Mohican Memories Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

The Dun-Gym

No one could hear the screams...

Chapter 3 in a series, beginning here.

If C.E. Budd School was a castle, the gym was the dungeon. Sunk below ground level, it was cold and dark and filled with various torture devices like the heavy knotted ropes which hung from the ceiling, metal balance beams, and suspicious lengths of volleyball netting. A kid could scream as loud as he could in that room, and no one on the outside would hear.

Three times a week, we were forced to endure unspeakable punishments in that gym, things like basketball and tumbling and various forms of running and stretching and jumping rope. It was hideous, and the worst part was, the parents knew all about it and didn’t do a thing, using excuses like, “I had to do it when I was a kid,” as if that made it any better.

Even my teacher was in on it. When it was time for gym, Mrs. Henry made us line up at the door in reverse alphabetical order. She thought this was creative and educational, but all it did was make sure Jessica White was first and I was last and everybody else just memorized who they had to stand next to and never thought about it again.

Mrs. Henry held up her finger like we were still in kindergarten, and we all quieted down and copied her. You can’t talk if you have your finger in the air. It’s like a law or something.

Once we were all lined up and quiet, Mrs. Henry led us snake-like through the halls lined with students’ papers and colorful bulletin boards. We walked single-file down the steps into the belly of the school where the lights grew dim and the painted walls changed to colorless, glossy subway tiles that reflected our eyes back to us.

The lunch room was on one side of the dark hallway. Here, the smells of Salisbury steak and overcooked peas mingled with the smell of Pine-sol from the janitor’s closet. We were so quiet with our fingers up in the air, we could hear the lunch ladies chattering about the latest development on The Young and the Restless, which was a show about people kissing each other and then running around and kissing other people and getting all mad about it.

We filed past the band room where Miss Watkins was trying to teach five boys how to play brass instruments. Their cheeks were puffed and red, and she had the look of woman who was trying to have more patience than she really had, like the way my mom looked when we were acting up in church and she couldn’t do anything about because God was watching.

The next door opened to the dun-gym. On the other side, Mr. Peterson would be waiting, and next to him, Ms. Miller. Mr. Peterson liked it when we called him Coach. He wore his Loudonville Redbirds hat every day, even inside, which was against the law, but Coach didn’t seem to know about it. He carried gum in his pocket, and sometimes, right in the middle of gym class, he’d shout “Free throw!” and everybody had to rush for a basketball and make one shot. If you got your shot, Coach gave you a piece of cinnamon gum, but you had to spit it out in the locker room before you went back to class because Mrs. Henry didn’t understand about free throw gum and she’d make you sit in the hall if she caught you with it.

Ms. Miller didn’t understand about free throw gum either, even though she was the assistant gym teacher. She was the only teacher I had ever known who wasn’t a Miss or a Missus. I didn’t even know there was a third option, but I kind of thought Ms. Miller made it up for herself because she was getting too old to be a Miss but hadn’t quite made it to Missus yet. Ms. Miller was some kind of angry in-between.

Coach called us kiddos and pinched our arms when we came in the door. Ms. Miller blew her whistle and herded us into the locker rooms where it was her responsibility to make sure we girls changed into appropriate gym clothing and wore shoes that didn’t scuff and left our bangle bracelets in a locker. Ms. Miller thought bangle bracelets were an affliction, and she felt it deeply.

That's a fierce Cardinal...um...Redbird

Our gym shirt was stamped with a picture of our school mascot, the Redbird, which isn’t even a real bird. Blue birds are real birds. Redbirds are not. By fifth grade, you know that. We had to run around the gym under a cartoonish painting of a giant red bird and act like we were proud of having a mascot that wasn’t smart enough to be called a Cardinal.

In the winter, when it was too snowy outside to do much of anything, that red bird watched us learn to square dance. Ms. Miller told us to do-si-do and promenade, even though you could tell she didn’t think dancing was real gym. It wasn’t even half-way agonizing like real gym should be, except that you had to hold hands with a boy, and Ms. Miller didn’t remember what it was like to be agonized over something like that.

But in the spring, when the weather turned warm and the dandelions started to bloom, Ms. Miller got all the real gym she wanted because that was the time of year when we all had to take the President’s Physical Fitness Test. Nothing made Ms. Miller happier than a test on physical fitness. It was the only time she smiled all year.

“It is our goal that each one of you passes,” she stated, “and earns one of these special badges.” Ms. Miller held up a large, official-looking patch. I wouldn’t care anything about it if it wasn’t for the fact that it was an official-looking patch, which is exactly the kind of thing a real spy needs to get into top-secret buildings and things like that. It was a badge of honor for anyone who had survived the torture chamber of the dun-gym.

“Just do your best,” Coach added, “and you’ll do fine.” He was picking at his fingernails and thinking about what he was going to grill for dinner.

Ms. Miller glared at him over her glasses. “I have printed copies of the requirements and I expect each of you to practice at home so you can do your best,” she said, whipping her thin ponytail over her shoulder and passing around a stack of photocopies. “You have two weeks to get ready!”

When I got off the school bus, I dug the crumpled sheet out of my backpack and handed it over to David, who scanned it quickly and declared himself my personal trainer. We met in the fort for our first consultation.

“Sprints, easy. Sit ups, piece of cake. Flexed arm hang, are you kidding me? All you have to do is hang there? Girls have it so easy.” He looked annoyed.

“What about the mile run?” I asked. The thought of it made me queasy.

He looked at the chart. “You have 11 minutes and 22 seconds to run a mile. Stop whining. You could walk it that fast. Herbie could walk it that fast. ”

Herbert was the fattest kid in my class, even though Mrs. Henry said we should never call another person fat. “Pudgie” made him sound like a puppy, and “rotund” made me think of the something I saw at the state capital when we were on a field trip. So I just didn’t talk about it.

“You’re totally overreacting,” he concluded. “You owe me fifteen Skittles.”

I counted them out, thinking about how I could have paid Michael half as many Skittles to get the same amount of help. But you can’t very well ask your younger brother for advice about anything. It’s a matter of principle.

Coach decided to spread the test over three days, which only prolonged the agony. On the third day, we were scheduled to do the flexed arm hang and the mile run. I had muddled my way through the sit ups and the flexibility test and even survived the sprints. But it was hard to be happy about it when I knew a mile run was in my future.

I barely slept the night before the test, and when I did, I dreamed about being chased around the school by a giant bumble bee that looked like Ms. Miller. I woke up with knots in my stomach. I poured myself a big bowl of Lucky Charms and picked a few extra charms out of the box for good measure. I wished I had lucky socks.

“You’ll do fine,” my mom said when I said I might throw up. It was her standard mom-reply to every childhood crisis, no matter how large or small.

“Mom, I’m about to swim through shark-infested waters!”

“You’ll do fine.”

“Mom, I’m about to run with scissors!”

“You’ll do fine.”

“Mom, I’m about to fight a fire-breathing dragon and then perform open heart surgery on the hamster!”

“You’ll do fine.”

Once, just once, it would have been nice to hear her scream, “Oh my goodness! You’re probably going to die or at least embarrass yourself so much that you can never go back to school ever again!” But she never did.

The gym was colder than normal, and my skin looked purple and splotchy under the giant fluorescent lights which hung like eyeballs from the ceiling. Coach took the boys to one side of the gym and sent the girls over to the other side where Ms. Miller was waiting. She stood under a horizontal bar with a clipboard in her hand.

“Today, you’ll do one of the easiest parts of the President’s Physical Fitness test. All you have to do is grab on to the bar and hang for at least eight seconds. Jessica, why don’t you come up and demonstrate.”

Jessica always got called on to demonstrate things for Ms. Miller because Jessica was going to be in the Olympics.

Jessica smiled and hopped up on the chair under the bar. Her skin didn’t look splotchy at all. She was still tan from swimming in the ocean during spring break. She grabbed onto the bar and as soon as Ms. Miller counted down “3, 2, 1, go!” Jessica dangled from the bar like she was part bat. She looked over at Ms. Miller and smiled. “How am I doing?”

“Great, Jessica! Just great! It’s 20 seconds so far!”

It looked so easy; I started feeling better. Over a minute passed before Jessica dropped to the floor, still smiling. “I could have gone longer, but I got bored,” she shrugged.

Ms. Miller patted Jessica on the back and made the rest of us line up. One by one, the girls took a turn, and we clapped and said encouraging things like, “Good effort!” and “Way to hang!”

Soon it was my turn. I stood up on the chair and Ms. Miller counted “3, 2, 1, go!” She looked up. I was standing next to her. “Kristie, you’re supposed to be up on the chair so you’re ready to go when I say go.”

She had been so busy looking at her stopwatch that she hadn’t seen my attempt at the flexed arm hang, in which I lifted my feet off the chair and fell to the ground so quickly, I barely had time to contemplate my complete and utter lack of upper body strength.

“Did you fall off? Hop back up there and wait for me to say go,” Ms. Miller instructed. She repeated her countdown, and I repeated my noteworthy performance, only this time, I knocked my chin against the bar on the way down. The girls giggled, even Jessica, who was supposed to be my best friend.

Ms. Miller looked at her stop watch. “Did you do it? “

“Yes. I mean, no, not really,” I said feebly, rubbing my chin.

“Well, I can’t count that! The watch didn’t even start! Try it again. I don’t think you’re doing it right.” She placed my hands on the bar and pulled the chair out from under me without even bothering with the stop watch. My arms gave out immediately and I landed on the gym floor with a thud.

“I don’t know what to do with you!” Ms. Miller threw up her hands and ran off to consult with Coach. He came over and took a look at my chin.

“Had a tough time with that one, huh kiddo?”

I nodded and tried not to cry. “Well, just put her down for eight seconds, Miller. I’m sure she could have done it if that bar hadn’t clocked her one.”

Ms. Miller gave an audible gasp. “I will do no such thing! I am not going to defraud the government!”

“Ms. Miller, it’s a gym test, not your state taxes. Just write it down.”

Ms. Miller pushed her lips together and wrote down the number eight so hard, her pencil broke. I thought that my muscles must be made of Silly Putty, and if that was the case, maybe I could just melt right into the wall while the rest of the girls took their turns.

But before I could, Coach’s whistle blew and he waved us outside. The air was warm and smelled like spring and a cool breeze blew across the school yard. It was a terrible day for a run.

“Alright, everyone, a mile is almost exactly three times around the school,” Ms. Miller was saying. “You can walk if you absolutely have to, but you should run as much as you can or you won’t make your time.”

“Just pace yourself and do your best,” Coach added. Ms. Miller glared at him again. She looked like she was having the worst President’s Physical Fitness Test day ever.

Three times around the school didn’t seem that bad. I remembered what David said and hoped for the best. We lined up and Coach blew his whistle.

The boys tore off at break-neck speed while the girls trotted off at a more sensible pace. I stayed with the pack at first and congratulated myself on the fact that my legs were not as wimpy as my arms. We made it around the school one time before the faster girls began to pull ahead, with Jessica in the lead. My lungs began to burn.

In the distance, I could hear Ms. Miller calling out the times of some of the fastest boys, who were already finishing. My throat was sandpaper and I was pretty sure someone was stabbing me in the side, but when I looked back all I saw was Coach running next to Herbie, urging him on. All the girls who had started with me began to pass me, one by one. They were a lap ahead, and not one of them looked tired.

Somewhere during the second lap, I determined that the President’s Physical Fitness badge was not as cool as I had once thought. It looked cool at first, but I had been blinded out of all sensibility by the savage looking eagle and gold trim. No one was going to believe it was a real spy badge anyway. I slowed down and started walking, holding my side. I didn’t even want one, even if it came from the President himself.

I was right in the middle of this thought when I heard someone behind me.

“How’s it going, kiddo?” Coach asked, trotting along next to me.

“It’s okay,” I puffed, and tried to run next to him, matching his pace.

“Whose idea was this, anyway?” he asked.

“The President’s,” I moaned.

“What a stupid idea. No wonder I didn’t vote for him.” Even Mr. Peterson was breathing hard, but he kept talking. “Back when I was in the Army, I had this Drill Sergeant who used to make us run until we threw up. I seem to remember it taking longer than a mile.”

I did not want to talk about throwing up. I was regretting every single Lucky Charm and was significantly concerned that I might be seeing them again very, very soon.

“You know, the thing about being a gym teacher is that you don’t actually get a lot of exercise during school hours,” Coach was saying. “A mile seems a lot farther now than when I was your age!”

We spotted Ms. Miller up ahead.

“You got this in the bag, kiddo!”

“What?”

“Don’t tell me you were having so much fun running, you lost track of the laps! You’re in the home stretch! Just run it in.”

I crossed the finish line in disbelief.

“10:25, Kristie. Good job,” Ms. Miller said as I collapsed into the grass.

10:25? 10:25?! “You mean I passed?”

“Yep, with almost a minute to spare,” Ms. Miller smiled. She was actually kind of pretty when she smiled. I decided to try extra hard not to throw up on her grass.

Three months later, a package arrived in the mail from Washington D.C., addressed to me. I tucked it under my shirt and walked into the house as nonchalantly as possible, just in case my Soviet-spy neighbor was watching. It was my badge and a letter from the President congratulating me on my achievement. I had survived.

“Wow, that’s awesome!” Michael breathed.

“I thought it would be bigger,” David said, but he was twelve and wasn’t allowed to think anything was cool. But then he added, “You’d better get Mom to sew that on quick. I saw a black car in the neighbor’s driveway and I think we need to check it out.” Everyone knew bad guys drove black cars.

I looked at my new spy badge and smiled. The very sight of it would strike fear into the hearts of evil-doers everywhere. I shoved it in my pocket and grabbed my binoculars. Duty called.

Badge of Honor

The Contingency Plan

When I was ten, my dad decided it was time to move away from the suburbs. He loaded up the contents of our house and drove down State Route 97, right into the middle of the Mohican State Forest. The highway followed the river as it wound through acres and acres of thick green trees and then dropped us right in the middle of all that green, far away from any neighbors. There was not a sidewalk in sight.

Our house was small and old and magical. The siding was made of asbestos and the windows didn’t open or shut without a significant expenditure of energy. Once, one of those windows dropped shut and nearly decapitated the cat, who was basking on the ledge. The cat sprang away, but not before the window caught her by the tail and left her dangling and scratching frantically against the wall. It took my dad a full five seconds to get the window back up, and it took my mom more than a couple swipes with the disinfectant to get the cat urine off the wall. That was the summer Dad decided to replace some windows.

Our little green house perched atop a delightfully steep hill, steep enough that you could try to break your neck by riding your bike down it in the summer, and steep enough to justify complaining whenever you had to haul wood up it in the winter. Three unfortunate hamsters were buried at the bottom, in shallow graves that overlooked the creek.

My dad bought the house from his uncle, who passed on the legend that the original owners had hidden a Stradivarius in one of the walls. He had the bow to prove it. My brothers and I immediately set about determining which walls we were going to knock down first in an attempt to find it. We could be rich! Apparently, my mother cared nothing for worldly treasure, judging by the way she reacted when she caught us with the sledge hammer.

Summer brought tourists and the refurbished blue busses that rumbled past our house, hauling bright yellow kayaks and aluminum canoes back up the river to canoe livery just outside of town. The local businesses put out signs that said “Cold Beer” and “Dry Cigarettes” and boasted about the fact that they had ice. Main Street was bustling and the ice cream shop was never without customers.

Town was only a short drive away, but out in our forest, it seemed like we had the whole world to ourselves. My brothers and I ran barefooted through the woods, exploring every turn in the creek. We turned over rocks looking for crawdads and tried in vain to catch minnows with our bare hands. There were tadpoles to capture and raise in buckets in the basement and arrowheads to search for among the wild blackberry brambles. It was Indian country, and I imagined how the woods must have looked a couple hundred years ago, and who must have walked the paths before me.

Even though we lived just ten minutes from C.E. Budd Elementary School, we were the first ones on the bus every morning. That meant we were also the first ones off the bus in the afternoon, but that was little consolation at 6:30 in the morning, when the sky was still black and the air was at its coldest. Every morning, we shuffled out to the driveway at exactly 6:25 am to wait for the bus. If we weren’t outside when the bus came, the driver wouldn’t stop. Other bus drivers stopped and honked if kids were late. But our driver didn’t even slow down. His glasses were so dark and thick, I didn’t think he could recognize our house unless he saw three children standing out in front of it.

The school bus driver was a large, unshaven man who hunched over his steering wheel like he’d spent his whole life digging graves. I secretly nicknamed him “Warden” because I imagined he had been acquainted with life behind bars. I wondered why background checks weren’t more popular.

We had to endure an hour bus ride through the darkness as the Warden collected children from across the countryside and delivered us to school before the 8 o’clock bell. “One of these days, he’s going to pull over and eat us,” I thought as I looked at his face in the dim morning light. But for some reason, my mom didn’t think she should drive us to school just because my bus driver was very likely a cannibal.

In the murky early morning darkness, the school bus rattled past the Mohican Juvenile Correction Institution, which was just minutes from my house. Even at that time of the day, the yard was all lit up like a baseball field, and razor wire lined the perimeter. I liked to think that the building was full of type writers and overzealous English teachers who liked nothing more than to correct the dangling modifiers and split infinitives in the term papers of the young rouges under their tutelage. But I knew better. As my dad had pointed out, the difference between an “institute” and an “institution” was a sentence.

We had heard stories about the inmates in that place, young men who had committed crimes beyond their years. In the dark of the night, when children are supposed to be sleeping in their bedrooms upstairs, the grownups sometimes talked about the time when two of these teens had escaped, walked through the woods, and held up a neighbor at gunpoint. Little children who are supposed to be asleep have keen ears for words like “escape” and “gunpoint.” From that point on, every creaky old board or squeaky door hinge in our house held the prospect of a sure and sudden death at the hands of a young mercenary.

I had read enough Little House on the Prairie books to know that the thing to do when danger is afoot is to have a trusty watchdog and a gun above the door. But for some reason, my dad did not think it necessary to stand watch at my bedroom door with a shotgun in hand, and we did not own a brindle bulldog. Our only four-footed defenders included a pregnant Cocker Spaniel and a tiger cat who could be wooed to enemy ranks with little more than a potato chip and an empty tuna can.

So I devised a contingency plan.

My bedroom had two long, low closets that ran the length of my bedroom. They were full of boxes of winter coats and Christmas decorations and sentimental stuff that had no purpose but to take up space in my closet. Even a villainous murder wouldn’t want to sort through all those boxes unless he was planning a garage sale. They were the perfect thing to hide a foxhole in the back of the closet. In the amount of time it would have taken me to do my math homework, I created a false front of boxes to conceal my secret hideout. Using a big, empty box, I made a flap for a door and scrawled the words “Completely Uninteresting Stuff” across the front in black Sharpie, just in case. Huddled in the back of my closet with nothing but a flashlight and the fear of discovery to keep me company, I felt very much like Anne Frank.

After a series of quality assurance tests, my brothers and I found that we could get from our beds to the foxhole in 8.5 seconds, less if David and I didn’t wake up Michael. We put our sleeping bags in the fort (it was called a fort when there was no fear of imminent death), along with a stack of Ranger Rick magazines and a box of candy we had squirreled away. The candy was Contingency Plan #2. In the event that the evil-doer broke through our false wall, we’d distract him with Sweet Tarts before bonking him on the head with the hammer my dad was convinced he’d lost at work.

All in all, it was a foolproof plan.

Except for one thing: the school bus stop. For five, eternal minutes each morning, we were unprotected, sent out into the darkness and into the hands of Fate. My mother thought ten and eleven year-olds were perfectly capable of standing outside by the road without getting themselves or their younger brother murdered, and she positively refused to stand in the doorway with a kitchen knife, just in case. I was pretty sure she had already gone back to bed before we were even on the bus.

So every morning, at exactly 6:25 am, we had to step outside of the Safety Zone. There was no Contingency Plan after 6:25 am.

One morning, the three of us were huddled together by the side of the road, wondering if this was the morning the Warden was going to cut out our gizzards.

Suddenly, a twig broke. Then another. Someone was walking in the woods! “What was that?” I asked as the underbrush crackled.

“I dunno!” Michael answered.

The heavy footsteps came closer and closer. The sound of snapping branches filled my ears. I wished I had hidden my diary. I would have, I thought, if I had known that this was going to be my last day on earth.

“Someone get Mom!” David whispered fiercely.

Sheer terror gripped me and I wanted to run, but my feet were frozen to the free-throw line on our makeshift basketball court. I couldn’t move.

Then, suddenly, a chipmunk sprang out of the darkness. We leaped into the air. “Stay away from us!” I yelled before I realized that I was talking to a varmint. The chipmunk gave us a condescending glace before scampering away into the shadows. We breathed a sigh of relief and even laughed a little at our foolishness.

“A chipmunk? Seriously?” I asked.

“I knew it was a chipmunk,” David responded.

Then Michael’s little voice spoke out of the darkness. “Who do you think he’s running from?”

David and I looked at each other. He had a point.

Just then, we heard a high, quivering wail. The chipmunk skittered deeper into the woods. Another cry broke through the darkness. Someone was coming through the trees, straight for us. He was breathless and made odd moaning sounds as he walked.

“It sounds like someone has been injured!”

“Maybe someone tried to escape from the prison. I bet they shot him!”

“Or stabbed him!”

Another branch snapped and the eerie wail sounded again. “Maybe he’s headed for the creek so the hounds won’t be able to follow his scent!” I didn’t even know if the police still used hounds, but I’d seen it on TV.

“What are we gonna do?!”

There wasn’t time to do anything. My only hope was that David had watched enough G.I. Joe episodes to know that it was his duty to save the women first.

“Gllgllgllgllo,” came the sound of the escaped prisoner in the woods, gurgling on his own blood.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” came the sound of our own fear betraying us. Mom is going to feel really guilty that my last breakfast was cold cereal, I thought to myself.

We stood transfixed, mesmerized by the reality of our coming demise. Just then, a beam of light glinted off the power line. “The bus!”

Never had I been so happy to hear the bus. “Drive! Drive!” we screamed.

A shadowy figure rustled through the oak branches. “Gllgllglllgo!” it babbled before jumping onto the road, right into the blinding high-beams. The bus screeched to a stop. I could smell the tires burning.

“Run for it!” David yelled.

We dashed across the road, my backpack strangling me as I ran. Someone breathed in my ear. “NoooooOOOOO!” I tripped up the steps, hitting my shin on the second step, and collapsed face-first into the front seat, grateful for the smell of Lysol and vinyl to assure me that I was still alive.

The Warden looked up from under his baseball cap and caught my eye in the rearview. He waited until he was certain I wasn’t having a heart attack. “Did you see the wild turkeys?” he drawled.

“What?” I gasped, shocked both by the fact that the Warden could talk and that he could observe anything from behind his two-inch thick glasses.

“You almost ran right over them,” he nodded toward the road.

I sat up and looked out the window just in time to see two wild turkeys descending into the shadows behind our house. I looked at David and he looked at me. We both laughed a little. Turkeys. It was nothing more than a couple of wild turkeys.

Michael leaned over the seat back and whispered, “Yah, but who do you think they were running from?”

We looked at each other again, eyes wide. He had a point.

******

The next morning, the newspapers were strangely silent about breach of security at the Mohican Juvenile Correction Institution. You’d think an escaped prisoner would have made the front page.

We told our parents all about the incident and how we very nearly died. Dad almost choked on his coffee, and Mom had to leave the room because she said she had something in her eye. This was not exactly the reaction we expected. Clearly it was time to begin work on Contingency Plan #3.

Like this story? Read the next chapter here.

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

My eighth grade science teacher was Mr. Hau. He was tall, lanky and had brown hair and a mustache just like my dad. Mr. Hau loved science, and he loved nature. When the weather was nice, he’d take us out on the football field where we’d stare at patches of grass, marveling at all the things waiting to be discovered in six inches of turf, if someone actually took the time to look. We charted the path of the sun, learned about fault lines, memorized the Periodic Table, and learned to read test tubes. But we hardly ever opened the science textbook even though we had to bring it to class just the same, in case the principal came in and we had to act like science was boring.

Mr. Hau’s class was right before band. In fact, every single student in the class was also in band. The aisles of Mr. Hau’s science class were a jumble of instrument cases and sheet music.

We had to bring our instruments to class because the band room was on the other side of the building and it was hard enough to make it from science to band without being tardy. Mr. Hau never gave tardies. But the band teacher did.

I sat a couple rows back, on the right hand side of the class, with my flute tucked discreetly under my chair. Nikki Schmidt, who changed her name to Nichole after she decided she was going to become a world famous supermodel, sat in the very back with the boys. Meanwhile, Philip Doud, the first chair trumpet player and self-proclaimed king of eighth grade academia and my arch-nemesis, sat right up front. Jesse Beuchel whose parents owned the stone quarry, sat next to Phil, not because they were friends, but because Jesse had a way of distracting the class with questions that had nothing to do with composite rocks or tectonic plates, and Mr. Hau wanted to keep an eye on him. He had to keep his saxophone by the door so no one would trip over it.

One day, we came into class, banging into the chairs with our instruments. Mr. Hau was writing on the board. In loud, sloping letters he wrote: “There is NO such thing as a FREE LUNCH! “ He turned around and grinned at us, rubbing his chalky hands on his jacket. “Okay, you might want to take notes because this is going to be on your test,” he said as he began his lecture. Philip Doud threw me a look and dove into his backpack, digging out his power red college-ruled science notebook, and a tape recorder, just in case.

“Anyone know what this means?” Mr. Hau pointed at the board. I stared and pretended to look thoughtful. I couldn’t think of one intelligent thing to say. I was the kid poor enough to get free school lunches. I wondered if maybe this was some kind of joke, but Mr. Hau wouldn’t make a joke like that.

Every Monday morning, the entire eighth grade lined up outside of Mr. Hau’s homeroom and purchased their lunch tickets for the week. I lined up too, in my hand-me-down clothes and the wrong kind of tennis shoes, and every week, I prayed Mr. Hau would remember so I wouldn’t have to say it. But when it came my turn, Mr. Hau always said, “That’ll be five dollars, Kristie,” and I had to say, in front of everyone, “Um, Mr. Hau, I get free lunch.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he smiled, making his eyes crinkle up at me just the way my dad’s used to. He really did look a lot like my dad. Except my dad’s eyes were blue, and Mr. Hau’s were brown. Brown eyes can look a lot like blue when they smile, but they’re not.

Then he put down the big roll of purple lunch tickets and picked up the small roll of light blue lunch tickets. He counted off five and handed them to me. “See you in class!” he called as I walked away. Light blue looks a lot like purple. But it’s not.

Mr. Hau was waiting for an answer. “Kristie?” He asked me. My face went hot and I suddenly felt the intense need to cry. “I’m not really sure,” I mumbled. Philip Doud looked triumphant. He already had his hand in the air. Mr. Hau stared at me for a second. I loved science and I loved Mr. Hau and I always had the answers if Philip Doud didn’t beat me to it. Mr. Hau blinked, and I saw him remember. I could tell he remembered by the way he sucked his breath in quickly and then looked away.

Philip Doud was practically writhing with knowledge. I wanted to smack the GPA right out of him. “It means you can’t get something for nothing,” he snorted. “Everything costs something. Whether in science or in economics, nothing happens without significant expenditure of energy and resources.”

Philip was right of course, and he beamed all through Mr. Hau’s presentation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. “Everything costs something. Nothing is free.” Jesse Beuchel yawned. He was wearing the new leather bomber jacket he had gotten for Christmas, and he didn’t understand how any of this applied to him.

But I knew it was true. Everything cost something, and everything seemed to cost something more than we had. “You’re lucky you have so much,” my mom reminded me if I complained. There were always those African orphans to think about when I started to feel like the most economically depressed kid on the planet. I tried, but I hated those hand-me-downs, and I hated those light blue lunch tickets even more.

When the bell rang, I gathered up my books and my flute. Mr. Hau was waiting for me by the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” He looked worried, and that made it worse. Ever since my dad died, teachers felt like they needed to worry about me.

“I know,” I said, staring as Nichole’s perfect head bobbed by. I wished my jeans were long enough to roll up the way she did.

“Can I tell you something?” he went on.

“Sure,” I said, seeing a band tardy in my future.

Mr. Hau read my mind and grinned. “I’ll write you a note,” he said.

Then Mr. Hau sat down on the edge of a front row desk and folded his hands over his knee. “I teach this lesson every year,” he said, “and every year, I wonder if anyone really gets it. So it’s important to me that you understand something: Most people have much more then they deserve, but they think they deserve much more than they have.”

I thought about my hand-me-down clothes and swallowed hard. I hoped he wasn’t going to start talking about Africa.

“I want to show you a picture of my son,” Mr. Hau was saying as he got out his wallet. I didn’t know Mr. Hau had a son, but there I was staring at a picture of a boy about my age. He had brown hair like Mr. Hau, but his face was all screwed up and contorted and only one side of his mouth smiled in the picture.

“This is my boy, Peter. Something happened when he was born. The doctors told us that Peter probably wouldn’t live past a year, but he beat the odds! I told you that everything cost something, remember? And do you know what it cost to keep my son alive? It cost my wife staying up with him every night, making sure he didn’t stop breathing, it meant surgeries and trips to the doctor and wiping the spit off his mouth. It meant changing his diapers even when he wasn’t a small boy anymore. It meant selling our house and moving into a small apartment so we could afford his medical bills. It meant listening to him screaming whenever he had to ride in the car, and never, ever hearing him say ‘mom’ or ‘dad.’

“I used to feel kind of sorry for myself, and I was a little jealous of the dads who got to teach their sons how to throw a ball or build a fire. But then one day, a new doctor looked at Peter and he said it was a miracle that Peter was alive at all. And I finally got it. I had so much more than I deserved, and all I had been thinking about was the fact that I didn’t have what I wanted. If I’d gotten what I wanted, I wouldn’t have had my Peter, and if I didn’t have Peter, I wouldn’t be the man I am today.”

He was quiet for a minute, but then the second bell rang and Mr. Hau jumped a little and stood up. He smiled at me again. He really does look a lot like my dad, I thought.

“Ah, you’re going to be really late for band, and I’m going to hear about it if I don’t let you go!” He scribbled a note on a pad of paper and handed it to me, but he held on to it when I took it.

“It’s hard to do without, and it’s hard not to compare yourself to others. Believe me, I know. But if you have anything in your life that is good, consider it a gift. Don’t go around demanding more. Just be grateful.”

Then he let go of the note and winked at me, “Study hard for the test, okay? It would kill Philip if you beat him on it!”

I did study for the test, and I aced it. Philip Doud cried real tears until Jesse Beuchel punched him in the arm. Mr. Hau had written in red pen at the top of my page, “Great job! Now, don’t FORGET!”

I didn’t forget. To this day, I still remember those words. But that’s more than I can say for Mr. Hau. Every Monday, when I came up to his desk to get my lunch tickets, he looked at me and said, “That’s five dollars, Kristie.”

“I still get free lunch, Mr. Hau,” I tried to whisper.

With a mischievous grin, he would rip off five light blue tickets, lean over and whisper, “There’s no such thing!”