Thou Shalt Not (3 page)

“Cancer?”

She nodded her head as she sat across the table from me. It looked like she was fighting back tears.

“Is it bad?” I finally managed to get words out other than that nasty C word.

“It’s not very good.”

Oh god. How could this happen? How could this possibly be happening?

“Well, aren’t there, I mean, aren’t there stages or something? Now that it’s been detected, isn’t it easier to keep it from getting to the worse stages? Obviously something can be done!”

“There are only four stages, Luke.”

Oh god. For some reason the number four seemed very ominous at that moment, like the Four Horsemen of the Cancer Apocalypse were coming to unleash their collective fury. I don’t know how I had forgotten there were only four stages. I wasn’t even sure why it was such a big deal at the time, but it was. Cancer. Four stages. Oh god.

“And?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

This time she paused. She obviously didn’t want to answer as much as I didn’t want to hear it.

I am not by nature a nervous person. I don’t get fazed or rattled easily. I’ve spoken in front of large crowds, played baseball in sold-out college stadiums, drummed in venues holding thousands. But I was shaking, waiting for her to speak. My hands were clammy, a feeling I wasn’t at all familiar with and sure as hell wasn’t enjoying.

“And?” I said again.

There was another long pause, and then she spoke. “Late stage three. Maybe four.”

“Oh god.”

The first few periods flew by, and I found myself jealous of the 9th grade students that were getting to spend their morning in a room with April. They certainly couldn’t have been as appreciative of it as I would have been. But at least they weren’t causing her much trouble, as there hadn’t been any banging on the wall to beckon me. I had half a mind to pay some kid to start something so she would need my help. But, the mature side of me won out and I abstained.

Plus, once lunchtime rolled around, our classes would hit the lunchroom together and I would invite her to sit with the teachers at our table. Obviously, all she would have had to do would be to walk into the lunchroom and see that the only table not swarming with smelly teenagers was the one occupied by 9th and 10th grade faculty, but for some reason I thought an invite would be charming.

As my American Literature class walked into the room to start the third period I went back to my desk to dig out an old binder that held papers written by former students over the last few years. I copied and saved a few of the papers I liked best from the discussions we had on
To Kill A Mockingbird
. I planned on using them to spur on some new discussion today if the talks grew stale.

When I straightened up and turned back to the class with the binder in hand, I froze. Standing in the back of the room was April.

I flashed her a quick smile and told the class, “All right, everyone have a seat and get out your notes. Be ready to discuss them in a minute.”

I walked to where April was standing; she looked uncomfortable.

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked, being as casual as possible. I was standing closer to her this time than I had earlier in the morning, and now I could smell her. She smelled like flowers. I wanted to bury my face in her neck.

“I’m sorry, Luke,” she said, mostly looking at her feet. “Is there a teacher’s lounge around here or something? It’s Robin’s free period, and I don’t exactly feel like sitting around for an hour in an empty room. I should have brought a book.”

“Hey, quiet down, class!” Just me being Mr. Authoritative again. I turned back to her.

“Yeah, actually the teacher’s lounge is downstairs. It’s in the office. You would just have to go in, get buzzed through by the desk to go back there, and it’s at the far end of the hallway on the left.”

“Oh okay. That sounds easy enough to find. Thank you.”

“No problem. If you don’t feel like walking that far, you could always go plop down on the couch back there,” I said, pointing to the couch that had been in the room for as long as I had been in the classroom. From the looks of it, the couch had probably been there since the Carter Administration.

“No, no, I wouldn’t want to intrude on your class,” she said as the bell chimed, signaling the start of the period.

“You wouldn’t be intruding. We’re going to be having a discussion about one of my favorite quotes from
To Kill A Mockingbird
.”

Those perfect brown eyes took their gaze up from the floor and met my eyes.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “That is one of my favorite books. Ever!” She emphasized the last word loudly and all the students looked back at us.

“Well, then go back there, get comfortable, and join the conversatio
n.”

And to my surprise, she nodded in agreement and headed straight back to the couch. I caught a couple of the boys following her every step with their eyes. There was really no telling what part of her they were focusing on, but I couldn’t blame them for looking. She obviously turned heads wherever she went. Landry’s eyes lingered the longest, and I wanted to throw something at his head.

“So, the quote up for discussion today is: ‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.’ What does this mean to you? How do you see this play out in your lives, in the world around you? No answers are wrong, except for the really bad ones.”

The class laughed and hands began to shoot up around the room.

Boring answer was first, followed by short answer, followed by scatterbrained answer, followed by an answer that seemed to have nothing to do with the question, followed by a request to go to the bathroom, which I denied.

“Come on, guys, I think this is such an important quote. Emily,” I said, gesturing to a particularly demure girl in the back who was in her first year at Lakefront, “what do you think the quote means?”

She clearly was not expecting to be called and immediately clutched the paper in front of her. Her eyes darted around the room, and she was blushing. But I knew she was intelligent and very perceptive. So I told her that.

“I read your papers every week, Emily. You always give some of the most insightful answers. Surely, you have an opinion that would be valuable for us to hear.”

Emily sat up straight when I said the part about how her answers were insightful, as if being injected with a shot of pride. She suddenly looked confident.

From the back of the room, I could see April smiling.

“Well,” Emily started, looking up at me as she spoke, “I think it is pretty simple what the quote means, what Atticus was trying to say. If you feel like something is the right thing to do or say or whatever, it doesn’t matter what other people think, even if it’s a large group of people. I mean, in the South, the majority of the people believed in slavery for the longest time, or that Blacks weren’t equal to Whites, and they were treated horribly. But, I am sure there were plenty of people who didn’t agree with the majority opinion. Their conscience told them that everyone else’s attitude was wrong.”

I noticed a couple students shaking their heads as Emily spoke, as if they were in disagreement with her. I made a mental note to grade their quizzes more harshly.

“You are absolutely correct, Emily,” I said. “Just because a large group of people do something or agree to some ideal, doesn’t mean that you have to, especially if deep down, you know what they are saying or doing is wrong.”

I turned
toward the beauty on the couch. I had a fleeting dirty thought about her before I spoke.

“Mrs. Batista, what do you think about all this?”

She started to talk, and then I immediately cut her off. Like a jerk.

“Oh, by the way, everyone, this is Mrs. Batista. Mrs. Geary is out sick this week, so Mrs. Batista is substituting for her.”

Everyone nodded and a few girls smiled. The boys used this opportunity to turn around completely in their desks as they had seemingly been given permission to ogle.

“Landry!” I said. His head jerked away from April to my face. “Your shoelace is untied.” He bent down to take care of it, and I shook my head. Little pervert.

“Okay, sorry, Mrs. Batista, go ahead.”

“Well, I agree with everything Emily said. I think this can apply to important things and also inconsequential things. Emily brought up the great example of slavery and racism. Surely there were lots of people around at the time who knew internally that what was happening was wrong. And yet they let fear of the majority shut them up and keep them from taking a stand. And sometimes those who did were harmed for standing up for what they believed in.”

The girls nodded and the boys just stared.

“Absolutely,” I said, nodding. “What do you guys think are some of the inconsequential things this can apply to, like Mrs. Batista said?”

Anthony Elba started speaking without being called on. This was normal for him. If he wasn’t such a nice kid, I might have been tempted to throw a large book at him on a
daily basis.

“Probably, it could apply to like the stuff we eat, you know?” He was looking around at the class, waving his hands like a politician trying to rally support.  

“In what way, Tony?”

“Like, everyone knows it’s stupid to eat fast food. Like a really dumb idea. It clogs your arteries and stuff. But people still go to McDonalds. It don’t stop ‘em. They even made that one movie about how gross it is for you, but they still sell like a billion hamburgers a day. That’s ‘cause people are seeing what everyone else is doin’, and even though they know it’s a dumb idea and they’ll probably have a heart attack, they go buy that crap anyway. You know?”

All the kids were nodding in agreement now, even the kids who clearly had probably consumed fast food once a day for their entire lives. But, Tony had clearly gotten the support his hands were flailing for.

“That’s actually a really great example, Tony. Nicely done.”

He beamed and puffed out his chest like a bird.

The boys kept finding excuses to turn around and look at April. One of them dropped his pencil twice. Another began coughing more frequently so he could turn his head to the side and see her. It was comical to watch.

Landry was turning around every few seconds if any noise came from behind him.

“Landry,” I said. “We haven’t heard from you yet. What do you think about the quote?”

His eyes grew large as he turned back to me. I wasn’t sure if he had really liked what he was seeing, or if he was having a deer-in-the-headlights moment being forced to answer a question he hadn’t thought about.

Landry looked down at his paper and read the quote out loud for everyone to hear. I knew he was just trying to jog his memory and remind himself of what we were discussing.

“What does that mean to you?” I said.

“I mean, I think it’s just saying that you gotta always do what’s right for you, you know? You can’t let what other people think bother you. Unless, they’ve been in your shoes and know what’s going on, they have no right to judge you or tell you how to live your life. I don’t know.”

“That’s a pretty good answer, too,” I said. “See, I told you guys there wouldn’t be any bad answers.”

The rest of the class went by, with more hands darting up across the room. The comments and discussion were better, but now everyone seemed to be mentioning some variation of the slavery/fast food idea. April stayed silent the rest of the class, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The boys seemed to be disappointed she wasn’t speaking, but they all looked back at her after every comment to gauge her response.

“That was fun,” she said, climbing out of the couch. It was one of those quicksand couches that sucked you in as soon as you sat down and made escape nearly impossible. I reached out my hand to pull her up and she took it. Such soft hands, long elegant fingers. I didn’t want to let go.

“Yeah, it’s a good group of kids. You never know which way discussions are going to go, but thank God for Emily today.”

“She seems like a smart kid,” she said, straightening out her dress. “Well, I’ve got to get back over to my class. Thanks again for letting me sit in and for helping me out of your cavernous death couch.”

“Don’t get stuck in there after hours,” I said. “We’ve lost a few janitors that way.”

She smiled. “Noted.”

“Hey,” I said as she headed for the door, “just so you know for after next period, the lunchroom is downstairs and to your left. Just follow the smell of French fries and teenagers.”

“I’m not sure which of those smells worse.”

I laughed. “True. The teachers sit at the big table in the front. You can just go around the line of kids and walk in.”

“Thanks,” she said as she opened the door to leave. “I will probably have to pass on lunch today. Promised my husband I’d join him for lunch before he leaves town tonight.”

“Oh, okay. Well, have fun
!”
Damn husband.