Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  Contents

  Praise for Class Dismissed

  Class Dismissed

  Copyright © 2021 Kevin McIntosh. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  Write What You Know

  Who Is We?

  Susan

  Peterson’s Prairie, 1978

  Bit by Bit

  If Only the Czar

  Teacher Solitaire

  You Can’t Go Home

  The Rubber Room

  What Do You Need?

  You Can Go Home

  Back in the Emerald City

  In the Star Chamber

  Freedom’s Just Another Word

  Bringing It All Back Home

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Class Dismissed

  “Class Dismissed is pitch-perfect and elegantly plotted. That would be enough happiness for a reader—but it’s also very funny. Not to mention harrowing. And, of this moment. Patrick Lynch practicing the art of teaching is heroic in a way that illuminates why teaching is a calling and indeed an art. This book is a joy.”

  —Jane Hamilton, author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World

  “Class Dismissed explores the triumphs and tragedies of teaching—and the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that one gifted New York City public school teacher finds himself in after an accident involving his most difficult student. Simultaneously as cynical as the city he now calls home and as sincere as his midwestern roots, Patrick Lynch is an unforgettable narrator, one you’ll root for as he buckles under the weight of his own mistakes. This novel is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, and marks an impressive debut.”

  —Lisa Borders, author of The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land

  “Kevin M. McIntosh’s Class Dismissed is competing for The Great School Novel title, alongside classics such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. McIntosh writes with humor and a sardonic appreciation of life’s all-too-expected travails. In Class Dismissed, the world tries to teach Patrick Lynch a lesson. He proves to be as apt a pupil as he is a successful teacher.”

  —Alex Beam, Boston Globe columnist

  Class Dismissed

  Kevin McIntosh

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 Kevin McIntosh. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646030675

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030927

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941113

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  Cover images © Kris Schmidt/Shutterstock

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  Author photo credit: © Small Circle Studio, Inc.

  “It Had to Be You” copyright 1924, Jerome H. Remick & Co., WB Music Corp. (renewed), music by Isham Jones, lyrics by Gus Kahn

  “Oh, Lady Be Good!” copyright 1924, Harms, Inc., WB Music Corp. (renewed), music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin

  Parts of this novel were originally published in different form in the following: Beloit Fiction Journal: “Special Needs”; Bryant Literary Review: “Who Is We?”; Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal: “The Scheme”

  Dedication

  For Karin

  Write What You Know

  It begins with Patrick Lynch’s swollen, aching eyes. Then funnels out past the bank of gleaming white computers, past the gleaming white boards, over the heads of his gleaming white students. Above them all, tacked to either side of Old Glory, Steinbeck and Harper Lee gaze down on Tiffany Strohmeyer as she shares page two of her critical essay.

  “The pâté in the Princess Cruise buffet wasn’t heavy or greasy, as foie gras can so often be, and was superior in every way to that in the smorgasbord of the Royal Caribbean ship,” Tiffany asserts, swiping that renegade blonde lock out of her face, securing it behind her right ear. The floor fan in the back is cranked to high and it flutters Tiffany’s honeyed tresses like they’re shooting a shampoo commercial. A long pink nail flicks forward to page three.

  After an entire year, Patrick still can’t believe he gets to teach in this classroom—his classroom—for one more day. And so familiar now were the three Tiffanies, two Maxes, two Jasons, and twelve others in second period, though strangely indistinguishable when they met last fall. Minnesotans through and through, these kids, his tribe. More or less. He’d have had no problem sorting them by degrees of freckled dirty-blondness back when he was an eighth grader in Peterson’s Prairie. But they were so different from the kids he taught in Manhattan and so similar to one another that he took to calling them Ms. Thorsten, Mr. Swenson, just to keep them straight. Another Mr. Lynch quirk they added to their list of his New Yorkisms.

  He shakes his head. The Guy from the Midwest. Now the New York Guy. Perhaps he is both, neither. A man without a country, a teacher without a classroom.

  Brilliant June sunlight streams in the window, filtered through the horse chestnut blossoming in the courtyard. Without question the tree is the loveliest classroom view he’s ever had but also the source of his bloodshot eyes. The chubby gray squirrel that lives in the courtyard is leaping at the bird feeder, a covered disk that hangs from a pole near the chestnut, trying once again to knock some birdseed to the ground. As he descends on the feeder, he manages to smack it with one paw, sending the feeder swinging, seed intact, and falls on his side. The squirrel shakes himself and scrambles up the tree. Has he finally exhausted the supply of chestnuts he gathered in October? And didn’t squirrels always land on their feet?

  A soprano throat-clearing brings Patrick back to center stage. Tiffany Strohmeyer—Tiffany Number One—hand on one hip, critical essay in the other, is uninterested in her teacher’s nature musings. She merely wants feedback on her review of the cruise her family took last Christmas. Tiffany may be the sweetest, prettiest girl in the class, but she has trained her considerable intelligence on a withering dissection of the calorie-laden food, antiquated gym facilities, and corny entertainment to be found aboard the Scandinavian vessel. She smiles demurely, as if she hadn’t just left the Norwegian national honor in tatters.

  “Thank you, Ms. Strohmeyer,” says Mr. Lynch. “Very specific and relevant details. Well done.”

  And though their forebears, like those of many in the class, hailed from Greater Oslo, Tiffanies Two and Three nod their lovely heads in agreement, having endured the same cruise on winter breaks past.

  Ms. Strohmeyer smooths her short pleated skirt, returns to her seat and sits, snapping open her binder, slipping her essay in, snapping it shut. She folds her hands on her desk and looks up alertly, and it isn’t hard for Patrick to imagine her leading board meetings, as does her mother and, indeed, her father.

  Write what you know, he tells them, and they do, they do. Patrick leans back in a stud
ent desk in the last row, his shirt slick against the plastic. He tucks a bit of shirttail in and the sweat that has pooled above his belt trickles below. Twenty more minutes of reviews of horror movies, boy bands, skateboard brands, teen clothing lines, and he can plop himself onto the lime green sofa beneath the air conditioner in the teachers’ lounge.

  Erik Lindstrom is next. He shifts from foot to foot, swaying rhythmically, pulling at his dress-length Timberwolves jersey, plucking at his spiky red hair. Boys sway more than girls, and Patrick tries to alternate genders at these year-end readings, lest he get queasy. Erik’s review of Death Match 3, the computer game he got for his fourteenth birthday, is also full of specific, relevant details. Erik is tiny, half the size of the largest eighth-grade boys, but Zoltar, hero of Death Match 3, is massive, his biceps “awesome,” and when he swings his two-headed axe, enemy heads “spin through the air like so many basketballs,” the blood spurting vividly, aided by “twice as many pixels as they used in Death Match 2.”

  The boys are captivated by Erik’s account; the girls shoot glances at Tiffany Number One, covetous of her long shiny legs and the tight pink top that so cunningly matches her nails.

  Patrick stares at Erik, spouting gore in his half-changed contralto, and is amazed, still, at how well-behaved the students are at Lake Minnehaha Junior High. June nineteenth, the penultimate day of the school year, a day for battening down hatches, a humid ninety-two degrees, and yet they sit, if not attentive, respectful as only upper-middle class Midwestern teenagers, weaned on politeness, could be.

  It’s impossible not to like these kids, so hard-working, so well-trained. Not always kind, perhaps, but generally nice at an age notoriously cruel. A small wave of guilt bathes him, remembering the resentment he’d felt in September. Susan’s voice was keen—keening—in his head then. “Look at this place!” he could hear her wail, hands planted on those slender hips. If she were here, she’d survey his nineteen students, his sparkling classroom with its just-out-of-the-box Apple computers, its crackling new textbooks; she’d follow him into the high-buffed hallways, past the display cases filled with trophies and student art. And the supply room!—pencil and pen boxes, staplers, markers, transparencies, rulers, folders of every size and color. And paper—lined, graphed, copier—reams of it, pallets of it, stacked from floor to ceiling. “What do they spend—ten grand a kid?” Susan would huff. “These aren’t the kids who need it!” She’d fling that long dark hair over a pale shoulder, daring him to debate the point, though, of course, she knew he agreed. Then the eyes would narrow and out would come data on the socioeconomics of this community, the evils of funding schools through local property taxes.

  True enough, Susan, he’d answer her, answering himself. But you couldn’t hold all that against these kids. Not their fault, being oblivious of their privilege, he thinks, watching Erik Lindstrom sway in his Air Jordans. No fault of theirs, being raised at the Mall of America.

  Ted Sturdevant sticks his handsome head in the doorway, same time as every second period this year. Patrick nods at him. Ted nods back and disappears down the hall, but his forced smile tells Patrick just how unfocused he must look.

  Patrick never blames him, checking in like he does. Focus has been a struggle each of the previous 891 class periods this year, and today the heat and antihistamines aren’t helping. But he’s fought the good fight every class, given the Lake Minnehaha school board its money’s worth. And it’s the least he can do for Ted after he used his juice as the department chair to bring him here, taken that risk. Ted still insists Patrick did him a favor filling Cindy Sperling’s maternity leave. Buddy, Patrick thinks, you don’t have to teach an English teacher about suspension of disbelief.

  But they were never buddies, growing up. Which makes his hiring even more a mystery. Of course, Patrick’s mother called Ted, put that bug in his ear. Which explained why Ted didn’t ask too many questions about why he’d left New York so suddenly, why he was “coming home.” Good thing, too; Ted was not a man to understand free fall. An optimist, a can-do guy, same now as in high school: square-built, square-jawed, firm handshake. He strides the halls of LMJHS like he’s still president of the senior class at Willard County High, still blocking back on the football team. Having spent his whole career at Lake Minnehaha, Ted would not appreciate Patrick’s ambivalence about teaching this population. Ted is compassionate—even Susan wouldn’t argue otherwise—but he is not from the school of Life is Unfair.

  And as the squirrel scrambles back up the chestnut tree, Patrick envisions Ted and Susan in a lively dustup: state spending versus federal; racially biased testing; whether the mighty economic stream gushing from Lake Minnehaha trickles down its tributaries to the less fortunate neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Oh, the battle royal if Susan were here!

  If Susan were here. Patrick taps a pen on his forehead. Ridiculous. Here could never be “there,” with Susan, and with those other kids, the ones who need him. Patrick stops tapping. His head hurts.

  Prolonged silence is seldom a good thing in an eighth-grade classroom, Patrick is reminded as he looks away from the courtyard window to where Erik stands, twitching, expectant, the text of Death Match 3: The Final Episode? dangling at his side. The entire class stares at Mr. Lynch, making Patrick wonder just how long they have been watching him watch the squirrel.

  He clears his throat. “Good job, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  Erik doesn’t move. Something more precise is required to salvage this moment. “Your description of the sound effects, particularly the exploding…Kray-gon debillitators—was very sharp. Nicely done.” Erik, convinced, relieved, exhales loudly and sways back to his desk.

  Focus, Patrick tells himself as Tiffany Number Two launches into her review of SassyGrrrl magazine. You’ve made it this far, focus. And he does manage to watch, listen, respond through Tiffany’s, the Maxes’, the Jasons’ presentations. Then the bell rings, as it must, ending Mr. Lynch’s 892nd class of the year.

  “Thanks, everyone. We’ll wrap it all up tomorrow,” Mr. Lynch says to the backs of his students. They flee his classroom with their usual astounding speed, despite the heat. Patrick leans back in the desk, extracts a balled-up tissue from his khakis and blows his nose.

  “Have a good day, Mr. Lynch,” chirps Tiffany Number One, the last to leave.

  “You, too, Tiffany.” Patrick looks up to catch her farewell smile, but her symmetrical features are bemused, like Ted’s some minutes earlier. He offers something like a smile and she vanishes into the hallway. He rubs his eyes, stares out the courtyard window. The squirrel hangs from the feeder, swinging, a furry little man on a disk-shaped trapeze, unable to scramble on top or let go.

  Who Is We?

  New York City, One Year Earlier

  Patrick was handing back personal narratives to his second period. He used to call them memoirs, but his students always laughed. He checked the clock on the back wall: 9:23 it read, as it had for the past seven years. The clock, end point of an exclamation begun by the fissure that ran down the back wall, reassured Patrick. The one constant in his classroom. Beneath it, Emily Dickinson, poor defaced Emily Dickinson, looked over the proceedings with equanimity, alarmed neither by her disfigurement nor by her function as cover for the section of fissure beneath the clock. Mr. Lynch handed his narrative back to Jamar, a pudgy, bright-eyed boy in the front row.

  “Are they pretty, Mr. L?” Jamar smirked at his favorite Lynchism.

  “Some are pretty, Jamar,” Patrick said, “some less so.”

  Jamar frowned at his A-, which was pretty, but he wanted to be beautiful.

  Abdul said, “You always give me Cs ’cause I’m Black.”

  “’Cause you Black and don’t study,” said Jamar, who was blacker still, and studied, and was hell-bent on pushing his A- average to an A. Everyone laughed, even Abdul.

  “Don’t play yourself, Abdul,” Patrick said, an expression he liked. Still, you
had to be judicious with street lingo. It could only be used as self-parody: Look at the feeble white man, reaching out. You couldn’t let them think you were trying to be hip or, worse, making fun of their culture. Patrick remembered Mr. Graves, sophomore English back in Peterson’s Prairie, Willard County High. Mr. Graves caught the ’80s wave just as it crashed on the ’70s beach. “Let’s forget old Will Shakespeare,” he’d say, plopping The Tempest on his desk. “Let’s just rap. What’s goin’ on? What’s happenin’?” Then he’d pull at his bushy Elvis-length sideburns. Mr. Grooves, his students called him, in the hallways. Fifteen years later, at the Science & Tech Academy in Marcus Garvey High School, the same rules applied. “Snoopy Dog, I’m down with him,” sleepy Phil Sitkowitz declared last semester, without irony, a desperate grab for street cred that was met with howls, then barks for weeks afterward.

  That week’s narrative, “My Role in the American Dream,” one of Patrick’s lesser inspirations, had yielded predictable results. But they couldn’t expect a home run from him every day, could they? Not after Gladys Hellmann decided late last June that her tetchy hip would not, after all, allow her a thirty-fifth year of ninth grade American History. Principal Silverstein had left a terse, enigmatic message on Patrick’s answering machine that day: “Mr. Lynch, how would you feel about teaching American Humanities?”

  Silverstein later explained that American Humanities, a new course, would give Patrick the chance to broaden his teaching repertoire, synthesizing English and history. And, yes, it would save the principal the task of scrambling to find a replacement for Mrs. Hellmann. And save the district money. And, since Patrick was certified to teach both subjects, students would get credit for both. Unquestionably, he was the man for the job.