Pay It Forward (10 page)

H
e woke with a start, fully dressed, on a bed not his own. His eye patch was still on, so he must not have known he had been about to fall asleep. He’d just drifted off for an hour or two, but the sun seemed to be breaking through the east-facing window. He lay still, momentarily too sleepy to identify his surroundings immediately. Someone’s fingers were touching the uneven, partly deadened skin on the wrong side of his face. His impulse was to bolt, then he remembered. Knowing the fingers belonged to Arlene didn’t kill the urge to get away; it just took about ten percent off the top.

He opened his eye but could not see her. She was on his left, the reverse of where she’d been earlier that morning. He shifted slightly and felt her lips against his left cheek. His stomach went cold. “What are you doing?”

“Kissing your face.”

“Why that side?”

“It’s still your face. Right?”

“That’s how much you know. That skin came from my thigh.” He hoped the reality of that unfortunate detail might create its own distance.

“If I was kissing your thigh, would I be getting these kinds of complaints?”

And then it happened again, a touch of lips brushing just underneath the patch, upsetting his stomach.

“Arlene? This is making me uncomfortable.”

“Is there anything I could do that
wouldn’t
make you uncomfortable?” Indignation rose in her voice, oddly comfortable in its familiarity. The rest of this, though, was too strange and new.

“You could let me up.”

She had been leaning against his side, pinning his left arm, making him feel trapped, but she didn’t stay that way for long.

She stood in her robe by the window while Reuben attempted to locate his shoes. “You know what your problem is?” He met her eyes. “I say that a lot, don’t I?”

“Probably just to me. I have a lot of problems.”

“You sure make it hard to like you.”

He wanted to say, Then why don’t you give up? But in some small part of himself he feared that if he asked her to, she might. He found his shoes and opened the bedroom door.

“Why are you mad at me, Reuben? Why are you leaving like you’re mad? What the hell did I do wrong?”

He walked down the hall toward the front door and bumped into Trevor, in his pajamas, headed for the bathroom. With a cowlick in the back of his hair where he’d slept on it funny. And there was nowhere to hide, no way not to be seen.

“Morning, Mr. St. Clair,” he said, and locked the bathroom door behind him, leaving Reuben to wonder what he’d expected and why the experience had come up missing.

Just as he touched the knob of the front door, Arlene caught him from behind with a hand on his shoulder.

“So, you still coming back tonight?”

“Arlene, this is a mistake.” He wouldn’t turn around to say it, just stood facing the street as if he was breaking up with her front door. “I don’t know why we ever started with this.”

“You want to come back, I’ll explain it to you.”

He shook his head without turning around.

H
E STOOD IN FRONT OF HIS FIRST CLASS,
stomach unsettled and eye grainy from lack of sleep. “Today is the deadline for the extra credit assignment. I’d like to see a show of hands. How many of you chose to participate?”

Mary Anne Telmin’s hand shot up first, closely followed by another girl, named Jamie, who wore muted colors and tended to sit in the back and blend in with the walls. Then a boy named Jason, who liked to express his difficult growth phase by hitting and who needed all the extra credit he could get. After a second or two Arnie Jenkins raised his hand cautiously, the big, awkward, brutish boy who’d asked Reuben if he was a pirate.

“Chose to?” Arnie asked. “Or really did?”

“Did you participate, Arnie?”

“Well. I chose to. I could use the extra credit. But I couldn’t think of anything. I really tried, though.”

“Hard to document trying, Arnie. I think you’d better put your hand down.”

Reuben glanced at Trevor, who was staring at the wall on his right at close range. “Trevor?”

Trevor made a face and raised his hand.

“Is that it? Four? Out of a class of thirty-nine? Well, congratulations to the four of you for making the effort. Now. You documented your work on paper the way I asked you to? Would you pass those forward, please? Then we’ll present the ideas to the class. Mary Anne, would you like to go first?”

Reuben knew she would.

She stood in front of the class as though she’d always known she belonged there and had never quite felt comfortable any
where else. “Well. The earth only has just so many resources. So recycling is very important. And we don’t have curbside recycling here in Atascadero. So I gathered some recycling bins, not enough for everybody in the city, of course, but enough for probably everybody who cares enough to ask for one. We put little ads on the bulletin boards around town, at the Lucky and the Kmart, saying we had them for free.”

Reuben interrupted briefly. “We?”

“Oh. My father sort of drove me around. And then I wrote a letter to the City Council encouraging curbside recycling. And I got it signed by forty of my neighbors. There’s a copy of the letter in with my paper, Mr. St. Clair.”

“Thank you, Mary Anne. I’ll take a look at that. What about you, Jason?”

Jason walked up the aisle slowly, pausing to kick another boy’s foot. “Uh. Some people think we don’t have gangs in Atascadero, but they’re wrong. I mean, look at the graffiti. That’s called ‘tagging.’” He turned toward Reuben as he said this, as though everyone else in the room would know. “It’s a kind of gang talk, like bragging. So I went to the store owners who got tagged and said if you pay for the paint, I’ll paint over it. Some of it showed up again the next day, but I painted over it again. One store I did three times. But after a while, I guess the taggers just got tired of doing it over.”

“You wrote down all the businesses for me, Jason?”

“Yeah, it’s all there, Mr. St. Clair.”

“That’s good, Jason, I’m impressed. Thank you.”

Not that the project was unusually impressive; it was more a consider-the-source observation.

Mary Anne Telmin seemed to get her nose out of joint when he said that, but truthfully he had not been impressed by her project. Earlier in the semester it had come clear to Reuben that her father did most of the work. “Gathered” recycling bins, she’d said. Interesting euphemism for what a parent provides.

Trevor sat staring at the wall again. Reuben knew it would be
a bad moment for Trevor, so he saved him for last, the way he might postpone his own pain if he’d had that choice.

“Jamie?”

Jamie shifted on her feet and stammered. “I went to the Oak Tree retirement home and talked to some of the people there. And a lot of what they told me, I wrote down. Like a story. Of their life. So the class could read about them. Because sometimes young people don’t know that old people have a lot to say. If I could use the copy machine in the office, I could make one for everybody. I couldn’t do it at the copy place, it would have been too expensive. It’s almost twenty pages long.”

“Thank you, Jamie. Why don’t you talk to Principal Morgan during lunch today? See if she’ll let you.”

“Okay.” She hurried back to her seat.

Reuben looked at Trevor and Trevor looked at him. Reuben felt a pang of embarrassment, remembering bumping into him in the hall outside his bedroom earlier that morning, but Trevor hadn’t mentioned that.

Trevor took a deep breath and trudged to the front of the classroom, moving slowly and warily, like he was walking a gangplank. Reuben felt his own face flush, as if the presentation, the pressure, were his own.

Trevor stood in front of the class and sighed. “I put a lot of time and energy into my project,” he said. “But it didn’t turn out like I wanted.” Looking quiet and empty, he turned to the blackboard and sketched out a simple version of Paying Forward. He used Reuben’s pointer to indicate the first circle.

“This was Jerry. I helped him get a job. But then he violated his parole. I don’t know if you can pay it forward in prison. I guess you can, ’cause I guess the people in there need a favor more than anybody. But I don’t know if he will. Then, this was Mrs. Greenberg. I spent about three whole days fixing up her garden. Only, she died.”

Arnie spoke out of turn, shouted out, “I wonder if you can pay it forward in heaven.”

The class laughed and hooted, and Trevor exchanged a look with Reuben as though begging him to make it stop.

Reuben slammed his right hand on the desktop, hard. Trevor jumped. “Those of you who did not bother to participate will please stop making light of those who tried.” The class stared at Reuben in stony silence, most with their mouths open. It was the first break in his calm evenhandedness, and Reuben knew by the looks on their faces that he’d just become the human equivalent of Lou’s flying yardstick. “Please go on, Trevor.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, there was a third one too. But. Well, I’m not quite sure how good an idea that was. Anyway, I’m gonna come up with three more people. You know. Start over.”

Mary Anne Telmin raised her hand. “But Mr. St. Clair, the deadline is past. He can’t do anything about it now.”

Trevor stiffened to her challenge. “I’m not doing it for the credit, Mary Anne. I’m doing it to see if the world really changes.” He glanced at Reuben again for support, and Reuben gave him a subtle signal, pushing down with his hand as if to say, Settle down. Don’t rise to this.

Arnie raised his hand and jumped in. “But you can’t change the world on the honor system. Shoot, anybody knows that. Leave people on the honor system, they don’t do it. As soon as you look away, they just don’t. I mean, look what happened.”

Trevor rushed to his own defense again, tight and bristly now, as if being attacked from every side. “It’s not Mrs. Greenberg’s fault that she died, Arnie.”

“Well, people die, or they go to jail, or they just goof off, what’s the difference? They still don’t do it.”

“All right. That’s enough discussion. It’s easy to stand here and criticize Trevor’s idea because he had problems with the result, but it was still the best idea, especially since most of you didn’t even have one. Now, I’ll look these over tonight. The best effort earns an automatic A in this class. Everybody who participated will see a positive effect on his or her grade.”

But as Trevor returned to his desk and found his place in the textbook, the discussion continued in scattered whispers.

H
E RAN INTO
A
NNE
M
ORGAN
in the hall at the end of the following Friday. She said she’d told Jamie she could copy the stories in the office, and if he had just a moment, could Reuben come into her office for a chat. It had that “Let’s talk” ring to it, two words never followed by anything joyous or good.

He sat in the chair across from her desk, the same hot seat he’d occupied on his first day, feeling only slightly more comfortable now.

“Now, Reuben, I don’t want you to think this is a problem in my eyes. I just need to pass this along to you. I got a very strong complaint from Mary Anne Telmin’s parents today.”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. They think their little princess should have gotten the winning grade.”

“Yes, but that’s not the end of it. They’re upset because Trevor McKinney did. They claim that’s inappropriate in light of the fact that you and Arlene McKinney are…dating.” An awkward pause, during which neither spoke or met the other’s eyes. “Which I didn’t even know you were. And I’m not questioning you on that. What you do with your personal life is none of my business, Reuben. I’m uncomfortable even talking to you about it, but you have to know the complaint was lodged.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I would discuss it with you and determine whether any bias was involved in the grading. Which I already know there wasn’t, because I know that’s not the kind of teacher you are.”

“Where did they come by their information? I feel like I’m under some kind of surveillance.”

“You’ve never lived in a small town before, have you? Atas
cadero might not be so small that everybody literally knows everybody, but all the faces become commonplace. And a new one stands out.”

“Especially mine. Sorry. I’m doing it again. So, in other words, I go to dinner or a movie with someone, and the next day people are discussing it amongst themselves.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Reuben’s lack of sleep seemed to tackle him suddenly, a quick fade that left him feeling weak and slightly sick. But he breathed deeply, and filled Anne in on the basics of Paying Forward. She listened carefully and seemed impressed with the scope of Trevor’s idea.

“The purpose of that assignment was to get the students thinking globally,” he said. “Jamie came up with an idea to change the consciousness of the class. Mary Anne and Jason tried to change Atascadero. Trevor had the only idea that might have gotten bigger than this town. He was criticized because the results weren’t good. But the Telmins can’t swear that the city will adopt curbside recycling, either. That shouldn’t negate the effort. Which, by the way, in Mary Anne’s case, was more her father’s effort than her own. So I’m supposed to kick Trevor while he’s down, and punish him for the fact that old people die, and junkies don’t stay clean, and you can’t cure anyone else’s loneliness?”

“You didn’t tell me about that last one.”

“Oh. Well. I’m sketchy on the details. And also, for your information, Arlene McKinney and I dated a handful of times. Dated. And that’s all we did. And that’s over now, and ended uncomfortably, and I think more has been made of that situation than the facts warrant.”

“That part was never my business, Reuben, but I’ll tell the Telmins I discussed the students’ projects with you and that I approve of the priorities involved in your grading.”

“It’s not even just the beauty of the idea, Anne. If you could have seen how hard he worked. He put over a hundred dollars of
his own money into that homeless man, and more than thirty hours on the old woman’s garden. He was so hurt and disappointed.”