Forget my wise stance of leaving things alone outside. I bolted through the outer office, into the hallway, and out the building, which meant that Pip had more than adequate time for a few sound bites. If only I could have leaped through the window.
“The Constitution of the United States of America guarantees free speech.” He spoke with the gravitas of a Supreme Court justice.
“Say what we will!” the marchers chanted. “Say what we will! The Bill of Rights lets us say what we will!”
I liked the cadence and the idea, but I wasn’t sure I liked Pip involved in this. Was this what his mother would have hoped for?
Louis Applegate walked over to the reporter and spoke in a determined voice. It worked. She aimed the mike at him. “I teach history,” he said, “and until now, I saw no evidence of this great interest in the Constitution. These students would rather make news than study it. How can they be unaware—how can any American be unaware or refuse to understand these are not normal times? I’d suggest more studying before parading around on the—”
His voice was drowned in the general din. Cheryl had climbed on an overturned crate. She held up a sheet of paper, waved it, and the chanting died out, as if that had been a prearranged signal.
The reporter, good at her trade, sensed where the center of the action was, and turned, holding the microphone up to Cheryl who, as soon as it was sufficiently quiet on the pavement, recited:
The news tallies casualties and we
Check the numbers dead and sigh.
But a wound makes you an also-ran.
You don’t count.
“Disgraceful!” Applegate shouted.
“Be polite!” “Shut up!” people shouted back, and although he looked mildly apoplectic, Louis Applegate kept quiet while she continued to read her poem.
Havermeyer still stood on the front steps, his skin an unphotogenic green. He kept touching the strands of hair he combed over his head, as if he might suddenly rip them out.
A handful of other students had memorized Cheryl’s poem and they joined in and managed to sound more numerous than their actual numbers.
—Make people understand that
Being twenty-one and blind forever counts.
It wasn’t great, perhaps not even good, poetry, but it felt powerful out there on the street.
She finished and the students cheered and started the chant again. “Say what we will! Say what we . . .”
Applegate considered that permission to resume his complaints. “I don’t want to see any of my students inciting people to—”
Pip’s large sign said: AMENDMENT I: CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW . . . ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES.
It must have been heavy, and as he was apt to gesticulate when he spoke, it wobbled dangerously. The reporter kept ducking and moving to the side.
“I’m not your student!” Pip shouted at Applegate. The reporter pushed the mike under his face. “I’m from Iowa, and I saw the Constitution for the first time yesterday. And I learned a lot about it and”—he seemed older than he had in the loft—“We. Have. The. Right. And. No. School. Can. Take. It. Away. From. Us!!!”
The picketers cheered.
“Iowa?” the anchorwoman said. “What brings you here?”
What brought him here was dropping out of school and lying about his whereabouts and plans this morning. It wasn’t going to play that well or help the cause, but how could I interfere without becoming yet another censor of his freedom of speech?
“What brings me here?” Pip repeated rhetorically. “The Constitution of the United States brings me here!” He still wore that goofy grin. He was on TV!
“Who is that?” Havermeyer was literally breathing down my neck. I had the sense he was hiding behind me, using me as a shield against real or imagined enemies. “Did he say Iowa? He’s an outside agitator!” He wasn’t trying to keep his voice down. “The media deserves to know. Reporter! Reporter! Miss! This is important. We’ve got a professional outside agit—”
“He is anything but professional,” I said.
The anchorwoman had lost interest in Pip’s dazed expression and unrevolutionary pronouncements. She didn’t want to talk about the Constitution. She moved on, glancing once at her watch.
“You belong in class!” Applegate shouted. “And you know it. You’re all guilty of desertion.”
A little slip of the tongue because the man had been in the military too long. Students close enough to hear him laughed out loud and saluted.
“Aunt Amanda!” Pip shouted, blowing my cover. His smile was genuine.
“Aunt! You’re his aunt! You’re related!”
I could almost see Havermeyer’s brain searching for official language about hereditary big-mouthedness. I controlled the urge to palm Pip off as part of the family Mackenzie. “He’s visiting,” I said, “and he was quite dazzled by Constitution Hall yesterday. Couldn’t stop talking about it.”
“Doesn’t Iowa have schools?” Havermeyer didn’t wait for me to answer. “He shouldn’t be here. Look what he’s doing!”
“Doing? To whom?”
Havermeyer waved his arms at a vague everything: students, reporters, the news van in the drop-off zone, random faculty members. He was truly upset and the proof was that he wasn’t using jargon. I could understand what he meant. He had no idea how to protest the protest. Pip waved the First Amendment and the reporter hung on every inflammatory word she could find, and there was no dignified, let alone legal, way to halt any of it.
“Outside agitators,” Havermeyer muttered. “Insurrection. I won’t have this! I want their names. Harriet, get everybody’s names.”
He maneuvered his way around me, toward the front door, and as I stood there, wondering if we were becoming a mini–police state, I glanced across the street, to the Square, and, to my surprise, saw Seth.
The note had been accurate. He wasn’t in class. But there he was, shouldering a heavy-looking backpack and watching us through bruised eyes.
Why had his mother told me he wasn’t coming to school? And if he’d changed his mind and was in fact joining us, why was he across the street, watching with laser intensity? I’d have thought he’d be on our side, literally and metaphorically, not studying his peers as if they were a problem to be solved.
I wanted to ask him, but I had a more immediate concern. I cornered Pip, now that the reporter was gone. “Why are you here?” I demanded. “And why didn’t you tell your uncle or me where you’d be? You aren’t playing fair with us. Why run away from your school and show up at mine?”
He appeared flustered. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“How did you know about this demonstration?”
He shrugged.
Cheryl circled closer, holding her placard. “Good job,” she told him, smiling. “You were really impressive.”
I got it. Tardily, I admit, but there was his interest in the Constitution in the form of one cute junior.
Cheryl moved on, and I waited until she was out of earshot before I spoke. “That’s who you met yesterday at the Constitution Center, the one who sort-of goes to school, correct?”
“It’s got to be all right for me to meet people,” he said.
“Well, sure, but it’s also all right to be forthcoming and honest.”
“She was there doing research, and—”
But she was back, close enough on her rounds to speak to me as she again passed. “Not much of a vacation for him, is it?” she said, and I was aware of our having a new relationship. We were both connected to Pip now. She was my demonstration-in-law.
“I mean,” she said, “all his experience with nonviolent protests sure helped to plan this—but still, to come this far to get away from all that for a while and to bump right into it again . . . and in Philadelphia. The city of brotherly love.” Smiling, she moved on again, her words hanging in the a
ir.
The splots of color on Pip’s cheek grew more intense, and it would have been a kindness to let Cheryl’s words float off in the ether, but I wasn’t feeling a need for that level of compassion. “I had no idea you were what—a professional demonstrator?—a political radical back there in Iowa. Were the protests also about civil rights or something else?”
His eyes nearly crossed in a panicky roll, then he squeezed them shut, reopened them, and said, “Okay, maybe I exaggerated a little—”
“A little?”
“Okay, maybe a lot. Maybe I made the whole thing up—”
“Maybe?”
“Okay, I made it up, but she was all fired up about, you know, free speech and the right to assemble and the Bill of Rights . . .”
“Besides, she’s cute.”
“No,” he said. “I mean yes. Okay, she really is, but she’s also right.”
At which point, the bell tolled for all of us again. Havermeyer had made it back to the steps, and was watching the crowd, which had grown, with latecomers and stragglers reluctant to enter the building once they saw what was going on.
Nobody responded to the bell’s summons. But I did see Cheryl talking to the group around her, glancing toward the headmaster, apparently debating whether or not to go to school. Cheryl, of course, was student non grata, but a protest policy maker.
From his post, Havermeyer glanced at his watch and glowered. Harriet stood with a tablet on which to write down the protesters’ names. It would have been more efficient to pull the entire school roster, and tick off the names of the few who were not on the pavement.
Cheryl nodded in Havermeyer’s direction. I moved closer, shamelessly eavesdropping, and heard fragments that suggested they might end the demonstration, but pick it up again at lunchtime.
That meant I had to get ready for class, or homeroom. I wasn’t sure how we’d organize this late-starting day. I left the conspirators and walked over to Maurice Havermeyer, whose face was still red enough to make me worry about his blood pressure. “I was wondering how we’re going to work the day,” I said.
“They’re all going to be suspended.”
“Everybody? The entire school?”
“What other recourse—look, they still aren’t paying attention—I rang the bell again and look at them!”
Louis Applegate stood to the side, his lips pressed together in frustration at being unable to send the lot of them to the brig. His near apoplexy gave me great pleasure.
“Students!” Havermeyer shouted. “Students! This is your final warning, your last chance to avoid—”
Even if people were listening to him, nobody heard because history, which Applegate was still shouting we should study, appeared to be repeating itself in the worst way as the crowd was stunned by—
Déjà—BANG!
* * *
Eighteen
* * *
* * *
I wheeled around, the chemistry lab explosion replaying and echoing in my mind, the danger now expanded to a crowded sidewalk and hundreds of teenagers who screamed, pushed, bumped into each other, and moved back to where they’d been, still screaming.
“I saw it—I saw somebody throw something,” a blond girl with braces said.
“Who? From where? What did they—”
Another explosive sound and more screams, including those the girl who’d seen something was now making. I tried to calm her. “What did you see? Where? What’s going on?”
“A guy—over there.” She pointed across the street. “Somewhere.” She burst into tears and had nothing more to offer.
And then the sound of sirens—somebody had called 911—breaking into a scene as close to bedlam as I care to be.
I looked where the girl had pointed, where I’d earlier noticed only one person.
Seth was no longer there.
The police were out and everywhere, students milling. Whimpering came from within the group and a girl emerged, holding her side. “She hurts!” her friend said to the police, who hustled her off to the paramedics.
“What happened?” Carol, the math teacher, said. “I was inside and heard the noise and then—what’s going on?”
“Bombs,” Louis Applegate said. “You stir things up, upset—”
“Which of our kids would bring a bomb to a—”
“Cherry bomb,” a voice said with some authority, and I turned and saw a boy I’d taught the year before. He looked both proud of his savvy and slightly ashamed.
“How do you know about bombs?” Louise Applegate demanded.
He shrugged. “I know about firecrackers. Most everybody does. That was—they were probably cherry bombs. They’re illegal, but you can get the recipe on the Internet. Or else it was some other kind of firecracker.”
“They should not allow the Internet to—”
I turned away. It was too tumultuous a time for another debate about free speech.
Cherry bombs were probably not what Applegate had in mind, but it didn’t actually matter. The sidewalk was as much in turmoil as if a Molotov cocktail or fertilizer bomb had been detonated in its midst, except that we didn’t seem to have many casualties.
As far as I could tell, after a few minutes of watching, in addition to the girl who “hurt,” two students’ clothing had been partially scorched and a boy had been knocked off the curb and had fallen in the confusion. I still didn’t know what had hit us, but at least it hadn’t hit us with as much devastation as I’d feared.
And then I spotted Seth on our side of the street, now a part of the general tumult. I managed to get to him and discreetly—I thought—separate him from the herd, though he looked annoyed, his bruised face sullen every time he glanced at my hand on his letter jacket.
“I thought you weren’t coming in,” I said. “I was sent a note—”
“No point staying home. That wouldn’t solve anything.”
“Solve what?”
“So when they phoned about this—”
“Who?”
“The chain. Some kid named Billy. I didn’t know him. You know, how they call people for a snow day? Whoever had me on their list phoned and said there was going to be this demonstration, and then I had to come.”
“But you didn’t participate. You stood across the street.”
“I realized finally that I wasn’t going to join the hypocrites, but I wanted to see who was there.”
“Why are they hypocrites?”
“Why is anybody one? They don’t mean what they say.”
“They don’t believe in the Bill of Rights?”
His expression clouded, and I had the sense that he pitied me my ignorance and confusion. “I don’t believe in them,” he said. “You can’t trust anybody,” he said in a low, resigned, voice. “Not anybody.”
There’s not much worse as a guide for life than that sentiment, and I wished I knew what had been going on in Seth’s life. “Seth,” I said, “I know you’re going through a hard time.”
“They want to get me,” he muttered.
“Why? Who?” I hated this conversation and my growing fear that Seth had fallen off his tracks and was in serious trouble.
“Don’t worry. I’m smarter than they are. That’s partly why they want to get me.”
How would a paranoid adolescent elude his perceived enemies? Too many news stories about school murders. Too much evidence of immature brains—normal ones—being unable to think through to the logical consequences.
I should phone his mother again, I thought, mentally wincing at adding to that beleaguered woman’s plate. Make him empty his backpack right now, so I could check it. Or tell somebody—but whom? And what exactly would I say? I’ve got this feeling?
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
There are times when the truth is not the best option. “Of course not,” I said. “But I think—I know—you’re profoundly upset, and I can’t see how a demonstration about censorship has anything to do with you.”
“It doesn’t! But it should, it—” He seemed to collapse from within, as if something keeping him going had just dissolved.
“Help me understand,” I said. “What’s going on? I truly want to help you.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. You wouldn’t . . . Nobody can help me. I have to take care of this myself.”
“Look at your face. That’s not a good way to take care of things. You can’t let people beat you down, exclude you. It doesn’t make sense to stay home from school.”
He nodded, surprising me. “I know. That’s why I didn’t. Because if I did, it would mean they won.”
“Won? What is this, a contest?”
“It’s a war.”
I took time out to digest what he’d said, then asked him, “About what? Between whom?”
“Between me and everybody else.” His words were laced with sorrow, not anger or antagonism.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got to believe that things can be worked out peacefully. Not by beating each other senseless. You’re strong and smart. Don’t let yourself be bullied or defeated. It isn’t like you to stay home or stay apart or—or hide, in essence. This is your senior year.”
“I know. I can’t wait until it’s over and I’m out of here.”
“Don’t miss it, though. Don’t let them do that to you.”
He looked less defeated. “Miss it? You mean tonight’s party?”
I’d meant life, not a school dance, but why not? “Sure. Like everything that isn’t self-destructive or involves punching each other out. If you want to go—go. Why wouldn’t you?”
He looked at me and started to object, then stopped himself. “All right,” he said as if he meant it. “You’re right, so—all right. I’m not backing down.”
At that moment, two things happened. First, I realized I was not going to be fired. Havermeyer was too much of a coward. And I wasn’t going to quit. I was going to take my own advice and not miss my life—and a great portion of my life belongs in a classroom. My classroom.
A Hole in Juan Page 18
