The Children's War Read online

  THE CHILDREN’S WAR

  Also by C. P. Boyko

  Blackouts (2009)

  Psychology and Other Stories (2012)

  Novelists (2014)

  C.P. BOYKO

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ON

  Copyright © C. P. Boyko, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Boyko, Craig

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The children’s war / C. P. Boyko.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-213-1 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-214-8

  (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.O9962A6 2018 C813’.6 C2017-907307-9

  C2017-907308-7

  Edited by Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided financial assistance during the writing of this book.

  Part of “Andrew and Hillary” appeared in The Walrus, and part of “Infantry” appeared in the 2017 Short Story Advent Calendar.

  —HEY, MATT? THERE’S just one thing I don’t understand.

  —What’s that?

  —Everything.

  —Let me see. Well, this is a logarithmic equation.

  —I know, but I don’t know how to do it.

  —Well, logarithmics are tough. To be honest, I’ve forgotten just about everything I ever knew about them.

  —But you’re the teacher.

  —Yeah, but teachers don’t know everything. You know who you should ask? Khaji is good at this stuff.

  —Ugh, but she’s such a nerd.

  —Nerds can be cool people too. A lot of my best friends are nerds. I’m married to a nerd.

  Matt Roades became a teacher because he never wanted to leave high school. His classmates in teacher college had different reasons: they wanted to inspire, they wanted to ameliorate, they wanted to educate. Matt was appalled by their piety, and they were bemused by his facetiousness. He went from being one of the most popular people in high school to being a loner and a misfit in college. His degree lasted three years. Then he got a job and a classroom of his own. He entered it, that first morning, ready to tear the walls down.

  He filed in with the students at the warning bell and sat at one of the desks, which he had arranged in a circle the night before. He propped his feet on his guitar case, opened a novel, and waited. At the second bell a few stragglers rushed in ostentatiously, feigning breathlessness. The hubbub of conversation and insult died down for a minute, then, when nothing happened, rose in a crescendo, till everyone was shouting over one another hysterically. Matt turned the page of his novel.

  “Hey, who’s the teacher here anyway?”

  Matt looked up, smiled, and went back to his novel.

  “Hey, dog, seriously: are you going to teach us something or what?”

  Matt closed the book. They were all waiting for him to speak, even the ones still chatting, even the ones pretending to be absorbed in their own thoughts. He had, without effort or merit, achieved what he had once had to fight so hard for. He was the center of attention. He tossed his book on the floor. He was going to love this.

  “What do you want me to teach you?”

  “This is math class, isn’t it? You’re supposed to teach us math.”

  “I know what I’m supposed to do. What do you guys want me to do?”

  “Teach us math.” —“Let us have free time.” —“Yeah, independent study!” —“Shit, hoss, it doesn’t matter what we want. Don’t you know that? You gotta teach us math because it says math on the schedule, and we gotta learn math because we’re here.”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  “They fire your ass!” —“And they flunk all our asses.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Come on. You know. The school. Ms. Mowthorpe.”

  “Who’s going to tell them?”

  “They’ll find out when we all fail the tests.”

  “Who says we have to have tests?”

  “You gotta give tests, or else how do you give grades?”

  “That should be easy enough. We can draw lots for grades, or you can give yourselves the grades you want. We can figure that out.”

  The students who were not taking him seriously shouted that they would take A’s. The scholars objected.

  “Well, what would be fair?”

  “What would be fair would be if Charnise and me gave the grades.” —“What would be fair would be if you taught us all math and gave us math tests and the ones that did the best got the best grades.” —There was a murmur of grudging agreement.

  Matt shrugged. “Is that what everyone wants? Okay, I know voting is lame, but should we put it to a vote or something?”

  And so Matt found himself, twenty minutes into his first class on his first day of his first year as a teacher, standing at the board, outlining the approved curriculum from the assigned textbook to a room full of sullen teenagers whose desks all faced the same way and who raised their hands when they wanted to go to the toilet. His had become every class he had ever attended; he had become every teacher he had ever hated. He had offered them freedom and equality, and they had chosen slavery and subjection.

  “Hey, Mr. Roades, aren’t you forgetting to do roll call?”

  “Look, call me Matt, okay?”

  “I was here before the bell, Mr. Roades. Everybody saw me.”

  As the days passed, Matt came to blame the students’ abjectness on Dundrum High School itself. The building looked like a prison, and was surrounded by parking lots and chain-link fence. The parking lots were patrolled by security guards and the halls by teachers or student trusties. The entrances were chained and padlocked after hours, and extracurricular entry had to be requested in writing. Caged clocks and loudspeakers were mounted on every wall. The stairwells were festooned with nets to thwart suicides. Some of the windows had bars.

  The faculty, too, treated the students like convicts, and spoke of them in the staff room with animosity and contempt. Detentions and suspensions were handed out with vengeful relish. Matt’s new colleagues spoke not of inspiration and amelioration, but only of keeping the upper hand. He found this attitude even more repugnant than the idealism of teacher college, which survived here only in the principal’s pep talks and the poster over the staff-room door: “They will not ca
re to learn until you learn to care.”

  There was no one for him to talk to but Gwyneth, and she was too fascinated by the baby to empathize.

  “Don’t you think she drools too much?”

  “I’m sure it’s quite normal at that age.”

  Some nights, as they sat in front of the television, which played soothing mysteries for the baby, Matt cracked Gwyneth’s knuckles and told her of his disappointments. Her replies, though brief, were always incisive, and they irritated him.

  “Well, after years of being treated like prisoners by their teachers, can you blame them for treating their teachers like jailers?”

  “But I’m not like that.”

  “You’ll have to prove it to them.”

  He tried. When on hall duty, he whistled like a bumpkin and winked at infractions. He plucked his guitar and smiled on discussions in study hall. He ignored raised hands and gum chewing, but acknowledged interruptions, however irrelevant. He sent no one to the vice-principal. He neither outlawed nor demanded any behavior. He called students by their nicknames, or “dog,” “bird,” and “hoss.” He improvised songs about the quadratic formula and the Pythagorean theorem. He digressed, told jokes, burped, and cussed. He lied, and mocked his students’ credulity. He asked about their other classes, and joined in their criticism of other teachers. He told them stories about his own high school days.

  But nothing worked. Conversations died under his benevolent gaze. The kids groaned at his jokes and sneered at his belches. They fooled around if he tried to teach, and wanted to work if he tried to chat. They threw chalk when his back was turned, until he threw chalk back; then chalk-throwing fell beneath contempt. He revealed that he had been a point guard in high school, and attendance at basketball games dwindled. He admired Ezra Rosales’s Buzzcocks t-shirt, and the shirt was not seen again in the corridors of academe. Graffiti, a perennial plague at Dundrum, dried up after Henry McCarnock discovered Matt writing “Fuck The War” on a toilet stall door. Not even sex and drugs were immune to the death-kiss of his approval.

  “Shit, bird, no way, drugs fuck you up.”

  “You’re crazy if you’d risk getting knocked up before you’re even in college, that’s all I have to say.”

  He belonged to an inferior race. He was an adult. Worse, he was a teacher, and by definition nothing that a teacher said or did could be cool.

  “Oh my god, you guys, how uncool are we? Talking to our teacher about dating. Let’s get back to work.”

  This went on for two months. Matt grew more depressed, and more unsure of himself. Perhaps he really was uncool. Did his students see something that he himself was blind to? He looked at his old, tired, bitter, fat colleagues. Was he doomed to become one of them? Was he already halfway there? It was a terrifying thought. He was only twenty-two; but sometimes he heard himself talking in class, and the voice he heard was that of a thirty-year-old.

  Then, in November, the music club was founded, and things began to change.

  —Hey, Matt.

  —Hey, Taylor. You missed a water fountain.

  —Hi, Matt.

  —Hi, Parvinder. How’s that elbow? Ouch!

  —Hey, Matt! Chalmers’s uncle’ll give him as many two-liters as we want at cost.

  —Best. When do we pick them up?

  Years ago, in a distant school, a fistfight had broken out in a prom-committee meeting. Since that time, the school district had decreed that every extracurricular club must have one teacher advisor attend all its meetings and ratify all its decisions. These chaperon positions held little appeal for the overworked faculty, and tended to fall to the junior teachers. While students were obligated to join at least one club, teachers were not obligated to act as advisors. But most new teachers did not know this, and those who did found it hard to say no. Some were flattered by the nomination, which came from the students.

  —Hi, Matt. What does your shirt say?

  —Daisy Chain Gang Bang.

  —That’d be a cool name for a band.

  —It is a band! Don’t you guys know anything?

  —Hi, Matt.

  —Hey, Matt.

  —Hey, bird, hey, dog . . . Damn, since when are those two coupled up?

  —Since forever, dog.

  —Hi, Matty. Did you get my note? I put it in my test yesterday.

  —I haven’t corrected them yet. What’d it say?

  —Better do your homework, Matty!

  The music club was started by two seniors, Judd Haziz and Peyton Almoss. Judd was good-looking, expensively dressed, and sat through all his classes in silent, immobile protest. Peyton was a gawky chatterbox whose classes were always being disrupted by coughs, sneezes, and table tappings of mysterious origin. Matt was flattered by their nomination, which he supposed was due to his own musicality. He later learned that he was the eighth teacher they had approached. And he learned at the first meeting, when the club charter was drafted, that Judd, Peyton, and their friends had little interest in music.

  —Hey, Matt! Are you hall cop fifth period?

  —Nope. Harris.

  —Shit. I was going to skip French.

  —And deprive Ta Gueule of your charming presence? Harsh, hoss.

  The founders of the music club wanted to throw parties. This seemed too naked a statement of their intent, so, with Matt’s help, they translated their aim into officialese. “The purpose of the music club is to promote awareness of the music club. Any activity that promotes awareness of the music club will be considered a legitimate activity of the music club. Legitimate activities of the music club may therefore include, but will not be limited to: producing and/or distributing advertisements for the club, writing or speaking about the club, recruiting new members for the club, and holding social gatherings for members or potential members of the club.”

  This much was the handiwork of Judd and Peyton, with Matt contributing only a sonorous synonym or two. But when they began concocting restrictions to membership, becoming intoxicated with their exclusivity and increasingly cruel in their exclusions, Matt felt the need to intervene.

  “I don’t know, I just think our parties will be kind of worst if we don’t have as many people as possible.”

  They looked at him quizzically. In the end, they decided that Ms. Mowthorpe would not let them limit their membership anyway; somewhere there must be a rule that school clubs had to be open to everyone. And so, the final clause of the music club’s charter was Matt’s: “Every person who chooses to be a member of the music club is a member of the music club.”

  They all signed it. Matt signed too—not as an advisor, but as a founding member.

  “Imagine,” Judd said, “if we could get everyone in the school to join. Now that would be a best fucking party.”

  —Matt! Did you hear what happened to Judd? They’re shooting him through the grease for talking in class.

  —What the hell! Judd never talks in class. They should give him an award.

  —They’re going to suspend him probably, so he can’t go to the party.

  —They can’t do that.

  —Oh yes they can. The music club is still a school event, so if you’re suspended it’s off limits.

  The music club met opposition from the administration over its first picnic. Every outing, whether curricular or extracurricular, had to be approved at the weekly staff meeting by the Finance Committee. The Committee, consisting of three senior faculty and Ms. Mowthorpe, the vice-principal, contested every excursion automatically. They denied the instructiveness of museums, galleries, and concerts; they viewed the world outside the school as a minefield of liability and litigation. Matt tried to convince them that the music club had no more nefarious designs than to eat hamburgers and play capture-the-flag in the park.

  “What exactly does this have to do with music, Mr. Roades?”

 
“It’s a membership drive.” Afraid that the self-propagating aims of the club would not bear scrutiny, he improvised: “With enough members, we hope to be able to start a school band.”

  “We have had bands in this school before, Mr. Roades. To most of us their educational value was not, shall we say, manifest.”

  —This is total bullshit.

  —It’s just revenge. They can’t shut down the party so they’re going to harass as many of us as possible.

  —You better watch out, Matt.

  —The hell I will. I’m going to talk to Bartleman.

  Nevertheless, the picnic was permitted, after the Committee made clear to Matt that he would be held solely accountable for any crimes committed or injuries sustained by his charges while outside the school walls. When all fifteen students who had attended the picnic came to class on Monday morning, apparently intact and no more inattentive than usual, a precedent was set. The Committee groused and stonewalled at every new application he submitted, but they could find no reason to forbid the music club from holding its meetings.

  —There’s not a heck of a lot I can do, Matthew. You know I don’t concern myself directly with discipline.

  —I got the kids to clean up their parking lot, didn’t I? You owe me one, Trevor.

  —Perhaps if you hadn’t been quite so eager to make enemies . . .

  Though Matt portrayed it that way to the students, not everyone on the staff was against him. Some of the younger teachers, those who had tussled with Ms. Mowthorpe themselves, showed by their silence in staff meetings or their smiles in the hallways that they supported Matt’s rebellion. And Trevor Bartleman, the principal, apparently confusing him with other teachers he had known, said he was in sympathy with Matt’s philosophy of pedagogy, and treated him like an undercover agent.

  But when Matt proposed to host a meeting of the music club at his own house, everyone objected. They all agreed that it could not be done. Maybe twenty years ago, but not today. Not today, when merry-go-rounds had been removed from playgrounds and teachers were forbidden to shake their students’ hands for fear of lawsuits. It might be different, someone said, if Matt were a woman, but, unfortunately . . .