Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY NINE. Tuesday, April 1, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, EIGHTH GRADE

I CAN WRITE, BUT I DON’T WRITE

IT WAS APRIL FOOL’S DAY at Lasswell Middle School. “You’re Mr. Monette today, all day,” said the secretary, Elaine. Mr. Monette’s room was in Team Ganges, and he taught eighth-graders language arts. At the lockers outside room 83, Wyatt, with an orange Superman logo on his shirt, saw me and froze. “Wait, are you subbing for Mr. Monette?”

I said I was.

“Yessss!” He pumped his fists and did a little dance with his friend, who was wearing a cape: No real work for them today.

I found the staff bathroom and blew my nose and tried to wake up.

“Students are working on a unit on Conflict in short stories,” Mr. Monette’s sub plans said. “Their rough drafts should be completed today and their final drafts are due tomorrow.” I cleared some space on the desk and poured some coffee from a thermos. Prentice sat down near me and stared into space. “How are you doing?” I asked. “Did you get enough sleep?”

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” It was homeroom, so I didn’t have to teach anything.

“Hey, Mr. Whatsyourname!” said Bethany, dressed as Wonder Woman.

A teacher came by. “It’s Superhero Day,” she explained. “Some of them have chosen to dress up, so that will create a stir.”

“Sean, that’s quite the outfit!” said Bethany.

“My sister’s annoying,” said Felicity, who was also dressed as Wonder Woman. “She’s like, ‘I’m cute, I’m real cute!’ I’m like, ‘Shut up, you’re retarded.’”

“Don’t tell her those words,” said Bethany.

Felicity said, “She’s like, ‘Well, you’re retarded, too.’”

Marielle sat down. “What’s your name, Mr. — ?”

“Baker. So it’s Superhero Day?”

“Yes, it’s Spirit Week,” said Marielle. “We raise money. Right now we’re raising money for a school in Cameroon.”

I asked how the superhero outfits related to that.

“We have to bring in a dollar if we want to wear an outfit.” Marielle rubbed her finger. “I burned myself.”

“Toaster accident?” I said.

“No, ironing,” said Marielle.

The PA lady came on. “Good morning, if you could please rise and say with me the Pledge of Allegiance.” We rose; we said it. The lunch menu was hot buffalo-wing wrap-it-ups with shredded cheese, brown rice pilaf, romaine and tomato mix, carrot coins, chilled apple juice, and milk choices. Milk choices, there were always milk choices. She read the names of the artists of the week. “And here’s another list, of students who will receive a super student award, due to their considerate and kind behavior to others.” There were three boys and four girls. “Congratulations to these students,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be excellent to hear your name read on this announcement, too?” Then the president of the student council made an announcement. “Good morning, LMS!” he said. “Today is Superhero Day. I’m excited to see all the costumes people brought in to wear.” He described the private school in Cameroon that was the recipient of superhero money. “There are a hundred and forty students in the school,” he said. “The students get two meals a day, plus their education.” The money raised by middle schoolers would pay for a storage tank for clean water, he said. “There is no running water at the school. Students have to carry water down the street in buckets.”

The first-block students filled the room, and there were a lot of them. “I remember you from science,” said John. I wrote my name on the board and waved my arms and shouted and got the class to look up. “I guess you’re thinking about conflict today? Conflict in short stories?”

A quiet girl nodded; her name was Bailey.

I said I didn’t understand what conflict was, and why we needed to look for it.

“I don’t understand it either,” said Bailey. She had a photocopy of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” on her desk.

I said, “SO BAILEY’S READING ‘THE TELL-TALE HEART,’ which is about the scary heart that’s beating and all that. What’s the conflict?”

Shelby raised his hand. “He chopped him up.”

“That’s something that happened,” I said.

“It’s person versus person,” said Aaron.

“I see, it’s a fight,” I said.

Melissa raised her hand. “It was person versus self.”

“That’s what they say, right, it’s person versus self,” I said. “I guess you’re right.”

The class went back to talking. I looked down at the sub plans. I had nothing to offer them. Somebody started noisily sharpening a pencil.

I raised my voice to Mr. Boxer levels. “HOW MANY PEOPLE have actually read the story that you’re supposed to read?”

Lots of hands went up.

“So you’re supposed to write a rough draft of an essay about internal and external conflict. Why do you think they came up with this word that somehow sums up all short stories? Why wouldn’t it be that a short story is about what is beautiful and interesting in life?”

The class went quiet. Payson said, “Because there’d be no fun in that?”

I said, “Something has to go wrong?”

Payson nodded. “Something always has to go wrong in order for something else to go right.”

I asked people to say what other stories they’d read.

“‘The Sniper,’” said Harley. “It’s about a guy who’s on a mission. He had to shoot this old lady, and afterwards there was another sniper on another roof that shot him in the arm. And then he went down and realized it was his brother.”

“Do NOT give away the ending, Harley!” said Tamara.

The conflict was easy to spot in that one, I said, because the people in it actually have guns. “How often in real life do people actually shoot each other?”

“Every day,” said Katylynn.

“Every day somewhere in the world,” I said. “But in your own immediate experience, in Maine.”

Victor, who was small and freckled, said, “People shoot theirselves every day in Maine.”

“That’s sad,” said Shelby, making a fake crying face.

“Shut up,” said Victor.

“It matters what you’re talking about,” said Christopher. “I could shoot Rodney right now, in the face, with a paintball gun. It can hurt him. And maybe I want him to be hurt.”

“Do you play paintball together?”

“No, I’m just saying if I shot him in the face, which I really want to do right now—”

“Don’t shoot me in the face!” said Rodney.

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “Guys, when you woke up this morning, what was the conflict in your life?”

“Going to school?” said Melissa, who was wearing a pink headband that morning.

The wall phone rang. I answered. The secretary asked if I’d taken attendance in homeroom. I said I’d forgotten to take it. She said not to worry. I said goodbye and hung up.

“Shut up, Chris,” said Rodney.

I said, “When you realized you had to get up and go to school, what was your feeling inside?”

“Tired,” said Melissa. “And I was disappointed. Pretty much. I hate going to school.”

“So if you were writing a story about your day, the main conflict would be that you did not want to get out of bed?”

“Yes,” she said.

By then the class had dissolved into eight separate conversations. I couldn’t blame them: I was doing a lousy job of teaching this English class. Raising my voice to a shout, I said, “SO WRITE A DRAFT OF THE ESSAY.”

“Can I take attendance?” said Melissa.

“Yes.”

Melissa began checking off the names of everyone who was there. I asked her to look over the previous sheet, for homeroom, and try to remember if anyone had been absent. Jessica helped her. “Can I bring a buddy when I go to the office?” Melissa asked.

“No,” I said.

“What if I get lost?”

Kimberly, dressed as Wonder Woman, handed Aaron one of her earbuds. “Put this in your ear,” she said.

Payson explained to me how they were supposed to write an essay. First they had to fill out several pages of something called an organizer, and in the organizer they were supposed to write their thesis statement, which had to appear in the essay’s introduction.

I said, “That sounds really—”

“Hard?” said Payson.

“Theoretical. So did you get a first sentence?”

“I do not have a first sentence,” said Payson.

He showed me his paper. At the top, he’d written “The Snipper.”

Shelby read it aloud: “The Snipper.”

“That’s a very different story,” I said. “About a madman with some scissors.”

Payson handed me his copy of “The Sniper,” by Liam O’Flaherty. I read the first sentence aloud. “The long June twilight faded into night. Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds. I’m in it already. So what do you think you’ll have for sentence one?”

Payson said, “For sentence one I’d probably say, ‘My story is about “The Sniper.”’ And then I’d do my introduction. That would be on the upper line. I’d put my name, and then I’d put my story below that.”

“Boom, you’re on it,” I said. “The name, then the date.”

“But we have to use the organizer,” Payson said. “My organizer is in my locker.” He went out to the hall to get his organizer.

I asked Shelby what his story was. “I’m doing ‘Thank You, Ma’am,’” he said. “It’s about this boy named Roger. He tries to steal this big woman’s purse, but then he trips. She grabs him and brings him to her apartment and talks to him and makes him dinner. Makes him wash his face. Gives him money to buy shoes.” It turned out to be a story by Langston Hughes.

Kimberly was reading through a piece of paper filled with her neat writing.

“You’ve already gotten it written?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. She was working on an extra-credit question: predict how a character in her story would react to a different conflict, using evidence taken from the text. “This is to get you a score four,” she explained. “The essay only gets you a score three.” She was writing about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “I like Edgar Allan Poe.”

“He was kind of messed up,” I said. “But it worked out for him.” I found an apple in my jacket pocket and took a bite of it. I kept circulating.

Payson came back with his organizer. On one sheet he was supposed to list examples from the story that demonstrated four different kinds of conflict: character vs. self, character vs. character, character vs. nature, and character vs. society.

“Are you ever conflicted with yourself?” I asked him.

“Um.”

Behind him, Aaron was lobbing balls of paper at the trash basket.

“How many times are you going to miss?” I said.

“That was like my second time!”

Payson scoffed. “Second time! That was like your fifth time.”

“Just put it away,” I said.

“We used to get yelled at all the time last year for doing that,” said Payson.

I looked away for a moment. Aaron took one last shot and made it.

I made my way to the back of the class and asked May, who was wearing a denim dress and a cable-knit sweater, what a good first sentence would be.

“You just write what you wrote on the graphic organizer,” said May, showing it to me. “The graphic organizer sets up how your essay is supposed to flow. Introduction, and then your Claim One, your Claim Two.” She’d filled the organizer’s boxes with tiny, elegant writing.

“That’s really good,” I said. “Let me ask you this, because you seem to know what’s going on. Say writers grew up in a world where there were no middle school classes that taught the idea of conflict. Could they still write short stories?”

“I think most fiction stories have conflicts anyway,” said May. “The writer doesn’t necessarily need to know what conflict he or she is going to put into it, but the story will have it.”

I said I guessed it was sort of like people who grow up and learn to speak and read well, but they may not know grammar.

“Yes,” May said. “I believe that many people, when they’re writing short stories, don’t exactly know that they’re creating conflict, but it naturally occurs.”

“That’s really helpful, thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

I walked over to Victor. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” said Victor. He’d chosen to write about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “I also saw the movie,” he said.

“Which is scarier, the movie or the story?”

“It depends. There are two versions of the story.”

I asked Victor if he had a first sentence; he didn’t. He still had to fill out the graphic organizer, he said. All he had was a thesis statement.

Christopher interrupted, asking to go out in the hall because the people near him were stressing him out. I told him he could go if he came back with a finished draft.

I turned back to Victor. “What if you didn’t fill out the organizer?” I said. “What if you just started, and said, ‘In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe blasts wide open the knowledge of the inner demons we confront, blah blah blah.’ Don’t use the blah blah blah.”

“I want to use the blah blah blah,” said Harley.

I read John’s thesis statement, which was, The vulture eye is really a weird part of the story. I didn’t remember the vulture eye. “What is it?”

“A guy kept shining a light on a vulture eye,” said John. “It was really weird, because he just kept mentioning it.”

I said, “It’s sort of a random terror element?”

“Is it sort of like a random tattoo that kills people?” said Aaron.

“The Killer Tattoo,” I said. “That’s a really good idea.” I told Aaron about Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. “He’s tattooed all over his body, and when people look close, the tattoos start to move.” I turned back to John. “So now that you’ve got the thesis that you want to prove, why don’t you just go out on the surfboard and just write the damn thing. Just wing it!”

He couldn’t, he said. He had to finish filling out the organizer first. Rodney appeared. “I’m coming to help,” he said.

“We don’t want you to help,” said Aaron.

Payson called out, “I can’t feel my legs!”

I went over to James. “How’s it going?” He flipped his iPad over so I wouldn’t see that he’d been playing a game.

“It’s going well,” he said. His voice was just changing, and he had braces and a twinkle in his eye.

“You’ve got the worksheet?”

“I do.”

“And it’s looking good?”

“It is looking good.”

“Gold plated?”

His eyebrows went up. “Silver? Or maybe copper? Can I get a drink?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” He hurried off, the inquisition over.

Some crumpled paper flew past my head.

“Did something just fly by?” I asked.

“He threw it,” Harley said, pointing to Payson.

“What!” said Payson. “Did not!”

“Okay, I did it,” Harley said. “It just hit my foot and I got angry.”

I asked Harley if he was having an insightful and productive day. He said he was. He was wearing a black Batman cape.

Rodney said something in a black-accented falsetto that turned out to be from The Cleveland Show.

“Do you get your homework done at school?” I said.

“Most of the time,” Rodney said. “I went from fifty to twenty-five missing assignments. I did nineteen the other day.”

“Nineteen assignments in one day?” I said. “You must have been smoking!”

“Smoking what?” said Aaron.

Rodney explained what was at stake. “If you’re over five missing assignments you get your iPad locked up. You can’t buy apps, you can’t play games.” YouTube wasn’t blocked, though.

“And it’s weird,” Aaron added, “because sometimes I’ll try to look up some information for a project, and half the sites come up restricted. It’s a pain because even if you do finish up all your work, it’s a long process to get it unlocked again. You have to have all your teachers sign a paper saying that you got caught up.” Both kids were using blocked iPads.

I said, “Well, now you’ve got to write an essay. You’ve got to just motor through it.”

“I’m tired,” said Rodney. “I’m always tired, and I’m always hungry. I wake up at five in the morning, and I don’t get on the bus till seven o’clock.”

Why did he wake up at five?

“I have a bunch of crap to do every morning,” Rodney said. “I put my stuff in this one place every day, and I wake up the next morning, and it’s everywhere, scattered through the house. I have two little sisters.”

Aaron and Rodney began rehearsing pickup lines they’d gotten from websites: “Girl, did you just sit in a pile of sugar, because you have a sweet ass.” And: “‘Did it hurt?’ Girl: ‘Did what hurt?’ ‘When you fell from heaven.’” “I’ve used that one so many times,” said Rodney.

I told them to get writing. “How hard is it to write a sentence? I mean, seriously. Come out all guns blazing! ‘In Edgar Allan Poe’s mind-blowing festival of terror, comma, the conflict expresses itself as boom biddly boom bang boom.’”

“I typed a story,” said Rodney. He began explaining it and Christopher, who’d returned, tried to interrupt.

“Shut up, Chris,” Rodney said. “I have so many people in this story. Shut up!” He held many single-spaced typed pages, maybe ten pages.

“Wow, when did you write this?” I said.

“Last month,” said Rodney.

Aaron said he’d written a story, too, seventeen pages about Somali pirates, on his iPad, but the iPad died when he was updating it, and the school’s tech person fixed the problem by doing a clean install, so he lost the whole story. The teacher told him he had to write it all over again.

Meanwhile Rodney had been silently rereading his opus. “There’s a lot of mistakes on this page,” he said. He handed it to me. It was a story about the adventures of a kid named Fat Andrew, who was always hungry. “It’s a good thing I bought a Twinkie!” Fat Andrew said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-eaten Twinkie with dirt and hair all over it. “You still Big Daddy’s little angel, you creamy pumpkin!” he said.

“I want you to read this one part,” Rodney said. “Read from A to mermaids.”

I read: A car approached Fat Andrew and stopped. The man in the car started to scream and shout. His whole car started to shake. He started to rip his hair out. He reached over the dashboard and punched through the windshield. “What’s that guy doing?” said Fat Andrew. The man got out of the car and ripped the door off. He bit all the tires till they were completely flat. Ripped the engine right out of the car. Then he ran away into the ocean and swam away with the mermaids.

I congratulated Rodney. “Lot of good writing in there,” I said. “Damn! Darn, I mean.”

“It’s all right, we won’t tattle,” said Rodney.

Did everyone in the class have to write something like that? They nodded.

“Mine was really good till they had to reinstall the iOS,” said Aaron.

The wall phone rang. The secretary was looking for a student who wasn’t in the class. I hung up, discovered I was still holding my apple, and took another bite.

Katylynn and Tamara were quietly looking at pictures of animals on their iPads, trying to find out which one had the longest lifespan, as part of an assignment for science class. They’d found a kind of lizard that lives for a hundred and forty years. “I want to be a koala bear,” said Katylynn. “I would be an urchin in the sea,” said Tamara.

Katylynn reconsidered. “No, I would be a small dog. Like a Yorkie. One of the really cute small dogs, that would have a preppy dog life.”

“I would be a golden retriever,” said Tamara.

“Well, I would be a bigger dog,” said Katylynn, “but they don’t live as long. I’d be one of the smaller dogs that they’d carry in their purse.”

I told them that I had a corgi at home.

“They’re adorable,” said Katylynn.

Tamara was Googling. “The oldest person in the world is a hundred and fifteen years old,” she announced.

“I thought it was a hundred and twenty-eight,” said Katylynn.

“No,” said Tamara, “now the oldest living person is a hundred and twenty-three years old, Bolivian.”

“They would just be a vegetable,” said Harley. “They’d have to have people to do everything for them.”

Tamara said, “In class, Prentice was like, ‘I will die proudly at seventy.’”

“I want to live to ninety-five,” said Katylynn.

Harley disagreed. “What if all your friends had died and you’re just sitting there?”

Tamara said, “I wouldn’t want to die alone for the simple fact that what if no one notices you’re gone? You just stay there until someone finally notices. They open it up and there’s a body there.”

“I’m just going to live in an RV,” said Katylynn, smiling sadly. “No one will notice me, and I will just — die.”

They began talking about when the science project was due. I looked at the clock. Eight minutes to go. I went back to the cluster of jokers and sat down. They were listening to a metal band, Disturbed, and comparing more pickup lines. Aaron read one: “I think I’m a firefighter, because you’ll find me where it’s hot and wet.”

Rodney said, “I don’t know, I think the chicken tender one is better. I said it to one of my good friends yesterday, and she thought I was serious. ‘Girl, you’re like the dipping sauce for my chicken tender, but not in a rude way, in a honey mustard way.’”

I said, “So what would Mr. Monette be doing right now?”

“He’d probably be yelling at us,” said Aaron.

“Does he yell a lot?”

“Only when people are loud like this,” said Rodney.

Rodney said, “If I turn and look at Aaron like this, and say, ‘How’s your day going?’ Mr. Monette will separate us.” He waved at the girls who were laughing. “They can be as loud as they want and he doesn’t do anything.”

“He’s got you targeted,” I said. “Is that because you’ve got homework assignments due?”

“Yeah, those people do a lot of work,” said Aaron, “so they can fool around.”

I lowered my voice and asked them what the secret was to maintaining order in a classroom.

“It’s fine like this right now,” said Rodney, “but when everybody’s talking, it’s just bad.”

“Be a friend,” said Aaron.

“But see, that’s what you’re not supposed to do,” I said. “If you become a friend, then supposedly you lose your authority.”

“Allow people to have fun,” said Rodney, “but don’t let them carry it away.”

Aaron said, “As long as they’re doing their work, they can do whatever they want.”

I said, “The problem is, I like talking to people. This is what I like doing. But getting you guys to actually finish an assignment is a whole different thing. Because you don’t want to do it. And I don’t—” I stopped. I didn’t want to say that I really didn’t care whether they wrote the conflict essay or not — that I didn’t think doing it would improve their writing one bit — because that wouldn’t make life any easier for them.

Rodney picked up my iPhone, which was on my desk. It was cracked and it had clear packaging tape on the back holding it together. He said, “I took one of the other substitutes’ phones and I started taking random pictures of myself the other day. I spammed his phone. I used up all his memory. He laughed.”

One table over, Christopher said, “Ow,” and fended off a pencil attack from Harley.

“Guys!” I said. “How important is it to stab people in the head?”

I looked at the clock. It was 8:48 a.m., end of block 1. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said.

“You’re here all day, right?” said Rodney. “I’ll be back.”

—

BLOCK 2 WAS IN MOTION. Frederick walked in and pointed at me. “I remember you!”

“I remember you,” I said. “How’s it been going?”

“Good. Baseball tryouts this week.” He said he liked to play catcher and second base. “I can play anything. I can play the outfield, I can hit. But I’m best at catching.”

I asked him how he learned to play.

“I played catch with my dad. He taught me how to throw. And then I started playing T-ball, and then it just came to me, and I learned to pitch.”

“I can’t pitch at all,” said Raymond, wearing a polo shirt.

“It’s hard,” I said. “I’m not so good at it. It’s a gift to get the ball going fast.”

“You need to have a good mixture of accuracy and speed, and it’s hard to get that mix,” said Frederick.

I wished him well at tryouts, and admired Winston’s superhero costume. “I like the boots, especially,” I said. He was wearing tall hiking boots and his sister’s tights. Lyle had on Incredible Hulk gloves

I said hello five times in different ways, at increasing volume, and said that I was Mr. Baker, filling in for Mr. Monette. The class went alarmingly quiet. “You guys have been reading these stories and thinking incredibly deeply about them. And analyzing them, and coming up with the conflict in your stories, supposedly.”

A strange prerecorded crowd sound came from Lyle’s Hulk gloves and everyone laughed.

“I didn’t mean to do that!” said Lyle.

I asked how many had started their essays. Lots of hands went up, and I went around reading bits of what they’d written. “I have some grammar issues,” said Anthony.

“Oh, let Mr. Monette worry about that,” I said, skimming the first paragraph, which described a character who had “twisted the truth” to get what he wanted. The essay continued: I will be explaining more in depth about how his internal and external conflicts that he experienced changed his personality. Without his external conflict, he would probably never have had to experience his internal conflict. After this introduction, I will start my next paragraph with his internal conflict.

I suggested that he cut that he experienced. “Nice going,” I said. “You wrote that whole thing in class yesterday?”

“Yes,” said Anthony.

“Nobody writes anything in the classes I supervise,” I said. “I don’t know why that is.”

The boy next to him, Sam, had read “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London. “I thought it was depressing,” he said. “Who wants to read about a guy who walks into the woods at seventy-five below zero and then dies? He wants to stab the dog but he can’t because his hands are useless.”

I told him I thought it was a memorable story, a killer story, especially the part where the snow fell on the fire.

“That must have stunk,” said Sam.

I said, “I think you can start with what you just said: ‘Who wants to read a short story about a guy who tries to build a fire and dies?’ That’s a very interesting question. You want to be true to what you actually felt. Because otherwise it’s just a meaningless exercise.”

Edith, in a facing desk, wearing slightly crooked glasses, was reading The Hunger Games. She asked, “Why do you have a rotten apple on your desk?”

I looked over at my half-eaten apple. “It’s a scientific experiment,” I said. “I’ll put it away, it’s disturbing you.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s just weird,” Edith said.

“You were the substitute when we were making the cubes,” said Sam.

Edith said she was in the middle of the scene in The Hunger Games where the girl is up in the tree, planning to drop the killer beehive. “Is it okay for me to be reading this?” she asked.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You’ve already churned out the conflict-and-resolution essay, right?”

“No,” said Edith. “I just don’t want to do it.” The graphic organizer bored her, she said. She’d read “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Cold Equations.”

“The Monkey’s Paw” was scary, wasn’t it?

“No.”

I asked her what “The Cold Equations” was about.

“This girl had to die because she was a stowaway,” said Edith.

Sam, listening in, gave a long, detailed plot summary of “The Cold Equations.”

“You know what I like doing?” I said. “You read the story, and then you close it and you say, ‘What in this story was actually memorable?’”

Edith tapped on her copy of The Hunger Games. “There’s a lot of memorable parts in this,” she said, with a half smile.

“He picks boring things to read,” Sam said, meaning Mr. Monette.

I read a paragraph or two of “The Cold Equations” and stopped. Sam was making no progress. “I have a hard time getting stuff on paper,” he said. “I can explain something fluently, but if you ask me to put it on paper it’s like I’m trying to write with a stick, basically.”

“What if you told it to me and I typed it real fast, and we got it done in two seconds?”

Sam grimaced.

To Edith I suggested that she write about being conflicted about having to write the conflict essay when she really wanted to know what happened to the girl up in the tree.

“She’s down from the tree now,” Edith said.

Joy walked up with her completed essay about “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her thesis was that the main character was neurotic and experiencing several conflicts. In this essay, she wrote, I will explain what these conflicts are, and what they caused the main character reveal. I complimented her — nice paragraph, you’re off and running! “To change this from a rough draft to a final draft,” I said, “you just have to add a to before reveal and you’re done.”

Joy smiled and sat down. I sipped coffee. Derek, bunchy-muscled and curly-haired, made a pained expression and adjusted his chair.

“That chair is giving you problems,” I said.

“No, wrestling is giving me problems,” Derek said. “I got second seed in my tournament the other day. I lost to Blake Burnside.” His essay began, In this essay I will attempt to convince the audience that the main character in “The Sniper” has external and internal conflicts. The character traits and actions he performs give me reason to believe this statement. I also say that he is heartless, weather external or external. My first reason is that he feels no remorse for killing anyone except his brother. He congratulates himself on killing the man in the armoured car. I nodded and asked, “What did you feel like when you finished this story?”

“I felt like this guy is a little bit heartless,” said Derek.

“Did you feel that the story should exist?”

Derek frowned, thinking. “It should,” he said.

“What if you were a person of criminal intent and the story pushed you over the edge and you started shooting people? Not you.”

“There are a lot of stories like that,” Derek said. “Sometimes you watch a movie about terrorism and you become a terrorist. But there are also movies like that that change people’s lives in a good way.”

Good point. I told Derek to take a look at the word weather in the third sentence. The boy next to him, Neil, had read Langston Hughes’s “Thank You, Ma’am” and loved it. He’d already written his essay on it but he’d lost it, so he was starting from nothing again. I left him to it.

“I guess there’s a lot of injuries in wrestling,” I said to Derek.

Derek leaned toward me and said, in a whisper, “I injured my shoulder the other day. I’m whispering because I didn’t report it as injured.”

“Don’t you want to save your body for high school sports?”

“Yeah, but the coach is intense.”

“Too intense?”

“Not too intense,” said Derek. “Just enough intense. We did well this season.”

Sam came up and said that he’d found an external conflict in “To Build a Fire.” The conflict was that a man warned the main character not to go out in the cold. “Good,” I said. “Isn’t that the story where he spits and the saliva freezes before it hits the ground? That’s a beautiful image.”

“Well, maybe not beautiful,” said Sam. He went off to keep writing.

Many minutes went by. Nothing happened. The class was wondrously quiet. Everyone was working, or pretending to work, or reading. I had entered a teacherly zone. I was floating in a polar-fleece paradise of studious silence. I read some more of “The Cold Equations.” I checked my iPhone. I unwrapped the end of a bar of coffee-laced chocolate made by Winnipesaukee Chocolates and gnawed off a piece.

After a while the silence became unbearable and I walked over to Bruce and said hello as softly as I could. His thesis sentence was, My thesis is that the sniper, according to the external and internal traits, he is brave. I suggested that he cut the he. Done. I didn’t want to mess with the mystically whispery mood of the class any more than that. More minutes passed. Finally a loud zipper-pull of a backpack signaled for people to look up at the clock. The noise resumed. “Where am I going?” said Neil loudly. “Did you dye your hair?” Bethany asked Joy. Nobody said goodbye to me, which hurt my feelings slightly.

—

BLOCK 3 TRICKLED IN. A boy, Blake, was wearing red tights, a tight Lasswell wrestling singlet with a paper B taped to it, and a red bandanna on his head. Jessie, in a Catwoman outfit, offered to take attendance, but I couldn’t find the class list. Courtney was writing on Rita’s hand with a Sharpie.

“Hello! Hello! Hello! HELLO! I’m Mr. Baker and I’m filling in for Mr. Monette, and you guys are supposedly deep into and completely caught up in the idea of conflict. What is this nonsensical notion that every story has conflict? Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Yep.”

“Maybe.”

A group in the back was telling hall stories and laughing. Sean, dressed as Batman and wearing his father’s Air National Guard boots, said, “Do you want me to get their attention?” He clapped five times loudly. Someone clapped back from the corner of the room.

I took a deep breath. “Do you think that — DO YOU THINK THAT when Poe sat down to write ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ he thought, All right, what conflict am I GOING TO HAVE IN THIS STORY?”

“No.”

The noise was amazing, but I persisted in my little foolish, unenlightening speech. “WHAT HE PROBABLY THOUGHT is, I want to write the frighteningest, most disturbing thing—”

The noise was just too loud. I started to feel angry. “Hello! Guys! JESUS CRAM.”

All the kids in the back erupted in happy laughter. “Jesus cram,” they said, “Jesus cram.”

“I was trying to say jeezum crow,” I said. “So the question is! — ” Nobody was listening. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t care. You’ve got work to do.”

“Guys, you’re rude,” said Jessie.

Finally things settled down a bit. “So we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “He’s a small, very disturbed human being, who happens to be a genius, and he thinks to himself, I want to write the most terrifying, nerve-wracking story I can write. And then later on, generations of high school and junior high school students have to read through it and find the conflict in it. I’ve never understood that. I think you should just read the story and find out what happens. You’re either entertained, and you like it, or you don’t and you stop reading. Did anybody read the story and not like it?”

Nobody raised their hand.

“It’s good, isn’t it? Are you all pretty far along in writing about it?”

Nods.

“So all you have to do is put in a few touches, stuff in a few adjectives? Did anyone try to write a funny essay?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Mr. Monette would not allow it,” said Sean.

“Yeah, he’s not a very funny person,” said Courtney.

“He doesn’t do well with humor?” I said.

“No, and he doesn’t say Jesus cram,” said Sean.

In the back of the room, the superheroes were gleefully imitating me.

“LET ME FINISH UP,” I hollered. “I don’t mind a general basic quiet murmur of talking, because I think you’re all responsible almost-adults. But when the noise level gets to be a certain sort of cresting wave, then I’ll make lots of gesticulations and angry sounds, and you’ll quiet down, right?”

“You’ll make angry sounds?” said Blake.

“Well, I’ll say, ‘Be quiet.’ Is it possible to have fun writing this essay?”

“No!” said Roslyn, a big girl with a red streak in her black hair.

“Seriously?” I said.

“Yes, that is truly true,” said Roslyn.

“Can I read your first sentence?”

“Yes, sir.” She handed her paper to me. It was written in magenta marker. I read, In “The Sniper,” by Liam O’Flaherty, the sniper shows that he is strong and cares about his job. It also shows that he has to go through the many dangers. Period. The sniper was at war. All of a sudden It stopped there.

“Mr. Monette helped me with it,” the girl said.

“The many dangers what? That he confronts?”

“Yeah, I haven’t finished it,” said Roslyn.

What did she think of the story? I asked.

“I actually liked it because I like people getting shot and stuff,” Roslyn said.

“You’re very gruesome?” I said.

“Yep.” Roslyn smiled. “I like war, and I just — I don’t know — I like scary.”

I said she was off and running. “And you’ve got a great color of pen, too.”

The girl next to her, Natasha, said, “I’m doing ‘The Sniper,’ too, but I find it’s very boring.”

“That’s because you love romance,” said Roslyn.

Natasha said, “I think it’s boring because he didn’t even notice that he could have got shot — which he did! — when he lit the cigarette.”

I said, “So it’s not boring so much as it irritated you.”

“Yeah, that’s the word.”

“Why don’t you try to tell the truth about what you actually felt?”

“Okay, I will!” said Natasha.

“Oh, god,” said Roslyn.

“You should not do that,” said Prentice.

I read some more first sentences. Adam, in a Spider-Man shirt, had written: In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Telltale Heart” the main character reacted to the external and internal conflicts determined that he was mentally unstable because he killed the old man just because of the way his eyes looked, and then struggled with his own griefs.

Suddenly, belatedly, I understood what was happening. Mr. Monette was forcing all his students to inject language about external and internal conflicts willy-nilly into their opening sentences. How touching, how desperate, how wrong. “Great, nice job,” I said. “The only thing I didn’t understand is, did Mr. Monette tell you to put that phrase in there, reacted to the external and internal conflicts?”

“Yes,” said Adam.

“The rest of the sentence is great, but that phrase is sort of jammed in,” I said. Could he perhaps put the phrase at the end of the paragraph somehow?

“He told us to put it in, and he insists,” Adam said.

If he had to explain to an eight-year-old what the conflict was in the story, I said, what would he say?

“It’s between the main character and the old man, and the main character and himself. He struggled with himself after he killed him.”

“Right, because it’s guilt,” I said. “The guilt is coming back to get him. It’s his own conscience. The only part that’s hard to understand is your first sentence.”

“Yeah, but he kind of wrote it,” said Adam. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t put it in, but…”

“Okay, well, you’ve got a nice flow, good going.”

I said hello to Trey, who was sitting expressionlessly, rubbing his crew cut. He couldn’t write about “The Sniper,” he said, because he didn’t have his iPad. “It’s in that closet right there.”

“Are you in trouble?” I said.

“No, he just keeps it in there, and he gives it to me in class,” said Trey.

“Are you having fun in this school?”

“No,” said Trey.

“Why not? How can you design your day so you actually have fun here?”

“We can’t have fun here till one-forty,” Trey said, meaning at dismissal.

“Seriously, you don’t enjoy any class?”

“Nope,” said Trey. “I don’t like any of it.”

“Some of the classes, I have to admit, are kind of dry.”

“Like this one,” said Trey.

“Why don’t you just tell the truth when you write? You seem to know how to talk, you’re smart. Why not tell the truth?”

“Because I don’t write,” said Trey. “I can write, but I don’t write.”

“Are you in a superhero costume?”

“No.”

“Well, I wish you all the best,” I said. “Have fun, tell the truth, be kind, rewind.”

“I’m going to go get my iPad,” said Trey.

I turned to Blake. He, too, was writing about “The Sniper.”

“Another sniper,” I said. “You guys are sniping all over the place.”

“I think Mr. Monette is trying to send us a message,” said Blake.

I went to the next cluster, where Prentice was paying a visit to Courtney and Rita. “What’s your kneecap called?” Courtney asked me.

“Patella,” I said.

“See? I’m not going to remember that.”

“Nutella,” said Prentice.

I said, “So you read the story ‘How I Ate My Donut Yesterday’?”

“I didn’t read that one,” said Prentice. “I read ‘The No-Guitar Blues.’”

“You’re the first person I’ve talked to that has read ‘The No-Guitar Blues,’ and that’s very exciting to me,” I said. “Did you physically move your eyes over the page?”

“Yes!”

“And so when you finished, what did you remember?”

“That he wanted to be a musician,” said Prentice. “He wanted to get the money for this guitar he really wanted. He couldn’t get the money, so he set out to do raking and mowing, but it was the wintertime, and nobody was hiring him. He found a dog on the side of the road, wandering around. He was going to bring it back to the owner so that the owner would give him money. He ended up finding an old guitar in the garage.”

“So it had a happy ending,” I said. “Do you have a guitar?”

“Yes, but I don’t play it,” Prentice said. “I look at it.”

What did he have for a first sentence?

“Actually I’ve got nothing so far,” said Prentice.

Leap into the unknown, I told him, like a parachutist from an airplane, and then I looked over at Courtney. She’d filled a page with writing about “To Build a Fire.” I asked her what she thought was the most impressive moment in the story. “It’s terribly tragic, isn’t it?” I said.

“Mhm,” said Courtney. “I felt bad because of the dog.”

“Pretty sad,” said Rita.

I said, “Why don’t you tell the truth with your essay? You felt bad for the dog.”

“You’ve got sparkle on your eyebrow,” said Rita to Courtney.

“I know,” said Courtney.

I read bits of her essay. The environment was so cold, to the point where his body was numb. He tried to keep warm by making a fire, but the snow put it out. I said, “Excellent.”

Rita said, “I don’t have my story yet because I was out for three days sick.”

Blake jabbed at Adam with the corner of an iPad case. I leapt up. “Okay, that’s the part I don’t like. I don’t like any poking at all. I hate poking! I literally hate it. And I will keep close tabs on that.”

“You don’t like it?” Prentice said, laughing.

“No, I hate it,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s painful and disruptive!”

“Poking is painful?” said Blake.

“Yeah, don’t even go there!” I said. “Here’s a broken pencil for you. If you jab at somebody another time, I’m going to physically write you up. And make your life unhappy. I don’t want to do that, because I actually like you. I actually think you’re funny. I want you to do this.”

“I don’t want to have an unhappy life,” said Blake.

“My life is great,” said Prentice.

“I see so much conflict with iPad cases,” I said. “It’s like the case becomes a weapon.”

“Mr. Monette’s teaching us violence with these gruesome stories,” said Blake.

Trey came back. “I can’t do my thing because I looked in the cabinet and he must have moved my iPad or something.”

“Here, dictate it to me,” I said. “Tell me what you want to write. I’ll type it out and email it to you.”

“I don’t have email,” said Trey. “My iPad is all messed up. I don’t even remember what the story is.”

“Mr. Baker!” Natasha called. “Do you want to read my essay?”

“I do, very much,” I said, “and I’ll be right there.”

“I took your advice and I wrote what I felt,” she said.

I turned back to Trey. “What do you want to do right now? You’re obviously bored and idle.”

“I want my iPad but I can’t find it,” said Trey.

“Do you want to draw a picture?”

“I want to know where my iPad is.”

“It’s gone,” I said.

“My ear’s itchy,” said Natasha, when I went over to read her beginning. The sniper, she said, wants to smoke a cigarette but he doesn’t want to get shot. Here is my evidence that supports my claim. Then she quoted from the story: “He paused for a moment considering whether to risk a smoke. It was dangerous. The flash might be seen in the darkness.”

“I have a couple more paragraphs,” said Natasha.

“Excellent,” I said. “Mr. Monette seems to like this phrase ‘external and internal conflicts.’ Is there a way to work that in?”

“I will.”

I glanced around. Sean was rapidly typing his essay on his iPad, using only his thumbs. Prentice was unscrewing something underneath my desk chair, trying to set up an April Fool’s prank. I shook my head at him. He stopped.

The class was on the move, and the noise was increasing logarithmically. “Ow, stop it!” said Courtney. I looked up and waved my hands above my head.

“All right, it’s starting to get above the plateau!” I bawled. “The plateau of misery where the SOUND IS TOO LOUD!”

That settled them.

Michelle was quietly drawing a tousle-haired anime boy, with huge eyes. She’d written her conflict essay and put it away. “I get it, but I don’t understand why we have to do it,” she said. She fished it out of her notebook.

In the story “The Telltale Heart,” Michelle had written, the nameless main character shows that he is compulsive by his quick and determined decisions. He repeatedly asserts that he is in fact not a madman.

The noise was bad. “How does Mr. Monette keep people quiet?” I asked her.

“I have no idea,” said Michelle.

“Does he beat a gong?”

“No.”

I read her description of the narrator’s murder. After he decapitated the body and cut the arms off, he shoved them under the floorboards, where later he dragged a chair onto that spot happily, talking freely with the officers.

I said she’d given a very good précis of what happened. “Is the word conflict in your essay? Not that I personally care.”

“No,” she said.

“Well, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”

I sat next to Natasha and said, “So we’ve got one story about a character freezing to death in the snow, one story about a guy trying to mug an old woman, one story about a sniper, one story about a girl trapped in a spaceship and she’s supposed to get killed.”

Natasha nodded.

“Mr. Baker, I’m going to the bathroom!” said Blake.

“Okay,” I said.

“Go to the bathroom!” said Courtney.

Prentice, who was sitting with his pals Sean and Trey in the middle of the room, wanted to talk about video games: Dead Space, Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto V, FIFA, NFL.

“I played Call of Duty for like nine hours straight,” said Prentice.

“How did that go for you?” I asked.

“My eyes hurt really bad,” said Prentice.

“Your thumb was trembling?” I said.

“No, my thumb didn’t bother me, my eyes hurt,” said Prentice.

I asked them whether they liked having the iPads in middle school.

“I hate the iPads,” said Trey.

“I’d rather have a laptop,” said Adam.

“Me, too,” said Rita, eavesdropping.

“You can tell if someone’s playing a game on the iPads, whereas the laptops you can’t tell,” said Trey.

“Dude,” said Sean, “Bruce has like thirteen missing assignments and he’s not blocked!”

“Does it depend on the teacher?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Adam. “She checked it once and restricted some people and then she never checked it again.”

I said, “So basically they get you hooked on the iPads and then they say if you don’t deliver the goods we will take away the thing that makes you happy.”

“Yeah,” said Trey.

Prentice nodded. “They took my iPad. I don’t really care.”

I excused myself and walked over to Blake and Company. “Guys, I see frantic activity over here, and I don’t know what it’s all about.”

Jessie the Catwoman said, “We’re doing a communal thing.”

They were folding cootie catchers using old drafts of essays. I told them that making cootie catchers showed spirit and leadership but to please do it more quietly. It was time for the class to go anyway. “Is this it for you?”

“Yeah, unless Mrs. Moorehouse lets us come in here for STAR,” said Blake. “She won’t let us. She is against fun.”

“Blake, I know you have it!” said Roslyn.

“I don’t have your iPad!” said Blake. “Why would I have your iPad? I don’t have your iPad.”

A teacher’s loud voice came from the hall. “Go back into your class!” she said to Prentice and Sean. “Back into your class!”

Bong, bong, bong.

When everyone had left I sat in my room for a while without moving. Then I walked outside and around the far end of the building and got my lunch from the car. A woman was out for a stroll with her little dog. “Hello, little dog!” I said. I kept walking. “I give up with this shit,” I muttered. I went back inside to the office and apologized for not taking attendance in homeroom.

Some teachers I didn’t know were in the teachers’ lounge, talking about which sub was going to cover a class in the afternoon. “There’s a group of boys that can be trying,” said one teacher.

Another teacher said that after there had been a substitute in his class he deleted all the iPad assignments that the students had done.

“You delete them without reading them?” said his colleague.

“Yes,” he said. “They don’t do anything anyway.” The iPads had been a financial disaster, he felt. Any kid who messed up his iPad and had to have it restored should get a detention.

I took my leave. Shane, in a gray T-shirt with a flying baseball on it, was sitting at a table in the hallway serving some sort of detention. I asked if I could sit down with him.

“I don’t care,” said Shane.

“We had some good times in that class,” I said. “But then you said your pills wear off in the afternoon and you get bad.”

“It’s not that I get bad,” said Shane. “It’s just that I start to lose focus.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” I said.

“Yeah, nice seeing you,” said Shane.

—

I WENT BACK INTO the room and sat down and squirted some sanitizer on my hands and clapped them together.

It was time for STAR class.

“Hello, Mr. Substitute!” said Olivia.

I gnawed more of my coffee-bean chocolate bar.

“What is that?” said Olivia.

I told her.

“Soylent!” said Aaron.

“Oh no, I got sparkles everywhere,” said Felicity.

I said hi, hello.

“Mr. Baker, I need to go to my locker,” said Harley.

“I understand your pain,” I said, “and I want you to go to your locker.”

“Hello, Mr. Baker, again!” said Bethany. “May I get a drink? It’s really steaming in here.”

“What happens in this class?” I asked May.

“We read until twelve-ten,” said May.

“Twelve-ten or twelve-twelve,” said Michelle.

“So it’s supposed to be absolutely quiet?”

Michelle said, “We’re supposed to silent-read. Plus a few whispers here and there.”

I tried a stage whisper to get the class into the mood. “All right, so this is one of those beautiful moments of the day, I guess — it’s actual silent reading.”

“I don’t like reading,” said Victor.

“When does the actual silent time begin?” I said.

“Now,” said May.

“Okay.” I stage-whispered, “It’s like we’re floating in a cloud of cotton!”

The PA system came on. “Lacey Bissonette to the office to pick something up.”

I closed the door. “Do you mind if I turn the lights off?” I whispered.

“Go for it,” said Harley.

I typed some notes. Everyone’s head was down. I could hear my stomach making digesting noises. How lovely to be able to hear one’s own digestion.

Five minutes went by. The PA lady came on again. “Ashley Kimball to the office, please.” I read the Thesis Statement Checklist from the Constructed Response Graphic Organizer, which the students were supposedly using to write about conflict in their short stories. A thesis statement had to: (a) be a complete sentence; (b) take a stand; (c) have one main idea; (d) be specific; (e) generate discussion; and (f) not be a question.

At noon I announced that it was noon — no more silence. Bethany, Kimberly, and Felicity began planning a group Wonder Woman selfie.

Aaron and Harley and I discussed the selfie song and agreed it had a good beat.

Rodney, who was playing Flappy Bird, told me he’d tried out the pickup line about the pile of sugar with someone on the way to lunch.

“How did that work?”

“They gave me a dirty look,” Rodney said. “They didn’t know if I was talking to them or not, so I kind of faced the opposite direction and walked away.”

I sat down near another cluster of talkers. “So what’s happening? I feel I’ve lost touch with you guys.”

“You want to get involved with our awkward conversations?” said Christopher.

“I do,” I said.

“We’re talking about cows,” said Todd.

“Are there many kids who come from farms around here?”

“Almost everyone here,” said Christopher.

A kid showed a picture of a cow.

“Oh, those udders!” said Todd.

Payson asked if he could go to the bathroom. I said he could. James asked if he could go to the bathroom. I said he could. Bethany asked if they could take the Wonder Woman selfie out in the hall. I said they could if they didn’t make noise. I stood by the door.

May came up, wanting to go to the bathroom. I asked her to hold on for a second, so there wouldn’t be too many people in the hall. “People are never like this when Mr. Monette’s here,” she said. “They’re like actually reading.” She told me I should tell them to get their work done and, if they didn’t, fill out “instance sheets”—reports that they had to take home to their parents itemizing their misbehavior.

I said, “But don’t you think it’s kind of an unnatural situation to be cooped up in this classroom?”

“Yes,” May said.

“I figure my job as a substitute is to give people a little more latitude, because on the days when Mr. Monette’s here, they don’t get any. Does that make sense?”

“Mhm,” said May.

“Also, it’s hard for me to keep order,” I said. “I’m not very good at it, frankly. Thanks for the advice. I’ll think about it. You didn’t bring in your dollar today.”

“I wasn’t in yesterday and I forgot it was Superhero Day. I didn’t realize it was today.”

Payson, returning from the bathroom, mimicked May: “I didn’t wealize it was today!”

I turned on him. “Hey hey, what was that? Please, say you’re sorry, there’s NO mimicry in this class.”

“Sorry,” said Payson.

“Good.”

May said, “I wasn’t feeling well yesterday.” She left for the bathroom. I leaned out the classroom door and told the Wonder Women to wrap up their selfie. “I don’t want to be on the hook for having created a ruckus.”

“I’m just waiting for them to get ready,” said Bethany.

They smiled, arm in arm, and Blake took the picture.

Back in the class Rodney called out, “Mr. Baker! Is this what you looked like in high school?” He flashed me a picture on his iPad of a proud, smiley middle school student at a science fair.

Christopher tried to grab the iPad. “Don’t show him that! Don’t!”

“What is it?” I said. “I saw a pickle there. Let me see.”

I looked at the picture. Next to the smiley science fair boy, against a blue foam-core display board, was the headline “Things I’ve Shoved Up My Ass.” Besides the pickle, there were cutout pictures of a hairbrush, a toilet plunger, and a baby’s bottle.

I had to laugh. Aaron peered at it, shaking his head.

“Don’t let anyone else see that!” said Christopher, with genuine alarm.

Felicity came up. “Mr. Baker, can we take the picture again, but with the whole group of friends? It’ll be quick.”

“Try to do it efficiently this time.”

Blake, Bethany, James, Felicity, and their giggly friends posed for a popular-kid portrait.

“Don’t let those morons get too loud,” Aaron said, meaning the popular kids. “Just tell them to quiet down. That’s what Mr. Monette does.”

Rodney said, “Mr. Monette flips out.”

Todd said, “He’s like—” He waggled his cheeks rapidly and made a sound like Curly of the Three Stooges.

“He’s got steam coming out of his ears,” said Rodney. “His face is like on fire.”

Michelle came up to show me another one of her drawings. “Isn’t this creepy?” she said. The drawing was of an anime girl with strange striped ribbons around her neck. I said how much I liked the ribbons.

“Here’s another one she drew,” said Marielle, showing a picture of a girl with stitched-up Frankensteinian cuts on her face and arms, and a boy with a knife in his neck.

“Woo,” I said. “Edgy.”

“I need to go turn something in to the math room,” said Blake.

“You just need to go see Miss Buckley,” said Felicity.

“She’s really hot,” Blake said. He spun toward me. “You want to come?”

“No, I don’t want to come,” I said.

“Miss Buckley and the virgin little boy!” mocked Victor.

“Victor!” said Kimberly.

“What does Mr. Monette do at this point?” I asked again. I was running on fumes.

“He just sits there doing his work,” said Felicity. “Yells at us, the whole class. He’s like, ‘You guys need to stop!’”

Bethany leapt and pushed herself lightly off the wall. A pen twirled through the air.

“Okay, the steam is going to come out of my ears,” I said. “I like conversation, I like friendly things, I don’t like plastic flying around, I don’t like feet making contact with walls.”

“Sorry about that,” said Bethany.

“I like drawing flowers,” said Olivia. “I’m really good at them.”

In the back of the room Blake was shadowboxing with James. I told him to stop.

An ed tech wandered in looking for someone. “It’s Superhero Day!” she said, and left.

Rodney made a disgusted expression. “She is so nosy. It can be dead silent in here, and she’ll walk in here and be like bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh! I was suspended three times last year because of her.”

“So there’s bad blood between you?” I said. “Grudge match?”

“Basically,” said Rodney, “because she’s always looking over our shoulder and telling us what to do. And she’s not even a real teacher.”

“She’s like a demon toad,” said Todd. He pointed at Rodney. “He’s a cactus, prickly on the outside. But full of water. And juices.”

“You’ve got cactus milk,” said Aaron. “Cactuses have milk.”

I told them they needed to learn how to work under the radar. “You can have fun and do crazy stuff,” I said, “but you have to not make noise that goes above a certain altitude.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say!” said Aaron.

“I was kicked out of two mental hospitals,” said Rodney. “I had sharp objects on me. I hid them in my bathroom and they found out.”

“You gotta have protection,” said Todd. Aaron laughed.

“No, shut up — this is a true story!” said Rodney. “I was rooming with a twelve-year-old at the time. In the middle of the night, he stands up, halfway between our beds, and he just goes—” He made a long raspberry sound.

“Mr. Baker?” Payson asked me if he could go to his locker. I sat down next to Marielle and May. They had worksheets in front of them. “We’re studying for art,” one said. “We have a test tomorrow.”

“Art history,” I said, “or art?”

“Art, like clay.”

“And you have a test?”

“We have to describe the process of making clay.”

I said, “You’d think that one class, like art, you’d get a vacation from having to do worksheets.”

“Nope,” said Marielle.

Payson opened a YA baseball book called Plunked.

Felicity was imitating Mr. Monette’s stare. “‘What are you doing, Felicity! Get back to work!’ He goes, ‘Come here. What you said to me today in class really upset me!’”

I turned to Payson, who looked up from his book. “This is an amazing thing, this class,” I said. “It’s like watching fireflies at night. The little lights come on, go off, come on, go off.”

Bethany was swiping through the superhero selfies. “Ew, look at how fat I look in that. I look like a fat blob!”

James twirled a calculator and Blake pounced on it. I said, “Sit down and don’t make loud, sudden, crazy explosions.”

“How long have you been a sub?” asked Bethany.

“Way too short a time to know what I’m doing,” I said.

“But you’ve been our sub twice,” said Felicity.

“Yeah, and I’m not getting any better at it.”

Blake said, “Yes you are — you yelled at me today.”

I picked up a sheet of paper on the floor, a worksheet filled with words, called “Find the Noun.” I let the class be loud. They were keyed up because of the costumes and the photos and flirting and joking. I walked over to May, the girl who’d forgotten it was Superhero Day.

“I’m circulating,” I said. “That’s what teachers are supposed to do. I just wander all day.”

“I’m just bored,” said May. “I’m just sitting here being bored.”

“You don’t seem bored,” I said. “You still seem attentive.”

“I’m just so quiet all the time.”

Todd said, “She’s quiet because she was born from an egg. An egg that came from a bear. May of the Forest, kind of like George of the Jungle. The birds are her friends.”

May smiled.

The three Wonder Women were really getting annoying — they were laughing loudly, talking baby talk, calling each other from across the room, full of the knowledge that they were favored by fate. Blake, meanwhile, was swinging around an iPad case and making chimp sounds. Soon he would be eating his own vomit. I thought of a white paperback that I’d read in college: Asylums, by Erving Goffman.

“Can I go get a pencil out of my locker?” asked May. I think she just wanted to be out of the class.

I hated how completely I’d given up. I didn’t want to scream and yell to quiet them down, but I didn’t want them to be loud, either. I wanted the day to be over so that everyone could go home and end this charade.

Rodney took Blake’s calculator. “I don’t care whose it is, it’s mine now,” he said.

“Did you do time in prison, seriously?” I said to him.

“Not prison,” said Rodney. “Psycho ward.”

“I’ve been to Parkeways once,” said Todd.

“Clear Island Center for Youth,” said Rodney. “I got in a fight in the cafeteria with a kid. I’ve been in a police program since I got out. I’m in a police program right now. Cadets.”

“To learn how to be a policeman?”

Rodney nodded. Harley began pestering Todd. “Stop it,” said Todd. “I will bring a piece of raw chicken into school and put it down your shirt.”

“Do it!” said Rodney.

“I’ll put lasagna in your pocket,” said Harley.

“Okay, I’ll eat it,” said Todd. “I’ll bring a gallon of milk to school and pour it all over you.”

Bethany said, “I think it’s time to go.”

“Bye,” called Rodney.

“Have fun, guys.”

I had a free period and I sat and breathed and moaned and tried to get collected. The PA system came on. “Please excuse the interruption for the afternoon announcements. There will be no intramurals today. Student council has been canceled. Grade six, seven, and eight boys’ lacrosse meeting tomorrow evening. There is no detention today. And now for a message from our student council.”

“Hey, LMS, don’t forget,” said the student council member, “tomorrow is Sports Day. You’ll be able to wear your favorite sports team’s jerseys and gear.” Again we heard about the school in Cameroon with no running water.

With twenty minutes to go before the end of the day, some students returned and there was big noise again. I asked Melissa what the worst moment of the day was.

“Mile run,” she said. They’d run for a mile around the gym.

“I didn’t run a mile,” I said. “I walked around this room.”

“That counts as your own little mile,” said Melissa.

The PA lady said, “FIRST-WAVE STUDENTS, YOU ARE DISMISSED.”

“Ow! Ow, my hair!” said Tamara.

Harley appeared in the room and walked quickly to my desk.

I said, “How’s it going?”

“Good,” said Harley. “Got a detention.”

A grim-faced guidance counselor appeared in the door.

“What?” said Harley. “I was talking to him.”

“And how would I know where you would be?” said the guidance counselor.

“I was talking to him,” said Harley.

“You stopped in here when you saw me coming in the hallway.” The guidance counselor led Harley away.

I was shell-shocked. I felt I’d missed several boats.

“Why is there glitter all over?” said Marielle.

I asked her, “What do you think I should write in the note to Mr. Monette?”

“We were really good,” said Marielle. “We were a funny group.”

“You were a funny group. How did the art thing go for you?”

“It was good. We had to pick an artist and we had to write about him.”

Prentice put on some hip-hop and offered me a piece of gum. Everyone was mortally tired, counting down the minutes.

“Please excuse the interruption,” said the PA woman. “Second-wave students, you are dismissed. You may walk to your buses.”

“Take it easy, guys, bye,” I said.

I turned in my ID at the office. Walked to my car. End of Day Nine.