Nita spun around and marched off, and Allie ran after her with Jimmy waving his hands and shouting something.
Did any of this have to do with the events of the day—the injury to the teacher they’d been harassing? Or the expulsion of Cheryl Stevens?
Probably not. Too much of a stretch, and too much animation and division of opinion over there. It was, in all likelihood, domestic and boring if seen up close, another of their operatic performances when somebody’s boyfriend misbehaved, or somebody wanted to wear the wrong thing to the party. However petty the topic, they’d made it a group issue in the past.
Better off not knowing what it was this time, I decided. I stood there, feeling foolish—and hungry now as well. I put my hands into my raincoat pockets, hoping for a long-forgotten protein bar or mints, but instead, my hand touched paper. No surprise. Too often, my pockets were the handiest wastepaper receptacles, and emptying them took on the look of an archaeological dig unearthing my life through receipts, to-do lists, and junk mail.
This was none of those. I looked at the folded orange sheet of paper and had no memory of seeing it before, of putting it into the pocket of my raincoat.
Orange paper meant another notice about Friday’s dance, and I was ready to trash it until a quick glance made it clear this was not a routine announcement.
The words in thick black felt-tip marker felt like a slap:
IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT!!!!!
WORSE IS GOING TO HAPPEN
SOMEBODY HAS TO STOP IT!!!!
I stood still, the paper in my hand, the letters dark scars across the orange surface, the words like muffled, semi-intelligible shouts.
Somebody had put this in my pocket today. Somebody who knew what Juan Reyes thought I knew, or could find out.
The seniors entering my room showed no sign of the passions that had raged in the Square. I wish I could believe I’d hallucinated the whole thing, including the note.
Before they were in their seats, they asked if there was news about Mr. Reyes, and I was surprised by how quiet they became, so intently waiting for a response that the air seemed charged. “I called the hospital,” Seth said. “All they’d say was his condition was critical. Is that true?”
I told them what Harriet had told me, though it added little. “Anybody have any idea what happened in that room?”
The silence that followed my question was nothing like the hush before I’d answered them. This was heavy, like the air before an electrical storm.
It was finally broken by a half-growled: “Why would we know?”
I didn’t like the way Wilson had asked, but I tried not to read anything into it.
“The cops said it was an accident,” Erik added.
“I’m sure it was,” I said, now sure it wasn’t. The warning note I’d gotten felt confirmed because of the speed and manner of their replies.
“So how are we supposed to know about it, then?” Erik demanded.
“I meant what might have caused the accident. You’re learning chemistry and you know the lab and Mr. Reyes. Any theories?”
They reverted to a third variation on silence, this one the silence of those who have emotionally left the room. They offered nothing beyond shrugs and head shakes. It wasn’t the response I’d anticipate from people who truly knew nothing about the explosion. Why weren’t they speculating? Gossiping? Wondering?
Why were so many of them reacting the same way?
“Oh, no!” Juan Reyes had said just as his world exploded. He’d known something. And he’d told the police my name. He thought I knew something as well—but what? I looked at the stone-faced seniors, wishing for X-ray vision.
I put the lab explosion on hold for the moment. The day’s repeated adrenaline floods were exhausting me, so I tried instead to focus on the more manageable mystery of who had stolen my exam.
I complimented them on how they’d done, while scanning the room to see if anyone reacted oddly. They looked their normal selves, which is to say, anxiously belligerent when about to receive test results.
I handed the exams back and watched relief, disappointment, and stolid acceptance shape their features, but nothing that I could interpret as suspicious.
But of course, that’s how it would be. They’d known since yesterday that I’d replaced the stolen exam. Of course they wouldn’t show surprise now. My after-the-fact sleuthing was ridiculous and the bottom line was that I’d never know who’d taken the exam or why.
We went over the questions. “I was particularly interested in that last question,” I said. “The one about the relevance of the Oedipus cycle. Your responses were varied, and you picked different aspects—commercial, psychological, and political.”
Though I didn’t say so out loud, some of the aspects picked were too creative, e.g., the one connecting Oedipus to Japanese anime and one to golf, and one gem that consistently discussed the “ancient Geeks.”
“I’m pointing that out because we’ve talked about how many levels and meanings great works of art contain, and I think your responses demonstrated that. Works written thousands of years ago can still touch us, and ethical or psychological issues that troubled the Greeks continue to trouble us today.”
I couldn’t completely disengage from a depressed, anxious awareness of what had happened today, and I felt as if my words to the class were partially rote.
“Yeah, right,” I heard. “Like we’re going to marry our mothers!” Two boys in the back of the room slapped hands, ducked, and laughed. I let it go. Even crude and stupid jokes about Oedipus were literary efforts and in the case of those two boys, a definite step forward, especially since one of them was the author of the paper about those ancient Geeks.
No matter how I felt—no matter how they felt—we seemed back on a fairly good classroom footing as long as we weren’t talking about Juan Reyes. Somebody brought up Antigone and the issue of civil rights and of the individual versus the state.
And while that may have taken my mind off Juan Reyes a bit, it bumped me smack into my noontime encounter with Maurice Havermeyer, which still burned and rankled.
I saw the headmaster’s bloated, angry face, and heard his twisted view of what freedom of speech meant. But given that I was about to quit because of his asinine behavior, what did I have to lose if I used the episode to teach them a final, bonus lesson, bringing the point home?
“If Antigone lived today, what do you think she’d be like?” I asked.
I knew they’d be happy to answer the question and entertain me, to delay moving on to the next unit, which involved long reading assignments. All kids love it when I veer off course and seem to have forgotten what we should be doing. They think it’s the result of their devious manipulation, when, in fact, most times, it’s something I’d planned all along.
This particular instance was spur of the moment, but it didn’t feel like a detour. It felt like a live demonstration of the ideas in the play they’d just read. We’d talked about Antigone’s civil disobedience, about her probable immaturity and rashness, about Creon’s intractability, about morality versus the law, the state versus the individual, fathers versus sons, Ismene as the “good girl” and what that meant, about assigned gender roles then and now, about fear of breaking those roles. To me, that made my confrontation with Havermeyer right on topic.
They seemed bemused by my question. “If nobody messed with her, she’d be an ordinary housewife,” Drew said. And when he was hissed at, he defended himself. “I mean that’s where she was headed, only her brother was killed and not allowed to be buried.”
“Her personality would be the same, so somebody would have made her irate, especially today,” Patti Burton said. “More so today because women are allowed more freedoms.”
“She’d belong to Greenpeace,” Susan Blackburn offered. “Not just as a member, but as one of the people who ride on the ship saving whales. She wouldn’t only talk about it or send money—she’d do it.”
“She’d march for civil
rights.”
“She’d have a political blog. A famous one because she’s the king’s daughter and all.”
Thoughts of the blind king pulled me back to Juan Reyes with his life in the balance and blindness a definite possibility. There was no escaping thoughts of him, and I would no longer try to.
“Former king,” somebody added. “Disgraced king.”
“Yeah, like scandal means you can’t still be famous. It’d make more people read her than ever!”
I wanted to push them further, but my inner censor squeaked a protest. Shouldn’t do this, it squealed, but my censor was a diminutive creature, and I ignored it. “Do you think, on that blog, she could say whatever she wanted?”
“She’s Antigone, so of course!”
“It’s imaginary,” Susan Blackburn reminded me. “We’re speculating. She’s mythical.”
“I know,” I said. “But what if.”
“Yes,” Nita said. “Of course she can say whatever she wants. This isn’t Greece.”
“Freedom of speech.” Drew nodded and folded his arms across his chest, making it clear that what he’d said was correct and that the topic was now closed for discussion.
“No limits?”
Allie’s eyebrows pulled together. “Why would there be?” She seemed angry about something—Antigone?
“What if Antigone’s advocating the overthrow of the government?” I asked. “In the play, she was, in essence, doing just that. Saying the king was wrong, that she wouldn’t live by his decision.”
“Freedom. Of. Speech.” Drew repeated his words slowly, to help the cognitively impaired teacher.
I nodded. He smiled.
“I guess,” Nita said, “if it’s violent overthrow, then maybe the government would be watching the blog.”
People called out. They weren’t supposed to, but I wasn’t about to squelch the discussion.
“Maybe,” Susan said. “But they couldn’t stop it. You can think stuff and say stuff even if you can’t do stuff.”
“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me,” Drew added. “My mother taught me to say that.”
“Here’s another thought,” I said. The tiny censor jumped up and down now, screaming, but luckily, he was still tiny. Plus, he had a lifetime of being ignored. He’d handle this. “What if Antigone wrote a play like the one about her? Say she puts a play on her blog about disobeying the king, the law of the land. Or at least disagreeing with him, with it. Could it be produced? If it was produced, would she be in trouble?”
They grew more sure of themselves, and more sure that I wasn’t getting it. “Freedom of speech,” I heard repeated with a touch of exasperation.
“Long as she’s not lying—or libeling the king.”
I nodded. “Would freedom of speech apply to other art forms? What if she tried to draw it, to express her feelings visually? Drew an ugly, a foul portrait of the king?”
They weren’t as sure at first, but then they nodded. “It’s the way artists express themselves,” Davida said. “I’d consider that their form of speech, then. And how about political cartoonists? So yes.”
“If it was a play? A poem?”
Even though some of the class continued to look at me as if I had lost more than a few of my buttons, as soon as I’d said the word “poem,” I saw the glint of recognition in Susan Blackburn’s eyes. She leaned to her right and whispered to her neighbor, who then turned to the boy behind her.
“I think I know what this is about,” Susan said. “I mean it’s about Antigone, yes, but my sister’s in eleventh grade. She doesn’t go here, but she’s good friends with Cheryl Stevens.”
“What are you talking about?” a boy said, and then I saw someone lean toward him and whisper, and then the buzz traversed the room at warp speed.
“We’re talking about Antigone, the ideas in the play. And also,” I admitted, “about the Bill of Rights.”
“It isn’t fair—it isn’t legal!” Allie said.
I was once again impressed by the subterranean communication in our tiny high school village. I knew the class’s collective knowledge—not academic, but practical, street smarts—would amaze me.
“Which poem was it?”
We weren’t even pretending this was about Antigone anymore.
“We heard all of them—which was it?” the boy continued.
When told, the response was immediate.
“That wasn’t even bad!”
“She was sad—is that a crime?”
“The guy’s blind! Why can’t she be angry for what happened to him?”
The air crackled with their electricity. There are few things teens enjoy more than a sense of outrage and unfairness.
I imagined Maurice Havermeyer happening upon this scene. I would so have loved to see him try to defend himself against these righteous twelfth graders and all they’d been taught.
My attention returned to the room where, within seconds, everyone had learned that the author of the antiwar poem was leaving the school. It was possible they knew more than I did about it, since I’d only gotten Havermeyer’s version of the story. Their sense of violation seemed even greater than mine.
“We have to do something,” Susan said. Many voices agreed.
We had a dissident. Mike Novak, generally interested in nothing outside the basketball court except for his hair, was at least consistent. He shook his head. Yawned. “I’m sure we don’t know the whole story,” he said. “The school must have good reasons.”
His classmates glared at him. He shrugged. The conversation bored him. “If you knew about her since yesterday,” he said, “why didn’t you already do something? Why now?”
Susan was silent for a moment. “Because I didn’t think about it until we were talking about Antigone.”
It was a bad day, a terrible day, but I suddenly thought I might cry with happiness. Look at what had been given me, like a gift, a sense of being a genuine, certified educator. I had tapped into their unused reservoir of brains, at least a bit, at least for some of them.
Okay, at least for one of them.
Mike Novak was in the minority, though I saw him recruiting Jimmy, who, in his perpetual state of discontent, was ready to disagree with anyone, even to disagree with disagreeing. But the conversation rolled over them, and grew ever more heated and determined.
“We have rights in this country!”
“The law’s the law for everybody!”
“Yeah, what are we? Second-class citizens?”
“Slaves?”
I was amazed. Of course, their sudden passion was not abstract. In the eternal war of faculty versus students, their ranks had been attacked, and unfairly, so this was about their personal rights, and this was about them. We were talking about perceived self-interest, but it didn’t matter.
“Let’s sign a petition.”
“Let’s boycott school!”
I knew somebody would come up with that one. Normally, I would discourage such an idea, but today, I didn’t think it was the worst way of expressing their disgust. It was, in fact, close to my own plans.
They were delighted by each others’ suggestions, and I saw a succession of high-fives, and more quietly, nods and thumbs-ups.
I watched their animation, listened to the happy whine of mental gears in motion, and tried to superimpose this excited, exciting reaction onto the stolen exam, the threats against Reyes, his keyed car, the harassment, and the idea that they—or at least somebody in this group—had something to do with his accident.
The pictures didn’t fit.
I kept hoping Seth would join in, become engaged, but he looked abstracted, as though viewing his classmates from a high and distant peak. Lately, he’d behaved as if he were behind a barricade, one I couldn’t see, but was nonetheless impermeable.
This afternoon, he again was the remote observer. Now and then he nodded if he agreed with comments, but he added nothing. In fact, he looked nervous, flicking quick g
lances at people, then looking away.
Susan stood up, arms crossed over her chest, legs in a firm, wide stance. She looked like the can-do! World War II posters of women in the factories. “We could call ourselves the Antigone Brigade,” she said.
I watched her gather support until even Mike and Jimmy grudgingly listened to a wild series of civil protest plans.
I did nothing to stop any of it. It was their right. Right?
And having fomented dissent, or at least given it a try, I felt ready to bid adieu. I didn’t need to stay to watch the revolution.
I was on emotional overload, worried about Juan Reyes’s future, if he had one, and about what had happened to him, about the series of minor and major pranks and attacks, about the dramatic changes in Seth—but also filled with a rush of love, admiration, and a sense of profound connection to this class for what was happening right now.
Their activism and excitement meant I’d done enough. It was time for me to say good-bye and find a new place where the First Amendment was still in effect.
* * *
Twelve
* * *
* * *
And that was that. The rest of the day went quietly and smoothly. My teaching life had apparently ended not with a bang but a fizzle and no matter what had happened, obligations continued, so I jumped into a phone booth—if only there were still phone booths, changed into my cape—if only I had one—and became PI Girl for the thrill of watching the blank façade of Bertha Polley’s house.
I tried to pass the time by imagining how Pip pictured this. Surveillance—what an exciting lie of a word. For Pip’s sake, I pretended to be dictating a memo of what I observed. “Subject’s patio is three steps up from sidewalk. Furnishings consist of two aluminum-tubing chairs with threadbare red-and-yellow striped seats and backs and one small round table holding a terra-cotta pot and dead plant. Blue aluminum siding on house façade, and wrought-iron railing around patio. Front yard contains one scraggly bush and packed dirt. Ms. Polley apparently not an avid gardener even before her accident.”
A Hole in Juan Page 12
