Be Gentle

“Think about it like this,” I tell her. “We call it computer class but it’s not really a class. Just like I work at the school but am not really a teacher.” She stares at me blankly. “Just like even though these are pictures of naked women, it’s not pornography. This is art.” She gives me no indication that I’m breaking through. She called me over claiming the boy sitting next to her was looking at porn. I can’t remember the girl’s name, only that in our few exchanges her frequency registered as someone who has been told a lot of times how smart she is.

The websites we let the students visit are pretty limited so what I found on the screen of the computer terminal next to her were high quality photos of ancient nude sculptures taken in a museum. Who I found looking at them was a fat kid with glasses wearing a shirt with a dragon graphic wrapped all the way around. 

“Is this for a project?” I ask him.

“Um,” he says.

“Look at something else, please.”

“I like them,” he says. “Like white chocolate.” He licks the screen. It makes a staticy sound.

The girl stands up. “I’m going to tell Ms. Vaughn.” She stands in front of my desk with her arms crossed as I write her a pass. Ms. Vaughn is the Vice Principal and it’s whose office I am sitting in before I leave for the day. I am there at the request of a note that came by student courier. It arrived shortly after the girl went to tattle on the boy, whose name I discovered was EJ.

Ms. Vaughn is smiling at me with her mouth closed from across her desk. I am wondering if I should call her by her first name and whether her first name is Tracy or Trudy. She asks me if I want a bottle of water and I say no and she tells me not to be nervous.

“I want to let you know this is not one of those yell-at-the-new-guy things,” she starts. “I think this is much more of a I-want-to-help-you-succeed-here kind of thing.” Ms. Vaughn goes on to explain that this incident in the computer lab was not the first, but rather the most recent in a long series of EJ’s behavior that could only be described as disturbing.

“Of course you know about the machete.” I shake my head. “Brought one to Show and Tell back in middle school. Apparently it was one of those souvenir jobs, not sharp, but he swung it pretty close to a few kids. Pressed the edge against his wrists to show everyone how dull it was. He scared people. Then laughed his head off. Oh, and the algebra book. He ate an entire algebra workbook. This was last year, his freshman year. Every day, he’d tear out two pages and eat them. Chew, swallow, the whole deal. Mrs. Flagler—she left, got pregnant—sometimes she’d send him to me and sometimes she’d just try to ignore him. End of the semester, he’d eaten every single page.”

“And that’s pretty unusual.”

“Mr. Culberson, yes that’s very unusual. I’m starting to see why Mary Ann came to me. I don’t think you understand how much EJ bothers the other students. How disturbing this kind of thing is to the other students who are here to learn. We owe it to the ones who are serious about their future to maintain an environment—yes, even in computer class—where they can do that.”

“Ms. Vaughn—”

“Safety, Mr. Culberson. You are not an educator. I respect your experience, being what it is, but what it is not is a degree in education. You are a supervisor. You are here to make sure no one gets hurt. You are here to make sure everyone uses the computers in a responsible way.” She narrows her eyes. “Safety, James.”

“I understand.”

“You know, I remember you from when you went here. People don’t think I remember them, but I’m good with faces and I remember you. I also know you served this country and that’s a big part of why you’re here too. I want this to be a place for people like you.” She stood up from behind her desk and knocked her fist against the wall behind her. “But this is the real world. And they’re just kids. So the next time you see boobs on a computer screen, marble or not, I want detention. And the next time EJ acts out, I want to hear from you, not a student. Okay?” She walks around the desk and opens the door for me.

“Thank you, Tracy,” I say, walking out the door.

“Oh, you’re going to do great here. You’ll get the hang of it,” she says. “You’re a natural.” And then, after I’m almost to the end of the hall, she leans out her door and through cupped hands stage-whispers, “It’s Trudy, by the way.”

#

I have EJ next week on a different day at a slightly different time. There’s some kind of elaborate rotation at the school and they group the kids together in pods and each one is named after an animal. EJ and Mary Ann are Otters. It’s halfway through the Otter hour when Mary Ann comes to my desk.

“Mr. Culberson, EJ is bothering me.” I ask her what he’s doing because from where I’m sitting it didn’t look like he was doing anything except for looking up photos of dinosaurs and drawing them in his notebook. I’ve been extra diligent in checking his screen.

“Mr. Culberson, he keeps poking me with his finger and saying that he’s putting his eggs in me.”

I go over to EJ’s workstation. “Don’t touch other students,” I say to him. He looks up at me, eyes squished in his fat face and says okay.

Mary Ann comes back a few minutes later. “Mr. Culberson, EJ said he’s putting eggs in me with his mind.”

I write EJ a pass to Ms. Vaughn’s office and phone down to let her know he’s on his way. Mary Ann goes back to her chair, crosses her legs at the ankles, rests her chin on the platform made from her laced fingers and propped elbows, and returns to reading the Wikipedia entry for dressage.

“EJ,” I say before he leaves the classroom. “Next class, come sit by me.” He blinks his eyes. “But no weird shit, okay?”

The curse makes him grin. He says, “Okay, Mr. Culberson.”

I wish I could say that fixed him, that EJ was never disturbing again, but of course he kept doing weird shit. Sharpening his pencils and putting them between his fingers like Wolverine and then running at other kids saying, “Make way, mortals!” I field-tested my admonitions until I landed on the most effective, which was a half-bored but stern sounding, “Knock it off, EJ.”

It also didn’t stop him from bothering students in other classes. Claiming to be a monkeyboy and only answering to the name Monkey Boy. That kind of thing. But sitting next to me, using my computer when it was the Otters turn for computer class kept him out of the way and that resembled a kind of understanding. An armistice.

#

It’s a few weeks later when I’m arriving to school that I see EJ standing by the field near the teacher’s parking lot. He’s just standing there motionless by a patch of flowers with his arms outstretched, palms upward. I start walking over to him and when I get close enough, I can see the bees. A swarm of them, buzzing around EJ, whose eyes are closed and either doesn’t see or hear me or is pretending like he can’t. The bees land on him and fly off, but EJ doesn’t flinch. His fleshy arms are pale and unstung. I watch until he breaks his stillness, until he bends over and plucks a flower from the ground. He’s doing something I can’t see with it and I turn around to head inside before he knows I was there.

I have the Otters first period that day and EJ comes in early because he always comes in early. He takes his seat, which is my seat, in front of the computer to log on and I tell him what I saw with the bees.

“Oh that,” he says. He types something on the keyboard and brings up the Wikipedia page for bees. He scrolls down and points a pudgy finger at the screen. “It says you have to be gentle.”

“And they don’t sting you?”

“No way,” he says and scoops his hand into the breast pocket of the hot air balloon-sized bowling shirt he’s wearing and brings out a flower bloom with its petals closed up. EJ pinches one petal back and a fuzzy bee steps out onto his palm. The bee shakes some pollen off. It starts walking the length of EJ’s hand and then onto the other one and then back again and then back into the flower, which EJ puts in his shirt pocket. I ask what he’s going to do with it and he shrugs.

“Let it go, I guess,” he says.

“That’s a special thing, EJ. Do you know that?” Pink blooms on his cheeks.

“Mr. Culberson,” he says. “Do you know that the other teachers don’t like me?” He looks down. I don’t know what to say and so I don’t say anything. The first bell rings in the silence that follows.

“I think you’re probably right about that,” I say, finally.

“But you like me, though?” he asks, looking up. Later this hour, he’ll pick his nose and wipe it on Mary Ann and get sent to Ms. Vaughn’s again. The summer before his senior year he’ll get a growth spurt and get recruited to play offensive tackle where he’ll help the team make the playoffs for the first time since I went to school here. EJ’s helmet will come off during a play but he’ll spear the runner anyway, gashing his head open. He’ll return to the bench, blood streaming down into his smiling face, the other boy unconscious, and that will be the last straw. He’ll get his GED and join the Marines and come back fucked up so when I see him next, it’s when I’m dropping off my car at a Jiffy Lube. He won’t recognize me and I won’t say anything, just a polite thank you, because I’ll see what’s left of him is the EJ who put a boy in the hospital in that football game and what’s gone is the part of him that could pet a bumblebee.

“I don’t know, EJ,” I tell him. The rest of the Otters start arriving and chatter blooms in pockets of the classroom as they sit down. The soft electric burning rises in my nose as the machines turn on. “I’m not a teacher.”