“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Mrs. English looked at me expectantly. I braced myself. The automatic answer to that question was always no, but I had no idea exactly what I wasn’t ready for.
“Ma’am?”
“For the reenactment of the Salem witch trials? We’re going to try the same cases The Crucible is based on. Have you been preparing your case study?”
“Yes, ma’am.” That explained the manila envelope marked ENGLISH in my backpack. I hadn’t been paying much attention in class lately.
“What an amazing idea, Lilian. I’d love to come watch, if you don’t mind,” my dad said.
“Not at all. You can videotape the trials for us. We can all watch it as a class afterward.”
“Great.” My dad beamed.
I felt the cold glass eye rolling over me as I walked out of the classroom.
L, did you know we’re reenacting the Salem witch trials in English tomorrow?
Haven’t been memorizing your case file? Do you even look in your backpack anymore?
Did you know my dad is videotaping it? I do. Because I walked in
on his lunch date with Mrs. English.
Ewww.
What should we do?
There was a long pause.
I guess we should start calling her Ms. English?
Not funny, L.
Maybe you should finish reading The Crucible before class tomorrow.
The problem with having actual evil in your life is that regular, everyday evil—administrators giving you detention, the textbook evil that makes up most of high school existence—starts to feel less terrifying. Unless it’s your father dating your glass-eyed English teacher.
No matter how you looked at it, Lilian English was evil—the real kind or your everyday variety. Either way, she was eating rubbery chicken with my dad, and I was screwed.
Turns out The Crucible is more about bitches than witches, as Lena would be the first to say. I was glad I waited until the end of the unit to finish reading the play. It made me hate half of Jackson High, and the whole cheer squad, even more than usual.
By the time class started, I was proud that I actually did the reading and knew a few things about John Proctor, the guy who gets completely shafted. What I hadn’t anticipated was costumes—girls in gray dresses and white aprons, and guys in Sunday school shirts with their pants tucked into their socks. I didn’t get the memo, or it was still in my backpack. Lena wasn’t wearing a costume either.
Mrs. English doled out our respective one-eyed glares and five-point deductions, and I tried to ignore the fact that my father was sitting in the back of the room with the school’s fifteen-year-old video camera.
The classroom was rearranged to look like a courtroom. The afflicted girls were on one side—led by Emily Asher. Apparently, their job was to act like phonies and pretend they were possessed. Emily was a natural. They all were. The magistrates were on one side of them and the witness box on the other.
Mrs. English turned her Good-Eye Side on me. “Mr. Wate. Why don’t you start off as John Proctor, and then we’ll switch around later on in the period?” I was the guy who was about to have his life destroyed by a bunch of Emily Ashers. “Lena, you can be our Abigail. We’ll start with the play and then spend the rest of the week on the actual cases the play was based on.”
I went over to my chair in one corner, and Lena went to the other.
Mrs. English waved to my dad. “Let’s start rolling, Mitchell.”
“I’m ready, Lilian.”
Everyone in class turned to look at me.
The reenactment went off without a hitch, which really meant it went on with all the customary hitches. The camera battery died in the first five minutes. The chief magistrate had to use the bathroom. The afflicted girls got caught texting, and the confiscation of their phones was a bigger affliction than the one the Devil was supposed to have brought on them in the first place.