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We sat three to a desk. Twenty-four girls and boys. Indian, Negro, Mixed. We had known each other since age five. This was our final year at RC school. Common Entrance had been set for the last Friday in March. After the exam twenty of us were going to the secondary school in Penal, three to the better schools in South, and one of us was doomed to fail and repeat, and to fail again the next year, and then be forced to learn a trade. After three terms together each year for the last seven years there was no mystery. We knew who was destined for what.
The Education Ministry tried to better our odds, and failed. Sir, our Common Entrance class teacher, taught an extra lesson to give the bush children a fair chance to advance. He received extra pay for dedicating his extra time, but Sir acted like he was doing us the biggest favor. Plus, someone’s mother was bound to send a plate of ground provisions and saltfish or lentil soup with dumplings and pigtail to thank Sir for the time and patience he put in to teach their duncy-head children. That was plenty food for some people to spare, and my grandmother, who could spare it easily, would never dream of sending Sir even a grain of rice. Neither my mother nor grandmother thought he was a good teacher, and I had to agree. Our house didn’t believe in whipping, and the whip was the only teaching tool Sir thought effective. While we worked, he sat on the stage above our Standard Five classroom and ate what had been provided. Done, he read The Daily Express, passed gas, and ignored us completely.
That hour was worse than church. I marked time by staring at the dirty brown patterns leaking rainwater had swirled into the bagasse ceiling. The circular rings looked like cross-sections of peaks and plateaus. Sometimes I got a reward if a daytime bat swooped out where the bagasse had completely rotted away and skimmed the room. The wheeling and dipping made the bush children scream, sure a night spirit had come to class to claim a soul.
Mechel and I sandwiched Delilah. The scratchy pine seat irritated the backs of my sweaty legs. My maroon smock was much too short, but my mother refused to buy me a new uniform saying that I only needed to get till the end of June and then I’d be going to a different school. One of the better schools in South. I had dropped the hem and then tried to tidy the raw edge using the blanket stitch I had learned at Miss Prosper’s House for Young Ladies in Training. Miss Prosper was my grandmother, and her H. for Y. L. in T. our verandah. On some evenings she taught the village girls sewing and also how sit and eat if we were ever invited to tea.
Mechel was older than me by a horoscope sign. Every morning as soon as she lost sight of her mother waving from their gap, she rolled her shirtsleeves to expose her forearms and untied the bright red ribbons in her hair. She was my best friend, but I envied her thick dougla plaits, cocoa-tea skin, and silky eyebrows that touched in a downy V. Mechel did the worksheet quick and never bothered to go over the sums. She scored a passing fifty percent week after week. I knew she could do better and once, walking home after lessons, I asked her why she didn’t take a few extra minutes to check her work.
She shrugged, the motion reminding her to unroll her sleeves. “Either they right or they wrong, right?”
The beautiful nose she had inherited from her Indian mother wrinkled.
“And,” she stopped to retie her ribbons, “no matter how much I change the answer is either I know or I don’t know, right?”
I made the girly bows she hated, glad to have a chance to touch her heavy hair.
Five minutes into what was supposed to be a fifty-minute exercise with ten minutes left at the end for corrections and punishment, Mechel flipped to the clean side of her worksheet, carefully placed her bitty colored pencils in her pleated lap, and fat plaits grazing the desk, created her weekly masterpiece. Today, she had drawn an amoebic number eight tilted towards infinity, a shape she transformed by tracing the inner rims in rainbow hues. Her mosaics were works of art, the shades blended and smudged to perfection when the pencils in her case didn’t match the colors in her mind. She spent forty-five minutes out of every lesson on one piece. Miss Prosper told her she was already an artist.
I took more time, not because the worksheet was hard, but because I couldn’t believe that the problems were so simple. Week after week I looked for the trick sum hidden within the easy multiplications, short long divisions, and simple fractions. I was convinced the Education Ministry had set math traps that even Sir couldn’t find. At the end of class we shuffled worksheets for marking and week after week the answers were easy as I had thought them to be. This week’s work included the eight times table. Even Jules, already apprenticed to Suck’s Auto Repairs, could do the eight times table even if he didn’t think he could. All he had to do was keep adding eight to eight to eight until ninety-six. My mother sent me to lessons as an example. On four nights a week, she tutored me in chemistry and biology, subjects my friends hadn’t even heard of yet. But, if the district doctor’s daughter went then the villagers who couldn’t spare their children for an extra hour would come as well.
I stared deep into the water rings stained on the ceiling and made up a story using the eight times table. Once upon a time twenty-four children were locked in a small hot classroom. On Thursdays when regular school was done, they were forced to spend an eighth hour, guarded by a forty-year old man wearing bamsee-squeezers and the world’s ugliest shirt-jack. Sir, who once he took off that ugly shirt transformed into my stupid next-door-neighbor, Mr. Charlot, demanded complete silence and threatened each child with the penalty of sixteen strokes from his tamarind whip for breaking his commandment. I wrote out the story on the back of my worksheet, thinking about how to factor in other multiples of eight, when without looking left or right Mechel said, “Ask Avian.”
Delilah too was done with the exercise, though all that meant was that she’d only filled in half the sums all with wrong answers. I knew Delilah worked hard, but in First Standard she had fallen behind and never managed to catch up. Always she needed more time. On most of the evenings my mother tutored me, Delilah was there too, sent by Mister Teddy to see if Dr. Julie couldn’t do her best to make sure Delilah got into one of the better schools in South. My mother let her be to read my old picture books, and oiled her chabine hair Madam Teddy’s arthritic fingers could no longer untangle. Delilah’s family was the closest the village had to white. But because my mother knew she could trust me not to repeat her and Miss Prosper’s big people talk, I knew Delilah’s grandfather was also her father.
“Avian?”
“What?” We weren’t supposed to talk.
“How to spell fuck?”
I didn’t think I had heard her right. “What?”
Mechel giggled but didn’t look up from blending the ocean’s blue into her interlocking loops.
“Fuck,” Delilah repeated. “I forget how to spell it.”
I couldn’t believe her. That word was scrawled all over the school, on the bathroom walls, by the water taps, on the desks. We had learned to spell ‘fuck’ the day after we had learned to spell our names. Once, my mother had heard me cuss after shattering a glass and instead of blessing me with licks like any other village mother would have, had asked, “Do you know what that word means, Avian?”
I looked now on our desk to see if I couldn’t find the word in script or block capitals. Miraculously, not seeing ‘fuck’ written anywhere, I whispered to Delilah what my grandmother would say, “Sound it out.”
Mechel bit her exposed arm to keep from laughing, and sucked up the spit she left there. Rajesh, Lal, and Ravi ducked glances over their shoulders to see what was going on.
“Is f-o-k?”
With care, so sir wouldn’t think I was helping Delilah, I wrote ‘fuck’ on the desk between our worksheets. She copied the word into the other lines she had written on the back of her own exercise.
No bat flew out. Up high, the rusted ventilation bars jailed us in but let in no breeze. No one could remember having seen the ceiling fans turn and the afternoon heat was stupefying. On his stage Sir had the standing fan trained so its spin never managed to graze us, only dusted him back and forth in purring coolness. Its hum was something alive in the heat. I pushed back and forth to scratch my sweaty legs. My enemy, Dale Thompson, who stood right up in your face when he talked, saw me squirm. Under his desk he jabbed his right index finger through the circle of his left thumb and pointer. I flared my nostrils at him. Delilah saw and showed him her middle finger. Mechel didn’t see, but ground her fist in her palm. We held our face-off, so when Sir dinged his brass bell we all jumped, and waited.
The thing Sir liked best was to make you feel shame. He liked nothing better than when Delilah stood at the blackboard unable to do a sum. He’d keep her standing for a good five minutes before making her hold out her palm for the three lashes he gave for wrong answers. He beat Delilah more than anyone else in class, even Jules.
“Avian,” I knew it would be me. “Collect the worksheets, and pass them out.” Sir rose and stood at the edge of the stage. To the rest of the class he said, “St. Agnes RC School operates on the honor system. If Avian gives you your own paper to mark, you are honor bound to return said paper to Avian to be marked by another child. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir.”
I shuffled the twenty-four sheets. Never once had I given a paper back to its original owner, or even to someone sharing a row.
Sir didn’t remove his dark shades to read off the answers. We listened, checking the right ones and X-ing the wrong. Instead of talking to him like a neighbor over the fence separating our properties, my mother had paid Sir an official visit at school. She suggested the children solve the lesson problems on the blackboard instead of him shouting out the solutions at the end. Sir had said that while he appreciated her educated input, the Ministry only paid him for one extra hour per week. Working out the problems would take at least another hour, surely. At dinner that night Miss Prosper had dabbed her lips with her napkin and called him a backside indeed.
After we were done marking came the ritual humiliation. Sir, legs dangling and crotch bulging, sat on the edge of the stage. “Anyone holding a one hundred percent score?”
Lal Beharry shot up his hand. “Avian Prosper score one hundred percent, Sir.”
Dale Thompson sent me the evil eye and I stared right back at him.
“Anyone score ninety percent?” Sir’s tamarind whip thwacked against the stage.
Perchance Chin raised her hand. “Dale Thompson, Sir.”
Seematie Brown, who was a dougla like Mechel, but had taken more on her father’s Negro side, raised her fingertips to her jaw. “Joanne Singh make ninety percent, too, Sir.”
Sir nodded, unsurprised by the scores. Following the curve, more hands lifted for the lower percentages, and then less as Sir called forty, and thirty, and twenty percent. Figuring out the percentages wasn’t hard. The Education Ministry had printed a grid at the bottom of the worksheets. Next to me Delilah pulled in her lips and danced her head to a music only she could hear. Her name hadn’t been called and Dale Thompson hadn’t spoken. When in triumph he rose to announce that Delilah O’Neil had scored zero percent, he laughed as he said it. We held our breath, because while Sir had in fact intended to humiliate the low scorers, St. Agnes’ RC School’s honor code also stipulated respect for classmates, at least while in the classroom.
“Something amusing about O’Neil’s results, Thompson?”
Dale stood again. “No, Sir.”
Sir, serge trousers tight, pushed himself off the stage and came down the narrow aisle formed by our desks. Delilah’s fingernails hurt my wrist and a flush, as beautiful and rosy as a pale ripe pomme-arac, splotched up her sea-sand colored neck. Sir stopped at Dale’s desk. “Then why are you braying like a jackass in the noonday sun?”
Dale held up Delilah’s worksheet. He held the marked side to his face and I could see the two rows of large Xs he had made over Delilah’s answers, even when she had left a sum blank. Whatever had made him laugh out loud was in the words Delilah had scribbled on the back of her paper.
When Sir took the sheet out of Dale’s hand to read what Delilah had written there, I needed my other hand to loosen her grip.
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Victoria Brown is the author of Minding Ben, Hyperion 2011 (released in paperback as Grace in the City, 2012). She has been profiled in the New York Times, New York Newsday, Library Journal, The Trinidad Guardian, and other publications. She has an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBCnews.com, Sunday Salon, Babble and Bookreporter