Chapter 24 . The Boyfriend
The next couple of weeks went by, with a noticeable easing of the pressure. The cops were leaving us alone, our parents seemed to be satisfied, and only the meanest of the teachers were really bearing down on us. As we approached the Thanksgiving break, all four of us were at least halfway caught up on our backlog of homework and quizzes, thanks to a lot of help from our friends.
I was talking to Kate between classes on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, and she was telling me that she was anxious to see Miss Delisle, and hopefully to speak with her.
“She told us on Friday that her boyfriend was driving here from California, and she expected him on the weekend. He had been on the west coast for a month, and she was looking forward to being with him again.”
Miss Delisle had become pretty good friends with Kate and Jackie, and she shared things with them that she didn’t tell the other kids.
“Is he a student, too?” I asked.
“He was, but he quit school after their Junior year. She was kind of vague about why. They drove to California together after the spring semester, then came back here at the end of July. He’s been back and forth twice since then.”
“To California and back, twice? That’s a little strange.”
“It seems strange, yeah, but she says he’s kind of a free spirit; does what he pleases.”
Miss Delisle was definitely in a good mood that afternoon. She was always friendly, anyway, but she seemed more sparkly than usual. We had a good time in class that day; Mrs. Rock left us for most of the period, and Miss Delisle kept everything simple and fun. Well, as simple and fun as diagramming sentences could be.
A lot of things happened the next day. It was the last day before the Thanksgiving holiday break, so all of the kids were restless, and the teachers had a hard time getting anyone to concentrate. Pratt was on a little rampage in French class, making sure we all remembered how stupid we were and making me stand and conjugate verbs we had only learned the day before. Business as usual.
English class started out fine. Mrs. Rock reminded us that, after the holiday, we would only have three and a half weeks until Christmas vacation, and we would need to have a proposal for our term paper ready before the break. Not a half-baked idea, but a solid proposal. Now, this was seventh grade, so we didn’t have much experience with essays, not proper essays, and this paper had to be at least ten pages, which was longer than anything any of us had ever written.
I had some ideas for my paper, but nothing definite. We had kidded Tom about Miss Delisle’s suggestion that he write his paper about his “alternative approach” to diagramming sentences, but we knew that it didn’t really exist, and I’m sure she knew it, too.
I don’t know if the term paper had anything to do with it, but, about ten minutes into the class, one of the boys sitting at the front of the room all of a sudden threw up. It wasn’t that unusual; almost every day some kid, somewhere in the school, was throwing up. After making sure the kid was okay, Rock sent him off to the basement to wash his face, then left to find Old Ben.
Old Ben came in a few minutes later, but Rock didn’t come back. Ben had his bucket of stuff – I think it was called “speedy-dry,” or something like that – that was just like cat litter. He dumped some on the pile of vomit, then went off to get his mop bucket. The stuff covered up the smell, so Miss Delisle went right on with the class, assuring everyone that she would be available to discuss the term paper ideas when we got back from the Thanksgiving break.
Old Ben came back shortly to scoop up the mess and mop that part of the floor. Miss Delisle was answering a question about the term paper from one of the kids when everybody all at once noticed that there was a man standing in the doorway. Ben had left the door open when he rolled his mop bucket in. The man was young, maybe twenty or so, tall and thin, and looked like he had stepped out of a Hollywood surf movie or a Beach Boys album cover, with his Levis and Pendleton jacket, except that he wasn’t very tanned and wasn’t very handsome. He looked like someone who rarely saw the sunlight.
Miss Delisle turned when she noticed everyone staring at the door. She gave a little gasp, but quickly recovered as the man smiled at her and tentatively stepped into the room. She walked over towards him and beckoned him to come in. The man reached out as if to put his arm around her, but she pushed his hand away as she turned towards the class.
“Kids,” she said, rather nervously, we thought, “this is Roger. He’s my boyfriend.”
“Hi,” Roger said, beaming a big smile at us, “I don’t want to interrupt what you’re doing. I’m planning to be a teacher myself, and I just thought I’d check out what Sally’s doing in her favorite class. Miss Delisle, I mean.”
She whispered something to him.
“I’ll just find an empty seat in the back, and sit and watch.” He strode quickly to the back of the room, where there were several unoccupied seats, and sat down as we all stared.
It was kind of a nervous feeling in the room. Old Ben had stopped what he was doing and was staring at Roger as he took his seat. Ben didn’t say anything, but there was a strong impression of disapproval as he finished up and wheeled his mop bucket out the door. We all felt the same thing. We didn’t really know the dos and don’ts for student teachers, but we all kind of understood that having your boyfriend show up at school wasn’t quite the proper thing.
Anyway, Miss Delisle continued, answering a couple more questions about the term paper, then shifting to a brief exercise in diagramming for the rest of the period. She was functioning smoothly, not letting Roger’s presence put her off at all, until Rock came back into the room a few minutes before the bell. Those last few minutes went by with Mrs. Rock and Miss Delisle standing together by the desk in front of the room, Miss Delisle whispering while Rock stared stonily at Roger, who just smiled.
The bell finally rang, and we all filed out of the room, wondering what would transpire among the three adults after we left, and anxious for an opportunity to talk about it. I had to go to the basement, urgently, so I missed the chatter with my classmates, but I talked to Old Ben when I came out of the boys’ room. He was not happy.
“It’s a bad thing,” he said, shaking his head back and forth, “That Miss Delisle should have told him not to come here. Mrs. Rock, well, I don’t know what she’ll do, but she’ll be some mad, I can tell you. And it’s a good thing the Principal’s not here right now; did you know he parked that thing in the Principal’s parking space?”
“That thing?”
“It’s like a little bus; a Volkswagen.”
Well, everyone was talking about it after school. We could all see the strange-looking VW bus with California plates parked in the Principal’s spot outside the east end of the building, and Roger smiled and waved to us as he walked out to sit in the van and wait for Miss Delisle. She usually took the bus to school and back, but he was giving her a ride home today. We figured she was getting a royal chewing-out in the teachers’ room while he waited for her.
Jackie had the most interesting comment about Roger.
“Did anybody else notice that smell?” she asked.
None of us had noticed it, but he had walked right past Jackie’s desk on his way to the back of the room.
“I could smell his after-shave, but there was something else; it was almost skunky.”
That didn’t mean anything to us at the time, and we all went our separate ways, ready for a five day break from school.
That was the last time any of us actually saw Roger Warren, in person, although we heard things about him occasionally. When we came back after the break, Miss Delisle talked to Jackie and Kate about him. Apparently, Roger had been an education major, too, but he had become disillusioned with “the system,” whatever that meant, and dropped out after junior year at UVM. He had some kind of money making scheme that he wanted to work on for at least a year, and then he was going to finish school and become a science teacher.
She did get in some trouble for Roger showing up at the school, but, since she insisted that it was his idea, not hers, and it would never happen again, they weren’t too hard on her. Besides, everyone was a little slack on the day before a holiday break. Some of the teachers took the day off to get an early start, some had parties in their room instead of classes, and the Principal took the whole week off.
School resumed on November 30th, with only twenty-one school days until Christmas vacation. The four of us were still under the gun, with homework every night, and make-up quizzes at least once a week for the stuff we had missed, plus all the regular work. We were ready for vacation.
I had a scheme that I had hatched over the break, and I went about putting it in motion that first week in December. Mr. Ermentrout, our Social Studies teacher, had assigned us a paper in his class, as well. We were doing U.S. History, and the paper could be on any aspect of the subject. Since I had tentatively decided to write my English paper on my favorite Civil War general (the term paper for English was more about form than content, so it could be on any subject,) I thought, why not just write one paper for both classes?
Tom and Win thought it was a great idea, and thought they might do the same thing. But would the teachers let us do it? I thought Mr. Ermentrout would be by far the easier touch, so I started with him.
Mr. Ermentrout was our favorite teacher. He was able to make his lessons really fun; not in a fake, self-serving way like Mrs. Pratt, but in a genuine way that everyone appreciated. The best thing about him was his bizarre sense of humor. My friends and I were pretty extreme when it came to outrageous humor, and Ermentrout fed off our wackiness and came right back with his own.
Ermentrout had welcomed us back in school after our six-week adventure, if not with open arms, at least with a lot less hostility than most of the others. He had to toe the line with the official attitude towards us, but he couldn’t hide the amused gleam in his eyes whenever he looked at us.
I had a chance to broach the subject with him later that week and his first reaction, of course, was to laugh at me. I launched my pre-emptive defense before he could respond.
“It’s not plagiarism,” I insisted, “I’ve read the definition and all of the examples they give, and it’s definitely not plagiarism to borrow, or re-use your own work.”
“You’re right,” he said, “it’s not plagiarism, but that’s not the issue. The purpose of assigning a term paper is for you to do the work; the research, the formatting of the essay, and the actual writing. You’re all supposed to be writing two major essays this year; one for Mrs. Rock and one for me. Now you want to get away with writing just one paper.”
“Well, you know how much extra work we still have to do to catch up.”
“Which is your own fault.”
“Yes, but, doesn’t it seem much more efficient, and productive, to use the same work for two different classes?”
“Efficient, or lazy?”
“Well, you know that my Dad teaches a course in Motion and Time Studies at UVM, and he would argue that making the most productive use of your time and labor has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with efficiency.”
He smirked, put his right hand on his forehead, and shook his head back and forth, something he seemed to do frequently when dealing with me and my friends.
“I suppose Win and Tom want to be efficient with their papers, as well?” he asked.
“Well, maybe.”
“Look,” he said, spreading his hands wide, “I’m not saying I would do this for you if I could, but the point is moot, because the logistics just won’t work. My paper is due several weeks before Mrs. Rock’s. If it were the other way around, I could accept your essay that you had already submitted to her, and she would be none the wiser. That is, if I decided to do that, which I haven’t. But, the way the papers are scheduled, she would have to agree to accept work you had already submitted to me, and there is no way on God’s green earth that she will do that, and you know it.”
He was right, and I glumly accepted defeat, for now.
On Wednesday of the next week, I arranged to meet with Miss Delisle to discuss my term paper. We had a quiz in Science, which I finished quickly, and Mr. Trainor, our Science teacher, had agreed to give me a hall pass so I could go talk to Miss Delisle. I knew she was between classes that period, so I headed for the teachers’ room to find her.
The teachers’ room was on the stair landing between floors at the west end of the main building. I had never been in that room before; hardly any of the kids had been. I hesitated on the landing, hearing laughing voices from within the room, but I needed to do it, so I knocked on the door.
A voice called out, “Who is it?” They knew I wasn’t a teacher, or I would have just opened the door.
“Can I speak to Miss Delisle?” I asked, rather than saying my name.
I heard someone striding to the door, then Mrs. Rock’s unmistakable voice saying, “Don’t open the door! Just a minute.” Then I heard what sounded like a drawer being opened, the clink of glass on glass, then a drawer being shut.
The door opened, and Miss Delisle was standing there, smiling at me. She came out and closed the door behind her, then, in the informal way that drove Rock crazy, she suggested that we just sit on the stairs to discuss my term paper. We sat there for about ten minutes, and I explained my proposal for a paper on the Second Manassas campaign and the subsequent court-martial of General Fitz John Porter. I didn’t have a thesis yet.
“That’s alright,” she said, “but are you sure you can find enough research material?”
“Oh, yes. My sister or my Dad will bring me to the UVM Library, and I’m sure I can find enough material there.”
“Oh, that’s great. Well, it sounds like you’re on the right track.”
Then I decided to just go for it, and I blurted out my idea of using the same paper for two classes. To my surprise, she didn’t laugh or reject the idea.
“You know, Denny, I’ve known some kids at UVM who have done that. Some of the professors won’t accept it, but a lot of them will. But you know that there’s no way Mrs. Rock will agree.”
“I know.”
“And I’m sorry, but, you know I’m not going to be here after Christmas, and, even if I were, she’d never listen to me. So my approval won’t help you any.”
Yeah, I knew that. But Miss Delisle’s approval meant a lot to me anyway.
School crawled along at the usual glacial pre-holiday pace. We finally reached the last week, which was only three days. Christmas was on a Friday, and we had Thursday off, as well.
On Tuesday, we had the first of two Civil War themed skits in Social Studies. All the girls in the class performed a skit, written by Kate, about the Emancipation Proclamation, with some readings from Uncle Tom’s Cabin woven into the script. It was really good; very informative, well written and well presented.
The boys’ skit, on Wednesday, was a little livelier. Our subject was Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, and our skit, scripted by Tom, with a little input from me and Win, faithfully portrayed the actual events of that day in April 1865. It also included an artillery sergeant being run over by a caisson, a drummer boy, convincingly played by Win, brutally impaled on a cheval de frise, and an accidental explosion that left Lee and Grant as the only survivors. The skit ended with the floor covered with writhing, groaning bodies, the girls either laughing or groaning, and Mr. Ermentrout sitting in his chair, eyes and hands raised in supplication and asking, “Why me? Why me?”
Almost every class was fun that final day before Christmas. The teachers knew they weren’t going to get any serious work done, and they were ready for a break, too. Even Mrs. Pratt was in a party mood, doing her best imitation of an actual nice person. But she ruined it for Tom, Win, and me by giving us a load of catch-up homework to do over vacation.
The best was English, because the lovely Miss Delisle, knowing she would never see most of us again, threw caution to the winds and blatantly broke Mrs. Rock’s rules by giving each and every one of us a big hug as we filed out. You can bet we made those hugs last as long as we possibly could.