Nobody Cries at Bingo (18 page)

I sat up straighter. Reading? Competition? Those were my two favourite words. So when my friend Trina and I were assigned to her class, I couldn't have been happier. Then I found out that Tyler was in the same class and my euphoria was downgraded to light happiness.

When we got home that day, Celeste and I fought over the rights to the story. We danced around our mom.

“There were new teachers!”

“I got one!”

“And I got the other one!”

“Mine is really pretty!”

“Mine smokes!”

Mom already knew because she was on the School Board. She went to a meeting once a month and from that meeting gleaned enough gossip to carry her through to the next month. At the band office she was the queen of the school news and would hold court at one of the big round tables the day after every meeting. She had learned about the new hirings a few months before and had even seen the women's resumes. Mom implied that she had used her connections to ensure that we would be in their classes.

“They're both smart young women and you're lucky to have them,” she said as she set the table. “You can thank me by doing the dishes without complaining for once.”

My sister and I felt that we were on the cutting edge of education. Most of the elementary school teachers had been around for more than thirty years and people complained that the staff room smelled like an old folk's home.

It was my first year in a split class. The grade fours would be sharing the same room as the grade threes. I wasn't happy about this. Younger kids were always a drag, as I knew from having three younger siblings.

The grade fours — my year — sat on the right side of the room and the grade threes sat on the other side. Trina sat in front of me, Tyler to my left.

“Here we go again, Dumont,” Tyler drawled. “You must love me or something?” For the past four years, we had always been in the same classroom.

“As if.”

Trina added for good measure. “You're gross, Tyler.”

To improve our reading skills, Miss Gramiak invented the dictionary game. I loved it. She gave us a list of words in the morning and we had a race to see who could find the word the quickest. I sped through the dictionary and found the words and wrote down the corresponding page number. I knew the competition was an important one, as I quickly needed to establish myself as the smartest student in the class.

Tyler came in second but he was good-natured about it. “Hey, Dumont, what the hell do you do with your weekends, sleep on a dictionary?”

“Yup. That's what I do.” With another victory in my pocket, Tyler's words could not touch me.

Just in case, Trina drew herself up to her full height; she was at least two heads taller than Tyler and looked down on him. “You have a problem with my friend?”

Tyler quickly backed away. “Hey, no need to get the whole tribe after me.”

Trina and I laughed at his ignorance. “We're from different reserves, idiot.”

I fully expected that my wins at the Dictionary Game would win my place at the top of Miss Gramiak's heart. I was used to being the teacher's pet. I had been one in grade one, two and three. I knew that teachers appreciated my ability to clean erasers, monitor the other students and smile on command. I liked rules and I often took on extra work to get extra attention. I was born to be a teacher's pet.

Miss Gramiak was different. Being a good student wasn't enough to guarantee her love. She appreciated different qualities . . . she liked a student to take initiative, to speak up and be cunning. She loved Tyler.

Trina and I watched open mouthed, as Tyler became the most powerful student in the class. Even Tyler was surprised. “Wow, she really likes me. And she hates everyone else.”

Hate. That's a strong word. I wouldn't say that she hated the other students; rather she was . . . annoyed by their existence.

It wasn't her fault. She had specifically stated that she wanted to have the best readers in the province. So why were students resisting her? The slower ones were clearly not trying to be the best; they were still sounding out words with their mouths and reaching for their phonics guides. We started to fall behind in the provincial standings. By the second month, we were in fourth place out of five schools.

Like all good competitors, Miss Gramiak saw this as a challenge, not a failure. She had declared her intentions and now she would employ her big city methods. These consisted primarily of yelling and pounding on desks. Sometimes she was forced to shake a student until the knowledge worked its way into their medulla oblongata. Other times she relied on vocal motivation such as by shouting in the face of the student: “Stop being so stupid!”

Some might say that her methods were harsh; I felt they were effective. For instance, I never, not even once, failed to do my homework. Many nights I even lay awake, my mind frantically searching for a lesson that might have been overlooked. Who needed sleep when I had stress to keep my young body going?

Everyone reacted differently to Miss Gramiak. Trina and I kept our heads down and pretended not to hear. Other students checked their dignity and self-respect at the door. Not a single class went by without someone collapsing into tears. I don't know why: Miss Gramiak did not show pity. She would mock the crybabies by placing her head next to theirs and pretending to weep. “Oh boo hoo, I can't do it. I'm just a little kid. Oh boo hoo.”

I felt the crybabies had chosen their reaction badly. “If they hadn't cried on the first day, if they had just held it in . . . they wouldn't keep crying,” I whispered to Trina. She agreed with me and we promised that no matter what happened we would not cry.

The grade threes coped by developing a group mind. They became a single entity that worked with only one goal in mind: driving Miss Gramiak insane. They were like feral beasts. They dropped their books on the floor and took two minutes to pick them up. They refused to do their homework. They kept asking to go to the bathroom at different times and, when she refused them, they would urinate at their desks.

Miss Gramiak responded by screaming louder. Pencils flew across the room. She grabbed arms and roughly pulled students out of the classroom. We would hear her spanking them — which we knew wasn't allowed — then the kid, red-eyed and angry would appear in the doorway in front of Miss Gramiak, a tight angry smile on her face. Within minutes the pattern would begin again, this time with a different student. It was a furious little battle that continued through the day. We grade fours kept our eyes on our books and sent silent messages of thanks to the grade three Borg Collective for absorbing the weight of her anger.

Tyler, as Miss Gramiak's pet, could not avert his eyes because her eyes often went to his for support. “Tyler, can you believe these students?” she would say and Tyler would shake his head, a huge fake smile plastered to his face.

When a boy would burst into tears, she would make a face at Tyler and Tyler would replicate it back at her. Our classmates hated him and wished all kinds of cooties upon his head. I could sense his fear. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and Tyler's neck looked like it was ready to snap.

I began to pee my bed. Not every night, but even once is a problem. It meant getting up in the middle of the night, changing my clothes, and then pushing my sister over onto the wet spot before falling back asleep.

“I don't understand it,” Mom said at the breakfast table. “Celeste's never wet the bed before.”

Celeste crossed her arms. “I didn't do it!”

I smiled benevolently down at her. ‘Hey, it's okay, you're still little.”

At supper each night, our family sat around the table and discussed our days. Celeste bubbled forth about Miss Noble's class. “Today Miss Noble took us on a field trip to pick flowers and then she made us blow on the dandelions and make wishes. I wished that Miss Noble would be my teacher forever.”

I silently reminded myself to find a dandelion after supper and make a wish of my own.

Celeste talked about chocolate prizes, and stickers that smelled like strawberries and sunshine.

Although I had nothing good to say about my teacher, I could not let my sister take all the attention. So I made up stories about how Miss Gramiak was teaching us to be good readers. “Every day one of us sits on her knee and she reads to us while she . . . brushes our hair.”

Mom raised her eyebrows. “She has time to do that? With all of you?”

“Yes, because in Miss Gramiak's class, time seems to last forever.”

My mom frequently told us that we got on her “nerves.” In Miss Gramiak's class I knew what that truly meant. My nerves were shattered. I jumped every time someone slammed a door or dropped a book. When she lost patience with a student in the front row and her heels drummed from the back of the room to the front, my gut muscles would tighten until her footsteps passed my desk.

Every day I would stare at the door to the classroom willing myself to run. “Now,” I would whisper, “now.” My feet would not move. I was afraid of what would happen once I reached the other side of the door. Yes, there would be the momentary satisfaction of having escaped, but how long would that last? It would only be a minute before Miss Gramiak made it to the hallway and then escorted me back to the classroom. Even if I encountered another teacher, even if I could get my story out, what would they do? If they had ears, then they already knew what was going on in that classroom. Unless of course they thought that Miss Gramiak had discovered a new way to teach phonics — by screaming it down her students' throats.

Worst of all, if I ran for it — Miss Gramiak would know what I really thought about her class. She would know that she was getting to me. As long as my eyes were down, we could all pretend that everything was okay.

I had made the mistake of opening my mouth, only once. I was standing beside her desk as she corrected my work with her red pen. With each stroke of her red pen, I uttered the word, “oops.” I'd said it three times when she put down her pen and stood up to address the class. “Instead of standing beside me and saying OOPS, do your work right the first time.”

My face turned red and I pretended that I was someone else, like my brother David who screwed up all the time and was loved even more for it. I tried to make my mouth into the shape of a smile; my trembling lips would allow only a grimace.

At least I had Trina. Tyler was all by himself. She would turn on him eventually and he grew nervous waiting for it to happen. He started getting sloppy. We noticed that he took longer and longer to clean the erasers and when he got back to the classroom, there was plenty of chalkboard dust on them.

Miss Gramiak noticed. “Hey, Tyler, what's wrong? You don't like your job?”

“No Miss Gramiak . . . it's great!” His fake enthusiasm was becoming weaker by the second.

“Because you can always be replaced. You know that, right?”

Tyler nodded and sat down.

“It's only a matter of time.” Trina would whisper to me, and offered to set up a pool for the date of Tyler's upcoming downfall. I couldn't join in the fun because I felt sorry for him.