Ms. Bixby's Last Day (18 page)

Ms. Bixby slipped off the desk, smoothed out her dress, and pulled opened her bottom drawer. I leaned in close. The drawer clicked and slid. Inside was a half-eaten bag of pretzel sticks and an empty bottle of Frappuccino. There was also a wire rack holding at least two dozen manila file folders, all labeled what you would expect: lesson plans and grade reports, math worksheets and tardy slips. Ms. Bixby knelt down and pushed past the plain folders to reveal a second row of folders behind, all different colors. The one in front was red.

“I can't let you read them. They aren't for sharing. But I thought you might want to see what happened after that first day.”

She pulled it out and set it on the desk. The red folder labeled Susanna Givens was bursting. Even at two poems a week there was no way she could have filled it that full. Even if she were to spend all of her class time, writing odes during recess and morning work and in the lunch line, there was just no way. “Impossible,” I said.

“This isn't just from when she was my student. She's been emailing me them ever since,” Ms. Bixby explained. “I print them out and keep them in here.”

I casually ran my thumb along the edge, ruffling the pages.

“That's hers,” she said. “Yours, on the other hand . . .”

Ms. Bixby bent down again and reached over the rainbow array of folders, only half a dozen, and retrieved a green folder from the very back of the drawer. The very last one. It was thin, probably only ten sheets or so. It had my name on the front in black marker. Just Topher. No last name. She set it on top of Susanna Givens's folder and stepped aside so I could see.

Inside were drawings. My drawings. Most of them were doodles scrawled carelessly on the backs of tests or quizzes. One was a photocopy of a sketch I had made in art class when we had a sub. Another was a picture that I had sold to Kyle Kipperson
for a quarter only to have him wad it up and throw it away. Ms. Bixby had saved it, unraveled it, pressed it flat, and stuck it in this folder with the rest. They were all discards. Throwaways. “You kept these?”

Ms. B. nodded. “You remember what I always wanted to be when I grew up? Before I decided to become a teacher?”

“Maggie the Magnificent,” I mumbled, thumbing through my sketches, looking at them again, trying to see whatever it was she saw in them, something I must have missed the first time. “Master Illusionist.”

“And my big trick, pulling my pet gerbil from my hat.”

“And how your grandmother tried to step on it,” I added, pausing at a drawing I'd made of Steve with his chin on his fist, styled after that famous statue of the guy who thinks too hard.

“Except I never told you
why
I gave up,” Ms. Bixby said. “It was the laughter. My parents, my grandparents, my brother, all laughing about it afterward, talking about how I'd messed up the trick, like it was all a big joke. I was a comedian, not a magician. They would keep telling that story the rest of my life, with their friends, at the dinner table, and every time they would laugh all over again. I ran to my room that day and cried. They didn't get it. That was supposed to be my breakout moment. But to them I was just a kid playing pretend.”

I stopped paging through the green folder and looked at
Ms. Bixby. She always seemed so confident, so one-step-ahead-of-the-rest-of-us, but now she looked different, uncertain.

“It's funny how, as kids, we get these ideas in our head about what's possible and what's not. One day we're invincible and the next day we are afraid of what's in the closet. I grew up wanting to become a magician. but I became a teacher instead. Teaching is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it's not every ten-year-old's dream.”

I shook my head. “So what? So you screwed up on one trick. You can still be a magician,” I said, trying to sound as inspirational as she did sometimes when she would spout her quotes. “What's stopping you?”

Ms. Bixby laughed, and her laughter made me feel foolish for some reason, probably the same way she felt after she failed at her grand finale. “Oh, Topher. There are so many things stopping me, you have no idea,” she said, as if there were a hundred secrets she wasn't about to share. “But this isn't about me. This isn't my folder. It's yours.”

I looked at my drawings. Sword-wielding warlords. Masked vigilantes. But also a sketch of the willow tree outside room 213. I closed the folder and looked at Ms. B.

“We all have moments when we think nobody really
sees
us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else just to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees.
Somebody out there probably thinks you're the greatest thing in the whole world. Don't ever think you're not good enough.”

She reached to the desk and took up the drawing of the spider, holding it out to me. “I won't keep it if you don't want me to. I won't keep any of them. They aren't mine, and I should have asked. If you still don't think it's worthwhile, we can put it right back where you left it. But I like it. I think it's one of your best.”

The drawing floated between Ms. Bixby and me, hovering beside the secret bottom drawer where Ms. Bixby kept a half dozen dreams. None of them were her dream, but she kept them safe anyways.

I took the picture, the one she'd rescued. Then I opened the folder again and put it on top.

I can see the hospital from the McDonald's—a dozen or so floors stretching skyward. It should have taken us three minutes to walk there, but we aren't moving as fast as when we started this morning, full of raisins and confidence and grand plans. I'm still limping and Steve seems woozy. I'm not sure if it's from George Nelson's left hook or from finally mustering the guts to stand up to Christina, but he staggers like a boxer after nine rounds.

I'm holding the bag of fries, which are already making grease spots through the paper. In my backpack sits a tattered paperback and a pair of now-useless speakers. They were supposed to
be hooked up to Steve's phone to play music—Beethoven, and whatever else he loaded up. But the phone is dead. No music. No wine. At least we still have the cheesecake. Sort of. And the french fries.

And the picture.

The one tucked away in the second half of my now-torn sketchbook. The one that Brand discovered and went all Gollum-my-precious about. I had planned to give it to her when nobody was looking. Leave it on a table or tuck it under her pillow, somewhere she might find it later. Or maybe a nurse would pick it up and show it to her and say something, like “This is really good. Is this you?” She would know who did it, of course. And she would smile and say, “Yes, it's me. Where did that come from?” Then later, she could stick it in the green folder in the bottom drawer. Or maybe she would keep it somewhere else. Somewhere closer.

The whole trip over, Brand stays behind us so that it's just Steve and me together. The two wounded warriors bumping into each other because neither of us can seem to walk straight.

“You might have said there was a chance of running into your sister downtown today,” I say. “That might have been incorporated into the plan somehow.” Though I'm not sure what we would have done about it. Disguises maybe. Ski masks. Though three boys wearing ski masks into a McDonald's probably would
have caused its own share of problems.

“The odds were against it,” Steve replies. “A hundred to one. It shouldn't have happened.”

“And yet it did. That's called destiny,” I say. “She's your Voldemort.”

Christina looked nothing like Voldemort. She needed to be balder and paler and a man. But throw a black robe on him, paint a scar on his forehead, and give him a stick to wave around, and Steve could probably pull off Harry Potter. At least the Japanese version.

Steve frowns. “She's not my Voldemort. She was just looking out for me.”

“Tchya,” I scoff. “Only because she was hoping to get you into trouble. She probably lied to us. She's probably calling your parents right now and telling them everything.” I look behind me, half expecting to see Steve's father trailing us in his black Nissan, waiting for just the right moment to cut us off and shove us in the trunk to be delivered directly to Principal McNasty's clutches.

“She's not going to call,” Steve says. “She promised she wouldn't tell.”

“And you believe her?”

Steve shrugs. “She's my sister, Topher. Sure she's annoying. And bossy. And sometimes I can't stand how good she is at
everything, but that doesn't mean I hate her or anything. You shouldn't give her such a hard time.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You exacerbate the situation.”

“I do
not
exacerbate,” I say. “Wait . . . what's exacerbate mean?”

“You make it worse,” Steve explains. “You egg her on.”

I kick at the gravel on the sidewalk. Maybe he has a point—he usually does. Maybe I do exacerbate sometimes. But that didn't make his sister not-annoying. I glance over my shoulder. Brand is lagging farther and farther behind, like he's having second thoughts. Again. But we are way too close to give up now. “So what did she say to you back there, when you two were whispering?” Steve tells me everything. Anything anybody ever whispered to him, I would hear about eventually. Not that anyone but me whispered anything to him usually.

“She asked me if I was really okay,” Steve tells me. “And if I really wanted her to take me home but was afraid to say it in front of you guys. Oh, and she told me I should probably stop listening to you all the time. She thinks you're trouble.”

“She thinks
I'm
trouble,” I sputter.

“She says you're no good for me. She thinks I could do better.”

My mouth hangs. “Do better than me? Not likely. I'm
infinitely
cooler than anyone else in your life,
especially
her.”

Steve shrugs. “You asked me what she said, so I told you.”

“Yeah, well, I hope one of her furry patients bites her and gives her rabies,” I say. But then I think about it, what it would be like if Steve took her advice and ditched me for somebody else, found another best friend. I don't know if I could take it. “And what did you say to her? When she said that?”

Steve looks down at his feet shuffling along the sidewalk.

“I told her that nobody's perfect,” he mumbles, then adds with a grin, “and that you were still infinitely cooler than anyone else in my life.”

“Especially her?”

“Especially her,” Steve repeats. Then he looks up and points. “We're there.”

St. Mary's Hospital looms over us, two big buildings connected by over-street walkways. Steve told me once that there were about ten thousand different saints, that Catholicism is like the Hallmark of religions—a saint for every occasion. There's a saint for comedians and lepers. There are saints for alcoholics and reformed alcoholics and for people who are named Joshua (Saint Joshua). There is a saint for artists too: Saint Catherine of Bologna. The city, not the lunch meat. Steve says that's the one who probably watches over me. Her and Saint Christopher, who usually looks after sailors, motorists, and people with toothaches,
though I get an automatic in because of my name. Of all ten thousand, though, I can only assume Mary is a first-round pick, if not the number one overall. Ms. Bixby is in good hands.

I can see the main entrance, and I stop for a moment and wait for the clouds to part, splitting to reveal a ray of sunshine, like a tractor beam, that will bathe St. Mary's in a sparkling pool of light. I see it in my head clear enough, I can even hear the choir, but it doesn't happen. It's just a hospital: steel and dark glass and sand-colored stone, though compared to the rest of the buildings around it, it looks brand-new and imposing, like some kind of impenetrable fortress.

“You think she will be happy to see us?” I ask.

“I don't know,” Steve says.

“But we should definitely still go, right?”

“I think the fries are getting cold.”

I take that as a yes. We stop at the automatic revolving doors and wait for Brand to catch up.

“We look like we should be going through the ER entrance instead,” Steve says, prodding at his puffy lip. I'm limping. He's bloody. Our clothes are filthy from too much time sitting on curbs, rolling on sidewalks, getting knocked to the ground, or hiding behind Dumpsters. I reach over and do my best to tame Steve's hair. I don't even bother with mine. Lost cause.

“We made it,” I say. Through fire and flipwads and stuffed
owls and sharks in toilets, we are finally here. So why am I even more nervous all of a sudden?

Brand steps up behind us, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“About time,” Steve says, and we both turn and head toward the door.

Brand doesn't move.

“Dude, are you coming?” I hold up the bag of french fries like it's a ticking time bomb, wondering what could possibly be holding him back, now that we are right outside the door.

“Hang on,” he says. “Before we go in there, there's something I've gotta tell you.”

THERE'S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TRUTH
and the
whole
truth. That's why they give that big spiel in court, when they make you place your hand on the Bible and promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because they know if they don't, people will try and sneak around it. They will leave out the details, skip over the incriminating stuff. Keep the worst parts to themselves.

She told me I shouldn't tell anyone. She said it was against school policy. That the school board would have an issue with it. And my father would probably frown upon it. That maybe society at large would frown upon it. Who knows, maybe she could even get fired, though she didn't think so.

But the truth is this.

I saw Ms. Bixby every Friday for two and a half months straight. I don't mean every Friday during school. I mean afterward.

She would pick me up at my house. Except not at my house, because I didn't want my father to know, so instead I waited for her at the corner. And she would pull up in her little white hatchback, the one with the bumper sticker that reads
I
♥
Brains
, which she insisted was both a zombie reference and a warning to most of the men out there. She would pick me up and toss her satchel in the back and offer me a stick of gum, which I always took because I was worried my breath smelled like school lunch. And she would drive us to the same place as the Friday before. We would spend the hour together, like always, and then she would drop me off at the corner again and wait till I got in the door with my bags and waved good-bye.

Every Friday. Ten Fridays in a row. Starting with the day she found me nearly collapsed in the snow. All the way up until the last one, when we found my father collapsed on the porch.

The whole truth is this: I waited for each Friday like it was Christmas Eve. Or better yet, like it was March 31st.

I would stand at the corner with my arms crossed, unconsciously holding my breath, trying to look cool by trying
not
to try to look cool. My list was usually stuffed in my back pocket, along with the money I had taken from the bread box—a
hundred bucks. I would see her Ford come around the corner and she would flash her lights or roll down the window and ask me if I needed a ride, even though she knew the answer, even though that was the whole point. And I would smile and nod and buckle in and look down at my shoes as she drove, or maybe just stare out the window. She would give me permission to change the radio station, to find something I liked, but I never touched it, no matter what it was. It was never the same kind of music. Sometimes it was classical. Sometimes it was talk radio. Once it was metal—she said she'd gotten in a little tiff with another teacher that day and needed Iron Maiden to help her unwind. She liked just about everything, but she had her favorites. She always turned it way up when the Stones came on. Her car always smelled like coffee.

We would park at the end of the row for no other reason than she said it never hurt anyone to walk, and we would pause outside to admire the shoots of green brave enough to sprout in early March, improbably breaking through the frost. Then she would pull out her list and I would pull out mine and we would each grab a cart. And I'm pretty sure I didn't stop smiling the whole time I was with her.

“Wait a minute. She took you shopping?” Steve stares at me, mouth like a Cheerio. “
Grocery
shopping?”

“The Kroger up on Sixty-First. By the Pizza Hut and what used to be a video store.”

“Every Friday?”

“It's a long walk,” I explain. “Groceries are heavy, and my dad can't drive.”

That's not the whole truth. He
could
drive—the car is fixed so that he could use his hands to stop and go—he just chose not to. He also chose not to leave the house. But he couldn't choose not to eat, or at least he hadn't yet, so I walked to the grocery store. It was only two miles. But two miles is an eternity when you are carrying a gallon of milk, a bag of potatoes, and six family-size boxes of mac and cheese. Two miles feels like torture when you walk it in the freezing cold rain.

The revolving door of the hospital spins, and an old couple comes out holding hands. Steve is shaking his head. Topher is silent.

“I should have told you guys earlier, but she said it was better if it stayed between us. Something about the school and legal issues with driving me and everything. Plus, you know, the water fountain thing. If you let one person get a drink of water, then you have to let everyone get a drink of water.”

“Ms. Bixby was afraid we'd
all
want to go grocery shopping with her?” Steve asks.

“Something like that,” I say.

“I hate grocery shopping,” he says.

Yes, well, when you have to start cooking all your dinners or else you won't eat, you suddenly take an interest,
I think, but I don't say it.

“So that's it?” Topher finally says. “That's your big secret? You and Ms. Bixby went Krogering together? For a minute there I thought . . .” But he doesn't finish that thought.

“That's it,” I say.

But it wasn't quite.

The whole truth is this: Ms. Bixby saved me. From the snow that first day and from other things other days. From the fog I woke up in. From the dark cloud that sometimes followed me. From having to carry so much weight around all the time.

There were days I thought about leaving town. Taking off for somewhere. I don't know where. Just away. I would stand in the door to my room, staring out across the hall at my father sitting in his recliner, legs covered with a blanket whether he was cold or not, just so he wouldn't have to look at them, staring at some show that he couldn't possibly care a thing about, about the world's cutest puppies or someone trying to eat too many hamburgers. Thinking, no doubt, about how life wasn't fair. To lose my mom and then his legs. To have to raise a kid when he can barely get out of his chair to take a shower. I would watch
him and think that neither of us was doing the other any favors. If I left, he'd have no choice but to start taking care of himself. He'd have to do his own laundry. Wash his own dishes.

If I left, he'd be forced to go buy his own groceries. Then I wouldn't have to make that long walk anymore. The walk was the worst, every step reminding me what I could do that he couldn't, what I had to do that he didn't. I resented every moment I spent in the store, knowing this was food I would end up making and cleaning up after. If I left, he'd be forced to go himself or just sit in his chair and starve.

Some days—the worst days—I thought maybe that was what he deserved. He was my father. He was supposed to be taking care of me.

Then Ms. Bixby came and pulled up beside me. By accident the first time, but after that, right on schedule. Friday afternoons, with the sun blushing and Ms. Bixby holding her sunglasses in her teeth as we stopped at the bins by the entrance to look over the strawberries. And she would ask me questions—not about school necessarily, but about me. What I was interested in. If I'd ever seen the ocean. What my favorite flavor of ice cream was. If I liked dogs or cats better. She didn't ask about my parents—I'm sure it was all in my file at school. It was as if she knew that this one hour was all I had, and she didn't want to waste it.

She told me about her. Not that much, but more than Ms.
Bixby the teacher ever would. She told me that she was married once, for six years, till she came to the conclusion that her husband was a jerk (which she always kind of knew but hoped otherwise) and that he wasn't going to change anytime soon (a conclusion that she took longer to come to). She told me about her trip to Australia when she was in high school and the time she broke her arm falling off a trampoline. She told me about her brother, who was in the army but was coming home on leave soon, and her own dad—an English professor who lived out east and who used to pack her scraps of paper with quotes from his favorite books in her lunch box, which explained one thing, at least. The Bixbyisms were an inheritance.

She also told me that she spent a lot of time alone as a kid. That it was hard for her to make friends, sometimes, and that she used to spend whole afternoons just walking along the train tracks that ran parallel to her neighborhood, thinking that one day she wouldn't turn around and go back, she would just keep on walking as far as the tracks would take her. But she never did, she said, because your troubles are like your shadow: you can't always see them, but you can't run from them either.

Some days she was serious. Other days she would tell jokes or stories about former students—names excluded—and crazy things they had done. She explained how sampling one grape or one cherry wasn't stealing so much as “ensuring customer
satisfaction.” She turned coupon time into a math lesson (she apologized right after—it was instinct, couldn't be helped) and made me stop to admire the carnations at the florist's. Carnations get a bad rap, she said, because they are cheaper than roses, but she liked them better because they fight harder. Roses are quitters—they give up and die before you can even get used to them being around.

It's amazing how fast an hour at the grocery store can go, how fast your cart fills up, how soon you find yourself paying, and marveling at how much it costs just to survive. She would tell me how half the stuff I bought was likely to kill me if I kept eating it, especially the hot dogs. “Too much processed meat is bad for your health,” she said.

“In that case, I have nothing to worry about,” I told her, holding up the package. “There's no actual meat in these things.” I sometimes tried too hard to make her laugh.

When we were finished and had our bags packed in her trunk—hers on the right, mine to the left—she would drive me back to my corner and say see-you-Monday and tell me to find some time for reading over the weekend. She usually said she had had a good time, though I always thought she was just saying it to be nice. She always told me to take care of myself.

Except for the night we spent in the emergency room. She didn't say any of those things then.

St. Mary's Community Hospital invites us through the automatic revolving doors with a rush of cool air. I've spent a lot of time in hospitals, more than I think is fair for someone my age. I know what to expect. First the lobby, so unhospital-like, set up like the entrance to a grand hotel, down to the fancy chairs and the grand piano that mostly just sits there unplayed. A vast space complete with carpet and a Starbucks and a Hallmark gift shop and a map that shows that
You are here
. The sun pours through the glass walls, reaches halfway down the halls, and the only sign that you're in a building where people often come to die is the empty wheelchair sitting by the elevators.

We walk in and Topher whispers for us to be cool and act normal, though he's the one limping and glancing nervously around. There is a security guard standing by the elevators and another behind the information desk. The only spot in the lobby that's at all crowded is a little window that says
Billing and Payment Support
, where there's a line of adults shuffling papers, waiting for their turn. I've been in that line before.

This would be easier if we had an adult to latch onto, I think, just someone to follow behind. We must stick out: three sixth graders walking way too close together, hissing at and jostling each other. Of course, the last time we enlisted an adult's help, he stole our money and used it to buy a bottle of hooch.

“Just keep walking,” I tell Topher, “straight for the elevators.” The guy at the desk doesn't even look up from his computer as we circle around. I look at the giant clock hanging above the desk. It's 1:22 on a Friday afternoon.

I used to look forward to Friday afternoons.

“Can I help you boys find something?”

We freeze right outside the hall leading to the elevators. The security guard who stopped us puts a thumb through his belt, settling it right by his gun. I'm sure it's just a habit, but it's unnerving. I suddenly start to wonder what the protocol is for hospital security. Like, if our packs will be searched. That would be bad. According to his badge, the security guard's name is Pete.

“No, sir,” Topher says. “We're here visiting our grandmother. She had a heart attack and is recovering from surgery.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the guard says, and you know from his tone that he probably says that a hundred times a day. I don't add anything to that story. I hope Topher doesn't either, but his overactive imagination has a pipeline directly to his always open mouth.

“Oh, it's all right,” he says brightly. “Maybe now she'll stop smoking three packs a day.”

The guard cocks his head to the side, but before he can ask anything else, the closest elevator chimes and the doors slide
open. We huddle in, still pressed close together even though we have the whole elevator to ourselves. Steve hits the button for the fourth floor. He has the room number memorized. I do too, actually.

“Three packs a day?” I say.

“The details are what make it believable,” Topher retorts.

The doors close, and for a second, the whole world drops out from under me.

That's how it felt. Five weeks ago. Like the earth had split and I had been standing right on the crack. It was the last Friday in March, four days before April Fool's. It was the last Friday I spent with Ms. Bixby.

There was nothing remarkable about that afternoon. I think Pepsi was on sale instead of Coke, and there was a promotion to celebrate the start of baseball season—buy one get one free on hot dog buns, which I was told not to fall prey to and did anyway. We spent some time looking over the flowers that were set up outside, and Ms. Bixby taught me the difference between annuals and perennials. Then she quoted something about the flame that burns twice as bright burning half as long, which she insisted was from a Chinese philosopher but I was pretty sure came from a movie.