Jacob stopped smiling when Mr. Hubbard walked in. Instead of immediately taking control of the situation, however, Mr. Hubbard simply strode up to his desk and set down his satchel and trombone case. He wore the same silly hat he’d been wearing the past week and was looking at a couple of small slips of paper in his hand, receipts maybe, shuffling through them. “Have a seat, Rusty,” he said without looking up.
“Mr. Hubbard,” Rusty said, and climbed off the chair. “I feel like I am being discriminated against.”
Mr. Hubbard continued going through the receipts and said, “What’s the charge this time?”
“It’s my animal magnetism, sir,” Rusty said. “My classmates are having a hard time controlling themselves.”
Mr. Hubbard folded the pieces of paper and put them in his pocket. He looked up at Rusty and, finally, the drone. “Have a seat,” he said again and watched the drone follow him as he made his trek over the outstrewn legs of his classmates. When he sat down at his desk, the drone did a wide circle above his head.
“Look at it,” somebody said. “It’s like a fly on a turd.”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Hubbard said. “Who’s controlling this thing?”
“I am,” Jerry said, remote still in hand. “I was thinking about yesterday, Mr. Hubbard. You know, how maybe this could be our new symbol if the bald eagle goes extinct.”
He then made the drone fly up to the ceiling and do a few expert loops around the class. He started making jet noises with his mouth, letting out a whistle now and again as if it were firing off missiles. “Paint a flag on it,” Jerry said. “Put it on the dollar bill.”
Mr. Hubbard sat on his desk and watched the small machine make several sorties over the students’ heads, to which they applauded. Then he looked over at Jacob. And it was this recent habit of Mr. Hubbard’s that had begun to aggravate Jacob. The way he tried to make eye contact at the pinnacle of each lecture. The way he looked to Jacob as if only he might know the answers to the rhetorical questions he posed about history and meaning. Jacob couldn’t stand it.
Why did Mr. Hubbard assume that he knew something the other kids of his age did not? Was it because he had become so predictably, so excruciatingly, Jacob wondered, the A student in all of his classes? Was it as benign as that? Or was it something else? Was it about his brother? His mother? His father? The interior walls of his life? Regardless, the manner of searching connection Mr. Hubbard had been making with him the past two months inevitably made Jacob want to tear up, which inevitably made Jacob embarrassed, which inevitably made Jacob furious.
So, he did what he often did, and broke off the gaze. He instead looked down at his desk as the other kids had their fun. They shot paper clips up at the drone, cast paper airplanes around the room, and began, under Jerry’s lead, a full-throated rendition of “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,” which the choir had been practicing for the bicentennial. Their concert was to kick the whole thing off tomorrow night, along with an award ceremony for the football team, who had made the state playoffs that fall, and Jacob knew this not because he had any desire to go, but because Trina had recently mentioned this as a place where nearly every single one of them would be, all the dickheads she blamed for Toby’s death. All of them gathered there, she said, like “sitting ducks.” Jacob shook this thought from his head as his classmates beat their desks like drums, paradiddled their pencils on their laptops, and constructed for themselves a lasting memory. When Jacob finally raised his head, he made the mistake of looking over at Trina, his new best friend, he supposed, his dead brother’s ex-something, his partner in mysterious sadness, his problem, who was staring right back at him. Her eyes were clear and gray and devoid of humor or even passion as she mouthed a string of words to Jacob beneath the noise of the classroom. Jacob looked back at her and furrowed his brow as if to say, What? As if I to say, I can’t understand you.
But he knew what Trina was saying. She was repeating, over and over:
Every single one of them.
3
Douglas
After lunch, Douglas had a break.
First period aside, the rest of his day had gone sanely. No more drones, military songs, or overt animal magnetism. Still, Douglas hadn’t taught well. He felt barely there. He’d lost his train of thought during lectures, let kids get away with their obnoxious snickering behind his back, and didn’t think to give a single quiz. This type of mental malleability, he knew, was the ruin of any good teacher. Still, he couldn’t help himself. Instead of reinventing the past for his students, Douglas had spent his morning reimagining his own recent history, at first headlined by his failure to produce the sexual encore Cherilyn had requested the night before. He’d tried, all right, as the last thing he ever wanted to do was disappoint his wife, but after positioning himself between Cherilyn’s legs for the second time in thirty minutes, his body, ever so pitifully, succumbed to his mind.
What were the reasons?
Cherilyn’s desire for something a bit rougher was out of character, sure, but Douglas wasn’t one to be selfish. He considered himself pretty open-minded in the grand scheme of things, although life in Deerfield rarely required him to prove it, and would like very much to provide any sexual attitude Cherilyn desired. After all, Douglas figured, he was still the person she was asking it from, and that’s what mattered. Yet this, the very fact that it was him she wanted it from, in its own way, became the problem. When Douglas looked down at her for the second time that night, the long, thin hairs he normally kept combed over the crown of his head fell before his eyes and he was reminded, resolutely, of his baldness. Mustn’t he look silly in this pose, he thought, like some desperate traveling salesman? When he tried to forget about this and focus instead on the pleasures available to him, to look down at steady parts of Cherilyn that always kept him able, he was again distracted by the unfortunate parts of himself, the paunch of his hairy stomach, the slight sag of his middle-aged breasts, and this also discouraged him. So, despite his best intentions, Douglas had to wonder if he was the type of man who could even do it a bit harder when called upon. Now, there was a depressing thought. This made him wonder if he was able to do anything differently than he had previously done. And, if not, then what kind of man was he? And who would want to be with a man who, at forty years old, doesn’t even know who he is? These worries, Douglas understood, were not very sexy. Yet around and around the pity pot he went until it became clear that he had nothing more to offer.
Douglas rolled over apologetically and made a few awkward attempts at pleasing Cherilyn with his hands. This well-intentioned groping only seemed to embarrass them both, though, and Cherilyn pulled the covers up over her breasts. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I would have waited,” Douglas told her. “I mean, if I knew you weren’t ready. I could have waited longer.”