A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  “Miss . . . Pepper? I . . .” The voice, thin and squeaky, grew ever more attenuated until I couldn’t tell whether he—she?—was still trying to speak or not.

  “Are you there? I can’t hear you. What is it? Who is it?”

  “I . . . Please, I’m sorry, I . . .” And in the background, somebody shouting something like “Do it!” and then another voice, lower, more adult, but unintelligible.

  And then click and silence.

  “Who was that?” Mackenzie asked.

  “I have no idea. We should have gotten caller ID. No, that’s wrong—it was a student. Somebody who would call me Miss Pepper. And who was upset—and apologetic. Sorry about something. But then they hung up. Somebody else was in the room, and then, I think, somebody else again.”

  “Maybe they got scared,” Mackenzie said.

  “Or they didn’t want whoever came in to hear what they would say,” Pip said.

  I looked at him with new respect. That made sense. Nothing was to be said in front of the adult. The witness.

  But nothing said about what? I was so tired of having unending questions and no answers.

  * * *

  Seven

  * * *

  * * *

  I began the next day with great resolve and a major attitude readjustment.

  I’d talked with Mackenzie late into the night, in the privacy of our room, and he’d helped me understand that I had lost objectivity and was seeing ghosts and goblins even before Halloween. I was working much too hard to force random and unexceptional happenings—a look, a prank, girlfriends disagreeing with each other, another teacher’s power struggle with a class, a pilfered exam, stupid jokes—all fit together into one negative picture.

  No more making myself crazy that way, I decided. I was going to step back, observe, and refrain from leaping to conclusions until I saw what in fact was going on.

  If anything was.

  I hoped Pip would go out and do something today—despite the rain—but if he wanted to stare at the TV, so be it. That, too, was depressingly ordinary and not something to worry over.

  Right now, normal reigned—and rained—and began with the fact that I couldn’t find a parking space. There’s the semblance of a faculty lot behind the school, but we’re in the city where real estate’s dear and free parking rare; so the space barely holds half the faculty’s cars. There’s no provision for the overflow except messages from Maurice Havermeyer urging carpooling, public transit, or the healthful benefits of hoofing it.

  His suggestions are valid for both ecology and health, but they are less than appealing when you don’t live close to anyone else on the faculty and you have to go on surveillance after school and more so when it’s raining.

  And when one spot is always reserved for him.

  Early as I was, there were no more spaces behind the school. I circled the block, then made wider circles until finally, in despair, I parked three blocks away. Only then did I realize I’d left my umbrella home.

  I speed-walked through the downpour, nostalgic for yesterday’s brilliant autumn colors and weather. Today, the sky was gunmetal and rain flailed the trees, ripping off red and yellow leaves which, on the sidewalk, became slippery traps.

  I broke into a careful trot, one hand holding my backpack over my head. My hair dripped down my neck inside the raincoat as I crossed the street—jaywalking or, more accurately, jayrunning—and headed into the narrow driveway that ran behind the school, resenting every one of the car owners who’d made it to safe harbor.

  I stopped when I stepped on glass.

  Juan Reyes’s Toyota was old but lovingly—one might even say obsessively—maintained, but now its left headlight was smashed.

  It had obviously happened here, while the car was parked. Despite the rain—I was too drenched to care—I paused and looked back over his car, as if I’d find clues to who’d smashed the headlight. I found none, of course, but saw jagged marks near his door handle. He’d been keyed.

  J A R had been cut into the waxed paint. A crude and ugly monogram.

  It was difficult squelching the return of the anxiety. Actually, impossible. It didn’t matter if I liked the man. I felt sorry for him. I wasn’t overreacting. This was too much.

  Once inside, I walked through clusters of students, all hiding from the rain, into the office, shaking myself out like a puppy.

  Harriet’s eyes were wide behind the horn rims. “Oooooh,” she said, “somebody got caught in the storm! Remember—it’s just liquid sunshine!”

  I understood that hostile expression about wiping a grin off somebody’s face and I clenched my fists to keep from doing so.

  She smiled. “Have a good day, anyway!” She sounded as if she really meant it, as if each day were a completely new start wherein anything good was not only possible, but probable. That was undoubtedly how she’d endured a dozen years of Erroll.

  “You don’t happen to have a towel around, do you?”

  “There are paper towels in the—”

  I imagined my head plastered with them—instant papier-mâché. “Thanks, but never mind. Meanwhile, did anybody turn in a roll book?”

  “Are teachers supposed to turn in—”

  “I mean did anybody find one? And then bring it to you?”

  “Yours?”

  I nodded. Rainwater dribbled down my face.

  “Oh, my. That’s bad. That’s really bad, but no. Nothing. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for it.” I pulled off my raincoat. The damp had wormed its way through to my bone marrow.

  I waited for Harriet, Havermeyer’s emissary, to broach the amorphous “thing” to which Reyes had alluded, but refused to describe. But Harriet didn’t look about to spring bad news on me. She didn’t even have the grieving and pitying expression I was sure she’d wear if she were keeping an unpleasant secret from me.

  Harriet didn’t know about it. I’d have to ask him myself, as soon as I collected whatever lurked in my mailbox, starting with the inevitable bulletin from Maurice Havermeyer, who believed these daily wastes of paper fulfilled his administrative duties.

  “Today,” his message said, “as the calendar indicates the autumnal proximity of the traditional trick-or-treat ambience of Halloween and the appropriately named Mischief Night, it behooves us all to be on the watchout for those who are apt to pervert the spirit of the season and it would not be amiss in addition to so instruct your students as well, both for observation of their surrounds and for considerations of their own behavior.”

  What the devil did he mean? Havermeyer’s verbosity always tempts me to find a red pencil and give him a failing grade.

  English teachers are probably to blame for the Havermeyers of the world. “Write a five-hundred-word essay,” we have been known to say, without adding: make each word necessary to clearly express your meaning. In essence, we ask for bulk, not content, so padding and redundancy get built into the system.

  I wondered what he meant by being on the watchout. Should we carry binoculars? Arm ourselves? Consider anybody in a mask—even on Halloween—a risk? And couldn’t he call it a lookout the way anybody else would—or did he choose watch because it had five letters to look’s four? For all the sense of what his message meant, he might as well have declared the school on orange alert. It was the color of the season in any case.

  I scooped up the rest of the contents of my mailbox, tossed the meaningless directive, and was about to leave, when Harriet issued a loud “Ta-da!” and I wheeled around.

  She’d placed an enormous pumpkin on the divider-counter. It had a have-a-nice-day face painted on it and a black pointed hat atop a black wig.

  My mother-in-law would not have liked that effigy of witchdom one bit. Bad hairdo, orange face, ugly hat.

  “What do you think?” Harriet said. “Seasonal and jolly enough? I wanted to get all of us into the spirit.”

  “Are you going to the party? Bringing Erroll?” It would be fun to see the taxidermist in person. In my mind, he’d be
come one of his specimens, stuffed and mounted on a simulated lawn.

  “Wish I could,” she said, with a shake of her hair, “but what with Erroll making up for when he had the flu, and his groundhog due any minute now . . .”

  “A real pity,” I said. “Some other time, then.” I turned to leave, but then I remembered the half dozen letters of recommendation I had to write, and that starting those letters was item number four on today’s list of chores, tonight’s after-dinner activity. I was going to try once again to avoid the December letter-writing crunch. “Could I have a dozen sheets of letterhead?”

  College application time had officially begun when the school year did, but Philly Prep students weren’t the most forward-thinking young people. A month from now, they’d be rushing in to ask for recommendations, and by winter break, they’d be in a state of crazed delirium asking not only for the letters, but for help with their essays.

  And if they weren’t panicked by then, their parents definitely would be. Many sacrificed New Year’s Eve plans, watching the clock count down to a midnight deadline while they all but guided the hand of a young person who professed to want college, but not if it involved writing an essay.

  I try not to take their aversion to expressing themselves on paper personally. I do, however, find it amusing that those same writing-averse seniors are apt to ask me, their English teacher, for a recommendation.

  But a handful of students had somehow known to play it smart and endearingly early, and had given me a decent lead time along with envelopes addressed to each of the colleges on their lists. I had every hope of being as organized and efficient as they were.

  “No problem,” Harriet said, and I once more felt the thrill of obtaining supplies without begging. In years and secretaries past, I’d gotten really good at wheedling but I was not sorry to give up that acquired talent.

  Harriet opened a drawer. “It must be hard writing all those letters. I remember when Erroll was applying . . .”

  I found it difficult to believe that taxidermy school required academic letters of recommendation, but what did I know?

  Harriet held up a single sheet of paper. “That’s odd. I would have sworn I had a good-sized pile of letterhead right where it belongs in that top drawer. But there was only this one. I’m having a senior moment!”

  She looked worried. “Well, never mind,” she said. “No use crying over spilled paper, or something like that. I’ll get you some—and some for me, too—out of the supply closet.”

  I watched her unlock the walk-in closet door, and tried not to overreact, to instead remain objective, as planned. Not to think that if Harriet thought she’d had a stack of letterhead there, she had. Now it was gone. She hadn’t had a senior moment. The seniors were having one of their moments. Again.

  That’s what I tried not to think.

  Louis Applegate, who taught history and government, and Edie Friedman, who taught gym, walked in simultaneously but not together. Of all the women I’ve known who were actively hunting for a man, and by now, in my thirties, I’ve known my share, Edie Friedman wins the prize as most desperate. But two years ago, when he started teaching here, Louis had asked her out. She’d crossed him off the eligibility list during that first coffee date.

  This was amazing to anyone who knew Edie. Her standards were almost nonexistent, and here was a decent-looking and interested bachelor, but she described him as “not there” and left it at that. Tisha Banks, the student teacher, must have felt the same lack of vibes this year.

  “Morning,” I said to them while I waited for Harriet.

  “And to you!” Edie said with a grin. Louis, however, waited before returning the greeting, with a stance that made it clear that maybe this was a good morning and maybe it wasn’t, and how would I know what constituted good, anyway? He knew more than I did, his posture indicated, and it was quite possible this morning had its flaws.

  Behind him, Edie rolled her eyes. I decided that I would figure out the Constitutional Hall project on my own and spare myself the company of Louis Applegate. A dull jerk for a few minutes in the morning is infinitely preferable to a dull jerk for hours on a class outing.

  “Must be gremlins underfoot.” Harriet carried a ream of paper. “After all, ’tis the season.” She tilted her head toward the pumpkin, and Edie complimented her decorating skills.

  When it comes to gremlins, I’m pretty much an agnostic. Ditto for ghosties and goblins, though I like the sound of all of them. I wish I could ascribe life’s oddments to them. Instead, I believed in humans who wanted to be sure of good recommendations, even if they had to write them themselves, who were smart enough to plan ahead. Letterhead missing now wouldn’t be nearly as suspect as letterhead missing in two months.

  Of course, that was precisely the sort of thinking I’d decided not to do anymore.

  I told myself that stealing letterhead was bad, forging letters of recommendation worse, but that even if I couldn’t recall hearing about it here before, it had probably happened and wasn’t indicative of anything specifically happening right now.

  I glanced at my watch, thanked Harriet, and left the office. Lots of time before school started. Rainy days were deceptive. On clear days, the students lounged around on the street and in the Square across from us, and the school remained in a pleasantly anticipatory hush until the bell rang. But on rainy days, the students treated the school hallways as if they were the pavement, and the din of young voices was already close to deafening. They were supposed to wait in the lunchroom at such times, but they’d perfected a delaying tactic, glancing at their watches and waiting until specifically, individually, asked to move on, then moving two feet, or simply exchanging positions and pausing again, so that it wasn’t worth the effort to try to herd them.

  I plowed through clumps and clusters of damp young people, and made my way up the marble stairs, which, after a fatal fall on them, had been outfitted with a broad runner in the school colors, maroon and gold. It was a great and overdue help on rainy and snowy days. Before this, large signs had been posted, the ones used when restrooms are being cleaned out. CAUTION: WET FLOOR.

  Typical Havermeyer way of handling a problem, albeit abnormally terse for him, but need I say such signs were not a great help? Only luck and teenage agility had saved the students’ bodies to date.

  I had time for two necessary preclass stops, and the first person I wanted to see wasn’t hard to find. Ms. Liddy Moffatt, the school custodian, would have found my grade book if it had spent any time overnight anywhere in the school.

  “Yes, ma’am!” she said. “How can I help you today? You the one left the perfectly usable ballpoint in your room? I think that was all we found, oh, except for some notes. Did you know that somebody named Annabel is hopelessly in love with Chuck?” Liddy, the world’s number one recycler, was not above studying the scraps and detritus she collected.

  “I—no. I didn’t know, and I wish them well, but that pen wasn’t—”

  “Didn’t think it would be you. You’re a good conservationist. People like you aren’t the ones messing this planet up. But I did find something—a poem—on your floor and I know your kids did that poetry show.” She reached into one of the dozen pockets on the oversized apron she wore. “Here it is! Don’t want one of your young poets all worried about losing his homework.”

  I glanced at the sheet she handed me. It had no name or section on it. I looked at the poem:

  Dim candles burn

  Incense on the air

  Evening has come

  Far in the mist

  Against all fear—

  I stopped reading. I didn’t remember it from class, and I was not sad about that. It felt like precisely the sort of overly precious and meaningless mood piece that my students had feared all poetry was. I glanced further, and it looked just as bad:

  Greatness arose

  Limited nowhere

  Intent fulfilled

  Armor and Shield

  Resist the nig
ht

  I wondered whose work it was as I put it into my backpack. “Thanks,” I said, “but I had a question about my roll book. I must have misplaced it.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I was wondering if you saw it anywhere. You’re so thorough, you and your crew . . .” But of course, had she found it, she’d have galloped in with her trophy the way she had with the wretched poem.

  She shook her head and said only, “Nope. Would have found it, too, if it was here.”

  Nothing left, then, but to move on. I headed across the hall to Juan Reyes’s closed classroom door wondering whether I should tell him about his car before or after I asked for clarification of my “troubles.” I could see advantages and disadvantages to both placements.

  Again, students milled about, exchanging gossip, awaiting the bell. Heaven forbid they should actually, willingly enter a classroom before it was compulsory. I made my way around them, greeting some, eavesdropping when I could, trying not to react to the lovesick tenth grade couple staring into each others’ faces with stunned and daft-looking adulation, and not to interrogate Seth, who stood in the middle of the crowd in his raingear, the hood still up.

  I had to convince Juan Reyes that I understood his reserve, his need to preserve confidences, not to confuse opinion with fact—but despite all that, I needed to know at least this portion of what was going on in my life, because it could be important. It might even help me find my missing roll book.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the clump of students near Reyes’s closed door, a clump that included the usual suspects: Wilson, Susan, Erik, Nita, and Allie. Slowly, they acknowledged me and moved back, still talking to one another. I put my hand on the doorknob, mentally rehearsing how I would circumvent his scruples and get to the truth. Why did he so intimidate me that I was searching for my words?

  The door was locked. I couldn’t blame him. I seldom locked mine, since there was nothing much worth taking, but he had every reason to lock up.

  However, did that apply when he was inside? Light came from below the door, and I knew his car was outside. Was he hiding from us?