Second Chance by June D. Wolfman
A recently retired middle school dean is reminded of one of her most difficult students when he sends her a Facebook friend request.
Jill Klein carefully mounted and framed her retirement gift from forty years as a Dean at a middle school in Connecticut. She gently tucked the edges of the embroidered fabric into the casing. On it was an embroidered, "Thank You Dean Klein for Forty Years of Caring," and embroidered names of this year's class, each signature the handiwork of this year's students. She gingerly hung it on the wall next to her twenty-fifth anniversary certificate. Suddenly, she felt abjectly alone. There would be no more gifts. She was retired now. She closed her eyes.
Ian Brown-Sumpter picked up his four-year-old son and tossed him in the air. The child giggled and squealed. He brushed his grey-tinged curls from his forehead and answered his wife about what he wanted for dinner: "Mozzarella pizza, please." His three children began playing indoor soccer with a red Nerf ball, giving him a reprieve. He glanced at his Facebook page and saw under "People you may know" his old middle-school teacher, Jill Klein. He grimaced. He thought about all the trouble he had given Ms. Klein when he was a boy and wondered at his younger self. What if one of his three kids gave him that kind of trouble? He didn't know if he would have the stamina to keep up with that. Ms. Klein had many kids to take care of. Still, he felt grateful to his old Dean. He smiled, looking at her Facebook picture, and sent a friend request. Surely all was forgiven by now. After all, his hair was half grey. He turned back to his brood of kids and grabbed the red ball. He rolled it to the youngest to kick. He looked around the room and appreciated the child-proof décor. Even the lamp was secured. It contained an LED bulb and was tethered to a bracket on the wall.
Jill Klein paged through Facebook and noticed a new friend request. Ian Brown-Sumpter had requested her as a friend. She gazed at his picture and smiled at his graying hair. She remembered all the crazy days with Ian...
"Ian, what have you done? You dumped a whole ant hill into the classroom. There are ants everywhere, Ian!" She remembered the ants crawling like invaders on the walls, all the walls, and the carpeting was alive with ants as well. Jill half-smiled and half-grimaced as she remembered.
"How do you know it was me?"
"Never mind how I know. I know. Now you can clean every speck of dirt and get rid of every ant, or you can be suspended for two weeks."
Jill remembered Ian's defeated look. He rolled his eyes and held his head. He hated suspensions.
"FINE," Ian yelled. He began the clean-up, huffing and grumbling.
It took him two days to clean up the mess. He had to miss some of his classes to do so. The girls in the class screamed at the ants, screamed at Ian, screamed at having to enter the room. They cut class. Jill had to get permission from his parents, who were only too willing to let their son undo what he had done. Still, Jill struggled with the decision to keep him away from academic work. He didn't like class anyway, and she worked hard with him on that. It was a setback as far as she was concerned. She remembered, though, how he captured each ant with a paper plate and a plastic cup. He dumped them into a jar he could close. He carried the jar outside when it was full.
It was late that evening, his wife and three children sleeping, when Ian remembered the ant incident. How did Ms. Klein know it was him? Did someone snitch? He remembered how he felt bringing that ant hill in a bucket into Ms. Klein's classroom. Triumphant. Truly, every adult would be aggravated, putting him in good with the cool kids. That was his goal. If only, he thought, he didn't have to be just the gifted kid - college-level skills in every subject. So much was expected of him at home. The only boy in a family of five girls and himself. He just wanted to be a rogue. He wanted to give everyone trouble. He didn't need a middle-school education anyway. But Ms. Klein didn't understand all of that. His parents told Ms. Klein he had ADHD. She thought he wanted excitement. That wasn't it at all. That just wasn't it. And it wasn't Ms. Klein's fault. She wasn't the one who expected so much from him. But she didn't understand him, either. He thought back to the ant incident. The girls' faces brought him despair. The older boys had pounded him for upsetting the girls. They were in pursuit of the girls, and this was a setback for that project. Ian became the heel.
Jill's hands sloshed around in the sink with sudsy water and dishes. She had never bothered to get a dishwasher. She began to think of Ian, and then remembered the conference with Ian and his science teacher. They sat on unsteady stools in the highly decorated science classroom, just the three of them. Pictures of quartz, glaciers, and graphite lined the walls.
The science teacher said, "Ian disrupts the class. He has not turned in any homework for three weeks."
Ian said, "This class is worthless. We're learning about rocks. I know all about rocks."
Jill cut in at that moment, "Ian, what would you like to learn about in science?"
Ian rolled his eyes. It was his bad luck that he was at a school that catered to kids' interests.
"I like physics."
"Okay, I'll find you a tutor. But in exchange, you stay in this class and be supportive of the teacher. You know about rocks, so be the star pupil."
"I just want to be a normal kid!"
The science teacher cut in, "You are not being a normal kid. You're the only problem kid in the class."
Jill disapproved of labeling kids as "problem kids," and she began to wonder if this relationship could be salvaged. She glanced at the science teacher and saw something like hatred in her face. The teacher's eyes bore into Ian's eyes. Her jaw was set.
Reluctantly, Jill said, "Do the two of you agree to Ian withdrawing from the study of rocks and doing his science with a physics tutor?"
"I'd rather see him behave," said the science teacher with a frown and balled fists.
"I'm all for getting out of this class," mumbled Ian.
"Okay, it would be ideal if Ian could participate in rock class, but I don't think right now that is realistic. There is a bit too much antagonism and resistance here. I'm going to set up the tutoring."
The science teacher murmured, "Spoiled brat."
Jill ended the meeting...
Ian slumped out of the meeting. His head was bowed. He kept rubbing at his eyes as he walked away.
Ian sat back in his company-hired car on the way to the office. He had to negotiate an agreement between the San Francisco office and the New York office. As the car made its way through traffic, he took a physics book out of his briefcase. It brought him back to his middle-school days and getting a tutor for physics. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. Thinking back, it was a big mess. If only he had agreed to stay in the rock class. He should have been a normal kid. Instead, they got a tutor to come in three times a week. His classmates were impressed and disgusted at the same time. His parents were thrilled, which annoyed him. His father began studying with him from the text provided by the tutor. He adored his father, but he wanted his father to go to a ballgame with him, not study. What a mess. Plus, the science teacher had called him "spoiled," which was just about the end for him. He remembered leaving the meeting and rushing to the boy's room to cry. He didn't feel spoiled. He felt smothered, held back, and pushed forward all at the same time. Ian brought himself back to the present. He closed his eyes and slept.
Later that night, while Jill trimmed indoor plants, she remembered the fake unconscious episode. Ian was wrestling at lunch break with a bigger kid. Ian was losing badly, and he got taunted by onlookers and pretended to fall unconscious after barely tapping his head on the wall. Jill happened to see the whole thing, and fake unconsciousness was about as easy to spot as fake sleeping. Nevertheless, the other children in the playroom became hysterical and began screaming, "Call an ambulance, Mrs. Klein!" "He's dying!" yelled one girl. Jill remembered wondering if she should call an ambulance just to be safe. She struggled because she knew he was faking, and he would only dig himself deeper into the lie if he were carried out on a stretcher. Time passed. She was about to call for help that she knew was unneeded when Ian's eyes flickered open. Jill called his parents to pick him up and take him to the doctor. Jill remembered how conflicted she felt. She knew it was all a fake. She wanted to call him on it somehow. But prudence dictated otherwise.
Ian woke but was still stuck in traffic. He smelled the stale air in the car and felt his asthma kick in. He pulled out his inhaler and took a puff. He leaned back and pretended to sleep. He didn't want to chat with the driver. The fake sleep reminded him of the pretend concussion he faked in middle school. Did he want to be the center of attention? No, he wanted a graceful way out of the wrestling match with Rob. He couldn't bring himself to give up. Poor Ms. Klein. Surely, he knew now, she knew he faked his concussion. Everyone was screaming as he lay there. Ms. Klein must have wondered what she should do. She knew he was okay, but the other children didn't, and what if she were wrong? What an agonizingly long moment he gave her. The car pulled up in front of a forty-story office and parked. Ian gathered his belongings and stuffed them in his briefcase. He left the vehicle with a wave of thanks to the driver. He left his inhaler behind. When he realized it, he felt lucky that his wife always made him pack two.
The next day, Jill was shelving some books and came upon The Tale of Two Cities. Jill remembered the condom incident. Ian was angry that his English class had stopped studying books like The Tale of Two Cities. They began working on a group project, a school newspaper. Jill recalled the day the English teacher came to her.
"Ian threw an unrolled condom on my desk. It had liquid in it."
"Do we know it was Ian?" Jill asked.
"My son saw him."
Jill remembered losing her temper with Ian over this.
She suspended him for a week.
His parents pressed for more talk and less suspension. They wanted his concerns about the class heard.
"I've heard his concerns," Jill had said, "and I understand them. Ian is a gifted student. He craves challenge. However, he has not given the newspaper project a chance. The English teacher is a genius. His response was like an assault on the teacher instead of any kind of effort."
Ian's parents had to accept the suspension.
Jill looked again at Ian's picture on Facebook. He had a wife and a slew of kids around him in the shot... she assumed it was a wife. She thought back to a time after Ian had graduated from Jill's middle school and had started high school. Jill got a call from Ian's mother.
"Jill, Ian has failed every single class freshman year. He doesn't do any work. We want to send him to a boarding school that has a working farm. He won't discuss it with us. He says you are the only one he will discuss it with. Would you come talk to him?"
Jill remembered the sinking feeling in her chest when she heard of Ian's failures. She couldn't comprehend why Ian wanted to speak with her about all this. Nevertheless, she drove to his home and took him out for a meal - a casual, neutral environment for a talk.
"I don't want to go to farm school," Ian began.
"Tell me about your school now."
"It's stupid."
"Use your intelligence, Ian, and tell me about the school more descriptively."
"I am just unhappy there," said Ian. "It's all a big game for grades."
"Well, you don't want to go to farm school. Does that mean that you want to stay in your high school?"
Ian rubbed his curly hair away from his forehead and sighed. "I can do better. I don't need special treatment at a farm school."
"Do they have grades there?"
"No, just written reports," Ian mumbled.
"That sounds better, then."
"I don't want a special school."
"Ian. You have always been very bright, but if you are not taught just the way that suits you, you refuse to learn. You would benefit from a big change, and I like the idea of your working on a farm as part of your education. You will learn to put your head down and do a job well."
Ian sat quietly for a few minutes, then asked if they could have dessert.
The conversation then turned easily to a million other topics: his parents, his sisters, his volunteer job. Jill enjoyed him, now that he wasn't her responsibility. They laughed a lot. They followed their pasta with an order of chocolate cake. They decided nothing about school. That was the last she heard from Ian or his family.
She looked again at the Facebook picture and wondered at the beautiful smile on Ian's face. He looked happier than she could ever remember seeing him in his childhood.
Jill accepted Ian's friend request.
Overnight, she received a private message from Ian. "Thank you, Mrs. Klein... can I call you Jill? You were there for me when I really needed you. I went to the farm school, then to Brown, then to law school, and now I practice international law. I am married and have three rug rats. Luckily, they are not the trouble I was to you."
Mrs. Klein hesitated. It felt like a real "friend" request. Friends now. How lovely.
She wrote, "Ian, I see you have little kids, and they have you turning prematurely gray. Kids will do that. But it suits you. Your job sounds fascinating. You'll have to tell me about it. What are your children's names and ages? How lovely it is to be friends after all this time."
Jill hit send. Maybe this was her second act. She would be friends with her old students. It never had occurred to her before. Leave it to Ian to guide her as much as she had ever guided him.
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Ian Brown-Sumpter picked up his four-year-old son and tossed him in the air. The child giggled and squealed. He brushed his grey-tinged curls from his forehead and answered his wife about what he wanted for dinner: "Mozzarella pizza, please." His three children began playing indoor soccer with a red Nerf ball, giving him a reprieve. He glanced at his Facebook page and saw under "People you may know" his old middle-school teacher, Jill Klein. He grimaced. He thought about all the trouble he had given Ms. Klein when he was a boy and wondered at his younger self. What if one of his three kids gave him that kind of trouble? He didn't know if he would have the stamina to keep up with that. Ms. Klein had many kids to take care of. Still, he felt grateful to his old Dean. He smiled, looking at her Facebook picture, and sent a friend request. Surely all was forgiven by now. After all, his hair was half grey. He turned back to his brood of kids and grabbed the red ball. He rolled it to the youngest to kick. He looked around the room and appreciated the child-proof décor. Even the lamp was secured. It contained an LED bulb and was tethered to a bracket on the wall.
Jill Klein paged through Facebook and noticed a new friend request. Ian Brown-Sumpter had requested her as a friend. She gazed at his picture and smiled at his graying hair. She remembered all the crazy days with Ian...
"Ian, what have you done? You dumped a whole ant hill into the classroom. There are ants everywhere, Ian!" She remembered the ants crawling like invaders on the walls, all the walls, and the carpeting was alive with ants as well. Jill half-smiled and half-grimaced as she remembered.
"How do you know it was me?"
"Never mind how I know. I know. Now you can clean every speck of dirt and get rid of every ant, or you can be suspended for two weeks."
Jill remembered Ian's defeated look. He rolled his eyes and held his head. He hated suspensions.
"FINE," Ian yelled. He began the clean-up, huffing and grumbling.
It took him two days to clean up the mess. He had to miss some of his classes to do so. The girls in the class screamed at the ants, screamed at Ian, screamed at having to enter the room. They cut class. Jill had to get permission from his parents, who were only too willing to let their son undo what he had done. Still, Jill struggled with the decision to keep him away from academic work. He didn't like class anyway, and she worked hard with him on that. It was a setback as far as she was concerned. She remembered, though, how he captured each ant with a paper plate and a plastic cup. He dumped them into a jar he could close. He carried the jar outside when it was full.
It was late that evening, his wife and three children sleeping, when Ian remembered the ant incident. How did Ms. Klein know it was him? Did someone snitch? He remembered how he felt bringing that ant hill in a bucket into Ms. Klein's classroom. Triumphant. Truly, every adult would be aggravated, putting him in good with the cool kids. That was his goal. If only, he thought, he didn't have to be just the gifted kid - college-level skills in every subject. So much was expected of him at home. The only boy in a family of five girls and himself. He just wanted to be a rogue. He wanted to give everyone trouble. He didn't need a middle-school education anyway. But Ms. Klein didn't understand all of that. His parents told Ms. Klein he had ADHD. She thought he wanted excitement. That wasn't it at all. That just wasn't it. And it wasn't Ms. Klein's fault. She wasn't the one who expected so much from him. But she didn't understand him, either. He thought back to the ant incident. The girls' faces brought him despair. The older boys had pounded him for upsetting the girls. They were in pursuit of the girls, and this was a setback for that project. Ian became the heel.
Jill's hands sloshed around in the sink with sudsy water and dishes. She had never bothered to get a dishwasher. She began to think of Ian, and then remembered the conference with Ian and his science teacher. They sat on unsteady stools in the highly decorated science classroom, just the three of them. Pictures of quartz, glaciers, and graphite lined the walls.
The science teacher said, "Ian disrupts the class. He has not turned in any homework for three weeks."
Ian said, "This class is worthless. We're learning about rocks. I know all about rocks."
Jill cut in at that moment, "Ian, what would you like to learn about in science?"
Ian rolled his eyes. It was his bad luck that he was at a school that catered to kids' interests.
"I like physics."
"Okay, I'll find you a tutor. But in exchange, you stay in this class and be supportive of the teacher. You know about rocks, so be the star pupil."
"I just want to be a normal kid!"
The science teacher cut in, "You are not being a normal kid. You're the only problem kid in the class."
Jill disapproved of labeling kids as "problem kids," and she began to wonder if this relationship could be salvaged. She glanced at the science teacher and saw something like hatred in her face. The teacher's eyes bore into Ian's eyes. Her jaw was set.
Reluctantly, Jill said, "Do the two of you agree to Ian withdrawing from the study of rocks and doing his science with a physics tutor?"
"I'd rather see him behave," said the science teacher with a frown and balled fists.
"I'm all for getting out of this class," mumbled Ian.
"Okay, it would be ideal if Ian could participate in rock class, but I don't think right now that is realistic. There is a bit too much antagonism and resistance here. I'm going to set up the tutoring."
The science teacher murmured, "Spoiled brat."
Jill ended the meeting...
Ian slumped out of the meeting. His head was bowed. He kept rubbing at his eyes as he walked away.
Ian sat back in his company-hired car on the way to the office. He had to negotiate an agreement between the San Francisco office and the New York office. As the car made its way through traffic, he took a physics book out of his briefcase. It brought him back to his middle-school days and getting a tutor for physics. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. Thinking back, it was a big mess. If only he had agreed to stay in the rock class. He should have been a normal kid. Instead, they got a tutor to come in three times a week. His classmates were impressed and disgusted at the same time. His parents were thrilled, which annoyed him. His father began studying with him from the text provided by the tutor. He adored his father, but he wanted his father to go to a ballgame with him, not study. What a mess. Plus, the science teacher had called him "spoiled," which was just about the end for him. He remembered leaving the meeting and rushing to the boy's room to cry. He didn't feel spoiled. He felt smothered, held back, and pushed forward all at the same time. Ian brought himself back to the present. He closed his eyes and slept.
Later that night, while Jill trimmed indoor plants, she remembered the fake unconscious episode. Ian was wrestling at lunch break with a bigger kid. Ian was losing badly, and he got taunted by onlookers and pretended to fall unconscious after barely tapping his head on the wall. Jill happened to see the whole thing, and fake unconsciousness was about as easy to spot as fake sleeping. Nevertheless, the other children in the playroom became hysterical and began screaming, "Call an ambulance, Mrs. Klein!" "He's dying!" yelled one girl. Jill remembered wondering if she should call an ambulance just to be safe. She struggled because she knew he was faking, and he would only dig himself deeper into the lie if he were carried out on a stretcher. Time passed. She was about to call for help that she knew was unneeded when Ian's eyes flickered open. Jill called his parents to pick him up and take him to the doctor. Jill remembered how conflicted she felt. She knew it was all a fake. She wanted to call him on it somehow. But prudence dictated otherwise.
Ian woke but was still stuck in traffic. He smelled the stale air in the car and felt his asthma kick in. He pulled out his inhaler and took a puff. He leaned back and pretended to sleep. He didn't want to chat with the driver. The fake sleep reminded him of the pretend concussion he faked in middle school. Did he want to be the center of attention? No, he wanted a graceful way out of the wrestling match with Rob. He couldn't bring himself to give up. Poor Ms. Klein. Surely, he knew now, she knew he faked his concussion. Everyone was screaming as he lay there. Ms. Klein must have wondered what she should do. She knew he was okay, but the other children didn't, and what if she were wrong? What an agonizingly long moment he gave her. The car pulled up in front of a forty-story office and parked. Ian gathered his belongings and stuffed them in his briefcase. He left the vehicle with a wave of thanks to the driver. He left his inhaler behind. When he realized it, he felt lucky that his wife always made him pack two.
The next day, Jill was shelving some books and came upon The Tale of Two Cities. Jill remembered the condom incident. Ian was angry that his English class had stopped studying books like The Tale of Two Cities. They began working on a group project, a school newspaper. Jill recalled the day the English teacher came to her.
"Ian threw an unrolled condom on my desk. It had liquid in it."
"Do we know it was Ian?" Jill asked.
"My son saw him."
Jill remembered losing her temper with Ian over this.
She suspended him for a week.
His parents pressed for more talk and less suspension. They wanted his concerns about the class heard.
"I've heard his concerns," Jill had said, "and I understand them. Ian is a gifted student. He craves challenge. However, he has not given the newspaper project a chance. The English teacher is a genius. His response was like an assault on the teacher instead of any kind of effort."
Ian's parents had to accept the suspension.
Jill looked again at Ian's picture on Facebook. He had a wife and a slew of kids around him in the shot... she assumed it was a wife. She thought back to a time after Ian had graduated from Jill's middle school and had started high school. Jill got a call from Ian's mother.
"Jill, Ian has failed every single class freshman year. He doesn't do any work. We want to send him to a boarding school that has a working farm. He won't discuss it with us. He says you are the only one he will discuss it with. Would you come talk to him?"
Jill remembered the sinking feeling in her chest when she heard of Ian's failures. She couldn't comprehend why Ian wanted to speak with her about all this. Nevertheless, she drove to his home and took him out for a meal - a casual, neutral environment for a talk.
"I don't want to go to farm school," Ian began.
"Tell me about your school now."
"It's stupid."
"Use your intelligence, Ian, and tell me about the school more descriptively."
"I am just unhappy there," said Ian. "It's all a big game for grades."
"Well, you don't want to go to farm school. Does that mean that you want to stay in your high school?"
Ian rubbed his curly hair away from his forehead and sighed. "I can do better. I don't need special treatment at a farm school."
"Do they have grades there?"
"No, just written reports," Ian mumbled.
"That sounds better, then."
"I don't want a special school."
"Ian. You have always been very bright, but if you are not taught just the way that suits you, you refuse to learn. You would benefit from a big change, and I like the idea of your working on a farm as part of your education. You will learn to put your head down and do a job well."
Ian sat quietly for a few minutes, then asked if they could have dessert.
The conversation then turned easily to a million other topics: his parents, his sisters, his volunteer job. Jill enjoyed him, now that he wasn't her responsibility. They laughed a lot. They followed their pasta with an order of chocolate cake. They decided nothing about school. That was the last she heard from Ian or his family.
She looked again at the Facebook picture and wondered at the beautiful smile on Ian's face. He looked happier than she could ever remember seeing him in his childhood.
Jill accepted Ian's friend request.
Overnight, she received a private message from Ian. "Thank you, Mrs. Klein... can I call you Jill? You were there for me when I really needed you. I went to the farm school, then to Brown, then to law school, and now I practice international law. I am married and have three rug rats. Luckily, they are not the trouble I was to you."
Mrs. Klein hesitated. It felt like a real "friend" request. Friends now. How lovely.
She wrote, "Ian, I see you have little kids, and they have you turning prematurely gray. Kids will do that. But it suits you. Your job sounds fascinating. You'll have to tell me about it. What are your children's names and ages? How lovely it is to be friends after all this time."
Jill hit send. Maybe this was her second act. She would be friends with her old students. It never had occurred to her before. Leave it to Ian to guide her as much as she had ever guided him.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/z9RYk3U
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