Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Accomplice

IT WASN’T EVEN HALLOWEEN YET, but Ms. Hempel was already thinking about her anecdotals. The word, with all its expectations of intimacy and specificity, bothered her: a noun in the guise of an adjective, an obfuscation of the fact that twice a year she had to produce eighty-two of these ineluctable things. Not reports, like those written by other teachers at other schools, but anecdotals: loving and detailed accounts of a student’s progress, enlivened by descriptions of the child offering a piercing insight or aiding a struggling classmate or challenging authority. It was a terrible responsibility: to render, in a recognizable way, something as ineffable as another human being, particularly a young one. On average she would spend an hour writing about each child, and then waste up to another hour rereading what she had just written, in the hope that her words might suddenly reveal themselves as judicious. But too often Ms. Hempel’s anecdotals reminded her of those blurry portraits from photography’s early days: is that a hand I see? A bird? The sitter has squirmed, readjusted her skirts, swatted at a fly: she is no longer a child, but a smudge of light. This is how Ms. Hempel’s students appeared, captured in her anecdotals: bright and beautiful and indistinct.

The cubicle where she now sat, peeling an orange, would, in less than two months, become a Faculty Work Station. Other faculty members would sit in the work stations next to hers; they would peer over and say, “Don’t kill yourself. You’re not writing a novel.” But now there was only Mr. Polidori, humming faintly and balancing equations.

The science and math teachers had it easy. During anecdotal season, Ms. Hempel would berate her younger, student self: she never should have turned away from the dark and gleaming surfaces of the lab. She had chosen instead the squishy embrace of the humanities, where nothing was quantifiable and absolute, and now she was paying for all those lovely, lazy years of sitting in circles and talking about novels. Mrs. Beasley, the head of the math department, had perfected an anecdotal formula: she entered the student’s test scores, indicated whether his ability to divide fractions was “strong,” “improving,” or “a matter of concern,” and then ended with either congratulations or exhortations, whichever seemed more appropriate. The formulaic would not do, however, for an English teacher. Ms. Hempel could not complain of a child’s limited vocabulary or plodding sentences without putting on a literary fireworks display of her own. Because there was always that skepticism: students who didn’t quite believe that she could do all the things that she required of them (vary your sentence structure — incorporate metaphors — analyze, not summarize!), as if she were a fleshy coach who relaxed on the bleachers while the team went panting around the gym.

So the anecdotals must be beautiful. But she didn’t want them to sound florid, or excessive. She didn’t want to sound insincere. (Oh, superlatives! Ms. Hempel’s undoing.) She wanted to offer up tiny, exact, tender portraits of the children she taught, like those miniature paintings that Victorians would keep inside their lockets along with a wisp of hair. And though she would fail to do so every time, she had not resigned herself to failure, could not experience that relief; every December and every May she would sit down to write, dogged by the fear that she would misrepresent a child, or that through some grievous grammatical error, some malapropism, some slip, she would expose herself, that she would by her own hand reveal the hoax.

“If I started my anecdotals this afternoon, I would have to write only one and a half a day. That sounds manageable.”

“Recycle,” Mr. Polidori said from the depths of his cubicle.

“I do recycle,” Ms. Hempel said. “I make my kids recycle, too.”

Mr. Polidori’s face appeared above her. “Use your anecdotals from last year. Just insert new names — if you go under Edit, then slide your arrow down to Replace, it’s quite straightforward.”

“Oh,” she said. “I can’t do it. Because the material is all new this year. They’re not reading The Light in the Forest anymore. Or April Morning. But it’s a wonderful idea.” This possibility had never occurred to her.

FOR THE NEW SEVENTH-GRADE curriculum, Ms. Hempel picked a book that had many swear words in it. She felt an attraction to swear words, just as she did to cable television, for both had been forbidden in her youth. Her father had considered swear words objectionable on the grounds of their very ordinariness. “Everyone uses the same old expletives over and over again,” he said. “And you are not everyone.” He grasped her cranium gently in one hand and squeezed, as if testing a cantaloupe at the farmers market. “Utterly unordinary,” he declared.

But to Ms. Hempel, swear words were beautiful precisely because they were ordinary, just as gum snapping and hair flipping were beautiful. She once longed to become a gum-snapping, foulmouthed person, a person who could describe every single thing as fucking and not even realize she was doing it.

In this, she never succeeded. When she read This Boy’s Life, when she saw shit and even fuck on the page, she quietly thrilled. Then she ordered copies for the seventh grade.

“First impressions?” she asked, perched atop her desk, her legs swinging. “What do you think?”

The seventh graders looked at each other uneasily. They had read the opening chapter for homework. A few stroked the book’s cover, of which they had already declared their approval; it was sleek and muted. Grown-up. A cover that promised they were venturing into new territory: no more shiny titles, endorsements from the American Library Association, oil paintings of teenagers squinting uncertainly into the distance.

“Do you like it?” Ms. Hempel tried again. She smiled entreatingly; her shoes banged against her desk. Teaching, she now understood, was a form of extortion; you were forever trying to extract from your students something they didn’t want to part with: their attention, their labor, their trust.

David D’Sousa, ladies’ man, came to her assistance. Even though he was a little chubby and overcurious about sex, he was a very popular boy in the seventh grade. He had gone out with a lot of girls. He walked down the hallways with the rolling, lopsided gait of the rappers he so fervently admired. In the classroom his poise deserted him; he sputtered a lot, rarely delivering coherent sentences. He batted away his ideas just as they were escaping from his mouth.

But David was a gentleman, and ready to sacrifice his own dignity in order to rescue Ms. Hempel’s. Cooperative and responsive, she thought. Willing to take risks.

“It’s like…,” he began, and stopped. Ms. Hempel smiled at him, nodding furiously, as if pumping the gas pedal on a car that wouldn’t start. “It’s…” He grabbed his upper lip with his bottom teeth. He ground his palm into the desk. The other kids delicately averted their eyes; they concentrated on caressing the covers of their books. “It’s… different from the other stuff I’ve read in school.”

The class exhaled: yes, it was different. They spoke about it as if they didn’t quite trust it, particularly the boys, as if there was something inherently suspicious about a book whose characters seemed real. Toby, for example — the narrator. He wanted to be a good kid, but couldn’t stop getting into trouble; he loved his mother a lot, but wasn’t above manipulating her into buying things that he wanted — it was all uncannily familiar. They were also puzzled by the everyday nature of his struggles: there was no sign that soon Toby would be surviving on his own in the wilderness, or traveling into the future to save the planet from nuclear disaster.

“It doesn’t really sound like a book,” said Emily Radinsky, capricious child, aspiring trapeze artist, lover of Marc Chagall. Ms. Hempel would write, Gifted.

“I normally don’t like books,” said Henry Woo, sad sack, hanger-on, misplacer of entire backpacks. Ms. Hempel would write, Has difficulty concentrating.

“It’s okay for us to be reading this?” said Simon Grosse, who needed to ask permission for everything. Ms. Hempel would write, Conscientious.

ON PARENTS’ NIGHT, MS. HEMPEL felt fluttery and damp. She knew from past experience that she would make a burlesque of herself, that her every sentence would end with an exclamation point, and her hands would fly about wildly and despairingly, like two bats trapped inside a bedroom. The previous year, a boy named Zachary Bouchet had reported, “My mother says that you smile too much.”

In the faculty room, Mr. Polidori threw an arm around her and whispered, “Just pretend they’re naked.”

That was the last thing Ms. Hempel wanted to imagine.

Instead, she decided to picture her own parents sitting in front of her. She pictured her mother, who would make them late because she had misplaced the car keys; and her father, who would station himself in the front row and ask embarrassing questions. Embarrassing not in their nature, but embarrassing simply because he had asked them. Her father liked to attract attention. “Ni hao ma!” he would greet the waiters at the Chinese restaurant. “Yee-haw!” he would whoop at the fourth-grade square dance recital. “Where’s the defense?” he would wail from the sidelines of soccer games. “Brava! Brava!” he would sing out, the first to rise to his feet. Ms. Hempel, as a child, had received several standing ovations, all induced by her beaming, cheering, inexorable father.

Each of these parents, Ms. Hempel told herself, is as mortifying as mine were.

A mother began: “This book they’re reading — I was just wondering if anyone else was troubled by the language.”

Ms. Hempel smiled bravely at the instigator. “I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, and reminded herself: This woman can never find her car keys. This woman is always running late.

A classroom of parents, squeezed into the same chairs that their children occupied during the day, looked at Ms. Hempel.

She couldn’t say, Your kids are okay with me. I promise.

Instead, she said, “When I chose this book, I was thinking of The Catcher in the Rye. Because every time I teach Catcher to the eighth grade, I feel like I’m witnessing the most astonishing thing. It’s like they’ve stuck their finger in a socket and all their hair is standing on end. They’re completely electrified. What they’re responding to, I think, is the immediacy and authenticity of the narrator’s voice. And part of what makes Holden sound authentic to them is the language he uses. This book’s impact on them is just—immeasurable. Even the ones who don’t like to read, who don’t like English. It suddenly opens up to them all of literature’s possibilities. Its power to speak to their experiences.”

Ms. Hempel paused, surprised. She had recovered.

“I thought to myself, Shouldn’t the seventh grade get the chance to feel that? That shock of recognition?”

And she meant it, in a way, now that she had to say it.

What happened then? Ms. Hempel doubted it had anything to do with her speech. Perhaps an insurgency had been building quietly against the concerned mother, who probably hijacked Parent Association meetings, or else was always suggesting another bake sale. Maybe they heard in her complaint an echo of their own parents, or they believed on principle that words could never be dirty. Maybe sitting in the plastic desk-chairs reminded them of what school felt like.

One after another, the parents began describing their children: She talks about it at dinner. He takes it with him into the bathroom. You don’t understand — the last thing that she enjoyed reading was the PlayStation manual.

They spoke in wonder.

At nights, I hear him chuckling in his bedroom. He says that he wants me to read it, that he’ll loan me his copy when he’s done. When I offered to rent the movie for her, she said that she didn’t want to ruin the book.

“I knew it!” a father announced. “It was just a question of finding the right book.”

And the parents nodded again, as if they had always known it, too.

“Well done!” Another father, sitting in the back row, began to clap. He smiled at Ms. Hempel. Three more giddy parents joined in the applause.

Ms. Hempel, standing at the front of the classroom, wanted to bow. She wanted to throw a kiss. She wanted to say thank you. Thank you.

And then it occurred to her: perhaps what had so humiliated her about her father had made someone else — a square dancer, a waiter, the director of the seventh-grade production of Cats—feel wonderful.

THE NEXT MORNING, IN HOMEROOM, Ms. Hempel helped Cilla Matsui free herself from her crippling backpack. “Your dad,” she noted, “has this very benevolent presence.”

“Benevolent?” Cilla Matsui asked.

Ms. Hempel always used big words when she spoke; they also appeared frequently in her anecdotals, words like acuity and perspicacious. It was all part of her ambitious schemes for vocabulary expansion. Most kids took interest in new words only if they felt they had something personal at stake. “You’re utterly depraved, Patrick,” she would say. “No, I won’t. Look it up. There’s about six of them sitting in the library.”

So Adelaide’s comments were astute. Gloria had an agile mind. Rasheed’s spelling was irreproachable. Even those who weren’t academically inclined deserved a dazzling adjective. David D’Sousa, for instance, was chivalrous. These words, Ms. Hempel knew, were now permanently embedded. Even after the last layer of verbal detritus had settled, they would still be visible, winking brightly: yes, I was an iconoclastic thinker.

Because one never forgets a compliment. “You looked positively beatific during the exam,” Miss Finch, her tenth-grade English teacher, had told her. “Staring out the window, a secret little smile on your face. I was worried, to tell the truth. But then you turned in the best of the bunch.”

Thus, beatific—blissful, saintly, serenely happy — was forever and irrevocably hers. She shared the new word with her father; she showed him the grade she had received. Aha, he said, with great vindication. Aha!

Uncomplimentary words, however, seemed to overshadow the complimentary ones. That wasn’t it, exactly. But whereas an ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom, words of criticism were familiar and unmovable fixtures in the landscape: fire hydrants, chained trash cans, bulky public sculptures. They were useful, though, as landmarks. Remember? she used to say to her father: Mr. Ziegler. White hair. He made us memorize Milton. And when that failed, she would say: Don’t you remember him? He was the one who called me lackadaisical.

Her mother’s memory was terrible, but her father could always be counted on. In his neat, reliable way, he sorted and shelved all the slights she had endured. Oh yes, he’d say. Mr. Ziegler. Looking back on those conversations, she wondered if perhaps it wasn’t fair to make him revisit the unhappy scene of her high school career. Remembering old criticisms is only fun once they have been proven laughably incorrect. Fractions! the famous mathematician hoots: Mrs. Beasley said I was hopeless at fractions!

When her father died, a year ago that spring, Ms. Hempel had spoken at his memorial service, along with her brother and their much younger sister. Calvin talked about a day they went hiking together in Maine, and Maggie, before she started crying, remembered how he used to read aloud to her every night at bedtime, something she still liked to do with him even though she was ten years old now and capable of reading The Hobbit on her own. Ms. Hempel’s story sounded unsentimental by comparison. She described her father picking her up from play practice, when she was maybe fourteen or fifteen. It was winter, and too cold to wait for the bus. Before parking the car in the garage, he would deposit her at the back door, so that she wouldn’t have to walk through the slush. As she balanced her way up the path, he would flick his headlights on and off. The beams cast shadows across the lawn, making everything seem bigger than it really was: the randy cat, her mother’s beloved gazebo, the fur sprouting from the hood of her parka. At the moment she reached the door, she would turn around and wave at him. She couldn’t see him, because the headlights were too bright, but she could hear him. Click, click. Click, click. Only once she stepped inside would he steer the car back out of the driveway.

When Ms. Hempel finished speaking, she looked out at her family. They looked back at her expectantly, waiting to hear the end of the story. The last time she stood on this pulpit, many years before, she had received the same anxious look. She was the narrator for the Christmas pageant, and though she had spoken her part clearly and with dramatic flair, she forgot to say her final line: “So the three wise men followed the star of Bethlehem.” A long pause followed, and then the three wise men stumbled out of the sacristy, as if a great force had propelled them.

For the rest of the pageant, she had to stay inside the pulpit, from where she was supposed to look down on the manger with a mild and interested expression; instead, she watched the other children wolfishly, willing someone else to make a mistake more terrible than her own. No one did. It could have happened to anyone, her mother would tell her, but she knew differently: it could have happened only to her. During her narration, she had fastened her eyes on the choir loft, but as she neared the end, in anticipation of the delicious relief that she would soon feel, she allowed her gaze to slip down onto the congregation below. There she saw her father, leaning forward very slightly, and holding on to the pew in front of him. He was smiling at her. Hugely. She lost her bearings entirely.

Now, standing in the same pulpit, she looked out at her family as they waited hopefully for a final paragraph. She looked at them in defiance: That’s all! He clicked the headlights on and off. The End. And she wished something that she never used to wish: that her father was there, on the edge of his pew. He would have liked the story; it would have made sense to him.

“Is being benevolent a good thing or a bad thing?” Cilla Matsui asked.

“A good thing!” said Ms. Hempel. “Benevolent means ‘generous and kind’.”

“Oh yes,” Cilla said. “That sounds like my dad.”

DWIGHT, TOBY’S STEPFATHER, was the character in the book whom her kids despised most. They shuddered at the humiliations that he made Toby endure: shucking whole boxes full of foul-smelling horse chestnuts, attending Boy Scouts in a secondhand uniform, playing basketball in street shoes because he wouldn’t fork out the money for sneakers. They hated him for coming between Toby and his mother. They hated him for being petty and insecure and cruel. “Dwight…,” they would mutter helplessly. “I want to kill the guy.”

As Toby’s situation worsened, they would turn over their books and study the author’s photograph: his handsome, bushy mustache, his gentle eyes. “He teaches at Syracuse,” they would point out. “He lives with his family in upstate New York.”

They loved these facts, because reading about the abusive stepdad, the failures at school, the yearnings to escape, to be someone else — it made them feel terrible. “He had such a tough life,” they repeated, shaking their heads. “A really tough life.”

But, according to the back of the book, Toby prevailed. The kids saw, in the felicitous pairing of picture and blurb, a happy ending to his story: he became a writer! He didn’t turn into a drunk or a bum. The back cover promised that it was possible to weather unhappy childhoods, that it was possible to do lots of bad things and have lots of bad things done to you — and the damage would not be irreparable. Often a particularly somber discussion of Toby’s struggles would conclude with this comforting thought: “And now he’s a famous and successful writer.” Tobias Wolff.

Fame and success: did that count as revenge? The seventh grade had a lively sense of justice. They wanted to see Dwight pay for all that he had done to Toby and his mother, for all the pain he had inflicted. They longed for a climactic, preferably violent, showdown between the boy and the stepfather. Barring that, they wanted Dwight to suffer in some specific and prolonged way. The fact that he had to live with the meagerness of his own soul — this was not considered punishment enough.

“He’s probably read the book, right?” Will Bean asked.

“And he knows that Toby’s a famous writer?”

They relished this idea: Dwight as an unrepentant old man, hobbling down to the liquor mart, pausing by the brilliant window of a bookstore. And there’s Toby. Mustached, mischievous Toby, the same photograph from the back cover, only much larger. A careful pyramid of his books is pointing toward the sky. number one bestseller, the sign reads. Through the plate glass, the old man can hear the faint slamming of the cash register. He can see the customers taking their place in line. And he can make out, even though his eyes are old and rheumy, the title of the book that they hold in their hands.

“If he’s read it, he knows that millions of people now hate him, right?”

Which would mean, of course, banishment from the Elks Club. Divorce papers from his latest wife. Bushels of hate mail thumping against his screen door. Furtive trips to the convenience store, his mechanic’s jacket pulled up over his head.

“Well,” said Ms. Hempel. “I think he’s dead already.”

A howl filled the classroom.

“Usually writers don’t publish this type of book until the main characters have all passed away. So people’s feelings don’t get hurt.”

Dwight, cold in the ground before the book even reached the stores. It was the greatest unfairness of all.

“And Rosemary? She’s dead? She didn’t get to see how good a writer her son is? She didn’t get to see how well he turned out?” This, too, struck them as terribly unjust.

“No, no,” Ms. Hempel said. “Rosemary is still alive. I think. Look in the front pages of your book — he thanks her, he says that she corrected him on certain facts, on the chronology of the events.”

“Good.” The class looked relieved. “Okay.”

An opportunity for moral inquiry presented itself. “If you were writing a book about your life,” Ms. Hempel asked, “and you cast a person in an unflattering light, would you wait until that person died? Before you published your book?”

The kids didn’t see her point. “I couldn’t write a book. I don’t have enough to write about,” Simon Grosse said.

“That’s not true!” said Ms. Hempel. “Each of you could write a book. Several books, in fact.” She tried to remember what Flannery O’Connor had said on the subject. “Anyone who’s made it through childhood has enough material to last them until the day they die.”

“We haven’t made it through yet,” Henry Woo said.

“But you will,” said Ms. Hempel. “And when you do, you’ll have lots to write about. Everyone does interesting things when they’re kids.”

“And bad things, like Toby?”

“And bad things. Everyone has, even if everyone won’t admit it.”

The kids waited for a moment, as if they needed, for politeness’ sake, to make a show of digesting this information.

“Did you do bad things, Ms. Hempel?”

She should have expected it.

“Well. Be logical. Everyone includes me, doesn’t it?”

Greedily the kids leaned forward. “What kinds of bad things?” The back legs of desk-chairs rose into the air.

Ms. Hempel heaved an enormous sigh of resignation. She let her arms drop heavily to her sides. “You really want to know?” she groaned, as if she were finally, under great duress, capitulating to their demands. “You’re really going to make me do this?” In truth, she loved talking about herself. Especially to her students.

All heads nodded vigorously.

“I watched TV when I wasn’t supposed to. And sometimes I stayed out past my curfew.”

The back legs returned to the floor. “That’s it?”

“I wasn’t always considerate of my parents.”

David D’Sousa offered her a wan smile.

“And I pierced my nose with a sewing needle,” Ms. Hempel said. “My mother turned her face away every time I walked into the room, like she does when she’s watching a violent movie. She was furious at me.”

“Caroline Pratt pierced her belly button,” Adelaide observed. Caroline was an eighth grader. “She didn’t even use ice.”

Ms. Hempel shuffled through her collected misdeeds, trying to find ones that she could, in good conscience, share with seventh graders. “I used to like skateboarders. I would help them dye their hair — it made my hands all blotchy. And I was always getting in trouble for breaking the dress code at my school. Once I wore—”

“Ms. Hempel, did you always want to be a teacher?”

It startled her, the conversation veering off in this direction. But then it made sense to her: they believed they already knew the answer. Of course she had always wanted to be a teacher. They were giving her a way out. A way of explaining her unremarkable youth.

“No!” she said. “I certainly didn’t.”

“Why not?” And the question sounded reproachful. “You like teaching, don’t you?” Because suddenly there was the possibility that she didn’t. “You like being a teacher. And you were good at school.”

They said it with confidence. They treated it as a commonplace, an assumption that needn’t be challenged. But the fact that they had said it, the fact that the issue had arisen, in the midst of this tour through Ms. Hempel’s offenses, suggested that somewhere, in some part of themselves, they knew differently. It was astonishing, the efficiency with which they arrived at the truth. This was probably why children were so useful in stories and films about social injustice, like To Kill a Mockingbird. But Ms. Hempel didn’t think that this ability was particularly ennobling. It was just something they could do, the way dogs can hear certain high-pitched sounds, or the way X-rays can see past skin and tissue down to the ghostly blueprint of the bones.

Ms. Hempel sighed. A real one, this time.

“My school — it was demanding, academically. They had very high expectations of us.”

“So you were a really good student?”

“No,” Ms. Hempel said. “I wasn’t.”

And this, finally, impressed them.

“I did well on all the standardized tests — like the ERBs? — I scored very high on those. Anything with bubbles I was excellent at, or multiple choice. Even short answer. But it was hard for me to develop my ideas at length. You know, stick with an argument, weave different threads together.

“And my school placed a lot of emphasis on that. On essays, term papers, the final question on exams. It’s not because I didn’t have anything to say or because I didn’t have any ideas. I had lots of them, too many of them. My papers were hard to make sense of.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have lots of potential? But that you aren’t fulfilling it? That’s what I heard all throughout high school.

“So I would get terribly nervous before a paper was due. I would tell myself, I’m really going to fulfill my potential on this one. I’m going to make an outline, do a rough draft, write a paragraph a night. I’m going to plan my time effectively. And I would spend two weeks telling myself this, and there I’d be, three o’clock in the morning, the paper’s due in five hours, and I can’t get my ideas to sit still long enough for me to write any of them down.

“That’s why,” Ms. Hempel concluded, “I make you turn in your outlines. And your rough drafts. Even though you hate me for it.”

But the attempt at levity went unremarked. Her class gazed at her soberly.

“So how’d you become a good student?” Cilla Matsui asked. “How did you get into a good college, and become a teacher?”

“I don’t know,” Ms. Hempel said. “Worked harder, I guess. What do they say? — I buckled down.”

It wasn’t until high school that all of this unfulfilled potential was discovered; up until then she had been simply great: great kid, great student. A pleasure to have in class. But beginning in the ninth grade, she felt her greatness gently ebbing away, retreating to a cool, deep cistern hidden somewhere inside her. I think it’s there! her teachers hollered down into the darkness. It is there! her father insisted. But where? she felt like asking. Because there was something faintly suspicious, faintly cajoling, about the way they spoke to her, as if she alone knew the location, and was refusing to tell them for the sake of being contrary.

Dear Parents,

You recently have received an anecdotal about your child. Although it might not have been immediately apparent, this anecdotal was written BY your child, from the perspective of one of his or her teachers. In response to the students’ entreaties, I did not include a note of explanation. They wanted to explain the exercise to you themselves, and I hope you have had a chance to talk with your children about the letters they wrote. At this point, though, I would like to offer my own thoughts about the assignment and provide a context in which to understand these “anecdotals.”

The assignment was inspired by a passage from the memoir we currently are reading, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. When this passage occurs, Toby is longing to escape his abusive stepfather and the dead-end town he lives in. When his older brother suggests that Toby apply to boarding school, he becomes excited about the idea, but then discouraged when he realizes that with his poor grades, he will never be accepted. Help arrives in the form of his best friend, who volunteers in the school office and supplies Toby with all the official stationery he needs to create his own letters of recommendation.

“I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing — the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice….

“I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And in the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.”

I had hoped that through this exercise students could give voice to their own visions of themselves, visions that might differ from those held by teachers, parents, or friends. I wanted to give them a chance to identify and celebrate what they see as their greatest strengths. During this crucial stage of their development, kids need, I think, to articulate what they believe themselves capable of.

The students approached the assignment with an enthusiasm that overwhelmed me. In their efforts to sound like their teachers, they wrote at greater length, in sharper detail, with more sophisticated phrasing and vocabulary, than they ever have before. Spelling and grammatical errors instantly disappeared; drafts were exhaustively revised. They felt it important that their anecdotals appear convincing.

The decision to mail these anecdotals home was fueled by my desire to share with you these very personal and often revealing self-portraits. When I read them, I found them by turns funny, poignant, and, as Tobias Wolff writes, full of truth. I thought that you, as parents, would value this opportunity to see your children as they see themselves. The intention was not, as I think a few students have mistaken, to play a joke.

I hope that this assignment has offered some meaningful insights into your child, and I deeply regret if it has been the cause of any misunderstanding or distress. Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions or concerns.

Ms. Hempel distributed the letters, each of which she had signed by hand. “Please,” she said. “It’s imperative that you deliver these to your parents. First thing tonight, before you do anything else. Its contents are extremely important.” Though she had omitted certain details: the glee with which she had brandished the school stationery, pulling it out from beneath her cardigan; the instructions she had provided as to perfecting her signature, the way she had leaned over her students’ shoulders and adjusted the loops in their Ls. How they had jigged up and down, and laughed wickedly, and rubbed their palms together in a villainous way. How she hadn’t the heart to tell them that their anecdotals, so carefully fashioned, would be, upon first glance, apprehended as false.

They didn’t sound quite right. And the signatures were awful.

Ms. Hempel had contemplated forgery, once, when she was still a student. Her school instituted a new policy: throughout the semester parents had to sign all tests and papers, so that when final grades were sent home, there wouldn’t be any unwelcome surprises. In accordance with the policy, she left her essay on her father’s desk, with a little note requesting his signature. The essay had earned a C+.

Later that evening she was lying face down on her bed, air-drying. Her skin was still ruddy from the bath, and as she peeked over her shoulder, surveying the damp expanse of her own body, it reminded her, in a satisfying way, of a walrus. But the comparison wasn’t very complimentary. She amended it to a seal, a sleek and shining seal. She imagined a great, gruff hunter coveting her pelt.

But then she was interrupted: the sound of something sliding beneath her door. Disappointingly, only her essay. She padded over from the bed and bent down to retrieve it.

It was horrible to behold. Her father had written not only at the top of the essay, per her instructions, but in the margins as well. His firm handwriting had completely colonized the page. The phrases were mysterious—No, no, she’s being ironic—agitated and without context, like the cries of people talking in their sleep. Upon closer inspection, she realized that his comments were in response to what her teacher, Mr. Ziegler, had already written. To his accusations of Obscure, her father rejoined: Nicely nuanced. When he wondered how one paragraph connected to the next, her father explained: It seems a natural transition to move from a general definition to a particular instance. The dialogue continued until the final page, where her father arrived at his jubilant conclusion: that this was an essay unequaled in its originality, its unpredictable leaps of imagination, its surprising twists and turns. On the bottom of the page, he had printed, neatly: A—. It was protected inside a circle.

“Your name!” she bellowed down the staircase. “Why is it so hard for you to just sign your name?”

Back inside her bedroom, she heard the methodical stamp of her father’s feet, climbing the stairs. “I don’t want any part in this!” she yelled, tucking the essay inside her binder, though she would apologize to Mr. Ziegler; she would say, My father lost it.

She stood up and spoke through the crack in the door: “Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” her father said, his voice muffled. He was right on the other side. “But I can’t promise you I won’t.”

It was at that moment forgery first presented itself as an option. But instead she decided to ask, from then on, for her mother’s signature. It seemed much easier than fraud. And she knew, anyhow, that even if she did try, she would inevitably get caught. Teachers were alert to that sort of crime.

Ms. Hempel thought that parents would be, too. They were supposed to be vigilant. They were supposed to reprogram the cable box, listen to lyrics, sniff sweaters, check under the mattress. Or, at the least, distinguish between Ms. Hempel’s prose and that of a seventh grader. She had read every one of the anecdotals herself, yet she could not account for the lapse.

Some were panegyrics, plain and simple: Adelaide is without a doubt the most outstanding French student I have ever encountered in my 26 years of teaching. Some were recantations: Please ignore my phone call of last week. Matthew is no longer disrupting my class. Some suggested publication: Elliott’s five-paragraph essay was so superb, I think he should send it to Newsweek. Some recommended immediate acceleration: Judging by her excellence in all areas, I think that Emily is ready to take the SATs, and maybe start college early.

Some anecdotals did everything at once.

Dear Melanie Bean,

I am writing to you about your son. He has been doing exceedingly well in English class. He has gotten a perfect score on every test or quiz we have had in English. He is completely outscoring, outtalking, outparticipating everyone in the class. I look forward to spending my time elaborating his mind in his field of expertise. I would like to consider moving him up to the eighth grade level, which I think would be more suited to his ability. Even though he would miss Spanish every day, I think that Spanish is an inferior class for any person of his mental state, and is simply ruining his skills. I have framed many of his works and find them all inspirational, especially his poetry. William is an inspirational character and I will never forget him. I suggest that you encourage him to use his skills constantly.

Sincerely,

Beatrice Hempel

Will Bean looked nothing like his mother. He was small and impish and pale, and had assumed the role of a friendly, benign irritant, someone who pops up from behind desks and briskly waves. His greatest joy was a series of books about a religious community made up of mice, voles, and hedgehogs. They had taken the Benedictine vows, and created a devout but merry life for themselves. Will frequently alluded to them. He produced a radio play in which he performed all the parts: the sonorous voice of the badger abbot, the tittering of the field mice, who were still novices and had to work in the monastery’s kitchens. He pestered Ms. Hempel into borrowing a tape deck and making the whole class listen to his production. In anecdotal terms, he could be described as whimsical, or inventive, or delightfully imaginative.

Ms. Bean, however, was tall and gaunt and harried. When Ms. Hempel saw her standing outside the school’s gates, she was swaddled in bags: one for her computer, another for her dry cleaning, for her groceries, for Will’s soccer uniform. It was strange, how clearly Ms. Hempel could picture her students’ lives — Will had tae kwon do on Tuesday afternoons, and every Wednesday night he spent with his dad — and how murky their parents’ lives seemed by comparison. All she could see in Ms. Bean was evidence of a job, an exhausting one.

“Do you have a moment,” she said.

Ms. Hempel said of course.

“I wanted to speak with you about the assignment.”

Would she find it deceitful, and dishonest, as Mrs. Woo did? Or maybe, like Mrs. Galvani, she had telephoned all the relatives, even the ones in California, to tell them the wonderful news. It was unlikely, though, that she loved the assignment, thought it original and brilliant and bold. Only Mr. Radinsky seemed to feel that way.

What Ms. Bean wanted her to know was that she felt the assignment to be unkind. Or maybe not unkind. Maybe just unfair. Because she had been waiting a long time for someone else to finally notice what she had always known about Will. And then to discover that it was an assignment, merely.

The disappointment was terrible — could she understand that?

MR. DUNNE, HER COLLEGE COUNSELOR, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after a while. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter. She wrote film reviews for the university paper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed, as if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived. Yes, her father flashed the headlights, and yes, she waved at him before she stepped inside. Those details were resilient. Not these: how she waved glamorously, and smiled radiantly, how the headlights heralded the arrival of a star. How her shadow, projected onto the snow, looked huge.

“That was beautiful,” her aunt said to her when she returned to her pew. “I can see Oscar doing just that — making sure you got in safely.”

Beautiful was not what she intended. Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions. It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine, the days of their collusion, when they communicated in code — click, click — as true accomplices do. When they were still plotting to prove everyone woefully mistaken. This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge? Something she didn’t even recognize as her own. Even her father — her coconspirator, her fan — had been changed into someone she didn’t quite know. A kind and shadowy figure, sitting in the car. Benevolent. Thoughtful. Considerate of others.