The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (5 page)

“Huh?”

Mr. Melville launched the Eyebrows of Cruelty upward in feigned surprise and then twisted his lips ironically, as if to say, “I’m not really surprised, my
arched eyebrows notwithstanding.”

“Your Special Project, Mr. Boyer?” Mr. Melville said. “On the great unknown?”

Long pause.

“Huh?”

The Eyebrows of Cruelty ascended even higher up Mr. Melville’s big forehead, like two fuzzy mountain climbers.

“You have an assignment due today, Tennyson.”

“I do?”

“Indeed. Right now, in fact.”

“Oh, man,” Tenny managed. He was wearing blue jeans, a faded Pearl Jam T-shirt, and a blue-hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled up over his mess of dark, unkempt hair. “I, uh …” Tenny trailed off with an awkward half smile. “Huh.”

Mr. Melville sighed. “Dare I infer from your expression of genial incomprehension that the assignment is not forthcoming? ”

Long pause.

“Wait. What?”

Bethesda glanced over at Suzie Schwartz, and they both smiled and shook their heads. Good ol’ Tenny Boyer.

There were kids (like Bethesda) who always paid attention and always did the homework and crossed and uncrossed giant mental fingers. There were kids (like Suzie, or like Chester Hu) who sometimes paid attention, and sometimes played video games instead of studying, and sometimes did their homework on the bus, but usually at least
tried
to do it. And then there was Tenny Boyer. The kid who
never
did the homework. Who never raised his hand and never had an answer ready in case he was called on. Who had to go back to his locker at least once a day because he had brought the wrong notebook, or no notebook at all. Who, once, in Home Ec, had sewed his sleeve to a pair of pants—on which occasion Ms. Aarndini had proclaimed Tenny “the king of careless errors.”

“Well, Tennyson,” concluded Mr. Melville. “I shall move forward, having failed once again in my quixotic effort to plant some small seed of knowledge in your mind.”

Long pause.

“Okay, man, sweet.”

“Yes. Sweet,” Mr. Melville said sternly. “Now let us press on. Ms. Fielding? ”

Bethesda set up her easel and her record player at the front of the room and took a deep breath. When speaking in front of large groups, Bethesda had a tendency to talk very quickly so that all the words ran together. Her dad said that at such times she sounded like a motorboat:

“Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

You’re not a motorboat,
Bethesda told herself, in her most soothing interior voice.
You’re a person. You’re a person.

She looked up. Everyone was staring at her, waiting for her to begin.
Okay. Now talk.

“Our story begins in 1991,” she said.

Bethesda told first-period Social Studies the story of Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings, just as she had pieced it together. She began with her father’s random memories of seeing the band play live at a basement bar called Bar Tender when he was a college sophomore. Then she moved on to what she had learned from the archives of various music magazines, which she had spent Saturday night and half of Sunday poring over. The big national ones like
Spin
and
Rolling Stone
didn’t have much on the Red Herrings, but then Bethesda had found a publication called
Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll,
which
had led her to a little Chicago punk-rock magazine called
The Fabulist,
which had been the gold mine.

Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings were an all-girl punk band formed by four friends in the early 1990s in a small town outside St. Louis called Webster Groves. They moved to Chicago and recorded a bunch of singles; they got pretty popular in clubs around the city but never hit it big; they broke up by the end of the decade.

Bethesda quoted for the class an article from
The Fabulist,
written in 1998 by someone named Rob Armstrong. “Ask anyone in their small but rabid fan base,” it said. “The Herrings’ recent unexpected breakup leaves a hole in the alternative scene that will be hard to fill.”

“Excellent use of primary sources,” Mr. Melville said approvingly. “Thanks.”

“Now, what’s the point?”

Bethesda swallowed nervously, and thought,
Don’t let Melville throw you. This project rules. You are not a motorboat.
Still, she decided to skip ahead to the fun part. “Okay, so before I reveal the mystery I solved, why don’t I play you a song?” Bethesda gave a nod to Suzie
Schwartz, her audio assistant, who dropped the needle on the record.

As soon as the record started to play, Tenny looked up.

Most kids, if they had found out there was a major project due today that they had totally spaced on, would be sitting at their desks in a state of stomach-churning, leg-twitching panic, trying to figure out something easy but impressive they could pull off by tomorrow. Not Tenny Boyer. Starting as soon as Mr. Melville finished scolding him, and right up until the moment Bethesda Fielding started playing that record, he sat with his eyes half closed, absentmindedly drawing the cover of
Led Zeppelin IV
on the bottom of his shoe.

It wasn’t true, as Mr. Melville had mockingly suggested, that Tenny Boyer didn’t know anything. Tenny knew, for example, the guitar solo from the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Gimme Three Steps” note for note, from beginning to end. He knew all the lyrics to every Nirvana song, including unreleased tracks and B sides. He could tell you when Bob Dylan went electric, when David Lee Roth left Van Halen, and when the Beatles first came to America. He could tell you the names of all the members of the Go-Go’s, who played which instrument, and who
wrote which songs. He could tell you Elvis Costello’s real name and why he changed it.

Unfortunately, all of this information didn’t leave a lot of brain space for, say, Social Studies. And all the many hours Tenny spent after school, alone in his basement, playing guitar, didn’t leave a lot of time for homework. And so Tenny’s always-terrible grades were getting worse with every passing semester; his father had lately begun grumbling that next year, when his fellow Mary Todd Lincolnites advanced to eighth grade, Tenny would be sent to the St. Francis Xavier Young Men’s Education and Socialization Academy.

So Tenny tried to force himself to make an effort, to do the work, to stop making so many careless errors—at least to pay attention every once in a while. But it was no use. Tenny’s mind always drifted back to rock and roll. By the time Mr. Melville had let him off the hook and moved on to the next kid, Tenny was already drawing on his shoe, trying to remember the third verse of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”

But then the music started.

That girl with the glasses, Bethesda or whatever her name was, was playing a record on a beat-up turntable. Tenny dropped his marker and sat up straight, eyes wide
open, trying to figure out what song it was. What band, even. It was punk, definitely early nineties punk, but who was it?

Whatever it was, it was
awesome.
The song was built on a thundering four-four beat, straight up and down, with a galloping, snare-rolling drum figure and a really sweet, slippery eighth-note bass line. And the vocal—the vocal was insane! The lyrics were garbled and buried in the mix, further distorted by the record player’s tinny old speakers. But it didn’t matter
what
this girl was singing. The
way
she was singing it was out of control. The vocal was delirious, a series of mad whoops, passionate and atonal and intense.

Is this Sleater-Kinney? Tenny thought, trying to place the singing voice. Sidemouse? L7 maybe? He wished he’d been paying attention.

And then it got even better. There was this long, strangled cry—“Waaaaa!”—as the song leaped into a bridge section, which was accented by a wicked buzz-saw guitar part. The bridge came to a walloping crescendo, and the song ripped back into the chorus. Then the chorus repeated; then it modulated; then it modulated again, as the rest of the band started singing—howling, really, Tenny thought
—howling
a punching, choppy
countermelody against the lead vocal line.

Tenny turned to the kid sitting next to him, who happened to be lanky, bespectacled, ultraserious Victor Glebe. Tenny had never spoken a word to Victor through six years of elementary school and two years of middle school. “Oh my god, dude,” Tenny said to him now, “this is
awesome.”

Victor, who was carefully organizing his photographs of Mr. Happy, the diving dolphin at Stinson Aquarium, looked up with a furrowed brow. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Awesome.”

At the front of the room, Bethesda stood bobbing her head nervously to the record. “You can call it overrated, tell me everything has faded! ” sang Little Miss Mystery. “But it’s not so complicated! It’s not so complicated!
Waaaaa!
”

“Well,” said Mr. Melville when the three-minute song ended. “That was horrible.”

“That song, sir, is called ‘Not So Complicated,’” said Bethesda, ignoring his opinion, “and it was recorded in 1994 by Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings. Here they are around that time.” Suzie’s sister, Shelly, acting as visual assistant, displayed a photograph from a Red
Herrings profile in
The Fabulist,
which Bethesda had taken to the 24/7 Kinko’s yesterday and blown up to poster size. “Part of the band’s deal was that no one ever knew Little Miss Mystery’s true identity.

“But I …,” Bethesda continued, dropping her voice into a dramatic register,
“do
know.”

On a nod from Bethesda, Shelly revealed a second blown-up picture, this one of Ms. Finkleman from last year’s yearbook.

The effect was immediate, and exactly as Bethesda had hoped. Mr. Melville’s class exploded with excited chatter.

“That’s crazy!” shouted Todd Spolin.

Lisa Deckter gasped loudly and clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Whoa! ” hollered Chester Hu. “Is that—”

“It is,” said Haley Eisenstein. “It totally is.”

“Whoa!” Chester hollered again.

In the magazine picture, Little Miss Mystery wore a battered black leather jacket and black leather boots; her nose was pierced and her hair was a mad tumble of black and red streaks. Ms. Finkleman, in the yearbook shot, wore glasses, a nondescript beige jacket, and had no piercings of any kind, not even earrings. But the
face—it was the same face, and Bethesda could tell that everyone in the room could see it: Ida Finkleman was Little Miss Mystery. Even Mr. Melville was nodding slowly, impressed, his mouth slightly open beneath his thick white mustache.

“Whoa! ” shouted Chester a third time.

“How did you figure this out? ” asked Violet Kelp.

Quickly Bethesda explained about the scrap of paper with the mysterious code, and how (with a little help from her dad) she had figured out that the “code” was really a set list. Bethesda skipped over how she got ahold of the code in the first place and didn’t make eye contact with Kevin McKelvey, who was sitting in the fourth row in his blue blazer.

“Oh, and there’s one more piece of evidence,” Bethesda went on. “When I asked other teachers what they knew about Ms. Finkleman, no one knew much, except for Ms. Zmuda, who once sat next to her in Nurse Kelly’s office, getting faculty flu shots. She saw that Ms. Finkleman has a tattoo on her arm. A tattoo of …” (Bethesda ostentatiously flipped open her SPDSTAMF spiral notebook to read, though of course she knew the quote by heart.) “‘A kind of a strange-looking man with long hair and piercing eyes.’”

Then Bethesda put down the spiral notebook and read aloud again from
The Fabulist:
“The Red Herrings weren’t afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves—sometimes literally. Little Miss Mystery proudly sports a tattoo of Ozzy Osbourne on her right arm.”

Shelly held aloft a picture of Ozzy Osbourne, who (Bethesda explained) was once the lead singer of a band called Black Sabbath. And he was definitely a strange-looking man, with long hair and piercing eyes. Bethesda crossed her arms across her chest and wrapped up in her best closing-argument voice. “There you have it, my friends. Mystery … solved! ”

The classroom burst into applause. Bethesda’s tough lawyer-lady face broke into a wide smile, which grew even wider when she looked over and saw that Mr. Melville, for once, was smiling, too.

Then there came a voice from the back of the room. It was Tenny Boyer, who in no one’s memory had ever volunteered a classroom comment, in Mr. Melville’s class or in any class, ever.

“Play the record again!”

As soon
as the bell rang, Ms. Finkleman knew something was wrong.

Sixth period was seventh-grade Music Fundamentals, and it usually took the students of seventh-grade Music Fundamentals at
least
five minutes to get settled. Five minutes for the birds to stop their wild chattering, for the wildebeests to stop snorting and huffling about, for the orangutans to stop howling and hooting and hurling pencil erasers.

Today, however, fifteen seconds after the bell, Ms. Finkleman looked out from behind her music stand and twenty-four pairs of eyes stared back. Twenty-four pairs of hands, folded in twenty-four laps. Twenty-four students, quiet, composed, and intent. If Ms. Finkleman didn’t know better, she might even have said
respectful.
She had heard other teachers speak of respectful students
before, but had always thought it was just a legend, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. But now, here they were: a roomful of children waiting quietly for her to begin teaching.

Ms. Finkleman felt a sharp pang, which she recognized as her keen agouti instinct for impending danger. A little voice sounded insistently in her ear.

Something is wrong,
said the voice.
Run!

“Um … good afternoon,” began Ms. Finkleman tentatively. “We will, uh, we will start with song number four in your books. That’s ‘Greensleeves.’”

She paused for the big burst of noise that always erupted when she asked her class to do anything. But not today. No one shouted. No one collapsed into unprompted gales of laughter. No one got up to sharpen a pencil. No one farted or sneezed or coughed a loud on-purpose cough. They flipped their songbooks open to song number four, looked up, and waited. Ms. Finkleman heard her heart beating in the eerie silence of the room.