Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWELVE. Tuesday, April 15, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH

I DON’T JUDGE

BACK IN THE OFFICE of Lasswell High School at seven-thirty in the morning, getting my day’s schedule and ID badge. “There you go,” said Paulette. “You’re in room eighteen.”

“Mr. Bowles?” I said.

“Yep, and your plans are on his desk in a three-ring binder.”

Mrs. Meese, the genial ed tech, was already sitting at her desk. “Good morning,” she said. “You are our illustrious leader today.”

“That is a scary thought,” I said.

“I’m sorry but that’s how it goes around here,” she said. She really was an incredibly nice person.

Ms. Gorton, another ed tech — with a kind-but-tough face and a yellow bandanna and a whiskey voice — showed me the schedule page in Mr. Bowles’s binder, and I said hello to Drew, my dyslexic friend from genetics class, who was sitting in the corner with his feet up on the heating unit, listening to music and staring at nothing. He waved a hand in languid greeting, but he was not happy. Mrs. Batelle, a sharp-featured, bustling older gal, was responsible for him; she was riffling through his stack of overdue assignments. “There’s one more short-answer part of the test,” she said. “And then another part.”

“Whatever,” Drew said.

“We can work on that another time. You have your iPad?”

“Yep.”

“Stupendous. Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome,” said Drew.

“You’re a good trooper. You want a Reese’s?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll owe you one, if you want.”

She left, and then Drew shouldered his backpack and left.

Ms. Gorton shook her head. “Battle zones,” she said. “The teacher and Drew. They don’t see eye to eye.”

I said how much I liked Drew.

“Yeah, me, too. It’s a little like being in between divorced parents. It’s hard.”

She took off for her classes. Mrs. Meese and I were the only people left in the room. I read Mr. Bowles’s binder and wrote out my schedule.

“Do you have any questions about what you’re doing?” Mrs. Meese asked.

I asked where Mr. Masille’s Intro to Tech class was.

“You’ve got to go to room forty-four, blocks one and five,” she said.

The high school PA lady came on — noticeably less singsongy in her delivery than the middle school PA lady. She said, “To the guidance office! Sisely Giles, Becca Hamilton, Leslie Ingalls, Angelica O’Donnell, Linus Hopper, Susanne Lampe, Randy Holloway, Lexie Locke, Greta Altham, Francisca Archambault! To the guidance office!”

I walked to the tech room, passing a goth couple crammed into a kissing corner, staring into each other’s eyes and squeezing each other’s bottoms before their day of classes. The tech room had high ceilings and battered gray stools and several ancient-looking metalworking machines from which sprouted pipes and ducts and electrical conduits. There was a beautiful old Bridgeport drill press against a side wall. Mr. Macpherson, who was substituting for Mr. Masille, said hello. He was a handsome man in a blue button-down shirt and a black tie. He looked a little like James Caan in Misery. I sat on a stool near a large chipped C-clamp.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The students said the pledge almost inaudibly, some not at all — maybe tech class was felt to be just outside of compulsory flag-pledge range. Mr. Macpherson barked out each student’s first name — about fifteen of them — and said, “All right, I think you’re all fully aware what you need to do today. Each one of you needs to draw two sketches of a possible maglev vehicle. The game plan is that once those are done, then we’re going to group you. We’ll have six groups of two and one group of three, where you can combine your ideas, and come up with one. Uno! Ein! One! Maglev truck, vehicle. Sound like a plan? All right, let’s do it.”

He brought out a box of model maglev vehicles from previous trimesters and set them on a table. There was a hum from the drop forge in back that covered up the murmur of students’ voices. “Don’t forget, whatever you design mathematically has to fit inside this track with minimal friction,” he said.

I checked in on the two boys I was supposed to be keeping an eye on and went over to Mr. Macpherson’s desk. “Let me know if I can make myself useful,” I said.

“Here’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re going to give them four magnets, have them cut the cardboard, and as I said to them yesterday, they can go anywhere they want to with this.” He showed me a maglev car with a toy locomotive glued on top that he’d built himself. “I have a model train collection,” he said. He demonstrated how the car was supposed to slide down the incline, levitating on the magnets glued to its underside. The locomotive slid to a stop halfway down. “The tolerance, and the balance, has to be precise, and I’m thinking that there’s a very slight drop in the ramp,” he said — maybe a sixteenth of an inch. “This one clearly starts, and then it stops. The car has to be perfect.” He placed a freight car at the top of the run. “This one goes good,” he said. We watched it go down smoothly. I asked him why he thought maglev hadn’t caught on more. “It’s the expense factor,” said Mr. Macpherson. “It’s a matter of maybe forty, fifty years. They’ll get it eventually. They’ll have to get it, when petrol as we know it is gone.”

Mr. Macpherson had been a sub at Lasswell for several years, he said. “I’m a retired college professor. So being involved in education is a piece of cake. A lot of people look at substitute teaching, they come in, they do it for two days, and they say nuh-uh.”

He took one of the worksheets and held it up for the class. “Guys, now once you have your practice design, there’s a sheet here, and I want you to put your first initial and last name. Print it, so it’s legible. Let’s get that done.”

Everyone printed their name at the top of their worksheet.

Mr. Macpherson pointed at a slacker dude, Martin, wearing headphones. “Take that headpiece off,” he said. “Once you’ve put your name on here, and you’ve got your designs, I want you to come to my ‘office.’” He pointed down at his desk, which was in the middle of the room, covered with clutter. “I want to peruse them quickly before you move on. Come and see me right here. There’s no fee to enter my office. But there is an exit fee.” He smiled. “Is there anything in the world that you can think of, where you can get in free, but you have to pay to get out?”

“Jail.”

“Jail, that’s correct. Totally, totally correct.”

Martin and his friend Dallas went up to Mr. Macpherson’s desk with their maglev sketches. They planned to add a rectangular sail for added speed. Mr. Macpherson suggested they use a double thickness of cardboard. “And make sure you measure carefully. You may have to get it down to a thirty-second. You guys are good to go.”

I asked Martin if they were allowed to blow on the sail.

“No,” he said. “You’re not allowed to add any force.”

I wondered what a rectangular sail would accomplish, aside from adding instability to the car, but I didn’t want to introduce doubt. Let them figure it out.

Another pair of students wanted to make a Spider-Man car.

“Where’s the cardboard?” said Martin.

“I’ve got the cardboard,” said Mr. Macpherson.

“Don, you want to make a hash spoon?” said another kid.

Mr. Macpherson continued to review designs at his desk.

“He’s hidden the cardboard,” said Martin. “I’m really getting annoyed.”

Finally Mr. Macpherson hoisted a box into view.

“All right, now,” he said to the class. “In this box right here on the table there’s cardboard, there’s also a glue gun, there are some scales, scissors, and magnets.”

He came over to me and spoke in a quiet voice. “I’ve got a little project for you,” he said. “I’m going to turn you loose.” He showed me a small piece of wood, about an eighth of an inch thick. He wanted me to find more wood of that thickness, which some students could use instead of the cardboard as a stable base for their models, since the cardboard was easily bent. He opened the door to Mr. Masille’s dim, still, unbelievably messy office.

“You’re going to have to be like a picker,” said Mr. Macpherson. “Don’t leave anything unturned. I’m subbing for Mr. Masille, and he’s been here for like fifty years. He knows where everything is, but he couldn’t tell you.”

I told him I’d see what I could find. Mr. Macpherson had a shrewd face — what, I wondered, had he taught in college? Electrical engineering? Physics? I asked him. He said he’d taught physical education and coached hockey at Tufts for thirty-four years, and in the summers, he’d taught phys ed at Exeter. When he retired, he and his wife had wanted to buy a house in Exeter, but the prices were too high. So they ended up in Maine, where real estate was cheaper.

“I love Maine,” I said. “Thanks for the mission.”

“Good luck.”

I spent a few minutes hunting around in Mr. Masille’s lair, feeling like Peter Falk in Columbo except that there was no murder. The office was a wonderland of ancient shop books and binders and bolts and broken wrenches and dusty, left-behind student projects. There was no secret stash of wood that I could see. The place made me sad — I’m not sure why. I left and toured the busy wood shop in the adjoining room, where goggled students were using two-by-fours to build a wall with two windows and a door, while the teacher shouted advice at them over the scream of the table saw. I took a left and found I was in the welding area. Gloves and helmets hung on the wall. Nobody was welding, and there were no thin pieces of wood there, either.

I circled back to my gray stool. Some of the students were cutting their pieces of cardboard. A few of the magnets were very weak. “Be sure you test the magnets,” said Mr. Macpherson to the class. A girl with a long blond braid, Laney, made her magnets jump and click together. She laughed delightedly.

“Not much luck?” said Mr. Macpherson to me.

“The scrap wood would have to be planed,” I said.

He sent me back out to look for small pieces of sheet metal that we could cut to size using scissors. I pawed through a bucket near the drill press, but it held only heavy bars of steel with holes in them. Finally I found some smaller metal scraps in a different bucket and put them in the box with the glue and the maglev magnets.

“Guys, for weight on your maglevs you have the possibility of sheet metal,” said Mr. Macpherson. “And you have nails, screws, washers, you name it. Use your imagination.”

Laney and her friend had a glue gun but no place to plug it in. “Can you hook these ladies up?” Mr. Macpherson said to me. I found a spot for them at a table near an unused electrical outlet. They were discussing the possibility of a Christina Aguilera car.

“Dude, there’s sheet metal,” said Charles, one of my charges. I told him about the narrow spot in the middle of the track, where the cars tended to stall. He made some experiments with his cardboard chassis. “Yeah, it’s totally crooked,” he said. “Totally crooked.”

Some maglev cars from earlier trimesters decorated a steel door. There was a furry mouse car made of cotton with paperclip ears, a car made of green triangles with yellow accents called “the Blurr,” a mousetrap car, a car shaped like a house, a black bat car, and a car made from a real dollar bill, with a stabilizer fin in the back.

Mr. Macpherson seemed to want to keep me busy. He told me to repair one of the old prototypes with hot glue. It was made of a milk carton, but its magnet was dangling. There was only one glue gun.

I went over to the girls with the glue gun. Their car was going to be made of playing cards, but the glue wasn’t flowing. “We tried it in that outlet, and it wasn’t heating up, so we tried the other one,” said Laney. I touched the business end of the glue stick; it was still cold. Using an old radio, I tested several outlets; all of them were dead. “Imagine a machine shop without a working outlet,” I said.

“Yeah,” Laney said.

Mr. Macpherson brought over two more broken cars from last year for me to repair. One looked like a bobsled. I told him the electricity was off, and he went off to find the other tech teacher, who knew how to turn it on. We sat on our stools and waited.

“We’ve got power!” said Mr. Macpherson, returning. Still the glue gun didn’t work and the radio didn’t play. I found a red reset button and clicked it. “Phasers on stun,” I said.

The glue gun began dribbling and the girls began gluing. Charles came over and said he wanted to plug in the Shop-Vac and suck his face into it.

“Glue’s working!” I said.

Martin and Dallas were tired of waiting for the glue gun. “Let’s just call it quits, man,” said Dallas.

“I want to bend some sheet metal,” said Charles. He clamped a scrap of metal in a green Tennsmith manual brake bender and bent it. He’d taken tech before, apparently. He said, “Martin, come over and help me bend some sheet metal!”

Class was almost over. “GUYS, MAKE SURE YOUR STUFF IS SOMEPLACE SAFE,” Mr. Macpherson said.

Charles called, “Guys, how come you’re not helping me?” He bent another sheet metal scrap and held it up.

I tested the repaired cars and put the glue gun away in the box. Everyone gathered by the door, waiting for the bell. Heather was wearing a blue T-shirt with a tennis racket on it.

Mr. Macpherson asked, “What’s the circumference of a tennis ball?”

“I don’t know,” Heather said.

“Eight inches,” he said. “Anything else you want to know?” He began telling Heather the history of tennis, beginning with its royal origins in France. A member of the British army brought some rackets and balls to Bermuda in 1874, Mr. Macpherson said, and there a woman named Mary Outerbridge discovered the game and loved it. When she returned from Bermuda to Staten Island, she built the first tennis court in the United States.

Six bongs.

“Have a good day!” he said.

I shook hands with him. “Are you roving?” he said.

“I’m roving,” I said. I thanked him and left.

—

NEXT PERIOD I WAS IN Mrs. Prideaux’s remedial math class — the one with the cabinets full of snacks, where I’d spent the whole day the first time I’d subbed. My charges were Sebastian, who loved mango juice, and Jake and Pearl. Besides Mrs. Prideaux, who was standing on a chair finding some supplies in the cabinet, there was Mr. C., the young ed tech. “Eight kids,” he said, “and they’re all doing geometry. We’re doing area today.”

Mrs. Prideaux got down from the chair, and Pearl told her about a photograph that she’d seen in her grandmother’s AARP magazine. “She looked like she was just in her fifties,” said the girl. “She was ninety-one!”

“Wow,” said Mrs. Prideaux, who looked about thirty. “We should be so lucky.”

A boy named Taylor held up something made of pink and orange Popsicle sticks. “This is a gun,” he said. “A loaded gun. I don’t know where it came from, I just found it.” He handed it to Mrs. Prideaux.

“That’s so cute,” she said, and handed it back to him.

“It’s loaded and it’s cute,” said Pearl.

“Taylor, you know what you have to do,” Mrs. Prideaux said. “You’ve got to finish that little assessment. And I think you have to finish your quiz, too.”

Sebastian sharpened his pencil for a long time and sat down. From his backpack he withdrew three bottles of mango juice and set them in a row next to a suspension bridge that he’d made from yarn and Popsicle sticks.

“That’s a lot of mango juice,” I said. “Daily regularity. How’s it going today?”

Sebastian shook his head. “I haven’t slept in a long time,” he said. “Too much stuff to do.”

“Have you been making any of those origami cranes?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“You can work on your core curriculum standards,” said Mrs. Prideaux to Pearl.

Mr. C. began coaching Taylor. “She did the whole thing on the board yesterday,” he said to her. “This whole thing adds up.” He pointed to the sides of a triangle on the page of a workbook. “This, this, this.”

“Sh! I want to get started!” said Mrs. Prideaux. “I have some people still finishing assessments in here. Taylor, hurry up!”

Taylor was indignant. Pete was slower than he was, he said. Pete, an elegant kid with a drawl and a fade haircut, said he’d already done the quiz.

“Guys, just finish!” Mrs. Prideaux said.

I whisper-asked Sebastian what he was supposed to be doing. “Do you have to take a test?”

“Mine’s extra credit,” he said. He got up suddenly to get something from the cabinet.

Mrs. Prideaux’s finger went out. “Wait, no no no, Sebastian! Either you STAY IN YOUR SEAT over there, or—”

Sebastian said, “I have to get this! Or what? Or what?”

“You don’t have to get anything!” said Mrs. Prideaux. She was mad, I think — understandably so — because both of us ed techs had been talking while she’d been trying to get the class started. But she couldn’t get mad at us because we were on staff. There were too many adults in this tiny room.

Sebastian pulled out a workbook from the cabinet. It had his name on it.

“Can I get the work I have to do?”

“All right,” said Mrs. Prideaux. “Just hurry up, sit down, GET STARTED!”

I looked at my sheet. Mr. C. whispered to me to stay with Sebastian. Sebastian, pissed off that Mrs. Prideaux had yelled at him, pulled a glue gun and a stick of pink glue from his backpack and plugged it in. “Nice glue gun,” I whispered.

“I put passion in my pink,” he said — an Aerosmith allusion, perhaps.

“I’m disappointed in you,” Mr. C. whispered to Sebastian.

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t tell me the cafeteria sells coffee.”

“They don’t,” said Sebastian. “They sell coffee milk.”

“I bought a coffee this morning,” said Mr. C.

“Are you going to argue with me? You can argue with me all you want.”

“Okay, fine,” said Mr. C. “I’m not disappointed in you.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. C.,” Sebastian said. “I know about you and your coffee.”

Taylor climbed on a chair and wrestled with something in the cupboard, looking for an eraser. A dead spider fell from a shelf onto Pete’s head.

“Oh, that’s dead,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

Pete looked up from his test with a puzzled expression.

“He doesn’t even notice that there’s a spider on his head!” said Taylor, laughing.

Pete reached up, found the spider, and flipped it away, revolted. Somebody stomped on it. Hilarity.

I whisper-asked Sebastian if he’d finished reading The Shawshank Redemption in English class. “I buzzed through that in a couple of days,” he said. He explained his Popsicle-stick bridge to me. “I’m trying to put more shapes on it. I have this triangle, I have the rhombus, I have the squares, but I don’t have a parallelogram.” He rubbed his face and rapidly shook his head, as if shaking off thoughts he didn’t want to have.

“You all right?” I said.

“I haven’t slept in a long time. I go to bed at eight and I stay up all night.”

“Just lying there?”

“I take melatonin,” he said. “I’ve had it for so long I guess my body’s starting to get immune to it.”

Mrs. Prideaux was explaining to someone how to find the area of a rectangle. “You’re going to put the length and the width here,” she said, tapping the paper.

“It’s hard to get through the day when you haven’t had any sleep,” I said to Sebastian. “It’s torture.”

“Oh, yeah. I haven’t slept in two weeks. I doze for an hour or so, and then I wake up.”

“Area — whatever the length times the width is,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“Is that a side effect or something?” I asked Sebastian, figuring he was on some kind of hyperactivity drug.

“I have no idea.”

I asked him what his parents said about the sleeplessness, still talking very softly, so nobody else could hear.

“I haven’t told my parents, because I used to be able to sleep — once I went to my room, I was done. My parents will think I’m faking it or something. I’m not a fan of people not believing that something like that is a problem. I want it to be fixed. I’d probably get mad at them for unnecessary reasons.”

“That’s tough,” I said.

“Oh, it is.”

Pete was explaining to Mrs. Prideaux that he didn’t understand one section of the test.

Sebastian looked down at the worksheet and crunched his eyes closed for a long time.

After a while, I said, “If you take some pills every day, they can cause sleeplessness.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what pills I take in the morning. My parents keep track of that. I’m supposed to keep track of the ones I take at night. I take an allergy pill, and I take melatonin.”

“The pills you take in the morning may be making you lose sleep,” I said.

“Yeah, and for the past couple of days I’ve been running outside for hours to lose my energy. I go to bed and I’m extremely tired, and I can’t sleep.”

“That’s probably a side effect of the pills. If you were always a good sleeper before—”

“Yeah, I just haven’t slept in weeks.”

“Maybe you can talk to the doctor? Taper off? I don’t want to presume.”

“No, I get it. I just don’t feel sane. I feel on edge all the time.”

“That’s not you, that’s the medication.”

“I’m so on edge,” said Sebastian. “I can snap at any moment, and I don’t want to do that. Sleep is a good thing.”

“You’re so right,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’m either going to hurt somebody, or I’m going to hurt myself.”

“And you don’t want to talk to your parents about that?”

He shook his head. “I just want to figure it out.”

“I think you’ve figured it out. It’s probably your medication. If you’re taking something powerful that brings you up, and they’re giving you too high a dose, then that’s why you’re up.”

Sebastian was silent. He was done talking about pills and not sleeping.

“That’s one heck of a bridge,” I said.

Mrs. Prideaux clarified a test question for Mr. C., who was helping Taylor with his quiz. The question was, “What are the properties of a rectangle?”

“He could put down that the opposite sides are congruent, or that the angles are ninety degrees — things like that,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

Mr. C. sat back down near Sebastian and me. “What kind of coffee do they sell?” Sebastian asked him.

“I didn’t check. I just knew that they’d just brewed it when I bought it, and it was pretty strong. Nobody else was getting it. They should charge for it.”

“KOS is an isosceles triangle,” said Mrs. Prideaux to Pete. “There are three other isosceles triangles here. Which are they?”

“See, I’m not the only one who didn’t know they sold coffee,” said Sebastian in an undertone.

“They’d probably make a lot of revenue if more people knew,” Mr. C. said.

“People spend a lot of money on coffee,” said Sebastian.

Mr. C. resumed coaching Taylor on the properties of a rectangle. “Two sets of parallel lines,” he said softly.

Now that the glue was running, Sebastian affixed several more Popsicle sticks to the top of one of the towers.

“Last night we went and did backflips off the trunks of cars,” said Taylor to Mr. C.

Mr. C. winced. “There’s something about putting my feet in the air over my head that I just don’t enjoy,” he said.

Thin pink filaments of glue hung off Sebastian’s bridge. “It’s like a Spider-Man bridge,” he said.

“Beautiful,” I said.

He let the glue dry and looked at his worksheet. He wrote a few answers, scribbling them at high speed. “Mrs. Prideaux?” he said.

“Hang on,” she said.

“I just have a question,” said Sebastian.

“Done!” said Pete. He sighed with relief.

More pencil sharpening. This particular pencil sharpener was an expensive one, higher pitched than the middle-school pencil sharpener.

Taylor sketched a rectangle. Mr. C. measured the angles with a protractor. “Check this out,” he said to me. “All ninety degrees.”

“Nice,” I said.

“I just drew it,” said Taylor.

“Freehand,” said Mr. C. “Now the area.”

Taylor carefully added up the length of all four sides.

“Nope,” said Mr. C. “That’s perimeter.”

“Oh, area.”

“Okay, folks,” said Mrs. Prideaux, “I’m going to give you a few more minutes, actually three minutes, and then we’re moving right into the next section.”

One of Sebastian’s recently glued Popsicle sticks fell loose. He glued it back in place.

Mrs. Prideaux went over to Pete, who had his iPad out. “Put that away,” she said. “This is your one warning. You’re texting.”

“It’s not texting,” said Pete.

“It looks like you’re texting to me, or you’re on Facebook. I don’t care which it is.”

“It was a blog.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“There’s a difference, Mrs. Prideaux,” muttered Sebastian.

“You don’t do that in class!” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“I’ve done all the stuff you wanted me to do,” said Pete.

“It doesn’t matter! You could move right on to your core curriculum standards, or catch up on some of the old stuff that you haven’t done.”

“A blog!” said Sebastian, chuckling.

Taylor made an elephantine yawn.

“What the hell was that for?” said Sebastian. “The loudest yawn?” He stood up and stretched, quoting Eminem: “‘Music is like magic, there’s a certain feeling you get, when you’re real and you spit and people are feeling your shit.’” Then he said, “Mrs. Prideaux, what’s my grade in this class?”

“I’m not going to look that up right now,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“It’s right here!” said Taylor, pointing to her computer screen. “Look it up for yourself.”

Mrs. Prideaux and Sebastian went over to the computer. “Eighty-one,” she said. “I hope you’re not looking at the other grades. Taylor, you’re missing a whole big grade in there. Sebastian, back in your seat.”

Taylor raised a ruler and pretended to measure Sebastian’s skull with it.

“Today is not the day you want to hit me with a ruler,” said Sebastian. “Once I get more than three hours of sleep, I’ll let you know.”

Mrs. Prideaux stopped by Pearl’s desk. She said, “When you measure the four angles of a quadrilateral together, they equal…?”

I asked Sebastian how he passed the time at night.

“I listen to my music and read, basically. I don’t play games. I have better things to do than assault my mind with that stuff.” He leapt up and walked across the room again.

Mr. C. was showing Mrs. Prideaux a parallelogram that Taylor had just drawn. “He drew it freehand,” he said. “It’s right on the money all the way around.”

“Sebastian! Back over, sit down,” said Mrs. Prideaux. She grabbed a piece of chalk. “Now, I want everyone’s attention up here. Taylor!”

“Wha?” said Taylor, pretending to be startled.

“I want your attention up here. We’re going to do polygon areas today.” She drew an octagon, with sides that were ten inches long. “To calculate the area of an octagon, we need to know what the perimeter is. So what is the perimeter of this octagon?”

“Eighty,” said Dave.

“Nice job, Dave,” said Sebastian.

“Yep, it’s eighty,” Mrs. Prideaux said. “Now the other thing that you will get is the apothem.” She had an idiosyncratic way of pronouncing apothem: it sounded as if she was saying opossum, but with a lisp. “The opossum is a measurement from the side of the polygon to the center. So I’m going to say that this polygon has an opossum of thirteen.” She wrote the formula on the board: “One-half times the opossum times the perimeter equals the area.”

“So half the opossum?” said Sebastian.

“Yes, so I would put one-half times thirteen times eighty. And I will get—”

“Five twenty,” said Dave, checking his calculator.

“Is it five twenty? Good.”

“You’re amazing, Dave,” said Sebastian.

“So the area of this octagon is five hundred and twenty units. If I said it was inches it would be square inches.” She drew a hexagon and asked Pete to figure out the perimeter. He was very nearsighted, so he went up to the board and peered at it.

“Have you gotten your eyes checked lately, Pete?” said Pearl.

“Yeah, I have. I’m getting contacts soon.”

“Soon’s not enough,” said Sebastian.

“Why don’t you wear glasses?” said Dave.

“Because with my luck, they would break in a week,” said Pete.

“If you can’t find your phone, how are you going to find a frigging contact that’s about as big as your fingernail?” said Dave.

Mrs. Prideaux held up a handout. “I want everyone to find this page,” she said. “We’re almost done with this standard.”

I made a pop-eyed face to entertain myself.

“Hiccups?” said Sebastian to me. “You’ve got hiccups?” He held out some Tic Tacs for me.

“I was just making a stupid face, sorry,” I said.

“I don’t judge.”

Zeke snapped a pencil in two.

“Zeke!” said Mrs. Prideaux.

A teacher came to the door to talk to Mrs. Prideaux.

“Zeke’s a troublemaker, don’t make him mad,” said Sebastian. “He will kill you. He’s been to jail. Zeke! How many times have you been to jail? Don’t lie!”

“Like, once,” said Zeke slowly.

“That’s one time too many, Zeke,” said Sebastian. He began working on the handout.

“You’re into this stuff,” I said to Sebastian.

“I hate math,” Sebastian said. “Hate math altogether. Hate geometry. I can do it but I hate it. Don’t tell Mrs. Prideaux I said that.”

Mrs. Prideaux was back, and circulating, helping people calculate the area of the first polygon on the handout.

“Can you do a polygon area on no sleep?” I asked Sebastian. “That’s your challenge.”

Sebastian looked at the problem, did some multiplying in his head, came up with the number eighty-four, then burped. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Mighty mango,” I said. I used my calculator and, with some prompting from Sebastian, came up with the same number, eighty-four.

Taylor left the room. “Taylor, come back!” said Sebastian. “He leaves for hours, then he comes back and doesn’t know what we’re doing.”

“Next,” I said, tapping the paper.

Sebastian counted the sides. “This one’s a decahedron,” he said. “Four point six two times thirty times one-half. Sixty-nine point three.” Correct, check.

Sebastian and I began to race each other. I made a mistake and Sebastian pointed out where I’d gone wrong.

“What can I say, you’re better than me,” I said.

“Nah.” In the middle of doing one problem, Sebastian heard someone across the room say the word douche. “Hey,” he said. “No one says douche anymore.”

Pete pointed at the figures on the chalkboard. “How am I supposed to remember that?”

“You are supposed to use the formula,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“Even with the formula I’m going to get confused,” said Pete.

“But the formula is just one-half times the opossum times the perimeter.”

My math sparkplugs were badly corroded, and I forgot to multiply by 0.5. Sebastian corrected my error. We got the same answer for the next one. “I was actually right,” I said. “Praise the holy maker.”

“The baby Jesus,” said Sebastian.

We got to the bottom of the page. I sighed with relief.

Sebastian’s hand shot up. “Mrs. Prideaux, I finished it.”

“All right, good. On the back there’s another whole page of fun and excitement.”

Sebastian flipped over the paper to reveal several more complicated polygon problems involving square roots. The sample problem had an error on it. The area of an octagon that fit neatly within a square with four-inch sides could not be twenty-one square inches, because the area of the entire square would only be sixteen square inches. Sebastian went to Mrs. Prideaux and showed her the mistake. “You’re right, it should be half,” said Mrs. Prideaux. “Why did they do that? Why do they do these things?” She began telling the other students about the error in the example on the second page of the handout.

“Mrs. Prideaux, I finished it,” said Sebastian.

“Very good,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

I asked him what they were reading in Language Arts, now that they’d finished Shawshank. They were on to The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.

“Potato salad,” said Taylor. Zeke was abusing a yardstick. Mrs. Prideaux said, “When you get that yardstick in your hand, it gives you a feeling of power. It’s not really a good thing to have.”

“I’ll take this to my next class,” said Zeke. “I want to whack everybody. I just want to bash Tucker’s face in.”

“No, you don’t,” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Zeke’s a killer,” said Sebastian. “Zeke has that face of killing. Mass murderer.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

Mrs. Prideaux held the worksheets that she’d collected as the special ed students went off to their next class. “I don’t know why they can’t have nice simple little numbers,” she said.

“All those radicals!” said Mr. C. “I won’t be back till the end of the day. I’m teaching chemistry.”

“That should be fun,” said Mrs. Prideaux. She shook my hand. “Thank you, it was nice to meet you.”

“A pleasure to be in your class,” I said.

—

“GOOD MORNING, AGAIN,” said Ms. Gorton in Mr. Bowles’s room. She was handing out candy from a plastic bag. “Can you have chocolate?” she asked Charles, one of the two kids I was in charge of for that block.

“I can have chocolate, but not peanut butter,” he said. He had black hair sticking out from under a blue baseball hat.

“Can you have Skittles?” She handed him the bag.

“Oh, I like Kit Kats,” he said.

I sat down next to Roland, my other responsibility, and introduced myself. Roland had a low voice and a baseball hat pulled low on his solid face. He looked about twenty-five.

Charles found some Zombie lip balm in his backpack and used it on his lips.

It was a sunny day, and I looked out the window at the brown, empty courtyard in the middle of the school. There was a robin on one of the benches. I turned to Roland. “Can anybody go out there? Or do we just look out sadly at the bird?”

“That’s the honors courtyard,” Roland said. “The next one is the teachers’ courtyard. And the furthest one down is the senior courtyard. Technically. They’re all shut down.”

“Soon,” said Ms. Gorton.

“Nobody knows,” said Roland.

Charles said, “They told us this year that nobody was allowed in there. There was shenanigans. Littering.”

I opened the window.

“We haven’t had air in like three months,” said Charles.

“These computers are up for grabs,” said Ms. Gorton, piling up her binders in readiness for her next block. “Bye, guys, happy morning.”

“Bye,” said Charles. “Thanks for the candy.”

He was working on a sculpture of a man kneeling, made of a soda bottle and coat hanger wire.

“Nice,” I said. “Are those arms?”

“Yeah.”

I pulled out an apple.

“You better bring food with you during school,” said Charles, “because if you don’t, you’re going to be screwed.”

“I just ran three miles,” said Roland.

I asked him why.

“I have gym.”

Charles said, “I couldn’t run three miles if somebody bribed me.”

“You’ll probably have to at some point,” I said.

“Nope,” said Charles. “I’ve been postponing the inevitable for a very long time.”

Roland said, “Waiting for the zombie apocalypse, when we’re all going to die?”

“I’ll be able to fast-walk,” said Charles.

“The place that’s safety will be exactly three miles away,” said Roland, “and you’ll have to run there.”

“The place where it’s safety is about seven miles away,” said Charles. “My house.”

I asked him if he had a zombie-proof air raid shelter.

“It’s not really an air raid shelter,” Charles said. “If we had a nuclear explosion, I wouldn’t be fine.”

“Your hamster?” said Roland.

“Actually, no one would be fine,” said Charles.

I said, “I don’t think we’re going to get anything like that, do you?”

“No, no,” Charles said. “A zombie apocalypse maybe. They have an animal-testing facility right in the middle of Kansas. That’s where we get most of our food and it’s Tornado Alley.”

I said, “So the tornado releases the animals that are being inhumanely tested, they’re pumped up on antibiotics, they’re huge chickens, they leap out and they start terrorizing the countryside?”

“Yeah,” said Charles, “and then we pretty much get the swine flu epidemic.”

“I see,” I said. “That’s not good.” I took a bite of my apple. “I know there’s a lot of corn in the middle of the country.”

“Pretty much you should grow your own food,” Charles said.

Roland said, “I don’t really care if there’s a zombie apocalypse.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t even like watching those damn shows. I can’t stand these people staggering around half dead, I hate it.”

“Walk normal!” said Roland.

Charles laughed. “I look at it like this. If you’re prepared for the zombie apocalypse, you’re prepared for almost anything.”

“I hear you,” I said. “But I don’t even know how to shoot a gun. On those shows, they’re always having to take them out somehow. I think I’d be the first casualty.”

Charles asked me if I knew how to fire a cannon. I didn’t.

Roland said, “You clean it, you pack it, stick the wick in. It’s not that difficult.”

A third kid walked in and sat down. He had long bangs and tired eyes and his name was Patrick. “Are you a new teacher here?”

“No, I’m filling in for Mr. Bowles. I’m Mr. Intestine. No, that’s stupid, never mind, move on.”

“You mind helping me with my test?” said Patrick.

“By all means. What’s your test in?”

“History.” His teacher was Ms. Hopkins.

He handed me the test packet. On page 1 it said, Fill in the blank line with the correct ism. The choices were fascism, militarism, isolationism, and totalitarianism:

Japan

Always prepared for war

Foreign policy of United States after World War I

System run by a dictator having complete power, includes extreme nationalism, and often racism

Connected to the Soviets

Focus of growth on industry and military, low standard of living, shortage of food and consumer goods

“Death is the safest place,” said Roland, still musing on the zombie apocalypse. “No, Canada is the safest place.”

“Canada is not the safest place!” said Charles.

“They have no crime,” said Roland. “The zombies would just look at the border and go, ‘Nope,’ turn around and walk away.”

Patrick said, “My notes are on the computer. May I get a computer?”

“Let’s just do it,” I said. I pulled up a chair next to him. “So, Japan. They were very devoted to military life. The ism connected to Japan would be which one? Isolationism is what we were doing, saying we don’t want to be bothered, right?”

“Yeah. So…”

“The Japanese were very militaristic,” I said. “They were building submarines like crazy, they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. You gotta admit that.”

“That’s true,” Patrick said.

I took another bite of my apple, waiting for him to figure it out.

He tapped his finger on the word militarism. “So that would be — Japan?”

“Bingo.”

We looked at the next question, “Always prepared for war.” The best match for that one also seemed to be militarism. “Hm,” I said. “I guess you can reuse them?”

Patrick went off to ask the history teacher whether you could reuse the isms.

I went back over to Roland and Charles. “What’s been happening over here?” I said.

“Basalt zombie stuff,” said Charles. “My grandfather, up north, gets them all the time.”

“Gets what?”

“Basalt zombies.”

I didn’t understand.

“People that are high on bath salts,” Charles explained.

I said, “What do you do, make a smoothie of bath salts and become a zombie? What the hell?”

“Pretty much,” Charles said. “It’s to the point where you have to take off your clothes. You’re pretty much burning yourself from the inside out.”

“It’s a form of, like, crack,” said Roland.

“And it gives you a high?” I said.

“Well, more than a high,” said Charles. “It gives you invincibility from gunshots.”

“It’s like PCP,” said Roland. “They could get shot seven times and still be running at you.”

“And it’s bath salts?” I said. “I’m so out of it. You used to be able to buy boxes of the stuff.”

“That’s the street term for it,” said Charles.

“It’s not actual bath salts,” said Roland.

“How do you spell territory?” said Patrick, who’d returned.

I told him. I turned back to Charles. “What do you mean they’re zombies? Your grandfather takes care of them?”

“No,” said Charles, eating his Kit Kat. “They just walk up to his house. They’re screaming and yelling and having a spasm attack.”

“Why are they there?”

“They’re lonely up there. It’s way way up Maine.”

“Everybody seems to be reasonably under control around here,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” said Charles.

I asked what was supposed to be happening in the room right now.

“Nothing, really,” said Charles.

Roland said, “It’s a study hall, so we can work on things. And if we have nothing to do, then we just sit around and do nothing.”

“You need a break in the day,” I said. “Constant assaults of nonsense. I just learned about polygons. I never took geometry.”

Roland said, “The hardest class I have is Algebra III.”

“The hardest class I have is trash art,” said Charles. “You take a bunch of random items, and you make something awesome out of it.”

I went back to Patrick. “What did she say?”

“We can use the words over and over again.”

“Beautiful.”

He put isolationism next to the United States. Next to System run by a dictator having complete power, includes extreme nationalism, and often racism, he put totalitarianism. He had trouble reading the word often.

The phone rang and then stopped. Roland and Charles were talking about pandemics. “Most of us die,” said Charles.

Patrick and I turned to the next page of the test. The first question was, Italian leader during World War II. I helped him spell Mussolini. The second question was What did he want?

“What does any dictator want?” I said.

“Control?”

“Sure, excellent.”

Sebastian showed up. “I have a question,” he said. “I was wondering if I could work in here.”

I said he could if it was okay with his teacher. He left to ask.

Next question: Pearl Harbor, who, when, where, why?

I asked Patrick if he remembered anything about Pearl Harbor.

“No,” said Patrick. “I wasn’t here.”

I told him about Pearl Harbor, and he began writing the date. “December seventh, nineteen forty — seven?”

I pointed down.

“Forty-six?” Down. “Forty-three?” Down. “Forty-one.” Then he asked, “How do you spell Hawaii?”

He had to give three reasons why fighting in the Pacific was difficult for US troops. The islands were well fortified, I said, and the supply lines were long. “How do you spell supplies?” he said.

The test wanted him to define two-front war. I drew a picture. Patrick wrote, War is hapening in two diffrent places.

He asked me how to spell reparation. He wrote about the attitude of the United States after World War I. He wrote about tanks versus horses in World War I. It wasn’t an easy test. “Okay, I’m going to pass this in,” he said. He left.

I went back to Charles and Roland, who were watching a trailer for a Japanese cartoon called Attack on Titan, in which the citizens of a walled city battle enormous homicidal naked people. “Is it lunch yet?”

“No.”

I asked them what year they were in. Roland was a senior, and Charles was a senior, too, but he was going to be a super-senior next year. That got us on the topic of the movie Super Size Me. “I could have done without the scene of him puking,” said Roland.

“And we didn’t really need to know about his sex life,” said Charles.

I said I’d once bought four fish sandwiches from McDonald’s and set them up in a row in front of me and eaten them. “They were delicious,” I said. “Now I don’t do that anymore, because I think, The poor fish, there aren’t that many fish left in the sea.”

“I hate fish anyway,” said Roland. “I like crab and lobster. I don’t like shrimp.”

Patrick returned holding his test, which the teacher had already gone over. I’d led him badly astray on one question — I’d prompted him to list the three Axis leaders, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, when he was supposed to list the “Big Three” Allied nations and their leaders. “Who were the three good guys?” I said. Patrick wrote down the USA and Russia, and then he was stumped. I did a Churchill impression: “We will fight on the beaches!”

“China?” he said.

“He was a British sort of man,” I said.

“France?”

“British, English.”

“Britain?”

“Boom.”

After some more prompting, he ended up with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. He left. Then he came back smiling — he’d gotten an 80 on the test.

Roland, Charles, and Patrick packed up to go. Charles was off to work on his reading. “Before I got to this high school, I was an illiterate,” he said. “I can read to a third-grade level right now. My comprehension is way up there, higher than the school average, but I’ve got dyslexia and stuff. When I was in kindergarten, they said, This kid will never learn how to read.”

“Wow, that’s kind of a triumph,” I said.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

Roland and Charles waved. “See you!”

The PA lady came on. “Mr. Nicholson Baker to the main office, please. Mr. Nicholson Baker to the main office.”

My heart started thumping. What had I done?

In the office Paulette asked me if I was available Wednesday and Thursday. I told her I wasn’t, unfortunately.

Walking back to Mr. Bowles’s room, I heard snatches of conversation: “The dentist made my gums bleed.” “You’re wrong, very wrong.” “It was like this weird fashion show thing.” “Did we pass?”

Mrs. Meese was in Mr. Bowles’s room talking to Lucas, one of the mud-truck aficionados from Day One — blinky, wiry, and slow moving. Drew was lounging out. I asked him how biology was going. He said they’d moved on from geographical tongues and hairy knuckles; now they were extracting DNA from wheat germ. “We’re putting soap in it, like Dawn or something, and we’re putting in rubbing alcohol. Next time we’ll use a stirring stick to pull out the DNA, put some blue dye on it, and look at it.”

“And then,” I said, “you will witness the secret of life — a little blob of something on a slide.”

“That’s where babies come from,” said Drew. “From test tubes.” We were quiet for a bit, while Mrs. Meese helped Lucas with his history. “It’s my least-favorite class, though,” Drew said. “I didn’t like it first trimester and I don’t like it this trimester.”

Drew liked English best, he said. “I’m learning how to make proper sentences. We watched a movie, too, Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, about the Holocaust. It was really interesting, I liked it. I mean I liked the movie, I didn’t like what was happening.”

Mrs. Meese was working with Lucas on his history — helping him spell Roosevelt.

Drew began eating an apple in a strange way. He ate one half completely, right down to the core, and left the other side untouched. That morning, he said, he woke up and didn’t want to move, he just lay there. “People are always saying sleep is so important, and yet school starts so early.”

“All right, Lucas, you did it!” said Mrs. Meese. She emailed his history assignment to his teacher.

Lucas came over to my side of the class and sat down. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Nothing much,” said Lucas.

“Drew’s eating an apple,” I said. “He eats one side at a time.”

A girl came in looking for a paperclip to fix her shirt.

“I eat oranges like that all the time,” said Drew. “It tastes really good to me. After I eat the orange peel, if I take a sip of water, I swear it’s the best sip of water I’ve ever tasted.”

“I’ll have to try that sometime,” I said.

Lucas looked up. “Peanut butter and mayonnaise,” he said.

“Together,” I said, “or apart?”

“Together,” Lucas said. “I had to eat it when I went into solitary.”

“Solitary what?”

“Juvenile hall,” said Lucas. “That’s what they give you, because they can’t give you fluff, because it has sugar in it.”

“No,” I said.

“They make it look like it’s fluff. They make it thick, but it’s mayonnaise. If you go in the hole, that’s what they give you.”

“You were in the hole?”

“Yep. I punched a guard.”

Mrs. Meese was explaining to a student how dot-dot-dots worked when you quoted a paragraph in an essay and wanted to leave something out. I leaned forward. Drew made a start on the second half of his apple.

“But you’re a kid,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You’re a senior, right?” said Drew.

“Yeah.”

I asked Lucas why he’d punched the guard.

“I went in there because I got charged with a Class A felony. I did like four months. I was in there, and the guard kept giving me crap, so I just punched him out. I did probably two weeks in the hole.”

I said, “How much contact with the outside world did you have?”

“You go in the TV room. You only have two windows, and that’s all you see. Woods.”

“That’s hard on your mind,” I said.

“You’d think that people would see their mothers and stuff, but you don’t want to do that. Somebody asks for an interview, you say no, or people will say you’re a pussy.”

I said I was glad it was over.

“I’m out now,” Lucas said. “I done my time, and I’m doing good. I did anger management classes. Couple incidents here and there. But I’ll say right now, any kid in this room wouldn’t want to be in my shoes at that time. Any kid in this school wouldn’t last three seconds there. When I was there, I was lifting weights, situps, pushups.”

I asked him what constituted a Class A felony.

“Well, I quit school and took off. Walked down the street, and a kid owed me money, and he didn’t pay me, and he punched me, so I punched him and knocked his head against a pole and slammed him with a shopping cart. I ran to Walgreens. I was sitting in the bathroom there for a while. Went home, went in my bedroom window, changed my clothes, acted like my bus came in. A cop comes to my house, he goes, ‘Where were you around one o’clock today?’ ‘Home!’ He goes, ‘Nuh-uh.’ I knew I was busted. I told my mom, I said, ‘I’m done.’ They took me to the station, read me my Miranda rights, said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ I thought I was the toughest kid, but when I went in there, you ain’t. I saw a kid ahead of me put his head right through a sheet of glass. The glass is this thick. He shoves his head, boom. He was bigger than that door. It took like four guards with shields to zap him down.”

“Like riot shields?” said a girl, who was listening.

“Yeah, and he was in there. I’m like the shortest kid. D block is when kids are bodybuilders — you’ve got to get like fourteen cops to get at them. So I was in E block. I remember this kid would always scream at night. On and on. I finally said, ‘If you don’t shut up, in the morning, you make me lose my lunch this time, I’m going to go in there and beat the hell out of you.’”

The class had gone quiet. Everybody was listening to Lucas, while pretending not to.

“So he screamed that night,” Lucas went on. “The guard goes, ‘You lost lunch.’ Because the kid wouldn’t get up in the morning and they always took lunches from all of us every time. I didn’t think they could do that. I told the kid, ‘Come over here. We lost lunch?’ So I peed all over his boots, the guy. I said, ‘There’s your lunch. You can eat that.’ I went in the hole for that. Came back out, and the kid still screamed. His mind was messed up. When he first went in there, he was great, didn’t scream or nothing. Three weeks in, his mind, it’s like you’re not there anymore. He was reading kids’ books.”

“He really lost it,” I said.

“He really lost it. So at nighttime, the kids in the cells would crack their doors. The kids would fart into the door. One time I farted and a guard came by and he goes, ‘Holy snap!’ One time I broke a pen and put it on the shaving cream bottle. I put the shaving cream on the door handle so the guard couldn’t open it. He tried to open it and all the shaving cream turned to, like, slime. So he goes, ‘Yep, who did this this time!’ Going into the shower he got me good. Pepper spray and oil and wax. That stings. He goes, ‘How does it feel to be back?’ So the kid was still screaming. Finally he followed me out for lunchtime. I went around and beat the crap right out of him. I said, ‘You made me lose lunch for two weeks.’ He stopped screaming after that. I’m sorry for that.”

Mrs. Meese said, “Pearl?” She and Pearl began working on Pearl’s English paper. Drew started talking to Mr. C.

Lucas didn’t want to stop talking. “A new kid came in, trying to make a name for himself,” he said. “He slit a kid’s throat. So the kid came back and killed him.”

“In juvie?”

“Oh, yeah, people don’t know. They don’t tell the outside world. Like if someone died, they won’t tell. This one kid came in, new kid, they’re beating him up every day. I went over to him. I said, ‘What’s your problem?’ He goes, ‘I’m not guilty.’ I said, ‘Everybody did something to come in here.’ This girl got him in for drug running. She passed him the stuff and got him in there. He couldn’t fight at all. He didn’t know nothing about fighting. Kids would beat him up so bad that the kid wouldn’t get up. I told him, ‘Get up.’ I went to Sergeant Stamm and I told him, ‘He’s going to die. The guys are going to get to him and he can’t fight back.’ In the shower I said, ‘Watch your back.’ They run up and stabbed him. I said to the guard, ‘What did I tell you? He’s going to die.’ Sergeant Stamm goes, ‘Yeah? So? This is your house, you’re supposed to take care of it.’ The kid made it out, and I go up to see him, and he says, ‘I might take my life tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Don’t do that.’ That night he woke up, he made stuff out of sheets, a noose, jumped off the thing, killed himself.”

Activity block was almost over and the class was noisy now. Lucas got up and I walked him to the door. “So I did my time, I came out, and I told my mom, my grandmom, my grandfather, I’m not going back in there for anything I do. I kept my promise ever since.” Now he boxed, he said. “My dad coached me.”

“That’s quite a story,” I said.

“I learned how to break someone’s arm,” said Drew, also standing by the door.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

“Good talking to you,” I said.

“Can you email that, Pearl?” said Mrs. Meese. “Lucas, thank you so much for all your hard work. Awesome job!” When the students were gone, she gathered some papers. I took a bite of a cheese sandwich. “This trimester just seems to fly for me,” Mrs. Meese said. “I’ve got blocks one, two, and three, and I’m just busy, busy, busy, and then I have a little chill here, but yet, I’m busy. And then four and five I’m just busy, busy again.” She bustled off.

Ms. Gorton came in to get a notebook. She asked how things were going. I said I’d just heard the whole grim story of juvie from Lucas. She shook her head. “If I listened to all the stories, my heart would be irrevocably broken,” she said. “Bro-ken!” She left.

Mrs. Batelle and a third ed tech came in and began comparing notes on the isms history test, so that they could help Drew take it. I went out to make some instant tap-water coffee in the kitchen and said hello to Mrs. Carlisle, the sub who’d played the relaxation tape. Cutting through the library, I saw a poster on which was posted the SAT word of the day. The word of the day was exodus. Yesterday’s word was languish, and before that it was frank, and before that nullfy, spelled without the i.

When I got back, the ed techs were shuffling fruitlessly through their history notes in order to find which of the isms was the correct answer to What was the foreign policy of the United States after World War I?

I put on my headphones and listened to some music. After a half hour Mrs. Batelle and Ms. Gorton went away and Mrs. Meese came back to have some yogurt. I told her that I was concerned about Sebastian. “I don’t know how much to say,” I said. “But I think he’s taking some kind of med that is keying him up too much.” I didn’t say that whatever he was taking — Strattera or Concerta or some such — was on the verge of making him psychotic.

“Well, he’s ADHD,” said Mrs. Meese.

“Yes, but he said, ‘I haven’t been sleeping, and I haven’t slept for days.’ He’s up, up, up.”

“I had him first block, and he wasn’t up, up, up, he was fine,” Mrs. Meese said. “Some of that is to see how much sympathy he can get. But he is severe ADHD — I’ve never seen somebody as ADHD as he is. Right now he’s on restricted pass, because he was signing out to go to the boys’ room, but instead going to the cafeteria and hanging out with friends. He’s not allowed to leave his classes at all.”

We talked about Patrick, the mumbly kid who took the history test with me. Patrick would do anything to get out of a class, Mrs. Meese said. “He’s a junior, and he’s ricocheted in and out of this school five times, I think. His parents keep moving. First Kansas City, then Brunswick, then Greenfield, Mass. It was here, Kansas City, here, Brunswick, Greenfield, here, Portland, here.”

“I think I saw him in the hall with a girlfriend, though,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s known her all these years. But he’s not getting anywhere scholastically because they keep bouncing in and out of here.”

“I feel sorry for some of these kids, seeing them struggle,” I said. “They’re barely able to spell, and I’m thinking, Is this the best use of their time?”

“No, it’s not,” Mrs. Meese said. “The issue that I see is kids that don’t do book learning. They do hands-on learning. There’s a ton of them in this school. Let them be a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. But here’s the problem. You can’t be a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter now without going to college. There’s no more coming out of high school and apprenticing under somebody.”

I said, “They’re being made unnecessarily miserable, and they think they’re stupid, but actually they might well be a brilliant small-engine-repair guy, who just can sort of take things apart in his mind, who has that spatial sense. And yet here it’s all about how many isms can you memorize.”

“It’s very frustrating,” said Mrs. Meese. “My brother falls into this category. He’s fifty-one, and he can do pretty much anything. But he’s never had college. Right now he’s working with a guy who is a furnace guy. He’s learning under this guy, and he’s doing fabulous. So my mother said to him, ‘Why don’t you apprentice under him, and get your license?’ He said, ‘Because there’s no more of that, Mom.’ He says, ‘I’ve got to go to college. It’s book learning.’ He goes, ‘I can’t learn by reading an effing book.’ When my brother was five, he was taking bicycles apart and remaking bicycles. And then he went to lawnmowers and minibikes. He took my mother’s blender apart. You can blindfold him and tell him, ‘There’s a whatever motorcycle engine in front of you,’ he’ll put it back together. But he can’t do it as a profession, because he has no college. He’d be a fabulous teacher. The f-bombs would be flying, I know that. He built a car from the ground up. He can weld like you’ve never seen anybody weld. He learned from my father. He learned all of it at my father’s elbow. My father was the same way. He took my grandmother’s washing machine apart — he wanted to know how it worked. Of course, she spanked him for that one — but it was the same idea.”

Mrs. Batelle and Ms. Gorton came in with Drew and a new girl, Kendra, to do some more work on the history test. “Let’s get this done, Kendra,” said Ms. Gorton.

“It’s nice and cool in here,” said Drew.

Mr. Clapper, the school principal, came on the PA system. “Good afternoon, this is Mr. Clapper, can I have your attention for a moment? I would like to congratulate the class of 2014, and I’d like to announce the students in the top ten percent, in alphabetical order.” He read off twenty-two names — eighteen girls and four boys. “Our honors essayist is Benjamin Young, our salutatorian is Tricia Hadden, and our valedictorian is Kelsie Mattingly. Congratulations to all of those students in the top ten percent of the class of 2014.”

Kendra read a question on her test: “Give three reasons why fighting in the Pacific was difficult for US troops.”

I sent some emails, after Drew showed me where to plug in the computer.

Drew opened a cupboard and found a can of antiperspirant. He gave himself a couple of quick squirts under his sweatshirt.

Mrs. Batelle looked up from her notes, hearing the hissing sound. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Deodorant,” said Drew. “I’m sweating.”

“That’s okay, Drew,” Mrs. Batelle said. “I thought you were having Jell-O pie or something.”

Ms. Gorton said to Kendra, “We skipped this question yesterday. I want you to read the question.”

“What was the foreign policy of the United States after World War I?” Kendra read softly.

Mrs. Batelle was reading an upcoming learning target assessment in Drew’s binder. “Are you good at drawing?” she asked.

“I draw stick men,” said Drew. “That’s the best I can do.” He yawned.

“Why don’t you put away all your notes,” said Mrs. Batelle. She handed him the learning target project packet. “And then, we can take a look at this. Okie dokie? You are a reporter or a writer during World War II, and you have just witnessed or experienced one of the following events. Fortunately, you were one American who was able to survive this horrific event. It’s your job to explain this experience to the American people. So how would you explain it?”

“What experience?” said Drew.

“How, though,” said Mrs. Batelle.

“You’ve got to pick an experience,” said Drew.

“True. But how would you relate it to the American people. You’re over there, you’re not here. How would you get the news to the people, over the ocean to us? What’s one way of doing it?”

“Boat,” said Drew. “Boat? I don’t know if they had planes.”

“How else? ‘Hello, hello?’ What’s this? A microphone!”

“Radio?”

“Radio. Or television? Did we have television in World War II?”

“Kind of, actually,” said Drew. “I did a thing about TV last trimester, where I researched the history.”

Mrs. Batelle said, “When did most households get a TV? I remember getting our first one, that’s how old I am.”

“Mostly it started getting popular around the 2000s,” said Drew. “Close to there. Like around the 1990s, I think. Maybe a little later.”

Mrs. Batelle pursed her lips. “I think earlier. Think about when I was born. We did this last year.”

“Nineteen eighty-five?”

“I would love that. That was when my son was born. I was born in 1958, and I can remember a TV. Very vaguely. When I was about five years old, my dad had to go to the hospital and have his teeth out, to get ready for dentures. I was a little thing, and I remember going with my mom to the store to get a little tiny TV—”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

“Is that our bell?” Mrs. Batelle asked.

Ms. Gorton nodded.

“Okay. Because in those days there were no TVs in the hospital.”

Drew got up.

“This little tiny black-and-white TV,” Mrs. Batelle went on. “And then we got the great big monster, and that big monster is still at my aunt’s. It still works. So anyway, you’ll be doing a project. You can do a cartoon strip, you can do a newspaper article, a radio show. Sounds like a blast! Now, Kendra, where do you go?”

“Metal tech.”

“Mr. Partridge?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a funny man. Bye.”

Drew slumped off for biology. I packed up my briefcase and followed Kendra to metal tech.

“Sean, I like the new hat,” said a kid out in the hall. “Nice and loose there.”

“I like it, too,” said Sean.

—

MR. PARTRIDGE HAD A BIKER’S PONYTAIL and a blacksmith’s chest. I found the same gray stool I’d sat on in the morning and positioned myself behind Jamie, Lucas, and Ben — not too close, but not too far. A kid was using a mallet to hammer idly on a piece of metal, watching it bounce around. Two friends discussed a music festival they wanted to go to.

“Okay, a few moments of your TIME!” said Mr. Partridge. “There’s two boxes. One that’s graded, and one to be graded. If there’s no paperwork, no name, well, who’s this?” He held up a wrought-iron hook with a twisted handle.

“Ahem, Linus!” said a boy.

“No paperwork, goes back in the box. No job is done until the paperwork is done. Bear in mind, two pieces of paper for each activity project. Production guide, assessment sheet. On the sheet metal trades, the people that don’t have it. Brian Kelso I don’t have. Unless it’s in the box with no paperwork. Rusty, no paperwork. Adam, paperwork. Roger!”

“I did it,” said Roger.

“Well, it’s not in the box. I’m not going to go looking for it! I’m looking for stuff all over the place here. Kendra and Rich, sheet metal! That’s just the first activity. We’re in the fifth week now!”

All this time Lucas and Ben had their heads crouched low over an iPad, conferring softly and smiling planfully.

Mr. Partridge said, “We got people working on the hook! We got foundry going on! The sugar scoop is that last sheet metal piece! You have to draw it out on paper.” He held up a piece of paper with a shape drawn on it. “This is half scale. You do it full scale. Dimensions on here. You do your template with that. Bill is not here. I don’t think we’re ready to pour. Are we ready to pour?”

“Bill’s is ready to be poured,” said a boy.

“We’ll wait for Bill. The foundry piece, everybody’s doing okay. I got three or four sheets in yesterday for the foundry knowledge book work. It’s an open book. Get the answers! Work together! I don’t want to lecture all period and bore you to death.”

Mr. Partridge walked around the class, checking on drawings. “You have an idea what I’m trying to do here?” he said to me.

“Yeah, I like the sugar scoop,” I said.

“So basically, one, two, three,” he said, pointing to Jamie, Ben, and Lucas. “Jamie does pretty good.”

I paid a visit to Jamie. He was holding a small metal box that he’d made, using the brake bender. He showed me his paperwork. He’d gotten a 90. Now he was supposed to be working on plans for the wrought-iron hook with the twisted handle.

Another ed tech, Ms. Laronde, was talking to Ben and Lucas, who were still snickering over Ben’s iPad. “Guys, I’m serious. Go ask Mr. Partridge for some work.”

“I’ve done it,” said Ben.

“When have you done the book work?” said Ms. Laronde.

“Last week.”

“Did you do the drill press?”

“Yep,” said Lucas. “First thing we did was that.”

“Well, ask Mr. Partridge what to do, then.”

Ms. Laronde went off to help someone else.

I went over. “Did you make that sugar scoop?” I said to Ben.

“Yes,” said Ben.

Lucas thought this was very funny. Had Ben found somebody else’s sugar scoop and appropriated it? Had he swapped his half-finished scoop for a fully completed one?

“How did you make it?” I asked.

More laughter from Lucas.

“Mr. Bowles showed me how to fold it,” said Ben. “Do you have a Sharpie? I forgot to put my name on it. Mr. Partridge will get mad if it gets lost. I’ve just got to put my name on it, and I’ll be done.”

“You’ll be done with work,” said Lucas, laughing and thigh-slapping.

“So, Lucas,” I said. “Thanks for telling me that unbelievable story. What are you up to now? Mr. Partridge said I was supposed to sit over here with you guys.”

“You don’t need to sit with us,” Lucas said. “You don’t need to watch us.”

“That would cramp your style.”

“Yeah, just do your own thing.” Lucas pulled out the sheet of paper with a half-scale plan of an unfolded sugar scoop on it. “Ben, you remember how to do this?”

“Not really,” said Ben. Snurfle snurfle. Either Mr. Bowles had done all the work for them, or they’d stolen or swapped a sugar scoop.

The blower in the forge came on. It sounded like the Bethlehem Steel factory back in its glory days.

Mr. Partridge checked on Lucas. “You need your paper template,” he said. “Get the tape. WHO’S GOT THE TAPE? Mr. Bowles must have done the paper template for you.”

“Give me some tape,” said Lucas.

Mr. Partridge slapped down a roll of masking tape irritably. He turned to Jamie, who was talking to a girl.

The girl said, “Jamie, you know those silver things that hold things?”

“Vise grips?” said Jamie.

“You should know that by now,” said Mr. Partridge. He showed Jamie how to measure the hook in order to estimate the length of quarter-inch iron he would need. “How many inches?”

“Sixteen,” said Jamie.

“So you write that there. Mr. Baker, you can help him out. You got quarter-inch square solid, sixteen inches, and it weighs how much? How many inches in a foot? See where I’m going with this?”

Jamie and I began calculating how much material we’d need to make the hook. The noise of hammering and pounding was incredible. “How much is it per foot, twenty-five cents?” I said. We looked at a price table for quarter-inch iron.

“No, it’s supposed to be forty-five,” said Jamie.

“Okay, forty-five cents a foot,” I said. “And you have sixteen inches.”

Jamie thought. “Would that be forty-five times sixteen?”

I drew him a picture of a length of iron two feet high. “This thing is a foot plus another four inches. Twelve inches is a foot, right?”

“A foot,” said Jamie, nodding.

“And then we’re going to add one, two, three, four inches”—I made pencil marks—“and then we would have a total of sixteen inches.”

“So would that be a dollar and thirty-six cents?”

“I think that’s a bit much,” I said, “because it’s forty-five cents for this much, and then you’ve got to pay a little bit more money for the extra four inches. So if you’ve got four inches out of twelve inches, how many is that?” I wrote a four over a twelve. I was going too fast.

“Uh, eight?” Jamie was subtracting.

“You can turn it into two-sixths, or one-third,” I said.

“Yeah, one-third, right.”

“So now you’ve got forty-five cents, plus one-third of forty five.” I drew three circles on the top of the piece of iron. “That second foot you’ve divided up into three pieces of four inches. What would be one-third of forty-five?”

Jamie groaned.

We divided forty-five by three on the paper. “Fifteen, boom,” I said. “So forty-five cents for most of it, and then you’re going to add fifteen cents for the rest of it. How much is forty-five and fifteen?” I wrote it as a sum, with a line under it.

“That would be a dollar and…”

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Jamie carefully added the numbers and looked at them. “Oh, sixty,” he said.

“So it’s going to cost sixty cents.”

Jamie wrote down $.60 on the blank line. “Now I’ve got to sketch the hook,” he said. “How do I sketch the hook?”

“Draw a hook,” I said.

Jamie carefully drew a hook.

“Now you just have to make it,” I said.

“No, I made it.” He lifted a nearby hook from the table. It was perfect.

“Holy crap, you made that?” I said.

“Yeah, I put on the glasses,” said Jamie. “I had to make this point first. And then, on the horn, you have to make the hook.”

I read the directions. Twist with the vise grips. Reheat. Twist in the opposite direction. “Wow. Hacksaw, reheat, then punch. Did you do all this in one class?”

“No, a couple classes. And I made this, too.” He handed me his tin box, which I showered with praise.

Jamie showed Mr. Partridge his math. Mr. Partridge told him to take the hook home and put the paperwork in the folder.

“Power!” called a kid near where the girls had been glue-gunning that morning. I showed him how to press the reset button to get current.

Mr. Partridge pointed to three boys in baseball hats sitting near Lucas and Ben. “They’re the bonehead table,” he said. “They’re just gabbing. I won’t give them much of a grade today, but at least I know where they are.”

“This is a great class, though,” I said. “You’re really giving them a taste of a lot of stuff.”

“Oh, I know,” said Mr. Partridge. He shook his head grimly and pointed out that Ben had left the shop. Lucas was doing something conspiratorial with Ben’s iPad. “If they’re working, fine,” he said. “If they’re not, what are you going to do? They might get a three, which is a thirty, for the day. I look at it as time spent. I don’t care if they do lousy work.” He waved toward the kids who were hammering. “They’re beating themselves up over there, but they’re working. I get a few of them that show up once or twice a week. This is the fifth week. Fifteen absences, what do I do? I fail them. That’s up to them. They know how I do things here.” He pointed to Jamie. “This fellow, he works hard. He did the hook, he did the tray.”

I sat down next to Lucas, while Mr. Partridge looked over my shoulder. “What happens now?” I said.

“What?” said Lucas.

“What do you have to do now?”

Lucas pointed at the template for the sugar scoop, and the sheet of tin from which it was to be made. “Something with that,” he said. No eye contact. He had a pair of tin snips in front of him. Everything was ready to go.

“You’ve got to cut sixteen and a half,” said Mr. Partridge. He marked the first place to snip with masking tape.

“Mr. Bowles messed this up for me,” said Lucas.

“Who did the drawing?” asked Mr. Partridge.

“I’m going to say Mr. Bowles did,” said Lucas.

“You’re going to blame him?”

“He did, he really, really did,” said Lucas.

“How come you didn’t do it?” said Mr. Partridge.

“He told me, ‘Do this, do that.’ So I did, and he messed it all up.”

Mr. Partridge said, “Well, maybe you ought to do your own, huh?”

“I was doing it,” said Lucas, “but then he did it for me.” He dropped a magnet on the piece of tin with a loud click and went back to Ben’s iPad. Mr. Partridge tore off a small piece of masking tape and stuck it right in the middle of the iPad’s screen. His thumb was enormous. Lucas squinted his eyes for an instant and decided not to fly into a rage.

“Those are the bane of education right now, Lucas,” Mr. Partridge said, meaning iPads. “You’re going to cut it, not all the way.”

Lucas began halfheartedly cutting with the tin snips.

“You don’t want to cut into the point, you want to stop before the point,” said Mr. Partridge.

“Oh!” said Lucas sarcastically. He stopped cutting. Mr. Partridge demonstrated the right way to cut. Lucas snapped the magnet again.

“You watching?” said Mr. Partridge.

“Yeah.”

Mr. Partridge put the snips down. “You do it, then.” Lucas cut into the metal.

Mr. Partridge left. Ben returned. “I went down there, and she told me to walk out,” Ben said to Lucas.

“You walked in, you walked out,” Lucas said. They began talking softly together about iTunes passwords.

I took another shot at being a dutiful ed tech. “So, Ben, do you know how to do this, so you can show Lucas?”

“I don’t remember how,” said Ben.

“I know how to do it,” said Lucas.

“If you know how to do it, you should just do it,” I said.

They went back to the iPad.

Ms. Laronde came over. “Hey, Lucas.”

“He’s mad at you,” said Kendra to Ms. Laronde.

“I know he’s mad at me, but Lucas, you can’t stay mad.”

“I’m not mad!” said Lucas.

“You can’t be on the iPad,” Ms. Laronde said.

“Class is almost over,” said Lucas.

“No, you have twenty minutes left.”

Lucas feigned amazement. “No!”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to do it,” said Lucas.

“Can you work on it, please?”

Lucas said nothing. He looked down, waiting. Ms. Laronde stood there for a while and walked away.

Near me, behind Lucas and Ben, the three young men in baseball hats sat poking at their iPads. I watched them for a while, until I began to get mad. “Did you guys already do the stuff with the thing?” They looked up and focused on me. “You breezed through it and you’re done?”

“We put our work somewhere and we can’t find it,” said one.

“So you spent the whole period doing nothing?”

“Yep.”

I said, “All these machines around, Jesus!”

“We’re not allowed to do anything else on them.”

“Seems like a waste,” I said.

“Yeah.”

They returned to their screens.

Lucas asked Jamie if he knew somebody’s password. Jamie, innocent, said, “I don’t know her password.”

Using common passwords, Lucas began trying to hack into an iTunes account. I watched them for a while, got up from the stool, and stood over them.

“So, guys,” I said, “this whole time you’ve spent trying to scam the fricking iTunes, instead of learning something.”

Lucas laughed, pleased that I sounded angry.

I pointed at the iPad. “This is a fucking screen,” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s just nothing.”

They were delighted with my swear. “It’s fucking important!” said Ben.

I picked up the half-cut sugar scoop. “This is actually something real.” I set it down.

“We do it because — ah—” said Ben.

“Tell him,” said Lucas.

Ben didn’t want to say. It had to do with a girl, I think.

I said, “Well, it’s your choice.”

Three people were hammering madly on their hooks.

I went back to my stool. Mr. Partridge dropped by. “How are they doing?”

“They just gave up.”

He nodded. “They’re done.”

Mr. Partridge moved over to Jamie. “So how much did this cost?”

“I don’t remember,” said Jamie. Then he remembered. “Sixty cents!”

“Okay. You got money? I do have to charge something for the materials. We’ll add it up at the end.”

I slid my stool back to Lucas and Ben. “How well do you get along with Mr. Bowles?” I asked.

“Pretty good,” said Ben.

I sat. Lucas said, “The first iPad I had got stolen. At the McDonald’s parking lot. Then it got stolen again.”

“Was it really stolen?” I said.

“Yeah, it was. I had food on top of my iPad. They didn’t take the food, they took the iPad.”

“My passionate door is open,” said Ben.

I said, “Passionate door? What the hell? This is what I don’t get. This room is actually real.”

Lucas held up the iPad. “This is real. I’m holding it.”

“I know it’s real, but seriously. You can learn to make a freaking box.”

“I don’t want to make a freaking box,” said Ben.

“But you did it. And Lucas didn’t do it. And the guy came by and he saw you were looking at the screen and he thought, Screw it, I’ll go and help somebody else. And then you lose your chance. I can’t believe it.”

“Two weeks ago, he did this,” said Ben, nodding at Lucas. “And his got messed up, and when we came back, it was gone.”

“It was stolen at McDonald’s?”

“No, that was his iPad.”

Lucas said, “Listen, he got his box done, and someone crushed it with a boot.”

“But he did it again,” I said. “He came back. I saw you did that template, I saw you did a good job with that. Now I’m supposed to help you, and I don’t know what the next step is. But Mr. Partridge came by and was ready to show you, and you were blowing him off.”

“I don’t think we were blowing him off,” said Ben.

“I don’t mean blowing him off that way, I mean you just shrugged him off. It actually hurts his feelings if you do that.”

“No it doesn’t,” said Lucas.

“Of course it does! Any teacher wants to teach. This guy wants to teach you stuff. He has skills, and he wants to teach you something. I watched the whole thing happen! I don’t want to bore you, but it’s like—” I shook my head. “So what do you guys want to do? In the end, do you want to do something with small engines?”

“I want to go in the military,” said Lucas.

“Me, too,” said Ben.

“All right,” I said. “There you go.”

Lucas said, “I’ll paint my face black and put a towel over my head and go around with an AK-47 and go, Whoo-hoo!” He went into a Southern falsetto. “I’ll shoot you, boy!”

Ben said, “My friend was in high school, he took a chair, he threw it out the window, and hit a car with the chair.”

“You know what my dad did, dude, when he was here?” Lucas said. “You know those janitor hats? So he greased one of those and filled it up with water. Took a dookie in it and put it on the principal’s truck.”

“Wait,” said Ben, “did he go here?”

“Yeah, here. The principal at the time says, ‘That fucking kid!’”

“Last year my friends and I hated the principal so bad we put lobsters in his car,” Ben said.

To Lucas I said, in a near whisper, “Your dad took a shit in a hat, and put it on the principal’s car?”

Happy laughter. “Yeah!”

“ALL RIGHT, CHILDREN,” said Mr. Partridge. “PACK UP. PAPERWORK UP FRONT.”

Lucas and Ben bolted toward the door to wait for the bell. Jamie had been listening. “Those guys are toxic,” I said to him. “You should stay away from them. You did really good work, by the way. This is a good class, it’s real.”

“My dad used to work at Bath, making ships,” Jamie said.

“He made destroyers?”

“Yeah, and he used to shoot the guns,” said Jamie. “He was in the army, too. He used to work for a company that makes jets.”

I asked Jamie what he wanted to do.

“I like building stuff. I want to build machines. I love art, too.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

Mr. Partridge sat down at his desk as his students trickled out of the room.

“I watched it happen,” I said to him. “They’re just transfixed by a stupid little rectangle.”

“They’re in another world,” said Mr. Partridge. “They come in, they’re late, they sit there, or they wander out. I grade every day. So far I got two, two, two, two, two. Five for the ones that worked. Jamie is about the best worker in here.”

“He just told me his father worked at Bath Iron Works,” I said.

“Good for him. I did five years there. It’s a good experience. If you’ve got an in, that helps nowadays. I just happened to walk by in Portland at the unemployment office. Bath Iron Works was hiring. Nobody in there but the guy hiring. I got in. This was in ’seventy-three. When I started, there was three thousand people. When I left, there was five thousand people.”

“It’s great what you’re doing here,” I said. “And some of it will have an effect. A delayed effect.”

“They’ll never forget what they do here,” Mr. Partridge said. “More so than the English or the math. I try to do shop math. I tell them to go on their iPad, look up metalworking. I ask them, What job would be your dream job in the metal area? I refuse to pass a kid who would mature better in a fifth year. I’m faced now with a couple kids. They want to graduate, but they’re not passing. They want us to pass them to get the numbers up.”

But sometimes, I said, a kid has to be tossed out into the world to realize what he really wants to do. “I wish I’d had a class like this,” I said. Which was true.

“I started in high school,” Mr. Partridge said. “I’m a welder by trade. I cut my first arc in high school, which I can get these kids to do. We’re in a dilemma now in education. These are the programs that get cut.”

We shook hands. Outside, as the buses idled, waiting to fan out over the countryside, it was beginning to rain. I drove home worrying about Sebastian’s sleeplessness. And thinking what a hypocrite I was to make an angry speech to Lucas because he wasn’t following the paper template and doing his sugar scoop. The only shop class I ever had to take was in eighth grade. It was taught by a trim, taciturn man, Mr. Harris, who told us to make keyhole chairs. No other kind of chair was acceptable; we had to follow his plans exactly. I used the jigsaw to cut the hole in the back of the chair — that was interesting — and I screwed in two of the legs, making pilot holes for the screws, and then I stopped. I looked around the room at eighteen children making the same thing. The chair, made of white pine, was one the cutesiest, ugliest things I’d ever seen — cutesy and so low to the ground that no grownup could sit on it comfortably. It was not a chair, it was an embarrassment, a pedagogical means to an end, and I despised it. I didn’t tell Mr. Harris that I despised the assignment, I just didn’t finish gluing it, or sanding it, and I didn’t stain it with the dark oak stain that never looks good on pine, and I didn’t polyurethane it. Mr. Harris gave me an F on my keyhole chair. Then, for the second half of the semester, he taught us drafting: how to write numbers and letters in blocky blueprint style, and how to use a T square and a triangle to make a three-quarter measured drawing of a rounded metal piece with two holes in it. That I liked doing — so I did it, and I got an A. One day a kid I was trying to befriend suddenly punched me in the chest, perhaps because I was good at drafting and he wasn’t. The punch hurt a lot because that winter my nipples had oddly swollen adolescent nodules behind them. My eyes filled with tears but I didn’t cry. Later Mr. Harris let each of us design our own piece of furniture. I made a Parsons table with a swiveling disk inset in the top, meant to hold our little black-and-white TV, but the TV couldn’t swivel, because it was slightly too big for the disk. I passed the course.

To Lucas, the sugar scoop and the wrought-iron hook were like my keyhole chair — absurd make-work exercises with no value to him. Sugar came in a yellow cardboard box with a pour spout, after all. And what was he going to do with a wrought-iron hook except use it as a weapon? He clearly wasn’t a pencil-on-paper kid, either — so he was probably going to fail the course, even with Mr. Bowles’s daily help, and perhaps he would be forced to take a fifth year of high school. Was a fifth year going to help Lucas mature? He wanted to be a soldier and shoot people. He wanted never to go to juvie again. He didn’t need more high school, he needed less high school. He certainly didn’t need me fussing at him about how he was blowing off metal tech. On the other hand, maybe it did him some good to know that he was hurting Mr. Partridge’s feelings.

Sebastian, though, Sebastian. Why was his doctor giving him those pills? Sleep is a beautiful thing.

And that was it for Day Twelve.