Friday morning Clarence sat right down and asked her if he could work on his essay instead of penmanship. So he really planned to enter the essay contest. He might be gone, she thought, before the contest was judged.
She felt tired. Her daughter had been up half the night with stomach flu. Her own stomach felt as if it were drifting from its moorings. She felt grateful for her morning chores. But when she got to the attendance sheet, she stopped. She dropped her pen, let her shoulders droop, and gazed off at nothing, one hand covering her mouth. "I don't know how to tell him," she thought. "Oh, God."
"Clarence, come here a minute."
Clarence took his usual stance, leaning on the edge of her desk. Pitching her voice low for this private talk, she said, "We had a meeting about you last week, and I was therrrre and some other people were therrrre..." She heard in her own voice the exaggerated cadence adults use to coax little children off to sleep, a voice that rarely works, of course. Perhaps the strangeness of her cadences put Clarence on his slowly turning wheel. He was standing sideways to her by the time she had managed to tell him that he was going to a new class.
She had her old voice back at least. "So anyways, I don't know when you're going there, but I want you to know that's where you're going. I also want you to know that you're not going there because of the way you've behaved or anything like that. Mrs. Zajac isn't sending you there for a punishment. She's sending you there because I think it's going to help you. I think you'll like it, as a matter of fact. You'll probably like it more than this school, because there's only twelve kids in the room and the teacher will be able to give you more attention. What do you think of that?" She waited. He didn't answer.
"Think you're going to want to go?"
He shook his head.
"Why not?"
He wouldn't speak. His eyelashes fluttered. No other part of him moved.
She tried for a while longer, and then she said, "Well, if you have any questions about it, you come up and ask me. Okay? Maybe you can think of some when you're sitting back down. As I said, it's not going to happen on Monday or anything like that. I don't know when, but I'll let you know. Okay?"
He walked slowly back to his desk. He sat staring at the board, mouth ajar. Then, in a flurry of movement, he pulled out pencil and paper and started working on his essay for the contest. A moment later, with the quickness of a woodland creature, Clarence turned his head toward the doorway just as Courtney, arriving late, appeared. Clarence looked at Mrs. Zajac. "Courtney!" he whispered.
By the end of math, Chris's ears were clicking. All day her illness expanded, and as it did, she grew markedly gentler, as she always did anyway on Friday. At the start of the day's last hour, she led the children down to the library to do research on their astronomy reports. She sat at a table a little distance away from them and didn't even try to work. Now and then children came up to her.
"Mrs. Zajac, there's lava on the moon!" said Felipe.
Ashley came up. "Mrs. Zajac, a comet is a fuzzy star."
Chris smiled. Her eyes were puffy. Her words were full of the sound of the letter b. She watched Clarence while holding tissues to her nose. He sat several tables away. He was pretending his chair was a horse. She smiled. She ached too much to try to do her duty by him. In sickness, she felt better than she had for days. All week the room had seemed to harbor the secret of Clarence's banishment. Now the feeling of intrigue had been swept away. The worst was almost over, and the revelation that had lain in front of her for the last six days, like a figure in the carpet, was not impossible to face. She had waited all week for the old Clarence to return. He had not. He had been trying to make up in a week for all the lessons he had missed in his six years of school. He looked happy now and mischievous, rocking in his chair and chewing gum openly, and she was glad. How frightened the boy must have been this past week and a half! she thought. And what amazing instincts he had.
Since the core, there had been important differences between what Chris knew and what she told herself and friends. She was relieved to feel so weak and aching that picking up a book was hard, and to blame microbes and not herself. Maybe she'd been coming down with flu all week, she told herself, and then she made a face. She gazed at Clarence. She wished she could think that others had made the decision to send him away. She had tried to believe that all week. Well, in fact, they had. She had not argued for Alpha. But she hadn't really argued against it. Only she had made the decision not to try to prevent the decision. "I let him down in a way," she thought. "That's why I can't sleep." There. She'd faced it all.
"Every hundred and fifty years Pluto moves into Neptune's orbit," Judith said to Alice in a loud voice a few tables away.
This week's scary gloom might not have come entirely from Clarence. In any case, Chris thought it was a warning. Maybe she was getting stale. She'd take her usual countermeasure and make a change. Al had asked her to teach sixth grade next year. That would mean new colleagues and a new curriculum. She'd have to spend a lot of summer vacation working on new lesson plans. But that would be fun. She liked that part of education, she thought. She was glad that she still did.
Chris was sick all weekend, and she slept and slept. She called in sick on Monday. The substitute, a college freshman on spring break, had it easier than Pam, because Clarence was still behaving fairly well.
When Chris walked in on Tuesday morning, her face was pale. At the start of math, Manny bickered with Horace.
"Just a minute!"
Chris stood before the low math group with her arms folded on her chest.
"Whether you realize it or not," she said to them, "Mrs. Zajac is back!"
They quieted down. In a moment, though, Manny started whispering to Jorge. Mrs. Zajac advanced on Manny. He stopped and lifted his eyes to her.
"Do I look like the sub who was in here yesterday?" she said to Manny.
Manny leered up at her. "No," he said. "She was younger."
Color moved up the nape of Mrs. Zajac's neck. She laid a hand flat on her breastbone and, tilting her head back, let loose her high-pitched, raspy laugh. The members of the top group stopped their work and turned around to see what they had missed.