The Academy (8 page)

Her gaze moved on to the small one-story building housing the office. Even before today, the vibe in the office had been strange this year. Although it was not something she would ever admit to anyone, she felt uncomfortable just going in there and checking her mailbox each morning.

Most of that was due to Bobbi. The secretary acted almost like a coprincipal these days. She’d gotten a title change and a subsequent pay bump—officially she was now “administrative coordinator” rather than “secretary”—and it had definitely gone to her head. Her job was still to answer phones, type memos and act as Jody’s toady, but she seemed to think she was ruler of all she surveyed. “Power corrupts,” Steve Warren said when the subject arose, a sentiment echoed by several other teachers, and that about summed it up.

For Linda, the office had become a very unpleasant place. Bobbi really had been taking notes at that initial staff meeting, or so it seemed, and she was definitely holding grudges. Whenever Linda went in to pick up her mail or use the copier, the secretary—
administrative coordinator

—would stop whatever she was doing and simply stare. Any phone conversation was instantly put on hold, all chatting with the other secretaries, clerks or administrators halted, and the woman would glare silently at Linda until she was out of the office. Linda had taken to going in with Diane or another friend in order to check her mailbox, and as cowardly as it was, she’d sent her TA down yesterday morning to make copies of a homework assignment.

Now it was going to be even worse.

She looked over at the office building and tried to imagine what Jody was doing in there right now. What stuck in her brain was the strangeness of the woman’s behavior at the end of the hallway and the creepiness of the way she’d stopped on the sidewalk to stare up at the window. The image in Linda’s mind was of the principal sitting perfectly still in a completely darkened office, smiling evilly, glowing eyes focused on nothing that could be seen by mortal eyes.

Shivering, Linda turned away. She really did have work to do this morning. And the quicker she got down to it and stopped overdramatizing every little thing that happened to her, the better off she’d be.

A carton of books had come in yesterday—class copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle
—and it was sitting next to several reams of paper that she had yet to unpack. She put the paperbacks in her bookcase, then placed the paper in the supply cabinet. The nighttime custodians had erased everything on both blackboards, though she’d left a note instructing them to leave it all as is, and she painstakingly rewrote everything all over again before settling down at her desk and treating herself to a breakfast bar.

It seemed quiet all of a sudden. Too quiet. She hadn’t really noticed while she’d been busy and moving around, but now that she was sitting still, the silence seemed oppressive. She was acutely aware that she was the only person in the building, and she walked over to the door and locked it.

She needed some noise. She kept a portable CD player on a shelf behind her desk. Not an iPod or one of those small devices with attached headphones, but a cheap boom-box-looking thing she’d picked up at The Store several years back. She put in a reissued Nazz CD that Frank had given her for her birthday in June, and although she’d intended to spend this time making lesson plans, she found herself just sitting there and listening to the music. As a teenager, she’d owned the original vinyl album, and now hearing it again, she was brought back to those days. Even then, it had been a relic of another era, the music of an earlier generation, but that had been part of its appeal. She’d never dated much until her senior year in high school, and after her best friend, Maddy, had moved in the middle of ninth grade, she’d felt lonely and isolated. It was music that had saved her, that had let her know she was not alone. Particularly music from the late 1960s and early 1970s. She’d spent hour after hour in her room by herself, listening to records, and those songs had spoken to her. Albums like
Nazz
had not only understood and reflected back her feelings but promised something better. Art from an earlier age, it had contained the innocence of that time period but had also pointed the way to a tomorrow that was better than today.

Listening to the same tunes now made her feel slightly sad, but it was a sweet sadness, and it made her think about the importance of art, and how much music and literature had meant to her over the years. That gave her an idea, and she decided to set aside her lesson plans for the day and have a discussion in each of her classes not about what they were studying but why. In these test-mad days, where parents were concerned about educational competition with other countries and politicians downplayed anything that did not lead directly to a specific job track, she thought it would be a good idea to talk about the importance of subjects that fed the soul rather than the résumé.

Her first class of the day was twelfth graders, and that was perfect. They were the ones about to go out into the big wide world, and they were the ones who most needed to think about the why of things rather than just the what.

She shut off the music and unlocked her door. The campus was coming alive now. She heard voices and footsteps in the hall, and when she glanced through the window at the quad down below, she saw that it was filling with students. Soon they would be coming in to class.

She was safe.

That was an odd reaction.

But an honest one.

She’d discovered this morning that she did not like being alone on campus anymore, and Linda decided that maybe she’d talk to Diane and the two of them could start carpooling together every day instead of just every once in a while.

The students were in their seats by the time the second bell rang. There was one absence—a girl named Olivia whom she could not yet put a face to—and after the announcements and the pledge, Linda told everyone to put down their pens and pencils. They were just going to talk for a while. No note taking.

She leaned against her desk. “What is the purpose of art?” she asked the class, and was met by a sea of blank faces.

“I thought this was an
English
class,” Antonio Gonzalez piped up.

“I’m not talking about art in terms of painting or sculpture, but art in general. The visual arts, of course, but also music and”—she spread her hands dramatically—“literature. As in . . . English!” She looked again around the room. “So why do we need art? What do you think it is about human beings that makes art a necessary and important ingredient in our lives?”

The conversation did not go the way she’d imagined. In fact, it wasn’t a conversation at all. More like a monologue. Or a lecture. She ended up
telling
them why art was important, though her goal had been to lead them to discover it for themselves. Linda told herself that maybe it was too early in the year for something free-form like this. The kids were just getting to know her; she was just getting to know them; the sense of trust and intimacy that would be theirs later in the semester had not yet been established. But then she realized that she did know most of these students. Three-fourths of them had been in one of her junior or sophomore classes. Unfamiliarity with one another was not a legitimate excuse.

No, the fact was that her students simply didn’t want to be led along the path she was trying to take them. Her entire premise seemed foreign to them, and by the time second period rolled around, she had abandoned her attempt at discussion and returned to her original lesson plan.

It was discouraging, how little kids today thought about anything beyond the facts and figures placed directly in front of them. For all the commercials, movies and television shows stressing the importance of thinking outside the box, very few young people possessed the ability to do so. And schools were not teaching those skills. It was a world of standardized learning now, and as an educator she was expected to teach to the test so their school’s scores would go up and they would get more money. It almost made her think that maybe this charter experiment wasn’t such a bad idea if it gave teachers more latitude to introduce alternative methods of instruction.

Back in her day, a knowledge of obscure trivia was the key to intellectual respect, and she and her friends had attempted to one-up each other by finding the most arcane minutiae about literature or music and dropping them casually into conversation as though they were something that everyone should know. Such behavior had been silly but also exhilarating, as they’d explored new worlds and delved deeply into subjects to which they had not previously been exposed. Of course, she’d learned as she got older that it was the experience of art that mattered, not the useless tangential facts that proved to peers that one had read a book or been exposed to a specific work. There was nothing phonier or more pretentious than someone posing as an intellectual by aping the opinions of others. But these days, the Internet seemed to have rendered even that trivial pursuit obsolete as students looked up information on a need-to-know basis, using it when necessary but making no effort to retain any of it. They lived in a Wikipedia world, where knowledge was no longer required and only the ability to access it mattered.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was better.

But she didn’t think so.

At lunch, Linda went to the teachers’ lounge, as she always did. The lounge was located in a windowless room adjacent to the Little Theater, which had always been an inconvenient pain in the butt to everyone except the drama instructor. But now she was happy about the lounge’s out-of-the-way location, because it meant that the administrators remained in the office to eat. And her goal this year was to avoid Jody as much as possible.

Steve Warren and Ray Cheng were sitting around one of the tables when she arrived, unwrapping their lunches. Yvonne Gauthier was heating up a Lean Cuisine in the microwave. Coincidentally, they were talking about the importance of art.

Had students in their classes brought it up? she wondered. Maybe her attempted discussion this morning had had some effect after all. The thought cheered her.

Her colleagues, however, were in the same frame of mind that she’d been in after first period, discouraged by the current generation’s cultural illiteracy. Steve shook his head. “There’s no intellectual currency anymore. The whole system’s breaking down. Used to be that if you name-dropped the right authors and musicians, books and movies, you could fool everyone into thinking you were smart. Kids today don’t even know enough to know what they don’t know. References just fly over their heads, and they’re not impressed by anything. It’s depressing.”

“Movies used to be cool,” Ray admitted. “Foreign films, old comedies. Very impressive, especially for a first date.”

“Remember, in the early seventies, when we were in high school?” Steve asked. The two of them had grown up in Anaheim and had known each other forever. “Remember how we used to go to that revival theater and see Marx Brothers movies and W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy?”

Ray nodded.

“Remember how
old
they seemed?”

Ray chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Well, there was only, like, a thirty years’ difference between us and them. The movies from that time, the
new
movies like
Holy Grail, Tommy
or
Annie Hall
? Those are just as far away to students today as W. C. Fields was to us.”

“You’re right,” Ray said as he did the math. He shook his head. “Shit. We
are
old.”

The conversation faded away as more teachers entered the lounge, and Linda missed the chance to jump in and add her own two cents’ worth. Suzanne Johnsonmentioned to someone, in a voice filled with barely concealed disgust, that she needed to ask Jody for a day off next week to attend her brother-in-law’s wedding. Before this semester, they’d never had to ask permission to use personal days.

“Has anyone seen Jody this morning?” Linda asked. She was curious if anyone else thought that the principal was behaving strangely.

There were shaking heads all around.

“I saw her before third period,” Yvonne offered. “She was walking into the library.”

“Seems like she’s been MIA more often since we turned charter,” Suzanne said. “Anyone else notice that?”

“Maybe she’s busy,” Steve suggested.

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Charter stuff.”

Linda wanted to share what had happened this morning before school started, what she’d seen, what she’d felt, but the truth was, she hadn’t really seen anything, and her feelings would sound just plain stupid if stated aloud. Her anticharter sentiments were already well-known, so anything she might say that did not have facts to back it up would probably come off as sour grapes.

And might very well find its way back to the principal.