The Basic Eight Read online

  “I don’t know,” I heard someone say, softly.

  “Mr. Carr?” I asked again, and pushed the door open all the way.

  Mr. Carr was in one of those phony white lab coats that biology teachers wear in an apparent effort to look like they’re in an aspirin commercial. At first it just looked like he was standing there, grinning at his desk, but when I followed his gaze I saw the teaching assistant half sprawled on the blotter, watching him warily. He leaned in and kissed her again. His hand was on her skirt, high up. She said, softly, “I don’t know.” It was not a coy “I don’t know.” It was a wary “I don’t know.” It was not “I don’t know, why don’t you choose the position?” It was “I don’t know if I should be in this position.” He leaned in and kissed her again. I didn’t move. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this and I was pretty sure that it wasn’t supposed to be happening at all. Talk about dangerous chemicals. “Come on,” he said, somewhere between seduction and irritation.

  The teaching assistant’s eyes were half closed, but she saw me anyway. “Ohmygod!” She sat up suddenly and bumped her head on a low-hanging shelf of petri dishes.

  Mr. Carr whirled around and looked at me. His eyes were bright and scary. “What do you want?” he yelled. “What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry I cut class Thursday,” I said, backing out of the room.

  “I’m in a meeting!” he yelled. “This is my office! You have no right to come in here!” He pounded the door as I scurried past the tadpoles, the posters. A chair clattered to the floor. “Get out!” I got out. In the hallway, some people had heard all the bellowing and were staring at me: a couple of guys were sitting on the floor, their backs against their lockers, open textbooks in their laps, a girl with dyed-black hair, a dallying janitor. I ran to the stairway and heard somebody running behind me, running after me. Carr kissing her wasn’t scary. Carr yelling was scary, and now he was coming after me.

  The girl with the dyed-black hair grabbed my arm as I hit the ground floor. “Leave me alone,” I said, and then realized it was Natasha. I hugged her, hard. I could hear my own breathing, hard. The sound of that breathing is something I’ll never forget.

  “What the fuck?” she said, all snarling lipstick and fingernails. “What the fuck was he shouting at?”

  “I went in to apologize for cutting class on Thursday,” I said. I was still breathing. I sounded like an iron lung.

  “Take your time,” she said. “Here, sit down. You sound like an iron lung.” We sat down on the second-to-last step. I rubbed at my face. Some people look good when they’re crying, but I’m not one of them so I tried my hardest to stop. The sound of Carr shouting began to dim in my mind’s ear, and instead I began to hear, over and over, the plunk of the teaching assistant’s head against the petri shelf. I started to laugh.

  Mind’s ear? I don’t know.

  Natasha looked at me warily, the way you look at someone when they shake, then cry, then laugh. A shadow fell over us and we looked up and saw our vice principal, a fat black man who always wore plaid vests and expressions of self-righteousness. His name is Mr. Mokie–pronounced so as to rhyme with “okey dokey.” He likes to tell people to think of him as a friend and not just a vice principal. Natasha eats those sort of people alive.

  “No sitting in the stairways, girls,” he said. “Fire marshal’s rules.”

  “I am the fire marshal,” Natasha snarled. “We’re having a drill.”

  “Look,” Mr. Mokie said. “I don’t make the rules, girls. Think of me as a friend, not just a vice principal. After all, the final word in principal is pal. Now move along.”

  “Pals don’t tell me to move along,” Natasha said. “We’re just going to sit here for a minute, OK? Let us break your stupid rules just once. We won’t report you to der Führer.”

  Mr. Mokie wrinkled his brow. “I don’t speak French,” he said. “Anyway, they’re not my rules. I don’t want to give you detention, but I have to. My hands are tied.”

  “Nobody’s making you,” Natasha said.

  “If you don’t follow the rules, I have to do it. My hands are tied.”

  “Don’t give me any ideas!” I screamed. I could hear the echo, bouncing way up the stairwell to the top floor and beyond, where God and the fire marshal live. It was a raw sound. Mr. Mokie scampered away, presumably to fetch some paperwork.

  Natasha turned to me, clearly impressed. “Nice work. Pretty soon you’re not going to need me around.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  We smiled at each other, friends. “So what happened?” she asked. “We fought for the conversation spot, we’d better have the conversation.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” I said. “Why don’t you just read about it?” I reached in the bag and took out my journal. Her eyebrows shot up; I never let anybody even touch the journal. “Go ahead,” I said. I flipped it open to the right page and handed it to her. She looked at me again and then just sat there. Read it, right up to the part where I handed her the journal. Oh, wait. That won’t work. I can’t have written it down yet. All this goddamn clanging.

  The bell clanged–rang, rather. “I have to go to Civics,” I said.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Natasha said, handing the journal back to me.

  “Don’t tell anybody about this!” I shouted, and she ran back up the stairs, a girl with dyed-black hair. I walked dumbly into Civics, slunk into a chair, and wrote everything down.

  Jennifer Rose Milton whispered to me that Maman had had too much red wine with some dinner guests last night, so today in French Millie corrected papers behind sunglassed eyes while we split into groups and read dialogues out loud to one another. What did you put in the soup that night? Shallots and a little red wine. Red wine! Goodness! Wasn’t that expensive to purchase? No, no, not if you go to that store on the corner of Lake and Forest. Lake and Forest? Sounds too pastoral for a modern girl like me! Ha ha ha ha ha! Did you get the shallots at the market? Yes, and I had to go to four stores before I found fresh vegetables. They are so rare in these (can’t translate) French times. Did you see your teacher hitting on the teaching assistant? Yes, I did. Was she enjoying herself? No, she wasn’t. I think my teacher was too slimy for a modern girl like her! Ha ha ha ha ha! What (can’t translate) times we have here at Roewer!

  Tuesday September 14th

  LA BOHEME

  Act Two: A square in the Latin Quarter. On one side is the Café Momus. Mimi and Rodolfo move about within the crowd. Colline is nearby at a ragwoman’s stand. Schaunard is buying a pipe and a trumpet. Marcello is pushed here and there by the throng. It is evening. Christmas Eve.

  Act Two: A square of desks in the Roewer Quarter. On one side is the Café Millie, where Jennifer Rose Milton and her mother are in quiet exclusionary conversation. Douglas and Lily are nearby, staring into each other’s eyes. So far away as to be scarcely visible, somebody feels like a ragwoman: Flannery. It is morning. Nowhere near Christmas break.

  It was a low turnout for Grand Opera Breakfast. Douglas, dressed rather informally in a coat and tie rather than a matching suit, talked to me once, to point out some irregularity in the time signature of the opening horn part, or some regularity, I don’t remember. Lily smiled at me, then turned her head until she was smiling at Douglas. Jennifer Rose Milton looked up from tete-a-tete avec Maman as I walked in and gave a half wave before turning back. Everybody was paired up. Even the lovers in La Boheme hadn’t run into any trouble yet, singing in the café like fools. I sat down at the table myself and munched too many doughnuts. Good plan, Flan; scarf down pastries and then surely you’ll be noticed more. Though I guess I could attain some sideshow freak value…

  The pastry calories must have worked–Jim Carr, for one, managed to spot me from a mile away. “In my office,” he said briskly, propelling me by the elbow into that same room, the tadpoles, the Bunsen burners, everything. A few kids were in there for homeroom already, reading comic books–the k
ind of kids who show up early for homeroom and sit around and read comic books, waiting for their lives to start. I flexed my cell walls and stood firm. Those sort of kids make good witnesses. Whatever he had to say to me he could say here in the classroom and not alone in his sleazy office.

  Little did I know. “She was always strange,” kids like that would say, only a few months later. “I suspected from the outset.” Hardly the stuff of good witnesses.

  “In my office,” he repeated as I stopped at the poster of the digestive system.

  “Alone in your office?” I said loudly, and a couple of the kids looked up from the latest issue of The Tarantula Team Adventure Series. Jim Carr flushed slightly. Behind him, the small and large intestines seemed to curl forward as if to wrap themselves around his neck. His voice lowered accordingly to a strangled half whisper, when somebody wants to be quiet and yell at you at the same time. His eyes were scary again. Nobody was going to step into this conversation. Nobody was going to rescue me. The intestines were only a poster.

  “I wanted to apologize for yelling at you yesterday,” he said in what is called in books, low tones. “I shouldn’t have talked to you that way.” He folded his arms and waited for me to say something. “Well?”

  I looked around nervously. The homeroomers were lost in their bustling metropolises again. They knew what to expect; the mutants would be routed. But what did Carr expect? “Your apology is accepted,” I mumbled, and started toward the door.

  He touched me again. He had me by the elbow again. “Well?” he said again.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I expected an apology from you, for barging into my office like that,” he said, and happily, that did it. He sounded so bureaucratic that he no longer sounded like a madman; he sounded like Mr. Mokie. Confrontations with bureaucratic idiots I could handle.

  “In that case, I’m sorry I barged into your office like that. See you sixth period,” I said, and then turned toward the door. Kids began to stream in and sit down.

  “Wait!” he called, sensing his power over me was somehow ebbing despite his continued grasp on my elbow. “You are not to mention our encounter in my office to anyone. You haven’t told anyone, have you?” Now he couldn’t meet my eyes, but I looked straight at him. “Don’t tell anyone, OK?” His desperation overrode his ability to produce a winning smile; he moved the corners of his mouth upward but all I saw were teeth.

  “See you sixth period, Mr. Carr,” I said, and left. The hallways were quiet; I was late for homeroom.

  “You’re late for homeroom!” Mr. Dodd called out as I entered.

  Suddenly I was too weary to answer. “Sorry,” I said, and sat down.

  Natasha shook her head and walked out of her seat to come talk to me. “Sorry,” she said, in, a “we are not amused” voice, “was a sorry response to Dodd’s dud.”

  I looked back at her. “I refuse to answer sentences containing an overabundance of alliteration,” I said. “I just came from Carr’s room.”

  “I meant to ask you about that,” she said, and took out her all-important nail file again. “What happened?”

  As I told her, she filed her nails harder and harder until I thought I’d see sparks. “That shit,” she said, “Trying to make you feel bad for catching him with someone. We ought to do something.”

  She sounded like she was reciting Baker’s Rule. “Do something,” I said. “What can we do? She’s not actually a student, so it’s not like it’s illegal or something, so we can’t tell anybody.”

  “I already told Kate,” she said. “Soon everyone will know.”

  “Jesus, Natasha,” I said. “I’ll get in trouble.”

  “For entering a teacher’s office during lunch? I don’t think so.” She shook her head. Her hair moved like a shampoo commercial, if people in shampoo commercials dyed their hair black. “But maybe he will. It’s certainly unethical if not illegal.” She smirked at me. “Don’t worry, we’ll do something. Trust me.”

  The bell rang.

  Wednesday September 15th

  After school, Drama Club finally started: after drama, the drama. Ron Piper is an angel in a black turtleneck, though everybody looks like angels in black turtlenecks so maybe it’s hard to tell. Ron Piper, our beloved drama teacher, even thinner and, incredibly enough, even more effeminate than I remember, bounced all around the stage, welcoming us to what he hoped would be a “brilliant theatrical year,” coyly refusing to tell us what play we’d be putting on, and apologizing for not showing up last week. The most exciting announcement he had was–is this an act of cosmic synchronicity or what?–that eight free tickets to the San Francisco Theater production of Hamlet were in his possession, to be given to the eight people who could name the most plays by the Bard himself. Well, all eight of us weren’t there–Lily is too immersed in classical music to venture out onto the stage, and V__’s bitchy mother says that the Roewer stage is too common for a oops I can’t say her last name, but you get the idea. But the six of us who were there began screaming out the names of them, mercilessly drowning out the voices of the ten thousand shy freshman girls who show up for Drama Club every year, audition inaudibly and end up selling refreshments to parents at intermission. Why do shy people invariably show up for Drama, anyway? Do their shyness coaches make them go? One of them actually guessed Cyrano de Bergerac, if you can believe it. Yeah, honey, Shakespeare also wrote in French; he was Canadian, you know.

  Am I a snob?

  In either case I don’t know why I’m blabbing on and on about petty details when you’re waiting for the point of the story. I got one, Jennifer Rose Milton got one, Gabriel got one, Douglas, Natasha of course and Kate who named a bunch of historical plays I hadn’t even heard of, and Flora Habstat got one (W. S. must be Most Famous Playwright in The Guinness Book) but I could tolerate her next to me in a dark theater and just when Ron was about to hand over the last ticket to one of the shy twerps and I was thinking that with my luck I’d end up sitting next to her answering her stupid whispered questions all night (“Why is Ophelia acting so weird?”) from the back of our cavernous auditorium came the booming shout, “Cymbeline!”

  I don’t have to tell you who it was, do I? You know that when a booming shout comes from nowhere, it’s the romantic hero. He walked grandly down the center aisle as Ron, grinning (and I think I could detect a look in Monsieur Piper’s eye that would confirm conservative school board members’ suspicions about hiring people of Ron’s, shall we say, persuasion; I wanted to hiss at him, Bette Davis-like, He’s mine, Ronny), handed Adam the ticket. Adam had the ticket to ride, and if you think this baby don’t care you probably don’t know that it was Moliere who wrote Cyrano.

  Adam took the ticket and told Ron he couldn’t stay; he just wanted to make sure his name was on the Drama Club list. “Dentist,” he said, pointing to his straight clean teeth, and when he saw me looking at him he winked at me.

  I mean, OK, winking is a little, I don’t know, horny-old-uncle, but Adam did it with just the right amount of self-consciousness, with a hint of rogue. Panache–it was very Cyrano. So much can be said, erased with a gesture like that. Well, not erased. The love wasn’t erased, or even the ache, but its context changed. I didn’t feel the despair, like my shoes were filled with rain and I just figured out that I had been waiting at the wrong bus stop for an hour and a half and that Adam didn’t give a shit about me. Now the tension I felt about Adam was laced with expectation, rather than pain. Like Adam was biding his time, waiting to make his perfect entrance into my life, the way he strode into the auditorium at precisely the right moment and turned my dread of an evening with a Shyness Patient into something that could be called, with only minimal overinterpretation, a date with Adam. A date with the man I love. Cymbeline. None of us had mentioned Cymbeline. Had it been the proper century I would have swooned. Did I say that already?

  LATER

  One last note: Because everyone else went on ahead, by the time
I reached the bus stop, my head still in the clouds, the bus had come and taken all my friends away. Bored, hungry, I sat on the bench, and who should sit next to me but Carr’s assistant. Talk about awkward. “Hi, what’s up since my high school teacher made a pass at you?”

  “Not much,” she sighed. OK, really I just said “What’s up?”; to say the rest would have pretty much been redundant. She looked tired and had folders and folders of papers with her. The Bio test, I realized. My test.

  “I could save you some time,” I said. “I’ll just correct my own exam. Scout’s honor.”

  She smiled, faintly. “Actually, yours is the only test that he’s correcting. He wouldn’t let me; he said it was a conflict of interest.”

  Talk about awkward–oh, we already were talking about awkward. I sat there opening and closing my mouth like a baby bird. I kept starting to say something. On my third try she interrupted me, although I don’t know if you can call it interrupting if the other person hasn’t said anything.

  “He’s a shit,” she said. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone in the education profession say “shit” except Millie. The bus was nowhere in sight. I became a baby bird again.

  “He’s a shit,” she said again. “A perverted shit. Everybody told me I shouldn’t take the job. Everybody told me,” she said, slapping her hand against the bus map printed on the side of the stop, color-coded routes scrawling across the city like something in a biology book. “But I took it anyway. When I get home I feel so gross I don’t even want to touch my own kid.”

  Her own kid. Jesus. The baby bird wants more food, more food. She looked at me and realized who I was. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’m just screwed,” she said. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’m sorry. But at the end of the semester he writes me an evaluation, and if I get a bad one then it won’t do me any good if I have a credential or not. No one will hire me. That’s what he did to the TA he had last semester, though nobody told me that”–she poked my neighborhood–“until I’d already taken the job. I shouldn’t be telling you this. But just remember”–she stood up; the bus was stopped, gurgling in front of us like a phlegmy infant–“he’s a shit. Remember that. Aren’t you getting on the bus?”