JARVIS, THE ENGLISH TEACHER, WAS PROBABLY forty, but he had this look in his eyes like someone who’d been around for a hundred years. He was wearing a yellow Oxford shirt with a frayed, unbuttoned collar whose tips turned up like the chips in Mexican restaurants. With one hand he was holding a marker in front of a whiteboard, and he held a coffee mug that said OHIO TURNPIKE in the other.
Instead of desks, Jarvis’s room was filled with totally weird furniture: old stuffed easy chairs, a couple of discarded dining-room chairs with Oakhurst crests on them, a blue wooden bench that looked like it was from a Little League dugout, and a fancy couch, which, by the time I came into the room, three A-listy girls had already claimed.
A desk in the corner was piled with a half dozen books about Zen Buddhism and what looked like about three years’ worth of ungraded papers, even though the year hadn’t even started. An old white plastic boom box from somewhere like Kmart sat on a windowsill playing early Clash.
I went for a wooden chair. A Korean boy and girl sat next to each other on the baseball bench. Then Caroline came in, eyes to the floor. She sat next to the two Korean kids on the bench.
Suddenly, Jarvis scrawled something on the board like he was attacking it. He was writing so hard that the marker slipped out of his hand and flew over his shoulder. The Korean boy snatched it from the air, without changing the deadpan expression on his face. Some of the kids applauded. The kid stood, bowed in all directions, and handed the marker back to Jarvis, who was smiling.
“Okay. I’m Mr. Jarvis, and this is what we’re going to talk about all year,” he said, pointing at what he’d written. I couldn’t read it.
“Albanian jumnys?” said the Korean girl.
“American journeys,” said Jarvis. “We will not be identifying subordinate clauses, dangling participles, or gerundive phrases. If you don’t know what those are, I believe you’ve all been issued grammar books, which I won’t assign anything from. I just ended a sentence with a preposition, which tells you how much I care about grammar. We’ll be spending our time taking journeys. Moving forward. Because if you stand still, you die.”
A cocky kid with blond hair and a blue Oakhurst Hall blazer raised his hand and spoke without being asked to. “Mr. Jarvis, are you playing the Clash so we’ll think you’re cool?” A couple of A-list girls giggled.
Jarvis shot a caffeinated glance back at the kid. “You are . . . ?”
“Ted Thorn. I’m the vice president of the fifth form,” he said like it was absurd that Jarvis didn’t know who he was.
“Officer Thorn, there are eight hundred students here. I know about five of their names. Sometimes I can remember my own. Don’t take it personally. To answer your question, I covered a Clash tour for Rolling Stone back in the Bronze Age. So, Mr. Thorn, did you manage to find time this summer to do the reading?”
“Sure. The Gatsby guy didn’t make any sense. Who’d be unhappy if they lived in a house that big?”
“But why do you think Tom Buchanan takes a mistress who’s married to a guy who owns a gas station?”
Silence. Jarvis scanned a piece of paper on his desk. “Lefferts?”
Damn. I sifted through my head for a bullshit answer.
“Maybe,” Caroline said, “the author wants to point out how sometimes people in the upper class never bother to grow up and just grab whatever or whoever they want.” Blushing at the attention, she added, “Like in Dreiser’s American Tragedy, where the upper-class guy sleeps with the lower-class girl and then drowns her.”
“Exactly. The American journey doesn’t have to be a physical journey,” Jarvis said, nodding. “It can be about growth, about being willing to change. Or choosing not to. Like Thorn. That was your name, right? As in, ‘in my side’?”
The kid blushed.
Then Caroline said, “‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”
“The last line of the book, and the best,” said Jarvis, excited and amped. “Meaning?”
“Maybe,” said Caroline, “that unless we try and break away, break the mold, we’re doomed to repeat the old mistakes. That if you want things to change, you have to do it yourself.”
Jarvis nodded. “And you are . . .”
“Caroline Callahan.”
“Well, Caroline, perhaps you could tutor Mr. Lefferts for the Gatsby quiz before Wednesday’s class.”
Caroline was first out the door, head down. I was second. I caught up to her to thank her for saving my butt.
“Sure,” she said before I had time to say anything, and unzipped her green pack. It had a Hello Kitty thingie hooked to the zipper. “Here,” she said. It was her copy of Gatsby. “It’s a real fast read.” She hurried down the hall before I could say a word.
• • •
Bruno, in history, was a guy in his fifties with a gray crew cut, and his class was clearly going to be a bitch. No one spoke a word as we all sat down. He was not warm and fuzzy. We gathered around one table; the only faces I recognized were Simon Ridgway and the Korean girl. A super-pretty, super-preppy blond girl was actually filing her nails, which seemed stupid until, thirty seconds into the class, Bruno assigned a five-page paper—“Compare ancient Sparta to Al-Qaeda”—and when he said, “Anybody know why this is the assignment?” the blonde said, “They’re both trying to bring down the superpowers of their time. Sparta wants to overthrow Athens in 456 BC; radical Arabs want to castrate the United States today.”
Damn. And this was the airhead?
“Good, Lucy,” said Bruno. “Santayana was right. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. As in ancient Athens, we are witnessing the death of a noble experiment: Democracy then, capitalism now. Nice ideas, but both forgot to factor in the human flaws.”
“Like power-lust,” said the Korean girl. “Like greed.”
No one said anything. So I did. “I guess both of them looked good on paper.” I looked at Lucy, but she was still filing her nails.
“Speaking of the paper,” said Bruno, expressionless, “I need five sources. No Wiki. Due Wednesday. Double-spaced, inch-and-a-half margins, twelve-point font: Times New Roman. Broken printers are not excuses. I don’t want ’em online, either. And I want big picture. I care less about the name of the Greek god of wine than knowing why they had a god of wine. Anyone?”
“Because grapes and olive oil were their major crops,” said Simon. “And drinking wine makes you feel a lot better when you’re being invaded than drinking olive oil. And Dionysus was a much cooler god than the god of olive oil. Was there one of those?”
“There was a god of everything,” Bruno said. “Back then, people didn’t know that their fate could be in their own hands. In Egypt, they thought that the gods ran everything, and that they couldn’t veer from the path that the gods had given them. They were wrong. All right, good day, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Sir?” Lucy said. “Class just started.”
“Then I suggest you head to the library and start researching the paper.”
I figured Bruno wasn’t going to accept Spartan Slaydown: Tears for Spears as a source.
• • •
I had hated science before, and it didn’t look like anything was going to change at Oakhurst Hall. The bio teacher was about twenty, totally out of it, a complete weirdsmobile. One of his sideburns was an inch longer than the other, and his tie had about seven stains on it. “Biology isn’t a science here,” he said. The class was a lab, stainless steely and creepy. “It’s about the world. You’ll learn the things you have to learn, and I hope you learn them quickly, so that we can spend more time out in the ponds and swamps.”
At least he was harmless. The French teacher, Booth, looked like an intern at Vogue, with all the right clothes and too much of all the right makeup. She spent most of the class talking about how much she’d loved her trip to some château over the summer, throwing in a bunch of French words like charcuterie. Then, in the middle of her story, she suddenly yelled at Simon for putting his feet on a chair. She went totally schizoid, and started ranting about how we weren’t little kids anymore and it was going to be a long year if we didn’t take her classroom seriously. Then she turned back into the other person, and finished her story about sun and cheese and grapes.
• • •
“Last year was her first year out of Hamilton,” Simon told me after the class. “Didn’t have a clue what to do with her life, so naturally, she gets a job teaching at her alma mater. Guarantee she spends the whole year taking her failures out on us. She can baizer mon arse.”
Intro to calculus completely went over my head. “I didn’t get half of that,” I said to Spencer. “What the hell’s calculus?”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Newton knew that certain celestial forces could not be explained by simple algebra. Should you need tutoring,” he said, “feel free to ask. My fees are competitive: Twenty dollars an hour.”
“You’re serious?”
Spencer wiped his glasses on his tie. “I’m always serious. I fail to see what purpose humor serves, evolutionarily.”
There seemed to be a lot of people around here who felt that way.