The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (10 page)

She was about to crack the door to see what was going on, when she heard her son … singing. Singing
loud.

Mrs. McKelvey couldn’t exactly make out the words coming from under Kevin’s closed bedroom door, but it sounded something like “Livin’ on a praaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayer!” Then, when the song ended, she heard another unfamiliar sound. Kevin was laughing. Deliriously, gleefully laughing.

TO:
Winston Cohn

FROM:
Isabel Van Vreeland

SUBJECT: UPCOMING CHORAL CORRAL/YOUR TOTAL HUMILIATION

My dear Principal Cohn,

Sorry if this email contains the occasional misspelign. My hands are trembling from what I have just witnessed in my Band and Chorus room, where our own Ms. Finkleman and her students are preparing for the upcoming Seventeenth Annual Choral Corral. Ms. Finkleman is creating a show

   Principal Van Vreeland tapped her chin for a moment with a perfectly manicured forefinger, and then deleted the word
show.

Ms. Finkleman is creating a
MASTERPIECE
that will surely go down in the history of the All-County Choral Corral as one of the

   Stop. Delete, delete.

   as
THE SINGLE GREATEST
performance ever. In sum, Principal Cohn:
WE WILL DESTROY YOU.

   “Principal Van Vreeland? If I might?”

The principal looked up with a sour expression. She hadn’t realized Jasper was still hovering over her shoulder. I should really get him some kind of bell, she thought suddenly, and then mentally filed the idea for later.

“Not to be a metaphorical rocker of the figurative boat, of course.” He wrung his reedy hands together with consternation. “But I wonder if you are certain this sort of communication is such a good idea?”

“My god, are you irritating,” the principal snapped as her finger plunged down on the send button. “I have total confidence in Ms. Finkleman, in Lady McMystery,
whatever her name is.”

“But—”

“But what, Jasper? Because at this moment, I’m having far
less
confidence in my choice of assistant principal! ”

Jasper blanched. “But nothing! Nothing at all. I was just going to say how completely I agree with you. Always. Obviously.”

Just then a sharp
ding
sounded from Principal Van Vreeland’s computer, as a reply email arrived. Together, the principal and her assistant leaned forward to read the three little words flashing merrily on the screen.

Care to wager?

A((righ.
Let’s start with an easy one tonight. Who was the primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence?”

“Oh. Shoot. Wait.” said Tenny slowly. “I think I might know this.”

“You do.”

“Okay.”

“You definitely do.” Pause.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Tenny. It rhymes with Fefferson.” “Oh. Okay … um …”

Bethesda scrunched up her face and moaned.
“Jefferson,
Tenny. The person who drafted the Declaration of Independence was Thomas Jefferson.”

“Oh.”

“Benjamin Franklin edited it.”

“I thought Benjamin Franklin was the traitor guy.”

“No! No, that’s …” Bethesda willed herself not to get upset and offered her best encouraging smile. “You know what? Let’s come back to it.”

In her imagination, Bethesda fixed her gaze on a distant mountaintop, reshouldered her heavy pack, and kept climbing. She had been tutoring Tenny Boyer in American history for three weeks, and they hadn’t made much progress. Bethesda had decided that her task was a mountain, and she was a mountain climber. A brave mountain climber! A dauntless mountain climber! Audacious! Steadfast! Intrepid! (She had looked up
brave
in the thesaurus.) She was counting on the mental imagery to inspire her, hoping that if she just worked hard enough, Tenny would finally start getting this stuff.

And he
better
start getting it; as of today it was March, and that meant it was open season for the Floating Midterm. It was usually later in the spring, but with Melville you never knew. One day, when they least expected it, first period would end with Mr. Melville suddenly, offhandedly announcing, in his rough growl of a voice: “Oh, by the way, little geniuses, tomorrow is test day.”

So here she was, the brave and dauntless and audacious (etc.) mountain climber, at the foot of Mount Everest, where Tenny Boyer knew absolutely nothing about early American history, gazing up at the summit, where he knew it all.

“Name one of the main events that led to the passage of the Stamp Act.” “The what? ”

“The Stamp Act? You know this! I know you know this,” Bethesda pleaded. She threw back a swallow of her kiwi-lime Snapple and looked desperately at Tenny, thinking hard about what led to the Stamp Act—French and Indian War, French and Indian War, French and Indian War—because maybe if she
thought
it hard enough, she could
will
him to know.

“I, uh … let’s see.”

“Come on, Tenny. The Stamp Act? The buildup to the Revolution? We made a whole flowchart for this!” “Oh, yeah,” said Tenny weakly.

“Okay.”

Pause.

“Wait, what’s a flowchart again? ” Bethesda the Mountain Climber watched as the peak of Everest disappeared behind cloud cover.

*   *   *

“Honey? Hi.”

Pamela Preston’s mother nudged open the door to her daughter’s bedroom, bearing a tray of premium organic snack crackers, sliced locally grown apples, and a cup of warm nonfat milk. Pamela looked up, irritated.

“You’ve been holed up in here all evening.” Pamela’s mother smiled gently. “Pam-Pam, darling, are you having boy trouble?”

“What? No.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I’m trying to solve a mystery.”

“Oh, I know, dear, I know,” answered her mom, lightly placing the snack tray on Pamela’s bedside table and settling down on the bed. “Boys
can
be a mystery.”

Pamela turned around in her desk chair to glare at her mother. “No, Mom. I’m trying to solve an actual, important mystery.”

“Oh, dear.”

“So I would appreciate some peace and quiet.” “Very well, darling.” “Thank you.”

As her mother rose, Pamela glanced up. “Leave the crackers.”

Pamela waited until her mother pulled the door shut and returned to her careful examination of the clues she had arranged in front of her. She’d gotten Bethesda’s notes with just the teensiest bit of trickery: She called to say how much she admired Bethesda’s Special Project, and how embarrassed she was that hers was such a nightmare—and could she borrow Bethesda’s notes to just, like, try to figure out how she had done it?

Bethesda had seemed sort of touched, actually, which made Pamela feel bad for about one half of one second. Until she remembered what was at stake. As in, the whole entire
universe.

Pamela bent over Bethesda’s notes, idly running a finger through her blond curls as she tried to make sense of it all. A bunch of old articles from these magazines no one had ever heard of. Some notes in Bethesda’s irritatingly careful handwriting, describing her conversation with Ms. Zmuda about the tattoo.

And the so-called set list.

Pamela studied it carefully. Was it
really
just a set list? Maybe Bethesda was wrong. Maybe it was a secret code after all! A code that had to be cracked. Some sort of message—but from who?

Oh my god,
she thought suddenly.
Aliens. Ms. Finkleman is an alien!

And then she thought:
Pamela! Enough with the stupid aliens!

Downstairs, Mrs. Preston settled into a living-room chair and smiled lovingly at her husband, who was engrossed in a mystery novel called
Murdered … For Good.

“What? ” he said finally, without looking up.

“Oh, nothing,” she said with a wistful sigh. “Our little Pamela is having boy problems.”

By mid-March,
Project SWT was under way almost every night, meaning that Bethesda was hanging out with Tenny Boyer more than her best friends. Of course, if they told people they were studying together they’d have to say
why:
it would give away the whole secret arrangement. So at school, they remained strangers. Bethesda still had lunch with the Schwartz sisters and Violet Kelp, and Tenny still had lunch by himself, listening to his iPod and bobbing his head, reading a magazine or scrawling ideas for the rock show in a spiral notebook.

The only thing was, when Tenny and Bethesda passed each other in the hallway, he gave her this tiny little nod, and she gave him a tiny little nod back. Like, for example, every day when Bethesda was on the way from third period to fourth period and she passed Tenny at
the Hallway C water fountain going the opposite way.

One day she lingered by the water fountain for over two minutes, waiting for him so they could nod, but he never walked by. (That night he explained that Mrs. Petrides had held him after because he fell asleep during a vocab drill.)

Oh, well,
she thought glumly as she sat down for fourth period.

She really liked the little nod thing.

“Oh my god—it’s her! Wait, is that her?”

“Yeah! Whoa!”

“Are you sure? She looks so … boring.” “I know!”

Ms. Finkleman kept walking, keeping her head down.

The revelations, about her “secret past” and the new plans for the Choral Corral, had spread through the school like a fever. Ms. Ida Finkleman, aka Little Miss Mystery, was the subject of every conversation, and her Band and Chorus room the epicenter of a great continuous whirl of excited speculation. The details about the rock show were a closely held secret, and students traded rumors about what songs were going to be in the show, who was playing what, and (as one particularly electrifying rumor
had it) who would be biting the head off a live chicken during the finale.

And so Ms. Finkleman, the timid little agouti who for so long had survived in the jungles of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School by remaining nameless and faceless, a total unknown, had suddenly been plucked from the protective obscurity of the underbrush and thrown out into the harsh sunlit glare of the savannah. Everywhere Ms. Finkleman looked, someone was staring, looking her up and down, taking her measure. As she emerged from her teal Honda Civic in the faculty parking lot, kids ran up, took furtive cellphone pictures, and ran away. As she traveled the hallways, students pointed at her and giggled nervously, whispering behind their hands. Every time she entered the teachers’ lounge, she discovered her colleagues having animated conversations that ended abruptly as soon as she came in.

Even the Band and Chorus room, long her private sanctuary in the howling wilderness, was no longer safe. Yesterday Principal Van Vreeland had “popped in to offer support,” but the principal’s support was not terribly supportive, especially when she just stood in the back of the room, dancing. Ms. Finkleman could imagine nothing more distracting than having the school’s highest official doing her bizarre, gyrating, snakelike
dance moves—unless it was when she was joined by the assistant principal, Jasper, who stood next to her, clapping his hands at odd intervals and shifting back and forth like the Frankenstein monster.

The day before that, it had been Mr. Darlington, the lanky, awkward science teacher, who stopped by midway through their rehearsal period.

“Can I help you?”

“I just needed to, uh, borrow a, uh, music stand for an experiment we’re doing,” said Mr. Darlington, adjusting his black horn-rim glasses on the bridge of his nose. “On the chemical properties of, uh …” Mr. Darlington trailed off, smiling lamely. “Music stands.”

“That’s fine,” Ms. Finkleman said impatiently, motioning toward the cluster of music stands in the back of the room. But instead of fetching one and leaving, Mr. Darlington grabbed a clementine off her desk and folded his spindly frame into a student chair to watch Half-Eaten Almond Joy practice “Livin’ on a Prayer”—while, presumably, his sixth-grade chemistry students watched a filmstrip.