Nathan Hill - The Nix

Did Miss Bowles know? Could she see it? That daily some of her boys went starry-eyed and glassy as their nervous systems took them somewhere else? If she did, she didn’t say anything. And she never called on any of the boys in such a state and demand they stand while giving their answers. This seemed, for Miss Bowles, unusually merciful.

Samuel looked at the clock: Ten minutes till recess. His pants felt too tight. He felt wedged into his seat. Then his mind flashed involuntarily with visions of girls, his mental inventory of images accidentally caught here and there: cleavage seen when a woman at the mall bent over; a snip of leg and crotch and inner thigh glimpsed as girls in class sat down; and now a new vision, Bethany, in her room, sitting up straight, knees together, in a light cotton dress, violin at her chin, looking at him, those green catlike eyes.

When the bell rang for recess he acted like there was something important in his desk that he couldn’t find. After everyone left the classroom, he stood up and maneuvered himself in such a way that, for anyone watching, would have looked like someone slowly hula-hooping without a Hula-Hoop.

The kids marched to the playground, marched with purpose and slow resolve even though they were by now surging with the energy that accumulates in an eleven-year-old body sitting rigidly still for hours under Miss Bowles’s imperious gaze. They marched in total silence, single file on the far-right side of the corridor past all the signs the faculty had helpfully taped to the white concrete walls, one or two of which promoted some kind of LEARNING IS FUN! message, while the rest attempted strict behavior management: KEEP HANDS AND FEET TO YOURSELF; QUIET VOICES ONLY; WALK, DON’T RUN; WAIT YOUR TURN; USE POLITE LANGUAGE; DON’T USE MORE TOILET PAPER THAN YOU NEED; EAT BEFORE TALKING; USE TABLE MANNERS; RESPECT PERSONAL SPACE; RAISE YOUR HAND; DO NOT SPEAK UNLESS CALLED ON; STAY IN LINE; APOLOGIZE WHEN NEEDED; FOLLOW DIRECTIONS; USE SOAP APPROPRIATELY.

To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school’s rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students’ various excreta. Getting a bathroom pass was an elaborate ritual whereby Miss Bowles would — if you asked really nicely and convinced her that it was, indeed, an emergency and not some ploy to get out of class to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol or do drugs — fill out this bathroom pass about the length of the Constitution. She’d write down your name and the time of your departure (down to the very second) and, horrifyingly, the nature of your visit (i.e., number one or number two), and then she’d ask you to read the hall pass aloud, which listed your “Rights and Restrictions,” primarily among them that you could leave class for no more than two minutes and that while gone you assented to walk only on the right side of the corridor and go directly to the nearest bathroom and not say a word to anyone and not run in the halls and not be disruptive whatsoever and do nothing illegal while in the bathroom. Then you had to sign the hall pass and wait while Miss Bowles explained to you that you had signed a contract and there were severe penalties for people who broke contracts. Most of the time the kids would listen to her wide-eyed and panicked and doing that uncomfortable pee dance because they were already on the clock and the more Miss Bowles talked about contract law the more of their precious two minutes she cut into, such that when they finally got to the hall they had maybe ninety seconds to get to the bathroom and do their business and get back to class, all without running, which was impossible.

Plus you were only allowed two bathroom passes per week.

Then there was the rule about the water fountain: after students returned from recess they could only drink from the water fountain for three seconds each —this was probably meant to teach them about cooperation and selflessness — but of course the kids were panting and exhausted after a frenzied recess letting off all their stored-up angst, and there was a heat wave, and they were rarely allowed bathroom breaks, so the only water these sweaty and sunburned and overheated kids got all day came at the water fountain for these three seconds. This was a perverse double whammy for the students, because if they ran off their energy at recess, they would be parched and exhausted for the rest of the day, whereas if they didn’t run around during recess, they’d feel so hyperactive in the late afternoon that they’d almost certainly get in some behavior-related trouble. So mostly the students played hard at recess, then gulped as much water as they could during their tiny three-second interval. And by the end of the day they were desolate, dehydrated lumps, which was actually how Miss Bowles preferred it.

So she stood over them and loudly counted out their time and each kid popped up at three, their chins dripping, not even close to enough water on this hot and humid and terrible Midwest day.

“This is bullshit,” Bishop said to Samuel as they waited in line. “Watch this.”

And when it was Bishop’s turn he leaned over the fountain, pressed the button, and drank while making direct eye contact with Miss Bowles, who said, “One. Two. Three. ” Then when Bishop did not stop drinking, she said “Three” again, more pointedly, then when Bishop still did not stop she said, “You’re done now. Next!” And then it became clear that Bishop was not going to stop drinking until he was good and ready, and it appeared to most of the kids in line that Bishop wasn’t even drinking anymore so much as letting the water run coolly over his lips, still looking directly at Miss Bowles as she finally realized this wasn’t a matter of the new kid not knowing the rules but rather a direct challenge to her authority. And she responded to the confrontation by gathering herself into a rigid hands-on-hips, chin-jutting-out kind of posture and her voice dropped an octave as she said, “Bishop. You will stop drinking. Now. ”

He stared at her with this bored, lifeless expression that was just so incredible and daring, and the kids in line were already bug-eyed and giggling dementedly because Bishop was about two seconds away from a paddling. Anyone who so blatantly disregarded the rules got paddled.

The paddle was famous.

It hung on the office wall of their principal, the school’s chief disciplinarian, the unfortunately named Laurence Large, a short and oddly-shaped man who carried his weight almost entirely from the waist up — his legs were skinny and frail while his upper body ballooned. He looked like an egg standing on toothpicks. One wondered how his ankles and shinbones didn’t snap. His paddle was made from a single three-inch-thick slab of wood, was about as wide as two pieces of notebook paper put together, and had about a dozen small holes drilled into it. For aerodynamics, the kids hypothesized. So he could swing it faster.

His paddlings were legendary for their force, for the technique required to generate enough power to, for example, shatter Brand Beaumonde’s glasses, which was a historical fact that lived on as oral history among the members of the sixth-grade class, that Large struck Beaumonde’s ass so hard the shock wave traveled up through the poor boy’s body and cracked his high-prescription lenses. Comparisons were made to professional tennis players uncoiling 140-mph serves, how Large could transfer his weight in such a way to deliver a devastating — and athletically unlikely — blow. Sure, occasionally a parent might complain about the principal’s retrograde punishment system, but since a paddling was the ultimate misbehavior prevention and deterrent, it was, for the most part, pretty rare. Certainly not frequent enough to spur any PTO campaigns. The absolute fact of assured backside annihilation was enough to keep even the rowdiest children in a more or less calm and low-decibel and narcotized fearful stupor for the whole of the school day. (That they went into spasms of wild hyperactivity as soon as they got home was something parents sometimes grumbled about to teachers, who quietly nodded their heads and thought: Not my problem. )