Inquiry

In my Advanced English class, we follow a strict schedule every day. On Mondays, we have inquiry discussion, on Tuesdays, grammar lessons, Wednesdays are for reading published works, Thursdays we have a CPR-learning-day, and Fridays we free-write.

My high school is one of those with a million accolades which really don’t mean anything to the students. Everyone is gifted. Everyone is talented. Everyone is an imbecile.

It’s Monday morning, so we’re all sitting in a large circle for our inquiry discussion—which the teacher pronounces like “incree discussions”—and this girl looks over at me, dull cow eyes shining with excitement and nearly brimming with tears, and says, “to piggy-back off of what Alyssa said, I also think that the main character has blue eyes to show her innocence.”

Now, usually, I’d nod and smile and then look to the teacher, since mostly in discussion, we all just look to the teacher for approval, make sure we talk three times to get a participation grade, and then shut the hell up for the rest of class, but this time, I guess some hell-escaped demon possesses me for a split second and instead, I say, “really, Abigail, can you have one fucking thought of your own?”

And, of course, this doesn’t fly with Mrs. Bagels, who gets up quickly and says, “Alyssa!

That is not how we talk during incree discussions!”

I pause for a second and think about tipping my desk over onto her powder-pink ballet flats or knocking Abigail’s blue-raspberry lemonade kombucha off of her desk, but instead, I just smile sweetly and say, “Oh no! I only meant that in The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Abigail, the character, doesn’t really have her own ideas. She’s influenced by the other girls who are pretending to be witches.”

Mrs. Bagels looks like she’s about to send me straight home, which she is not qualified to do, but instead, she breaks out into a huge smile and says, “Alyssa, next time preface it with that! A good point for the first time all year!” We aren’t even reading The Crucible.

Then, of course, to distract from the spotlight I accidentally made for myself, my best friend, Claudia Ribert, who wears a different-colored ascot every day, and loves to be the center of attention, perks up and says, “Mrs. Bagels, I don’t know why, but I feel like blue eyes aren’t innocent at all.”

Then she winks at Mrs. Bagels and Jace, who’s eating a gallon sized Ziplock bag full of loose skittles by the fistful. This, of course, pisses me off because that’s when I remember that Claudia has blue eyes. What is she doing—flirting with Jace? Definitely not—his mouth is all colorful and sticky and disgusting from the skittles. So then is she flirting with Mrs. Bagels? Mrs. Bagels is married to Mr. Bagels, who recently became Dr. Bagels, but it’s a PhD in being a piece-of-shit so I think I’m allowed to still call him Mister. The one who really needs a title change is Mrs. Bagels to Ms. Bagels, honestly.

“Claudia don’t be an attention whore,” Mrs. Bagels says, which makes me cackle, and of course makes Abigail tear up since her mother doesn’t let her use that kind of language or that kind of laugh. Claudia shoots me a well-deserved nasty look, but I can’t be mad at her because her eyes look so pure and innocent. Then she does what she always does, which is untie the ascot and tie it back even tighter, so I can see the bottom part of her neck bulging out in a way that absolutely cannot be comfortable. Today her ascot is a bright, bright orange with little brown stripes and blue polka dots. She huffs a little bit, which seems like an impossibility with the tightness of the ascot, but somehow, she manages. Then pulls out a makeup mirror from her backpack—the kind with lights—and runs an extension cord from across the room to her desk to re-apply her dark plum lipstick.

Of course, Claudia’s obsessed lover, Benson, starts drooling, metaphorically mostly, and says something like, “Mrs. Bagel can I ask a question?” Which is already a question, but we have to be nice to Benson because he’s stupid; she responds with a half-hearted nod.

“When we’re talking about eye color, do we mean the ring around the eye?”

“Benson what color eyes do you think you have?” I chime in before Mrs. Bagels can even open her Chapstick-clad lips.

“I have green eyes.” He looks over to Jace, who is sitting beside him in the circle, and has started eating a rather large stalk of celery with peanut butter smeared all over it, topped with rainbow sprinkles. Jace nods that his eyes are indeed green, and this gives Benson the confidence to look back over at me. I feel the irresistible urge to get up and stomp down on his leather cowboy boots. I control my rage, however, and stay sitting in my desk.

“Benson are you stupid?” I ask. This is a genuine question that I sincerely want the answer to. His jaw goes slack and I see the wires in his brain desperately trying to make a connection.

“Yes,” he says. He might be stupid, but at least he’s smart enough to know it. Which is more than Princeton can say, who, at the exact same moment that Benson responds, goes, “Hey Mrs. Bagels can I go to the bathroom?”

She doesn’t look up—she’s started a text fight with her husband, which I can tell from the way that she has her phone in her lap, and she isn’t paying attention anymore—she just says, “yeah the iris is the part we’re talking about. The colored ring. But rings are stupid.” She takes her ring off of her finger and starts hitting it with a ruler on her own desk, which makes the rest of us get quiet. She notices the awkward silence and clears her throat, slipping the ring back on without any kind of explanation.

And then Abigail has to get up and excuse herself to the restroom to get a tissue because she’s still crying.

“While you’re up,” Mrs. Bagels yells, which really isn’t necessary since Abigail is so close by still, “would you mind feeding Geoffrey?”

Abigail looks so dumb and so excited, and runs over to the hermit crab cage, sprinkling a few flakes out onto the damp sponge that Geoffrey uses for food, water, and light recreation, and then she sets his shell on top of it. Honestly the poor thing probably hates this part, since I know how it feels to have your face shoved in your food. If Geoffrey could be a part of our incree discussion, he’d probably ask why we were all losers, and we’d have to say, “I don’t know Geoffrey, we don’t live under a fucking shell like you do.” But that would probably hurt his feelings, so then Abigail would cry, Claudia would make a show, and Benson, Lord Dumb-Dumb, would probably ask why the crab was talking.

I’m not saying I’m jealous that she got to feed the hermit crab today, but it’s just that it was my turn. So I do end up pushing her kombucha off of her desk. The vinegar-blue-raspberry-lemonade smell that erupts from the spill is overpowering. My eyes water up from it.

“Alyssa! Why are you being an evil menace today?” Mrs. Bagels asks, pinching her nose like people do in the movies when they’re stressed—or maybe she’s trying not to breath in that God-awful flavor of Kombucha.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Bagels. But I’d love to go to the bathroom for just a second. Do you mind if I do that? If I get up and go to the bathroom for just one tiny minute? One itsy, bitsy little nanosecond? Huh?”

I don’t wait for her answer, I just get up and grab the bathroom pass, which is a cinderblock with the word “pass” scribbled across it in sharpie and go. This is what we’re supposed to do, anyway. Mrs. Bagels always said, “you’re in high school, if you have to pee, pee.” Somehow, it’s awkward both ways: to ask or not to ask, what a stupid question.

When I get to the bathroom, all of the stalls are locked of course. There’s a little demon-spawn who always locks them in the seven minutes between first and second period—I’ve seen her do it—she slips under the stalls one at a time, locking them and then going to the next one.

This means that I have to get on the ground and slide under. I hear Abigail crying in the stall next to me. I guess Geoffrey was only a temporary distraction from her daily struggle.

“Abigail, are you alright?” I ask begrudgingly.

“No. I’m sorry I copied your answer.”

“It’s okay Abigail, all of us are always copying someone, if you know what I mean. You see all of human knowledge is finite, and you don’t need to worry because I don’t see you going to college anyway.”

“Whoa, do you mean that, Alyssa?”

“Yeah I really do.”

“Thanks, Alyssa.”

“That’s enough.”

“No really, thank you.”

“I said that’s enough.”

“Listen, I really appreciate that because Mrs. Bagels wrote on my response paper ‘wow, you absolute genius, I think you should apply to Harvard and use this as your essay response’ and that really worried me because I really just want to not do that.”

“What the fuck? Mrs. Bagels wrote ‘go to hell’ on my paper. How is that fair?”

“Can you pass me some toilet paper? I used it all while I was crying.”

I pass her some under the stall, “you didn’t answer me. How is that fair at all?”

“I don’t know Alyssa, I guess you’re just stupid. It’s not your fault.”

“Abigail, I knocked over your kombucha, and I said it was an accident, but it wasn’t.”

She starts crying again, so I pass her the whole role under the stall door, so she has something to wipe her tears on. But then I realize I actually need some of that, so I have to ask for a little bit back. And she hands me one square! One tiny square!

“Abigail, that’s not really enough to wipe with, you know what I mean?”

She doesn’t respond, instead, she picks her feet up off of the ground so I can’t see her.

“Abigail! I know you’re in there!”

She stays silent.

“Abigail! What are you doing in there?”

She sniffles this time, and I crawl out of my stall in a huff.

When I walk back into the class, it seems like all hell’s broken loose. Jace, who only started going by Jace four weeks ago by the way, is eating a Sloppy Joe, and Claudia is focused only on that. This, of course, I can see is making Benson super jealous. Not to mention this weird surveillance coupled with the fact that she winked at him earlier today.

“Alyssa, thank you for finally rejoining us,” Mrs. Bagels says.

“Sorry. I had to console Abigail since I made her cry a few times.”

“Nevermatter, sit back down.”

I take my seat, and the smell of the spilled Kombucha and Sloppy Joe is over taking my nostrils. I start to get a headache, and just as I’m about to ask if I can go lay down on the floor in the back of the class, Mrs. Bagels starts talking about something vaguely interesting, which is a rarity, so I decide to power through.

“Well, I think we’ve officially beaten the blue eyes topic to death. Let’s move on. What do brown eyes mean?”

This is interesting to me because I have brown eyes. So I perk up and raise my hand.

Claudia, my friend, jumps in before I can, though, and says, “I think that they mean being a whiney little baby.”

Mrs. Bagels is back on her phone, which means chaos can and will ensure for a minute, so I say back, “what was that innocent girl?” Which somehow is as mean of an insult as whiney baby.

Then Benson says, “are my eyes brown?” Which I feel like we’ve already covered ad nauseam, so I say, “Benson, do you know what a color is?”

And just as he shakes his head, Jace starts choking on his Sloppy Joe. Everyone goes dead silent. Mrs. Bagels notices that there’s no screaming for four seconds, so she looks up from her phone and says, “what’s going on?”

“Jace is choking!” I say quickly, “What do we do?”

“This is what our weekly CPR training has prepared us for!” Benson says quickly.

“Benson, you absolute idiot, he’s choking. He doesn’t need CPR!” I scoff at him in disgust. There really is no person as dumb as Benson.

“I’ll start the compressions!” Benson’s eyes are so wide, “Where’s the dummy so I can get started? You can’t do CPR without a dummy!”

“Benson!” I scream, “are you the dumbest person on earth?”

He stares at me, green eyes shining with tears, and says, “I don’t know everyone on earth.” He looks away wistfully, as if his only goal is to know every person on earth. If I had a mallet, I’d hit him.

“Everyone stand back!” Mrs. Bagels says, “he needs the Heimlich maneuver!”

She tries to walk over there, but slips and falls on the kombucha, so now I’m implicated, because of course the kombucha thing was my fault, but really it was not, now that I think about it, because it was actually Abigail’s fault because she fed the stupid crab when it was my turn!

“I think I broke my back—call Dr. Bagels!” Mrs. Bagels says. I start to run to get her phone, but then I remember Jace, and so I run over to his desk instead, and shove my fingers down his throat in an attempt to rip the chunk of Sloppy Joe out of his trachea. I can’t quite get it out, so I start mentally saying my farewells to Jace. Then the door to the classroom swings open, and Abigail comes in with toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her shoe, and says, “step aside.”

Abigail crosses the room to Claudia, who is putting on eyeshadow in her makeup mirror, and says, “give me the ascot.”

“What?” Claudia’s neck bulges out when she talks.

Abigail slaps the desk in front of Claudia and throws the eyeshadow pallet to the floor before ripping off the ascot from Claudia’s skinny little neck, and goes to Jace, who is extremely blue in the face but has not stopped trying to eat more of the Sloppy Joe. She wraps the orange and brown ascot around his neck and pulls tight, grunting with the effort of it. Jace makes a final choking noise, and then we all see the bit of Sloppy Joe go flying across the room, landing squarely in Geoffrey’s cage, which he attacks and starts devouring with a fervor I’ve never seen before. He starts trying to climb out of the cage, I’m assuming to get more of the Sloppy Joe. Thankfully, for now at least, he seems to be unsuccessful.

Jace breaths a deep sigh of relief, which draws my attention away from the crab and back to the class. Jace’s face is already regaining its color, and the class starts applauding.

Mrs. Bagels stands up from her crumpled pile on the floor, apparently unscathed, and says, “See, Abigail, that’s why you’re the smart one in here!” And this makes me pretty mad, but I decide to let it go this one time.

“Mrs. Bagels can I please go to the bathroom,” Princeton asks again.

“Princeton, no, you’re being disruptive. Please stop distracting the incree discussion or I’ll have to send you home for the rest of the day.”