Standing Up to Mr. O. Page 4

  More than her grade, Maggie was lying awake worrying about Mr. O.’s reaction to her grade. How would he look when she told him she wasn’t going to dissect her worm? What would he say? Could Maggie make him understand? What if she couldn’t?

  * * *

  Maggie somehow expected the atmosphere in biology class on Friday to be somber, sorrowful. She almost thought she’d see the worm motels draped in black crepe paper and hear Chopin’s funeral march playing softly on Mr. O.’s portable CD player.

  Instead, Mr. O. was, if anything, more jovial and high-spirited than ever.

  “Campers! How many worms does it take to change a light bulb?”

  “Dead or alive?” someone called out. Maggie stiffened. Whatever killing worms was, it wasn’t funny.

  “One,” Mr. O. answered, ignoring the question. “But it has to be a glowworm.”

  The class groaned appreciatively. Maggie forced a smile. It was an appropriate joke for worm dissection day. Or would have been if any jokes could be appropriate under such gruesome circumstances.

  The class did fall unusually quiet as Mr. O. explained the procedure for killing the worm, by putting a small, poison-soaked cotton ball beside it in the jar. The fumes would kill it almost instantly.

  This is wrong, Maggie’s own voice repeated over and over again in her head. This is wrong.

  Matt brought their worm motel to their table. For the last time. Maggie looked at their worm, curled up in a semicircle, so small and helpless and trusting. He probably thought they were going to take him out of his jar and put him on the paper plate again, for another hour of playtime—and freedom. But the same people who had treated him so tenderly all week and had studied him so closely—these same people were now going to kill him.

  If Maggie had been braver, she would have snatched the jar off the table and dashed outside with it. She could have found a safe, sheltered bit of grass and dirt, and set her worm free. Instead, she sat motionless, wondering how guilty you were if you sat and did nothing while others killed. But even if she saved one worm, she couldn’t save them all.

  Maggie would never have believed, on Monday, that by Friday she would be crying over the death of a worm. But she was. She could feel her eyes fill to overflowing. Their worm had done nothing. All he asked of life was food and water and warm, moist soil. In five minutes he would be dead.

  Matt caught sight of Maggie’s face. “Give me a break,” he said.

  “I don’t want him to be dead.” Maggie forced the words out in a choked whisper.

  “It’s a worm! It’ll hardly even notice being dead. Worms don’t think, Maggie. They barely feel.”

  “How do you know they don’t?”

  “Because they barely have a brain! When we dissect it, you’ll see—there’s next-to-nothing upstairs for them to think or feel with.”

  Maggie felt Mr. O.’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Maggie.” His voice was so kind and gentle that Maggie’s tears only flowed more freely. He didn’t hate her—yet.

  “I can’t kill him.” No, it was more than that, and she had to say it. “I won’t kill him.”

  Mr. O. sighed. “Okay, Maggie.” He still didn’t sound mad, but he did sound disappointed. “We’ll have to talk about this later. For now, I’ll write you a pass, and you can spend the rest of the lab in the library.”

  Maggie didn’t linger to say a final farewell to their worm. She grabbed her book and backpack and stumbled toward the door, feeling Alycia’s sympathetic eyes upon her. But Alycia shouldn’t be pitying Maggie right now; she should be joining her. Relief at escaping the horror to come mingled with anger at the shame that was being inflicted on her alone. Maggie had been dismissed: the girl who was first too squeamish to touch a worm and then too squeamish to kill one. But it wasn’t a question of squeamishness. It was a simple question of right and wrong. Why couldn’t anyone else see that, too?

  Maggie turned back before she reached the door.

  “This is wrong!” Her voice came out too loudly. She was almost shouting: “Killing is wrong!”

  “Maggie, I asked you to leave.” She could hear the anger in Mr. O.’s voice now—anger she had heard only once or twice before, directed at Jake, never at her.

  “Maggie’s right.” Someone was defending her. With Mr. O.’s stern gaze upon her, she didn’t look to see who it was. She couldn’t bear another minute of his cold, barely controlled wrath. She fled the room, overcome by the same sense of finality as when she had found out, so many years ago, that her father was gone forever.

  6

  Maggie heard footsteps in the hall behind her. For a fleeting moment she hoped it was Alycia, hurrying to tell her, “Dissecting animals is wrong. I’m refusing to do it, too.” But she knew it wasn’t.

  “Hey, Maggie.” Jake fell into step next to her. So it had been Jake’s voice she had heard as she was leaving. It all felt oddly right. Although they had never officially spoken to each other, the way Jake had looked at her in class the other day had felt like a wordless conversation, echoing the question about dissections he had asked Mr. O. the very first day. Now he had walked out of the lab to join Maggie, making him the only person in the whole class to take her side.

  “That was cool,” Jake told her. “Standing up to Mr. O. like that. That took guts.”

  Even with Jake walking beside her, Maggie didn’t feel very gutsy right now. “I didn’t mean to make him mad,” she said. “I just wanted—well, I do think it’s wrong to kill animals. I just wanted to say it.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?” Jake asked as they kept on walking. Maggie felt a heightened consciousness of his presence beside her. She knew they made an odd pair: the bad boy and the good girl, he wearing the black leather jacket he wore every day, she wearing a corduroy jumper and blouse; his dark hair falling insolently over one eye, her blond hair held back from her face with a perky barrette. But they alone had opposed the dissection. They had that bond between them.

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie replied. She didn’t say that she had been a vegetarian only since Wednesday. She felt shy with Jake, even shyer than she did with Matt. Both boys were cynical and contemptuous, but about different things, in different ways.

  “Cool,” Jake said again. Maggie savored his approval. At least someone approved of her choices.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about it. One step at a time, I guess. Walking out on that creep today, that’s the first step.”

  “Mr. O.’s not a creep!” Even though Jake had taken her side, she couldn’t let him put down Mr. O.

  “Sorry,” Jake said. “I forgot that you’re the pet.” Now he sounded more like his usual hostile self.

  “He’s not a creep,” Maggie repeated. And she was no longer the pet. “He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

  “Guys like that bore me,” Jake said. “They act like they’re so cool and friendly, with the ties and the jokes and everything, while all the time they’re waiting to nail you the minute you cross their dumb line. Authority trips bore me.”

  Maggie didn’t say anything, so Jake went on, “My dad was like that.”

  Maggie noticed that he used the past tense: My dad was like that. So it was true that his dad had left.

  “He split,” Jake said then.

  “That’s too bad.” It sounded trite, but Maggie didn’t know what else to say. Should she tell him that her dad had left, too? It wasn’t the kind of thing Maggie told people. It had been hard for her even to tell Mr. O.

  “Oh, I’m really crying,” Jake said. “See how hard I’m crying?”

  They reached the library. Maggie suddenly remembered that she had left biology without her pass.

  As if reading her thoughts, Jake whipped out two passes with a flourish. “I got yours when I got mine.” He handed it to Maggie as if it were a thirty-dollar ticket to a rock concert, and she were his date. The gesture made Maggie feel even more drawn to Jake, even though he was completely wrong abo
ut Mr. O.

  Jake opened the door to the library and held it open for Maggie with an exaggerated show of gallantry. Maggie couldn’t help smiling at him. And surly, sullen Jake smiled back.

  * * *

  “Are you okay?” Alycia asked when Maggie took her usual seat at lunch.

  The concern in her voice irritated Maggie. “Sure,” Maggie said. “Are you?” Alycia was the one with a worm’s blood on her hands. If you could call it blood. Maggie called it goo. And of course Maggie knew that Alycia had been careful not to get worm goo on her hands. But she shared responsibility for the death of a worm. Maggie knew the answer now to the question she had asked an hour ago: You are guilty if you sit by and do nothing while others kill.

  If Alycia heard the edge to Maggie’s question, she chose to ignore it. “It wasn’t too bad,” she said. “As worm dissections go. I thought I wouldn’t be able to look at it at all, but after a while I got used to it, and then it was really kind of interesting.”

  Alycia’s words struck Maggie as chilling. It was terrible to think of all the killing that human beings had gotten used to in the history of the world. And how could the brutal murder of a worm be interesting?

  Maggie didn’t want to ask the next question, but she couldn’t stop herself. “How mad was Mr. O. after Jake and I left?”

  “He wasn’t mad at all. He turned to the rest of the class and said, ‘Anyone else for an F?’ And when there was no one else, he was his regular self again, kidding with the boys, you know.”

  Maggie hadn’t wanted Mr. O. to stay angry, and yet it bothered her that he had been able to move on to business as usual so quickly.

  The F that Maggie had gotten, that Alycia hadn’t gotten, was beginning to rankle, too. Maybe it was easier to get used to killing if it kept your grade point average high.

  “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with dissections?” Maggie asked, her voice sliding up into squeaking range. She had unwrapped her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but she was still too upset to eat it. She noticed that Alycia wasn’t having any trouble eating her ham and cheese croissant. The pink gleam of the ham in Alycia’s sandwich suddenly looked very pig-like to Maggie, very much like a sliver of flesh.

  “I guess not,” Alycia said. She took another ladylike bite of pig flesh. “I mean, I don’t want to dissect anything, but I wouldn’t judge anyone else for doing it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s wrong, but it’s not wrong wrong. I mean, it’s part of biology class. Mr. O. wouldn’t have us do it if it was really wrong.”

  A week before, Maggie would have said the same thing. She couldn’t say it now.

  * * *

  In English, Ms. Bealer began class with an announcement. She and the other seventh-grade English teachers had gathered together to organize a contest for the best opinion essays. There would be a first, second, and third prize, plus three honorable mentions. All six winning essays would be published in the middle-school newspaper, The Grand Valley Gazette.

  Maggie and Alycia exchanged hopeful glances. They were the two best writers in the class, in their own modest, unbiased opinion. With six prizes to be awarded, they had a good chance of winning one each.

  “All essays submitted in time—remember, they are due Wednesday, January 21—will be eligible for the contest,” Ms. Bealer said. “The important thing is not what you argue for, but how well you argue for it. That means thinking hard about what can be said for the other side. We’ll be judging your essays in part on how successfully you respond to the best objections that can be raised to your own opinion.”

  That was where Maggie had an advantage over Alycia. The trouble with the precycling topic was that there was nothing to be said on the other side. What could anybody say against precycling? That garbage dumps were actually kind of attractive, in their own special way? But Maggie knew that there was plenty that could be said in favor of dissections. All she would have to do for that part of her essay was spend another five minutes listening to Matt.

  What would Mr. O. do if her dissection essay won a prize and got published in the school paper for all to see? It couldn’t make him much madder than he was already. Maybe when he read it—with FIRST PRIZE WINNER printed at the top—he’d understand why Maggie had to do what she had done today.

  If Maggie could make Mr. O. understand, she’d deserve that prize.

  If Maggie could make Mr. O. understand, she wouldn’t need any other prize.

  * * *

  Maggie had trouble sleeping again that night. For some reason, her thoughts kept focusing on her father. She could hardly remember him, what he had looked like, how he had acted, the sound of his voice. When she did have a memory of him, she wasn’t sure if it was a real memory or something she had mixed up, or made up, or taken from a book. She was only four when he left. Four was a long time ago.

  The clock next to her bed read 3:15. Maggie switched on the light. She slipped out of the covers and, shivering in the chilly room, dug out a red-plaid shoe box she kept hidden at the back of her closet. One small shoe box—size 2½—contained everything she had left from her father.

  Back in bed again, she lifted off the lid. She knew the contents of the box by heart, but she still needed to look at them every few months.

  Three birthday cards, three Christmas cards, from the first three years after he had left. Maggie read the six signatures: “Love, Daddy,” printed carefully in big letters, because she hadn’t been able to read cursive then. One of the birthday cards said, “I miss my little girl.” Another said, “I love you, honey.” The other cards had no special comments at all.

  A picture of the two of them together building a snowman. A picture of them carving a pumpkin. Maggie’s mother had told her there were so few pictures of Maggie’s father because he had been the one taking all the pictures of everybody else, but Maggie knew that her mother had thrown most of the pictures away. Once, a few years ago, her mother had ripped up all their wedding pictures. She hadn’t merely thrown them in the trash; she had yanked them off the adhesive pages of the photo album and ripped them into pieces. Maggie had rescued one of them and taped it together.

  She studied it now. Her father had his arm around her mother, turning her toward the camera as if to tell the world, “Look at the beautiful girl I married.” Her mother was laughing, not the mocking laugh Maggie knew so well, but a laugh of pure wonder and delight.

  What had happened? How could two people love each other that much and then five years later not love each other at all?

  The only thing left in the box now was a picture of a bird that her father had drawn for her on the back of a grocery list, with her clumsy, four-year-old attempt to copy it. Her scribbled ball of a bird, with its two stick-like legs poking out, always brought tears to Maggie’s eyes, not for herself now, but for the little girl she had been.

  That was it. That was all that remained in Maggie’s life of the man who was her father: six cards, two snapshots, one taped-together wedding picture, two bird drawings on scrap paper. Maggie replaced the lid and pushed the box back under her bed. Then she switched off the light and burrowed under her covers.

  Where was he now? Did he ever think of her, the little girl he had left behind forever? Did he have his own little box of mementos hidden at the back of his closet? Or was she as forgotten as … a worm left shriveled on the sidewalk after the rain?

  7

  All weekend long, Maggie dreaded the moment Monday morning when she would have to walk in to biology class and face Mr. O. But as she slipped into her first-row seat right before the bell rang, he gave her his usual smile. Or a smile. Was it the same smile he gave everybody, or was it the special smile Maggie had always felt he saved for her?

  This is ridiculous, Maggie told herself. She shouldn’t be analyzing Mr. O.’s smiles on a scale of 1 to 10. She should be glad he had smiled at her at all.

  Maggie looked toward the window. The worm motels were gone, their inhabitants all dead, murdered, including Squirmy. Maggie won
dered what had become of their remains. Tossed into the trash, she supposed. Only little children held funerals for dead worms and birds and goldfish.

  “Campers!” Mr. O. blew his whistle. Maggie bet Jake hated that whistle. If “authority trips” bored him, probably whistles did, too. “How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb?”

  Maggie had heard that one before. She struggled to think of the answer. She had it! She raised her hand, practically waving it the way first graders did.

  “Maggie?”

  “I don’t know, but I can look it up for you,” Maggie said, feeling a bit silly over her pride at getting it right.

  Mr. O. flashed her a grin—this time Maggie was sure it was the special smile—and added her name to the Light Bulb Hall of Fame on the chalkboard. Maybe Maggie would look for a light bulb joke book in the library. For every dissection she didn’t do, she could have a light bulb punch line to offer in compensation.

  Worms were over, Mr. O. announced. They were now turning their attention to fish.

  “Will we dissect a fish?” Kip asked right away.

  “Next week,” Mr. O. promised. “But we won’t have them here in class to observe. We’ll be dissecting perch, and I don’t think our mayonnaise jars would make very comfortable perch motels. So I’ll have the perch delivered here a week from Friday, ready to go.”

  Ready to go meant already dead.

  As Mr. O. turned to the chalkboard to begin writing fish information, Matt asked Maggie, in a low scornful voice, “I suppose you think it’s wrong to dissect fish, too?”

  Obviously warming to his topic, he went on, “You’d take a fish home from the fish market to cook it and eat it, but not to dissect it and actually learn something about it.”

  Maggie welcomed Matt’s sarcasm. “For your information, I no longer eat fish. Or animals.”

  Matt looked puzzled.

  “I’ve become a vegetarian.” So there, Mr. Matt Dixon!