Not My Problem

by Ciara Smyth

  I couldn’t help but snort.

  “In my defense,” Angela declared, “he shouted at me for not participating in a discussion when loads of other people weren’t and he said he saw me in the last play and said, ‘If only you had so little to say then.’ I’m not going to take that kind of attack on my performance, you know?”

  “Right . . .” I nodded. “So what we’re looking at here is you getting detention, right? And you’ll be in deep shit with your parents, obviously.”

  “It’s not my parents.” She shook her head. “Getting in trouble with them is fine. Yeah, they’d be annoyed and I’d have my phone taken off me or whatever but that doesn’t matter. It’s the detention. I can’t stay after school.”

  No one wanted to stay after school.

  “You know my dad isn’t well, right?”

  I exchanged a look with Kavi. His expression implied he did know.

  “I didn’t. Sorry.”

  “He is. It’s fine. He’s going to be okay.” Angela’s jaw twitched and I wondered if he was really going to be okay or if this was something she had to tell herself. “If I get detention I miss visiting hours. My mam is out of town all week so he’d be all alone.”

  “That’s right,” I said, a memory of what Mícheál had said in English last week coming back to me. I assumed he too often had flashbacks of that class but for different reasons. “You’re having a party on Saturday.”

  “Yeah,” she said uneasily. “You can come if you want? I guess.”

  I shook my head. “You’re all right. I’ll do it,” I said. You didn’t get a much better cause than this one. You had to really love someone to sit around eating grapes and catching MRSA and Angela clearly loved her dad a lot.

  Angela let out a huge sigh. “Thank you so much.”

  “Where is the offending item now, do you know?”

  “It’s in his room. But I think he’s marking those papers as we speak.”

  “So he might have already seen it?”

  “I don’t think I’d be standing here talking to you if he had. But there isn’t much time.”

  “We need a distraction,” I said. I gave the door of the supply closet a light nudge with my toe and it swung open.

  I signaled to Orla.

  “Would you be able to get away for ten minutes? We need to distract Mr. Walker.”

  She checked the time on her phone. “If I’m not here when the secretary gets back, I’ll be in deep shit. But I know I owe you. Oh!” she exclaimed, suddenly excited. “What if I get the whole dance troupe to practice in the hall? He’d definitely come out and look at the racket. And let me tell you, our ‘Baby One More Time’ routine is so tight right now.”

  “I appreciate the offer but I don’t want you to get fired.”

  There was no point calling in a favor from someone only to get them in trouble.

  “I could fall down outside and pretend to be hurt,” Angela said. “See what he thinks of my acting skills then,” she added, muttering under her breath.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want you anywhere near this. Plausible deniability.”

  Kavi and I exchanged a look. His look said I got this. My look said I don’t know about this.

  “I did great last time,” he protested. “Very distracting.”

  There was no other option that I could think of and we were running out of time.

  “Okay, I need that same energy, but like . . . where you don’t get caught and get suspended. That part is vital. Can you do that?”

  He nodded. Kavi in business mode was a quiet Kavi.

  “Do you know what you’re going to do?” I asked.

  He grinned. “I’ll improvise.”

  Upstairs, I indicated for Kavi to stay put for a second. I slunk past Mr. Walker’s room. The door was closed but there was a small window you could look through. There was one student in there. A white boy with dark hair that curled around his ears. I could handle one boy. I recognized him from the year below me. Daniel something. He was one of the techy boys who did things with computers that I didn’t understand. He was bent over a piece of work but he was surreptitiously trying to pick his nose. I could just about see Mr. Walker at his desk with a pile of papers.

  He didn’t look enraged yet. That was a good sign. I slipped into the classroom next door, which was empty, and sent a signal to Kavi. From where I was standing, I watched him begin panting excessively and then he ran really fast and burst into Mr. Walker’s room. I closed the door to my classroom and slid to the floor, crouching awkwardly so I couldn’t be spotted through the window, but I could hear Kavi through the wall.

  “Sir! Sir! Come quick. I think I saw someone breaking into your car!”

  “What?!”

  I heard a scramble of chair legs against the wooden floor.

  “Did you call the police?” Mr. Walker said urgently.

  “Uh . . . yes. I did,” Kavi lied.

  I shook my head. He could have come up with a thousand less dramatic stories, but Kavi loved a good story, after all. I briefly wondered if Mr. K still thought he was pining for Meabh.

  I waited for them to leave and Mr. Walker gave a threatening “Don’t move” order to Daniel Something.

  I stole into Mr. Walker’s room, feeling very covert, and gave Daniel Something a glare.

  “Not a word,” I said.

  He furrowed his brow. He had no idea what I was talking about.

  I sat in Mr. Walker’s chair and marveled at how comfortable it was. Why did teachers get comfy chairs when we were the ones who had to sit down all day? There was a stack of papers on the desk in front of me and I flicked through them, looking for Angela’s name. It wasn’t there. I snatched the stack of marked papers, praying it wasn’t in those. It wasn’t.

  “He put a bunch of homework in the bottom drawer,” Daniel Something said.

  I opened the drawer. It was one of those deep ones. It was piled high with about a hundred papers. Ugh, being a teacher was so grim. I thought about some of the papers I handed in and had a tiny sliver of sympathy for my teachers. Imagine having to read that crap all day. Actually, wasn’t I really doing them a favor when I didn’t do my homework? Lightening their load?

  I dropped to my knees and began flicking through the papers in the drawer. I didn’t recognize enough names to know if I had the right year group so I couldn’t even skip past any.

  “What’re you at, anyway?” Daniel Something said, like it was only mildly curious that I was doing what I was doing.

  “I’m doing someone a favor,” I said brusquely.

  “Why though?”

  “Because I do that,” I said. Seána O’Brien. Nope. Seamus Keegan. Nope. Lina Jankauskas. Nope.

  “But why, though?”

  “Ughhhh, because I do!”

  Then, finally thinking, I popped my head over the desk.

  “Why? Do you need something?”

  When I thought about it later, I realized that Meabh might have started this whole thing. Kavi took that one favor and snowballed it into another. But at some point, maybe this exact point, I was the one who picked up the snowball and started chucking it in every direction.

  “Like what?” Daniel asked.

  “I don’t know. Like a favor. Something you need done that you can’t get done for yourself.”

  I was going to have to come up with a better elevator pitch.

  I didn’t know him well enough to know if he had tattling tendencies, but I figured if I did a favor for him, he’d be less inclined to rat me out. As Daniel appeared to muse on this, I returned to my papers. At least it kept him quiet.

  Dylan Cheung. Nope. Conor Quinn. Natasha Farrell. Nope.

  “There is one thing,” Daniel Something said.

  I popped my head up again and rested my arms, folded, on the desk.

  “What can I do for you, Daniel?” I asked, amiably and not at all like I was on the fucking clock. How much time had passed? How much time would it take Mr. Walker to get to the
car park and realize his car was fine?

  “You know Angela Berry?”

  Shit. Did he somehow know what I was doing?

  “Uh, yeah . . .”

  “Her party is on Saturday.”

  Thank God.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, I want to go.”

  “And you’re not invited?” I said, thinking of Angela’s reluctant invitation to have me at her party. It seemed unlikely she’d want this random boy three years below her.

  “No, that’s not it. Angela said I could go. Her cousin is my best friend.”

  Okay, just me then.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There’s no way my mum will let me go. She is so strict and my grandparents are visiting.”

  I felt unmoved. Although having a techy person owe me a favor would undoubtedly come in handy.

  Daniel fiddled with his pencil. “I’ve never been to a party or anything. She thinks parties are all drinking and sex and so she won’t ever let me go. I get left out of everything. On Monday all anyone’s going to be talking about is this stupid party and I’ll be the only one who didn’t get to go and I’ll be the loser again.”

  I didn’t care about being invited to things everyone was doing, but I did know how it felt to feel like everyone had something you didn’t. That you were the odd one out. His face was so pained and so pathetic, he reminded me of something that was so gross it was endearing. Like one of those really ugly dogs that look like they’re inside out, but they still deserve love.

  “All right,” I said, sighing heavily, like this was a huge ask. Getting to a party would be a piece of cake compared to breaking into school and trying to break bones, but Daniel needed to feel indebted to me. “But you owe me one, okay?”

  He pumped his fist and uttered a very intense, “YES!”

  I looked back at my papers and there it was. I pulled the offending sheet off and stuffed the essay back in the pile.

  “There you are, you wee bugger,” I muttered, looking over the comments with a smile.

  “I could say the same thing to you,” Ms. Devlin said.

  17.

  I looked from the paper in my hand to the open drawer, up to Ms. Devlin’s face. I’d seen her angry before, but this was something special.

  She held her hand out for the sheet and I stood up. I contemplated whether it would fit in my mouth if I scrunched it up. I wouldn’t put it past her to fish it out of my mouth, if I was honest. I handed the sheet over. She inspected it. I watched her take in whatever Angela had written on it, knowing that there was nothing identifiable on the paper now that it was detached from Angela’s homework.

  She folded it and put it in her pocket. “Come with me,” she said.

  I followed behind her in silence, through the halls, across the field, into the sports complex, and down the hall to her office.

  Ms. Devlin sat and gestured to a chair opposite her desk. She didn’t say anything. I wondered if she was waiting for an explanation, and that felt like a trap. I took in the office. There wasn’t much to it, except for a stack of cones in the corner and a succulent on the desk. I hadn’t been in it before. Seeing as Ms. Devlin loved to have private chats with me, I figured she kept her office for only the most serious infractions.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.

  “This isn’t the time, Aideen,” she said. I hadn’t heard her use that tone before. The one that didn’t have any humor in it.

  She took the piece of paper from her pocket. “Did you write this?”

  I nodded. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to her face.

  “And what were you doing in Mr. Walker’s drawers?”

  I resisted every urge to say that I would never, ever go near Mr. Walker’s drawers; I didn’t think she’d appreciate the double entendre.

  “I didn’t want him to see it. I accidentally handed it in with homework.”

  Thank God I actually had Mr. Walker for geography or I don’t know how I’d have explained that.

  Ms. Devlin narrowed her eyes. Then she wiggled her mouse and typed in the password on her computer. I tried to follow what it was. You never know when you might need these things. It started with S4, but unfortunately that was all I got.

  Ms. Devlin peered at her screen, typing in a few things, scrolling, and eventually reading something.

  “You haven’t had geography today. And from what I can see here, you haven’t handed in homework in at least two weeks.”

  “I . . . I had geography on Monday, I handed it in then. I only realized today I lost this sheet. I waited for Mr. Walker to go to the bathroom during lunch and snuck in and got it. I know it was wrong but I didn’t want him to read what I wrote. I was only thinking of his feelings, you know.”

  I tried to apply some of my charm and smiled innocently.

  It didn’t work.

  “I spoke to Miss Sullivan yesterday,” she said.

  Shit.

  “She said you’ve handed in three assignments since the start of term?” Her brows were knitted together and she seemed more worried than her usual gruff self.

  “I knew you were struggling in English and Maths, but French too?” She looked at her screen. “And geography, evidently.”

  And business studies, home ec, and biology.

  “Miss, I got one A, four Cs, and five Ds in my junior. It can’t really be a surprise that I’m not good at school.”

  “How could you be good?” she said, exasperated. “You don’t try!”

  “I’m not academic,” I said, thinking of what Mam had said when I’d got my results. She said I had other abilities, but she didn’t elaborate on what they were.

  “You’re a bright girl. I’m not asking you to get all As. I’m asking you to live up to your potential,” she said.

  Here it came. An inspirational speech. I’d heard them before. They came right before whatever do-gooder had seized on you completely gave up because you didn’t turn your life around based on their sage wisdom.

  “You’re unfocused and I know that you’ve had a difficult time in the past with your mother. There’s been social work involvement? How are things now?”

  I sighed, annoyed.

  “I am so sick of hearing about potential,” I said, sidestepping the social work bits. No way was I going into that. “What if this is my potential? What if this is the best I can do—what then? Look at my first year and you’ll see I was getting Ds back then too. You might see the odd C. Why would I work my butt off when that’s the best I can do anyway? Some people are never going to be able to do better! As much as you want to have your inspiring teacher moment, I’m only going to disappoint you!”

  Ms. Devlin looked taken aback at my sudden serious outburst and I regretted it only slightly.

  “You won’t disappoint me if you try,” she said. She was so earnest I felt sad for her. She needed a life of her own to worry about.

  “You need me to be terrible,” I said. “If everyone can get As if they only try hard enough, then As become totally meaningless. It’s not designed for everyone to succeed. A few people will be exceptional. Everyone else is getting by in the middle. But you need me at the bottom. I’m the low bar everyone else can jump over.”

  Ms. Devlin seemed to be trying to think of something she could say. I could tell I’d surprised her. I’d surprised myself with how true those words sounded. It had taken me ages to work out that feeling and I’d never said it out loud. I’d wrestled with this thorny, tangledy mess and somehow over the years managed to sort it into an idea that rang as true as a bell inside me.

  “If that’s true,” she said finally, “and I’m not saying it is. But if it is true, I want you to game the system. Don’t let it beat you.”

  There was a part of me that wanted to say, Yes, I’ll do what you want and work really hard and then you’ll be happy. I didn’t blame her. She was only doing her job, and she was new to being my form tutor so she hadn�
�t been worn into the ground by my perpetual failure yet. But I knew I couldn’t give her the thing she wanted. She wanted me to buck up and get a B and then she could be proud that I achieved something. Then she could feel like she’d helped the bad student blossom.

  I’d give her that moment if I could. She probably deserved it. But I didn’t have it in me. In first year I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be different in secondary school. People would be my friend and I wouldn’t feel lost every time I tried to follow what was going on in class. And I tried. I tried so, so hard for a while. But nothing ever clicked. Maths felt like someone was trying to teach me a foreign language by speaking another foreign language. English was some kind of riddle where people said things but meant other things and I was supposed to be the author’s therapist and analyze it all. And everything else required some kind of photographic memory. I couldn’t remember what happened on Fair City last week, never mind everything everyone in history ever said or did from the Aztecs up to Michael Collins.

  “The only way to beat it is if you want to do my homework for me,” I said. “And while I think it would be nice for you to have a hobby, I don’t think this will expand your horizons.”

  “I can’t fix the problem by doing it for you,” she said, taking everything way too seriously again. “But I can try and give you the tools you need to fix it yourself. What about tutoring?”

  Tutoring costs money. I mean, aside from the utter pointlessness. If I didn’t understand it in class, then how was I going to understand it after class when my brain was already fried?

  “I can’t give up my cigarette and cider money for a tutor, miss,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me but I wanted her not to push it.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said. “I don’t see how that will help you in any way. But I won’t be able to protect you from it if you keep carrying on like this, and if you did get in serious trouble, I’m afraid it will set you down a bad path.”

  “I think that path leads to my front door already, miss.”

  She looked sad.

  “I did my French homework for today,” I offered.