The Unteachables: Chapters 1–7

She looks frazzled, and I guess I don’t blame her. That much baby puke must be hard to face.

At the top it says: PROVISIONAL LICENSE.
“Provisional?” I ask.
“I’m allowed to drive for the family business,” he explains.

She plucks a paper from the sheaf sticking out of the hole in my backpack.

And if there’s a backlog at the pediatrician’s, I’m going to be sitting in that dumb chair all day.

His brow furrows. “What’s”—he points to the class description—“SCS-8?”

The Unteachables are the dummy class. We have a couple of groups like that in my middle school in California too. We call them the Disoriented Express, but it’s the same thing.

A plume of smoke is pouring out the single open window. It’s coming from the fire roaring in the wastebasket in the center of the room.

“So we’re moving you into her spot with the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class.”
I stare at her. “You mean the Unteachables?”
Dr. Thaddeus bristles. “We don’t use that term.”

“They’re the kids you’ve given up on. They had their chance in sixth and seventh grade, and now you’re just warehousing them until they can be the high school’s problem.”
“They’re a challenging group,” Christina concedes.

And did he ever take the credit when a class at his school scored number one in the country on the National Aptitude Test.

He squeezed every ounce of glory out of that—interviews, profiles in magazines. When there was traffic in the driveway, you could bet it was because of a TV station mobile unit on its way to interview the high-exalted lord of all principals.

And when the whole thing blew up, was Thaddeus there to take the heat the way he’d taken the acclaim?

No one revoked my teaching certificate or docked my pay or kicked me out of the union.

I went into a blue funk. Okay, that wasn’t the school’s fault, but it began to affect my personal life. My engagement to Fiona Bertelsman fell apart. That was on me. I was lost in my own misery.

I know where it is, though, from the stint in phys ed.

After all, how bad can these Unteachables really be? Behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents?

Kids toasting marshmallows on the end of pencils. Pencils catching fire. One pyromaniac-in-training seeing if he can get his eraser to burn.

An escapee standing outside in the bushes, gazing in, eyes wide with fear. A boy draped over a desk, fast asleep, oblivious to it all.

The pickup jounces over the packed dirt of the driveway before bumping onto the paved road where our property ends.

She’s been knitting me a sweater for the past three years that she can’t seem to finish. I’ve gotten a lot bigger in that time, but it’s okay, because so has the sweater. It’s draped over the back of the couch, a mass of dropped stitches, hanging strands, and random colors. It looks like a giant psychedelic wool amoeba.

Even if it’s math, they never just ask what’s five plus three. They have to make it into a story about five brown rabbits and three white rabbits having a rabbit cotillion.

A soupy fog swirls around my head, tinged with orange, until I can actually feel the heat from it.

“He’s probably in the middle of a puzzle,” I offer in a subdued voice.

“Just because this is middle school doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat one another with respect,” Miss Fountain says earnestly.

Mr. Kermit, who couldn’t even be riled by a roaring bonfire in his wastebasket, picks up his crossword puzzle, rips it into a million pieces, stomps on them, and stalks out.

As he launches into a whole story about his grandmother, the family farm, and a provisional license, I conjure up a picture of him in a front-row desk, examining worksheets from point-blank range like he’s staring through a jeweler’s eyepiece.

The window is open, and through the billowing clouds, we can just make out Miss Emma Fountain.

“Your mother picked it out,” I inform her with an oddly defiant smile.

“Oh, wow, that’s old. It’s just that people didn’t understand emissions back then. It was before everyone started putting the environment first—recycling, composting, installing solar panels...”

Now Barnstorm is fully reinstated to the Golden Eagles. He even stands on the sidelines at football games, leaning on his crutches and dispensing advice to the players.

“Circle Time?” he repeats, mystified.
I stare at our teacher. How could anybody in the school business never have heard about Circle Time?

He balances the bucket of coffee precariously on his lap.

He lives his life through fictional characters anyway. He lingers in front of the big posters, drinking in the details of the vibrant caricatures.

“He’s a gold dust day gecko,” Miss Fountain explains. “You can tell by the flecks of yellow in his scales.”

“Why don’t you share how you hurt your leg? I’m guessing it was a football injury.”
“No way,” Barnstorm scoffs. “The tackler isn’t born who can catch me..."