2015 – Barry’s twelfth grade

  It was the little things, really. Just the fact that she had just said : “now, just quiet down, I’ll launch the presentation” and he pretended not to hear her, or she was teaching, lecturing, but he was leaning over to Ed or Julie, and raising his voice just loud enough for it not to be a whisper, and the magic happened. He would see Ed or Julie’s eyes look at something behind him, which was Ms White, and guess, oh, guess, in relish, that she was trailing off and noticing him, gradually noticing the disturbing of the perfect pace she had planned for her lesson.

  Julie or Ed would run a hand under their chin, silently communicating to him that he was causing trouble, but he dove into it more. And bla, and bla, and bla, whatever he would feign to be talking about, at that one moment. “Barry, is there something wrong with your ears?” Ms White asked.

  “No, just got them checked yesterday, they’re all good” thinking, you are cute, you are a cute lady.

  “Barry, do you care to share with us the story you are sharing with Alberto right now?” she asked.

  “I don’t think it is appropriate for class” thinking, made you look, aha!

  “Barry, can you please repeat what I just said, out loud, so I am sure you were listening?”

  “You were saying something about uh… icebergs?” I was actually listening ‘cause, you Ms White you, you have such a lovely voice.

  “Barry Masquevert!” she lost her cool sometimes, “how many times do I have to request silence for you to give it to me?”

  “I’m sorry” he would reply. How many times can you steal my heart, is the real question here.

  “You are not sorry! Why are you acting this way?”

  “I am immature, you are a sweet creature, when you are angry, Ms White.

  When she had argued with him about cellphones and he had driven her to blurt out the infamous ‘I think you miss being punished by me’ in front of everyone, gasping, he had felt a small tremor in his chest, a hint of guilt, as he guessed he had taken it to the next level, publicly humiliating her, but he was also enchanted, because that, out of everything, would seal their bond forever. The anger she had shot at him from her eyes, while he was pretending to savor his victory, was the sexiest thing he had ever seen. Also, now, she would never forget him.

  Why sexy? He was bedazzled. Because she could take it. She was an uneventful teacher, nothing spectacular or eye-catching about her but, her strength, her diligence, her perseverance in her uninteresting subject, her ability to be roasted by an entire class without batting an eye, that was something. Many teachers pretended to be cool but became obviously upset at the first negative comment, overreacting like little bitches.

  So many walked around with a strong air about themselves, and exploded into blood-drenched crises when triggered the slightest, abusing their positions of power to censor the student population. Some others took the act further into pitiful-ness, laughing an embarrassing moment awkwardly, fighting to save their egos, but not Ms White. When he made her day a little worse, she just had this look, catapulted into his, her mouth shut. She took it like a lady, she didn’t shake in her boots, she didn’t attempt to salvage herself, only her lesson. She was a fucking professional.

  He loved her backbone and that she could face a horde of savage teenagers and hold her ground, not shy in front of self-deprecation, not denying her weaknesses, being genuine. Even though most of his peers would have said she lost many battles, in terms of what she initially aimed to accomplish in her ranks, he would have said the contrary. There were some outbursts of anger, yes, some words that they didn’t mean, some disrespectful and out-of-line exchanges but, in the end, there was a trust between the students and Ms White.

  How did she do that? He wondered. He supposed, because even if something bad happened on Monday, she cleared the slate on Tuesday, and gave second chances. It was a bizarre thing.

  She had a good heart. Many called her class boring and indulged in name-calling her or reviewing everything that was wrong about her teaching style, but that was only because after gossiping on classmates, listing fails and successes of burgeoning love stories at school and negotiating off pill debts, bitching about small jobs, guessing who had an eating disorders and how to hack an Instagram profile, there had to be something else to speak about, and it was teachers.How much school sucked and was such bullshit and how much this town was the next thing they’d see in their rear view mirror after graduation, leaving all those terrible dull teachers behind with their parents, bosses, cousins, foster families.

  She showed them what it was to be okay in adversity, to be allies while disagreeing, to stick together even after tensions, to give a fair chance to everyone in spite of past disastrous misunderstandings or incidents, to clean the slate off all the classes week after week, to grow as a whole diverse whole and not lose sight of it, no matter the difficulties. For that, he had to admit, she was a good teacher. Sucked at Geography but she was okay at life.

  That was the reason they were the perfect pair. Barry knew Ms White didn’t see it this way, rather, she saw him as a bubble gum sticking the sole of her shoe to the ground but he, in his privileged all-knowing position, understood it as bright as day made its brightness obvious.

  He didn’t torture her non-stop either. Sometimes, they had nice exchanges, like the day she was trying to project from the new DVD player all the classrooms had been equipped with over Winter break and couldn’t crack the code of the modern technology, he had not been thinking, and he just got up and walked to her desk, plugged one thing, activated the remote control. “Thank you Barry, you are a lifesaver!” she had exclaimed genuinely at him, “this is the only thing I had planned for today! You literally rescued my lesson!” He smiled back at her, saying nothing, nodding. Blank slates! Saving, saving lives, hell yeah, she was not able to ever know it, but saving lives was Barry’s new specialty.

  She was good with compliments, and always creative when it came to encouraging the less talented students at her subject, always finding the little thing that would boost them, such as “this map’s scale is all wrong but Jesus! Have you ever seen such beautifully drawn mountains?” she showed the work to the class, making Stephanie blush, “Stephanie, I didn’t know you were such an artist!”

  Even the little shits, like him, received some praise, as in “oh, I love your hat today Gregoire, it’s very stylish” or, if she knew something important was happening in anyone’s life, even a student who had gotten on her wrong side the day before, she was still able to treat all of them as human beings: “I heard your sister had a baby, Daphne! Congratulations! Can all the class clap for our new aunt in the room please? MAKE SOME NOISE!”

  During a Geography period, there had been a debate about Flat Earthers, and for once, Barry had felt like participating, and he had risen his hand and started talking about his neighbor and the crazy shit the guy believed, like, absence of curvature of the land that he thought, since observed with the naked eye, was proof the planet was as flat as pizza without all the ingredients on it.

  Another student had jumped in with the intention to interrupt Barry and Ms White had cut him off: “please, Ben, let Barry speak! Everyone will have their turn!” She could have chosen to grant the floor to Ben, a much gifted and devoted student in Geography, but she was applying fairness and demonstrating, as seemed to be her role as an educator, that everyone was equal in the room. It moved him, that she was kind, impartial to everyone after the hard times were over.

  One time, she had detained him on a Saturday morning and had had the unpleasant surprise that her name had been drawn as the supervisor of the detention –that was the deal, as staff members rotated for those extra duties. It was just him and two other guys, who had been caught smelling like weed with dilated pupils first period after smoking inside a car with closed windows on the parking lot like idiots.

  Ms White, looking tired and fed up and like she could, herself, use some drugs, at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning, entered the detention room, which was absurdly large for the relatively limited number of students detention was affecting every week. The gigantism of the place framed her little figure all enveloped in a large dress and at least two layers of scarves, clashing big against small. She dropped her backpack on the main desk, gestured to everyone to sit down, “do your homework or whatever, okay?” She retrieved a pile of papers from her pack, fetched a red pen and dove into her marking.

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  The silence in detention room was something that people who yearned for silence would probably get detained for rather than attending real classes or even real life, Barry observed. Every little rubbing, scratching of pen against paper, move of furniture on floor, was quite blissful, when you thought about it. Here, in this room that was meant to recreate some sort of a prison, freedom happened, from the noise, the business, the rush. It was a forced parenthesis during which he could not bolt, was not allowed to face his father for ill-at-ease chats, or struggle to fit in with his Team of superheroes. Detention was number four on Barry’s list of great School Things.

  One of the students suffering the sentence that day had fallen asleep and started snoring in the large room –detention on Saturday morning was in no way going to cancel partying like a rock star on Friday night for the high-schoolers— and Ms White had lazily gotten up, walked slowly to the boy drooling on his math paper, when he began farting in his sleep. Barry and the third kid started giggling and, he had seen on her face that she was biting her lip, trying to refrain from reacting in such a puerile manner to farts –five year old’s comical relief— until she couldn’t hold it anymore and they all started laughing together.

  She looked at Barry, shook her head while her shoulders bounced up and down with laughter, and they had shared that funny moment. The next day, they crossed paths in the hallway and he made a little fart noise with his mouth to catch her attention, and she turned around, chuckled warmly, shaking her head, before walking away. She had no animosity toward him, nothing more than the applying of her role, mixed with the acknowledgment that they were people too, brought together for that ridiculous instant of silliness.

  With time, Ms White had quickly learned that when Barry was sitting next to her on her cafeteria supervision bench, the goal was to torment her as much as possible before lunch was over, but she always made the effort to show him that she didn’t assume the worst, always started the conversation with a nice greeting, “how are you Barry? How is life?” When she heard that he was working at the car shop after school, she had asked him: “what do you do there? Are the customers nice?”

  “Some are di… I mean, jerks, they want the impossible, like, four tyres changed in an hour. And then they yell at us and threaten not to pay” he replied.

  “Wow, people are fennecs, Barry, you cannot let them treat you this way”

  “Some people think they are better than us at the shop because they show up in a fancy car wearing a suit and all”

  “That’s a load of crap. If they are so good, why don’t they fix their own cars?”

  “Thanks, Ms White” he had said, you are such a nice lady, I love you.

  “You’re welcome Barry. The world is full of pedantic people. You have to know your worth, sweetie pie”

  Those times, it was a bit harder for him to continue torturing her, but he knew he had to. The helpful interactions she was offering him were not enough, after all, she behaved like this with all the students, good or bad, called them all sweetie, or darling, and he wanted to be the special one, beyond the sweeties and the darlings. So starting nice, casual, he would always find a way to engage into the pestering path, as if he reprimanded her for granting him her trust, as if he enjoyed betraying her for being kind to him, and the emotion he felt as a result was a mix of culpability and great entertainment, and some enticement that inverted left and right for him.

  “Hey” he turned the discussion around, beginning his methodical switch subtly, slowly, marinating in the joy of what was to come, “it’s not going to be a career for me, anyway” You don’t deserve my insolence, you really don’t, but I HAVE to do this.

  “What kind of ambitions do you have then?” she asked, unphased.

  I have to do this or, when I’m gone, you will forget me, “I have the ambition to get on your nerves” he answered, I have the ambition to be remembered by you, laughing openly he responded something provocative to her, and she chased him away with the thin pile of papers she had brought to her supervision duty like he was a mosquito in a summer room, fuming. Success! Immense success!

  He was quite amazed himself at how diverse his approaches were on a daily basis to making Ms White’s life at school difficult, his mind was blown and his heart grew fonder of her seeing how inspired he constantly was. One time, in the middle of Geography class, he raised his hand to speak and, when given that permission by Ms White, he said out of seemingly nowhere, as he had not prepared anything special for the day and was just feeling sleepy: “I cheated in Spanish today, at the test”

  “What, Barry?” Ms White was confused and she walked to his desk, one hand behind her ear. He showed her the palm of his hand, all scribbles for the verbs gustar and encantar, “what did you say? No you didn’t, come on!”

  “Actually, he did” Mandy came up as a witness, one row on the left, “I saw you look at your hand during the test, you’re such a LOSER” Barry had not been surprised by Mandy’s inflamed testimony, as he had dumped her for her best friend, Becky, ten days ago, but was now dating Millie, her next door neighbor.

  Ms White closed her eyes, brought her hand to her forehead, “you’re interrupting my lesson to tell me this?”

  “It was weighing on me” he lied. He had not even cheated at the test— hadn’t studied, had not completed one single question of it. An investigation would have revealed all his fabrication.

  “Now I have to report you”

  Every different kind of place, context, circumstances was good, but Barry especially liked the times when he was able to create an argument between him and Ms White in front of her class, assessing her self-control, her persistence, her energy. That she might have been tired that day, or that it was last period, didn’t prevent her from being consistent in both positive and negative reinforcements. He admired that she passed most of his tests, except for the infamous ‘I think you miss being punished by me’, of course, which would go down in history.

  “You could just… let it go” he proposed, shrugging, and the rest of the class discreetly cheered, some:

  “Yes, come on, who hasn’t cheated before?”

  Or: “Give the guy a break!”

  “I can’t” she said. Her voice betrayed a mix of false regrets and real sadism.

  “Why not?”

  She sighed even heavier, eyes wide, astonished at his behaviour and naivete: “I work here, Barry, I’m not here to be the recipient of your tales of cheating during tests or to humour you”

  “So you mean we cannot trust you?”

  “Of course you cannot trust me! I will report you to the Spanish teacher, and let her decide what she wants to do with that information”

  “Snitch!” Someone coughed inside a fist at the back of the class.

  She heard it and she didn’t care, a sorry smile on her lips, both her index fingers tapping against each other, “you are just very silly to have told me that in the first place, Barry. You have dug your own hole”

  “So you mean we cannot confide in you when we have problems?” he pushed it a bit further.

  “Well no, I”

  He cut her off on purpose, seeing the frustration grow at the bottom of her stare, but she was calm that day, it was a morning lesson, she still had vigor and reactivity, and patience, “you know, you teachers are also supposed to be on our sides, for us teenagers, we’re going through puberty, and lots of stuff, and some kids have no one to talk to!” he had concluded, sending a wave of outrage through the group.

  Ms White stepped closer, her face relaxed, unbothered, and she waited for all the offended whispers to die out, and she let him finish his rant, and she spoke like she would have addressing a small child asking why the sky was blue: “well of course, you can count on teachers, on me, if you need to talk. We will listen, sometimes, we will try to help you if we can. There is not any single teacher in this building that doesn’t care about their students” she lied, as Mr O’Donovan, for instance, didn’t give a rat’s ass. “But” she rose one of her two busy index fingers in the air, “you have to understand, before you spill the contents of your hearts to people working at your school, that if you mention something dangerous, like drugs, or like, bad influences, or abusive situations, I am obligated to act on those. Honestly, this is a double edge sword: you have allies, here, at school, my dear children, but also responsible staff members who have been given the task to protect you and protocols to follow for the best”

  He pretended not to have listened to any word of this beautiful summary of the situation, although her painting of the concept of sense of duty resonated incredibly within him, You get it, he thought passionately, you get it, “how is cheating at a Spanish test dangerous?” Barry asked, producing a snob sniffle sound from his nostrils, in control of his little tease.

  Another sigh, this time, she went from scratching to massaging her forehead. She had such nice hands, such lovely index fingers and, by that time, the wedding ring on her left side had vanished, “it’s not dangerous, Barry like perilous” she said, “but it is a break of the rules. It’s like if you told me that you had robbed a bank, or committed a crime. I would encourage you to turn yourself in to the police, of course, and—”

  “Why not encourage me to inform the Spanish teacher of my actions instead of snitching directly to him then?”

  “Would you?” she looked at him puzzled, uncertain, “because that would be the best, obviously”

  “Yes” he lied.

  “I will go with you then, to make sure it is true”

  “Then no, nevermind” he giggled.

  She rolled her eyes, concluding, “anyway, I cannot let any of you confess such things to me and let you believe that this is a valid system, cheating through life is not a good message from an educator, you have to understand that. All of you have to comprehend the difference between disclosing stuff to your friends or families, and confiding to us, teachers” So she reported him and he got detained. That actually gave him an excuse not to attend the morning briefing Hobbes had planned that Saturday.