A Hole in Juan (7 page)

Physics, maybe, if I could make them see how it applied to ball games, but other than that, they are too cocky about being important in this tiny fishpond. About being seniors. Nothing is worth taking seriously.”

“Did something happen today?”

He sighed. “They talked a lot about Mischief Night,” he said. “It felt . . . it seemed some kind of warning.”

“Directed at you?”

He stood even taller and looked ready to deny such a ridiculous idea. But then he exhaled sharply, shook his head, and said,

“I’m not certain.”

“I’m sure the talk was about the party Friday night.”

He sighed and shrugged. “Yes, I understand. But they . . . I was thinking of attending, to see what this is all about, and then I heard them deliberately . . .”

“Yes?”

“They said some people weren’t welcome.”

“To you?” I was astounded.

He shook his head. “No, no. Pretended not to have even heard me. They said it to each other, those tennis girls. The ones in charge of everything. But they said it so others would hear, meaning me, I am certain.”

“Did they say any more?”

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He looked tired, older than his years. “Nothing specific. And I was still angry about the rotating supplies—about the arrogance of that class’s behavior. Today it was pipettes again, but I still don’t know how. I keep my supplies in the back, in the prep room, and students go there only with permission.”

Or so he had to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.

“I questioned the class, of course, and you know that blank look?”

The same look that had me so depressed. I’m not sure fully matured adults can replicate that look. Perhaps you have to feel unfairly subservient, the student facing the teacher, to passively resist by removing your actual self, leaving only the shell.

“I cannot tolerate this behavior! A chemistry lab has many potential dangers, and ultimately, I’m responsible. No matter what the reason . . .”

He continued to lecture about student responsibility, the need to grow up—about a whole lot of things that didn’t apply to me. I knew he felt overwhelmed, but I was a peer. I could only imagine what tone he adopted for the students.

“—discipline needs to be maintained for the good of all and that’s why a strict inventory and safety standards are mandatory, not optional. I—”

“Mr. Reyes, I understand.”

He seemed to actually notice me, then, and he stopped mid-sentence. And then started up again on another track. “What is the justification for a night devoted to mischief?” he asked without slowing for a response. “There was no such night where I grew up, and I find the idea reprehensible. Teens today have enough bad paths to follow without there being an official date on which to misbehave! What’s wrong with this city to have something like that?” He scowled, as if I had created the tradition purely in order to spite him.

“I think—I know—it goes beyond Philadelphia. It has an ancient origin, the way Halloween does, and had to do with ghosts rising from the dead.”

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“Pshah!” He waved away my words. “Ancient superstition! Is that an excuse for tormenting fellow human beings?”

“I can see you definitely do feel tormented,” I said. Maybe sympathy and a smidge of psychology would get him to ease up.

Wrong. He looked even more furious, albeit in his contained, ready to explode way. “Is it my imagination that there was a so-called accident—acid in my briefcase!”

“That’s awful—how? When?”

“While I was in the hallway between classes. Aren’t we supposed to be out here? Monitoring the passageways?”

I nodded, feeling guilty because I so seldom made it outside my room between classes. Somebody was always asking a question, or I was busy writing on the board, preparing for the next class.

“Right in this briefcase!”

“Is it—was much harmed?”

He pursed his mouth again and shook his head. “It’s still in-tact and nothing was crucially damaged, but it’s the principle.

The desecration of property! Who does such things that make no sense?” He cleared his throat and, without moving, seemed to smooth out his clothing and his hair. “Forgive me. It is kind of you to worry about me when you have problems of your own,”

he said in a softer, but still flat tone.

Had he heard about the exam? Or was this simply a bit of conventional speech, part of his ingrained sense of manners?

“Not really,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re having such a bad time.”

“The other classes—also sloppy thinkers, but not malicious.

But the seniors . . . all I can think of is to punish the entire class.

Maybe then they’ll be sufficiently upset to turn the guilty party over to me.”

There were many things wrong with his proposed course of action. First, it didn’t go with his professed desire not to dignify their actions by noticing them. Second, it’s pretty much what Stalin and Hitler did to recalcitrant villages, and I’ve never been eager to use them as mentors. And third, on a personal level, I GILLIAN ROBERTS

52

had a teacher who did that when I was in eighth grade, and her actions stuck with me as an example of what might make me hate a teacher. Whatever the lesson was she had in mind, whatever we were supposed to collectively have learned is long lost, but not my outrage for being punished for something I hadn’t done and knew nothing about.

“I don’t think it would work,” I said. “They’re really good friends. I think they’d rather all go down in flames.”

“What then? My authority is being undermined. I tried telling the headmaster last week. He was no help and in fact I’m not sure what he actually told me. I couldn’t follow him. It was quite strange.”

No surprise there. “Unfortunately, the best you could hope for from Havermeyer would be a flurry of meaningless activity resulting in a flyer telling students in semiacademic gobbledy-gook that it’s bad to steal or to torment people, and that chemicals belong in the laboratory because they can be dangerous. Or maybe an assembly in which he pretty much said the same thing, but took an hour to do so.”

I’d forgotten again how humor-challenged he was. He solemnly digested my words. “Given those circumstances, what does one do?” he asked gravely.

Time for me to unbend even if he wouldn’t, to be honest with him, although being around the man was like snowshoeing through the Arctic tundra. I told him about my sense that something was going on, and about my stolen examination.

“Ah,” he said with great sorrow. Perhaps misery didn’t love company, and there was no comfort in numbers, simply greater depression and confusion.

I wondered how a man could stand that straight and tall, holding a briefcase and books, and yet look defeated. “Are you familiar with St. Cassian of Imola?” he suddenly asked.

“I’m afraid saints aren’t my area of expertise.”

“I’d never heard about him, either,” he said. “And saints were part of my expertise. St. Cassian isn’t widely known. But I got 53

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this in my mailbox at noon. I would like to think of it as another prank, although I am sick of that word.” He put his books down on the floor, opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of plain paper, a computer printout with the saint’s name in large letters that had a slash through them, and beneath them, as a sort of correction, the spanish inquisitor.

“I know that’s what they call me, because I gave them a hard test,” he said. “They think they are sly and devious, but I know.”

He shook his head. “They also call me Dr. Jar because of my initials. They apparently find that very funny. But The Spanish Inquisitor at least shows some intelligence, a comprehension of history, even though I am not Spanish. I was born in Massachu-setts.”

“Maybe you should continue to ignore all of it and hope it really does have to do with Mischief Night.”

I knew that what I said was unlikely. The tradition was dying out and it was Mischief Night, not Mischief Week, and surely not a two-month torment for a teacher.

“I went online and looked him up,” Reyes said.

“Who?”

“St. Cassian.”

I’d forgotten about him.

“He was martyred.”

“Weren’t all the saints martyred?”

“He was a martyred teacher.”

Not good.

“His students hacked him to death.”

Really not good. As was the idea that our unscholarly pupils had done research and had ferreted out this martyred teacher so as to torture their chemistry teacher.

“It’s even worse than that. Nobody was allowed to actually kill him, only to cut. They had to keep their hackings minor, so that death would take longer and be more painful.”

“That’s . . .”

“I will tell you what that is. That is what this job feels like to GILLIAN ROBERTS

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me. Little cuts—more and more little cuts until you bleed to death if you stay long enough. As if it isn’t bad enough trying to teach people who don’t give a damn about learning. Then this—

the death of a thousand cuts—that’s what the whole thing feels like. Hack, hack, hack! The lying, the stealing, the false alarms, the covering up for each other—and this threat!” Again, he waved the sheet of paper.

“I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be taken literally.”

He seemed ready to protest; then he sighed and nodded.

“Maybe not, but it was meant as another nonlethal cut. All I tried to do is teach them.” He shoved the paper back into his briefcase, nodded to me, and walked toward the staircase, but paused again. “Are you sure you are all right yourself?”

“Me?” I thought about that misspelled note, about the locked-drawer puzzle. “I’m upset, of course.”

“I would be, too,” he said. “If something like that happened to me.”

I did a double take. Hadn’t something precisely like that happened to him? “I don’t understand. You told me this morning, and then now—things like the stolen test
have
been happening to you.”

“Stolen test?”

“Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

His eyes opened wider than they’d been, but his lips now held tightly closed for too long a pause, as if he were thinking something through. “I apologize,” he finally said. “It’s obvious I misspoke.”

“About what?”

“No, no. I should not have . . . Undoubtedly, it means it was a tempest in a teapot and it is now all over and it is only my in-experience that made me think it was anything more than that.”

He looked at his watch and
tsk
ed. “And now I must leave. I have a meeting with my dissertation advisor quite soon.”

“Wait! What’s over? What tempest in what teapot?”

He walked down several steps, then he turned halfway. “If 55

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you haven’t heard, then it’s nothing, and it was never anything, and I am not a bearer of tales.” He paused for a second, his mouth pursed once more, and I was almost convinced he was preparing a lecture for me about how a chemistry teacher must never tell tales. Instead, he shook his head, turned back, and made his deliberate way down the marble staircase. He walked with his customary dignity, or rigidity, and with no excess speed, but I nevertheless had the distinct feeling he was running away from me as quickly as he could.

I watched his silhouette as he reached the door, one arm cradling the stack of books, the briefcase in the other.

His poor acid-burned briefcase. What was wrong with those kids? As if it needed reassurance, I patted my own briefcase with my free hand, promising it that I wouldn’t allow a drop of anything foreign to touch it.

Except that I was patting my pocketbook. I looked to verify that there was no other strap on my right or left shoulder.

With a surge of relief, I remembered that I had given up on a briefcase per se and was experimenting with a backpack, especially on days I walked to school. I had obviously left the classroom too quickly in order to speak with Jar.

Good thing I’d noticed before I’d walked all the way home.

I went back into my room and saw the backpack on the floor beside my desk. Given Reyes’s story of acid in his briefcase, I felt compelled to peer inside, double-checking that everything was there, unharmed.

I had been holding the green plastic envelope with the seniors’ exams the entire time, so that was no problem. I saw folders for various classes, and all looked in place.

Except for my attendance book. I looked at my desk, where it sits most periods. I looked at the green plastic folder I’d been carrying.

I checked the entire room, the insides of each desk, which was foolish, since I would never have left it there, and dishearten-ing because I found some objects I’d be happier not having seen.

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I checked under my desk, in each of the drawers, then went back into the hallway to see if I’d dropped it out there.

It was nowhere. Whatever was going on now included me, and nothing had slowed or played itself out. Instead, whatever it was had escalated.

We’d gone from bad to much worse.

Six

he walk home did nothing to clear my head despite the de-Tlicious autumn snap in the air. I was tired, worried, and feeling put-upon.

Apparently, Pip’s travels hadn’t energized him, either. I was surprised to find him already home, worried to note that his normally alarming energy level seemed to have flatlined, annoyed, finally, to realize that once again he’d spent the day slouched on the sofa, watching TV.

Macavity sat atop the set, watching Pip and keeping his opinions to himself. There was, I suppose, a sort of camaraderie in their mutual staring.

“How was your day?” I asked as I settled myself back into home.

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“Fine, I guess.”

He was not having a great time, then, but maybe that was good. Maybe being unmoored was becoming less appealing.

“What did you do?”

“Not much.”

“See anything interesting?”

“Not really.”

I picked up the list of sights and outings I’d so carefully crafted for him, wondering how pathetic or onerous he found it.

“So . . . did you go out today at all?” I asked.