Fallen Land (24 page)

10:15 AM:
They walk back to Mrs. Pitt’s classroom, fingers always on lips. “Why are children like flowers?” she asks them. They know the answer: “Because our mouths should be tulips.”
Two lips
. He thinks it is a stupid thing to say. Tulips open in the day and close at night, but Mrs. Pitt means their mouths should always be closed. They stop outside the classroom door. The Row Monitors are allowed into the room first, and then four students at a time may enter the room. The Row Monitors help Mrs. Pitt and Miss Fox, the classroom assistant, keep silent order. Only when one batch of four students is seated is the next batch allowed to enter. If anyone speaks, the Row Monitors make a note and hold it up for Mrs. Pitt or Miss Fox to collect once everyone is seated. If you speak, you are fined.

10:18 AM:
They begin the language arts lesson. For this, he and Joslyn and four other students go next door to Mrs. Abbot’s classroom. It is often the best part of the day. While they are still expected only to speak when called upon, Mrs. Abbot is nice. She gives them treats, she praises their work, she smiles in a way that looks happy instead of angry. She never raises her voice. There is never any need for her to raise her voice. Although Mrs. Abbot’s language arts class is for the advanced students, the stories are still stupid and too simple. At the Lab School he took a test that indicated he had a twelfth-grade reading level. Reading has always been easy; he read before he talked. Letters of the alphabet are, like numbers, either boys or girls or in some cases neutral:

A: neutral

B: boy

C: girl

D: boy

E: boy

F: neutral

G: girl

H: boy

I: boy

J: boy

K: girl

L: girl

M: boy

N: boy

O: girl

P: boy

Q: girl

R: girl

S: girl

T: boy

U: boy

V: boy

W: boy

X: girl

Y: boy

Z: neutral

It is all so obvious, and the composition of letters in a particular word means that each word is itself either a boy or a girl or neutral. Apple, key, dog, house, lawn, car are all boys. Orange, kite, giraffe, river, wagon are all girls. Lake, sky, tree, word, music are neutral. Last week when he told Mrs. Abbot he was reading the book about the boy trying to rescue his father she looked surprised and warned him it was meant for older children. She asked him if he understood it. He said he did, and showed her some of his drawings of a hypercube in four dimensions. She kept the drawings and then, over the weekend, his parents gave them back to him at home. He wonders if his father and Mrs. Abbot have been speaking with each other.

11:30 AM:
He and Joslyn and the four other students return to Mrs. Pitt’s classroom. He thinks of telling Mrs. Pitt he is ill and wants to go to the nurse but he knows Mrs. Pitt will put her hand on his forehead, as she has done with other students who have complained of not feeling well, and unless his forehead is hot she will not let him go. He takes his seat at the back of Row One, wondering how to make his forehead hot enough to be allowed to go to the nurse. He concentrates on making himself warm. He holds his breath. Mrs. Pitt looks at him and tells him to stop making faces and gives him a first warning for the day. A warning carries a fine of one dollar. If he gets three warnings he will be held inside during recess. If he gets four warnings in a day he will be given detention. If he gets five warnings he will have a one-day suspension. He knows the consequences and schedule of fees for every infraction, but does not always know what behavior will be judged punishable. He could not have imagined that holding his breath for a few seconds and trying to make himself feel hot would result in a warning, but then other students—Emily for instance—have been fined for failing to make eye contact with Mrs. Pitt when she asks them a question.

11:32 AM:
Today they have art on the other side of the building. They go through the same process of lining up in the hallway, fingers on lips, before walking to the center of school, circling round the Hub, and turning down to the Green Wing. Each wing has its own color. Mrs. Pitt’s classroom is in the Red Wing, where all the doors are red and there are red stripes along the floor on either side of the hallway. The Hub is white. Talking is forbidden in art as well, but in the art classroom they do not have assigned seats. He and Joslyn sit next to each other at the point farthest from the door and closest to the windows. The art teacher, Mr. Cross, is tall and bearded, always smells like cigarettes, and wears the same uniform as the other teachers although he does not tuck his shirt into his slacks. He does not smile but he does compliment their work if they do something he likes. He is always trying to tell them to look more closely at the world. “A tree trunk is not brown,” he says, holding up a brown crayon. “A tree trunk is lots of different colors. Look at all the colors in the tree trunk,” he tells them, pointing outside to the trees that are closest to the school, at the edge of the playground, on the opposite side of the fence. Today, Mr. Cross tells them to draw an autumn scene, and shows some examples:
The Harvesters
,
Haystacks (Autumn)
,
Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys
,
Autumn Series (Number IV)
,
Autumn Forest
,
Autumnal Sacrifice
, and many different Chinese and Japanese scrolls. Mr. Cross hands out large sheets of heavy white paper and gives each of them a box of oil pastels. If they had been given graph paper he would have drawn a hypercube in four dimensions but instead he decides to draw the old white house next to his own, and Louise standing inside it with her candle. He begins by sketching the outline of the picture in pencil and once he has the house, trees, the road beyond the house, and the window with Louise inside all outlined, he begins to color in the shapes, starting with the sky and background and gradually working to the top layer, finishing just before the end of the hour with Louise’s face and the flame of the candle. Mr. Cross walks around looking at the students’ work. He pauses and makes a sound of approval over the picture of Louise in her house. “Very good work, Copley,” Mr. Cross says. “But you need to put in some fall colors, more trees in the background.” “But there aren’t any more trees in that direction. There’s just the road,” he says, and then the bell rings and art is over.

12:30–12:50
PM:
Lunch. The classroom assistant, Miss Fox, collects them from art and takes them to the gymnasium, which is also the cafeteria and auditorium. Tables with integrated benches are unfolded and lined up in a grid across the gym floor. At one end of the room is a stage, at the other the doors leading into the kitchen area where the food is dispensed. They walk in line to the kitchen, and one by one they place their right index finger on the sensor, wait for the screen to register their account, and then are allowed by the attendant to pick up a tray and collect their lunch. There is never any choice. Today it is hamburger pizza, salad, and an oatmeal cookie. When he first arrived he told the attendants he does not eat meat and they said he has to have a doctor’s note and otherwise he should eat around it. He has not complained to his parents, who also do not eat meat, because he knows they have enough to worry about already. Each classroom sits at its own table, though there are no assigned seats. He and Joslyn always sit together at the end. He picks the cheese and hamburger off the pizza, eats the crust with the remaining tomato sauce, and then eats the salad and the cookie. The other students, and not just those in Mrs. Pitt’s class, have started referring to Joslyn as Medusa. He has looked up the name at home and discovered that the goddess Medusa had snakes for hair. Joslyn has braids, but these look nothing like snakes. The students play a game, pretending that if they happen to look at Joslyn they will turn to stone: they freeze in place waiting until another classmate puts a hand over their eyes to “unfreeze” them. Joslyn acts like she does not hear what they say, and the two of them do not discuss the game. She asks him about Boston and he tells her all he can remember about his other school. “But I don’t understand how you go to school in a lab,” she says, “because a lab is where you do experiments.” “I don’t know. That’s just what they called it. The Laboratory School.” “Did the teachers experiment on you?” she laughs. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He asks her about growing up in this city, and what she knows about it. They exchange information, they ask and respond, they have become friendly in very little time at all. He would like to ask her if she will come to his house for a play date but he does not know how this is done and worries she might say no. “I don’t want my cookie,” she says. “I’m on a diet. My mother says I’m getting fat.” “I don’t think you’re fat, Joslyn.” She smiles but does not look happy. “You’re skinny, so you eat it,” she says, and hands him the cookie.

12:50 PM:
Miss Fox returns to take them outside for recess, which lasts for twenty minutes. There are balls of various kinds, a jungle gym, and monkey bars. The rain has stopped and they stand in the concrete playground overlooked by two security guards in uniforms with the same logo as the company baseball cap his father owns. The first week at the Pinwheel Academy he walked around at recess on his own, studying patterns in the concrete and thinking about his old school. Now, he and Joslyn continue whatever conversation they were having over lunch. After recess, they will not speak again to each other until the final bell of the day, and then only briefly at their lockers, on their way to the school parking lot where their respective parents will be waiting. The entire school, from first through sixth grade, is out at recess together. Several older girls bounce basketballs in time. If one of them gets her bounce out of rhythm she has to drop out and the last one remaining wins. Half a dozen boys play a game of basketball and then, all at once, the game compresses into a coagulation of bodies at the far corner of the playground, catching the attention of the security guards who begin shouting for the students to disperse. Most run away, thinning out to fill the expanse of concrete, but three of the boys remain, their bodies locked together. The guards shout again, “Disperse!” but the boys go on fighting. “Final warning!” the guards shout. One of the boys separates from the other two and a guard catches him by the shirt collar while the other removes the taser from his belt and shoots at the two remaining boys, who both fall to the ground, screaming. The guard who fired the taser puts it back in the holster and pulls each of the boys up by an arm before marching them inside the building. One of them does not look like he is awake and his face is bloody. It is not the first time this has happened. Joslyn makes a clicking sound with her tongue. “They oughta know better by now,” she says. He agrees. He has seen it happen so many times in the last few weeks he cannot understand why anyone would risk breaking even a minor rule, let alone fighting.

1:10 PM:
The bell rings and Mrs. Pitt appears on the playground. He and Joslyn are the first in line. He always hopes that if he is prompt, if he shows he is well behaved, then Mrs. Pitt will like him and stop assuming he is a troublemaker. She frowns as the others line up behind them. By being first in line, he and Joslyn should be the Line Leaders for the march back to class, except that once everyone is present Mrs. Pitt calls for them to turn around, making Joslyn and him the last in line, while allowing those who were the slowest to line up (including two of the four Row Monitors in class) the privilege of leading everyone back to Mrs. Pitt’s room. This has occurred so often he knows he should expect it: just when he thinks he understands what will happen, the situation is reversed.

1:20 PM:
There are three hours left in the day and he has no idea how he will last until his mother arrives to pick him up and take him to the appointment she has made for him to see a new kind of doctor. He does not understand why he is being taken to a doctor, since he does not feel unwell, except for the moments of queasiness about school. Before the end of the day there are three long periods: social studies, science, and then, at the end of the day, PE. If only PE were at the beginning of the day and not at the end, always there to be dreaded, scowling over every hour. Today is even worse, because today is swimming. As they are starting the social studies lesson he hears the sound of an ambulance siren, which comes closer and closer until he can see it drive into the school parking lot. The sirens stop but the lights keep flashing and five minutes later the paramedics wheel a gurney out of the school with one of the boys who was shot by the taser strapped down against it. A guard—the guard who shot the boy—walks alongside the gurney and climbs into the back of the ambulance. The social studies lesson is on maps. Mrs. Pitt hands out a worksheet that has a map printed on it with directions to follow. They have to color in the map: the river should be blue, the park green, the fire station red, schools brown, etc. Once they have colored in the map they have to answer questions about whether the church or the school is farther east, whether the town hall is north or south of the river, how many blocks it is between the school and the jail. Some of the students do not understand the questions and Miss Fox or Mrs. Pitt has to come around to help them. In the first ten minutes of the lesson he finishes the map, puts down his pencil, and pushes the crayons back into their box. Mrs. Pitt notices and asks him why he isn’t working. “I’m finished,” he says, and holds up the handout. “Check your work thoroughly,” she chides. “Good work is never rushed work.” He reads over the directions, checks he has colored everything as required, makes sure his answers are correct, and is pleased to see he has made not a single error and never strayed outside the lines. He is not sure what teachers are for in this new school. At his school in Boston, they never had handouts like this. The work was interesting and difficult and always took as long to finish as the time allotted for the lesson. Here he spends too much time doing nothing, waiting for Mrs. Pitt to move on to something new, for the other students to finish their work. He has asked Joslyn about this at recess. She tells him he has to learn to go slow: “Stretch it out. Make yourself take longer than you have to.”