Confusion Is Nothing New

by Paul Acampora

  Dad and I slide into adjacent student desks while Sister Stephanie fusses with a laptop that’s propped on a podium. A moment later, a video of the St. Francis Marching Band covers the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  “Is that from last night?” I ask.

  “It is.” Sister Stephanie hits a key on the laptop, and the classroom fills with the “Jump on It” beat, which, I have to say, still sounds great. On the board, Daniel and I are dancing, the band is jumping, and then the piccolo is flying. Now Daniel and Mr. DeGroot have met on the stairs. The tension is rising, and suddenly a glockenspiel soars into view. The camera captures the silver instrument’s brief flight as it crashes and careens all the way down to the field. Without warning, the person filming the scene swivels back around and finds our band teacher sprawled on his backside.

  “Cut!” Sister Stephanie calls out. She halts the playback.

  The classroom is quiet for a long time. Just a couple of feet away, the expression on my father’s face reminds me of a time during the summer between first and second grades. Dad and I had walked to a park near our house so I could play on the playground. We stumbled across two middle school boys lying in the grass sharing a cheap BB gun. They were taking turns firing at the crows and grackles that landed on top of the nearby swing set. There were kids playing on that swing set. Dad snatched the gun, snapped it over his knee, and gave each boy a piece of the rifle. One of them opened his mouth to protest. Before he could speak, Dad held out a hand to stop him. “A million years of evolution suggests that it’s not always the strong that survive,” Dad said. “Sometimes it’s the silent.”

  The boys ran home. Silently. Right now, I’m thinking it would be good for me to be as quiet as possible too.

  “I can’t believe you threw that glockenspiel,” Dad finally says to me.

  I shrug. “It seemed like the right thing to do at that time.” So much for silence.

  Neither Dad nor Sister offers a reply.

  “It might have been the highlight of the game,” I add.

  “You should know that I’ve fired Mr. DeGroot,” Sister Stephanie announces.

  Dad’s head whips around as fast as mine.

  “I have high expectations for every member of the St. Francis school community,” she continues. “Mr. DeGroot did not meet those expectations.”

  “You fired him?” I say.

  “I fired him,” Sister tells me, “and now we’re moving on.”

  Dad considers the small woman at the front of the room. “You haven’t changed much, have you?” he asks.

  “In some ways yes,” says Sister. “In some ways no.”

  Dad turns to me. “Sister Stephanie ran cross-country in high school.”

  “That’s true,” she says. “I also played tuba in the marching band.”

  “Is that why your picture’s on the Wall of Fame?” I ask.

  Sister shares a quick smile. “It wasn’t for the tuba.”

  “She was Cross-Country State Champion four years in a row,” Dad tells me. “And that’s a sport that requires speed, endurance, and a very high tolerance for pain.”

  Sister shrugs. “It was a good way to see if I had what it takes to be a Catholic school principal.”

  “You used to wear a T-shirt,” Dad continues. “It said—”

  Sister finishes the sentence. “Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.”

  “Too bad Mr. DeGroot never saw that shirt,” says Dad.

  “He saw it,” Sister replies. “It’s hanging in my office right now.”

  “You had it in your office at St. Corentin’s too,” I recall. “It was right next to a poster that said, ‘It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s the flying nun.’ ”

  Sister grins a little. “I love the flying nun.”

  The flying nun poster showed a smiling, dark-haired girl wearing a long, white religious habit and a huge, pale headpiece shaped like a pair of wings. Apparently, the hat enabled her to soar above the seaside towns pictured below her feet. When I was little, I assumed the picture was young Sister Stephanie leaving the convent for the very first time. Even now, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I was right.

  “With luck, Mr. DeGroot will be the last person to see my decorations and believe that they’re only there for decoration.” Sister points at the image frozen on the wall. “Speaking of Mr. DeGroot, this video does not capture exactly how the man ended on top of his alto sax section.” She turns to me. “What happened?”

  “Did Daniel punch the guy?” Dad asks.

  I shake my head. “It was my fault.”

  “You punched him?” says Sister.

  “No. He jumped back and tripped after I threw the glockenspiel.”

  Dad runs a hand over his head. “Did you really have to throw the thing?”

  “Did you really have to tell me my mother was dead just before I headed off to the football game?”

  “Wait a minute,” says Sister. “When did she die?”

  “A couple weeks ago,” says Dad.

  “A couple weeks ago?” This is news to me. “You didn’t tell me till yesterday!”

  “I wouldn’t have told you at all, but then I thought her obituary might show up in the Rockhill Free Press.”

  “Did it?” asks Sister Stephanie.

  Dad shakes his head. “Korky moved to Boston years ago. There’s no reason for her to show up in the Rockhill newspaper now, but you never know.” He turns to me. “I thought it would be better if you heard it from me.”

  “Gee,” I say, “thanks.”

  “Ellie,” says Dad. “You never even met her. Stop talking like this is some kind of—”

  “It just would have been nice to meet her one day,” I continue. “Now that’s never going to happen.”

  “Guess what,” says Dad. “There’s lots of things that are never going to happen. You’ll never take a piano lesson from Beethoven. I’ll never pitch for the Red Sox. Neither one of us is going to steal the Millennium Falcon and destroy the Death Star.”

  Dad and I are both huge Star Wars fans.

  “Bruce,” Sister Stephanie says to my father. “You are intentionally missing the point.”

  “Here’s the point,” says Dad. “There are seven billion people on the planet. Ellie won’t meet most of them, and she’ll be just fine.”

  I cross my arms. “Only one of those seven billion strangers was my mother. In case you can’t pick her out, she’s stacked with the dead ones.”

  My father gets to his feet.

  “Sit down!” Sister yells at him.

  Surprisingly, Dad sits.

  Sister turns to me. “Ellie, is this why you tossed a thousand-dollar musical instrument down the grandstand?”

  “It probably influenced my decision,” I admit.

  Sister Stephanie sighs. “It seems that you and Mr. DeGroot both carried some baggage into that football game.”

  “I have a dead mom,” I say. “What’s his excuse?”

  “I’m not sure that it’s any of your business,” the principal snaps at me.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “Apology accepted.” Sister Stephanie points at the image of Mr. DeGroot still tangled in the saxophonists on the board. “Now please tell me how we got to this.”

  I take a big breath and try to explain. “We were just playing and dancing, and then the piccolo hit me in the back of the head. That was an accident. Daniel was going to get it, and suddenly Mr. DeGroot was being a bully.”

  “That’s when you stepped in?” says Sister.

  “Daniel has a temper,” I say. “I didn’t want him to do something stupid.”

  “Thank goodness you were there to save the day,” says Dad.

  “Bruce,” Sister says in a forced calm voice, “sarcasm is rarely an effective parenting technique.”

  “Rarely,” Dad says. “But not never.”

  The principal turns back to me. “Go on.”

  “I was already angry
because of everything else. It felt like the whole world was going crazy. I just wanted it to stop.”

  Sister Stephanie nods. “I know the feeling well.”

  “Do you deal with it by tossing a glockenspiel?” Dad asks her.

  “It’s not an option I’d ever considered,” she admits.

  “It worked for me,” I say.

  “Unfortunately not so much for me.” Sister Stephanie leans against a desk. “Thanks to your flying glockenspiel, I have to meet with the superintendent, the school board, and my staff to let them know that I fired a teacher because of inappropriate conduct. I’ll have to make some kind of announcement to parents and students too. I’ll probably get a call from a newspaper reporter because there is an online video that appears to show a St. Francis of Assisi faculty member bullying one kid while another kid tosses a very expensive musical instrument down a flight of bleacher stairs. Meanwhile, the same video suggests that a member of our marching band may have assaulted an adult, who, quite frankly, might have deserved it.”

  Dad opens his mouth as if he’s about to speak.

  “Wait,” says Sister Stephanie, “there’s more. I’ll have to explain all this to our teachers’ union. I have to find a new music instructor. I need to purchase a new glockenspiel. Most importantly, I have to make sure that all our students take away an appropriate lesson from this fiasco.”

  “And a piccolo,” I say.

  “What?” says Sister.

  “Daniel and I never found the piccolo.”

  Sister Stephanie’s eyes narrow.

  “But we’ll go back and look again,” I add quickly.

  “Good,” she says. “You’re also going to do a billion hours of community service, and I’m going to announce that you’ve agreed to pay for the glockenspiel.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Dad. “A thousand dollars—”

  “Don’t worry,” Sister tells him. “The school insurance will cover the cost of the instrument, but a principal should never miss an opportunity to appear unreasonably harsh.”

  Dad relaxes a bit. “Okay. That makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I say.

  “Nobody asked you,” Dad tells me.

  “Can I say something?” I ask.

  “You can say thank you,” says Dad.

  “For what?”

  “For not getting suspended, expelled, or charged with assault and battery.”

  “But I did the right thing!” I protest. “Why am I getting punished?”

  “Ellie,” says Sister Stephanie, “why did you ever think that doing the right thing would cost nothing?”

  On Sunday, Daniel and I wade through small piles of windblown trash while we look for his piccolo beneath the Howling Wolf bleachers. Nearby, a metal trash can tipped on its side explains the mess. Raccoons must have knocked the bin over during the night. I step over limp French fries and red, plastic cups that hold nothing but the syrupy, sweet smell of old, flat soda. On the plus side, I’m finding a lot of loose change.

  Daniel spots a stick in the dirt. He grabs it and uses it to sweep garbage out of his way.

  I find two more dimes and a quarter to add to my pocket. “I really think Sister Stephanie has a crush on my father.”

  “You’ve mentioned that about a thousand times.” Daniel ducks to avoid smacking his head on a low-hanging metal beam. “First of all, she doesn’t. Second of all, so what?”

  “So she’s a nun.” I nudge an empty popcorn box with my toe in the hopes that it’s hiding a piccolo. It’s not.

  “She wasn’t always a nun,” Daniel reminds me.

  “I think she still likes him.”

  “Everybody likes your dad, Ellie.”

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “That’s because you’re not a nun with a secret crush.”

  I tip over another sticky cup. “Not funny, Daniel.”

  He continues swinging the stick through the trash. “Imagine if Sister Stephanie was your mom.”

  “Shut up.” I told Daniel about my dead mom earlier in the day. He knows she’s been missing for years. News that she’s dead is a new wrinkle.

  “Having a nun for a mother would probably be complicated,” he suggests.

  “What part of shut up do you not understand?”

  “That would be all the parts.” He pokes at a couple of old football programs while the last sunshine of the day filters through the metal bleachers above us.

  “Just find the piccolo, okay?”

  He stops. “It’s not my fault that we’re down here, Ellie.”

  “Actually,” I tell him, “it is.”

  Daniel considers this. “Okay,” he finally says. “That’s true, but—”

  “But nothing. You dropped the piccolo. I’m the one with a billion hours of community service. Besides that, I’m supposed to figure out who posted the online video and convince them to take it down.”

  Daniel holds up his hand, then waves a finger in the air as if he’s working out a math problem on an invisible chalkboard. “According to my calculations,” he tells me, “it will take approximately one hundred and fourteen thousand years to finish a billion hours of community service.” He lowers his hand. “I can see why you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset.” I give a green, plastic soda bottle a ferocious kick. The empty container ricochets off a rusty electrical box and nearly hits Daniel in the head.

  “I’m glad you’re not upset,” he says.

  “Maybe I’m a little upset.”

  “Would you feel better if we found your mom?” Daniel asks.

  “I’d feel better if we found the piccolo.”

  Daniel lifts his stick and points at a knothole in the wooden bench directly above my head. “I was sitting right there.”

  I lean back, look around, and spot the shiny, silver instrument just an arm’s length away. It’s balanced on an old metal beam, so I reach up, grab the thing, and hand it to Daniel. He drops the stick, takes the piccolo, and begins to play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while we head out from beneath the bleachers and back toward open sky.

  “Hey, Pied Piper,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

  Daniel lowers his piccolo. “The Pied Piper was a medieval German rat catcher, Ellie. You know how I feel about rodents.”

  Just then, I notice a figure walking toward the end zone near the school parking lot. “Speaking of rodents.”

  Daniel turns to see what I’m looking at. “Is that Mr. DeGroot?”

  Even at this distance, the beard and the shaggy hair make it easy to identify our former band teacher. “That’s him,” I say.

  “What’s he doing?”

  I squint. “It looks like he’s coming our way.”

  Daniel says nothing.

  I take his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” Daniel tells me.

  “He lost his job because of us.”

  “He lost his job because of himself.”

  “He might not see it that way,” I point out.

  “Then he’s seeing it wrong.”

  “I still don’t want to talk to him.” Above us, the sky is turning from a late afternoon coral pink into deep evening purple and blue. I pull Daniel toward the path that cuts through the nearby woods and leads back to our neighborhood. “Let’s leave Mr. DeGroot alone.”

  Daniel follows, but he doesn’t look away from the man on the other side of the field.

  “Do you want to have supper at my house tonight?” I ask as we make our way toward home.

  Daniel shoves his piccolo into a coat pocket. “Is one hundred and seventy-two the square root of twenty-nine thousand five hundred and eighty-four?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It is,” says Daniel. “And after supper, we can visit Anya Flowers.”

  Anya Flowers is a tall, dark-haired, Asian girl who attended seventh and eighth grades at St. Corentin’s with Daniel and me. Now she’s a St. Francis of Assisi freshman just like us. I nev
er spent much time with Anya when we were at St. Corentin’s. I still don’t hang out with her. It’s not that I dislike her. It’s just that she’s in all honors classes. I am not. Also, Anya’s sort of supermodel pretty, which is one more thing that I am not.

  “Why would we visit Anya Flowers?”

  “Because Anya is the one who took the video last night.”

  “When were you going to mention that?”

  Daniel pulls out his phone and checks the time. “At exactly seventeen minutes past five o’clock.” He looks up and grins. “I’m right on time.”

  Daniel’s father runs the service department for Rockhill Automotive. His mom works in the produce section at the Rockhill Market. I’d like to say that they’re both very nice people, but honestly, Mr. Field is a grouchy, pear-shaped man who rarely visits his son. Daniel’s mother is a small, raspy-voiced woman who likes to garden but hates to cook. She’s usually tired and cranky from working most of the time. In any case, Daniel eats with me and Dad almost every night. Daniel’s fascinated by the whole culinary thing, so he generally helps Dad with the cooking too.

  “We’re home!” Daniel calls when we step into my kitchen.

  Dad’s usually mixing up corn biscuits or sautéing vegetables or maybe even baking a cake by now. Tonight, there’s nothing.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “The chef doesn’t seem to be in,” Daniel observes.

  “Dad?” I holler.

  “In here.” My father’s voice comes from the living room, where we find him sitting on the sofa. A plain, fat shoe box rests at his feet.

  “What are you doing?” I ask when we enter the room.

  “I’m thinking.”

  I pull my sweatshirt over my head. “About what?”

  “About how much I enjoy hearing you play the piano.” He points at our old upright on the opposite side of the room. It’s a massive, mahogany monster that looks like a stack of dark coffins with a keyboard attached to the front. “How about a song?”

  “I’m still mad at you,” I tell him.

  “One song?” Dad says.

  Daniel plops onto the sofa beside my father. “Come on, Ellie.”

  “Fine.” I cross the room, toss my sweatshirt on the piano bench, and take a seat facing the keyboard. Without comment, I begin a Beethoven piece that Dad’s heard a million times.