencing herself, then getting hurt when you didn’t do backflips over it all. In this case, the food would be left in wax paper in the fridge, even though Daddy didn’t really like it that way.
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