Nicholson Baker - Substitute - Going to School With a Thousand Kids

I looked at the clock. “Two minutes to go,” I said. “And by the way, I really enjoyed having you in class. You guys are great. You’re quiet and you’re funny and you’re charming — and you’re delightful.”

Owen laughed. “You’re ‘delightful,’” he said to Caitlin.

“Yes I am!” said Caitlin.

“Can you sub for us again?” said Thomas.

The bell triple-bonged.

“Bye, Mr. Baker!”

“Be our sub again soon, please!” said Laura.

“Have a good one.”

“You, too!”

“Bye!”

The next class poured in and slumped down, waiting for something to happen. I took attendance. “I hope you’re having a good day today,” I said.

“I’ve been having an interesting day,” said Georgia.

There was a loud bang from the far corner.

I spun around. “A sudden incredible sound just ripped the air wide open,” I said. Somebody had dropped a textbook on the floor.

“It was Evan,” said Brock, apple-cheeked and beaming.

“No it wasn’t,” said Evan, who wore a football jersey. “Brock does this all the time.”

“Why does he do that?”

“Because he’s Brock.”

Lots of giggling.

I said, “What grade are you guys in?”

“Seventh!”

“Eighth!”

“Fourth!”

“Just ignore Brock,” said Travis.

I passed out the half sheet on quadrants of the coordinate plane. “Do you know how to label the quadrants?”

“No.”

“Kind of.”

I went around to various desks, explaining number lines and Cartesian coordinates. It happens that each of the four quadrants on the Cartesian plane is designated by a Roman numeral — I, II, III, IV — and the Roman numerals go counterclockwise, for some reason. Valueless, instantly forgettable knowledge for most people, but these thirteen-year-olds had to know it.

“You have fifteen plump, beautiful minutes to do this lovely assignment,” I said, and I bent with a flourish to pick up a sock eraser that somebody had thrown across the room. Instantly I knew I was in trouble: I had a bloody nose. Right when things were going well, too. I sat at my desk dabbing at myself with a napkin, hoping nobody had seen, hoping the bleeding would stop. How pathetic, I thought — I’d often gotten winter nosebleeds in school, because of the dry, overheated air, and now, back in school, I was getting winter nosebleeds all over again.

“Can we work in the hall?” asked Lily and Cheyenne.

“I think it’s just as good to work in here,” I said from behind my napkin. Somebody sharpened a pencil. I watched people explaining quadrants to each other. Alec walked up. “I don’t know how to do any of these,” he said.

“Just put your name at the top,” I said. I took the napkin away from my nose and watched two fat, dark drops of blood fall. One landed on the top right corner of the sub plans, and one in the margin of a completed test from last period. Sniffing furtively, I quickly tore off the blood-dropletted bits of paper. I stuffed the scraps in my pocket. My nose seemed to have stopped bleeding.

“Quit it!” said Georgia.

Brock was causing a ruckus in the back.

“It was not me,” said Evan, “it was Brock.”

I walked over. Lily said, “If you have a problem with someone, write their name down or send them to the office.”

“Why does everybody always blame me?” said Brock.

I stood in the middle of the room. “I WANT IT TO BE SILENT!” I said, in a ship captain’s voice. “There are still a couple of kids working.”

“I don’t have any computational skills,” said Cheyenne.

I looked at Brock’s worksheet. “Are you done?”

I began collecting papers. The effort of shouting made another drop of blood fall somewhere on the blue-gray carpet.

“Oh!” said Trinity, who’d seen the drop fall.

“I’m sorry, I have a bloody nose,” I said.

I covered my face again with the napkin. “I’m just going to talk to you like this.”

“Just don’t get it on any of the papers,” said Trinity.

“You should go to the nurse,” said Lily.

“I’m too old to go to the nurse.”

“No you’re not,” said Lily. “I had a teacher that went to the nurse, and then she went home sick.”

I handed the last stack of worksheets to her to pass out — the one with the jackhammer cartoon on it. I circulated, I explained the order of operations, I shushed, I joshed, I handed out compliments, but I was a wounded wildebeest of a teacher now. My inner sense of authority was compromised by the nosebleed, even though only a quarter of the class was aware of it. “Seriously, you’re an atheist, you really are!” said Cheyenne to Luke, the boy next to her. I stopped by the chair of one string-bean of a student, Timothy, who hadn’t made a noise. He was bent with his face inches from the desk, clutching his pencil with four fingers. “How are you making out?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Timothy said, “is this right?” He’d filled a page of notebook paper with tiny numbers, some of them worked out to several decimals, some in the hundred thousands. It looked like something in A Beautiful Mind , and it was all wrong.

“I think you may have made a little technical mistake up here, maybe with the fraction,” I said, pointing. “But you did some great calculations.” Timothy began erasing.

“Aw, sugar!” said Georgia. She also began erasing.

“Sugar,” said Brock.

Trinity, tall and full of casual sass, handed me her paper and turned to Devin and Mandy, who were sitting close together, sharing a pair of earbuds. “Are you guys like an old married couple?” she said.

“Shut UP!” said Mandy.

“Can I go get food from my locker?” Brock asked.

“Absolutely not,” I said. But that gave me an idea. I told the class I’d be back in a second, and I hustled around the corner to the boys’ bathroom to wash my face. I looked at the wild-eyed bleeder in the mirror. My shirttail was untucked and my substitute badge had flipped around on its lanyard so that it was blank. “You hopeless jackass,” I said to my reflection, and laughed, tossing out the paper towels. I went back to class.

The noise level had not appreciably risen. I told Evan and Brock to go on IXL and finish up their word problems. Luke, who was caught up, had assembled a pretend gun out of three dry-erase markers, rubber bands, and a plastic ruler. “That’s just wrong,” I said. He took it apart.

Cheyenne got up on a chair. “There’s a pencil in the light,” she said.

I waved for her to get down. “That was meant to be there,” I said. “When they designed this building they said there’s going to be a pencil in the light.”

“I put it there last trimester,” Evan said.

“Are you lying?” said Trinity.

“No, I threw it, and it stuck into the tile,” Evan said. “Then it fell. So I put it in the light.”

“Why would you tell a sub that?”

I said, “You have made a difference in this school.”

“Dude, your own mother hates you,” said Travis to Brock.

Lily handed in her paper. “Mr. Baker,” she said, “they’re not allowed to have their hoods up in school.” She gestured toward Brock, Evan, and Travis, all of whom had their iPads tilted against their backpacks so that I wouldn’t see that they were playing video games. The three of them had their hoods up.

“Luke, honey, I need your help,” said Trinity. Luke was quick with math. He went over to help her with fractions.

I walked Mia, who was bookish, through some minor algebra. “You want to get that x all by its lonesome self,” I said, “so you first want to multiply by six.”

It got quiet. I sat down and yawned. Some people sat by the heating register on the floor. “Five minus four is what?” Devin said to Mandy, prompting her. Cheyenne started brushing her hair. Eight minutes to go in the period.