The Revealers (18 page)

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Authors: Doug Wilhelm

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At lunchtime, Catalina was sitting with Allison and her friends at their table, in the middle of everything. Elliot was at our old table with Big Chris Kuppel. I could hardly believe it. Elliot looked up when he saw me, but I walked away. I went and ate my lunch by myself.
In afternoon detention we weren't allowed to talk, which was fine with me. Catalina did homework. Elliot sat and read a dinosaur book. I did nothing. Detention was in Ms. Hogeboom's room that day and I looked at stuff on the walls, stuff I'd read a million times before and never paid much attention to. Like the banner above the blackboard that said, in big letters: NEVER SETTLE FOR LESS THAN YOUR BEST. Uh-huh. There was also a poster for Mr. Dallas's Creative Science Fair. And there was a section of the bulletin board that was crowded with political cartoons, headlines, pictures of people in the news. Above that stuff more big letters said: WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
Nice try, Ms. Hogeboom.
When three forty-five came, I hadn't done a thing. Ms. Hogeboom said we could go. Elliot and Catalina picked up their stuff and left.
Ms. Hogeboom was looking at me.
“Russell,” she said, “I imagine this has been a tough couple
of days for you.” I started gathering up my stuff. She said, “I wouldn't be surprised or blame you if you were upset. I just wonder if you'd like to talk about it.”
I shook my head.
“It's okay if you talk about it,” Ms. Hogeboom said gently.
I didn't want to. But then I heard myself whisper, “It's … just over. That's all.”
“What?” she said. “What's over?”
I shrugged. “Everything. We got beat. We are beat.” I zipped the backpack. I couldn't say any more.
She came around and sat on her desk. “Why?”
I couldn't answer.
“Why are you beat?” she said.
I shook my head. I didn't want to have this conversation. I was looking past her, at Mr. Dallas's poster.
A “Little Bit More Challenging” Science Fair
, it said. The fair was in four weeks, the poster said. So what?
“I know this decision about the network was a disappointment,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “And I know you feel responsible.”
I did not want to hear this. I read the poster instead.
“But who says you have to be beaten?” she was saying.
The poster said,
The Challenge: Create something that tests an original hypothesis.
“
Beaten
—that means ground down, doesn't it? Defeated. Depleted. Pretty much used up. Are you really used up? Russell? Russell, could you look at me?”
She was leaning sideways to catch my eye. “You're just beginning your life,” she said. “Why should you feel used up?”
I didn't answer.
“May I tell you what I've seen?” she said. “I've seen three promising kids who had each been unconfident, unsure—in fact, isolated. Definitely. And so they got picked on. This happens, I know. It breaks my heart, but I see it all the time.
I see that it happens when young people have, among their peers, a lack of stature.
“But then these three kids got together. That was a big thing, wasn't it? Just that they got together. I saw that. And you know what? That made other things possible.”
The poster said,
What do we mean, “original”
?
“These three kids started doing something,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “They started to share their experiences. And they found a way to put those experiences in front of every student in the seventh grade.”
“The whole school,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“We put them in front of every kid in the school.”
“Oh. Well, that's even better.”
We mean YOU thought of it
, the poster said.
The more unique, the better
.
“Anyway, the next thing anybody knew, other kids were sending in their stories,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “Everybody was reading these stories, and something very subtle was beginning to happen. Just in the atmosphere of the school. I don't know how to put it, exactly …”
What do we mean, “create”?
the poster said.
Ms. Hogeboom snapped her fingers. “Here's what I think it was. A lot of the time middle-schoolers are not very compassionate toward each other—especially to those who don't have stature. But all of a sudden I saw a humanizing. I think students were starting to look at each other a little bit differently. It was like a small revolution.”
She smiled.
“Maybe that's a bit much,” she said. “But I really felt that students were actually starting to treat each other differently.”
We mean when you're done
, the poster said,
something exists that didn't exist before.
“And now you three had stature,” Ms. Hogeboom was saying. “You were making an impact every day. You actually had power, all of a sudden. Maybe that didn't please everyone—maybe it even made some people nervous. Maybe they wanted to stop you, or knock you down. Or maybe you just made a mistake. I don't really know. But meanwhile, this other thing, this more general humanizing thing,
has
been happening.
“If you let yourself be beat, Russell,” she said. “Russell? Hello?”
I sat up. I still wasn't looking at her.
“If you are defeated,” she said, “I wonder—will this other thing be defeated, too? Will some kids go right back to victimizing other kids, with that same old arrogance and impunity? Will everyone else go right back to not really seeing, and not really caring? Will my heart start to get broken again?”
Note: the poster said,
This fair will be judged by real scientists and technology professionals. Advance human knowledge! MAKE something—whether weirdly wacky or totally technical—that opens people's eyes!
“Russell? Hello?”
“Huh?”
Ms. Hogeboom sighed.
“I guess you better go, Russell. Is someone here to pick you up?”
“No. I walk home.”
“All right.” She stood up. She thought for a second. Then she reached back on her desk, picked up a book, and tossed it to me. I missed it, and it fell to the floor. I picked it up.
It was her copy of Anne Frank's
Diary.
It still had that Mohawk shag of yellow Post-its across the top. The book had been read and reread and used so much that its cover had all these white cracks, its corners were rounded and swollen,
and the spine had totally come apart. She had tape holding it together.
“I would say nobody is truly isolated unless they cut
themselves
off, Russell,” she said. She nodded at Anne Frank's book in my hands. “That is one choice she never made.”
Ms. Hogeboom held out her hand. I put the book in it.
“And now we have something we never had before,” she said. “We have this.”
 
Walking up Chamber Street and then through the parking lot, I was almost hoping the dark figure would be there. When I saw him leaning against the white wall of Convenience Farms, I was almost glad.
I came walking up. He nodded. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
I leaned up alongside him. I just stood there. I could feel him glance over at me.
“I read that letter,” he said. “I heard what happened.”
I looked down. “It was a setup,” I said. “We got played.”
“Yeah? By who?”
“Couple of kids.”
“Huh. So, what are you gonna do about it?”
I scratched my foot in the gravel. “What can we do about it? We lost.”
Richie stood out from the wall.
“Says who?”
“I don't know.”
“Says you. Right? Says
you
.”
“No, the kids who played us. They said things are meant to be this way. I mean, the principal said it.”
“Oh, so that's it? A couple dirtball kids and that hot-air bag say you're done, so you're
done
?”
“Well what else can we do?” I was getting mad. “There's nothing we can do, all right?”
“No. That's not all right.” He was staring at the ground. Then he looked right at me. “You're just gonna cave? I mean, you stand up to me, then a couple midgets trip you up and you're gonna
lie
there?”
“I don't know what to do!” I was yelling. “All right? Everybody thinks it was our fault!”
He shook his head. “I don't. So that's not everybody. Right? That's a
big
not everybody.”
I shrugged.
“So,” Richie said, “now you figure out how to clue in everybody else. What's so hard about that?”
“For the last time, Richie, I don't know what to do!”
He started looking around. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “See that thing over there?” He was pointing toward the back.
“The phone booth?”
“
No
, not the phone booth. There.”
“The Dumpster?”
“Yeah. The Dumpster. You cave now, you give up now, where's the rest of your life going? Any guesses?”
“But I don't …”
“You don't always have to know what to do! You just have to know who you
are.
So who are you? Huh?”
He shoved me. Backward.
“Don't push me,” I said. “I've had a bad day.”
“I'm gonna push you right in that damn Dumpster. You want to go there, I'm gonna
put
you there.”
“Don't.”
“Why not? You're just gonna take it, right?” He pushed me again. I stumbled back. He pushed me
again.
I stopped stumbling and launched myself at him. I shoved him in the chest, right in his stupid black jacket. He stumbled backward himself.
“You're just a damn bully, you know that? You think every
answer is just to shove someone around. It's not that simple, Richie, all right? It's not that easy!”
I stuck my face in Richie's. His eyebrows lifted, but that's all. I said, “I can't solve an incredibly complicated problem just because you act like a tough guy and tell me
or else
! I mean, or else what?”
Slowly, Richie turned up his open palms.
“Or else nothing, man. That's just it. Or else you got nothing.
I turned and walked away. But my mind was working—I will say that. All day I'd been numb and dumb and feeling stuck. But Richie got me thinking again.
 
That night I was so tired, I went to bed early. Then, when I was almost asleep, I sat straight up in bed.
I was wide awake. There in the dark, all the pieces came together, and I got it.
I
got
it!
In that instant, I knew what we could do.
“So what's this?” said Jake Messner.
“Take a look,” said Elliot, sliding the mouse his way.
We three watched as Jake slipped into a chair and double-clicked. He leaned forward and looked at the screen, while behind him dozens of other kids milled around the gym.
A big yellow banner on the wall above the blue hanging mats said, WELCOME TO THE CREATIVE SCIENCE FAIR! There was a buzz of noise and a bubbling-up of laughter as all the kids who'd just been let in circled the gym, eyeing the exhibits as they shuffled by and peered from safe distances, cracking smart comments from their little moving groups but usually, unlike Jake, too self-conscious to be the first to stop and actually look.
The three of us had already wandered around. Because our exhibit was easy to set up—just a computer and a simple sign—we'd had time to make the circuit before the general student body was admitted. Some of the projects were fairly funny, like “The Answer Guys.” That was a refrigerator box three eighth-graders had painted silver, with an opening
the shape of a TV screen cut out at face level. Below the “screen” was a button and a sign that said PUSH—THEN ASK ANY QUESTION.
When you pushed, a guy popped up, and no matter what you asked, he would loudly intone a serious-sounding answer. Then another kid at a table asked you to fill out a survey, which had only one question: “Did you believe your answer?” Every exhibit had to be based on a hypothesis, and this one's was: “A majority of people will believe you if you sound like you know what you're talking about.”
Three sixth-graders had mummified a pig. They had used “ancient Egyptian methods,” according to a pretty cool brochure they had created on the computer with their picture (not the pig's) on the cover, “to reconstruct the art of mummification.” It was a prenatal pig, actually—unborn, but real. The brochure explained their methods: filling the “body cavities” with salt, soaking the body in baking soda, and filling the gut area with herbs mixed with Calvin Klein cologne. Their hypothesis was that mummification worked, but I figured they'd need to keep the pig around for a few years to know for sure.
Then there was “The Class Gas-O-Meter.” This was a Plexiglas box containing a carbon-dioxide meter that was connected to a buzzer alarm. The hypothesis was that high levels of CO
2
(“Human Exhaust,” the explanation panel explained) in school classrooms are “at least partially responsible for general discomfort, drowsiness, and increased perception of body odor experienced in school.” The kids had tested several classrooms. They had a chart showing their results—which were that three out of five classes tested above the maximum CO
2
level set by the state, which was 1,000 parts per million.
That was probably the coolest exhibit, next to ours.
There was also “The Hamster Trainer Maze.” This was one of those wooden skittle mazes where you spin a top and hope it makes it through several openings in the little walls to the goal. Only these kids had put a blob of peanut butter at the goal, and they kept letting a hamster go where you usually start the top. Their hypothesis was that you could train a hamster to find peanut butter in a maze. So far, though, they hadn't. I don't think they really got the idea of creating something new.
There were about a dozen other exhibits. Right in the middle was us.
Behind Jake, the tide of kids started to slow down. Some kids were stopping to look as our welcome screen swam up on the monitor:
Welcome to The Bully Lab
An Interactive Scientific Investigation
Created and assembled by:
Catalina Aarons
,
Elliot Gekewicz, and Russell Trainor
School survey conducted and report written and narrated by:
Catalina Aarons and Allison Kukovna
Reenactments featuring:
Jon Blanchette, Elliot Gekewicz, Christopher Kuppel, and Richard C. Tucker
Interviews conducted by:
Russell Trainor
Direction and videography by:
Turner White
Project adviser:
Claire Hogeboom
Technical adviser:
Jerome Dallas
True stories contributed by:
42 students of Parkland Middle School
Stories collected via:
Parkland School Local Area Network (LAN), running SchoolStream 3.0 communication software, with (formerly) open student access
 

Jake clicked up the menu:
I. Hypothesis
II. Research Methods
III. Research Report
IV. Video Reenactments
V. Video Interviews
VI. Gallery of Nasty Notes
VII. The Stories
Turner White came up and leaned against the table, watching. He was wearing a black turtleneck, and an actual black beret.
“Try the hypothesis first,” Catalina suggested.
“I want to see these reenactments,” Jake said, quickly double-clicking.
Turner smiled as the titles came up:
a.
The Bus
: Chris & Elliot
b.
The Locker
: Jon & Elliot
c.
The Lunchroom
: Chris & Elliot
d.
The Playground
: Chris, Jon & Elliot
e.
In Your Face
: Richard
A small crowd of kids were now peering over Jake's shoulder. “Do
The Bus
,” someone said. Jake nodded, and clicked.
The video window came up. Turner and Elliot and I had filled the back part of a school bus with a bunch of kids, so that it looked like the whole bus was full. It looked pretty good.
The kids are swaying back and forth like the bus is moving.
Elliot comes up the aisle. Only one seat is open—beside Chris.
Elliot puts his backpack on the floor, and turns to sit.
“You can't sit here.”
“But it's the only seat left.”
“It's saved.”
“For who?”
“For anybody but you,” Big Chris sneers. He slowly stands up. “You got a problem with that, shrimp-o?”
More kids, drawn by the video, joined the cluster around the computer.
“Well, yeah,” Elliot says. “I need to sit
some
where.”
He swings his butt and starts to sit—but Chris lowers his big shoulder and slams Elliot into the seat across the aisle so hard that Elliot goes sprawling over the two kids sitting there.
Chris picks up Elliot's backpack. He opens the bus window.
“Hey!” Elliot yells. The kids in the seats all laugh. Chris unzips the backpack and empties it out the window. Then he looks back, and grins.
 
The End

“This,” said Jake, grinning, “is cool.”
“Yo, man, give someone else a chance!”
There was a crowd now, pushing and squeezing up behind his chair.
“There oughta be more than one station for this,” somebody complained. I looked at Elliot, who shrugged.
“I'm next—I helped,” Allison Kukovna said. Jake lifted up so she could slide in and nobody else. She gave him a little nudge. Elliot jabbed me, and I thought,
Hmmm
.
Allison punched up Research Methods:
To test our hypothesis, we distributed a special survey to every student in Parkland Middle School.
Allison's recorded voice reads the same words out loud.
“
Boring
,” said someone in the crowd.
“Yeah—do more scenes,” said someone else.
“Hey,” Allison said, “I'm
narrating
here.” Jake turned back and glared. The kids shut up.
Our questions were simple:
1.
Have you ever been directly involved in a bullying or harassment incident at this school?
2.
If “yes,” were you:
a.
On the giver side?
b.
On the receiver side?
3.
Have you been involved in more than 5 incidents?
4.
More than 10?
5.
Did you read
The Revealer
on SchoolStream?
6.
Do you think that bullying and harassment in school have decreased since before
The Revealer
?
To see the responses and our analysis, click here for Research Report.
Click here to go back to Menu.
“Go to Menu!”
“Yeah!”
Allison nodded, and did. Kids were actually shouting.
“Interviews?”
“Reenactments?”
“I want to see the stories,” someone said.
“Hey, we've
seen
the stories,” said another kid. “They were on KidNet.”
“Not all of them,” Catalina piped up. “We collected lots more.
“How'd you do that?” Leah Sternberg asked, worming through the crowd. “Your access was revoked.”
Elliot smiled at me. “We had help,” he said.
Leah's forehead wrinkled, as if she was frustrated. Over her head came a big, thick hand, then Big Chris's head and shoulders. Elliot stood up far enough to slap hands.
“Like I said,” he told Leah.
“You weren't supposed to.”
“It was completely legal. We had two weeks before everyone
else
got shut down.”
“I, myself,” said Big Chris, “gained valuable computer networking, as well as acting, experience.” He bowed.
“Would you like a turn?” Allison said to Leah. They did the butt-to-butt seat exchange.
Leah quickly opened Video Interviews.
a.
Bethany DeMere and Catalina Aarons
b.
Jon Blanchette, Burke Brown, and Elliot Gekewicz
c.
Judith Lefkowitz, Guidance Counselor
d.
Janet Capelli, Principal
Leah tapped keys. Up swam Mrs. Capelli, sitting on a chair. The crowd behind us groaned. “Not
her
,” somebody said. Leah sat up straighter, and doubled-clicked.
“Mrs. Capelli,” says the voice of the interviewer (me), “how much of a problem do you think bullying is at our school?”
“I don't know what you mean by
problem
,” she says. “Are you suggesting it's uncontrolled?”
“I'm just asking how often you think it happens.”
She shrugs. “Of course it does happen. It happens at all schools.”
“Well, do you think it happens a lot at this school?”
She shakes her head. “What you might call ‘bullying' can encompass a wide spectrum of quite typical preadolescent and adolescent behaviors. If two students get into an argument on the soccer field, and one happens to be bigger than the other, is that bullying? If a group of friends decide to exclude one member for a brief time, as so often happens at the middle-school age levels, unfortunately, is that bullying?”
“I think we mean when one person intentionally hurts or humiliates another person,” I say.
“As I've said, this tends to occur at all schools—especially middle schools, unfortunately. As an educator, I don't wish to stereotype any of our students. But when specific incidents do occur, we are aggressive in our response to inappropriate behavior.”
She folds her hands in her lap.
“Well … Mrs. Capelli, what do you think about this project?”
Now she leans forward. Her hands grip the chair.
“While I commend any responsible project for the science fair, I'm much less comfortable with something that seeks to deliberately humiliate certain people. Isn't that what you call bullying, Mr. Trainor? Mr. White?”
“Deliberately humiliating who, Mrs. Capelli?”
“I believe it's
whom
, Mr. Trainor.”
“Okay. Deliberately humiliating whom?”
“Why, these young people whose stories you are featuring. Of course.”
“But they've all given permission. We asked every one.
They
wan
ted to tell their stories.”
“I'm very concerned that you are deliberately portraying Parkland School in a very one-sided, negative light,” the principal says quickly. “What if you should win this science fair and go on to the district competition? How will that reflect on Parkland School? That we're somehow the capital of … cruelty?”
“We're just being honest. Aren't we?”
“I think this is just a way of victimizing some people you'd like to get back at,” Mrs. Capelli says, pointing her finger at the camera. “I'm upset about it and it will
not
convince me to restore student access to SchoolStream, just in case that's what you're hoping will happen. I think you're only proving that students—that some students—can't be trusted to … to …”
She stops. Collects herself. Suddenly she smiles broadly at the camera.
“Well. I hope this has been a helpful interview.”

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