Getting Even in Room 15
by Roland Goity

Take on a persona and spill your guts! Become a character in time or a figure of today. Just make sure you’re someone worth caring about.

That was the quest behind the week’s oral presentations in Ms. Leavenworth’s homeroom—said so on the handout she’d delivered a month before. A momentary foray for students into the world of fame and adulthood. An assignment dreaded in some quarters, anticipated with glee in others. It had become a ritual. Seventh graders at Oak Glen Middle School had been dressing up and masquerading each afternoon the first week in April for too many years to count. Three of the kids in class had parents who’d undergone the endeavor a generation before. Fact was Ms. Leavenworth was fifty-nine and had been teaching at Oak Glen the bulk of her lifetime. She wondered just how many such presentations she’d overseen, some number fast approaching a thousand to be sure.

After Monday’s lunch recess, students filed into Room 15 in pairs and clusters, a few of them, including Tommy Hines, more anxious than the rest. Tommy was the second to go on, after Summer Wilhorn, a gleaming freckled girl whose sleight-of-hand turn into Susan B. Anthony caught the room by surprise and spurred nary a question. She mumbled nonsense for three minutes max and then returned to her seat with a smile, happy to become a class spectator the rest of the week.

Tommy was next. He was a pirate, one dressed primarily in his mother’s clothes: a saffron blouse with ruffles everywhere, a green paisley vest that tugged at his sides, black leather boots that entombed his growing feet and made each step, each movement, painful. And there were things he’d picked up from the costume store: an eye-patch and black, tri-cornered hat; a plastic fencing sword to carry and a faux parrot that he strung with wire to the knob of his shoulder. As he stood beside Ms. Leavenworth and before the class in costume, steak knife between his teeth, Tommy looked like a true pirate. Well, close enough anyway. Students soon cheered as he pulled the knife from his teeth, to sway it around aggressively.

“Oh my God, Ms. Leavenworth! He brought a weapon on campus!” Penelope Seevers shouted from the front row, not a dozen feet away. “Should we report him?”

“Yeah, Tommy’s gone serial killer,” Jamie Kemper, the class clown, said with a snicker, before Ms. Leavenworth could respond. The room erupted in nervous laughter.

“Pipe down everyone, Penelope’s asked a very valid question,” the teacher said finally, arms out and palms face-down before her, rising and falling as if she was submerging laundry in a soapy tub. “But there’s no need for alarm. The knife’s simply a prop.”

Tommy seemed a bit nonplussed by Penelope’s objection, crossing his arms over his chest and fidgeting his feet as if nature called. But it didn’t take long for him to gather himself and get going. He’d rehearsed his presentation at home, in front of his mother and little sister. It had always clocked in around ten minutes, but when he wrapped up his spiel before Ms. Leavenworth’s class, barely half that time had elapsed. Still, not only had he “survived,” he’d also thrown in a few interesting facts about Blackbeard’s parrot and contemporary pirates off the coast of east Africa. “Ahoy mateys!” he said in conclusion, sword overhead in one hand, controversial steak knife withdrawn from a vest pocket and brandished in the other. “You scurvy dogs, you!”

“And can you tell us what that means?” Ms. Leavenworth asked. Over the years too many students thought they’d throw in clever asides and avoid questioning. Boys like Tommy Hines. The teacher didn’t like to let them off the hook so easily.

“Excuse me?”

“What’s a scurvy dog? What’s scurvy?”

Tommy’s smile was dashed and his body went limp, the green toy parrot keeled over his shoulder as if it had been shot. “Dunno,” he uttered. “Something curvy?”

While most of the class had no idea themselves, they could detect a ridiculous answer when they heard one. Hoots and cackles arose from every corner of the room. Then Penelope, her furrowed forehead especially pronounced with her hair thrown back under a pastel-yellow band, shot her hand skyward.

“It occurs from a lack of vitamin C,” Penelope informed them when called upon by Ms. Leavenworth. “It makes people’s skin and gums go bad. You get spots all over and your teeth fall out.”

“Very good, Penelope. Glad someone knows the answer,” the teacher said. “Now who’s going next? Let’s see… Angela, and then Casey.”

Little Angela, the shyest girl in class, took to the chalkboard dressed as a princess, as Tommy moped back to where his friend Casey sat and tapped him on the shoulder. The two of them then disappeared behind the screen room divider temporarily set up in the corner for quick costume changes. Their “whispers” nearly drowned out poor Angela’s entire presentation before Casey emerged as a musketeer, and Tommy was back to his same old self.

Soon Angela was seated and Casey was the one trying to convince the class of his newfound character. But it was hard to reconcile Casey’s musketeer from Tommy’s pirate. After all, Casey had borrowed Tommy’s fencing sword—it was now precariously leveraged through the belt loops of his black jeans—and the tri-cornered hat. He also adorned the blouse, vest, and boots of Tommy’s mother, while adding his own mother’s red silk scarf that wrapped his neck. The line between pirate and musketeer was murky.

Casey cleared his throat to speak. “The three musketeers were swashbuckling characters in a novel written hundreds of years ago by Alexander Dumas,” he began, but not only was he fuzzy on the dates, he pronounced the French author’s name dumb ass, and laughter quickly lorded over the room. Even Ms. Leavenworth was unable to suppress a chuckle.

Next, Casey fumbled with the fencing sword’s handle but eventually withdrew it from his hip, and went into “en garde” pose. That steadied him a bit, renewed his confidence. And so he managed to cull together and spew enough random info to keep his audience at bay and Mrs. Leavenworth honest. He mentioned things like “Cardinal Richelieu,” “Milady de Winter,” and “Louis the Thirteenth,” and when at a loss for words drummed up the musketeer refrain, “All for one and one for all!”

When Casey appeared to have come to a close, Mrs. Leavenworth asked, “And which of the three musketeers are you?”

“I’m d’Artagnan,” he said, and he jousted the air as if defending them all from a fiery dragon.

Penelope covered her mouth and looked at Ms. Leavenworth.

“You may sit down, d’Artagnan,” the teacher said. “But you are NOT one of the three musketeers… Can someone tell me who they were?”

“Dumas is rolling over in his grave,” Penelope said, pronouncing the name doo mah with perfect French-accented aplomb. “Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are their names,” she added in singsong delight, all the while looking smugly at Casey, with whom she’d gone steady for thirteen days the prior winter until Casey got an electric guitar and joined a “band” and didn’t find her so rad anymore.

After a few more presentations students exited the door in various directions, making their way to whichever classroom hosted their final period, and Mrs. Leavenworth went about the room, gathering discarded belongings, the never-to-be-used-again props and uniform accoutrements to go along with the usual 8.5" x 11" flyers of doodles and notes, empty energy drink cans and gum wrappers. Tommy and Casey, though, leaned against a bank of lockers just outside the door and pulled over the Longmire twins, Jake and Joe, with whom they were tight.

“Hey, what’s up?” Jake said. “You guys weren’t really that bad,” Joe suggested.

“Tommy and I were just talking,” Casey said, wringing his hands as if he’d just used them to commit an unpardonable sin. “We need to shut up Penelope Seevers. She made us look like fools and is screwing up our GPA.”

“Got any ideas? You guys live practically next door,” Tommy asked.

The Longmire brothers locked eyes with one another and smiled.

***

The rest of the week, as people elsewhere concerned themselves with Easter festivities, the start of baseball season, and a garbage strike that threatened to turn the city to stink, pupils in Room 15 assumed their roles with style, entertaining fellow classmates mostly, but also educating a bit, the gaps in their presentations quickly filled by either Ms. Leavenworth—or Penelope.

Tuesday included a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful try as Ulysses by the shortest, skinniest kid in class. Wednesday brought on portrayals of historical greats (Einstein and Marco Polo) and contemporary pop icons (James Dean and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs), as well as a surprising incarnation by mild-mannered Bailey Shoemaker as a fluffer, who casually described her role to a surprised audience: “I keep male porno actors rock hard between takes.”

On Thursday, two rather poor performances preceded Penelope’s, making hers that much better. Like magic, she transformed from a little Miss Priss into Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. The preppy outfits and skyrocketing IQ often hid her attractiveness, but as she stood there in ancient garb, her classmates were taken aback by the seductress before them. Casey gulped and asked himself why he’d chosen to join the band—as it turned out, they almost never rehearsed, couldn’t agree on a set list, and disbanded before ever coming up with a name for themselves. But beyond looks and style, Penelope also charmed them with her wit and knowledge and presence; she was a master at showing and telling. As Cleopatra, she explained how she ruled Egypt when the Hellenistic Period gave way to the Roman Era, and went through lovers like Kleenex tissues—Antony and Caesar and many in her own bloodline. How she was a woman well ahead of her time. “You think Hillary Clinton’s powerful?” she asked the class. “Well, I am way bigger than she is or ever will be. I am Bill Clinton powerful, with a libido to match!”

Penelope’s fellow students didn’t know a libido from a hole in the head, but took her word for it. When she finished up, her few friends in class dropped their jaws and told Penelope how awesome she’d been. If palm fronds had been available, no doubt they would have treated her just like the real Cleopatra. Others were less gracious of course. “She forgot to say Cleopatra was such a nympho, she banged her horse… that’s what I heard,” said class clown Jamie, loud enough to hear for everyone in the room who cared to listen. Tommy, Casey and the Longmire twins snorted their appreciation.

Friday came. And for the first time in all her years of teaching, Ms Leavenworth was grateful for the impending conclusion to “masquerade week.” Class size expanded every year while student attentiveness shrunk. Now, though, there were but four performances left. The first featured a male student dressed as a Spartan warrior, the next a girl paying tribute to her great-great-great grandmother, who she claimed was a pioneer settler. While showing promise on paper, the kids were uncomfortable and unprepared, their stammering and random facts drawing yawns and frequent peeks at the clock from everyone, including Ms. Leavenworth. When they finished the Longmires were the only ones left on the docket.

Jake was first. He and his brother weren’t identical twins, and Jake was the smaller, less athletic of the pair. He also wore wire-rim glasses which suited him in the role he’d undertaken as a private investigator. Particularly when he flipped down their shades. “I’m a P.I.,” he said. “People hire me to find out if their accountant is embezzling their earnings, if their would-be son-in-law is up to no good, or if their spouse is cheating on them. Stuff like that. I have to be crafty and sometimes skirt the law.”

“A sleazier profession is hard to find,” Penelope remarked.

Jake ignored the comment. He put on what he called “stealthy” gloves, showed some contraption the size of a quarter that he claimed was a phone bug. He suggested the right distance for tailing someone, be it on foot, by car, or by bike. He explained how a living could be made in the line of work, but that it was a dicey proposition. Often those in need of such services weren’t loaded with deep pockets, and when they were, trouble always seemed right around the corner. “You must have a passion for such work,” Jake said. “It definitely requires a yearning for adventure…”

“And a deplorable code of ethics,” Penelope added, after Jake acknowledged her waving hand.

“That, too,” he admitted.

Others in class were more intrigued by a private eye’s life than was Penelope. They eagerly posed a handful of questions, the answers to which Jake rarely had a clue. “That will take some digging,” he said, when asked what type of training and licenses were needed to become a P.I. “But I’m just the man for the job!” Jake then pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket, raised it to his face and panned a magnified eye over the room. When he took to his seat students clapped.

Then it was Joe’s turn to present, his twin offering a fist bump of support as they exchanged locations. Joe’s presentation was the very last. Soon the heralded week would end and there’d be no more sanctioned theatrics in Ms Leavenworth’s class for another year.

“Boring outfit,” Penelope remarked, as Joe walked to the chalkboard. But after droves of kings and queens, pop culture celebrities, and icons of history, it was true: Joe looked particularly mundane, even more so than his private-eye twin. He wore leather walking shoes and had on a basic jersey tee and cotton sweat pants. At his sides he carried a studded dog leash and collar, dog biscuits and treats, and as he put it, a “pooper scooper.”

“I’m a dog walker,” he started. “I give neighborhood canines a run of the land. Rottweilers, Labradors, Bichon Frises. It don’t matter. I walk ’em all. My rates aren’t cheap, though. We all have to make a living.”

Joe then managed to spend several minutes yakking about city parks that were “dog friendly,” what to do when a client’s dog turned ornery, and the best methods for cleaning up after them. Nothing earth shattering. Aside from Jake, Tommy and Casey, who muffled their giddiness with the sleeves of their shirts, students in Room 15 were baffled by Joe’s report on dog walking. Not only were they not learning anything worthwhile, they were bored. And being bored was a lot worse.

Penelope sensed the prevailing mood. “Ms. Leavenworth,” she said, right as the quickest way to attach the plastic bag to the pooper-scooper was being demonstrated, “I’d like to ask Joe just what the purpose is of his presentation.” She turned back to face him. “We all know what a dog walker does. You’re not exactly enlightening us with knowledge.”

“What about at your house, Penelope? Who walks the dog?”

“Oh, man,” Tommy said, drumming his desktop with his fingers, “this is going to be good.”

Penelope leaned back into her chair rocked her shoulders, trying to get comfortable. She rolled her eyes and said, “We don’t have a dog. You know that.”

“Right, just your father…”

“What are you talking about?”
”Come on, Penelope. Don’t pretend you don’t know about his fetish…”

Ms. Leavenworth was as puzzled as most in the room, but didn’t like the direction the presentation was headed. No one had used the word “fetish” in her classroom before. No one would have known what it meant. “Stop it, Joe!” she said. “If you’re finished teaching the class about dog walking, I suggest you take your seat.”

“But, Ms. Leavenworth, Penelope’s mother really does walk him around by a leash and ask him to be a ‘good boy.’ When Mr. Seevers barks, Mrs. Seevers gives him special treats.”

“It’s true!” Jake yelled, jumping up from behind his desk as if he were a trial lawyer. “I investigated the matter and have pictures. Come, have a look!”

Ms. Leavenworth couldn’t believe what was happening. She enjoyed letting students assume mature roles but this time they’d totally abused the privilege. “That’s it, everyone. The presentation is over! Class is dismissed!”

Joe shrugged and walked back to his desk, but other students weren’t moving.

“Did you hear me?” Ms. Leavenworth asked. “I said: Class dismissed!”

But despite the teacher’s pleas, kids swarmed towards the back corner of the room abuzz, creating a massive huddle around Jake, who, with a n’er-do-well’s smile, passed out the evidentiary photos like he was dealing poker hands. Meanwhile, Penelope covered her reddening face between the covers of her binder, skidded back her chair, and bolted for the door as if a bomb was set to detonate. And Ms. Leavenworth threw her arms in the air and gazed at the ceiling, and wondered if she should have a second look at the retirement package the district offered her a few weeks before.

 

ROLAND GOITY lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and edits fiction for the online journal LITnIMAGE. His stories appear in dozens of literary publications, including Fiction International, Underground Voices, Bryant Literary Review, Compass Rose, Word Riot, Eclectica, and Scrivener Creative Review. He continues with plans to slowly take over the world (and promises to make it a happier, more peaceful place for all).

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