Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 33, No. 1, January, 1988

A Glass Act by Lyn Peters

The day was hot, too hot to find comfort anywhere but skinny-dipping in Carter’s Creek, or lying in the shade of a big old oak. It was too hot to be expected to sit quietly in that stuffy little box of a room and concentrate on sums and such. But Miss Abigail Hornfellow stood before us, dressed in her customary long-sleeved black dress and heavy black stockings, expecting us to do just that, concentrate.

Jimmy Bufort, a heavyset boy with the great misfortune of being one of Miss Homfellow’s least favorite students of all time, was having an especially hard time that day coming up with the correct answer to a problem he’d been told to solve.

“Concentrate, Mr. Bufort,” Miss Hornfellow demanded, when he’d stammered out an incorrect answer. “Concentrate!”

Jimmy tried to oblige. Straining and sweating, he bent over his paper and laboriously worked through the problem again. With obvious relief, he supplied an answer, different from the first, believing it to be correct. It was not. Miss Hornfellow promptly informed him that he was either not trying hard enough, or he was indeed as stupid as she suspected. Miss Hornfellow said she was rather inclined to believe the latter.

We all felt bad for Jimmy, he was trying so hard and Miss Horn-fellow and the heat were not making things any easier for him.

“Again, Mr. Bufort,” she demanded, “you shall do the sums again and again until you give me the correct response. In the meantime, your classmates will suffer at your hand, no one will be allowed to move, until you have supplied us with the correct answer. If, Mr. Bufort, that means your classmates will be forced to miss their recess period, they will have you to thank.”

Jimmy bent closer to his paper, trying to hide his tears of shame and frustration. Sums had always been dreadfully difficult for him. Try as he might to keep the figures in neat, manageable rows, they just wouldn’t stay that way. A fourteen would somehow turn itself around into a forty-one, his columns would stray and cause him confusion, his papers would always turn into jumbled messes. Poor Jimmy, we all tried to help him out, after school and during recess, tried to make things easier on him. But Jimmy just couldn’t catch on no matter what we did. It wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it. Miss Hornfellow didn’t understand Jimmy’s dilemma; she believed he was too lazy to try. To make matters worse, counting on fingers was not allowed in class. Miss Hornfellow believed anyone who’d reached the age of twelve should surely be capable of doing simple additions and subtractions in their heads and not need the assistance of their fingers. A lot of us had trouble with sums and, in spite of what she said, needed that little extra help from our fingers. Most of us had been caught at some point during that year, using our fingers to count, and had received a sharp rap on the knuckles with the long, stiff ruler she always carried with her. Jimmy got hit more than the rest of us that year, most every day as a matter of fact. Things were already going so badly for him on that day in June that Jimmy didn’t want to make matters worse by counting on his fingers. That added to his troubles, though, because he wasn’t even coming close to the right answer.

After what seemed like an awfully long time, Jimmy came out with a third answer. This one even he knew was wrong, but he’d become desperate to say something, anything. By that time the tension in the room had become almost as bad as the heat. Jimmy was really in for it, but so were the rest of us. Miss Hornfellow believed strongly in mass punishment, and dealt it out often.

“It appears, class,” she said, “that Mr. Bufort is not satisfied with merely wasting our time, he now wishes to imply that we are, each of us, fools. Is that so Mr. Bufort, do you wish to make us all appear foolish?”

“No, ma’am,” Jimmy choked, “I just can’t seem to do this.”

I had to give him credit, he was holding himself real well, considering the circumstances. I don’t know if I could have even made myself able to talk at all. Still, he should have known better than to say he couldn’t do the sums.

“Is that so?” She shook her head and tapped her stick on the desktop. Miss Hornfellow was just about out of patience. “There is nothing the human mind cannot accomplish,” she hissed. “I will not hear ‘I can’t,’ I will not hear it, is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” we answered in unison as we were expected to and waited for what would happen next.

Each of us was thinking about how we felt when Miss Hornfellow singled us out for her special attention. It was awful. Nothing in any of Our previous school experiences had prepared us for her wrath, and not one of us had escaped it during that long, hateful year. The only good thing that did come of those months we spent together in that drab, cell-like room was that we developed among us a special sort of kinship, a meeting of the minds if you will. It sounds crazy, I know, but it did exist. Rather than feeling any anger toward Jimmy for placing us all in such a bad position, as might be expected, we felt protective of him, and wanted to find a way to stop his torment.

Rachel Cummings, seated on Jimmy’s right, considered whispering the answer to him, but she didn’t because she knew it would only make matters worse. Miss Hornfellow would have heard, and both of them would have been called out for cheating. In Miss Hornfellow’s class, cheating was considered one of the worst possible offenses, and everyone involved received an automatic paddling. Rachel had already been paddled four or five times that year, and she didn’t want to find herself in that position again. I can’t say I blame her for thinking that way, we all felt pretty much the same.

When Jimmy looked up from his paper, his round, fat face flushed, his chin quivering, we all knew he still didn’t have the right answer. It was pitiful, knowing he believed he finally had it.

As I said, there was something between us all. I know how it sounds, but we could feel each other’s thoughts. We couldn’t “read” them, like you see in movies and books, but we could feel them.

Of course, all of us were concentrating on the right answer, hoping Jimmy would be able to pick up on it, as he was sometimes able to do with history and English, but that block of his, it just wouldn’t seem to let anything through about sums.

Jimmy blurted out his answer, and Miss Hornfellow sighed with disgust. We could see she’d been pushed beyond her breaking point.

“This class, on the whole, has been a bitter disappointment to me,” she announced coldly. “Not one of you has learned the single most important element necessary to becoming successful and productive human beings. You are, every one, a disgrace to yourselves and to your school.”

She walked stiffly toward the back of the room, where three small windows stood open, allowing a light but welcome breeze into the room. One by one, she slid those windows shut and locked them. Immediately the temperature in the room seemed to soar.

“Now,” she said with grim satisfaction, when she’d returned to her place at the front of the room, “we shall have a lesson in concentration. This will, perhaps, be the most valuable lesson in your lives, you will thank me for this in time.”

The heat in there had become so great all of us were beginning to feel ill, all but her. Miss Hornfellow looked just as cool as always, not a drop of sweat on her.

“Mr. Bufort will continue to search for the correct answer to our simple sum,” she announced, “and until he finds it, we shall remain exactly as we are. However, I cannot justify allowing your minds to sit idle during this period of time, and so we shall take full advantage of our unfortunate situation.”

Mary Sue Davis made small gagging noises. She was going to throw up, I was sure of it, and so was everyone else. She always did have a weak stomach, and the heat was working at bringing up the little bit of lunch she’d managed to force down less than an hour before.

Miss Hornfellow fixed her eyes sternly on Mary Sue. “You will control yourself, Miss Davis,” she said, “or I shall be forced to administer a paddling.”

Mary Sue closed her eyes and took deep, gulping breaths. “I am sorry, ma’am,” she whispered. To this day I don’t know how she managed it, but she kept her lunch down.

“Concentration, ladies and gentlemen,” Miss Hornfellow shouted, “concentration is the key to every success in life.” She paused for a long moment and glared at Jimmy, who was working frantically at his sums with a combination of sweat and tears streaming down his face. “Mr. Bufort,” she said with satisfaction, “is learning the meaning of concentration, and so shall you all.

“You will each take out your pencils and pads,” she instructed, “and prepare to write a two page essay on the subject of heat, and how concentration will assist you in dealing with it. I trust you will have no difficulty with this subject matter. You will complete this assignment within thirty minutes. Mr. Bufort will have the correct answer for us also within that time, or I shall begin administering paddlings to each of you, to help Mr. Bufort understand the seriousness of his responsibilities to himself and to all of you. Ready, begin!”

What exactly happened during those thirty minutes is impossible to explain. We worked on our compositions and our concentration. Jimmy labored over his figures, and Miss Hornfellow sat at her desk watching over us with a sharp eye. Precisely one half hour after she’d instructed us to set to work, Miss Abigail Hornfellow announced that class was dismissed.

We stood, in unison, and filed in an orderly fashion past her desk, laying our assignments in a neat pile before her.

Some later claimed to have noticed a strange odor as they approached her desk, others swore they noticed tiny wisps of smoke curling slowly up from her chair. Me, I don’t claim to have noticed a thing, though I will admit I knew well what was about to take place.

We left Room 27, and went to stand in the shade of that big old bent tree that grew outside our classroom. Nothing in my life ever felt so good as leaving that room.

We stood out there, all seventeen of us, staring silently into the classroom, witnessing the results of our work. We saw Mr. Bingsby, the principal, storm into the room, intending, I suppose, to reprimand Miss Hornfellow for releasing us without permission. We saw the astonished look on his face when all he found in our teacher’s chair was a pile of smoldering clothing lying in a heap, and a pair of heavy dark stockings smoldering on the floor.

School was dismissed early that day in June, without explanation. We didn’t need any explaining, we knew well what had happened in Room 27 and why, though we never shared that knowledge with anyone else.

The sheriff spoke with each of us, and got the same story from every one of Miss Hornfellow’s students. Officially, they came up with the notion that Miss Hornfellow had expired of the heat, which in a roundabout way, is the truth.

Folks for the most part just shook their heads and muttered about needing better ventilation in the school. Well, that wouldn’t hurt, no sir, it wouldn’t hurt one bit.

We’ll all be starting school again tomorrow, and we hear we’re gonna have a real nice teacher this year. That’ll be good, real good, we wouldn’t want to have to repeat that exercise in concentration that we had to do in Miss Hornfellow’s class. Folks just might begin to wonder.