I call after him before he gets out the door. “Come back after class to get tomorrow’s assignment.”
He doesn’t answer.
Vernette is nearly yelling. “Aren’t you going to make him go to the principal? He should be suspended for acting like that.”
I tell her to drop it but she isn’t through. “That’s not right, Mr. Bishop. He called me a bitch in front of the whole class and you, I don’t know, you just rewarded him or something by letting him go early.”
“Relax, Vernette. I’ll cut his tongue out later if that will make you happy, but can we get back to work now?”
She snatches up her purse and her textbook and stalks to the door. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Baker.”
Ted Baker is the principal and he and I don’t much like each other. No doubt he’ll lecture me later on the need to maintain proper discipline in my classroom.
Vernette waits for me to say something else, probably hoping I’ll call her back. I shake my head. “Tell him I said hello.”
She spins on her heels and flounces down the hall.
The first time I tried to kill myself was November 23, 1988. I got up on a stump and threw a rope over a tree branch in the woods, then I put a noose around my neck and tied my hands behind my back with some phone cord and stepped off the stump.
It hurt like hell. The rope bit into my neck and I tried to scream but I couldn’t. I kicked my legs around and was starting to black out when I felt the stump under my toes and pulled myself to where I could stand up again. But I couldn’t get untied so I started yelling for somebody to come help me. My legs were going numb and I was beginning to panic when Tommy finally came looking for me. I’d yelled myself hoarse and pissed my pants, and I bawled like a baby calf when I saw him. He bawled, too, after he got me down.
Dad was still at work when we got back to the cottage, thank God, so at least I didn’t have to deal with him, but after I took a shower Tommy yelled at me for almost an hour and kept asking me why I’d do something so stupid. I’d never seen him so mad. I couldn’t tell him the truth, though, because it would have hurt him too much to hear it. Besides, he wouldn’t have understood.
To people like Tommy, suicide is never an option. The idea of killing himself has never crossed his mind. He believes that no matter how shitty today is, tomorrow will be better, and if tomorrow is shitty, too, then next week or next month everything will sort itself out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to him spout obnoxious, cloying bromides like “Just wait: the pendulum will swing from bad to good again,” or “You’ll see, the wheel will turn full circle,” or—the one I hate the most—“You just have to hold on till dawn.” In his reality, guilt and pain can be dealt with by simply flipping a switch. And what’s especially irritating is that he really, truly has faith that the world works like that for everybody, and all people like me need to do to fix ourselves is to “Turn that frown upside down.”
God. I should have hung him instead of myself.
The reason he got so pissed at me that day was because he thought I’d made a conscious choice to commit suicide. He probably still thinks that. I’m sure if you asked him he’d tell you that I had a plan about where to tie the rope, and what stump I should stand on, and what time of the afternoon I wanted to try it—as if I had an outline in my head for the whole thing. Something like:
(1) Get home from school.(a) Have snack.(b) Brush teeth.
(2) Dangle from tree by neck until dead.(a) Loll tongue, turn purple.(b) Severely inconvenience Tommy.
But it wasn’t like that.
There was no premeditation, no schedule, no design. Blackness just came down in my head, like a curtain at the end of a play. That’s all. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s as if my mind hung up a sign in the window that said “Out to lunch,” and my hands and feet did the rest for me. Instinct took over, and sometimes instinct isn’t about survival. Sometimes it’s only about stopping the pain, however you have to do it.
I had a bad rope burn around my neck and I had to wear a turtleneck for three days to cover it. Tommy watched me like a hawk for more than a month, and he made me promise not to do anything like that again.
But I had my fingers crossed when I promised, so of course it didn’t count.
Simon doesn’t come back after class, but Ted Baker is standing in the door when I dismiss the kids. He comes in while I’m erasing the blackboard and perches his fat left ass-cheek on my desk and his fat right foot on my floor. He’s wearing bright blue tennis shorts and a polo shirt, and he’s got black dress socks on under his sandals.
I can’t stand this guy. We’ve known each other for decades, because we’re the same age and we both grew up in Walcott. He was an asshole when we were in school and he’s even more of an asshole now. He was the kind of kid who did one stupid thing after another—poured sugar in gas tanks, pulled the fire alarm during basketball games, set fires in trash cans—and he never once got caught. I could have ignored all that, though, because none of it affected me directly, but one time he decided it would be funny to pee on Tommy’s clothes in the locker room while Tommy was in the shower. I remember catching him doing it and I remember moving toward him, but I don’t remember anything else about the fight until I heard Tommy’s voice in my ear whispering, “Please let go of him, Nathan. He can’t breathe.” Tommy’s arms were wrapped around me from behind, and I remember looking down at Baker and seeing that I was kneeling on him and his face was purple and his eyes were frantic and his hands were trying to pry my fingers off his throat. My forearms were scratched and bloody and the right side of my face felt numb. I let go and stood up, and I remember wondering why all the other boys in the locker room backed away from me when I went to my locker to give Tommy my clothes to wear.
Anyway, Baker never did anything to Tommy or me again, but he hates us both, and I know it pisses him off to no end that I work here and he hasn’t been able to get rid of me. I was here before he was, and the superintendent, Madeline Huber, won’t let him fire me, but he’s been a thorn in my side for years, burying me with paperwork and making frequent classroom “visits” to evaluate my teaching. (It’s his doing, by the way, that I no longer have a summer vacation to speak of. He somehow managed to convince the school board—over my strident protests—that I should be permanently drafted into the summer school’s remedial teaching program.) I have yet to receive a positive evaluation from him, but for some reason Huber doesn’t care.
He clears his throat and rubs his hands together. “How’s it going, Nathan?”
“It’s going fine, Ted. I take it Vernette came to talk to you.”
“She did. She said the new kid—what’s his name?”
“Simon Hart.”
“She said this Hart kid flipped her off and called her a bitch and you didn’t do anything about it.”
“That’s not true. I kicked him out of class. And he only flipped her off because she was rude to him when he walked in the room.”
He gestures for me to sit down at one of the kid’s desks. “That doesn’t justify him giving her the finger.”
I stay standing. “No, it doesn’t. That’s why I kicked him out.”
“Why didn’t you send him to me? That’s why I’m here.”
“And what would you have done? Suspended him?”
“Probably. The school has a no-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.”
“What are you talking about? He wasn’t hitting on her, Ted, he was just flipping her off.” I wander over to the window. There’s a hot breeze blowing through and I can feel sweat on my back and in my armpits. I turn to face him. “She kind of