Valedictorian

I can’t decide what I want to be. Right now, I am becoming more careful with myself. I eat green foods. I’m dating around, but never stay out later than nine. Mom and Dad love me for being smart for so long. I am seventeen years and eleven months old. When I graduate in the spring, I will be the valedictorian in my graduating class of thirteen people. Last year, Larissa was a shoo-in for my spot, but she was mulched for helping her friends with an essay about the Quakers.

No one knows for sure what happens before you are mulched, but the consensus is that you are probably taken into the nurse’s office and the nurse tells you that you are going to die. You can’t run or anything because the school resource officer is there, too, and he has a gun. You might ask if you can have a phone to say goodbye to your parents or to your boyfriend, but I haven’t heard of that happening ever. It is, ultimately, your decisions that brought you there. They probably just put chemicals in you, you die, and they put you in the mulcher. I’m not sure where exactly. There’s a wing of the school that stays locked, so maybe there. I spend the day with twelve others in the classroom. We take a half-hour to go to the cafeteria, then back to class. Then we drive home.

When my older brother Glenn died, he left a Jeep behind. Mom and Dad saved it in the garage until I was old enough. When I pull in on Monday morning, Bernadette and Bo are standing in the parking lot, sharing a cigarette. They seem excited. I take the cigarette from Bo’s mouth and ask her what.

Her teeth shine. “Jerry got hit on Saturday.”

I nod and exhale. “Dead?”

“He was with Andrea, his girlfriend. She’s a freshman. They were walking to Thirty-One Flavors and a pickup truck tried to run them both down. She told me his legs were bent the wrong way and he was breathing like a leaf blower. The cops came and took Jerry’s body.”

“Damn,” I say. “His senior year, too.”

“His senior year,” Bernadette agrees.

“It won’t happen to us,” I say.

With Jerry gone, Bo is now salutatorian. Despite everything, she looks thrilled.

Once, when we were little, Bo made plans to open a business with me after graduation, I don’t remember what. A bakery, probably. Now, Bo wants to follow in the footsteps of our parents and do nothing. I almost hate this about her. Also: when she smiles, she looks a lot like Jennifer Grey, but with a prettier nose.

Dr. Grosshans is our teacher, and he spent years as a professor at the local university. “This is my version of retirement,” he sometimes says, mustache warping, smiling like an older brother. He doesn’t seem old enough to be retired. He has gold wire glasses and a ponytail that you can’t see if he’s facing you. He is impossible to read, which makes him more dangerous than any teacher I’ve had. Kids he loves in class have been mulched for less than nothing. He berates me, calls my answers dumb, and yet he has never given me less than a 95.

He looks sad today. “Good morning, folks,” he says, tapping the papers in front of him. “Before we get started, I wanted to address something that I know a lot of you may have heard about already. Tough news.”

We are all quiet. I look at the chair where Jerry sat.

“Town council made a vote this past summer. It’s supposed to have been confidential—not even the school administration knew. But word gets around, and, well, I know you guys like to gossip. So last weekend, there was another vote to declassify. And our elected officials want me to tell you. So, here’s facts.” He begins reading from the paper: “For a variety of different factors, from resource mis-circulation to overpopulation in various areas of the county, we are limiting the number of graduating students who will be granted citizenship at Jefferson High this year to one. All others will be safely and humanely included in the Human Composting Project.’”

We are silent.

“Obviously,” Grosshans is saying, “the one student who will be selected for citizenship will depend on—in order of descending importance—grade point average, standardized test scores, and amount of work/volunteer service. That means if two of you have the highest GPA, the one with the lower SAT gets mulched. But I believe we have only one student with a GPA that exceeds 4.5. Is that you, Beth?”

Heads and shoulders turn to me. Grosshans is smiling politely. I pull my face into the pleasantest thing I can manage and say, “Yes, that’s me.”

“Well, good for you, smart stuff. If you can stay afloat this year, you’ll be a made man. Or woman, ha.”

“Ha,” I say. The faces all pivot away, one by one.

“To the rest of you, I recommend you buckle down and get rocking and rolling. So,” Grosshans says, standing and scratching his nose, “Jane Eyre, Chapters 11-15. What are we thinking right now?”

When the bell rings for lunch, everyone packs up and no one is looking at me. I grab my backpack from the floor and clutch my binder to my chest, hauling as much ass as I can. I hear several footsteps behind me, and Bo calls out, “Beth? Beth? Wait up.”

“Can I see the nurse?” I say downstairs, sweating. Bo and several of my classmates are outside the office door, trying not to leer.

There are several things you can tell the nurse that will get her to send you home. Most of the time, saying you are sick makes her decide you are unfit to continue working and she will call the resource officer. I don’t know if there’s any one right thing to say, but this is my only chance.

“I’m sick,” I say, “I think it’s because I’m pregnant.”

She looks confused. “Pregnant?”

“I’ve been sexually active in the last four weeks, and I’ve missed my period. I was wondering if you could send me home to take a test and to tell my mother and father.”

She stands up and walks over to me, looking into my eyes.

She says, “Take the rest of the week off, Beth. You’ll miss some assignments. But if you think that you can take the hit, be my guest. Did you hear that only one of you will make it out this year?”

I nod.

She smiles and touches my chin. “So, you must know what you’re doing. You’re a smart girl.”

For the rest of the week, I make sure all our doors and windows stay locked. We get calls four or five times an evening from my classmates, and Dad asks if I’d like to take the phone up to me and Andy’s room. Andy is my brother. He is in the seventh grade.

I answer the first call one night. It’s Bo. She says, “Hey. What’s going on?”

“I’m taking some time away from school,” I say. “I want someone else to take the lead for a while.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, huffing. “But, like, your plan is to eventually overtake whoever overtakes you, right? You just want the heat on someone else until the end of the year, and then you’ll beat them.”

“The heat?”

“Don’t play dumb. Everyone’s going to go after the person in the lead.”

“Ok,” I say. “You’re right.”

She is quiet for a while. “If you purposely take a dive, I’m going to take your spot. And then everyone will go after me.”

“You really think someone is going to try to kill us?”

“Beth, please.”

The calls keep coming. On the fourth night, our downstairs window breaks and the entire living room is in flames. The fire spreads through the hall into Mom and Dad’s room. I grab Andy and we run downstairs and out the back door. I’m coughing more than I’m breathing, but Andy is choking like he’s going to die. By the time we hear sirens, our swimming pool and Glenn’s headstone are glowing orange. We walk around the house, and firemen give Dad air in a tube. I don’t see Mom. Andy and I stand there in our PJs until Dad sees us. He shakes his head. The firemen explain to him that Mom is severely burned, but the surgeons at County General are going to do everything they can to save her. Andy is still coughing, and he begins crying but I put a hand on the back of his head, and he stops.

Several nights later at the Marriott I wake up and Andy is standing over me, his jaw pointed out and his eyes puffy. He’s trying not to wake Dad. He says something about construction paper, about a project due tomorrow.

“What project?”

“The lives of the presidents,” he says.

“You just remembered you had to present it tomorrow?”

He murmurs something about the fire and about Mom and about how he forgot. He buries his head into a pillowcase, and his body is heaving up and down. I know that he’s really crying, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s faking it, that I need to treat him as if he’s a faker.

“Put your shoes on,” I say.

Everyone had to choose a different president. As we drive, I get the idea that he should try sculpture. Everyone in his class is going to do posterboard. One or two might dress up. But this could be a chance for him to stand apart from everyone else, in a good way.

At various stores we gather a secondhand business suit and tie, cotton stuffing, wooden rods and poles, a white lifeless Styrofoam head, acrylic paint, and animal fur. We assemble our creation in the early hours of the morning in one of the meeting rooms of the Marriott lobby—the one with the big window so that people passing through can see and wonder at it. A different concierge relieves the nighttime one of his duty and clocks Andy and I through the window. He opens the door and says, with cautious admiration, “Is that—Ronald Reagan?”

We say in unison, “Yes.”

When I return to class, much to my relief, I am not valedictorian anymore. But Bo isn’t either. Mickey, a boy with a disorder that makes him smaller and frailer than all of us, figured out a loophole in Grosshan’s syllabus. While everyone was trying to find their weakest quiz grade to schedule for a retake, Mickey was writing an essay on every novel over three hundred pages in the library, which, if it was “a quality piece of criticism on a quality piece of work,” allowed him to replace any exam grade with a one hundred. This went unnoticed by all of us, apparently even Grosshans himself, because on the morning of my return he calls attention to it, in front of everyone.

“Can I just say,” he says, shaking his head and cupping his hand against his cheek, “that despite this frankly barbaric ordinance that is punishing you all for your respective lifetimes of great work, I am amazed at how much learning is going on here. Mick, could you stand for a second?”

Mickey stands. He has a thin wisp of white hair combed to the front of his scalp. His bones are too big for his skin. He was my love in the fifth grade. We kissed once. With our tongues. He looked strange back then; we all did. But everyone grew except for him.

That afternoon, someone breaks into his house and kills him. He is shot in the head. The next day at school, everyone feigns ignorance. Bo is now valedictorian.

She comes up to me in the parking lot and says, “Did you hear about Mickey?”

“This needs to stop.”

“He died really suddenly. Shot himself in his room. His mom was out of town, though, so no one found him until super late yesterday.”

“Stop,” I say. “People are getting hurt. I’m getting hurt.”

“I don’t know what you want me to stop.”

“Mickey,” I say. “The fire. I know it was you.”

“Why am I the first person you always blame when something bad happens?”

“Do you deny it?”

Her mouth twists and her forehead ripples. She’s crying, I think. Bo says, “I want you to know that it will never be me. I’m not going down like everyone in the fifth grade when they introduced algebra.”

She hunches and dabs her eyes with the collar of her blouse.

“You are such a loser,” I say. “Cross me like that again and you’re fucking dead.”

She’s really wailing now. I go to my jeep and drive home to our new condo. On my drive, I pass the peony gardens on the edge of town. A truck dumps compost and a backhoe smooths it along for a new flower plot. I park and watch them for a while.

That night, I wait for our phone to ring. It doesn’t.

After we return from winter break, Bo seems shaken. She isn’t looking at anyone and hasn’t taken out her copy of Julius Caesar. Despite myself, I’m worried about her. When Grosshans is distracted, I pass her a note. It says: meet me after class.

When she looks at it, she folds the note and presses it between her two palms and puts her palms in her lap. Grosshans looks at her. He has this smile like he’s embarrassed. He says, “Bo? Would you read as Flavius? Or do you have your copy?” Then Bo reaches into her backpack and takes out a small gun and shoots Grosshans. It is extremely loud. Everyone in the room jumps and stiffens, as if they are the one being shot. No one screams or makes any sound. Grosshans tips and catches the floor, holding himself with the other hand. Then Bo gets up from her chair and says, “This is our chance,” two times. She is shaking and drooling a little bit and waving the gun at the ceiling. “We can free ourselves. And then we can free every other school in town. They can’t stop all of us. We will free all the little kids. Our baby brothers and sisters. Join me! Join me!” Then she leaves the classroom. No one gets up. There is silence. Then there is the sound of many guns firing at the same time, and several minutes later, the resource officers arrive, rifles drawn. One tends to Grosshans, while another looks at all of us. I believe for a moment that they will take us all to the mulcher and that no one will get to graduate, which makes me very sad. I feel like crying. But they just let us go. We go home early.

As we walk through the hall to the main lobby, we see Bo being wheeled by Mrs. Dobbs in the barrow they use for bodies. We’ve heard about this wheelbarrow since we were very small, but I’ve never seen it before.

When I get home, they’re throwing a party for Andy because he won an award at school. Two awards, actually—one for having the highest grade and another for “best problem solver.” His classmates are there: all the serious boys and girls of the seventh grade, sulking in bathing suits. Mom serves strawberry cake. “Do you want a piece, Beth?” she asks, her fake eye pointed at my shoes.

“No,” I say.

“Why don’t you get changed into a bathing suit and come enjoy the party?”

“Okay.” I go upstairs and close the door. I don’t come out until a day and a half later, when school makes everyone come back.

Mrs. Dobbs teaches for a while. Her lessons are limper than Grosshans’, and she’s crueler. I’ve forgotten this about her. She makes Gary the polyglot stand and take his clothes off when he can’t think of a good reason why the color green shows up so many times in Gatsby. He stands at the front of us all with his underwear balled, covering himself. I want to grab and slap his face and say, “It’s money, idiot! Or envy! Or hope! Think of anything next time! Anything can save you!”

Over the next thirteen weeks, I study harder and behave better than I ever have before. Gary dies for forgetting his paperback and for trying to share with Spencer. Spencer dies for the same reason, Mollie gets it for asking too many annoying questions, Jack too, because he never participates without being asked, and Rich because he yawns with too much drama. Each time a resource officer arrives to escort a crying student to the nurse’s office I think that Dobbs particularly has it in for boys. I am not sure what this means.

Then, without warning, Grosshans returns to proctor our final exam. He has a crutch and a strained expression, but other than that his enthusiasm for education seems unswayed. He feels a responsibility to all of us, he says.

At the end of the final exam, there is an essay question about how we plan to spend our lives after graduation. This is what I write:

“No one at school has spoken to me for several months. I do not care. The truth is, I rarely think about any of them at all. Here is what I think about: tasks. There are two types of love: complicated love, and uncomplicated love: love that comes without the burden of difficulty. I love my brother complexly. Same with my friend Bo, before she passed. What isn’t complicated is my love for tasks. So, in a way, this past year has brought me more joy than anything else. This is why, after graduation, I wish to pursue a role in teaching.”

Grosshans reads my test while the other four girls are finishing up. When they’re all turned in, Grosshans says, “Everyone can go home. Beth, stay.”

We’re alone.

Grosshans says, “What do your parents do, Beth?”

“My mother has been in recovery for six months and my father has been caring for her.”

“Ok, but before then.”

“My mother tended to the house and my father helped her. They cooked meals together. Often, they swam.”

“And…you want to be a teacher?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right. But. When you graduate, when you become an adult, no one can force you to do anything you don’t want to do. You don’t have to work at all. You know that, right?”

“Of course.”

“And I can tell you from experience: teaching is one of the worst professions there is. I love it, but I’m very strange. So why commit yourself to something like this? And you can speak frankly with your answer here. I will treat you as an adult.”

“I don’t think I’m prepared for doing nothing. All I know is this,” I say, gesturing at the walls, the desks. “School.”

“Ok,” Grosshans says, nodding. “That is very sad to hear.”

We sit for a while. I wait for his cue that I can leave, but he isn’t looking at me; he’s staring at the floor.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I think about how all of this doesn’t make any sense. We make mulch, but not for food. For flowers.” He smiles and shakes his head. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason for any of this. But then, I guess that’s why I’m a teacher, not a doer. Ha.”

“Ha,” I say.

I graduate. Grosshans excuses me from school on the day that they tell my classmates the bad news. I am grateful to him for that. I don’t say goodbye to anyone.

Andy moves up to the eighth grade. We have a bonfire in his honor and in mine. S’mores. Toasted weenies. Mom stays inside because she is afraid of the open flame. Dad is drinking and keeps dousing the fire with sticks and lighter fluid. Andy does this stupid little dance. He moves every limb like it is a worm trying to free itself from the rest of him. I look at Glenn’s headstone, which is nearby. I laugh. I can’t help myself.

I move into my own townhome, and the town sends me a letter to set up various services. For example, I can forfeit a small part of my salary for men to collect the garbage every Wednesday morning. I can also set up a service to deliver my groceries. It’s bizarre, but I can’t remember my parents ever going grocery shopping.

I call them. Mom picks up: “Hello?”

I say, “When I was growing up, did we ever get groceries delivered to the house?”

She says, “Only every three or four days for the past twenty years.” She must catch her breath in between the words “twenty” and “years.”

I say, “How does it work? Do I make a list and send it to someone?”

She laughs. “Beth. You’re supposed to be a smart girl.”

I become a student teacher. I’m assigned to Ms. Cleat, who taught my third grade class. She is excited to see me again, until I tell her my name and she realizes that I’m not Bo. She insists she never had a Beth; she doesn’t remember me.

On my first day, we gather all the children, put them in a room, and turn off the lights. I can’t shake the feeling that something terrible is going to happen. Cleat hands me a drawstring bag full of small flashlights. I’m meant to hand them to everyone. When they all get one, some of the children marvel at their flashlight and can’t keep themselves from turning it on, from putting it under their chin and making Evil Face. Others are disinterested in the lights. They sit crisscross on the floor.

The game goes like this: one child begins with no flashlight. They are the ghost. They touch the other children, at which point those children turn their flashlights off and become ghosts, too. Cleat puts on some old music and stops it when the room is in complete darkness, to let them know the game is over and it’s time to start again. They shuffle around, grabbing each other. One or two grope me by accident. I scream and they realize I’m not playing; I have no light. Every so often I hear a squeal or giggle and a fragment of the room disappears. Some cover themselves, pretending to be dead. They’re excited to do this. No single game takes longer than a minute. Often, it is difficult to tell when the game should be over. Often, it is difficult to tell who is dead and who is pretending to be.