Classroom discipline was a rumor and the teaching was a formality.
The couple in the row behind Alex had been wrapped around each other for ten minutes, nibbling at each other’s necks, while up at the front the white man who taught English read Emily Dickinson aloud in the easy, worn voice of someone who had read her to a wall many times before.
The bell went and the room emptied in the time it took to blink.
Whatever else these kids were late for, it was never that.
“Hnh.”
Alex sighed and stayed in his seat.
This body’s English grades were bad, and the Chinese soul now living in it hadn’t improved them much.
Reading he could manage.
Writing and speaking were the holes, and the teacher was no use for either — not that Alex could really blame the man.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to care about his students.
He didn’t dare to.
Which meant nobody was going to teach him.
He’d been over the numbers carefully, and there was no version of the credit plan that went around English; the weighting was too heavy.
Fine.
If the conditions didn’t exist, he’d build them.
Library at lunch.
Borrow a stack of books and teach myself the rest.
Annoying, all of it, and after school there was that damn basketball again.
What does a straight-A machine need most of?
Time.
He dawdled at the desk until the room was nearly clear, then got up and headed for the cafeteria.
He had settled, tentatively, on a strategy for the bullying problem: keep his head down and be as close to invisible as a person could get.
Which reminded him — he needed to go and have a quiet word with his overenthusiastic math teacher.
Stop painting a target on my back.
Doing his best to take up no space at all, he drifted into the school cafeteria at a pace that was neither hurried nor slow.
This was the most orderly place in the building.
The vice-principal stood at the door policing the line, the PE teachers patrolled the floor in shifts, and security covered every exit.
The lunch ladies waited behind the steam.
On the walls hung posters of an old Black man, and under his face a line of big letters: 27 YEARS.
FREE AT LAST.
Under the old man’s smiling gaze Alex dealt with a hamburger that had meat in it, a heap of mashed potatoes, boiled broccoli and carrots swimming in a white sauce, and a large cup of soda.
Then he waited until no teacher was looking his way and sailed the tray into the recycling bin.
American schools let out early, so the lunch break wasn’t generous.
He went straight to the library, checked out a collection of Franklin Roosevelt’s speeches, and hustled over to the teachers’ offices to make his delicately worded request that the math teacher keep things a little quieter.
The math teacher was an elegant Black lady.
Since the leap in his scores she had looked at him with distinct approval, and she smiled before he had finished talking.
“Let me make you an offer instead. If you can pass my ninth-grade basic course exam, how would you feel about transferring to the advanced math class?”
“Advanced class?” Alex stopped.
“Advanced class!”
With the old lady patiently explaining, it came out like this: alongside the standard course for each year, American high schools also ran advanced classes — honors courses — for the top students who had capacity to spare.
Considerably harder.
Worth more credits.
“Okay. I’ll do my best!” The word credits put the energy straight back into him.
It was only an exam.
He said a cheerful goodbye to the math teacher and walked into the music teacher in the doorway.
She was white, middle-aged, with neat short hair, and she wasn’t much for small talk.
The school might be a wreck academically, but its arts and athletics were genuinely strong, and her orchestra and chorus were known well beyond the neighborhood — which meant her standards were merciless.
“Alexander, isn’t it? Last week your trumpet made several obvious mistakes in rehearsal.”
Alex went faint.
Of course.
It had to come home to roost sometime.
This body had real gifts for music and sport, music above all; he was the school orchestra’s first trumpet.
Unfortunately, since the switch, the math had improved and the ear and the physical coordination had simply gone.
“I’ll—”
He was planning to bluff his way past it.
“It won’t happen again!”
“It certainly won’t,” the music teacher cut in, flat and hard.
“The public performance is coming up and I am not taking a risk on you. At the next joint rehearsal you will not be playing the trumpet. Go.”
“What?”
“Triangle.”
“Okay…” Alex wiped his forehead.
“Do I still get the credits if all I’m doing is hitting a triangle?”
“You won’t make any more mistakes.”
“Right. Right…”
As long as the credits survived, the blow was nothing.
He got through the afternoon classes conscientiously and found Tony waiting outside at three, and the two of them left school the way they had come, in the back and front seats of the beat-up old Toyota belonging to Tony’s best friend, the boy everyone called Muffler.
“What happened?”
It took Alex until he was settled in the back to notice that neither of them was in any kind of mood.
Muffler started the car, turned around from the driver’s seat, pointed at the spot beside Alex, and drew a thumb across his own throat.
On the seat next to him were some dirty jerseys, a pile of pads, and two footballs.
“What’s that supposed to— wait. The team cut you? Both of you?” Alex understood the gesture.
Muffler nodded again, and Alex noticed the shine of tears in his eyes.
Tony and Muffler were starters on the school football team, Tony on defense, Muffler the running back on offense.
Alex had watched them play a practice game only last week.
In America, high school or college, football players walked around campus like they owned it.
Quarterbacks and star players were something closer to local dignitaries, and went through girls like socks.
Getting cut was a serious blow for the two of them.
Then again — they were both twelfth-graders, graduation was a few months off, and a team has to bring the next crop through sometime.
“Forget that. Why’s everybody calling you A Plus?”
Alex hadn’t said anything comforting yet.
Tony dragged a hand hard down his face and changed the subject himself.
“Uh…”
There were kids from Alex’s grade on the football team; that would be where Tony heard it.
“It’s nothing. I got an A-plus on the math test, so—”
He didn’t get to the end.
Both faces in the front seat, miserable a second ago, twisted up, and Muffler — who had earned his nickname by being the quietest, most inward human being either of them knew — whipped his head around and shouted, “An A-plus? You?”
“What? What’s wrong with that?” Alex felt obscurely guilty.
“Hahaha!” The two of them fell apart laughing.
“It’s not that funny.”
“It’s funny. A Plus. Hahaha—” Tony was laughing himself backward in the seat.
“It’s very funny.”
In any case the little episode blew the gloom out of the car.
The three of them laughed all the way down the block.
Muffler snapped the radio on, and Tony started rolling his shoulders to the rap that came out of it.
All we have is rap in this era, Alex thought, and allowed his thoughts to drift.