WE AGREED THAT MR. COOPER was the go-to guy for support and advice on this one. We’d keep our mouths shut about cutting down the flags. It would be our little secret for now. But if we were to pull off a children’s crusade, it would be good to have at least one adult in on the action.
“Maybe we should call it a young adult crusade,” Ashley said. “I mean, seriously, look at the size of my boobs. I’m not exactly a child.”
“Oh my God, here we go again!” I sighed. “And thanks, Ash. You always make me feel so much better about myself.”
“We! I meant we! Our boobs! We’re not children!”
“Boobs or no boobs, let’s stick with the Children’s Crusade. It rolls off the tongue much better. Plus, it packs a much more powerful punch. There’s something about being a young adult that’s kind of pathetic.”
All week long in science class, Mr. Cooper had been on a tear about climate change. Humans burning fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—and pumping all those heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the air and warming up the planet. His lectures were a cross between a rant and a sermon. He was combing and flossing and flossing and combing so obsessively I was getting anxious his hair would all fall out and his teeth would explode out of his gums. There he’d be, bald and toothless and still going off.
Mr. Livingston, the moronic math teacher that he was, had the stupidity to walk in on Coop in the middle of one of these tirades.
“Mr. Cooper!” Livingston said, his squirrelly face twitching away. “My students next door are extremely distracted by the volume of your voice. It is extremely difficult for young minds to concentrate when you continually shout out your opinions about controversial subjects. Do you mind, sir, turning it down a notch?”
“Turn it down?” Coop snorted, turning it up. “Turn it down? I’ll give you ‘turn it down’!” He threw back his head, closed his eyes, and howled like a coyote: “Yip yip yip yow-ow-ow-ow!”
Livingston, wild-eyed and trembling, backed away and skedaddled out of the classroom while Mr. Cooper glared at him like a wild animal.
“A D!” Coop howled, the coyote still possessing him. “That man gets a D! A D for Denier!”
No one had a clue what he was talking about.
“Most of you have Mrs. Osgood for English, correct?” Mr. Cooper asked, his voice regaining some degree of normalcy.
We all groaned, images of poopy diapers bringing on the gag reflex.
“And you’re reading The Scarlet Letter?”
More groans.
“What did the character Hester Prynne wear on her dress?”
“An A,” Ashley shouted. “A for adulteress. A for affair.”
What had gotten into Ashley? Had she actually read the book? First spouting off history facts and now a completed English assignment? I made a mental note to take her temperature and make sure she wasn’t sick or something.
“Exactly!” Coop said. “A scarlet letter of shame! A physical manifestation of sin! For all the world to see!” Mr. Cooper raised his voice even louder. His whole body trembled as he spoke.
“No A’s for Livingston. That’s way too good for him! He gets a scarlet D—D for denier! A climate change denier—the worst kind!”
Evidently Mr. Livingston was one of the folks on Coop’s shit list who still didn’t believe that humans were the cause of climate change.
“Only God can change the climate,” we had once overheard Mr. Livingston say. This did not go down well with our science guru.
Mr. Cooper turned his back to us and began yelling through the wall that separated the two classrooms.
“Do the math, Livingston!” he shouted, pounding on the wall. “No more multiplying the lies! No more subtracting the truth! Add up the facts, Livingston! The wonderful thing about science is that it’s still true even if you don’t believe it!”
With a final flourish he flung his flosser at the wall and gave it a solid kick.
Even for Coop this was way over the top. To trash another teacher in front of us? None of us could stand Mr. Livingston, but it still seemed a little harsh.
Ashley passed me a note.
“Has Coop lost it?” it read.
Mr. Cooper stopped his rant and, still trembling, walked over to my desk.
“Give it to me,” he said. Even in the middle of a mental meltdown there was nothing that escaped that man.
“Give you what?” I asked innocently.
“Give me the note. Now!” He snatched it out of my hands.
“‘Has Coop lost it?’” he read out loud to the entire class. Ashley covered her face with her hands and slumped down in her seat.
“‘Has Coop lost it?’” he repeated.
Total silence. It was so quiet you could hear crickets.
“Raise your hands if you think I’m crazy,” he said.
It was an awkward moment. We all looked around at each other anxiously.
“I’m serious. Hands up if you think I’m crazy.”
“Crazy in a good way?” Ashley asked. “Or crazy in a psycho-killer, looney-bin, crystal-meth, whacked-out, get-me-the-hell-out-of-here-right-now kind of way? I’ll be the first to put my hand up for the good kind of crazy.”
“Me too,” I said. Most of the class nodded. A few seemed to be holding back for the second option.
That seemed to break the tension. Mr. Cooper sighed, picked up the flosser and put it and the comb back in his front pocket.
“Livingston!” he yelled to the wall. “Get in here!”
The door opened and Mr. Livingston awkwardly shuffled into the front of the classroom.
“Mr. Livingston,” Coop began. “I would like to apologize for my unprofessional and disrespectful behavior. For the rest of the period, I will put a capital Q into Quiet. And while we may disagree about the facts of climate change, it was inappropriate for me to equate you with an adulterer.” Mr. Cooper put particular emphasis on the word adulterer.
It was hard to tell whether that was yet another diss or a sincere apology.
Coop held out his hand. “Please accept my heartfelt request for forgiveness.”
I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if Mr. Cooper had had one of those buzzers or zappers or mini-Tasers or fake-flower water-squirters or some other bizarre gag thing and had socked it to Livingston yet again.
Mr. Livingston, licking his lips, his eyes nervously scanning the room, seemed to be thinking the same thing. He limply shook Mr. Cooper’s hand, mumbled something that sounded like a yes, and filed silently out of the room.
“Call me crazy,” Mr. Cooper said, turning toward us. “Believe me, I’ve been called worse, that’s for damn sure. But, for the record, allow me to tell you what real crazy is.”
Mr. Cooper’s voice went all soft and quiet—super-spooky. We had never heard him talk like this. It was barely audible, barely above a whisper.
“Real crazy is wildfires burning out of control out West. No rain in California. Torrential flooding around here.
“Real crazy is the glaciers melting and the sea levels rising.
“Real crazy is the millions, or is it billions, of people who live near the coast line, with no way out.”
Mr. Cooper’s voice began to rise. He had stopped his pacing and was standing stock still in the middle of the room, gazing upwards, his arms out to his side with his palms facing forward. He looked like one of those statues you see in front of some Catholic churches.
The class was mesmerized.
“Real crazy is storm after storm, each one worse than the one before, plowing right on through,” he continued.
“Real crazy is cranking up the earth’s thermostat, degree after degree, and burning up the very crops we need to survive.
“Real crazy is trying to get out of the hole we’re in by digging even deeper. Or in the case of Mount Tom, not digging but blowing it up. Blowing it up and polluting our rivers and making us sick so we can go ahead and burn more of the stuff that’s gotten us into this damn mess to begin with.
“You want crazy? That’s crazy! I may need a checkup from the neck up. I may be a whacked-out, wigged-out, mondobizarro, certifiable crank.” His voice became menacing. “But I am nothing, nothing compared to that!”
He sat down on the edge of his desk looking somewhat sad and disheveled, blankly staring off into space. The class was quiet. More crickets. Everyone looked at their feet, or out the window—anywhere but at Mr. Cooper.
A minute went by. Then three, or four. No one moved. No one seemed to breathe. We all sat still in awkward silence till the bell rang and then, like Livingston, we filed wordlessly out of the classroom.