Understudy

“Nope,” I say under my breath but loud enough for her to hear. The next question asks what day of the week it is when Jeremy threatens to jump off the bridge. I think I know the answer to this, so I write Friday and ignore the fact that my aunt is still glaring at me.

She comes over to my desk, her six foot frame towering over me as I stare at my paper and try to focus on the next question. “It certainly sounded like cheating.”

“Well, it wasn’t.” I’m totally not a smart ass to teachers, I swear. Just this one.

“Tell me, Greg.” She steps forward and puts her hand on his shoulder. “If two students are whispering to each other during a quiz, and they aren’t cheating, then what would they possibly be talking about?”

“Uh,” he says, crumpling his paper at the corners. “I don’t know.”

“Seriously, Ms. Barlow,” I say. “He wasn’t cheating. He was only trying to.” I smirk because it’s funny and I’m trying to lighten the mood and maybe pull her out of her bad day, but it totally backfires.

“Zeros for both of you.”

“What the fu-?” I say, faster than my brain can register. “FUDGE! Fudge, fudge, fudge.” Ms. Barlow slaps her hand on her head so hard it makes a few students jump. She grabs a handful of orange hair and pulls. “Say another word in this class, Wren, and you’re out of here.”

I nod, but I’m not that intimidated. Had another teacher told me that, I’d probably be holding back tears like some kind of baby.

After the quiz, which judging by the defeated faces of my classmates was a total fail, Ms. Barlow sits at her desk and reads through the papers for fifteen minutes. Her frown deepens with each paper. She slaps the final one face down on her desk.

“Do you kids even care about theater?” The crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes crease deeper than I’ve ever seen them. “Why are you even here? Do you want to

be a professional actor?” She stops pacing the room in front of Jason William’s desk. He swallows. “Uh, no?” he says.

Gwen stands up at her desk, and we all stare at her because this isn’t the kind of school where you stand up at your desk. “Ms. Barlow, I think maybe you’re overreacting a little bit. Everyone truly loves your class.”

Ms. Barlow’s eyeballs burst out of her head and her hair seems to stand on its ends. Every word she bites off sounds like its own sentence. “Honey you don’t even know what overreacting is!”

A stark white moment of silence fills the room for an entire sixty sections. Then Ms. Barlow’s head droops and she slumps over to the corner of the room where her FIVE RULES OF IMPROV poster hangs on the wall. She peels back the tape at each corner, careful not to rip the unlaminated poster. When it pulls free from the wall, she rolls it up gingerly, slips a rubber band around it and walks to the next poster.

After an agonizingly slow fifteen minutes, Ms. Barlow has taken down all of her posters and packed everything into three big plastic tubs with lids. No one has said a word.

A folded piece of paper slides onto my desk. In Greg’s teensy handwriting, in the very center of the page, are the words: Is she quitting?

I write underneath it: No. She’s being dramatic, and then I fold it back over its square creases and hand it to him.

There’s sixteen and a half minutes left of class. Ms. Barlow drags all four of her plastic bins out into the hallway. She closes the door behind her.

“Should we do something?” Ricky asks. Everyone looks at me.

I shake my head. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

Ms. Barlow isn’t back the next day. At the empty desk that used to be Ms. Barlow’s, sits Mrs. Buchanan. She looks like Betty White and has been a substitute teacher at Lawson ISD since I was in kindergarten.

And although I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules, she’s talking on her cell phone when class starts. After the bell rings we find our seats and sit quietly like the well-behaved class we should have been for Ms. Barlow. I expect Mrs. Buchanan will hang up and start passing out the busy work reserved for students when a teacher is absent, but after six and a half minutes, she’s still on the phone. Apparently her husband has been getting drunk before noon on Sundays now, and her neighbor’s dog likes to crap in her front yard.

Greg kicks my desk. I look over at him. “So she really quit?” he half whispers, half yells to me. Everyone within earshot turns to me, anxiously waiting my answer. “I guess,” I say.

“Well doesn’t she live with you?” he asks.

“Yeah but I didn’t see her. She locked herself in her room.”

“All night?”

I nod. “Yep.” He doesn’t need to know that I only checked on her once and was consumed with thoughts of Derek for the rest of the night.

Gwen, who sits three rows down, gets out of her chair and walks across the classroom. Our substitute teacher doesn’t look up from her phone call. Gwen sits on the edge of my desk, and everyone else takes this as their clue to gather around me.

“What are we going to do about the play?” she asks me. Before I can answer, she adds, “We can’t end the play! You have to get her to come back to school.” Her and Ricky’s eyes meet and I find it weird that she would give him such a depressed look, but then I remember that he’s her costar in the play. I guess they’re both desperate for the attention they will get as lead actors.