The Great Expectations School (32 page)

To work on the classroom, I canceled the Visual Arts Club for the week, postponing our music video shoot to the end of the month. No Region One Literacy Fair showcase for us. When I stopped by Ms. Fiore's room to give the news, Ivana asked Corrina, “What are we going to do to have fun now?”

Elizabeth Camaraza stayed with me for the eleventh-hour 217 makeover. She single-handedly designed and mounted a gorgeous “
Pocahontas and the Strangers
: Responses to Literature” bulletin board, replete with green-and-gold construction-paper cornhusks. “You just needed a woman's touch,” she said.

On Friday, May 7, I delivered to Mrs. Baker eleven days of lesson plans, which were politely and promptly discarded. The tutors had mountains of materials to keep the kids busy.

“You have worked like a Trojan, Mr. Brown,” Mrs. Boyd said, looking at the pretty paper agriculture on my wall. “Don't miss your plane home.”

The Festival de Cannes is a land of cinephile dreams. I spent my days sporting a laminated access pass as an editorial intern for the
Hollywood Reporter
and my evenings in black tie at red-carpet screenings or swank soirees, usually with Clarissa, a film student from Texas, on my arm. We drank wine and watched Truffaut's
The 400 Blows,
the movie that had blown my mind as a high school sophomore, on a giant floating movie screen at the Cinéma de la Plage by the indigo Mediterranean's edge. I saw films from fourteen countries, ranging from Bosnia to Chile. On my last day, the
Reporter
published a story I wrote called “Scarlet Fever” about the diversity of the red-carpet
camp-out-spectator culture. Then I caught the first ever screening of
Kill Bill
with both volumes merged into one continuous film, introduced by Quentin Tarantino himself.

On my last night in France, the familiar, queasy dread seeped back into my stomach. Did I really have to see Mrs. Boyd or Ms. Guiterrez ever again? I preferred life in the cosmopolitan world of film. Drinking fresh grapefruit juice for breakfast in a courtyard several tables away from Pedro Almodóvar beat my bodega bagel on the D train. I was only gone eleven school days, but the idea of coming back to P.S. 85 gave me horrific goosebumps.

I left my top-floor suite to check out of the Pierre et Vacances de Verrerie at 6 a.m., and immediately noticed something strange when the elevator's lobby-floor button refused to light. I got out on the second floor and bump-dragged my massive seventy-pound suitcase down the steps, into a dark, ghost-town lobby. Where was the desk person at six on a Monday morning? Where was anybody?

I walked to the front door to find it
bolted from the outside.
All other windows and doors that led outdoors were locked too. I had never heard of a large hotel lobby being closed, let alone locked down. I
needed
an employee to call a cab for me. If I hoofed it with my giant luggage to the bus station, I'd be dangerously close to missing the only bus to Nice that would get me to the airport in time for my EasyJet flight to London. I started to sweat.

A man pushing a mop appeared. Frazzled, I pounced in his direction. “Monsieur! I need to call a taxi. Do you know the number for a taxi? A taxi!”

The shrugging man spoke zero English, and I could offer no French. He moved toward the stairwell with his bucket and mop. A flash went through me, familiar from my 4-217 crisis moments:
Assess what he can accomplish.No taxi.Get him to let you out, or find out how to let yourself out of the building. Do it calmly and cordially.

I took a breath and followed the cleaning man, smiling and pantomiming a key turning and opening the front door. He frowned. I
gave him a pleading look, fully shifted into my let's-cooperate teacher mode. He capitulated and unlocked the door.

The bus would leave for Nice in forty-one minutes, and I had clocked the beachside walk from my hotel in suburban CannesBocca to the bus station in the center of Cannes to take forty-five. I steeled myself for a brutal trudge under the sweltering early morning sun.

Then something amazing happened. A taxi, the first unoccupied one I had seen in my whole stay in this neighborhood, rolled up the block with its vacancy light switched on. I wildly waved down the driver and he stopped, asking something in French and squinting in the sunglare. I nodded, and he asked again, raising his voice and miming speaking into a telephone.

He's asking if I called a cab, I deciphered.

“Yes,” I lied, opening the door and hoisting my suitcase onto the seat. “Oui, oui. I called, I called.” Now with both hands free, I mimicked holding two phones to my ears.

“Get out!”

“What?”

“Get out! I am not your taxi. Get out of here.”

My stomach dropped. The French cabbies had a code of honor about stealing each other's fares. If I had in fact called, he thought one of his buddies was coming for me. I
needed
to make this man understand my side of things. “Wait! I didn't call a taxi. I
tried
to call is what I meant. I need to get to the bus station. No one else is coming for me. Please!” I could feel my insides firing up, the rising, now familiar twist of anger and frustration, of discarded hope. I dumbly dragged my luggage off the seat and it plopped to the pavement. “S'il vous plaît! Come on!”

“Get away! Fuck you, Ashton Kutcher!” the incensed cabbie barked.

“What?”

“FUCK YOU!”

His shouting set a match to my bubbling rage.
“I need to get in this cab!”
I screamed, whipping my body to bare-knuckle-punch the passenger door. I froze, suddenly aware of myself. I had snapped again.

“POLICE! POLICE!”

I grabbed my suitcase and hustled toward the beach. Forty perspiration-drenched minutes later, I staggered onto the bus, heading home and promising myself not to punch things ever again.

Four-two-seventeen cheered for fifteen seconds when I entered the cafeteria before quickly returning to normal. Several teachers asked to see pictures from the trip. Others shot me looks of thinly veiled antipathy.

“They were fine,” Mrs. Baker reported. “We kept them busy with busywork. Usual problems with the usual ones. Group two [Gladys Viña, Evley, Sonandia, Gladys Ferraro, and Gloria] was a joy. They were really wonderful.”

Sonandia looked worried. “Sony, what's up?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Somebody wrote something about you in the bathroom. On the third floor.”

“Is that what's bothering you?” I asked. She nodded. “Don't worry about that at all. That doesn't bother me. That means nothing.” Sonandia smiled because I smiled, and that was the end of it.

The moment the day ended, I jogged upstairs to the third-floor girls' bathroom to read inside the first stall door in giant magic marker letters, “MR. BROWN HAS SEX WITH MS. BAKER.” I washed it off, feeling strangely legitimized to be inspiration for graffiti in the Bronx.

I returned from France to find 4-217 suffused with romantic intrigue. Rumors swirled that Eddie had the hots for Lakiya, and Evley turned beet red every time he and Julissa stood beside each other in line.

Eric Ruiz was behaving stranger than usual, grinning ceaselessly and clutching a one-dollar bill every time I looked at him. “Eric, put
the dollar in your pocket or you're going to make me a hundred cents richer.” He complied, but the next time I glanced his way, his grin was back, with a corner of the greenback just peeking over the edge of his desk. At the end of the day, I found a tightly crumpled sheet of loose-leaf paper on the floor near group two.

To: glyds V

Do you like me because of the $1.00
Yes or No
And what is your pone number

Sadly for Eric, the “No” was circled several times before the paper was discarded. But Gladys Viña, a quiet pal of Sonandia's, was not only receiving love letters that day. Next to Eric's rejection note, I found something else.

Dear Lito,

I love you. You like me a little bit. Answer my question and write back anything.
Pick one do you like me
A lot or a little
Write back I got another paper.

Sincerly love,

Gladys Viña

I had never seen Lito and Gladys V. even say hello to each other. Not far away from Gladys V.'s confession lay another sheet from the same miniature notepad, marked by Lito's scraggly penmanship.

Baby I LOVE YOU

The hotly anticipated book fair was a glorified toy sale. The kids loved it. Jennifer was the only student who bought a book, but ten
others walked away with card games, magic sets, and stationery featuring pictures of mammals.

Eric bought the most expensive item available, a ten-dollar “Keep-Out Box” filled with activities and secrets. I had never seen perpetually blank-faced Eric in such good spirits. I could barely believe it when he raised his hand in the afternoon to ask if he could visit the library to check out a book. He returned ten minutes later, cradling a weathered hardback reference book titled
Automobiles.

“I didn't know you were into cars,” I said.

The floodgates opened. “I want to be a mechanic. My cousin works in a garage. He teaches me stuff. He's gonna teach me to build cars. He knows everything in the engines and how to take it apart and make it work again like perfect.” In moments, he was explaining to me the difference between carburetors and alternators. “My dad teaches me about cars, too. But he's on vacation.”

“That sounds fun.”

Eric shrugged and stuck out an index finger and flexed his thumb like he was pulling a trigger. “It's not that kind of vacation.”

“Oh. Well, maybe you can teach me some things about cars in writing. And I can bring in some car stuff for you. Would you like that?” Eric nodded and excitedly went back to inspecting the diagrams in
Automobiles.

Walking down the stairs for dismissal, he mumbled something unintelligible.

“What?” I asked.

He mumbled again.

“Speak louder. I can't understand you.”

“I said my Keep-Out Box was stolen!” He started sobbing, the first time I had seen him cry since Fausto strangled him back in week one.

“Stolen! When?”

“I don't know.”

I halted the line. “Has anyone seen Eric's Keep-Out Box? Any
information will be rewarded!” No one volunteered to speak. The line below me snaked around the lower landing, so I couldn't even see everyone. We were in the worst spot to attempt a quickie investigation. “Eric, when did you realize it was missing?”

Sensing the hopelessness, Eric bolted forward, hurtling down the steps to the exit.

The next morning, he looked miserable. He gave no answer when I asked him if he wanted to read about cars in the library with Mr. Klein. “I just want to go to Mr. Schwesig,” he said. I sent him to the guidance counselor where he played Connect Four for a half hour. He put his head down on his desk.

During my prep period, I visited the book fair, now packing up on its last day. “I'm looking for something that I think is called a Keep-Out Box, or something like that. Do you have it?”

The PTA mother had not heard of it. She called in some help, and soon all four volunteers were discussing my desire for a Keep-Out Box. “I think we ran out of those,” the boss lady finally determined.

I returned to 217 and summoned Eric to the hall. “What'd I do?”

“Nothing, you're not in trouble. We're going to the book fair.” I told him he could pick out anything he wanted to replace the Keep-Out Box. He shrugged and selected a deck of playing cards decorated with fish.

“Are you sure that's all you want?”

He shrugged again.

At a spring PTA meeting, Jodi, Karen Adler's champion student in 4-111 and a leader in my Visual Arts Club, who was attending with her mom, posited the idea of holding a talent show as a fund-raiser for the school. The plan was set in motion for an evening talent and fashion show, with food and door prizes for the year's final PTA gathering. Maimouna and Cwasey were picked to be two of the featured
dozen models and dancers, meaning they left room 217 two wonderful periods per week for rehearsal.

Seeking to put the T back in PTA at least once, Karen and I went to the culminating performance. Aside from fiancées Mulvehill and Bonn, we were the only teachers there.

“Where's Jodi?” I asked.

“She's not coming. She's punished for fighting with her sisters,” Karen said.

The emcee's microphone did not work, so Ms. Llanos, the PTA president, attempted to achieve silence through raising her hand and asking for quiet. The din of chatter in the half-full auditorium did not subside. It was the
parents
making the noise. Karen and I looked at each other in horror, giving the silent signal in sync with Ms. Llanos. Mrs. Boyd finally took to the stage. “Excuse me, people, but the microphone is not working! We are going to need your cooperation to begin!
Excuse me
!” Boyd and Llanos exchanged a helpless look, somewhere between shared fury and disappointment. The crowd continued its roaring chatter, oblivious to the distressed organizers. Mrs. Boyd called again fruitlessly for quiet, then left the stage to seek a custodian.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to Karen and me as she passed.

Fifty-five minutes after the scheduled start, a newly acquired microphone enabled the show to begin. It was a halfhearted performance of loosely synchronized movements punctuated by spontaneously wild poses that drew personal cheers.

“
Maybe it's all right that Jodi missed this,” I said.

“I got the job, muthafucka!”

“Congrizzats, bitch!”

“It's official. The hiring committee approved me. I'm in!” Karen shouted into the phone. Karen had secretly responded to a job posting she saw on a bulletin board at City College. She would teach
sixth grade at a Riverdale start-up charter middle school specializing in science. Her interviewer and future supervisor, Mr. Kahn, was a funny, intelligent, laid-back character who wanted Karen to infuse her piano-playing expertise into her teaching.