Photograph by Amy Hart
Teacher almost ran over the Devil on his drive to work. I can’t read, but when Teacher tells his story during Morning Meeting the words go into my mind and make a movie. I see Teacher driving. I see the tule fog, white and sour, and the big farm trucks that go too fast through town. I see the trees that have lost all their leaves. The egrets that sit in the trees, hunched and making sounds like old men. Teacher holds an imaginary steering wheel in his hands and squints. In my mind he’s trying to look through the fog, driving slow like our bus driver does, looking for brake lights ahead. I’m sitting in a circle on the carpet with everyone else, we always sit in a circle during Morning Meeting. We’re supposed to be quiet but Scarlett and Janie are talking to each other. I’m slowly untying Carter’s shoe without him noticing. Jayden’s writing his name on the wall and Maya, Frida, and Fay keep laughing and pointing to Gordon who’s sitting with the top of his butt showing. Teacher suddenly stomps on the floor. He’s still holding the steering wheel, and he says he stopped just before something strange. A red rooster was in the road. It stared at Teacher with red eyes. I can see the rooster too, in my mind, red like a skinned knee. I let go of Carter’s shoelace and try to keep the picture still in my brain. The rooster stared at Teacher and crowed, and Teacher says it sounded like the rooster was saying “Go away!”
I look across the carpet at Jayden, who has stopped writing on the wall. He nods, then passes the look to Frida. One by one we meet eyes, all of us kids sitting in a circle and the windows of our classroom white with tule fog. We know the Devil in all his disguises. But we won’t let him get Teacher.
We’ve faced the Devil before. He’s always at our school, trying to get us to do bad things. And usually, we do them.
One time the Devil came as the shadow of a cloud and promised us a day off from school if we bled for him. We took turns heading the soccer ball at recess and Maya and Angel both got bloody noses. Wilder picked at his scabby knee until his leg was covered in little red streams. Janie bit her lip and Oscar jabbed Andrea with a sharp pencil. Teacher couldn’t figure out what was going on. He kept running to his box of Band-Aids, which he keeps now on a high shelf after the Devil got David to put five in Scarlett’s hair. All the while the sky was getting thick with clouds. When I stapled my own finger the whole classroom shook with thunder. That night the wind blew down a power pole and school was out for three days. The Devil always rewards us for our hard work.
If I’d been in the car with Teacher, I would have recognized that Devil. He can’t hide from us. We’ve seen him as a shiny red pebble, as a hot wind shaking the flags up on the pole. A double-headed penny. A stain where someone tripped on the front steps. Once the Devil came to Fay as a pencil-top eraser and told her to put her library book in the fish tank.
Oh was Teacher mad!
Teacher’s not like other adults, when he gets mad he doesn’t yell. He gets quiet. He takes long, slow breaths at his desk, and he looks out the window like we’re not even here. Some of the kids play around when he does this, and sometimes we even shout or drum on our desks to fill the quiet classroom. But eventually we get quiet too. It’s no fun making Teacher mad. We love Teacher. He’s here every day.
Before Teacher was a teacher he lived in a city called San Francisco. He talks about it a lot. In San Francisco it’s always foggy, even in the summer. There’s a big golden bridge and lots of skyscrapers. It’s where Teacher was born. Teacher moved to our town this year. Teacher told us it’s his first year teaching. It’s pretty obvious. Teacher is too nice. He lets us talk in line, in class. We turn and talk with our friends at the carpet, even when Teacher is teaching. Teacher writes little notes on our work, which I can’t read, but he draws smiley faces too, and because he forgets to draw noses I draw them for him. He knows all of our names. When we come into the classroom in the morning we can give Teacher a high five or a fist bump or even a hug. I always give Teacher the hardest high five I can so it really slaps, and Teacher smiles and shakes his hand and says Wow!
I don’t want the Devil to scare Teacher back to San Francisco. And neither does anyone else.
Jayden calls for everyone to meet at Recess by the big sycamore tree. The tree is so tall and has white bark shaped like puzzle pieces. If you peel away the top layer you can find the twisting trails of bugs. Once the Devil spent a whole day up in the sycamore tree, throwing bird eggs at us. They hit against our raised hands, our shoulders, and when they broke they spilled out small yellow teeth.
Jayden is speaking in the big voice he uses to remind everyone he’s a year older, even though that’s just because he got held back in Kindergarten. I’m one of the shortest kids in class and nobody lets me get closer, so I can’t really see him. And I’m distracted by all the sycamore leaves on the ground. They look like big golden moths and crunch deliciously under my shoes. But I hear Jayden tell everyone that the Devil has come for Teacher. And since none of the adults at our school can see the Devil, it’s up to us to stop him.
Jayden says the best way to do this is to be good students. Jayden says we need to be better than good. We need to be perfect. That means listening to Teacher. That means lining up quietly. Doing our homework. And being nice to everyone, even Gordon.
It seems simple, but it’s not. We’re bad kids. We know it because the adults tell us so, every day. Even if they don’t use the words, we see it in their eyes, the way they look at us like bad is the only thing we know how to do. It’s as if the adults blink every time we try to be good, and they only open their eyes for our mistakes. You can be perfect all day long, but if you just do one thing wrong, like put a pen in the electric pencil sharpener, that’s what the adults will see. And it’s not enough if you put the pencil sharpener in the sink and run water over it and pump a million paper towels out of the paper towel machine to clean it up, because it’s too late. You’re a bad kid.
But we can do better, Jayden says.
So we try.
Teacher can’t believe it, the first time we line up without talking or shoving or getting in fights. He smiles and calls us Professional Students. I feel so good that I run up and down the line giving everyone high fives. Then when we come back from recess, you guessed it, no one is crying. Teacher smiles more. He calls us to the carpet for read aloud and we’re all there, looking at him like he’s a beautiful sunrise. Teacher reads the whole book without any interruptions.
We all write our names at the tops of our papers. We all put our pencils back inside our lift-top desks, and no one slams their desk closed. At the end of the day we pick up all the papers and crayons from the floor. We say Thank You Teacher and Have a Nice Day Teacher.
I can’t stop yawning, waiting for the bus in the cow-smelling fog. I’m tired to the center of my body. Being good is hard work.
But we do it every day.
Still the Devil tries to get Teacher to leave. We can hear him in the creak of the classroom door: it opens with a groan like Go and closes with a long and whining Away. All of Teacher’s read aloud books just happen to be about family, about going back home. And the tule fog sticks to our school like a cold. Outside the playground sweats. Inside it’s too hot, my legs ache and all I want to do is run and climb and play. I try and I try but I can’t keep out the voice of the Devil. He tells me to shout out the wrong answer when everyone else is raising their hands. He gets me to take the caps off of all the glue sticks, to break every green crayon, to take the Pokémon cards out of Carter’s backpack and slide them into Gordon’s desk. Everyone knows Gordon steals. As Teacher writes words I can’t read on the whiteboard I see Carter looking through his backpack. He scrunches his face and looks at Gordon, who is waving his hand in the air, showing off how he can read even the big words. I feel a little bad. But when Carter and Gordon start fighting in the mess Carter makes when he tips over the desk, Teacher stops the lesson and now I don’t have to worry about reading the words on the whiteboard.
Teacher looks tired, once things quiet down. He sits at his desk and looks out the window. Like he’s looking for a golden bridge in all that fog.
On Friday I decide I will make Teacher happy again. When I find a paperclip on the carpet I unbend it and try to make it into the shape of an egret. I could give it to Teacher as a gift, to show him how I always listen to his stories. But instead what I make looks more like a key. On the wall is an outlet. It’s got holes that remind me of the lock on our mailbox at home. I wonder what’s behind, and when I try to unlock it the classroom fills with fireworks and a smell like camping.
It’s fun to see the big fire trucks roll up to our school with their lights flashing. I’m standing on the blacktop with my class and all the other classes. We watch the firefighters march in and out of our classroom. They open the windows, they talk with the principal and Ms. Martinez who’s always pulling trash cans around our school. Jayden walks by me and punches my arm, hard. I hear Maya and Fay say my name, and when I look they make ugly faces. And then I remember the sound of the sirens as the firetrucks arrived, how they sounded so much like the words Go Away, Go Away. And then I know the Devil used me again.
Teacher’s not with us, instead it’s PE Coach. She’s blowing her whistle, trying to stop kids from running away. But I just stand by her side. I wish she’d hold my hand.
When all the other kids return to class, Coach takes us to the auditorium and lets us play games. I look for Teacher when the bell rings at the end of the day but I don’t see him. On Monday we have a substitute, some old lady who puts on movie after movie all day long. Everyone’s eyes go wide in the blue glow of the TV but I can’t keep still. I ask where Teacher is. The old lady tells me to be quiet and watch the movie. She sits in Teacher’s chair and eats cherries from a brown paper bag. The pits fall from her craggy mouth into Teacher’s coffee mug.
We watch movies for three days.
At first Jayden doesn’t want to talk with me. He shoves me away, calls me crazy, tells me to go set another fire. But by Wednesday he’s sick of it too. I stand near the sycamore tree at recess and watch Jayden hit the trunk with a stick. He hits it over and over again. Little puzzle pieces are flying off, and Jayden’s breathing hard. Jayden says he doesn’t miss Teacher but I can tell he’s lying. Teacher would have told him to be kind to the tree. He would have let Jayden run laps or do push-ups or just scream to get all his angry energy out. Back in class the old lady puts on another movie and I ask to use the bathroom. I walk past the stalls to the corner where the tiles are cracked and fuzzy with mold. My pee sinks down between the tiles to whatever is underneath. As always, this gets the Devil to appear. I recognize him right away. He’s in the mirror and he looks just like me. I tell the Devil I want Teacher back. The Devil smiles with my smile and tells me what to do.
I find Jayden slumped in his chair. There are little versions of the movie playing in the wetness of his eyes. I tell him the Devil wants a sacrifice. A big one, not just a bloody nose or a drowned book. He wants us to ruin a life.
Jayden laughs. He says that will be no problem for us. We’re bad kids. Jayden spreads the word and I see the other kids bending their heads, my words making everyone smile like they’re passing around a bag of candy. We start right away.
Maya and Fay raise their voices over the movie. They’re trading gossip from recess, how David dared Wilder to say who he’s in love with, Andrea or Scarlett or Frida. Other kids gasp and laugh. The old lady tells them to quiet down. Everyone just gets louder. Oscar starts teasing Wilder for having a girlfriend but then Wilder shouts out that he doesn’t just like Andrea and Scarlett and Frida, he loves all the girls in class. Then someone says Cootie Touch and now everyone’s tagging each other and screaming that they’re immune and Wilder climbs to the top of the filing cabinet to avoid David. Angel flicks the lights on and off. Nobody’s watching the movie, it’s just bodies moving in the yellow classroom light and then the blue movie light and then the yellow light again. The old lady is running around clucking at us. She goes to pull Angel from the light switch and that’s when Frida steals her lunch and slips the paper bag into her desk. This really sets off the old lady. She raises her voice all the way to the ceiling and tells us to put our heads down on our desks. She turns off the movie and sits down hard in Teacher’s chair. We do what she says, but the silence is less like peace and more like a big balloon everyone’s watching sink down towards sharp dry grass. Then Carter lets out a roaring fart. The class explodes.
The old lady doesn’t come back. But there’s another substitute the next day, a pretty woman in a Christmas sweater. We make quick work of her when we tell her Teacher wants us to clean the fish tank. Oscar squirts a bunch of soap in the water and the pretty woman shrieks. She grabs at the fish with her bare hands and runs out of the classroom, trying to find another tank. But all the other classes have hamsters and lizards and there’s no fresh water up or down the hall. We will miss our fish, but we want Teacher.
Every day we act worse than the last. We get substitutes who yell like their voices can hold us down. Substitutes who plead and offer us stickers and gum. Substitutes who look like our grandparents, substitutes with pimples and scraggly hair, substitutes who remind us of neighbors or aunties or fairy tale witches. We scare them all away. We fight, we cry, we throw our chairs. We draw on the walls, on our bodies. We write every dirty word we know on sticky notes and hide them all over the classroom. Frida fills her desk with brown paper bags, Ziplocks, Tupperware. We can smell her desk when we come into the classroom. It smells like bad soup. It smells like the Devil. We do his work and wait for Teacher to return. But Teacher stays away.
At recess Jayden and I watch the farm trucks pass. The last time we saw Teacher they were carrying late summer peaches and almonds piled so high they’d spill at every stop sign. Now we see hairy brown kiwis. Winter squash shaped like stars, like question marks. The school year is passing.
One day a man is standing at the front of our classroom. He is bent over like something is riding him. His hair is dark and greasy and his thick glasses make his eyes look like two peeled yellow eggs. He has written his name on the whiteboard but I don’t even look at it. He tells us he woke up with a tremendous headache. The smallest noise gives him terrible pain. He rubs at his head, he makes faces like a Halloween mask. He begs us to be quiet today, then drinks from a huge metal water bottle.
Sometimes adults make it so easy to be bad. I think of a possum I once saw limping across the road. I think of how it froze in fear as the farm trucks rumbled close. Everyone in class breathes in. Like we’re revving our engines.
The substitute tells us to read. But doesn’t he know how many ways there are to make noises with a book? You can slam the cover. You can drop it to the floor. You can shout in surprise or pretend to get a papercut. We do everything to be loud. We make music with our chairs. We scrape the legs on the floor, we beat the cracked plastic backs with pencils. We cough so hard our throats hurt. We leave to use the bathroom over and over and slam the door going out and in. Behind the substitute’s back Wilder shouts Marco! The substitute turns and David says Polo!
The substitute grabs at his face. He rolls his yellowed eyes. He groans, he stumbles to his desk, weaving between the noises we are making. He cries out, where is his water bottle? Where is his lunch?
We turn our eyes to Frida. The substitute growls and stalks across the classroom. He looms over Frida and demands that she open up her desk. Frida does so.
The smell that’s been trapped in Frida’s desk, the crazy perfume of half-eaten sandwiches, leaking bags of veggies, crumbled chips and soggy cookies, all the lunches and snacks she’s swiped from substitutes, blooms into the classroom. We gag, we shout out, we hold our stomachs and cross our eyes and pretend to barf.
The substitute reels back like he’s been struck. He calls for us to be quiet. Silence!
And then fat little brown raindrops start falling from Frida’s desk. They hit the tile floor and zigzag away. Cockroaches.
Frida slams her desk over and over but the roaches keep coming. Andrea’s screaming. Carter’s laughing and stomping on the bugs. Wilder starts to climb the file cabinet but it crashes to the floor. The substitute suddenly lifts his head like he’s trying to see the sky through the classroom ceiling. His spine straightens, he’s surprisingly tall. Then he falls backwards. His head hits the floor and the sound is like thunder. The substitute twitches, moans. His glasses have fallen somewhere and his eyes roll back, unseeing. A cockroach crosses his shirt. Another one’s one his pant leg, holding on as he kicks. He watch him. We are finally silent.
Eventually Scarlett leaves to find the school nurse.
Teacher returns the next day. When I walk into the classroom and see him it’s like someone’s finally turned on the light. Like I didn’t even notice how dark it was. Teacher’s up at the whiteboard writing today’s schedule and then he turns and sees me and he smiles. My face heats up and I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I watch the other students as they come in. They all get quiet when they see Teacher. We worked so hard for this moment. No one shouts or celebrates. I don’t even give out my loud high fives. It’s like we’re afraid that if we move too fast we’ll wake up from this dream. We’ll pop the bubble of our happiness.
We are no longer bad kids. We leave those kids with the substitutes. With the Devil. Today we listen. We line up. We do our best. In the light of Teacher’s smile I start to believe we could be, if not Good Kids, something close.
There’s only one part of the day when I choose to break the rules. Just before dismissal Teacher has us do our handwriting practice. We all take out our notebooks and start tracing letters. Teacher pulls aside a small group of students who are reading a chapter book, Frog and Toad. It’s Scarlett, Janie, Gordon, and Oscar, all the smart kids. While they work I sneak out a piece of paper and some markers. I draw a big bridge and a man standing on it. I use yellow and orange to make the bridge look like shining gold. I try my best to write words across the foggy white sky: Mr. Rivers I love you.
On my way out of the classroom I put the paper on Teacher’s desk. He’s busy at the door giving students high fives, fist bumps, hugs. I imagine him finding the picture and the movie in my mind makes me smile. Only later as I wait for the bus in the cold, clear sunlight do I realize I forgot to write my name on the drawing. But it doesn’t matter. Teacher will know who it’s from.
K Russell Breakstone: I am an elementary school teacher, having taught in Atlanta, Georgia, and the California Central Valley and Bay Area. I have tried writing pure fiction and pure fantasy before, but it’s only when I’m at the border of those two worlds that I get the “writing madness,” as my wife puts it. I was inspired to write “Bad Kids in All Disguises” by an email I received from a student twelve years after my first year of teaching. In my memory that entire year was chaos, but she remembered me as a kind and supportive teacher. Almost every incident in this story actually happened in that classroom.