The Best of Intentions

By T.J. Gillespie

The SAT Corner marked the back wall with its brightly colored paper strips: stalwart, fabricate, preeminent, anomaly. There should have been more words of course, a whole semester’s worth by now, but they were gone, ripped down, written on, walked over, crumpled up, thrown out. Beside the posted words, the ones that had survived so far, was a large bulletin board, and above that were bare walls decorated with old magazine covers, mostly Newsweeks and New Yorkers. Here’s Harry Potter. Is the Bull Market Really Over? Lieberman. Cheyney: Our Newest Avenger. Poor Little Elian. They were cheap ornaments, a young teacher’s D-I-Y attempt to bring reading, bring current events, bring ideas into the classroom, but now, they were the ignored images of the forgettable and the forgotten. They are things that other people think important.

Underneath the March 12 issue, one featuring a particularly crazed bovine and a tag-line warning about the coming epidemic of Mad Cow, was a poster of Kenneth Brannagh’s Henry V. Beside him were student drawings of Greek gods: a gothic pen-and-ink rendering of Hades, a collage of Tyra Banks advertisements lounging under a magic-markered “Aphrodite,” various computer clip art and internet pastings of Zeus, and one glamorous, glittery, graffitied Apollo splayed across construction paper. Moving toward the front was a big round table that was routinely defaced with shout-outs to neighborhoods, declarations of teenage love, and arrogant outbursts of sophomore superiority: SLC—SouthLawnCru, Antwon Maxwell Luvs Valeria Bicks 4-EvA, Class of ’03—That’s Right!!

Beside the chalkboards in the front was another bulletin board, a stange mixture of a young teacher’s idealism and official school propaganda. Between pictures of Seamus Heaney and V.S. Naipul (scandalously smoking a cigarette) were the Xeroxed handouts of the principal: “Our High School is Under Construction—We are Building a World Class High School!” and “Clipper Pride Means Believing I am Special.”

There was no class going on in Room 332. No students and no teacher. Scholar Mycroft was called a motherfucker today. It really got to him. So he walked out and never came back.

The day had started out strangely to begin with. The kid they called Baltimore was suspended and then taken away by the police. It wasn’t for torching a kid with a Bunsen burner during science class, though that is how his trouble started. It wasn’t even for smoking weed out front of main entrance, but for threatening to cut the security guard who reported him in the first place. Elsewhere Mr. Dosunmu, the Nigerian math teacher, was spending his planning period calculating the best way to accommodated 2600 students in a building designed to hold 1400. Senora Carmen was having her Spanish 2 class help prepare her summer vacation. In the library, Mr. Jackson soothed his hangover, the lasting souvenir from a weekend spent with his old college friends.

It was around this time—fourth period—that Scholar Mycroft interrupted a small gambling operation going on outside the cafeteria. Mycroft, a shaggy haired, thickly bearded white man, just a few short years older than these boys he happened upon, majored in philosophy and the classics and addressed the boys in the same manner that he himself liked to be called. He saw himself not as an authority figure or even as a teacher, but as a student himself, albeit more like an Oxbridge seminarian. Given the choice he would probably even like to wear the black robes of the academic. He greeted the boys cheerfully and then proceeded to tell them about Palamedes, the famed Greek soldier who tricked Odysseus into going to the Trojan War against his will, and how he invented dice to relieve boredom of his men as they awaited the fall of Troy. He was by no means hectoring or even sermonizing. His tone was avuncular and warm. Several of the boys seemed warily interested.

That was when Scholar picked up the boys’ dice in his own hands. “The Egyptians would throw six-sided heel bones of sheep—the astragli—in games of chance,” he said, rattling the dice in his clasped hands. The boys exchanged glances. One silently mouthed something to himself as Scholar continued, “The Romans, and their emperors, Augustus, Domitian, Commodus, Caligula, Nero, wagered fortunes on single pitches.” He threw the dice down toward his feet. They bounded off the wall and landed in the center of the circle.

Someone's luck just ran out.