Two

Back in the past, the narrator recants a conflict with his elementary school.

October 1998

 

The woman who sat behind a pristine folding desk and swirled a Splenda into her mug was an idiot. I could tell. Idiots do this weird trick with their noses when they look at you, and this woman had apparently taken gold at the nose trickery Olympics. First she pursed her lips in while simultaneously inhaling a single sustained hiss of air into her nose. Then she craned her whole head forward tilted her head up so that anything dwelling in her nostrils could see me just as well as her eyes. The nose, now a more of a disgusting kind of potato fixed to this idiot's face, scrunched up tightly. And then the finale, the gesture of this woman's disqualification from the kingdom of sentient life forms. She released the air, not as one normally blows away an expired breath, but rather as a horse does, with lips rapidly vibrating and saliva bombs noisily ejecting.

 

Content, the idiot leaned back into her armchair, took a ceremonial first sip of coffee, and mouthed the highlighted sentences as she proceeded to read through the report on the pristine folding desk. She seemed to periodically read a word or two of ecumenical importance, which she then slowly and deliberately circled with a pink gel pen.

 

As this seemed poised to go on for the next several minutes, I elected to scan the petty office for something – anything – of incongruous intelligence. The room itself seemed like it had been grudgingly partitioned from other offices. That tired gray-pink color of paint covered all the paintable territory of the walls that were available during the latest remodel. Two towers of filing cabinets huddled in a corner, and a few rows of crimson bookcases displayed volumes of immaculately-labeled purple binders of education code revisions. Faded Beanie-Babies gave me dusty sighs from a number of perches around the room. A chameleon and a flamingo seemed displeased to be garrisoned at the corners of her desk.

 

The desk itself was no exception to the apparent rule of everything about the assistant principal's office; it was fake and it was pink. On it was the report, neatly collated into her daily agenda, the mug whose contents must have finally been sweet enough, and lastly the precious placard.  The tidy chrome typecast of the idiot's name was a plaque of legend; never in the whole history of WOE had such a small piece of dull furniture been so odious to such a vast body of the falsely accused. Its triangular construction was sturdy, structurally efficient, and built to last, its font neutral silver and eye-pleasing. But just try to take a seat in the stained suede of history where I sat now, and endure the concentrated boredom of figuring out the placard. It read plainly "Assistant Principal Brody". It was the sole real thing in the office of motley pastels. It was the most nauseating counterfeit of all.

 

A slurp from the mug signified the commencement of hostilities, and I did not sit up. Brody's openers were always the same.

 

"Well, Andrew, why are we here today?" She crocked forward to better resemble a strawberry-frosted vulture. "Can you tell me what you've done wrong?" Those questions were ones that could only have been discovered in the stickiest and slimiest of caves somewhere.  But they were classics in their own right. Teachers must learn them when they go to teaching school.

 

"I don't know."

 

"Andrew, the students at White Oak are all grown up. They are all White Oak Wonders. Each knows when to take responsibility for their mistakes." I thought of my WOW certificate decaying in a landfill somewhere. "You know Mrs. Blake loves you to death, Andrew. And then Katyya's mother had to come pick her up because she was crying so much. Andrew, you deliberately made her cry. Do you know how unacceptable your behavior was?" She had accelerated while she said this, then realized, and then creaked back into her chair. Smile and quick slurp.

 

"Mrs. Blake doesn't have anything to do with this."

 

"Andrew, your irresponsibility required her to phone your mother. She is very disappointed in you, Andrew. She thought you had outgrown this stage of misbehavior." She paused. The sugar-coated gears in the idiots head crunched together at uneven intervals. "It was very difficult for her to explain you to Katyya's mother, Andrew. She hasn't lived in America for very long. She was confused when Mrs. Blake explained my obligation to punish her daughter for voluntarily departing campus grounds without appropriate authorization." Brody read the code verbatim, enunciating the caveat with the glorious notion of finally having me cornered.

 

At once, I was angry.

 

For once, I was angry.

 

"I told her to get some ice cream. I told her she needed some ice cream! I told her we could –"

 

She had risen. "You are not allowed to leave my campus for any –"

 

"Well you can't punish someone you've never even noticed before! She has no –!"

 

"YOU DO NOT TELL STUPID GIRLS THEY MAY BREAK SCHOOL RULES!" In an instant, Brody had traded her grip on the mug for one on the placard. She hunched on it, pumped vehement idiot-hisses through her lungs, glared at me in violent confusion. I stared too. I was a silhouette in her office. It hurt her somehow.

 

Creaking punctured the standoff. A far door had cracked open in the hallway outside. I heard two gentle feet shuffle inside. They were whimpering.

 

I grunted up from my chair, turned back to face an Assistant Principal Brody startled into petrifaction. Here was the real definition of ignorance, expressible only when too many hatreds eat you up inside. For a long moment, those pitiful gears ceased grinding altogether. She just didn't know who to hate.

 

I exhaled. "She has no friends."

 

I turned one last time, stepped out from the office door, and walked to face the solitary form of Katyya, the five month old American, ensconced in the waiting area. No one else would hear. "I don't have any, either, Kat." I was gone before her gifted eyes looked up.