Sarah Bynum - Ms. Hempel Chronicles

“Your name!” she bellowed down the staircase. “Why is it so hard for you to just sign your name?”

Back inside her bedroom, she heard the methodical stamp of her father’s feet, climbing the stairs. “I don’t want any part in this!” she yelled, tucking the essay inside her binder, though she would apologize to Mr. Ziegler; she would say, My father lost it.

She stood up and spoke through the crack in the door: “Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” her father said, his voice muffled. He was right on the other side. “But I can’t promise you I won’t.”

It was at that moment forgery first presented itself as an option. But instead she decided to ask, from then on, for her mother’s signature. It seemed much easier than fraud. And she knew, anyhow, that even if she did try, she would inevitably get caught. Teachers were alert to that sort of crime.

Ms. Hempel thought that parents would be, too. They were supposed to be vigilant. They were supposed to reprogram the cable box, listen to lyrics, sniff sweaters, check under the mattress. Or, at the least, distinguish between Ms. Hempel’s prose and that of a seventh grader. She had read every one of the anecdotals herself, yet she could not account for the lapse.

Some were panegyrics, plain and simple: Adelaide is without a doubt the most outstanding French student I have ever encountered in my 26 years of teaching. Some were recantations: Please ignore my phone call of last week. Matthew is no longer disrupting my class. Some suggested publication: Elliott’s five-paragraph essay was so superb, I think he should send it to Newsweek. Some recommended immediate acceleration: Judging by her excellence in all areas, I think that Emily is ready to take the SATs, and maybe start college early.

Some anecdotals did everything at once.

Dear Melanie Bean,

I am writing to you about your son. He has been doing exceedingly well in English class. He has gotten a perfect score on every test or quiz we have had in English. He is completely outscoring, outtalking, outparticipating everyone in the class. I look forward to spending my time elaborating his mind in his field of expertise. I would like to consider moving him up to the eighth grade level, which I think would be more suited to his ability. Even though he would miss Spanish every day, I think that Spanish is an inferior class for any person of his mental state, and is simply ruining his skills. I have framed many of his works and find them all inspirational, especially his poetry. William is an inspirational character and I will never forget him. I suggest that you encourage him to use his skills constantly.

Sincerely,

Beatrice Hempel

Will Bean looked nothing like his mother. He was small and impish and pale, and had assumed the role of a friendly, benign irritant, someone who pops up from behind desks and briskly waves. His greatest joy was a series of books about a religious community made up of mice, voles, and hedgehogs. They had taken the Benedictine vows, and created a devout but merry life for themselves. Will frequently alluded to them. He produced a radio play in which he performed all the parts: the sonorous voice of the badger abbot, the tittering of the field mice, who were still novices and had to work in the monastery’s kitchens. He pestered Ms. Hempel into borrowing a tape deck and making the whole class listen to his production. In anecdotal terms, he could be described as whimsical, or inventive, or delightfully imaginative.

Ms. Bean, however, was tall and gaunt and harried. When Ms. Hempel saw her standing outside the school’s gates, she was swaddled in bags: one for her computer, another for her dry cleaning, for her groceries, for Will’s soccer uniform. It was strange, how clearly Ms. Hempel could picture her students’ lives — Will had tae kwon do on Tuesday afternoons, and every Wednesday night he spent with his dad — and how murky their parents’ lives seemed by comparison. All she could see in Ms. Bean was evidence of a job, an exhausting one.

“Do you have a moment,” she said.

Ms. Hempel said of course.

“I wanted to speak with you about the assignment.”

Would she find it deceitful, and dishonest, as Mrs. Woo did? Or maybe, like Mrs. Galvani, she had telephoned all the relatives, even the ones in California, to tell them the wonderful news. It was unlikely, though, that she loved the assignment, thought it original and brilliant and bold. Only Mr. Radinsky seemed to feel that way.

What Ms. Bean wanted her to know was that she felt the assignment to be unkind. Or maybe not unkind. Maybe just unfair. Because she had been waiting a long time for someone else to finally notice what she had always known about Will. And then to discover that it was an assignment, merely.

The disappointment was terrible — could she understand that?

MR. DUNNE, HER COLLEGE COUNSELOR, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after a while. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter. She wrote film reviews for the university paper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed, as if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived. Yes, her father flashed the headlights, and yes, she waved at him before she stepped inside. Those details were resilient. Not these: how she waved glamorously, and smiled radiantly, how the headlights heralded the arrival of a star. How her shadow, projected onto the snow, looked huge.

“That was beautiful,” her aunt said to her when she returned to her pew. “I can see Oscar doing just that — making sure you got in safely.”

Beautiful was not what she intended. Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions. It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine, the days of their collusion, when they communicated in code — click, click — as true accomplices do. When they were still plotting to prove everyone woefully mistaken. This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge? Something she didn’t even recognize as her own. Even her father — her coconspirator, her fan — had been changed into someone she didn’t quite know. A kind and shadowy figure, sitting in the car. Benevolent. Thoughtful. Considerate of others.

IT WAS THE ANNUAL ALL-SCHOOL Safety Assembly. The police officer looked short and lonely in the middle of the stage as he reeled off the possible threats: flashers in raincoats; razor blades in apples; strangers in cars.

Ms. Hempel wanted to raise her hand. Wasn’t he forgetting something? He hadn’t even mentioned the predators she dreaded most. And wasn’t it all supposed to sound more cautionary, more scary?

The grisly details that the officer omitted, Ms. Hempel’s imagination generously supplied. The black and shining van, the malevolent clowns, their wigs in sherbet colors. The dim interior, the stains on the carpet. Doors that shut with a rattling slam.

Ms. Hempel clenched her muscles. Terror flowered darkly inside her.

In the very back row of the auditorium, the eighth grade sat and squirmed. Zander, upon completing a drum solo, crashed an invisible cymbal. Elias drew a picture of a small, slouching boy on the back of Julianne’s binder. Jonathan, with the toe of his sneaker, battered the chair of the seventh grader sitting in front of him. Here they were, arrayed before her: restless, oblivious, vulnerable, all of them.