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Show TWO Being student janitor at Bonneville wouldn't be half bad, Parker thought, if the prissy teachers would lay off about the blackboards. For some reason, he'd expected Mrs. Simpson, the new creative writing teacher, to be different. "I have a confession to make," she told him as she packed up her briefcase after school. "I'm addicted to clean boards. Is the service included?" "Fridays," he said, looking up from the desks he was moving. She had smiled pleasantly enough as she left, but her asking bugged him just the same. What was so great about a fresh blackboard, anyhow? Mr. Cisneros, the best teacher he'd ever had, never picked up the chalk. Only once, that he could remember. "Walk quickly to the fire exit," he'd written imperatively across the board, his face white. They had, too, exiting without noise or panic. Spencer Junior was gutted by four in the afternoon that day. Like Mr. Cisneros, who avoided using blackboards but never had to give directions twice, Parker was a great respecter of words. Small talk gave him a headache. The endless chatter of teenage females at school was sometimes more than he could stand. Even his own mother's voice set him on edge. On and on she talked--extolling, expounding, lecturing-covering everything from his terrible health habits to international conspiracies. Life with her was one long fillibuster after another. For this reason, among others, Parker had instinctively liked Mrs. Simpson. Sitting kind of relaxed on one of the front desks, she'd asked questions all period, then really listened to the students. "Why did you sign up for this class?" she'd directed the question at Lisa Martinez. Then she'd included the rest of them: "What do you expect to happen here?" And they'd told her-most of them. He'd liked the way her face lighted up when she got excited about their answers and the little-girl way she'd clasped her hands together when she asked them to remember characters from books they read as children. |
