The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,92

Libby continues to write notes: HE IS ADORABLE!!!

The other teachers don’t think Mr. Goldman is adorable, though, I know. My locker is just around the corner from the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge, and I can hear what they are saying even when the door is shut. They liked him okay at first, but now they’re mad because they think he balks. This is the word they use. He balked about parent-teacher night, because it was scheduled on a day that was a holiday for him but not for us, and they had to reschedule it.

“I had a sitter lined up,” Mrs. Hansen told Dr. Queen. “If he’s going to balk about every special holiday, this is going to be a pain in the ass.”

Mr. Goldman also balked about Christmas, about how the proposed title for the annual winter musical was “Christmas Around the World.” I heard him balk about this myself, making photocopies in the teachers’ lounge.

“Ignoring the fact that the title isn’t exactly inclusive,” he said—and though I couldn’t see him, I imagined his hands were probably moving—“it’s also pretty inaccurate, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh Jake,” Mrs. Hansen said. “We’ve done it that way for years. You don’t have to be so careful with these kids. Everybody celebrates Christmas out here.”

“Well,” Mr. Goldman had said, stacking his photocopies. “I’m here now.”

No one said anything until after he left. He smiled quickly at me as he passed my locker, shutting the door to the teachers’ lounge.

“Give me a break,” Mrs. Hansen said. “He’s too sensitive. Nobody’s burning crosses.”

They wait until he leaves the teachers’ lounge to say things like this. They are nice to his face, and he is nice to theirs. With the other teacher no one likes, Ms. Jenkins, nobody bothers pretending.

Ms. Jenkins is different from the other teachers in a lot of ways. She is maybe fifty, but she isn’t married, and she doesn’t have any children. All the other teachers eat at one lunch table together, even Mr. Goldman, but Ms. Jenkins sits by herself. I don’t know who started this. Maybe they won’t sit with her, or maybe she won’t sit with them. She does not buy hot lunch, but brings a salad in a Tupperware container in a cloth bag that says JUST BAG IT!, and while she eats she reads magazines that don’t have any pictures. She has a floor-to-ceiling poster of Mr. Spock on her door. She is a vegetarian. Also, she is very tall, and does not wear makeup. She scratches her head when she talks, and her hair stays in the direction that she scratched it, sometimes sticking straight up because of static electricity, even when everyone else’s hair is fine.

I like her, though. She hands back my lab reports with smiley faces drawn in red ink with words like “Impressive!” and “Quite good!” across the top. She has colorful posters of extinct and endangered animals along one wall of her classroom, and whenever an animal or insect or bird gets taken off the endangered species list, she brings a bag of Snickers to class. Another wall is covered with Far Side comics, and if you finish your test early, you get to go over and read them until the bell rings.

But the best part of Ms. Jenkins’s room is the beehive. She made it herself. It’s just a plastic container with a tube that leads directly to a sealed-off window, so the bees can go in and out as they please. But the plastic is see-through, so we can watch them when they bring back their honey in round balls they carry with their feet. When they come back into the tube from outside, sometimes they stop where they are and spin in circles. It looks like they are dancing, or maybe confused, but Ms. Jenkins says really they are communicating with one another, telling one another where the good flowers are. Two circles to the right means one thing; three circles to the left means another. If you want extra credit, you’re allowed to stay in during lunch and watch them, taking notes on which way they turn.

I do this sometimes. I don’t need the extra credit, but I think it’s amazing, watching the bees. They really do spin in circles the way Ms. Jenkins says, telling one another things, and it’s like watching something secret. I look at bees more carefully now when I see them outside, even when I see just one, resting on a