Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

“I’m trying,” he said. “It doesn’t always work.”

  I watched some basketball happening for a while. Imogen came up to ask what we were doing in the afternoon. I looked at the plans. Lunch, silent reading, and literacy worksheets, I said.

  “Oh, no,” said Imogen. “I don’t like worksheets.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “I just like talking to people.”

  She pointed at the ground. “That’s a bunch of ants,” she said.

  “They work all the time,” I said. “After a rain they have to dig.”

  “Dig the little hole that they fall through,” said Imogen.

  “They have to take out the little grains of sand,” I said. “It’s a lot of work to be an ant.”

  “Especially when you’re so small,” said Imogen. “When I was living where my dad is living now, we used to have carpenter ants chewing our wall. All the time.”

  “We have them, too,” I said. “After a while the wood turns to powder.”

  “Especially when you have a little brother that likes poking holes in the wall.”

  Imogen sat under a tree and worked on her clipboard for a while. Then she coughed and said, “Ow.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “That’s deep in there.”

  She showed me what she’d written on her clipboard: “Dear, Mr. B, Today the class was grate!! Love Imogen.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “Let me ask you this, and answer me honestly. Does it drive you crazy that the teachers are always telling people to be silent, to be quiet? They’re always saying, ‘I hear people talking!’ Does that drive you nuts, or is that just the way school is?”

  “That’s just the way school is,” Imogen said, smiling.

  “It sometimes hurts me when a teacher suddenly says, ‘You will give me five minutes of recess!’”

  Imogen said, “Yeah, I saw you like blinking a couple times.”

  “Did you catch that? I didn’t know anyone caught that. Anyway, it’s all good, right?”

  “Mm,” she said.

  We looked out at the playground for a while. “Will you be happy when it’s summertime?”

  “Yes!”

  “LINE UUUUUUUP!” called Devin, Sabrina, and Demi.

  Balls went into wire baskets. Lines formed and went quiet. At Mr. Stowe’s signal, we snaked inside, with chosen door-holders holding the doors. It was time for lunch. “QUIET IN THE LINE,” I said. My class walked off to the cafeteria.

  Ten minutes later, three girls, Myra, Rianna, and Sabrina, returned carrying their brunch-for-lunch lunches and their lunches from home. “Can we sit in here?” said Rianna.

  “Everybody keeps barging into all of our fights,” said Myra.

  “We need to talk,” said Sabrina.

  “Yeah, we need to talk and work things out,” said Rianna.

  They pulled up chairs around a table near me and, using several colors of Sharpie, began making behavioral charts for each other, and for several other students who weren’t there, with boxes to check yes or no.

  “Do you need to talk in private?” I said, eating a sandwich at Mrs. Compton’s desk, under the American flag. “I can move.”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Sabrina.

  “We have to work this out ASAP,” said Rianna.

  “If we keep yelling at each other, Mrs. Compton will have to move us.”

  They talked seriously, at times formally, coloring in their charts, drawing lines with rulers—almost as if they were playing house or having a tea party. They were playing guidance counselor. Myra wrote, “No fighting, no bullying,” at the top of her paper. “That’s just a reminder,” she said. The problem, I gathered, had to do with secrets told to two of the boys and withheld from some of the girls. There was a fair amount of giggling.

  “Sabrina, eat over your tray,” said Myra.

  “Whenever we get in a fight, we write yes, and each box is for each day,” said Sabrina.

  “How about we have a Y for yes, and an N for no, since we have such tiny boxes?” said Rianna. She wrote an abbreviation key. “Y equals Y-E-S. N equals N-O.”

  They ate for a while.

  “I’d say we worked everything out pretty good,” said Rianna.

  “For today, should we put yes or no?” asked Myra.

  “It should be no, because we’re working it out.”

  They wrote “N” in the today boxes, and “talk” in the boxes for how they’d resolved their disagreement.

  Cecil came in. “What are you guys doing?”

  “We’re talking about our privates,” said Myra.

  Wild laughter. “Ew!”

  I stood. “It’s after one o’clock. It is SILENT READING. SHHHH.” I turned the lights off.

  “Can we keep going?” said Myra.

  I whispered, “No, it’s absolutely silent reading. You’re going to have to continue this meeting tomorrow. I like what you’re doing, but you’ve got to table it now.”

  A specials teacher came to take away several students.

  I turned off the fan. Merciful joy of no fan. “Marshall, sit down!” I hiss-whispered.

  “WHOO-HOO, WELCOME BACK!” said someone’s iPad reading app.

  “Turn all the sounds off, and just use your eyeballs to read the words,” I said. “Eyes, words—no sounds.”

  “Use your eyeballs,” said Demi.

  The room became hot. I inspected the fan, which turned out to have a low setting. It had been on high the whole time. I moved it closer to the window and turned it on low. Marshall said that Mrs. Compton allowed some kids to listen to books with headphones. Fine.

  “Oh, thank you, Your Majesty!” said an iPad.

  Finally the parachute of silence spread over the class. All we could hear was the now tolerable fan and Mrs. Hulbert in the next room yelling to her class to line up.

  Marshall continued to fidget. “Marshall!” said Ms. Lamarche. She coughed loudly and talked nonstop to the kids in the back of the class. She seemed to be physically incapable of whispering.

  When the half hour was over, I said, “Okay, it’s Showbie time. Get your iPads out, get them warmed up, get them revved up. There should be worksheets for you to do.”

  “God, there are three of them in there!” said Jonas.

  “Ugh,” said Devin.

  Marshall, meanwhile, had left for an alternate space-time continuum. “Flip around in your chair, Mr. Sir,” I said. “With your feet on the floor.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Marshall.

  “And your mind in your head.”

  I glanced at an iPad to see what the first worksheet was. It was about idioms. “Does anybody know what an idiom is?” They didn’t seem to know. “It’s a way of saying something without actually saying it. Be quiet, please. So if you say, ‘It is hot as a bee’s bananas outside,’ which I don’t think means all that much—”

  “It just means that it’s really hot,” said Elijah.

  “Right. So here it says, Casey is always on time. She is always . . .” Jonas was talking to Marshall. “Dudes? What is happening? Why don’t you stand up and read this one for us, please. Right now.”

  “Okay,” said Jonas. “Casey is always on time. She is always on the dot.”

  “What does ‘on the dot’ mean?” I said.

  “Um, they’re early?”

  “Right on time. It’s an example of something called an idiom. I liked the way you read it in a loud voice. Why don’t you try another? Jonas’s going to read this one in an even louder, ringinger voice.”

  “The pizza was selling like hotcakes!”

  Another ed tech arrived. She began having a chat with Ms. Lamarche, while I tried to explain the meaning of “chip on your shoulder.” I asked whether “Who let the dogs out?” was an idiom, not knowing the answer myself. The class ignored me.<
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  “Can I tell you a joke?” said Clayton. “What do bananas always say when they’re having fun?”

  “What?”

  “Go bananas!”

  “Good one,” I said. “What about ‘shake a leg’?”

  “What about ‘break a leg’?” asked Myra.

  “‘Break a leg’ means do really well, ‘shake a leg’ means get going.”

  The second Showbie worksheet was about a dentist. I turned off the fan and read it to them, with the two ed techs chatting in the back. The heck with them, I thought, I’ll just be like the robotics teacher and roar over them. “DAVE WAS A DENTIST,” I read. “However, he was a very special dentist. He was very, very tiny. In fact, he was smaller than a toothbrush.” Dave has a new patient, a lion, who is in terrible pain and can’t eat. Dave goes into the lion’s mouth, which smells very bad, and, taking stock of the situation while standing on the lion’s tongue, he spots a bad cavity in one of the lion’s back teeth. He fixes the cavity and the lion is happy. “However, the next time Dave saw the zookeeper coming, he hid in his closet. The end.” They had to answer detailed reading comprehension questions about the story: What was so special about Dave? What was the first thing he noticed when he stepped into the lion’s mouth? Etc. The worksheet seemed to be loosely based on William Steig’s Doctor De Soto, but without charm.

  “What was the smell like?” I said.

  “Smelled like raw poop,” said Cecil.

  “Lions eat a lot of meat, so it probably smelled like bad meat,” I said.

  Imogen coughed horribly. Elijah sneezed. “Bless you,” I said.

  Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on high.

  “How do you spell roar?” said Devin.

  Their last Showbie assignment was to write an alternative ending to Judith Viorst’s Lulu and the Brontosaurus, about a spoiled girl who wants a pet brontosaurus. It was an unusual book because it already had three endings, one sad, one happy, one mixed. “Write your own ending, and make it good,” I said. “Make the sentences rich. Lots of description. MY FRIENDS, IT’S TOO LOUD. Marshall, sit down. SIT DOWN. When you’ve written your end, bring it up to me, I’ll look it over, and then you can type it.”

  Kirsten brought her alternative ending up: every week, Lulu and the brontosaurus went ice-skating together. Good. I pointed to where she needed to capitalize and punctuate and she was off to type it on her iPad. In Caroline’s ending Lulu tricked the brontosaurus by inviting him over for cake and asking him to close his eyes; while the dinosaur’s eyes were trustingly closed, Lulu quickly built a wall around her house so he could never escape. Jonas’s ending was not a happy one: Lulu called the brontosaurus a hag and the brontosaurus farted in Lulu’s face and said he hated her. Cormac had Lulu inviting the brontosaurus to Thanksgiving dinner, whereupon she dressed him as a clown and played football with him—and the brontosaurus dropped all the passes. In Wayne’s wrap-up, Lulu invited the brontosaurus over to play on a pogo stick; while bouncing on the pogo, the brontosaurus went to the bathroom and fell into his own poop.

  “Right,” I said. “I want to hear more about how a brontosaurus can go on a pogo stick.”

  “He has really tiny feet?” said Wayne.

  “That’s quite an achievement. If you want to write about poop, that’s up to you, man. I think it would be better if you wrote about not-poop, but who am I to say?”

  “Sorry,” he said, chortling. “I already typed mine in. What do I do now?”

  I referred to the sub plans, and made an announcement. “IF YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR LULU ENDING, YOU CAN DO PICTURE OF THE DAY, FLUENCY CENTER, OR SHUFFLE CENTER, whatever that is.”

  “I’ll do Picture of the Day,” said Wayne.

  Sabrina said that Lulu and the brontosaurus didn’t end up living together, but they did schedule a playdate. Colleen, the selectively mute girl, wrote: Lulu asked the brontosaurus to be her pet, and she would give him leaves all the time, and would let him stay in the back yard. The end.

  “Nice going, Colleen,” I said.

  Rianna had filled a page with red printing. Lulu, she said, packed a pickle sandwich in her backpack and went for a walk in the woods, where she encountered a huge spider, who told her to give him something. Lulu took out her sandwich and gave the spider her backpack, and she kept walking till she got to the brontosaurus’s house. He gave her a snack and a new backpack; she hugged him and returned home.

  “Wow,” I said. “I like the pickle sandwich and the backpack. Only thing is huged—just add a g there. Excellent. How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  Elijah had a happy ending: Lulu wished the brontosaurus a great brontosaurusy life and carried him home on her back. “At least, that’s the most I know of his life,” he said.

  “Excellent job, man,” I said.

  I went over to Jonas and Marshall. “Dudes, you’re pushing your hips together in the same chair. That’s bizarre and ridiculous. Marshall, sit over here.”

  Porter’s ending was that Lulu invited the brontosaurus over for Christmas. The brontosaurus got a Great Dane as a present, and Lulu got a stuffed animal.

  Porter said, “Mrs. Baker—I mean Mr. Baker—what do I do now?”

  “Now just give it up,” I said. “You’re done. You’re so far done that you’re done beyond done.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Well, you’ve got Picture of the Day, Fluency Center, or Shuffle Center. What is Shuffle Center anyway?”

  “It’s what Colleen’s doing, see her?” said Porter, pointing across the room. “So I do one of those three? What happens if I do all three?”

  “Then you’ll just be in the stratosphere,” I said. “Get a whole book and read it and memorize it and say it to me backwards.”

  Clayton said that when the brontosaurus came to eat strawberry three-layer cake he experienced a sugar rush and cracked his head open. Lulu brought him to the doctor and he was so happy that he tossed Lulu up in the air and she hit Jupiter. She came down stupider.

  “Mr. Baker,” he said, “Devin is on the app store and he’s not supposed to be on the app store.”

  “Should we bring in the app police?” I said.

  Clayton made a siren sound and we strolled toward Devin, who got out of the app store at high speed.

  “Quickly changed it, did you?” I said to Devin. “Do you remember the story about Lulu and the brontosaurus?”

  “No.”

  “You do not? Where the heck have you been all my life? They’ve been reading it aloud in this class.”

  “I forget,” said Devin.

  Imogen, whose desk was near Devin, had put her head down, feeling terrible. She sat up, coughed, turned on her Kindle, and summarized one of the endings of Lulu, in which the brontosaurus had cake and went home.

  “I don’t like that story,” said Devin. “The girl has a big fat head.” It was true, in the illustrations she had a very large head. I told him to read some of the book.

  Marshall had written about the dinosaur smashing his head on a lot of trees until Lulu smacked him in the face.

  “Looks like you are done,” I said. “You can do Shuffleboard, Fluency Center, this and that.”

  Colleen silently brought up the work she’d done in the Shuffle Center. an octopus is a boneless creature, she’d written. octopuses can grow at night. they can live for six months to a couple of years.

  “Excellent,” I said. “I know you know this, but I’m just calling it to your attention. When you start a sentence, you want to start it with a capital, right?”

  She nodded.

  “You are in business,” I said. “Thank you very much for doing it. You are hot stuff.”

  “Colleen’s hot stuff,” said Cecil. He’d written that the brontosaurus ate ten thousand cookies at Lulu’s party, then excused himself to go to the bathroom: when he came ou
t he felt much better. Cecil’s deskmate Elijah was beside himself with hysterics over Cecil’s story.

  “I’M LIKING THESE ENDINGS, FOLKS!” I said. “A LOT OF GOOD WORK HAPPENED TODAY.”

  “Who did the longest one?” asked Myra.

  “The longest one was by Rianna,” I said. “Very long and very detailed, and it involved a pickle sandwich. I saw ones that involved ten thousand cookies, ones that involved bathrooms, I saw ones that involved cake, celebrations, Christmases.”

  Rianna, Myra, and Sabrina asked to go to the library.

  I said, “You are very quiet workers, so I think you can go to the library, yes.” I gestured toward the back of the class, where Marshall was raising hell. “Look at this pandemonium. Pandemonium means ‘wild chaos.’ You are calm. Thank you.”

  The intercom came on. “Mr. Baker? Can you please dismiss Jonas?”

  Everyone said goodbye. Bye, Jonas, bye, Jonas, bye, Jonas!

  “Good work today, Jonas,” I said.

  Devin was whispering into the fan. Had he read any of the book? He had. “How did it seem?” I said.

  “I can’t remember it. I don’t have a good memory.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  We were entering the horrific end-of-day limbo time. I thought maybe it would be a good idea to have some music, but while I was talking to Kirstin about what to play, things went wrong in the back. Wayne and Devin were making an iPad action movie in which Devin pretended to stab Wayne with a pair of children’s scissors. Ms. Lamarche saw it happen and pushed herself up out of her chair. “ALL BOYS BACK THERE, I WANT YOU IN YOUR SEAT,” she said.

  “Absolutely right,” I said.

  “THAT WAS NOT SAFE,” said Ms. Lamarche.

  “What did I do?” said Devin.

  “What did you do?” said Ms. Lamarche. “You stood over him with a pair of scissors, doing like this to his head. THAT IS NOT OKAY.”

  “It seems like toward the end of the day,” I said, “people begin to fall apart.”

  “Oh, we do,” said Cecil.

  “Especially him and him and him,” said Elijah, pointing to Marshall, Devin, and Wayne.

  “I can fall apart,” said Marshall. He pretended to lose an arm.