The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (12 page)

And maybe that’s why she quit being a rock star! Because she stank at it! And … and … and it’s so embarrassing… and …

She crunkled her water bottle and growled.
And maybe I’ve got nothing.

“Oh, forget it! ” she cried, hurling the bottle across the room. “I give up! ”

“What do you mean, give up? ”

Pamela’s father, a tall man with a furrowed brow and a bristly black mustache, stood in her doorway with his arms crossed, a paperback mystery called
Murdered … Again
dangling from one hand.

“It’s nothing, Father,” Pamela answered glumly, fishing around under her bed for the maracas.
I might as well practice my supplemental percussion,
she thought miserably as she pulled them out. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I will worry about it, Pamela Preston. I distinctly heard you say that you give up, and I’d like to know what you’re giving up on.” He cocked his head and gave a strained half smile. “These aren’t, uh, more of the boy problems your mother keeps—”

“No! I’m not having any boy problems. It’s just—it’s just …”

Pamela burst into tears. Her father’s uncomfortable smile grew more uncomfortable. “There, there,” he said, still standing in the doorway of her bedroom with his arms folded. “There, there.”

Then Pamela, her chin quivering, said, “I need to find a way to make this dumb teacher do what I want her to do! And there’s this secret information that I could use to, like,
force
her to do it.” Pamela took a heaving breath and dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her frilly lilac bedspread.

“Ah,” her father said, nodding thoughtfully. “Blackmail. My little girl is growing up so fast.”

“Well, except, I can’t figure out the secret. So I give up. I give up! ”

“Oh, no, you don’t, young lady.” Pamela’s father stepped into her room and sat down next to her on the bed and looked her right in the eye. “We are Prestons, Pamela. And Prestons
never
give up.”

Pamela sniffled. “We don’t?”

“If you want to blackmail this teacher, by gum, you go in there and you do it.” He thumped his mystery novel on his knee for emphasis. “And if you don’t have the dirt you need on her, well then, you just stand up straight, hold your head high, and
bluff.”
As he spoke, Pamela sat up straighter and stuck out her chin. “You bluff your little pants off, Pamela Preston! You hear me? ”

Pamela looked back at him resolutely, her final tear rapidly drying on her cheek.

“I love you, Daddy!”

“Yes, well,” he muttered, blushing. “Go to sleep.”

“You’re late,” said Bethesda Fielding, impatiently gesturing Tenny inside. “Sorry.”

Tenny slouched into the kitchen and ran his hand through his hair. As always, Bethesda’s kitchen smelled richly of buttered microwave popcorn; as always, Bethesda’s dad yelled, “Hey, Tenny,” from the living
room, where he was working his way through a root beer float and staring at the Weather Channel.

“All right,” Bethesda said. “Let’s get to it.”

In her imagination, Bethesda adjusted her top hat and cracked a whip. Lately she had dropped the whole Bethesda Fielding, Mountain Climber thing and thought of herself as Bethesda Fielding, Lion Tamer. The task of preparing Tenny Boyer for Mr. Melville’s test was the lion. Or, wait—maybe Tenny was the lion. Or maybe Bethesda was the whip, and Mr. Melville was the lion … oh, what did it matter? Bethesda the Lion Tamer wasn’t doing any better than Bethesda Fielding the Mountain Climber, Bethesda the Riverboat Pilot, or Bethesda the World War I Flying Ace. After six weeks of intense studying, with Melville adding more material every day, Tenny Boyer knew exactly as much as he had when they started: nothing.

“Let’s refresh,” Bethesda began. “The Quartering Act. What do you—”

“Oh, hey,” Tenny interrupted. “I had the raddest idea for an encore. I was thinking—”

“Stop, Tenny! Come
on,”
Bethesda answered sharply. “We are not talking about the rock show tonight.”

“But it’s really coming up soon, dude.”

“The test is coming up really soon, too!” Bethesda gestured helplessly at her copy of
A More Perfect Union.
“Remember? Any day now Mr. Melville is going to announce the Floating Midterm. He could do it tomorrow! And when he does, we’re only going to have one night left.”

“Yeah,” Tenny said glumly.

“I mean, I’m sorry to be harsh, but to be totally honest, I feel like you’re just as far behind as when we started.” Bethesda had been wanting to say something like this for a few days. She still didn’t really
know
Tenny—their entire relationship consisted of A) secretly nodding at each other by the Hallway C water fountain, and B) sitting around her table failing to study American history—but she felt like they had started to become friends, in this weird way. Which is why she felt comfortable being kind of stern: It was for his own good. He had to pass this test! “We have to make some kind of breakthrough here, or you’re really sunk.”

“I know.” He sounded miserable.

“Well, whenever you’re stumped on social studies,” which, Bethesda didn’t add, was constantly, “instead of figuring it out, you change the subject to the rock show.”

“All right. So let’s … let’s just—”

But it was too late: Bethesda was on a roll. “I don’t get you, Tenny. You’re the one who needs help. You’re the one who’s going to fail this test, and this subject, and probably have to go to St. Francis Xavier. Ms. Finkleman is trying to do you a favor here, and so am I. But I can’t if all you want to talk about all the time is the rock show.”

Suddenly it was really quiet. Bethesda had been speaking louder than she meant to. For a long moment, the two kids didn’t say anything. Tenny picked up one of the pencils Bethesda had left out for him and chewed on the eraser. Bethesda walked silently to the fridge and opened a mango passionberry Snapple. In the other room, Bethesda’s dad talked to the television. “What? You think you can outrun a hurricane? You can’t outrun a hurricane, pal.” As she sat back at the table, Bethesda noticed that Tenny was absently making guitar chords with his fingers.
He probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing that.
She thought.
Like me, with the sneaker squeaking.

“It’s not …” Tenny trailed off.

“What?”

“It’s not that I don’t
want
to learn this stuff, dude—Bethesda. I mean, Bethesda.” “That’s okay.”

“It’s just—it’s my brain. I have, like, a brain problem.”

Bethesda sipped her Snapple. They were wasting time. They should stop talking and just get to work. But there was something about the way Tenny was sitting, with his eyes most of the way closed, his head tilted slightly forward, like he was trying to look inside his head and examine his own problematic brain that made her wait quietly until he spoke again.

“It’s, like, inside my brain, everything you say is gray.”

“Um, thanks?”

“Not everything. Not, like, ‘How are you?’ But all this history stuff is gray. And gross. All these wars, and the guys in their funny hats with their guns and stuff. It’s all gray.”

“I think I know what you mean,” said Bethesda. Then she predicted what he was going to say next, which was a nervous habit Bethesda sometimes had during serious conversations. Tenny would say that when he thought about the rock show, everything was in color. And she knew how she would respond: for
her,
the opposite was true. Rock was essentially boring and gray, but
history
was colorful.

But as it turned out, Bethesda had predicted incorrectly.

“When we’re working on the rock show, or I’m
thinking about it, it’s not gray. It’s
black.”

“Huh?” said Bethesda, and then smiled—she sounded like Tenny.

“Yeah. It’s like I’m in a room where everything is totally black,” Tenny continued. “Weird, right? Then when the chords start, or a big backbeat kicks in, one by one, all these little lights go on. Like those little lights you buy on a string. What do you call them? ”

“Christmas lights.”

“Exactly.”

Bethesda loved Christmas lights. Every year her father spent three days stringing the house with them, and he usually fell off the roof at some point and ended up hanging by the gutters. And it usually took seven tries before they would all light up. Every year he vowed that it wasn’t worth the effort and he would never do it again. But every year he did, and it was always worth it. Bethesda
loved
Christmas lights.

“And so, when I’m thinking about the rock show,” Tenny went on, “or, you know, when I’m actually
listening
to music, it’s like my mind goes to perfect, beautiful black, and then it fills with Christmas lights. And they’re flickering and buzzing and making all these wild patterns.”

He paused for a second, lifted his head and opened his eyes, and looked right at Bethesda for the first time that night. She realized that it was the first time he had looked directly at her since they began studying together six weeks ago.

“You know what I mean? ”

“Yeah,” said Bethesda. “I do.”

Tenny sort of shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, I just want you to know that I
know
what a pain it is, tutoring me, and I’m sorry. I promise I’ll try and focus. It’s just … you know, these, uh …”

“Christmas lights,” Bethesda concluded.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “So, let’s get to work.”

As anyone who has lived through Mrs. Petrides’s English Language Arts class and her Thursday vocabulary drills can tell you, the word
paradox
means “something that contradicts itself.” And the moment the words “Let’s get to work” escaped Bethesda Fielding’s mouth—and she tied her hair in a ponytail and put on her fiercest, most determined face—her situation became deeply paradoxical.

Because at that moment she knew that she was done
for. There was no chance that all the work she had put in was going to pay off. After six weeks of intense studying, after all of her tricks of the imagination, early American history was a big gray mush for Tenny Boyer, and it was going to stay that way.

But also, at the
very same moment,
she was more determined than ever for him to pass the Floating Midterm. Not just for Ms. Finkleman (to make up to her for revealing her secret past to the world), and not just for herself (to prove that she was a terrific tutor), but for Tenny himself. She couldn’t give up on him.

She liked him—though Bethesda didn’t exactly
know
that she liked him.

And she definitely didn’t know that the fact that she liked him was about to change both of their lives forever.

“Little Miss
Mystery! Wait up!”

Ms. Finkleman stopped, startled, in the mostly empty parking lot. She’d been arriving at school super early every day to meet with Tenny Boyer, so she could get that day’s notes from him in secret. So it was a bit unnerving when, one day in early April, she stepped out of her Honda Civic forty-five minutes before the first bell and heard someone calling out to her, frantically. Especially since he was calling her by that ridiculous name, which she still couldn’t get used to. After all, until a few weeks ago, it was a name she hadn’t thought about—in fact had tried with strenuous effort
not
to think about—for years.

“Miss Mystery!”

The student racing toward her was one she had never seen before, with wild eyes and hair a mess, waving some sort of rumpled blue flag over his head to get her attention.

“Hey, I was—I was hoping to catch you,” the kid panted, out of breath and twittering with excitement. “Miss Mystery, I want to—there’s something I’ve really gotta tell you.”

The student was hunched over, trying to catch his breath. And with a start, Ms. Finkleman realized that she
did
know him. It wasn’t a flag that now hung limply from his left hand, gently flapping in the spring breeze. It was a navy blue blazer.

“Kevin?”

“Yes. Hi. Okay, so,” Kevin McKelvey began, his chest still heaving. “My father came home last night. He, um, he’s been away for, like, two months, playing Prokofiev in the National Symphony Hall in Beijing.”

“Wow,” murmured Ms. Finkleman. She loved Prokofiev.

“Whatever,” Kevin said, and shook his head rapidly, dismissively. Prokofiev was not the point. “As soon as he got home my mom took him aside for this extremely urgent conversation. She told him how I haven’t been practicing for my stupid recitals since I’ve been doing all this stuff for your class.”

Ms. Finkleman’s brow creased. Just what she needed: An angry concert pianist. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Kevin continued, speaking very rapidly. “And at first I was going to apologize and say I was sorry and that I would rededicate myself to the fine art of classical piano, and have respect for myself and for my instrument, and all that stuff. Because, you know, my dad, he’s really … he’s my
dad,
you know? ”

“Take a breath, Kevin.”

Kevin took a breath. “But instead I sort of heard myself talking all about Little Miss Mystery. All about you. I had to explain who you were and about your old band and stuff, because of course my father had never heard of it. Anyway, I said that—well, I told him that rock music had really changed me. I think I said it altered the substance of my soul. Weird, right? But how now at last I could feel the joy in the piano that I was always supposed to feel and, and, and …”

Ms. Finkleman took a deep breath of her own.
Oh, boy.

“And?”

“And they grounded me, but I said they would have to chain me to the wall if they thought they would keep me out of the rock show. And we yelled a lot. Basically, it was the worst conversation I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

“Oh,” said Ms. Finkleman. “Oh, dear. Well, Kevin, I’m really sorry about this. What can I do?”

Kevin squinted at her, confused. “Do? No, I—” He paused. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

And then, in one quick movement, he took a step forward and hugged her tightly. “Thank you so much.” And then he ran off.

Five minutes later, Ms. Finkleman slipped down Hallway A, took a right at the broken water fountain, and pushed open a door that said DARKROOM. The Mary Todd Lincoln photography program had been abruptly discontinued two years ago, when a kid named Tino something-or-other had won a contest for kids, held by a national photography magazine, with an “abstract” photo that turned out to be of his own butt. Nobody used the room anymore, which made it the perfect place for Ms. Finkleman and Tenny Boyer to conduct their secret sessions.