Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “A ghost stole it.”

  I showed Perry the classification packet, page by page, and did a question with him so he knew how it worked. “Just fill this out and you’ll have a world of knowledge at your fingertips,” I said. “Do you want a cheese cracker?”

  “No, thanks,” said Perry.

  I popped a cracker in my mouth. “Are you having fun?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s science!”

  “Would you have more fun if it was math?”

  “Yeah,” said Perry. “Science has always been my weak subject.”

  “Do you like trucks? What do you like?”

  “Fast cars.”

  He stuffed his earbuds in to get rid of me.

  “Have fun with it,” I said. “Fast cars and music, you can’t go wrong with that.”

  I circulated three more times and poured myself some coffee. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the class began to leave. I must have been in a fugue state. “Bye, have a good one,” I said.

  —

  “SO HELLO!” I SAID, to the next crew of twenty-two. “Hello, hello, hello. Taxonomy. Today it’s all about taxonomy. If you were beamed down from a spaceship—first of all, you would NOT HAVE AN IPAD CASE to fling around and hit somebody with. If you were beamed down from a spaceship into a foreign planet—”

  “I was!” said Owen.

  “That’s clear,” I said. “And you landed, and you asked, ‘How do I make sense of this planet?’ what would you do? You’d have to look at all the growing things, all of the things that are alive, and you’d have to figure out how to classify them. If you came to this planet, what would be maybe the biggest distinction you could see?”

  “Biggest distinction?” asked Caleb, with his chin on his hand. “That there’s life.”

  “Right. Then basic things, like there’s plants on the one hand, and animals on the other hand.”

  “And fungi!”

  “So when Carl Linnaeus— GUYS! PLEASE! When Carl Linnaeus started to classify things, he did it just the way anybody in this room would do it. He looked around and said, Okay, the big distinction is between . . . ,” etc. Then came the microscopes and etc. Kingdom packet etc. “So do the stuff that Mrs. Painter sent you, and you’ll be very happy. And so will Mrs. Painter. And so will I.”

  “I forgot my charger in the last classroom,” said Caleb. “Can I go get it?”

  I heard more silly sentences. Dogs Kick Penguins Climbing Off From Giant Skyscapers. Dolphins Kill People Cause Of Fluffy Girl’s Sweaters. Don’t Kick Pink Cats Or Fun Guys Slaughter.

  “Protista is my favorite of all the kingdoms,” said Caleb, plugging his iPad into the wall. “It sounds Italian.”

  Sydney came up to describe her homework success. “I did mine on Notability, and I put it in Google Drive, and I put it on my iPad, and then I went onto my house computer, and took it out, and I did it, then I emailed it. My dad is a computer person.”

  Cayden said, “We can’t get into the Keynote.”

  “Nobody’s able to get into it,” I said.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Wait, what are we supposed to do?” said Regan. Kingdom packet, kingdom packet, kingdom packet. I studied some plants growing in one of the aquariums.

  “I’d be careful,” said Cayden. “There might be a hornet in there. Last year I was in a science class with Miss Basset, and every day there would be two or three hornets in there. And it was my job to water them.”

  “Did you ever get stung?”

  “No, I had one of them come this close to my face,” said Cayden. “They kind of blend in with the plants. Owen! I need my pencil!”

  “Are you making any progress?”

  “I’m going to,” said Cayden.

  “I bet you are. Taxonomy. Not taxidermy.”

  “Taxidermy would be so fun!”

  Owen sharpened a pencil for a full minute. “Can I go to my locker?” he asked. “My iPad’s dead.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t charge it at home,” said Jenn, who was smart and thin-boned and easily distracted. She was catching up, doing an old worksheet on binomial nomenclature. She had to use a key to figure out the scientific names for blue jay and Virginia waterleaf—Cyanocitta cristata and Hydrophyllum virginianum.

  Chase and Caleb recited the taxonomic ranks. I nodded and gave them a thumbs-up. I said, “Think if you wanted to know about cars, and the first thing they did is say cars are all classified in this crazy way: Hubcapia frontlightia. What if you thought, I really love cars and I really love a certain kind of car?”

  “The Ferrari Spider!” said Chase.

  “You could become the world’s expert in the Ferrari Spider without knowing the slightest bit about how cars are classified!” I said.

  Chase was not interested in my disgruntled theorizing. “What’s your favorite car?” he said.

  “The one I’d buy right now is the Fiat,” I said.

  “I’d buy a DeLorean,” said Chase. “And not just because of Back to the Future. Just because it’s cool.”

  “It makes too much noise,” said Mackenzie.

  “And the engine stinks,” said Caleb.

  Chase showed me a picture of a Ferrari Spider. Then he said, “Jade! What are you doing?”

  I went over to Jade and said, “I was sent over here to find out what you were doing, by certain of your colleagues.”

  “What’s a colleague?” said Jade.

  “A person you work with. Your schoolmates, your colleagues.” I turned to Owen. “Are you a member of the Animalia kingdom?”

  “No,” said Owen. “I’m a eubacteria.”

  Mackenzie asked Chase how many questions he’d done for the archaebacteria page.

  “Three,” said Chase.

  “There is no question three!” said Mackenzie. “It goes one, two, four, five.” She laughed. “Three!”

  Caleb said, “I found it. I found the Keynote.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “Damn. Nobody’s gotten into it. Or at least they pretend they can’t get into it.”

  Caleb began untangling his earbuds so he could hear the audio track that went along with the slides.

  Marcy announced that she’d already listened to the Keynote. “I’m all caught up. Now I’m working on another level-two skill.”

  Chase showed me a 1929 Bugatti pedal-powered toy car, for sale for thirteen thousand dollars. “In Europe I saw a whole museum of stuff like that,” he said.

  Jade asked Chase how to answer a question about vascular plants.

  “You’re the smart one,” Chase said. “You should know about that.”

  “About taxomony?” she said incredulously.

  “Look at the Bugattis after you’ve finished your worksheet,” I said to Chase. I watched him answer a question on the BrainPOP and then swipe back to the Bugatti page. “If you could do anything right now, what would you do?”

  “Go to Burger King,” said Chase.

  “Do you have a long bus ride?”

  “About forty-five minutes.”

  I asked him what the hardest part of the day was for him.

  “Math,” said Chase. “She handed us a test.”

  Darryl whooped; she’d gotten a right answer on her BrainPOP.

  “The hardest part of my day,” I said, “is when people start to get really noisy, and I can’t get them to be quiet.”

  Chase said that Mr. Hansen had that same problem in English class.

  Mackenzie and Jenn were taking selfies.

  “My mom ran over my iPhone,” said Jade, who was wearing Daffy Duck pajama bottoms. “After she took my phone away, she ran it over. By ‘accident.’”

  I said that I’d dropped mine in the toilet.

  “My mom did that,” said Ja
de.

  “Let me see,” said Chase. He inspected the cracks on my phone, then handed it back to me. “Oh, wow, my Safari just logged out,” he said. “Let’s attempt to get it back.”

  “What did he call me?” said Jenn. “Sydney. SYDNEY! What did he call me?”

  Sydney didn’t want to say.

  “She screams like a banshee,” said Chase.

  “Don’t pull on people’s clothes,” I said to Jenn.

  “Banshee,” said Chase.

  “I sense that things are falling apart,” I said.

  “Don’t mind them,” said Jade.

  “Well, it’s getting towards the end of the day,” I said.

  Jade said, “Everyone just wants to go, Whoop, out of here!” She started wrestling with her clothes and giggling. She held up a dry-erase marker.

  “I threw it at her, and then it went down her shirt,” said Owen.

  “GUYS, THE NOISE LEVEL. BRING IT DOWN. BRING IT DOWN.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Baker,” said Jade. She and Owen briefly struggled, trying to sit in the same seat.

  “No, no,” I said. “No.”

  “Sit next to Jenn,” said Owen, “or in your own seat.”

  Jade wanted to sit next to Chase. She moved to an unoccupied seat.

  “What scientific conclusions can you draw about this class right now?” I asked her.

  “You can look at where they’re grouped,” said Jade. “Jenn would go with Chase, and those three would stay together. Mackenzie would go with them. Darryl would stay with them. Marcy would also go with them. And Sydney would go with them.”

  “What are you doing?” said Caleb.

  “He asked me to classify the class,” said Jade.

  “Any unknown species?” said Caleb.

  Chase asked me, “What’s the function of a eubacteria?”

  “It doesn’t do a damn thing,” I said. “No, it breaks stuff down, doesn’t it?”

  Chase began showing Sydney how to fold her lip down.

  “I can’t do it,” said Sydney.

  “Just fold your lip down! It’s not hard, look!” He made a bizarre lip face and got a laugh.

  Jade looked at the archaebacteria questions and sighed. “What’s the answer to this one?” she asked Chase.

  “You’re the smart one,” said Chase.

  Jade turned to me. “Can you just like give me the answers and I’ll write them down?” she said to me.

  “I think you should do what you’ve got to do,” I said.

  I sat down in a different chair. “Are you here tomorrow?” asked Regan.

  I said I was. “What that means, I don’t know.” I was making him nervous. “I won’t sit next to you if you don’t want me to. I’m just circulating. I’m like a little blood cell. Meanwhile you’re busy.” I looked at all the pencil writing on his kingdom packet. “I see massive progress.”

  Mackenzie said, “We’re all really stressed out right now. We have so much homework. All these level-two things.”

  Kyle was passing the time by pretending to stab himself in the eye with his pencil. I looked at his packet. He’d answered question one on the protist page: How are Protists, Archaebacteria, and Eubacteria the same? Different? He’d written, They have one cell. He was stuck on the differences.

  Owen’s BrainPOP test crashed and he lost all his answers. He began it again.

  “What are we doing tomorrow?” asked Caleb.

  I looked at the whiteboard. “Tomorrow you’re doing the finch exercise.”

  Jade said, “We could take a picture of all these people, and then write, weird, awkward, short, and tall.”

  “You wouldn’t want to make personal remarks, would you?” I said.

  “That’s why I didn’t go with sexy, I went with tall, because he’s tall.”

  Chase, who was pleased to be called tall, said, “I’m a socially awkward entrepreneur.”

  Jade started taking pictures with her iPad.

  “No, no,” I said. “Jade, hold it together. There’s five more minutes.”

  Worse things were happening on the other side of the class: Darryl, Mackenzie, and Marcy had Sharpies out and they were marking each other with dots on the small of their backs. I got them to cut it out and took a bite from the unbitten side of my apple.

  Owen sharpened his pencil aggressively. He checked the point. “There we go!” he said.

  Music wafted from an iPad. Pictures were taken and discussed. Chase was a hub of activity. Darryl sang, “Eight six seven five three oh nigh-ee-ine.” The whole class began singing it. I began singing it.

  The PA lady came on. “Good afternoon, please excuse the interruption for the afternoon announcements.” Intramurals. Drama rehearsal. The movie Frozen. Cameroon. Nobody listened.

  “Thank you, Mr. Baker,” said Chase. “You’re going to be here tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Caleb said, “Thank you for your time.”

  “Thank you for your time!” I said back.

  “I finished the test!” said Owen.

  “He did not finish the test!” said Kyle.

  “I did finish it! I finished it twice.”

  I suddenly thought, I love these kids. I really love these kids.

  End-of-day homeroom. Brock came flying in with his arms out singing, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!”

  Jeff walked in looking worried. “Did you find a paper on the ground with my name on it? It said ‘Jeff Lamarchais’ on it and it said ‘Frozen movie’ on it?” I hadn’t. He hunted worriedly around the desks for the permission slip and then left.

  Georgia walked in, saw the empty room, and said, “Everyone went away!” She left. A moment later the room was crowded again. Then it was empty.

  “Brock, you’re in trouble,” called Marcy.

  “What did I do now?” The room was full again and wild and loud. What the hell, it was Pajama Day.

  I asked Luke what the highlight of his day had been, seriously.

  Luke didn’t want to say.

  Evan said, “He sat with his girlfriend at lunch.”

  “‘Girlfriend,’” said Luke bashfully. “Heh-heh.”

  Chair stacking. The first-wave kids left. Next to the door, where I stood, was posted the middle school dress code. Forbidden were short shorts, tank tops, belly shirts, basketball shirts without an undershirt, spaghetti straps, tube tops, spandex, spiked dog collars, spiked wristbands, bandannas, and pajamas.

  Darryl, Mackenzie, Georgia, and Cheyenne, all dressed in pajamas, came in and put on One Direction. “This is the song we were telling you about!” said Mackenzie.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Then they put on a beautiful John Legend song, “All of Me.” They boosted the volume by putting the iPhone in a plastic cereal bowl and began singing along: “My head’s underwater, but I’m breathing fine!” They moved their heads and held their arms out and swayed. “You’re crazy, and I’m out of my mind!” They carried the bowl full of music away with them.

  The PA lady came on. “Please excuse the interruption. For those of you who are staying for the student council’s showing of the movie Frozen, to benefit the Tara School in Cameroon, we’re going to begin calling down teams. But just a quick reminder that all school rules apply. There is no taking of any pictures. On your way down to the cafeteria to view the movie, please stop by the library and drop your bags and your iPads off, as you typically do for dances. With that said, could all student council members and Team Nile students who are staying for the movie please make your way to the cafeteria.”

  Cheyenne had done her hair in a new way, pulling it to the side. “Does this look totally unnatural?” she said. “Be honest with me.”

  “Yes,” said Brock.

  “It looks like you blow-dried your
hair,” said Georgia. “It looks really good.”

  The PA lady came back on. “Team Orinoco students attending the movie can make their way to the cafeteria.”

  “I want to get good seats,” said Cheyenne. Everyone rushed off.

  An excited roar came from the hallway. The full reality of what was about to happen was beginning to register. In the darkness of the cafeteria they were going to watch a beloved movie, and everyone would be wearing pajamas. It was a sort of sleepless best-friend sleepover involving hundreds of people.

  When everyone was gone I went to the office. “You survived!” said the assistant principal.

  “I’m in one piece,” I said. I drove home.

  Day Ten, over.

  DAY ELEVEN. Friday, April 4, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, SEVENTH GRADE

  SHE STOLE MY GRAPE

  ON FRIDAY, AN EARLY-RELEASE DAY, I drove to the middle school thinking about my eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. James, a kindly red-haired man with tinted aviator glasses and muttonchop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. Eighth grade in my section of the city was taught at Monroe High School, a brick monster of a place with guards in the hallways. Mr. James made us memorize the taxonomic rankings, and he taught us the classification kingdoms, but there weren’t six of them back then, and they had different names, except for plants and animals. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, Mr. James liked to hang out with the English teacher, Mr. Dean, who had slicked-back hair and a bunchy jaw muscle. Once I took a shortcut to my place in the cafeteria by walking over an empty lunch table. It took only a second. I sat down quickly, hoping that nobody had seen me, but knowing that I’d just done something very wrong and very stupid. A minute went by and I thought I was in the clear. Then I felt a hand take hold of my hair, which was long, and yank my head up hard. It was Mr. Dean, the English teacher, smiling a cruel smile. “You think that’s funny?”

  “No.” My hair was held tight in his fist, pulling me up straight.

  “I don’t want to ever see you do that again.”

  “Okay.”

  He let go of my hair and walked away. I saw him across the room, talking to Mr. James and pointing to me.

  Because Mr. Dean hated me, my mother talked to the principal and got me moved to a different section at Monroe, with four new eighth-grade teachers. My new science teacher wasn’t nearly as good as Mr. James, but my new English teacher, Mr. Toole, was smart. He winked a lot, and he said I should buy a book of poems called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. I memorized a poem in it by William Jay Smith. Mr. Toole wore a three-piece gray suit every day, and he liked Shakespeare. He told me and my friend Nick, who was from Aberdeen, Scotland, to build a scale model of the Globe Theatre, instead of reading To Kill a Mockingbird for a month with the rest of the class. So we got to work. We found some Elizabethan plans and we used Popsicle sticks and toothpicks and pinkish plaster of Paris and made a horrible-looking likeness of the Globe Theatre that sat, quietly shedding bits of plaster, in the project room. We didn’t read any Shakespeare. Later Mr. Toole told us to read Homer’s Iliad and write an epic poem of our own. We did that, too. Mr. Toole was the best teacher I had, and he changed my life.