A Hole in Juan (6 page)

Maybe I’d never locked the drawer. Maybe I imagined it.

Maybe before I’d locked the drawer I’d left the room between periods, or during lunch, and somebody had spotted the opportunity, in which case it could be anybody.

I wished I’d said something more about the exam to Nita and Allie, just to see their expressions, their reactions, but now it was too late.

As they entered, the seniors had the sideways-glancing, vaguely frowning faces of a class facing a major test. I wanted to study their expressions as they read the questions—wanted to see who looked shocked or dismayed.

Maybe no one would, because the note itself was a hoax.

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A HOLE IN JUAN

Then I laughed at myself, thinking back to today’s discussion of
A Separate Peace,
in which Finney refuses to believe World War II is really going on. I was pulling a mini-Finney—and he wound up dead. Literature can be so instructive.

I watched them, making mental notes, and I realized I was preparing a dossier on each student to share with Mackenzie, to get his fix on who the culprit might be.

Two of the students, Erik Steegmuller and Donny Wilson, by chance Allie and Nita’s boyfriends, had seemed particularly grim and worried lately. Normally, they considered physical, not necessarily mental, attendance sufficient. Their brains were seas of hormones, with a few basketballs and tennis balls afloat in there.

They weren’t history-making stars on the courts, just fine athletes, and in any case, this wasn’t the sort of school scouts can-vassed. And neither Erik nor Wilson, as he was known, came from families that could generously endow or gift a university.

That they were going to have to gain admission by their records alone was apparently a thought that hadn’t occurred to them until a few weeks ago. I knew they were now working feverishly with independent college advisors to find a school so desperate that it would want them—in essence, the collegiate equivalent of Philly Prep. But even with such a school, they couldn’t afford to fail English.

Today, they seemed cocky, overly self-assured, elbows into the other’s side and winks as they found their seats. I’d like to think that was the body language of the insufficiently gifted who might well balance the scales by stealing an exam, except that it was also their normal behavior. They were like ill-trained puppies, only not as cute.

“It isn’t fair, you know,” redheaded Susan Blackburn told me in a sweet voice that barely masked the steel within it. “I think it’s against the rules.”

I wondered if someday I’d find out that Susan had become a lawyer. Philly Prep didn’t have that many rules, but she could GILLIAN ROBERTS

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quote each one of them from memory—especially when it suited her side of the argument. “We just had a test with Dr. Ja—I mean Mr. Reyes.”

This semester, the headmaster had instituted a master calendar with the objective of having the staff stagger the schedule of major exams. Apparently, parents had been protesting the burdens on their overworked offspring. Given that this was the least academic private school in the Delaware Valley, possibly in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, possibly in the solar system, the complete fiction of our students being crushed under the weight of assignments verged on the ludicrous. Nonetheless, nonoverlapping exams were the new rule, and bad luck if you and the math teacher both finished units and wanted to test and move on.

Where is the No Teacher Left Behind program?

Our students, consistently underestimating the faculty’s intelligence, played us off one another, behaving like children fer-rying back and forth between parents. “Dad said we could do it if you said it was okay,” and so forth. “We already had a test with this other teacher, and the rules say . . . !”

This had been going on since the start of the semester, and it was growing old.

I knew they were lying. Of all the faculty, Juan Angel Reyes would be the last person to break a rule, or to suddenly change his mind and give a test he’d told me he was not giving.

“What kind of exam?” I hoped I sounded only mildly interested.

“Chemistry, of course!” Susan’s righteous indignation was over the top. Her zeal and tone of desperation made it obvious she was toying with the truth.

“No, I meant that it was a pop quiz, wasn’t it?” Susan’s jaw dropped enough to please me. She was bright and did well, and I didn’t even know why she’d protest, except for the sport of it.

Definitely going to be a lawyer. I wondered if she already knew that.

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A HOLE IN JUAN

Seth Fremont, across the aisle from her, raised his eyebrows and looked amused by the entire performance. Clearly, her plan of attack had been announced in advance. His eyebrows and grin clearly said, “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

Susan grimaced at him.

Nita, who’d been watching carefully, turned her head so that the back of it was to Seth.

I eyed her carefully. Was she the test thief? She seemed hyper-attentive, but I knew her writing, and she surely wasn’t the semiliterate tattler.

Maybe nobody I taught was actually that poor a writer.

Maybe the note’s illiteracy was a disguise.

Maybe Nita had taken the test to help out her boyfriend, Erik. She didn’t need to steal anything, but love does strange things to people.

Still, it bothered me even more to think that the brightest students in the class were the ones behaving most oddly. “Mr.

Reyes wouldn’t break the rules,” I said, pushing my advantage.

Allie’s eyebrows shot up and she rolled her eyeballs up as close to the brows as she could get. She looked like a comic-book drawing of incredulity. “Oh, yes he would.
He
breaks the rules a lot.” Her words—a challenge, a taunt—were spoken in a stage whisper designed to reach me.

It reached everyone. I heard a snort of laughter from the right side of the room, and saw more eye-rolling.

“In the mornings, he breaks the rules.” Wilson sang the lines as if they were the lyrics to a familiar folk tune, but he sang softly, as if he—almost—didn’t want me to hear.

“
They
break the rules. Miss Banks, too.”

Of course I wanted to know more. Tisha Banks was a student teacher in art. I’d heard that in September Louis Applegate had tried his luck with her and failed. Was it possible that one month later she was intensely involved with Juan Angel Reyes? Why didn’t I know these things—and how did they? And precisely what rules were they breaking in the mornings?
Those
rules?

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I wanted to say, “Tell all.” But I was the teacher, they were the students, and gossip was neither appropriate—much to my sorrow—nor on the curriculum. So I had to pretend to be as naïve and oblivious as they thought I was and squelch their mer-riment by giving out the revised exam.

We’d completed a unit on Greek drama, reading the Oedipus cycle:
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus,
and
Antigone.
They’d seemed to enjoy and comprehend the plays, and the discussions—

until the great sullen freeze set in—were animated and thoughtful, which made any motive behind stealing the exam even murkier.

Now, as I spoke briefly about the test, the clique’s members,

“the team” as they called themselves, exchanged glances, as if reaf-firming that they were all there—Erik and Wilson, Nita and Allie, Seth, Jimmy, Mark, and Susan.

With all their foibles, I loved this group. Even in a school like ours, where the word
academic
was . . . academic and generally ir-relevant, our sports leagues were insignificant in the larger scheme of school athletics. We rated the tiniest notices in the newspaper, if we rated at all. Still, these were our stars, and what they lacked in scholastic ambition, they made up for with good nature and humor—or used to. They played off each other, on the courts or off, and the result was a comfortable sense of good-will.

This was why the suggestion that they’d been maliciously conniving sat so poorly with me, and why the sense of subterranean conflict was so upsetting.

I scanned the room as I spoke. Nobody looked particularly worried or anxious. In fact, at least half a dozen students didn’t even look interested. I would have liked to ascribe this to guilt, to having memorized the pilfered test, but in truth, the combina-tion of apathy and senior cool made displays of anxiety almost nonexistent. One might show hostility, but not fear, be angry with a teacher and her exam, be furious about the way the world 45

A HOLE IN JUAN

worked—e.g., college admissions—but that was not the same as worrying about one’s performance on any given exam.

They settled down quickly with a final flurry of desk-clearing and pen-retrieving and then sighed and began the exam. I wished I had the leisure to truly study each of the twenty faces in the room as it studied the paper in front of it. Instead, I glanced and scanned.

Perhaps I did it too obviously. Perhaps the guilty party observed my actions, saw the exam, grasped what had happened, and remained expressionless. But it all looked normal: scowls, sighs, head scratches, and nothing incriminating.

Nothing, that is, until Nita gave Seth a look of pure fury. He in turn looked startled, then openly confused. Her eyes glanced back to the examination paper, and then to him. And then, with a final slow head shake, her expression a mix of disgust and surprised betrayal, she settled down to the task at hand.

If I’d been a more Victorian type, I would have swooned.

Seth Fremont simply wasn’t the type to steal an exam and, like Susan, Nita, and Allie, he’d have no need. Less need than anybody else in his class, in fact. I looked at my grade book, to unnecessarily confirm what I already knew—that he had an A average so far, and I knew this wasn’t an aberration. He’d always been an outstanding student. Plus, he was captain of the tennis team, and he’d been the star of the student production of
Our
Town
last year. Seth was the real thing, the student you think about on discouraged days. He was here because his parents had recognized that he needed a smaller class size than the public schools afforded, and Philly Prep was an easy walk from his home. So why would he pilfer an exam? To impress his peers? But as far as I could see, he was well liked. He didn’t have to curry favor.

Was some substance messing with his synapses? I so did not want to think about that.

I watched as the class concentrated, biting their lips, swal-GILLIAN ROBERTS

46

lowing hard, looking blankly toward the windows as if asking for divine intervention and, to my painful sorrow and increasing confusion, first Erik, then Jimmy, looked over to Seth, both with expressions that suggested they wanted to strangle him.

For forty-five minutes, I watched young faces grimace and stare into space. I didn’t know how many of them found their answers, but I do know that I found none, only growing panic about the need for one.

Five

he rest of the school day passed uneventfully, but my spirits Tand energy were low and the minutes seemed made of slowly melting tar. At times, it feels too difficult finding a balance on the periphery of teens’ confusing and confused lives. Sometimes it feels like being a long-term uninvited guest; other times, like being a fellow prisoner.

Finally, the bell rang and my room emptied with undue speed. The students were obviously having no more fun than I was.

Juan Reyes’s classroom was on the other side of the hall from mine, and he was passing my room as I left it. I greeted him, considering him in a new way, given the snickers about trysts with the young student teacher.

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His return nod was brisk and businesslike. “Miss Pepper,” he said. I wondered if he’d always been so excessively correct and unbending, or if two months of Philly Prep disappointment had been enough to harden him.

He wasn’t one to share in the dark humor of the teaching staff. At the end of a bone-tiring day, what else is there to do but laugh, but Reyes had so far never shown even a trace of humor. I wanted to warn the student teacher that no matter how hand-some a man is—and Juan Angel Reyes was quite elegantly crafted—he wasn’t going to make a great partner if he had no sense of humor.

Even if we couldn’t laugh about it, now that I’d been subjected to some of the same whatever-it-was by the seniors, I wanted to talk with him, to commiserate, speculate, and maybe together comprehend what neither of us could manage separately. I smiled and paused, but he passed me.

Okay, I’d force sociability on him. “Do you have a minute?”

I asked as he reached the top of the staircase. I wasn’t certain whether he was a loner—with the rumored exception of the student teacher—if he was shy or awkward, and hadn’t found a way to feel a part of the staff, or if, as his demeanor suggested, he simply had no time for the likes of us.

He’d have been a wonderful model or department store man-nequin. He looked right, dressed beautifully, and was completely appealing until he spoke. And then his manner of delivery and that startling lack of humor erased the possibilities he had from a distance.

He carried a small stack of textbooks in one arm and held his briefcase with his free hand, but Juan Angel Reyes was nothing if not a gentleman. He struggled to rebalance his load in order to shake my hand. “Please, no,” I said. “The books—”

My fears were immediately realized as chemistry workbooks toppled to the floor. We both stooped to gather them up, and he apologized profusely. He was U.S.-born and raised, but he had an Old World and, in fact, old century, set of manners.

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“How was today?” I asked when we were reassembled. “Any better?” Selfish of me, but I wanted to know if I’d become part of a spreading malaise, or if the seniors had turned their pranks—I hoped that was all they were—on me, if it was now my turn.

His lips set, he shook his head.

No better. I was ashamed to admit that gave me some relief.

“The seniors again?”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m new and they feel like the kings of the mountain. Perhaps I don’t understand how to keep control the way I would wish and they take advantage. This is not, I realize, a college classroom. Not a place that these people necessarily want to be, and not a subject they necessarily want to learn.