seats, everyone in place before they get to the door. Travis takes his seat in the back, his eyes steady on the back of Mr. Goldman’s head for the rest of the hour, the hissing radiator the only sound in the room.
The protesters show up the next day, chanting loud enough for us to hear them in health and family life. The snow has turned into a cold March drizzle, but they are out there anyway, walking in slow circles in the school parking lot, carrying signs: DON’T LISTEN TO JENKINS; LISTEN TO JESUS!! DON’T MONKEY WITH FREEDOM OF RELIGION!
Mrs. Hansen pulls the curtains over the windows and turns on the air conditioner so the hum of it will drown them out, even though our hair is still wet from walking from the buses.
“Who are they?” Traci asks. “What do they want?”
Mrs. Hansen rolls her eyes. “Ms. Jenkins wants to teach evolution. It gets people stirred up.”
I am silent, taking this in. I don’t know what the protesters are mad about. I want to ask, but I’m worried if I do it will be like asking about Noah’s ark, and Traci will turn around and say, “You’ve got to be joking” again.
I am most disturbed by the sign that says you have to listen to Jesus instead of Jenkins, like Jesus is on one side and Ms. Jenkins is on the other. Ms. Jenkins has just handed back my report on the different kinds of cloud formations with an A+ and GREAT WORK written across the top, underlined three times. She’s my favorite teacher besides Mr. Goldman, but if she’s on a different side than Jesus, well then.
I have biology third period, and all through class, I watch Ms. Jenkins carefully. She moves around the room like nothing is happening, like we don’t all know that there are protesters outside with her name on their signs. She talks about chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer, scratching her graying hair so it sticks up at the sides. I am thinking that Ms. Jenkins doesn’t believe in God, and this is why the protesters are mad.
Eileen says she feels sorry for people who don’t believe in God, just plain sorry for them. I don’t know if she would feel sorry for Ms. Jenkins or not, if she met her. I can’t imagine them in the same room. I can’t even have both of them in my head at the same time. They are like two parallel lines that should never cross each other, but keep going on side by side, always on different tracks.
At lunch, Mr. Goldman sits by himself, reading U.S. News & World Report, sipping orange juice through a straw, his green tie flipped up over his shoulder so he won’t spill anything on it.
“I hate that fucker,” Travis says.
I give Travis a look. I don’t like his calling Mr. Goldman a fucker. He’s nice. If anyone is confused about a math problem, he stays during lunch and helps them, eating a sandwich with one hand, writing on the board with the other.
Last week, he caught Libby Masterson passing a note to Traci. Usually this is a good thing for everybody else, because if a teacher like Sellers catches you passing notes, he takes it from you and reads it out loud to everyone. It can be very interesting. But when Mr. Goldman took the folded-up note out of Libby’s hand, she looked up at him with her rabbit face and said, “Please, please, don’t read it,” and just looking at her you could see that the note had something about him in it, and that if he read it, that would be it for her as far as being embarrassed. Sellers was in the back of the room, and he started snapping his fingers and saying, “Bring the note to me,” and we were all saying, “Read it! Read it!” But Mr. Goldman just wadded it up and threw it away and told Libby to keep her mind on math.
I was one of the people saying, “Read it! Read it!” and now I feel bad.
Deena does not say yes or no about whether Mr. Goldman is a fucker. She’s preoccupied, reading an article in People about Fawn Hall. Fawn Hall was Oliver North’s secretary, and she was supposed to shred the documents about Iran and Nicaragua but did not. The article is not about this, but about how Fawn Hall is not just a secretary but also a part-time model