Gwendolyn expressed her worry despite the present lecture.
Mr. Caulier yanked back his words to a stop. He was explaining to his students the device of doppelgängers and their regular occurrence in Victorian literature. But a raised hand, quivering, signaled that this was no simple request for the restroom.
“Mr. Caulier. Something is wrong,” Gwendolyn said.
The forty-five-year-old teacher’s bushy eyebrows came together as if shaking hands in agreement: The lesson could wait; this claim from such a wide-eyed student should be given full attention.
The fluorescent light shone off Mr. Caulier’s greasy hair. A glassy, wet glow. He washed it nightly, scouring himself of the day’s grime and that rotting wood smell that permeated Birchland High School. Mr. Caulier constantly smoothed down his hair—a needless tic of nerves, feeding the grease and the expanding circle of nothing at the crown of his dented dome.
“Ooo, boy,” Nelson Burrows said. Jiggling his right leg from the heel, lounging at his desk next to Gwendolyn’s, he fancied himself the class clown. Or, at least, the shit-stirrer. But no one paid him any mind. His nasal voice repelled, and the constant, packed dirt underneath his fingernails didn’t help. His mother and father work at a humid manure plant. Bullshit runs in the family, his classmates thought.
When Mr. Caulier sauntered over to Gwendolyn’s desk, he avoided looking down at her soft lemon sweater. To stop himself from registering the shape of it.
Gwendolyn kept her hand up despite its shaking.
Nelson chimed in. “What da heck! Put your hand down!”
Mr. Caulier would normally ignore Nelson. He pitied this boy who felt the constant need to bark. Nelson was only lonely. But the dry redness of Gwendolyn’s typically radiant green eyes had Mr. Caulier spooked.
On this cloudy day, the bell rang regularly. No student arrived sick or distraught. No worrisome add-on found its way into Principal Sheerborn’s morning announcement. Tickets for the homecoming dance were available for purchase, 25 dollars apiece. The girls’ JV volleyball team had a game against Checker Prep at 6:30pm. In the Sally Ride Gymnasium.
“Quiet, you,” Mr. Caulier said to Nelson.
Mr. Caulier patted down his hair before kneeling in front of Gwendolyn’s desk.
He should’ve spoken Nelson’s name instead of using the broad “you.” This was showing favoritism. The one thing Mr. Caulier’s master teacher had warned him about. “You’re too soft with the delicate students. The tougher children, the others, they need your attention too.”
This remark was a generous code for “You can’t just be nice to the girls, particularly the pretty ones.” Cause what other kind of student is “delicate” besides lovely, young girls in soft lemon sweaters?
Despite passing every in-class evaluation and later obtaining his degree, this note of caution from his master teacher often pierced Mr. Caulier into the back of his head and yanked, permanently lifting his gaze toward the ceiling. Enough to see his students from the chin up. Some students clocked this odd way Mr. Caulier held his head. They believed he was choosing to look down upon them.
Really, he was looking away.
Mr. Caulier knew his master teacher had been correct. He had gestured to, called upon, engaged and joked with, reassured, and provided extra help to… the pretty girls. It had all been unintentional, he was unaware of it until reading that comment. Mr. Caulier understood he had acquired 50,000 dollars in student loans, believing himself to be a boots-on-the-ground warrior for children’s literacy, only to realize he had become a “creep.”
After that, he never closed his classroom door, claiming a strong case of “claustrophobia.” He met with students one-on-one out on schoolyard benches or, during the wintertime, in the library. The part-time librarian always beeping her scanner even though there was never anyone in there. No books returned. None ever checked out.
But kneeling in front of Gwendolyn, there he was.
Even his knees cracked in protest until they were kissing the linoleum in a dull middle-aged pain.
But now there was no one to evaluate him on his handling of this pretty, young student except for, say, thirty-three pairs of eyes.
Only the actual class clown, Roger Carol, in his oversized leather jacket, delivered no humiliating, highlighting remark.
No side chattering or snickering erupted at all.
Even the crunching tick of the mounted clock held off to hear Gwendolyn’s need for disruption.
“What’s the matter?” Mr. Caulier’s voice softened to a whisper. “Gwendolyn, if it’s medical, you can—”
“No, there’s—” Gwendolyn’s button nose wiggled as her face crumpled. Suddenly, her dry eyes pooled, becoming so glassy—a wet, involuntary layer of protection. “There’s a… a man outside. Out on the grass. He’s holding this… hammer. He keeps staring at me.”
This girl with chocolate ringlets lowered her hand to conceal her sobs, hiding also her milky skin and the freckles blasting across both cheekbones.
Thirty-three heads swiveled toward the windows.
Mr. Caulier stood. Though he needed to lean on Gwendolyn’s desk to steady himself.
The wall of rectangular windows, sixteen individual things that could be opened or closed to regulate temperature, much cheaper than a central air system, offered a view of the east wing lawn.
The east wing was where they plopped the arts. Classrooms meant for dreamers. Most of which had this pleasing lookout: a manicured patch of grass with trees zig-zagging across and, beyond that, an indiscriminate but tall brown fence that delineated the line between Birchland High and the pastel suburbs.
One could only step across this lawn if they were landscaping it or, as full-time faculty, had the Birchland skeleton key.
Or if they had scaled the fence.
Mr. Caulier didn’t question his immediate protective anger, especially with Gwendolyn’s crying jags rising and falling, stirring his turbulent sea.
“It’s all right.” This was Nelson comforting her.
Nose greasing the window, Mr. Caulier scanned left, then right, then back again, looking for a man with a hammer. Or footprints. Grass disturbed. Anything.
“It’s all right, children. We’ll get this sorted in no time.” He wanted to calm all of them, not just one particular student. But he also wanted to provide credence to Gwendolyn’s grand claim.
He knew, the entire class knew, that Gwendolyn was a studious pupil who routinely turned in B-plus essays (that A-minus always in spitting distance) flavored with personal anecdotes: her cat Mitzy acting like the impulsive Juliet, purposefully knocking over a water glass onto the living room carpet—“As if Capulet born, Mitzy acted on impulse, reacting from a (this work for you?) heart she knew to be true!”
With the honking scrape of chairs, some of the students got up to get their own survey of the lawn.
Mr. Caulier continued to search for a pair of legs wrapped around a tree limb or a set of leering eyes peeking just over the pointed ends of the fence. Where was that something? That anything to behold?
The lawn, however, offered nothing more than the afternoon: a dull, bright gray over green.
Apparently, Gwendolyn had chosen to be as impulsive as Juliet, as her Mitzy.
Mr. Caulier had fallen for her sudden need to regale his classroom with her wild imagination.
Her need to toy with him.
A particular “her.”
A “delicate student” with chocolate curls and a button nose and those freckles that Mr. Caulier would often fixate on from the safety of his desk, an island and its inhabitants made impartial by distance, wondering if those freckles were by the hands of nature or a skilled hand working some high-priced makeup pencil.
“Class. Everyone! Back to their seats,” Mr. Caulier said.
Those honking scrapes failed to return in reverse, so Mr. Caulier raised his voice, still searching out the window.
“Now!” he said, flattening his hair.
Chairs did then scrape and scooch, yet Mr. Caulier remained at the window. The humiliation rendered him inert. A silly, young girl tripped him over his own tendencies and gullibility.
In the window’s glass, the light of day pierced Mr. Caulier’s spirit further by highlighting his far-reaching crow’s feet and widened pores. He wasn’t smooth like them anymore.
He was “other.”
No matter what he offered “the delicates,” they would never view him as anything but old. Not even an “old man,” just the indefinite, shapeless “old.”
Mr. Caulier’s eyes started to sting, and he shook his head at this stark reflection.
He didn’t want anything from “the delicates”—no! What disgusting, horrible thoughts.
Sure. Perhaps he yearned for their respect and maybe for that delicateness to rub off on him. He had been a lanky, greasy young person until he gained weight in his thirties and became nothing at all to look at; a man like a half-hearted cloud. But certainly, he desired nothing untoward, nothing further than a healthy admiration.
Mr. Caulier rocked his jaw back and forth.
His vision unfocused, the lawn blurred away, and he saw only the words of his master teacher: “You’re too soft with them.”
Pierced by Gwendolyn’s crying that had ascended to a screeching wail, his daydream fell away.
“There will be no more of that!” He purposely left out her name. Gwendolyn would become a “Nelson” to him. So would every other delicate thing in the classroom.
Rose Juárez.
Samantha Tanner.
Lydia Milner.
Becky Snow.
All his students would be just that. “Students.” One indecipherable body, one indecipherable mind. Meant to be instructed and nothing else.
Before he turned back around to face them, Mr. Caulier had to set his skull and the rest of his body right, rid them fully of this former favor.
His shoulders bristled to a sag. His face leapt then fell. Mr. Caulier wiped (freed!) his mind of Gwendolyn despite her screams, now almost deafening.
“Mr. Caulier!!”
He wasn’t sure who had spoken. He could barely make out this new voice, but he would handle them with his own screaming. “I am the teacher! And it is my job to teach you the language arts! That is it! That’s all I am to do! Do you hear me—”
Mr. Caulier turned around.
And there was the man with the hammer, closing the classroom door behind him, the one Mr. Caulier never locked or shut, despite the advice of countless active shooter drills.
The man with the hammer wore brown sweatpants and a white shirt, both clean, and a pinched, weary look on his wide face like he had a real long shift ahead of him behind a dusty cash register.
Despite his English degree, Mr. Caulier had no words.
Until he was mentally forming the words of mourning and condolences for Garreth Vick, a brownnoser who sat front row, closest to the door, and struggled with a lisp.
Mr. Caulier expected to hear Garreth’s version of “Stop!” (“Thh-top!”) as the man’s hammer struck him, but this visitor lumbered further into the classroom, his alternating, thrusting shoulders pointing the way.
When the man arrived at the start of the third row where Gwendolyn sat four desks deep, Mr. Caulier understood this to be a fellow man who dealt in delicates, here to collect the “prize” he had coveted out on the lawn.
But the man continued on.
The quivering young teens followed him with their puppy dog eyes as he walked up to Mr. Caulier.
In his final moments, he chose to smooth down his hair.
The hammer reared back, glinting in the fluorescence, and then soared down, claw-side first, puncturing the bald spot of Mr. Caulier’s making.
It was then that Mr. Caulier became more impartial than he could have ever thought possible. Limp, splayed on the floor like a starfish, sans internal structure, he understood his own delicate nature.
