***
“Can I get salmonella or something from this thing?” Robert asked.
He was seated in Esmeralda’s little kitchen, in her little brown house, in a little neighborhood just a few blocks from the school on Symphony Street.
Esmeralda’s father had listened patiently to her story, with Robert jumping in periodically to clarify some issue that Esmeralda had glossed over. Her father reached into the pockets of the old, brown sport coat he always wore when he was puttering around the house, furrowed his brow a little and waited for all the facts to straighten themselves. When the tale had wound down, he reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a fat, red steak.
“I don’t think you’ll have a shiner come out of this,” he said, “but this will help put down any swelling you might get.”
That’s when Robert got concerned about the salmonella.
“Salmonella comes from chickens, Robert,” Esmeralda said.
“I just don’t want to get a disease in my eye, okay?”
“Are you wearing a chicken on your eye?” Esmeralda smirked.
“I don’t know. I can’t see it.” Robert pointed to the steak now resting upon him. “It’s on my eye.”
“Robert,” Mr. Comstock cut in, “you can’t get salmonella from free-range flank steak. You can get mad cow disease from it. But you won’t. And if you do, have your parents call me. Now, as for you, Esmeralda, I’d like you to come upstairs to my study so that we can talk alone.”
Esmeralda’s father’s study was filled with huge and ancient books. They lined the walls, riding tall shelves cut from cherry wood. His desk was a big, black thing, crammed into the middle of the little room. While Mr. Comstock didn’t use the space with great organization, he did fit a great deal into it. As a result, there was very little room for walking or, say, little girls about to be scolded. But it was a comfortable place, with many books and stack after stack of papers arranged haphazardly on the desk and floor and other places besides. In the corner was an old globe, and on the walls were a few little paintings and many pictures of Esmeralda and her mother.
Mr. Comstock sat behind his desk and Esmeralda stood.
“Now, honey…” he began.
“Dad, it wasn’t my fault,” Esmeralda said. “You heard me and Robert. Billy Moore is a crazy, homicidal maniac, and he hit Robert in the face. And that wasn’t the worst of it, I mean, we’re playing dodgeball, and you heard it, Dad, he was laughing and you know he was laughing and you can’t just do that. You can’t just hit someone in the face and just be…laughing, and awful, and all that mean.”
“Honey,” Esmeralda’s father said softly, “that’s enough. Now it’s time for you to listen to me. Okay? I love you; I’m your father. I understand what you were trying to do. You wanted to defend your friend. That makes sense to me…”
From there, Esmeralda’s father went into a giant speech that had nothing to do with Billy Moore and how awful and cruel he was. He kept going on and on about Esmeralda. He talked about how actions have consequences and about responsibility and things like that. Esmeralda knew all of that stuff already. She knew she shouldn’t have punched Billy in the mouth, even though he really deserved it. She just wanted, just had to have for once, some justice. She wanted some of Robert’s comeuppance. Her father didn’t even get it; he didn’t understand that Billy Moore was something like the focus of all the evil in the world. If he gets a fat lip, he gets off easy. Her father didn’t understand that at all. But the longer he talked, the more she felt like he wasn’t saying that Esmeralda was bad, or that she had been bad. He didn’t even mention punishing her. She began to feel like her father said only that he wanted her to be better and that he knew she could be.
“Honey, are you okay?” Mr. Comstock asked.
Esmeralda hadn’t noticed it, but she had started to cry just a little. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “But they’re all so mean.”
Mr. Comstock jumped up from behind his desk, walked over to Esmeralda and gave her a hug. One of those big, warm bear-hugs: not too tight but close enough that she didn’t have to feel that she was lost to the air of the world. It was close enough that she could feel like part of something; that she belonged somewhere; that things were now, would be soon, or perhaps always were, all right.
2. Mr. Chandrasekhar
Mr. Eldredge was not in the room when everyone filed into fifth period history the following Monday. They went into the class rowdy but ready to be instantly silent when he appeared. After five minutes, Mr. Eldredge still had not arrived.
“If he’s not here in two minutes, we should leave,” Billy Moore called out.
Someone in the back made a fart noise. Everybody laughed.
A moment later, Mr. Dee, the principal, came into the room. “Alright kids, let’s settle down. Mr. Eldredge is out very, very sick today. He called in, and you’ll be having a substitute.”
What Mr. Dee did not tell the class was that the onset of Mr. Eldredge’s sickness was rather inexplicably sudden. He awoke that morning around five, rolled out of bed, went cheerfully to the bathroom to wash up, looked in the mirror and became instantly, quite messily ill. The substitute the school found for the unfortunate Mr. Eldredge was one that they had never used before. No one in the district knew him, personally or professionally, except for one person, who gave him the highest and most enthusiastic recommendation.
“Children,” Mr. Dee said, “please behave for Mr. Chandrasekhar.”
Into the class walked a tall man. He had skin the color of cinnamon, a thick black mustache, and straight black hair that fell over his ears. He wore perfectly round spectacles, and in his right hand he was holding something like a briefcase that at the same time was something like a wicker basket. You could call it a rectangular wicker basket with a handle, or you could call it a briefcase made of wicker. If it contained sandwiches and juice, it would properly be called a wicker basket. If it contained papers and pens and school supplies, it was a briefcase. Esmeralda figured it was a briefcase.
Mr. Dee left, and the substitute walked to the chalkboard and began to write.
“My name is Raahi Chandrasekhar,” he said. “I know that, for you children, ‘Mr. Chandrasekhar’ is not an easy thing to say. So, if you want, you can call me Mr. Chandrasekhar, Mr. Chandra, Mr. C., Mr. Raahi, or you can just call me Raahi. It’s up to you.”
As he spoke, Mr. Chandrasekhar seemed a little distracted, almost as if he had planned out exactly what he was going to say and so was free to scan the room and look into each of the student’s faces for just a moment. It may have been Esmeralda’s imagination, but it seemed that as his eyes landed on her face, he looked for a great deal longer than when he examined the others.
After he finished writing on the board, Mr. Chandrasekhar began rummaging through the drawers of Mr. Eldredge’s desk, maybe searching for a lesson plan or something like that. The students waited quietly, most of them noticing how slightly out of place Mr. Chandrasekhar looked. He was certainly an adult, but he didn’t seem much like a teacher at all. Teachers on the whole have a certain swagger about them. Even the good and engaged ones have a lifted eyebrow somewhere in the way that they walk and talk in the classroom. Kids tend to notice this.
“Yes, children,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said, still rummaging through the desk, “this is, uh, history class, or at least that is what I was told, so I assume that, uh, you have been studying history. So, can someone please let me know what kind of history you have been studying, or what you have been doing, so that we can, uh, do some more of that?”
Robert raised his hand. “We’ve been working on Christopher Columbus.” He turned to Esmeralda and smiled.
“Yes, very good. Christopher Columbus,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said flatly. “Who can tell me who Christopher Columbus is?”
Stacy Keenan raised her hand with a huge, plastic smile on her face. Mr. Chandrasekhar was still searching, almost desperately, through the desk and didn’t bother to look up
.
Stacy waited for about thirty seconds. Before her smile had faded completely, she simply called out, “he discovered America.”
“Mmhmm. Yes, very, very interesting,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said, closing all of the drawers to the desk. “Very good. Inspiring stuff. You all seem to know what it is you are talking about. Listen, I’d like to go around the room and have everyone tell me your name and birthday.”
Everyone did as he requested, with only a few giving out fake names. When it came to Esmeralda, Mr. Chandrasekhar seemed, at least to her, to be very intently listening to everything that she was saying. And when she said, “my name is Esmeralda Comstock, and my birthday is January thirteenth,” a subtle grin inched across Mr. Chandrasekhar’s face.
“Alright children,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said when everyone had finished, “we have about forty minutes left of class. Does anyone know what we’re supposed to do? We’ve covered Christopher Columbus. That went well. Does anyone have a suggestion?”
“We could all go home,” Billy Moore shouted.
“No, no, I’m pretty sure you have to…” Mr. Chandrasekhar opened his wicker briefcase and began searching through it. “I think we’re all supposed to stay in here until the bell. Is there a book? Do you have books you can read?”
It so happened that the class did have a book. They had a very heavy and thick history text with big block letters on the front that spelled out “AMERICA: PAST TO PRESENT.” Mr. Chandrasekhar instructed them to take out this book and read. He didn’t tell them where to read in it, what chapters, what pages. He just said to read for a while. So they did, or pretended to if they didn’t feel like actually reading.
Mr. Chandrasekhar sat at his desk watching them. After a little while he pulled out of his briefcase a long wooden flute. It was covered in strangely arranged buttons, as opposed to holes, each fashioned of gleaming silver. The dark, reddish wood of its body was carved with intricate designs.
As the kids read, he held the instrument, licked his lips and began to play. At first the music was so quiet no one could hear it. But they all felt there was something new in the air, that things had gone all soft somehow. Then the sound revealed itself, delicate and intricate and alive. It snaked through the lower registers of the beautiful instrument and produced the strangest effect. No one in the room felt bored or restless anymore. No one even thought of making a sound or moving a muscle while that music hung in the air. It seemed to Esmeralda that as Mr. Chandrasekhar played this very exotic and beautiful music he was looking at her. It may have been her imagination; maybe everyone felt like that. But it certainly seemed as if he was playing for her, that every note he played was a note in her song.
In two blinks the bell rang and class was over. For a long moment after Mr. Chandrasekhar stopped playing nobody moved. Everyone, seemingly, had to wait for the music to drip out of the air and for things to become normal again. Then all at once the whole class got up, collected their things and headed out of the room.
“Ms. Comstock,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said as Esmeralda passed his desk on her way out of the door.
“Um, yes,” She said, stopping.
“Your birthday is January thirteenth. That’s coming up. It’s this Friday.”
“Yeah,” Esmeralda said, “I know it’s not very lucky, turning thirteen on Friday the thirteenth.”
“Well, luck means different things to different people.” Mr. Chandrasekhar smiled. “Where I come from thirteen is a very important and lucky number.”
“Really?”
“Of course really,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said. “But then, Esmeralda, luck, like most things, is in the eye of the beholder.”
Esmeralda smiled. “I hope Mr. Eldredge is really sick. I mean, I don’t want him to be sick, that’s…I mean, I’m glad you’re teaching us.”
“Well, we’ll see about tomorrow then.”
Esmeralda turned and left.
Robert was outside the door waiting. “What did he say?”
“Nothing really,” Esmeralda said distantly. “He just said thirteen is really a lucky number where he comes from.”
“What a bad teacher that guy is,” Robert said.
“Huh? Did you think so?”
“I’m not sure he even knew who Christopher Columbus was.”
Esmeralda rolled her eyes. “What difference does it make who Christopher Columbus is?”
Robert was a little put off by this. “Well, we’re studying Christopher Columbus.”
“I guess,” Esmeralda said, “but maybe now we can study music.”