Читать книгу Last Dance - David Russell W. - Страница 8

The advantage of working on what’s known as a linear timetable is that you see each of your classes every other day. Of course, if you have a bad class, you’re stuck with them all year, but at least there are little gaps between your times together. I was counting on that one day gap to avoid having to see my law class, when I would have to admit I had failed them miserably in my attempt to argue their case with the vice-principal. It would be quite reasonable for them to no longer consider me the coolest teacher at the school. To be perfectly accurate, they hadn’t actually labelled me as the coolest, but I refused to believe any of the teaching faculty could be any cooler. If I called in sick tomorrow, I would buy myself another couple of days. After three days, surely their teenaged attention spans would have forgotten all about our previous conversation. These thoughts had almost put a spring in my step as I rounded the corner of the second floor hallway leading to my classroom and saw Sara sitting on the floor outside.

“So?” she asked as I walked up to the door, keys in hand, pretending not to have noticed her. “Mr. Patrick!” she demanded when she could stand my pitiful pretending no longer.

“Good morning to you too,” I grumbled, trying to muster indignation from the depths of my embarrassment. “Where I come from, we open our requests for information with a polite salutation.”

“You come from East Van like the rest of us, so cut the crap and get to the point. What did Owen say?” By this time I had entered the classroom and was involved in the daily ritual of emptying my pockets of wallet, keys — anything with a hint of value — and depositing them in my locking filing cabinet. The rule of thumb in most high schools is: if it isn’t locked or bolted down, they’ll steal it. As with Polish Sausage the night before, my attempts to engage myself in other activities in order to disengage my pursuer were not terribly successful.

“I spoke with Mr. Owen.”

“And?”

“Mr. Owen feels that Tim’s date might not be appropriate for the school’s graduation dance.”

Sara’s eyes rolled so emphatically I thought she might do herself an injury. Or she might be related to the vice-principal. “I already know that. I sent you there. How did you change his mind?” This was the moment in which my carefully cultivated nine-month journey to “cooldom” would be put to the test.

“I didn’t.”

She didn’t respond immediately. Her adolescent eyes searched my face, and I realized she was looking for signs of an imminent punch line. She smiled slightly. “Shut up,” she finally commanded, somehow making it sound as friendly as “good morning” might among adults. “What did you tell him?”

There was no holding back any more. “I told him I recognized it was his decision to make, and I quietly left his office.” Sara’s playful incredulity shifted to a flash of anger, and she seemed ready to let loose a pile of expletives — a skill she paradoxically practiced with as much acumen as her “A” essay writing abilities — when the sinister smile crept back into her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

“Oh, I get it. Nice one.”

I returned the smile. “Thank you.”

“You’re pretty crafty.”

“I have my moments.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I was willing to bask in her adulation a moment or two.

“Everything’s about a teaching opportunity for you. Once a teacher, always a teacher.”

“Occupational hazard.”

She shook her head in a gently scolding fashion without losing the good humour I was certain would have faded long before now. “Fine then. I’m up to it.”

“I figured you would be.” I wasn’t sure I liked the direction this conversation was taking. By now it was becoming clear that I might well have unleashed student anarchy on the poor befuddled vice-principal, and while I didn’t particularly feel sorry for him — I still considered him an ass despite his defeating me — I knew this would only serve to make my life more difficult. As Sara turned to leave, she glanced slyly over her shoulder in my direction.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Yeah. You bet.”

“We’ll be ready. You just need to let us know how we do this.” I couldn’t hold out any longer.

“How we do what?” I asked to her back.

She turned, smiling. “How we use law class to tackle the school’s discriminatory policies about Tim and grad.” With that she was gone.

“Shit,” I said to the empty desks.

The rest of the day passed in a haze, which must be what it feels like for many of my students on any given day. It’s hard to imagine that adolescents and teenagers wouldn’t be fascinated with the wonderful world of Canadian history, law, and literature, but somehow there it was. My head was not in the game as I pondered the following day’s law class, in which I was expected to lead my students in a coup. The more I thought of ways to disengage them, the angrier I got at Bill Owen, not just for having put me in this position but because I knew the kids were right. The school had no business trying to legislate the gender preferences of any of its students. Shortly after the end of the day bell, I had packed up my bag and was skulking toward the exit when the student at the centre of Sara’s furor appeared in front of me.

“Mr. Patrick,” Tim Morgan began as he stepped in front of the emergency exit that was the conduit to my freedom — or at least avoidance.

“Hi, Tim,” I said. He was standing right in front of the door.

“Mr. Patrick,” he replied glumly, “can I talk to you for a minute?” I couldn’t see any easy way to avoid the inevitable, so I sighed and motioned for him to carry on. “I know that Sara came and talked to you this morning. She said our law class was going to take on the vice-principal.” Talking with teenagers is much like playing that old kid’s game “telephone,” in which a message is passed around people sitting in a circle to see if the content of the message is anywhere near the same when it reaches its originator. Searching my memory of my conversation with Sara, I could not think of any way I had even hinted — let alone stated — that we would be using this elective course as a means to pick a fight with my boss, but somehow that was the message that had been received. Of course, I couldn’t confirm Tim’s question without sinking even deeper into the mire of employment uncertainty.

“That’s right,” I told him.

“Look, I appreciate you taking an interest and everything, but really, I don’t want you to get into any more trouble.”

“Any more trouble?”

“I think you know what I mean.” I did. My employers had scarcely forgiven me for my role in defending a colleague who had been accused of inappropriate conduct with a student. Both he and the student had ended up dead, and my academic career had nearly died with them. Of course, so had I. “Mr. Patrick. You’re new here. The students like you, but I’m not so sure you’ve made the best impression on the principal and vice-principals. They’d be looking for any excuse to get rid of you. I’ll survive without bringing Van to the dance.”

“Look. Don’t worry about me. I don’t think you should just roll over with your boyfriend here.” I honestly hadn’t meant to introduce such obvious double entendre, but my juvenile tendencies must have been playing havoc with my subconscious. Tim, unfortunately, was one of my brighter students, and there was no way the comment would have gotten by him. He smiled instead of taking offence.

“Oh my god,” he laughed.

“I just meant that …”

“I know what you meant,” he interrupted, still trying to stifle laughter. He held open the door to the exit stairway for me, and we passed into the relative privacy of the echo chamber that was the stairwell. As the door clanked shut behind us, he stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to face me. “Seriously, though. I want you to know how much this means to me.”

“Tim, all I’ve said we’d do is look into it.”

“No, I mean your attitude … your … uhm … acceptance. Not everyone is as accepting. My dad hasn’t talked to me in months. It’s good to know that someone cares.” It didn’t feel like I could say nothing any longer, so I reached into the depths of my experience of watching sappy moments in television sitcoms and responded.

“I do care, Tim.” As soon as I said it, a sudden panic flash overtook me, and I worried that Tim might actually hug me, always a risky act when it involves a student.

“Man, I think we just had a moment.”

“I’m going home,” I told him, walking past him and beginning my descent of the stairs.

“Okay, seriously though,” he continued, following along behind me, “what options do we have?”

“Not a whole hell of a lot,” I admitted. “I think that the best thing we can do is open up a conversation with the powers that be and see first of all if we can’t negotiate our way to an understanding both parties can be satisfied with.”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“Attorney-speak. Why don’t you just talk in Latin?”

“Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.” We opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, turned right, and continued down the hallway towards the exit. “Tim, before we go much further, I think it’s important that you do consider something very carefully.”

“What’s that?”

“The larger a brouhaha we make out of this, the less discretion about your, uhm, relationship we’re going to be able to keep. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not entirely.”

“I just mean that, not everyone is as tolerant as your immediate friends. Not all teenagers are known for their empathy and kind words.”

“Oh. Now I see.”

“I don’t want to get too personal here or anything, but do you think people in the school — I mean, beyond your close friends — know that you’re gay?” I turned to look at Tim, but he had stopped walking a few paces behind me. He was staring silently, ahead and to the left, his teeth clenched and the colour draining from his face. I turned back to see what had caught his attention. Just ahead of me, one of the lockers was adorned with “FAG” in bold black spray paint. I stopped too and looked back at my student. “I guess that answers my question.”

“Well, holy shit!” Bill Owen’s bellowing baritone could be heard all the way up the hall. It wasn’t the most professional response to the situation, but to be fair, it did convey the general mood in the school hallway. By now a small crowd of educators and a handful of kids had gathered and were staring at the offending language on Tim’s locker. Someone had thought to fetch one of the janitors, who had already gone in search of some paint to at least visually eradicate the slur. Tim was standing next to me, saying nothing. I would have joined the teachers to discuss the educational meaning of the act — which meant gossiping about which student we thought was the graffiti artist — but I felt leaving Tim alone to engage in speculative student character assassination might be a little insensitive.

The vice-principal proceeded towards us. “Are you happy now?” he barked as his presence filled my field of vision.

“Not especially, no,” I replied casually. “Is there any reason that childish pranks perpetrated by imbeciles against targets selected on the basis of sexual preference should bring delight to my life?” As a general rule, the longer I’m in the building past three, the bitchier I get.

“You’ve just got to stop getting yourself in so much hot water.” Tim finally spoke up for the first time since discovering the attack on his locker.

“Any guesses?” I asked him.

“How many people are there in the school?”

“About sixteen hundred.”

“That narrows it down to about fifteen hundred and ninety-nine.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” We paused to stare some more at Tim’s defaced locker. Although there are many areas within the teaching profession in which I consider myself to be lacking, making small talk with students during awkward moments is chief among them. If they covered it during teacher training at Simon Fraser University, from which I had graduated less than a year before, I must have been sleeping. This event would certainly qualify as awkward. “But you can’t think of anyone in particular who has a beef with you?”

“Only every homophobe who’s convinced they’ve ‘outed’ me.”

“I guess they have,” I said, nodding towards his locker, now being covered with a fresh coat of paint. The locker now stood out from every other in the hallway in that it had received a coat of paint sometime during this decade. By this time, Principal McFadden was approaching us, and I silently vowed not to be sarcastic and snippy with him. I needed some reserves for the inevitable follow-up conversation with his direct underling.

“Tim, I’m really sorry about what’s happened,” he began earnestly enough.

“It’s not your fault, Mr. McFadden,” Tim replied with a sigh.

“Still, no one should have to experience something like this, especially at school. We want you to feel safe here.” It sounded like a prepared statement, but there wasn’t a great deal more he could say. He turned his attention to me. “Maybe we can meet tomorrow morning.”

“Sure,” I said. Word was clearly already out that somehow I had been enlisted in this current battle. McFadden placed his hand briefly on Tim’s shoulder and walked away towards his office. When it was clear the principal was out of earshot, his underling again approached us.

“Don’t make this any worse,” Owen scolded me without stopping to wait for a sarcastic comeback. “Just let it go.” Then he was gone.

“Mr. Patrick?” Tim asked after the silence had hung between us awhile. “Mr. Owen might be right. We should probably just let it go.” He said it, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“I might have agreed, but the first part of your statement I just can’t go along with.” Confusion crossed Tim’s face then quickly abated when I added, “I will never concede that Mr. Owen is right.”