My Better Life

7

Jamie

The kids didn’t takethe bus. No. On my way home I was called into the school to speak with Ms. Crum, the principal. Luckily, Granny Allwright was bombing down the road in her old banana yellow Mustang, on her way to pick up some nightcrawlers from the tackle shop, and she offered me a lift.

She’s waiting in the school parking lot now, since the last time she came inside the school was three Christmas pageants ago, and the less said about that, the better.

Elijah, Tanner, and Shay sit in a row in the little blue plastic chairs, right outside Ms. Crum’s office. When I walked past, Shay looked at me with big eyes, but the boys stared at their feet. None of them made a peep, which is how I knew right away that this was real serious.

Hollow Creek School is a series of brown and white double wide trailers, connected by concrete sidewalks. Kindergarten through fifth grade is in one trailer, sixth through twelfth grade in another, music, art, and the cafeteria in the third, and the offices in the final trailer. Ms. Crum’s office smells just like it always does, like soggy carpet, pencil shavings, and stale coffee. The noise of her tapping her pencil against her metal desk is the only sound in the room.

She’s resided as Hollow Creek’s principal for forty years, molding the destinies of generations, and she’s silently reminding me of that fact.

Granny Allwright always claimed Elvira Crum has the squished, lumpy face of a toad and the personality of a rat, and I can’t say I disagree. As a kid, I had nightmares about being sent to her office.

I lean forward in the vinyl chair, a spring in the padding digging into my thigh, and I clear my throat. “Ms. Crum, what did you want to talk—”

“Jamie Sutton,” she snaps. Her eyes are swamp green, and when she frowns her wide mouth nearly sags over the entirety of her chin.

I sit up straight and the chair’s spring pokes me again. “Yes?”

“I’ve seen some bad eggs in my time. Bad eggs that amount to nothing.”

I hear one of the kids’ chairs scrape, and I imagine they’re leaning in closer to hear.

Ms. Crum slaps her pencil against her desk. “But I’ve never seen any eggs as rotten and spoiled as yours.”

“Now see here—”

“Your daughter refuses to recite her letters. She refuses to speak. She will not read. No matter what we try, the only thing she can do is meow, or bray, or neigh. Is learning a joke to your family? Do you deride education in your home?”

I flinch. “No, of course not. But she’s only five, she should be allowed to play—”

“She is not here to play. She is here to learn.”

There’s another scuff of a chair in the hallway. I’m itching to turn around and look at the kids, but I keep my eyes on Ms. Crum and the pencil sharpener, the pile of pencil shavings, and the stack of papers that have surrounded her for decades.

I grit my teeth. “I was a late reader. It isn’t unheard of—”

“Yes.” Ms. Crum stabs her pencil at me. “You were one of my greatest failures.”

I wipe my sweaty palms on my overalls. “Is that all?”

Ms. Crum’s eyes flicker to the kid’s seated in the hall, her gaze reminds me of a toad tracking the flight of a fly. “At afternoon recess, your daughter pretended to be a cat, and rightly so, Cody Thorn told her to stop. Your sons then used the pulley and rope on the flagpole to hang Cody by his underwear. He was ten feet up the pole and it took us a half-hour to get him down. Do you understand me?”

Ms. Crum’s voice has reached a high fever-pitched squeak. Her face is a florid red. I take that in, but I’m having a terrible time keeping a straight face. From what I know, Cody is just like his dad Doug, mean as an adder and big as a bull. I think Cody must’ve said something a little worse than “stop” to Shay, and I bet the boys decided he needed a lesson in how to treat their sister right. It’s not hard to imagine. What is hard to imagine is how Elijah and Tanner managed to hook Cody up to the pulley system.

Slowly, I turn in my creaky chair and look past the peeling wallpaper on the office wall to my kids lined up in the hall. All three of them look at me with the sweet, wide-eyed expressions of innocent little angels. I hold back a snort and turn to Ms. Crum.

“No. I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at.”

She thrusts a finger at me. “Your daughter is unmotivated and undisciplined. Your sons are deviants and troublemakers. In the last week alone your sons have jerry-rigged the classroom windows to open at their command, used a string to yank all the tests off their teacher’s desk, wired into the sound system and played ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’—”

That has to be Granny’s influence. I cover a snort.

“It is not funny!” Ms. Crum slaps her desk. “What would Bobby say if he saw his children? What would he think? They are spitting on his memory.”

I clench my fist and take a deep, steadying breath of the stale coffee-tinted air. In his early days, Bobby was in this office a fair share of the time, getting his own reaming. I imagine he would’ve asked the boys why they didn’t hoist Cody higher than ten feet, and then he would’ve cuddled Shay in a big, warm hug. Then again, if Bobby were still around, we might not live in Hollow Creek anymore, and our whole lives would be different.