feel bad for Ms. Jenkins getting booed up there, dressed like a teacher, in a brown jacket that doesn’t really match her pants, her hair sticking up the way it always does, so you know the people who don’t like her are going to make fun of her for that too. She scans the audience with her small eyes, talking about carbon 14 and the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, not even having to look down at her notes. She speaks slowly, the way you would talk to someone either very young or not very smart, saying “Okay?” after each sentence. Every now and then, Traci’s mother nods her french-twisted head and says, “Exactly.”
I understand that what Ms. Jenkins is saying makes sense, but if I nod my head, even once, I will be on the same side as the Carmichaels, and on the opposite side of Jesus and Eileen. I try to map it out in my head the way you can do with a story problem in math, hoping to find a space on the same side as Eileen and Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Goldman, but not with Traci and her mother. But there is no space like that. The lines keep crossing over one another. They would have to be curvy to make it work.
“I’m just giving facts now, people, okay?” Ms. Jenkins says, holding up her hands. “Those are just facts, which is what I’m concerned with, as a science teacher. I don’t barge into your churches Sunday mornings, so please, don’t barge into my classroom.” Dr. Queen waves the white flag then, and Ms. Jenkins walks away from the podium, but she keeps talking on the way back to her chair. “They’ve found fossils, okay? Nobody’s making this stuff up.”
Pastor Dave goes next. He begins his speech by thanking Ms. Jenkins for her illuminating introduction, but he says “illuminating” in a way that you know he didn’t really think it was. He tells the school board they are making an important decision, that they are standing at a crucial fork in the road.
“The wisdom of thousands of years and the faith in a higher power is this way,” he says, holding an arm out in one direction, “and some half-baked theory that tells children they come from slime is the other.” He holds his other arm in the other direction, so that both are raised, and he stands just like this for a moment, like he is getting ready to hug someone, or maybe do a back flip. The newspaper photographers take pictures of him like this, and I know it is because his T-shirt says GOD, and he is standing by himself, his arms spread wide like that. Tomorrow people will look at the newspaper and think that Pastor Dave thinks he’s God, not knowing that we’re all down here making up the rest of the sentence.
Mr. Goldman goes up to the microphone next, and the Carmichaels clap and smile even before he says anything at all. He is wearing a white shirt and a bright green tie, but it’s hard to tell if he tried to dress up or not because he looks exactly the same way he does in algebra, crisp and polished, smiling down at us with his straight white teeth.
“Good evening, folks,” he says. “Um, I know I’m a newcomer, but still, I have to say right off the bat that the fact that this is even a controversy is…flooring me.” He opens his mouth again to say something else, but for a moment, no words come out. “I’m…I’m having a hard time understanding how there can really be a debate in this day and age.” He looks at us as if there should be some reaction, but there isn’t. Everyone just keeps looking back at him, waiting. They don’t know what side he’s on.
“Of course we have to teach evolution,” he says. People catch on, start booing. But Traci and her father clap, and Mrs. Carmichael, to my surprise, puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles.
“Look,” he says, raising his voice, his hand over his heart, “I’m a religious person, too, okay? But you can’t pretend those fossils don’t exist. They do. You can’t tell your children they don’t and call it religion. You can’t call it anything but lying. What about truth? What about intellectual curiosity?”
Eileen touches me on the knee. “Evelyn, honey, what’s that man’s name?”
I know, right away. I know about last names