“I don’t know. Probably fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to put my hands in the poison pot, which you know I did.” He nodded at Miles’s father.
“Funny,” Sip grumbled. “I had a Mr. Chamberlain too. Except he wasn’t no teacher. He was Principal Chamberlain, but we always called him Old Man Chamberlain. He was a Mississippi good ol’ boy who ain’t give two shakes about kids like me.” Sip cracked the knuckles in his hands. “One day I got into a scuffle with a kid named Willie Richards for calling me out by name. Now, everybody saw it in the lunchroom. Willie said what he said. And I let it roll off me like water on a duck’s back. He was just mad about me being better than him on the football field. Stupid. But then dirtbag had the nerve to spit on me, and well, ain’t no coming back from being spat on. So, I…well…let’s just say Willie, wherever he is right now, is probably still wishing he coulda sucked that spit back in his mouth.” The guys at the table all laughed. Ganke and Miles did too. “Old Man Chamberlain didn’t find it funny though, nor did he think I was justified. So he expelled me. He was always kicking black kids out, though, so it really wasn’t no big surprise.”
“Did you go to a different school?” Miles asked.
“I tried. But when you got what I had on my record, and you living in Mississippi back then, ain’t nobody wanna be bothered with you. I was gonna go to college. Get my mother out that old clapboard house. But that required money, and I just felt so…I don’t know…like I couldn’t win for losing. And guess what? When the world is breaking your back, it get a whole lot easier to break some laws.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Carlo said.
And the Chamberlain stories continued. John John, the only person at the table who hadn’t dabbled in crime, had also been given the blues by a Mr. Chamberlain.
“I mean, I had a lot of tough teachers. But the one that gave it to me the worst, funny enough, was also named…Chamberlain.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Miles’s father said. He and Aaron had gone to school with John John. “He used to ride Aaron hard.”
“That’s right. What was his actual title, again? Because he wasn’t really a teacher.”
“He was the dean of discipline. He literally used to just walk the halls, or pop into classrooms and pick out students he felt needed to be chastised. It just so happened that me, you, Aaron, and a few others were always those students.”
“Yeah, like Tommy Rice. Remember him? Chamberlain yanked him out of…I can’t remember the teacher’s name, but she taught social studies. Tommy was asleep, but the reason why is because Tommy was up all night looking after his little brothers and sisters because his mom was messed up, and he was still doing his homework and stuff. We all knew that. I think most of the teachers even knew that. But Chamberlain suspended him for sleeping. Sleeping. Said he was being nonverbally disrespectful.”
“Yeah, he got Aaron on something crazy like that, too. Got him three times, and on the third he booted him from the school. But I kept going until Aaron started pulling up to the schoolyard in fancy cars.”
“Other people’s fancy cars,” Miles’s mother clarified, setting the bowl of candy on a small table by the front door.
“Right.” The men all sat in silence for a moment.
“So the moral to the story is, don’t trust nobody named Chamberlain unless it’s Wilt Chamberlain. Got it?” Carlo gruffed.
“Oh, be quiet,” Miles’s mother said, wrapping her arms around Miles’s and Ganke’s shoulders. “There’s no way you can blame all the bad stuff in your life on a few tough teachers.”
“Absolutely not,” Sip said. “I don’t blame nobody for my life but me. But I’ll tell you what, for some of us, school is like a tree we get to hide in. And at the bottom of it is a bunch of dogs. Them dogs are bad decisions. So when people shake us out that tree for no reason, it becomes a lot easier to get bit.”
“And that there’s the truth,” John John agreed. “It don’t always happen that way, but it definitely does happen.”
“Don’t matter what kind of family you from either. There’s enough out here to snatch you away from a good upbringing, especially if you got idle time and no clear path to success. Man…forget about it,” Carlo added.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough.” Miles’s mother cut the conversation. “You boys leave these old men here to reminisce and complain while y’all go party.” She gave Ganke a hug. And then she gave Miles one, and whispered in his ear, “Spill the salsa.”
“How weird is it that all my dad’s friends have bad stories about teachers named Mr. Chamberlain?” Miles asked Ganke as they walked to the train. He couldn’t help but think about how one of the things that led them down the wrong road was being kicked out of school. School might’ve been the formula to create a continual function, a life drawn without interruption. Calculus. Or to Miles’s father and his friends, basic arithmetic.
It was a strangely warm night for Halloween. Little kids dressed as witches and princesses, animals and Super Heroes, were all out, walking slowly up and down the block.
“I mean, it’s weird, but no more weird than if we were to ask how many people had a bad teacher named Mr. Johnson,” Ganke said. “It’d probably be like a million people. It’s just one of those things. Besides, they were all different people. It would’ve been more of a shock if they all had the same Mr. Chamberlain, even the guy in Mississippi. Like our Mr. Chamberlain has spent his whole life as a traveling educational jerk.”
“Word,” Miles agreed, but it was still pinballing around his mind until they got to the train. The train was full of people, some dressed in extravagant costumes, others in simple masks, and some just trying to avoid the madness of Halloween. “But what about the guard?”
“Who?”
“The guard in the prison. The one I told you whose name was Chamberlain, too.”
“Hmm. Co-winky-dink?”
Miles gnawed on his bottom lip as the train doors closed. “Doubt it.”
Once they were back on the Brooklyn Visions Academy campus, the boys ran up to their room to drop off their backpacks, wipe the sweat from their necks, and reapply deodorant. Well, Miles did. Ganke reminded him about Koreans not having body odor.
“But I can smell you, dude,” Miles said, digging around in his everyday jeans at the back of his closet. He pulled out the poem he had written Alicia—right where he’d left it. The denim had stained the paper indigo blue. Miles slipped it into his sweatpants, then checked himself out in the mirror. Such a shame his fresh haircut was going to be hidden under the zombie mask, Miles thought.