2014 - Barry’s eleventh grade

She remembered everything about Barry, which, she would find out much much later, had been his sole objective truly –that she would, in fact, remember— during the years they had shared at the big high school where she worked as a Geography teacher and where he was supposed to study, five or six years before.

Eugenie remembered him spreading his arms lazily on his pupil’s desk in her classroom, second hour of the day, still high from the night before, barely awake, uninspired by her lesson. She recalled he would wait for her to begin her canteen supervision duty and pull her on the side, begging for extra credit, and that she had been harsh with him, “well, now, I’m on duty, so we’ll talk in class” She remembered granting him the extra credit for a research project and that he had just copied and pasted his essay from Wikipedia, not even bothering with the margins. She remembered delighting in assigning him a zero. She recalled her guilty pleasure when he saw the mark and gagged with shock and threw her a grumpy look from above his paper, which he would soon punch into a ball and drop in the trash.

She had a vivid memory being responsible for parking lot triage at the end of the school day and blocking his car at the exit on purpose, just because he had pissed her off that day third hour, and letting a whole bus and several teachers’ vehicles go before she let him drive out. Those ends of school days, she was wearing her winter gear under the bite of the blizzard, underneath a flashy yellow sleeveless jacket that gave her the authority to decide who would be allowed to exit the place in which order.

She had the feeling their dialogue had started there, on this parking lot full of honks and teenagers screaming, with his frustration, hands clenched on the wheel, while he was probably thinking of his superhero errands and she was delaying him with her abuse of power, both her arms outstretched in a position that said STOP AND SHUT UP

“See you tomorrow Barry!” she had yelled many times as he accelerated out of the school grounds, and she was pretty sure she received a lot of middle fingers from him in return.

As most teachers would confirm, she couldn’t say that she had disliked Barry as her old student, but he was special. A wild card with whom she constantly had to be on her guards, unable to sit straight on his desk when he was not snoring in the middle of her lesson, bouncing against the walls and the lockers in the hallways, speaking out of turn, asking stupid questions just to throw her off her lecture, flirting with girls while she was handing out tests and the class was supposed to be silent. Eugenie was expected by her job description to control such a firecracker in her classroom, so she did, and felt occasional satisfaction, as she did with many other troublemakers, in seeing her privileged position overcome his many attempts to conquer her small teacher territory. Some other times, she didn’t really think about it and just did her job with no feelings.

But she didn’t hate him. A lot of students were convinced that educators had strong feelings about them, of either favoritism or total enmity, but the truth was that in the middle of the endless to-do list imposed by the profession, teachers rarely hated or adored their pupils. She didn’t dislike Barry, she even could sometimes like him, like she didn’t dislike some other agitators, who were just that: agitators.

Harmless creatures really, teenagers powered by pure hormones and Aderall pills, crazy about their cars and the girls and the boys, wild because they were young, provocative because their home situations or upbringings didn’t reassure their need for structure with the necessary boundaries, loud and disruptive only because they were still children, mean because they were struggling with life, not targeting you specifically, and just being little shits but, inherently, good kids. Just because they drove automobiles and held some part-time jobs and could rise to high level of athletics or art, some people made the mistake to associate adolescents with adults, but any high school teacher would tell you: they had more I common with infants than grown-ups.

She had liked Barry this accepting and trained way and, as she did with her other mildly difficult students, she had tried to make sure that he knew that, and that he didn’t interpret her sanctioning his attitude as intimate animosity. When she sent him to detention or let a rain of Failing marks fall down on him, she made sure she had an encouraging word, when she had the time, to say that she believed he could do better. When he came back the next day and pretended to approach her lessons in a more respectful manner –which would last ten minutes, or fifteen minutes at most—, she would welcome it with warmth and a positive endurance, erasing the slate. Tabula Rasa. She had taken him out of the group many times to talk privately in the hallway, addressed him in what she hoped would be shared trust, when he was eroding her patience near nothingness.

“Barry why are you acting this way? I know you are aware you’re punishing the whole class with your behavior. I told you guys we’d play a game but because you’re being such a pain in my butt, I think I will give you a pop quiz”

He was always different those times when she imposed him a face to face, tugging at the sleeve of his sweater, uncomfortable, put on the spot or, she gradually suspected with time, pretending to be embarrassed. It took her years to comprehend that it was all fake, that he was at the threshold of unleashing his talent and taste for arguing with her and leading her on and out and down and up “I have very low control over my behavior, Ms White”

“I don’t care. I care about the class and how hard they’ve been working all week and how you’re depriving them of a game”

“Your games are lame, they all have to do with Geography”

“But I teach Geography”

“A movie would be better I think” he suggested

“Listen to me sweetie, I would LOVE to watch a movie and play Majong on my phone while you all doze off, but no, you have to earn it, you understand?”

One time, he had stood up to her, asked: “why do we have to learn stupid Geography when we know we will never use it after we graduate?”

Eugenie had been boiling inside her shoes, inside her head, wanting to strangle him. She suffered the most when students called her subject stupid or useless or her teaching style unsatisfactory. If she never took affronts or provocations or speaking out of turn personally from her adolescents, she had once wept alone for half an hour in the school’s bathroom after overhearing a group of who she thought were some of her favorite girls agreeing with each other that Geography was the second dullest class in the school. Those fucking little bitches.

So she had taken a deep breath and replied as calmly as she could, her voice flat, speaking every word clearly : “Why, Barry? Because you picked it as an option for junior year, that’s why you, particularly, have to learn Geography” Dumbass. He had repressed a strange and mysterious laughter and tried his best to return to the classroom and behave the rest of the period, two minutes before the bell had rung. Later in the school year, reaching the end of Spring, she had dragged two desks outside her classroom in the hallway, placed two chairs on both sides, assigned a booklet of word search handouts to the group and called the students out one by one to give them a final comment before the year wrapped up. She reached the letter M in her list, sighed, and shouted out: “Barry Masquevert!”

She heard the chair’s legs scraping the floor inside her classroom and his lazy steps carrying him to her little outside station, his reluctance a masterpiece of theater. His shoe laces were never tied, and she had renounced her initial desire to encourage him to secure them instead of risking falling to his death when he was avalanching downwards in the school stairs, since he always looked at her in return as if she’d said that he should come to class dressed as a dinosaur.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Barry” she said “I met your father last night at the conference evening”

He sat, manspreading on the chair, his hands behind his head, his longer hair, back then, oily, smelling of petrol as he was working a job at the local gas station before and after school. “And?” he asked insolently and, she saw, bracing for something he feared under his show of bravado.

“Is this a bubble gum in your mouth?”

“No, it’s methamphetamine” he replied and, seeing that she was not impressed, he sighed, rolled his eyes and non-enthusiastically reached for a little folded tissue in his pocket to discard his bubble gum, “Ms White, you have no humor. You never laugh or take a joke, you’re always like ‘stop having fun, students! Be serious, study this map of rivers, be sad for the rest of your lives’ you’re like”

“I’m sorry Barry” she smiled, fairly amused by his imitation of her voice and his nominating her as official Party Pooper of the Year, “you seem to never notice it but here, this school, is my workplace, and I am very busy with, like, lesson plans, academics, stuff like that, making sure a bomb doesn’t explode in my room”

“That sounds boring to me”

“Well, your uh, input is… uh it exists. Anyway, as I said, I saw your father last night and, apparently, he is the reason why you took Geography as an option. Now it all makes sense, I guess”

“Well yeah… old dudes always think Geography is important. He says Americans are dumb for thinking Brazil is in South America”

“Barry, Brazil is in South America” she gathered her hands in a prayer, trying to keep her cool, “I’m going to pass you”

He jumped on his chair, the manspreading gone, his elbows rubbing one against the other, his eyes avid, “what?”

“I’m going to validate your year”

“But my grades…”

“Are all Fails”

“And you will pass me” he squinted his eyes as if suddenly, they were surrounded by a thick fog and he couldn’t see her very well.

“Only if you promise me to take another option for your senior year”

“Why?” when he was under the spell of an emotion, she had noticed, his w sounds had a v accent which she couldn’t place.

“Because otherwise I won’t pass you and you’ll have to take Geography again, a senior in my junior class and some extras after school, since your performance is a disaster”

“No I mean Why? Why would you do such a nice thing?”

She had looked at him, “for your own sake, Barry, and it is not a nice thing, it is a logical thing, don’t you get it? I will help you stand up to your father, if you need, saying that there is an option that you think is more relevant for your future life”

“Please don’t talk to my father, I’m not like, five years old, I don’t need a mediator”

You’re welcome, you fucking ungrateful booger, you piece of gravel stuck in the sole of my shoe, you, the poop that a pigeon dropped on my car’s windshield, which spreads when I activate it, and ruins my impeccable glass. Teenagers didn’t filter their words, most of the time. When you expected a thank you, a little nod of recognition that would have sufficed in front of the tale of kindness being offered, they took offense of the most surprising things and threw the things back in your face very unpleasantly, words cutting like a knife. Like every other time, she could have pointed that out to him, made him think about his interpersonal skills, but she was really concerned about losing the boy’s concentration so she remained on the tracks of their discussion, unphased. “If you pass Geography, your father might be more inclined to let you pick another option next year, don’t you agree?”

“You are trying to get rid of me!”

It had been her turn to jump on her seat and she had leaned forward closer to him, allowing herself a little demonstration of force, her hands in fists on the desk under his nose : “On which planet do you live, Barry?” she struggled against adding some cuss words in her question, “you say I don’t have any humor, well, you don’t have a single memory brain cell in that skull of yours! You make all of us laugh, actually, all of us, but you don’t even pay attention because you’re so self-centered. Your presentation about this cartographer who was actually a butterfly hunter was the best thing we saw all year and later after school I thought again about it and laughed more, and that was the highlight of my day”

“Humm”

“What does it mean huumm” Eugenie asked, thought: people who are not teachers do not know what patience is, scaffolding of patience, specifically. Maybe hostage negotiators knew it, maybe, bomb disarmers. Perhaps, people who photographed very rare animals and crouched around all day waiting for the perfect shot of an albino bear out of its den.

“You’re laughing about me then”

“Come on! It was truly funny and you have a nice presence on stage, take a compliment!”

“And yet you gave me a Fail for this presentation” he remarked.

“Because you didn’t bother to read the requirements so you missed them all. Don’t you understand the words coming out of my mouth? I am saying to you that I enjoy having you with us, all the class enjoys having you” He had grunted something back, unconvinced, so she went on : “first of all, no matter how much crap you give me, I always win, so it’s no problem for me”

“You always win because you report me to the Principal and I get detained, and the only reason is that the Principal backs you up”

“Exactly”

“You are a snitch”

“Yes”

“Or you call students’ homes and ask parents to confiscate our phones and X-Boxes”

“Yes. And second of all, we know each other, we have a familiar dynamic and I’m perfectly used to your demonstrations of childish attitude. We can get together to your graduation with a Geography option on your certificate. But it gives me no pleasure seeing you suffer over the map of old USSR, or fall asleep first period because you are not interested”

“Wow. I never said your class was boring”

“Barry”

“What”

“Excuse me: you said it a thousand times. You said it once while I was observed and evaluated by my Department Head after I had taken you on the side at the start of the lesson and asked you, begged you, lowered myself to your feet to request from you that you behave for just one period”

“I’m sorry” he said, confused “I was probably not listening when you were asking me to play nice”

“That was my guess also. And another time, you said my lesson was boring, Greg recorded it on his phone and posted it on social media. I had to watch you say my class was boring, stupid, and pointless, in a meeting about image privacy and content online, a dozen times, projected on the screen, all my colleagues present”

He was openly baffled and she watched him work very very hard to try to recollect the memory. “That time… Oh wow, I remember. Sorry” he said, slowly understanding her point and feeling slightly remorseful. Was he feeling that though? She would learn to doubt all the things that would come out of his mouth and transpire from his facial expression. Something was telling her that on a game of chess, he would always be ahead of her. She suspected a high level of hidden cleverness in him.

But this time again she brushed it off, as she had another half of the group to see alone in the hallway and this was taking ages, “think fast, Barry. What option would you like to take, if you were completely free of choice?”

“I don’t know”

“If you don’t figure it out you’re going to be a super senior and a duper senior and an ultra senior stuck in Geography and”

“Computer Science” he blurted, then looked at her with real fear in his eyes. She could read something unusual in them, something like ‘is this the correct answer?’

“Very well!” she said, “promise me you will tell you dad you are done with Geography and you will take Computer Science next year, it’s actually across the hallway to my classroom, so you’ll still see me every day”

He had laughed, bizarrely, relieved to see she wasn’t bluffing, glanced at the door, three rooms down leading to the ICT lab, looked back at her : “you’re not joking. You’re going to pass me if I… change my option?”

“I had a thought about your question: Why take Geography? And pondered over it and decided that yes, you are right”

“What?”

“You are right. You have better fish to fry than Geography”

He was shocked : “you said I was right?”

This young man lives in his own bubble, a bubble of naïveté, a bubble of pure bullshit, she had thought. “What’s so weird about that? Oh, come on, don’t act so surprised, I’m not a dictator” she had said with great seriousness, not giving him an ounce of affection, keeping it all business while she was, internally, quite happy about her little number and the reprieve it was creating in Barry.

“You are a very kind uh… very kind lady” he said almost reluctantly, running his hand through his dirty hair.

Eugenie had kept quiet for a while, stared at him eye to eye, summoning all the coldness she could gather, and replied without a trace of agitation : “this is logic”

“Have you ever done something like that before?” he had wanted to know.

She had thought about how to answer him and decided that, with such a volatile element, she would be wiser to keep it honest between them : “No” she had replied, unable to look him in the eye. “Now, if you tell anyone about this, I will drag you back to Geography and enroll you into advanced Geology next year and make you study some rocks”

“Copy that” Barry had taken the message and fled from the desk, calling Christine to be the next student to face whatever Ms White had to share.