The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (8 page)

“Okay, so I think that’s everything, folks,” Ms. Finkleman concluded. “Let’s uh, let’s get star—uh, yes? Ezra?”

Ezra McClellan was a short boy with perfectly straight blond hair and very pale skin. According to the band assignments Ms. Finkleman had just made, he was to play drums in Band Three, the one doing nineties rock.

“Oh,” said Ezra. “Yeah. So, what are the bands called? ”

“Hey, yeah,” echoed the girl sitting next to Ezra, Hayley Eisenstein, speaking thickly through her retainer. “Real rock bands aren’t just called Band Number One or Band Number Two.”

There was a murmur of general approval.

“Excellent question,” answered Ms. Finkleman, and looked quickly at Tenny, who nodded slightly. “Very well. Each band will decide upon its own name. We have
very little time to waste, so please divide into your bands and let’s take …” She glanced at her watch. “We’ll take thirty seconds to name the bands.”

It took the rest of the period to name the bands. Band Number One, who would be playing sixties rock, swiftly devolved into discord when tambourinist Natasha Belinsky dismissed the first suggestion from drummer Chester Hu, which was Barf Hammer.

“Ew! ” Natasha protested. “No way.”

“Okey-doke,” replied Chester cheerfully. “How about Barf Machine?”

“Ew!”

“But we’re all agreed it should have the word ‘barf’ in it?” “No! Ew!”

Band Number Two, the eighties rock band, was equally deadlocked over a suggestion from rhythm guitarist Carmine Lopez that it would be cool to name the band Floccinaucinihilipilification, because it’s the longest word in the English language. Rory Daas (lead vocals) protested that, first of all, Floccinaucinihilipilification would never fit on a T-shirt, and secondly, it isn’t the longest word in the English language—the longest word
is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Hayley thought those were both dumb, and she lobbied to name the band after her dog, who had recently been hit by a bus. Unfortunately, the late pet’s name was Ms. Pinkbottom, and nobody thought that sounded right. Carmine then suggested they name the band after the bus (“The M43! C’mon, that’s a great name!”), but Hayley didn’t think that was very funny.

Only for Band Three, who would be doing nineties rock, did the naming conversation go smoothly, and only after its members remembered that they had an expert in their midst.

“Um, so, Tenny—it’s Tenny, right?” said Suzie Schwartz.

“What? Yeah.” Tenny was so rarely the center of attention that he was kind of startled to find the other seven kids in his assigned band staring at him.

“Do you have any thoughts on a band name?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, with a little smile. “I mean, the name is, like, super key, you know what I mean? ”

The other members of Band Number Three did not really know what he meant, and they looked at each other quizzically—except Pamela Preston, who exhaled heavily and looked at her watch.

Like anyone who is really into rock, Tenny Boyer spent a lot of time coming up with cool band names. Some people like names that sort of
feel
like the music the band does, like Metallica or Devo or Soundgarden. Some band names are more like little stories, like the Grateful Dead, or Minor Threat, or They Might Be Giants. Some are just nonsense, like one of Tenny’s favorites, Pearl Jam. What’s a Pearl Jam?

But Tenny had a special affection for band names that are the Somethings: like the Modern Lovers, or the B-52s, or the Replacements, or the Talking Heads.

“Tenny? ” He looked up—whoops. He had totally drifted off into his own thoughts.

“So, what do you think?” It was Bethesda Fielding, this intense girl with the glasses and the pigtails, who since yesterday was suddenly this big part of his life. She smiled at him encouragingly. “Do you have any suggestions? ”

Tenny smiled. “The Careless Errors,” he said. “How about the Careless Errors?”

Everyone in Band Three looked over at Bethesda, who had made this whole rock thing happen. (Except for Pamela, who looked at her watch again and got up to go to the bathroom.)

“What do you think? ” said Lisa Deckter, rhythm guitar.

“The Careless Errors,” Bethesda repeated, and then, after a pause: “Huh. That’s, like—that’s perfect.” The Careless Errors it was.

At last the other bands had their names as well. The members of Band Number Two agreed that Hayley would reach into her backpack, and they would name themselves for whatever she pulled out—and so Half-Eaten Almond Joy was born.

Band Number One gave up and decided to just call themselves Band Number One.

When the bell rang, the students of Ms. Finkleman’s sixth-period Music Fundamentals streamed out, happily chattering about band names and rock songs and who was playing what and how totally, ridiculously fun this whole thing was going to be. “Tomorrow, children,” Ms. Finkleman called after them. “Tomorrow our preparations for this performance shall begin in earnest.”

Tenny was the last one at the door. “Hey, maybe don’t say stuff like ‘shall begin in earnest,’” he said quietly. “It doesn’t sound very, you know, very rock.”

She gave a little nod, and he shut the door behind him.
Ms. Finkleman’s gaze fell to her desk and her teacher’s edition of
Greensleeves and Other Traditional English Folk Ballads.
She looked sadly at the tattered green volume for a second, sighed, and slipped it into the top drawer.

In the
cafeteria on Wednesday, Todd Spolin reached across Natasha Belinsky to get to Pamela Preston’s half-eaten lunch, which consisted of homemade chicken salad on sprouted grain bread, four carrots, Greek yogurt, and a fun pack of M&M’s for a treat.

“Pammers? You gonna eat this?”

“What? No. You can have it.”

“Sweetness.”

Todd happily tore open the bag of M&M’s and smooshed them into the yogurt. Pamela wasn’t hungry. Not after this morning, and her Special Project, which had been
significantly
less than perfect. She spoke for four and a half minutes about the mysterious rock formations ringing the school’s athletic field, showed numerous close-up photographs neatly displayed on pink poster board, and paused dramatically before revealing her
conclusion about the alien invasion force.

It wasn’t until she was halfway through her first bow that she noticed no one was clapping. And that Mr. Melville, instead of beaming and pronouncing hers a Special Project of extreme ingenuity and penetrating insight, was …
laughing!
He was laughing a low, throaty laugh that caused his sizable gut to slowly roll up and down beneath his crossed arms. And when a teacher begins to laugh, especially a teacher as serious and self-contained and unsmiling as Mr. Melville, his students naturally begin to laugh as well.

Laughing.

At her!

“What? ” Pamela demanded, her note cards trembling in her hand.

“Alas, Ms. Preston, if you had checked the recent archives of our local newspaper, you might have discovered the truth, which is a tad more … picayune.”

“Picayune?” Pamela didn’t know what the word meant, but she didn’t like where this was heading.

“Gophers, my dear. The rock rings were caused by gophers, and I believe they’ve already been taken care of. Not so much a mystery of the unknown as an inconvenient rodent infestation.”

“But—I—Mr. Melville—”

“All right. Who’s the next victim?”

“Stupid gophers,” Pamela grumbled now, furiously drumming her fingers on the cafeteria table.

“You never could have known, Pammy,” Natasha offered.

“That’s true,” Pamela said, tilting her head reflectively.

“Acphhhly—” Todd interjected, talking through a thick mouthful of Pamela’s chicken salad.

“What?”

“I said, actually—I knew. That it was gophers.”
“What?”

“My dad is an exterminator, remember? He was the one they called in to smoke out the little buggers.”

Pamela narrowed her eyes at Todd and grabbed her lunch back. “For god’s sake, Todd, why didn’t you tell me that yesterday? I stood up there and announced that the rock rings were caused by aliens from outer space! ”

“Yeah, no, I know.” He shrugged. “I thought you were going to say that the gophers
were
aliens. I was like, wait, is there a planet of gophers somewhere? Because
that
would be
awesome!”

“Oh my god, Todd, you are such a moron.”

Natasha leaned over with outstretched arms and gave Pamela a hug. “You know what, Pamela? It’s not such a big deal. This one time, you didn’t have the best Special Project. I mean, Bethesda—”

At the mention of Bethesda Fielding’s name, Pamela interrupted her friend with a sharp “Ick!” and pried Natasha’s fingers off her arm like leeches. “You know what? Don’t even talk to me about Bethesda and this rock-show nonsense! In fact …” Pamela leaned forward slightly. “I have a
strong
suspicion that there is something fishy about that whole situation.”

“Fishy? ” Natasha said, her eyes wide. “What do you mean? ”

Todd looked up from the table; he had been absently scooping bits of spilled yogurt off the cafeteria table and licking them from his fingers. “I’m so down with the rock show. I was practicing my guitar until one o’clock last night. Then I was like—wait! I gotta put strings on this thing! And
then
I was like—wait! Maybe if I—”

“Todd! Listen!” Pamela said, and stood in a huff. “So Ms. Finkleman used to be a rock star. Great. Very interesting—but why keep it hidden so long? And how come now she’s suddenly fine with it becoming public knowledge? Not only that, but putting on a big concert? ”

She looked coolly at Natasha and Todd, who looked at each other, and then said, in perfect unison, “I dunno.”

“There is dirt to be dug up on this,” Pamela said, “And I am going to do the digging! Like a—like a …”

“A gopher? ”

Pamela glared at Natasha, threw up her hands, and stalked out of the lunchroom.

“What? ” said Natasha to Todd, who shrugged and got back to work on Pamela’s lunch. “What did I say?”

Bethesda Fielding
sat at her kitchen table directly across from Tenny Boyer, her tannish reddish hair serious and unpigtailed, her glasses high on her nose, her right hand holding a sharpened number two pencil. In front of Bethesda were the following things: a well-thumbed copy of
A More Perfect Union: United States History from Plymouth Rock to the Constitution;
a pencil case containing several backup pencils, two blue pens, four fresh erasers, and a fancy highlighter that was either pink or yellow, depending on how you clicked it; and a new spiral notebook, labeled PROJECT: STUDYING WITH TENNY (SWT), opened to the first page, labeled THINGS TO GO OVER (T-GO).

In front of Tenny Boyer was a red bowl filled with microwave popcorn, from which he was grabbing big handfuls and shoveling them into his face, and a can of
cream soda, from which he was loudly drinking with a straw.

Bethesda looked at Tenny. He looked back at her, smiled blankly, and then kind of looked around the room. Bethesda took a breath to start talking, but wasn’t sure what to say. Tenny slurped his soda.

“So,” Bethesda said finally.

“So,” Tenny answered.

“You excited?”

“What?”

“You know, for the rock show? ” “Oh, yeah. Totally.”

The clock ticked. Tenny shifted in his chair. Finally Bethesda said, “Hey, do you need a pencil?”

“What?”

“A pencil? To write things down? ”

“Oh,” he said vacantly. “Yup. Totally.”

As she dug around for a pencil she wouldn’t mind losing (or getting back coated with earwax), Bethesda thought for the millionth time that having Tenny Boyer in her house was approximately the weirdest thing ever.

She had promised Ms. Finkleman she would do this, had agreed to the deal, and she had no intention of backing out. But it was
so weird.

Bethesda and Tenny hadn’t even had a conversation since the fourth grade, when everyone in Mrs. Kleindienst’s class had been assigned partners for their reports on the regions of Canada. They had worked together fine, Bethesda recalled, but only because she had done the whole project. Their presentation on Nova Scotia consisted of a poem Bethesda wrote about Nova Scotia, a drawing by Bethesda of a traditional Nova Scotian schoolhouse, and a list Bethesda made of Nova Scotia’s primary imports (steel, cotton) and exports (wool, herring). Tenny’s only contribution was a thirty-five-second, Nova Scotia-inspired “musical interlude,” played with two pencils against the side of a milk carton.

Since then, Bethesda and Tenny had maybe said hi to each other now and then, or “Sorry,” if they collided in the hall, but that was it. Bethesda hung out with the Schwartz sisters, and sometimes Violet Kelp, and she worked on the
Mary Todd Lincoln Gazetteer
and did math team and studied at the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library. Tenny Boyer … well, Bethesda didn’t know what he did, or who he hung out with, or where. All she knew was that he sat in the back of every class with a spaced-out expression—and, she was now learning, he was the messiest popcorn eater in all human history.

Bethesda handed Tenny a pencil, and he said, “Thanks, dude.” And then they sat in awkward silence. From the other room came the low murmur of a reporter on TV, discussing expected rainfall in various regions of the American Southeast. Bethesda’s father followed weather like some people follow sports.

“Okay,” Bethesda began. “I’ll list some topics, and we’ll both write down everything you’re having trouble with. That way, I’ve got a list of what to focus on when we’re working together, and you’ve got a list of what to work on at home.”

“Sounds good,” Tenny said, and then scratched his head. Popcorn crumbs cascaded gently from his hair. “Um, can I have some paper?”

Half an hour later, after Tenny had gathered all the necessary supplies … and after he had borrowed some scissors to take the shrink-wrap off his copy of
A More Perfect Union …
and after he had finished his cream soda and asked Bethesda if it was okay to have another one … and after he had cleaned up the popcorn he accidentally knocked off the table on the way to the fridge … and after he had waited, repeating, “I’m really sorry, dude,” while Bethesda vacuumed the crumbs he
missed … they finally began studying.