Just Some Stuff I Wrote

by William Bell

  “The way you’re doing it,” Maddie rushed on, “it makes some of us feel REAL BAD.”

  “There’s no reason to feel really bad,” Quinn said. “If people feel really bad about their marks, they should study harder.”

  Phil tried to come to Maddie’s rescue. “But aren’t our marks private?” he asked.

  “No, Mr. Lawyer, they are not. All of you,” Quinn said to the class, “had better get used to this because, at mid-semester and after the final exams, your grades will be posted on the bulletin board. I’ll say this one more time: if you want to feel better about your results, improve them.”

  During this exchange, I was watching Chumley. Quinn’s methods were probably all right with him, I thought, since he had aced both tests so far. Chumley looked on, his face calm. It was impossible to know what he was thinking.

  As he had the first week, he loaned his test to Phil and Maddie so they could see how he had arrived at the correct solutions. I took a gander too, even though I was hopeless in math. I was one of those Quinn wouldn’t admit existed: I could study and practise until my teeth fell out and I would never ace a math test. I was lucky to pass.

  Chumley’s test paper was beautiful. You’d have sworn he had cheated. His answers came in the order the questions were given—he didn’t do the easy ones first, as Quinn always suggested—and they were perfect. No corrections, just line after line of clear, neat, legible numbers and letters. He was so confident, he wrote the tests in ink. With a fountain pen.

  But in the third week, something changed. Chumley came second in the Monday ritual, earning a sympathetic smile from Quinn, as if to say, I’ll let you away with this only once. He hadn’t done the last problem.

  “What HAPPENED?” Maddie asked.

  “Maybe old CN isn’t perfect after all,” I said.

  Chumley smiled. “Not to worry, my dear,” he said to Maddie.

  The following Monday saw Chumley walking to the front of the class after five kids had gone up before him. Quinn didn’t make eye contact with him. Chumley’s test showed why. This time, he had left off two questions. But as before, the solutions he did complete were perfect.

  “He’s up to something,” Phil said at lunch the same day, after Chumley had left for the library.

  “Up to what?” I said. “So he didn’t know the answers. It happens.”

  “Vic, the guy can knock over any problem you give him. I’ve seen him work. There’s something going on.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Don’t buy WHAT?” Maddie asked.

  Chumley kept up the routine, and one day he got a special mention from Quinn. “For the first time in this class’s dubious history,” she said before she began her Monday routine, “someone actually got a zero!”

  And after she had distributed all the tests except one, Chumley stood, buttoned his sports jacket, straightened his ascot, and walked forward. When he got to the front, Quinn wouldn’t hand him his test.

  “What do you mean by handing in a blank paper?” she demanded.

  “The Scriptures,” Chumley said, “admonish us that the first shall be last and the last, first.”

  A rare look of astonishment passed across Quinn’s face. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Apparently not,” Chumley replied. Then he slid the paper from her hand and walked slowly back to his seat, his face as calm as a summer morning.

  “That was beautiful!” Phil crowed around a mouthful of fries and gravy.

  “Philip, I do wish you’d swallow your cud before speaking,” Chumley said. “And thank you for the compliment.”

  “I STILL don’t GET it,” Maddie put in as she struggled with the cap on a bottle of juice.

  “He got zero on purpose,” I said. “Right?” I looked at Chumley, who just smiled that satisfied-cat smile of his.

  “But THAT’S the part I don’t GET!”

  “As CN would say,” Phil explained, “it’s elementary, my dear. He’s trying to teach Quinn a lesson. He’s been doing it in stages, getting a lower mark each week.”

  “WHAT LESSON?”

  In a way, Quinn was like Maddie. She didn’t get it. Or pretended she didn’t. Her mean-spirited ritual continued.

  One morning toward the end of the semester, I got to school late—not a rare thing for me, but this time it wasn’t my fault. My bus had broken down. It was too far from home to go back and take the day off, too far from the school to walk. So we all had to wait until the company sent out another bus.

  I got to school about halfway through the first period—English. I sauntered down the hall, enjoying the break in routine, climbed the stairs to the second floor where my locker was. Up there, every third locker had a sheet of paper taped to it. Some kind of Students’ Council event, I figured, ignoring the sheet on the locker next to mine—Chumley’s. I got my stuff and hurried into English.

  The atmosphere in the class was, I don’t know, charged. Things looked normal on the surface—Mr. Singh had everybody working on their independent studies. They were reading, making notes, drafting their research papers. I took my seat. Tammy, who sat next to me, looked up. Her eyes glittered with excitement. She stole a quick glance toward Singh, then slowly slid a sheet of paper from under her notebook. It was a list of some kind. Across the top, in a zany handwritten font I’d never seen before, it read, “Blue-Box Boogie.”

  “Alarm clock failure?” Singh’s voice pulled me away from the list.

  “Better than that, sir,” I said. “The yellow monster died.”

  A few kids snickered.

  “A masterful example of metaphor. I take it you mean a bus breakdown.”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  Singh smiled. He was cool. Most of the time. “Feel ready for some heavy scholarship?”

  “Got my stuff right here,” I said. “Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Yuck,” some girl at the back commented.

  I opened my novel and pretended to read while I took a good look at the paper Tammy had given me.

  I worked at a variety store after school and on weekends, so I knew an inventory when I saw one. And I had carried many blue recycling boxes to the alley behind the store. Along with notations for numbers of cans of soup and spaghetti sauce and sardines, jars of cheese spread and pickles and mayonnaise, I read line after line, stretching to the bottom of the page, listing the brand names of red and white wine, whisky and cans of imported beer. The titles of at least four gossip mags were there, too.

  When I read the last line, I laughed out loud.

  Singh looked up. “I had no idea that Papa H. was a humorist.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  I looked again at the sentence. “Contents of the blue recycling box of Ms. J. Quinn over a two-week period. Compiled by the masked avenger.”

  I looked across the room to Chumley.

  Math was next period, and I had never seen kids in such a hurry to get there. The word was out. When Quinn came through the door of the math office into the classroom, her face was without expression. But she had no tests under her arm.

  She assigned a list of problems from the text-book, warned us to work quietly and returned to the office, leaving the door open a crack. There wasn’t much math done. Whispers swished back and forth. The air of expectation built with every passing minute.

  Quinn, it seemed, was a heavy drinker. Lots to gossip about there, but no big deal really. And she liked celebrity mags. So did half the girls in the school and probably some of the guys. I couldn’t have cared less if Quinn went home every day, poured a whisky, put her feet up and lost herself in a gossip rag. But the thing was, in her lectures about hard work and discipline, Quinn was always putting down soap operas and comic books, labelling them trash for simpletons. The mathematical mind, she would say, is a disciplined mind, with no room for self-indulgence.

  The class dragged, and Quinn didn’t appear. Who put up the list? everybody wanted to know. In the swirl of talk around me, name after name
was mentioned. But I knew who it was. I looked at Phil and he nodded. Even Maddie, intelligent-but-not-always-with-it Maddie, knew.

  At the end of the period, after the bell rang, Quinn finally appeared, carrying a small cardboard carton. She set it on the corner of her desk.

  “The quizzes are in there,” she said. “Pick yours up on your way out.”

  The next week, Chumley aced his test.

  “Care to join me in my humble repast, Vic?” Chumley asked in his nasal British twang as he unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured a cup of steaming soup.

  “No, thanks, I’ll pass.”

  Chumley unwrapped his sandwich, cheese goo on whole wheat. “Speaking of which, shall you, do you think?”

  It was the last week of classes before final exams. Phil and Maddie were already geared up, arranging study schedules. They and Chumley were very serious about doing well. And me? I went along for the ride. I wanted to pass, but that was all—just to avoid summer school.

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Your confidence and enthusiasm overwhelm.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a humble guy.”

  “Indeed.”

  I picked up my burger and took a bite, watching Chumley eat. He held the spoon with his baby finger curled, dipped into the tomato soup, pushing the spoon away from him across the bowl, brought it to his mouth and sipped delicately. He had tried one day to get Phil to stop slurping, but that was a lost cause. Phil ate the way you’d shovel dirt into a hole.

  Chumley was in tight with us now. Everybody tolerated him, kind of like a harmless crazy uncle living upstairs. Phil had accepted him long ago—“He’s got style,” he’d said—and it was clear to everyone but Chumley and Maddie that she was in love with him.

  But I was still cautious. There was something about Chumley that got on my nerves—not the accent or the eccentric clothes, not the high marks. Not even the sense I still got that he considered himself a superior being. It was a kind of phoniness. He gave the impression he was rich and privileged, could have gone to a private school but chose not to—that kind of thing.

  Maybe it was the clothes that gave him away. He wore a jacket and ascot, but it was the same jacket and ascot day after day. His shirt collars were sometimes frayed. His leather shoes, always polished, were worn down at the heels. He was trying to put one over on us, and nobody but me seemed to mind.

  Following a trolley bus on a bicycle, especially at rush hour, is easy. One afternoon, from the shadows beside the school, I watched Chumley climb on board the A3, cane in one hand, his trusty briefcase in the other. A few minutes later, I zipped along half a block behind the bus as it headed deeper into the heart of the city, where the streets grew more crowded, narrower and dirtier, the mantis arms on the bus roof sparking on the overhead wires.

  Finally, in a neighbourhood I wasn’t familiar with, when the bus pulled away from the stop I saw Chumley standing on the sidewalk. He had taken off the spats and funny hat and he had put the cane away. Even the ascot was gone. Weaving among the shoppers, Chumley walked past a bank and some fruit and vegetable stands and pushed through the doors of a dollar store.

  I waited for three changes of the traffic lights, then locked my bike to a parking meter and followed him in. I made my way carefully among aisles of plastic toys, watering cans, cheap knockoffs of watches, calculators and cameras. I spotted him at the back of the store. With a few aisles of men’s clothing between us, I stood watching him.

  A man came through a curtain at the back. He was dressed in grey coveralls and carried a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other. He smiled when he saw Chumley, nodded, and stashed the cleaning equipment in a closet.

  Even before he spoke, I knew he was Chumley’s father. He had the same fair hair (with a bit of grey), the same nose, the same slight build. But I was surprised when he said, “Hi, Charlie.”

  And shocked when I heard the reply. “Hi, Dad. Ready to go?”

  Because it was said without the slightest trace of an accent.

  The man removed a windbreaker from the closet, pulled it on and closed the door. They ambled out of the store together. I unlocked my bike and followed from a safe distance. Chumley-Charlie and his father strolled down the street and turned a corner, chatting away. They passed a church, a playground, an abandoned factory with boarded-up windows, then turned onto a street of rooming houses and decrepit bungalows. They entered a small house with a cracked cement porch. The place seemed to slump under its own weight as if it was sinking into the ground. So the guy who had convinced all his teachers to call him Chumley was a fake. On my way home, pedalling against the spring wind, I tried to figure out how he had managed to change his name on the school records, then I remembered that on the first day of the semester, when he had dropped Chumley on my shoulders like a sack of potatoes, the principal never did say his name. The new kid had introduced himself as Chumley N. etcetera and we had believed him.

  Why had Chumley-Charlie come all the way across town to our school? There must have been half a dozen closer to his house. Had he been thrown out of other places for bad behaviour? Had he flunked out? Not likely. And why the act—the accent, the barely concealed snobbery, the costume? It wasn’t as if he had been trying all this time to blend in. I didn’t have the answers, but I had discovered a few things. I knew where he came from, and I knew he was a phony. And I didn’t intend to keep it a secret.

  Friday was the last day of classes. On Monday exams would start, and after a week of agony we’d be free for the summer. In the hall after first period, Maddie came rushing toward me, clutching her books to her chest.

  I said, “I’ve got something to—”

  “We need to TALK, Vic,” she gushed. “Meet me at my locker before lunch. It’s IMPORTANT!” And she was gone in the stream of bodies.

  I waited for her at the beginning of lunch period. I had been looking forward to giving her and Phil my news at the same time and bursting Chumley-Charlie’s bubble in a dramatic announcement, but I’d have to change my plans and tell Maddie first.

  She came charging down the hall. She spun the dial on her lock, yanked open her locker, dumped her books inside like an armful of unwanted garbage, slammed the door, snapped the lock closed and grabbed my arm.

  “Come ON,” she said, dragging me toward the doors to the playing field.

  A few kids had already taken spots on the bleachers, munching sandwiches and crunching potato chips in the noonday sun. Maddie pulled me to the top row and sat down.

  “OKAY,” she said, letting out a deep breath. “Vic, I need to ASK you something. You have to PROMISE to be HONEST.”

  “Um, sure, Maddie. What’s up?”

  “You have to PROMISE,” she repeated.

  “Okay, okay. I promise. Even though I don’t know what I’m promising.”

  Maddie’s eyes sparkled and danced. She fixed me in her gaze and said, “What do you think about CHUMLEY? I mean, REALLY?”

  The air rushed out of my lungs. Damn, I thought, she found out about him. She knows. So much for my big exposé. Before I could get a word out, she charged ahead.

  “Because, I’m thinking of asking him to the PROM!”

  “The prom? You’re going to ask him to the prom?” I said stupidly.

  “Is there an ECHO around here?” she said. “Come on, GRANDPA, dig the WAX out of your ears.”

  “Maddie, look. There’s something you’ve got to know about Char—Chumley. I found out a few things.”

  Out on the field, a couple of guys were tossing a football back and forth, calling out to one another. Below us, someone had turned on a boom box, and some kind of classical music pounded out of it, so loud it put my nerves on edge.

  “The MORE you can tell me, the BETTER,” Maddie said. “Because I really LIKE him.”

  “Yeah, I know you do. That’s why I have to tell you this.”

  “Tell me WHAT? Spit it OUT.”

  “Chumley is—Hey! You guys wanna turn that crap down
a little?” I shouted. The boom box owner gave me the finger but lowered the volume anyway.

  “Chumley LIKES that kind of music,” Maddie said. “Now COME ON, Vic. What do you THINK?”

  I pictured Chumley walking down the sidewalk behind his father to the peeling door of the run-down house on a street of run-down houses. I pictured his cane, his pathetic hat, his ridiculous briefcase, the ironic way he raised one eyebrow to make a silent comment about whatever was going on. I saw him sitting on the bus for an hour each morning, on his way to our school, putting on his costume as the bus neared his stop, composing himself for the daily routine in which he pretended to be someone else.

  “Okay, Maddie. You asked. You’re my friend, so I’m going to tell you the truth. Chumley is—”

  “Come ON!”

  “The thing is,” I went on, “Chumley is … special. He’s … well, kind of delicate.”

  “You mean, like, SENSITIVE?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I KNOW. It’s one of the things I LIKE about him. He’s not afraid to be sensitive.”

  “Yeah, that’s it exactly. So, what I mean is, at first, he might not seem like he wants to go to the prom with you. But I’m sure he does.”

  Maddie’s smile seemed to make her freckles vibrate. “You’re SURE?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “THANKS, Vic. I KNEW I could count on you!”

  I was at my locker, stuffing books into my backpack for the weekend study grind. Chumley bounced down the hall, lowered his briefcase to the floor and opened his locker.

  “Greetings, my good man,” he said.

  “Hey, CN.”

  “Girded your loins for the exams, yet, old sport?”

  “You know, CN, one of these days it would be nice to know what you’re talking about.”

  He laughed. “Quite so.”

  “Look,” I began. “I was wondering. Any way you’d be willing to give me a hand prepping for the math exam?”

  Up went the eyebrow. Chumley’s eyes searched my face, hunting for sarcasm. Then he smiled. “Certainly, old thing. Delighted.”