June held out her hand, Charley reached for it, and they shook, up and down, one time.
Then June walked back to Mrs. Brennan and the children. She crossed her eyes and blew a gust of air up at her own brown bangs, as if to say, Thank god that's aver with.
Kate and George hugged her from either side.
Mrs. Brennan waited for a moment, then she pointed discreetly to the manila envelope. She whispered urgently, "When can I open it?"
June kept her arms around the children's shoulders. "I would wait, Mrs. Brennan, until about a minute before the performance."
Mrs. Brennan looked worried. "Tell me exactly what to do again."
"Open the envelope, and leave it on the podium with just the top of the book sticking out."
"All right. I can do that."
"Remember: Let Dr. Austin pull out the book the rest of the way. Let him be the one exposed."
Kate couldn't take any more. She demanded to know. "Mom, what's going on?"
June lowered her voice so that only Kate and George could hear. "When I told you my Whittaker Library story, Kate? About you and me at Toddler Time? There was a detail that I left out. I do remember one thing about the experience: Jill. It was not Jack who took over my body. I am absolutely certain about that. It was Jill."
She turned to Mrs. Brennan. "Show them the book It's safe if you do it the way that I described."
Mrs. Brennan opened the top of the envelope and carried it over to the children like it was an unexploded bomb. Kate and George peered inside. They saw a Little Golden Book, a match of the Walt Disney's Peter Pan that Mrs. Brennan had carried out to June.
June repeated, to Kate and George, "It was Jill. She was inside this very book. And guess what?" Kate's and George's eyes widened. "She's inside it still."
June looked from astonished face to astonished face. "Unless, of course, you don't believe in ghosts."
Kate reached out with a trembling hand. "Can I touch it?"
"Yes. In fact, you have touched it before, Kate. It was one of your favorite books. You held this very copy in your hands when you were a toddler. You turned to me and said, 'You read it, Mommy.'"
Kate tried to cast herself back to that moment, long ago. "I gave the book to you. That means it would have happened to me. I'd have been possessed by Jill. Instead, it happened to you."
"That's right. No one would have given it a second thought. The grown-ups would have said, 'There's little Kate Peters having a little-girl tantrum.' Jill would have escaped, like she always did. She would have joined Jack back home in Perrault's Mother Goose."
George asked, "So why didn't that happen?"
"Because this book never made it back to the scanner. When the fireman got me down, Jill slipped back into the book. I grabbed Kate, and all our stuff, and ran out. This book was part of our stuff."
"Jill thought she'd be going right back into the scanner, to be with Jack. But, instead, she has been a prisoner for ten years in a safe-deposit box?"
June smiled. "That's right. You don't think she's mad, do you?"
Kate shook her head in wonderment. "So what about Jack? Is he really gone?"
June answered decisively. "Jack is gone. We were there when it happened. Right, George?"
George had no doubt, either. "Oh, yes. He's gone. Vaporized. That Ashley-Nicole really kills things dead."
Mrs. Brennan pointed at the Whittaker Building. "But Ashley-Nicole is not here today. And neither is her killing machine."
Kate could barely contain herself. "Oh my god, Mrs. Brennan, do you really think you can do this?"
"I know I can do it. Believe me, little Jimmy Austin will be making an unforgettable impression on the president of the United States today."
Mrs. Brennan started back with the book tucked safely under her arm.
Pogo bent down and peeked at the envelope as she walked by. She then turned to Kate, pointed at it excitedly, and called out, "Jack and Jill went up the hill!"
Kate called back, "Yes! Yes!" and waved good-bye to her. She turned to June and George. "Pogo knew!"
June smiled sadly. "Oh, yes. She always knew. She knew everything. But no one would ever listen to her."
Mrs. Brennan led Pogo and Charley back to the security checkpoint. She opened the top of the envelope to let Agent McCoy glance inside. He waved them in with the order, "Proceed to the metal detectors in the lobby."
Mrs. Brennan, Pogo, and Charley walked under the Id pendemus motto and past the Andrew Carnegie in Hell mosaic. Soon they, and the long overdue copy of Peter Pan and its occupant, Jill, were out of sight.
Then Kate, June, and George turned and started back down the crowded street. They stopped only once, at the spot where Dr. Austin had been interviewed. The TV crew had packed up, but Dr. Austin remained.
He and June stood and stared at each other for a long moment, amid the swirl of people with Level 1 badges, both of them remembering an incident from ten years before.
Dr. Austin looked away first. He shook his head, as if to drive away the memory. He started off briskly toward the Whittaker Building, intent on escape, but he stopped upon seeing George.
In spite of his disturbing encounter with June, and in spite of all the demands on his schedule that day, he took the time to say, "Ah, George Melvil."
George answered with uncharacteristic insolence. "Ah, Dr. Austin."
The insolence was not lost on Dr. Austin. He narrowed his eyes and replied caustically, "Apparently I overestimated you, my boy. You turned out to be a Whittaker Magnet School failure."
George snuck a look at Kate. Then he answered, "'A Whittaker Magnet School failure'? That, sir, would be redundant."
Dr. Austin blinked rapidly. He thought for a moment, then he replied coldly, "I must get ready. I am about to meet the president of the United States."
But George got in the last word, to Dr. Austin's back. "I know. To teach him about the p sound in Peter Pan."
As George, Kate, and June watched him walk away, they pictured what would happen during that Story Time: Mrs. Brennan would fold back the manila envelope and place it on the podium; Dr. Austin would pick up the envelope and slide out his copy of Walt Disney's Peter Pan.
Then they pictured what the vengeful Jill, released after ten years of captivity, might do within the body of the headmaster of the Whittaker Magnet School and the author of TBC: Test-Based Curriculum, as he performed for the president of the United States.
After a minute of this contemplation, they turned to go, working their way back through the reporters and the onlookers and the security guards. The morning sun had by now risen fully above the Whittaker Building, and they soon passed from shadow into sunlight.
As they cleared the outer checkpoint, Kate grabbed George by one hand and June by the other. She led them at a brisk pace toward the river. Every step away from the Whittaker Building lifted their spirits higher, so that soon they were practically skipping down the steep hill.
When the building was completely out of sight, Kate could no longer contain herself. She let go of their hands and took off running on her own. She threw back her head to feel the breeze in her hair and the sunlight on her face. Then she stretched out her arms and let the swirling river winds envelop her. They seemed to lift her up and pull her along as if she were weightless; as if she were sprinkled with fairy dust; as if she were flying. Quite involuntarily, she opened her mouth and started to sing.
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Reader Chat Page
1. Dr. Austin and the other administrators at the Whittaker Magnet School are convinced that high scores on standardized tests and rote memorization of facts make an ideal education. Do you think success in these areas is truly a measure of intelligence? What else do you think is wrong with the Whittaker system?
2. One of Dr. Austin's many innovations was having teachers be known to students only by the subject and grade level they teach. What purpose did this serve?
3. At the beginning of the story, Kate and George h
ave very different personalities and interests. Over the course of their time at the Whittaker Magnet School, they grow closer and seem to take on some of each other's personality traits. How are Kate and George at the end of the story different from the way they were at the beginning?
4. What are some of the experiences that Kate and George share that bring them closer together?
5. Kate and her mother, June, also grew closer over the course of Kate's attendance at Whittaker. How does Kate feel about June in the beginning of the story, and why do her feelings change?
6. How do the First Lady and her chief of staff, Rosetta Turner, react to the practices they observe taking place at Whittaker?
7. Cornelia Whittaker-Austin, Dr. Austin, and others try to make the Whittaker Magnet School a place that is very structured and organized, with students who behave almost mechanically—but the demons in the library always seem to return to knock their system out of control. What kinds of actions do the demons cause that are normally suppressed at Whittaker?
8. If you could open your ideal school, what would it be like? What kinds of classrooms, teachers, and lessons do you think would best promote learning? How would it be different from the Whittaker School? How would it be different from the school that you attend now?
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Edward Bloor on Writing Story Time
My first two novels, Tangerine and Crusader, tried to deal with reality, as I saw it, in our public schools. For my third novel, Story Time, I was eager to do something different, or at least to approach reality from a different direction. The result is a novel that is part ghost story, with lots of supernatural action, and part satire about public schools.
Story Time is set in the Whittaker Magnet School, a grades six through eight experimental school that boasts the highest standardized-testing scores in the United States. Within this school's sterile, Orwellian environment arises a curious poltergeist—at times funny, at times malevolent—who turns everything upside down. This unfriendly ghost provokes incidents that, should the public catch wind of them, would wreak havoc on real estate values in the highly desirable Whittaker Magnet School district.
I was fortunate to teach in the public school system (nearly twenty years ago) in what now seems to be a golden age, unencumbered by state standards and high-stakes tests. Seventh-graders could read aloud and talk about The Odyssey, Flowers for Algernon, and Lord of the Flies. They could put on a drama festival in which they wrote and acted in their own plays. They could write and illustrate poems to adorn the classroom walls.
I doubt that so many fanciful activities could occur with such frequency in seventh-grade classrooms in America today. The relentless pressure from above to succeed on standardized tests, pressure originating from the president of the United States himself, trickles down through descending levels of politicians until it pours onto the heads of local principals. These hapless former teachers now find their worlds turned upside down, their livelihoods tied to their students' performances on a specific test on a specific day.
"Test-Based Curriculum," the absurd pedagogy upon which Story Time's Whittaker Magnet School is founded, is already a reality in many American public schools. As a result, many children who learn to love reading today do so in spite of, not because of, what they experience in the classroom. In this topsy-turvy system, the politicians win and the educators and students lose. I believe that, in the Latin words displayed in the Whittaker Magnet School, "We will pay for it" with a less literate society. We risk producing a generation that could read for pleasure, but chooses not to.
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Edward Bloor, Story Time
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