The school shut down, locking windows and doors, supposedly allowing no one in or out, when there were reports of violence in the neighborhood. The first lockdown of the week happened after a tenth grader at the nearby junior high stood up during algebra class, brought out a hammer, and started whacking his classmates. A month ago, the owner of a convenience store two blocks away had been killed during a regular transaction, and I passed the memorial of supermarket torches of roses and carnations set out by the mart every morning. I had seen the man the day before, a bald figure with a shiny, toffee face, who had moved here from Beirut. He had been sweeping the sidewalk then, and I remember brushing against his arm as I passed him, the way his upper arm was soft like a balloon. I read about his family in the newspaper for a couple days, the fund to send his award-winning clarinetist daughter to summer camp, and then I had to stop reading. I put a rose wrapped in a plastic paper on the memorial site. The next day, I walked down a different block.
I didn’t know what was going on today. I had worked here for a year and a half, and the lockdown protocol still messed me up, the click of the lock, the brisk, absurd drawing of the blinds, as though the thin plastic provided any protection from anything. I was not in a mood to be locked anywhere now, not since my boyfriend Hal left about four months ago. The kindergartners were supposed to go into lockdown position, sitting, crouched, knees to chest, in their uniforms, the blue pants and crisp white collared shirts. I was secretly glad that they ignored this. The girls clustered to make their own hair salon. The children didn’t want to stop introducing themselves; the Bengal tiger, orangutan, and poison dart frog wanted their turns even if, or perhaps especially if, a gunman burst into the room. Tyree rose slightly out of the group and announced, “I am a tapir,” and we all chimed, “You are one of us!”
Who was going insane this time? Was it a husband and wife? Was it a fed-up parent? Was it someone so lonely her body felt like it might split? Was it someone who had been stomped on so many times he had forgotten how to feel anything good? I stepped away from the nook and lifted one of the flimsy plastic blinds, peering at the empty playground; it was blanched, white from the sun, the metal slides starry with heat.
The school had been generally tense the last week, too, as the third, fourth, and fifth graders got ready for the End of Grade Tests, or EOGs. The flyers in the hallways started twenty days ago. Twenty days to the EOGS! Then Nineteen days, and so forth. It had the subtlety of a hurricane watch. Did they really think any of us would forget? The administration wanted Arthur to again be a “School of Distinction,” getting more government money if their test scores kept going up, and teachers gave the students the practice tests every day for three weeks; some demented fifth-grade parents kept showing up at school with the intent expressions of hunters. They were in search of scores. They followed them with the discrimination of statisticians, knowing the slight advantages a 95 gave over a 94; they stared at them as though they could predict the future of the world. Miss Eileen Hill, the guidance counselor and expert in student evaluations, was the one the parents sought out this time of year; she believed in numbers, percentiles, which all parents — suburban, inner-city, white, black — ate up. A score in the top 5 percent got you into Gifted. A score in the top 10 percent got you into an Honors track in sixth grade. The parents were greedy for every point, every question, every tiny glimmer of hope.
My cell phone buzzed. Tyree’s mother texted me twenty minutes into the lockdown. R U OK? I hoped, in a sanguine moment, that she was asking about me. That made her one of the good parents. The good parents were the ones who complimented my blouse, who touched my shoulder and asked, how are you? We were all there “for the children,” black, white, and brown, poor and rich, the ones who lived in the district and the ones who clamored for the waiting list. We were the public magnet school with the best test scores in the city — top five in the state. Mostly the parents wanted compliments about their children; no, the correct word was craved. They craved reassurance that their kids wouldn’t end up in the same sorry messes they were in, and this was true across the board, upper-middle class to lower.
“Who is it?” Peter Olsen whispered.
“I don’t know,” whispered Savannah.
“Do you think he has a hammer?” whispered Peter.
There was the sound of walking in the hallway, a skittering kind of walk, someone not running but falling across the hall. Mrs. Reeves looked up. She walked to the nook and gripped the sides of one of the bookshelves.
“Give me a hand,” she said.
She pushed one end, and I pushed the other, and we positioned a bookshelf so it was blocking the children. I looked at her.
“Class!” said Mrs. Reeves, clapping her hands in a rhythm that the children were supposed to imitate. They did, in a straggly way. The cramped nook, the bookshelf wall made them chatty. It was a bit hard to see them through the tower of chairs. Mrs. Reeves paced to the door and back and said, “It is time to sort macaroni.” She said this with a honeyed, calm authority, as though, of course, this was the only activity permitted at this moment in time. “Each of you move forty pieces of macaroni from this bowl into this one.” She set a few plastic bowls inside the reading nook. “Get exactly forty in each bowl. Go.”
WHICH CHILD WOULD I SAVE FIRST? I TRIED TO IMAGINE HOW MANY my body would cover. Five? Mrs. Reeves, taller than me, maybe eight? That left twelve of them to fend for themselves. Mo Sampson, the biter, maybe on one of his vampire-ish days, he could go. The girls. . I couldn’t sort through the girls. Keisha, the best reader, and who seemed, for an unknown reason, to see something good in me, could be saved first.
They sorted the macaroni. Mrs. Reeves sang “If I had a Hammer,” which was, I thought, a poor choice. Travis bit his fingernails until one began to bleed. I sat down in the nook with them. “You all turned in your permission slips for our field trip to the sea turtle hospital tomorrow, right?” I asked them, trying to normalize, distract, which was a teacher’s first strategy, in all situations; I told them all I knew about turtles. They leaned forward, the air thick with the salty sourness of their breath. They wanted to know how the injured turtles were rehabilitated, and if your hands smelled bad after you petted them. Keisha climbed into my lap. I tried not to encourage sitting on laps or they would all Velcro themselves to me, but since Hal left, and I was now alone in this town where we had moved together, I was so lonely I felt it, a cold pain, when I breathed. Keisha leaned back against me, and I let her.
Fifteen minutes went by. Twenty. I stood up, started organizing the chairs around the nook again. Outside, Tyree’s mother was unraveling.
LUV U WE’LL GET ICE CREM
TIE UR SHOES
U CAN WATCH TV TONITE