The Academy (9 page)

It was hard to tell where sympathies lay these days.

Mary Mercer walked into the lounge looking depressed and out of sorts. “Hey, Grumpy,” Ray said. “Where’s Snow White?”

“Shut up,” the French teacher told him, and her tone of voice made it clear that she was not in the mood to joke around.

Linda walked over to her. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I hope.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Mary swung her eyes toward the couch, where Nina Habeck and Ken Myers were discussing the new history textbooks, and Linda understood that the French teacher didn’t want to talk in front of them. “Later,” she said softly, putting a hand on Mary’s arm.

Later came after school in the women’s restroom, where she came across Mary dabbing at her red eyes with a tissue in front of one of the mirrors over the sinks.

“All right,” Linda said. “Spill it.”

The other woman just looked at her.

“Come on. There’s no one else here.”

She shook her head.

“Mary.”

“It’s . . . Dennis. I . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s just too . . . too tabloid TV.”

“What is it?” Linda asked softly.

Mary blinked into the mirror. “I found e-mails. On his computer.”

“No!”

“Yes! Some whore named Tina.” She dabbed at her eyes again. “I mean, maybe it’s nothing—maybe I’m overreacting. . . .

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m not. I read those e-mails and they were what they were.”

“Explicit?”

“Oh yes.” Mary’s eyes held a hopeful, questioning look that made her appear almost childlike. “But a lot of people do that these days, right? I mean, a lot of times it’s just fiction, fantasy. They’re not actually having affairs with the people they chat with. They’re just . . . writing. Right?”

“I wouldn’t put up with it,” Linda said honestly.

“I can’t live with it either. That’s what’s got me so upset.” She looked like she was about to cry again.

“Have you confronted him?”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that! He’d know I read his e-mails. He’d know I broke his trust.”

“Broke
his
trust? He’s sneaking around behind your back writing sex letters to strangers.”

Mary looked down. “I know.”

Linda stared at the other teacher. She had no advice to give, no words of wisdom, and the terrible truth was that deep down she was just thankful it was not happening to her, that she did not have to face such a problem. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Even if you don’t want to admit you were spying on his e-mails, you need to get this out in the open. You need to talk it out.”

Mary reached over and touched her arm. “Thank you, Linda.”

“For what?”

“Listening.”

By the time she arrived home, Linda had a headache. “So how ends your first week at the charter school?” Frank asked from the kitchen as she stepped through the door into the living room. He was grinning, but Linda found nothing funny about the question, and the look she gave him wiped the smile completely off his face.

He walked around the end of the counter, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel. “That bad, huh?” he said sympathetically.

She sighed. “No, not really. But it’s definitely different from last year. And not in a good way.” She skipped her after-school session with Mary, but told him about Jody’s creepy behavior, her own failure to engage the kids in an off-topic discussion, and the general feeling of unease that she had about Tyler, including the cold shoulder and hostile stares she received every time she went into the office.

“Like I said before, you could transfer to another school if you really feel that strongly about it.”

Linda shook her head. “I’m not sure I can, actually. It may not be allowed under our charter. Besides, this is my school. I’d rather stay and fight than just run away and abandon it.”

“I didn’t realize you were so patriotic.”

“Despite all your talk, you didn’t move to Canada during the George Bush years, did you?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Same thing.”

“There’s no chance that you could be laid off or fired, is there? I mean, you’re obviously on their list, and you have little or no recourse—”

“If they ever tried something like that, I’d have them in court so fast their heads would spin. They have no cause. I’m a good teacher, I have ten years of positive evaluations to prove it and I have witnesses from both sides of the aisle. They don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Still . . .”

“What brought this up?”

Frank sighed. “Word is that they’re going to be out-sourcing a lot of the company’s IT functions. So my job’s not exactly secure. And at least one of us needs to be gainfully employed.”

“Are you sending out résumés?”

“Not yet. This is just scuttlebutt. It might not even be true. Who knows? Maybe it’s the exact opposite, and I’m in line for a raise or a promotion. In which case, putting feelers out would stop those chances cold. So I’m just going to wait and see.”

She kissed him and tried to smile. “We both will,” she said.

Six

Kate Robinson sorted through the contents of the white folder-sized envelope that Tony had brought home from school and left on the kitchen counter for her. An appeal to parents to join the PTA . . . a discount offer from a private company offering math tutorials . . . a notice that Back-to-School Night was coming up and that attendance was mandatory for all parents . . . an ad for Target . . . a Coca-Cola coupon.

When she’d first received notification near the end of summer that Tyler High was going to become a charter school, Kate had been happy. She’d been reading about the academic successes of charters in the
Los Angeles Times,
including an editorial suggesting that even more schools in the L.A. district should be granted charter status, and she thought it a good thing that Tony’s school was following suit. Now she was not so sure. She didn’t like the commercial tie-ins that were popping up, the growing emphasis on fund-raising and other peripherals that had little or nothing to do with education.

She also didn’t like the fact that parents were now required to donate either their time or money to the high school. She and Tony’s father had been forced to sign a contract stating that they would volunteer to work at Tyler for a minimum of twenty hours each semester. If they did not sign it, Tony would have to attend one of the district’s traditional high schools: either Washington, which was in a bad area, or Fill-more, which was on the other side of the city and very inconvenient to get to in the morning. Such a thing seemed illegal, making parents sign a contract to a public school, but it was up to parents with more money and initiative than she to try to fight it.

One of the papers in the envelope was for Tony, not her, and it was a pledge of allegiance to the school. Starting next week, said the attached memo, they were going to be replacing the traditional flag salute with this more site-specific version. She read the words:

I pledge allegiance
to the school
of John Tyler High.
And to the principles for which it stands.
One student body, under Charter,
With rules and regulations for all.

That, she decided, was very odd. She read the pledge again. It was fairly generic and didn’t say much, but there was something about it she didn’t like, an underlying assumption that the school was more important than anything else and that students’ allegiance should be to Tyler High rather than to the nation.

That didn’t sit right with her.

Kate finished looking through the envelope. Tony’s art teacher, Mr. Swaim, had sent a note home asking if parents could help out by coming in tomorrow and, following his instructions, prepare the materials for various projects his classes would be working on later in the week. He needed two parents from each period. Since assisting would help satisfy her volunteer requirement, she quickly e-mailed the instructor that she would be happy to show up and do whatever needed to be done, and he e-mailed back later that evening that she should meet him at the art room a half hour before school started at eight.

The next morning, she drove while Tony walked. He was at the stage where he didn’t even want to acknowledge that he
had
parents, and he made her promise that they would arrive separately and that she would pretend not to recognize him if she saw him on campus.

All volunteers were required to check in at the office, and Kate stood in an unexpectedly long line before signing her name in a log and receiving a “volunteer pass” from one of the secretaries. Not knowing where the art room was, she asked directions, and when she made her way to the west side of the campus, she was surprised to see quite a few adults standing on the small patch of grass outside the classroom. There were over a dozen women and one man waiting for the art teacher—it made sense: two parents from each period, seven periods total—but seeing so many made her wonder what they were all going to do. It certainly didn’t take fourteen people to cut construction-paper shapes or punch holes in cardboard or do whatever simple prep work the instructor had planned.

The parents seemed to be divided into two distinct cliques: a group of stay-at-home moms who had apparently known one another forever and who acknowledged her arrival with cursory insincere greetings before returning to their talk of scrapbooking; and a smaller but even more annoying pack of tattooed alterna-parents who completely ignored her existence. She ended up bonding with a grandmother named Lillianwho was happily sorting through the contents of an oversized canvas bag, looking for her crochet needles. They talked as easily as old friends until the door to the art room opened and the teacher bade them all come inside.

“You know,” the older woman confided, “I’m not sure if my being here even counts. According to my granddaughter Megan’s contract, her
parents
are supposed to volunteer. I don’t know if I’m allowed to substitute.”

“Talk to the people in the office. They should be flexible on something like this.”

“
Should
be. But that doesn’t mean they
will
be. So far, my daughter is not very impressed with this charter school, and I have to say I agree.”

One of the alterna-moms, a ferret-faced woman wearing camouflage pants and a faux Ramones tour T-shirt, pushed past them into the room and gave Lillian a bitchy look of disapproval. Kate was about to say something, but her new friend must have guessed her intentions because she met Kate’s eyes and shook her head with a sad smile, imploring her to let it go.

Once they were all inside, the door closed behind them, Mr. Swaim spoke quickly. “I’m teaching seven art classes this year, from Beginning Painting and Drawing to Advanced Pottery. Ordinarily, that would mean that I’d have seven separate sets of curricula, but since Tyler High is now a charter school, I’ve been given the leeway to institute interdisciplinary course work.” He held up a hand in anticipation of complaints. “I will still be teaching drawing in the drawing class, painting in the painting class, pottery in the pottery class, et cetera. But, periodically, I will be combining lesson plans and having the students produce artwork from the same source in their various media. First up will be the human form. To this end, I am looking for women willing to pose this Friday for each of my seven periods.”

“Pose?” one of the alterna-moms said.

“Yes.”

“In—?”

“In the nude, yes.”

Kate stared at the teacher, stunned, not sure she’d heard what she thought she’d heard.

“Those are our
children
!” exclaimed an outraged scrapbooker.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Swaim assured her. “I won’t be asking
you
to pose.” He addressed the other parents. “Those not posing I would ask to prepare materials for another upcoming project in which—”

“I’m telling the principal.” The mother who had voiced the complaint turned suddenly and left the room, followed by three others of her group. Kate stood rooted in place and looked over at Lillian, who appeared as shell-shocked as she herself felt.

Mr. Swaim cleared his throat. “As I started to say, those who are not chosen to pose for a class will be prepping materials: cutting drawing paper to size, refilling glue bottles, measuring clay, mixing paint.”