The Eleventh Plague

SEVENTEEN

When the classroom was empty except for me and Jenny, Tuttle regarded us over the rim of his steel glasses. “American History,” he said. “Chapters one through three.”

“Read them?” I asked.

“Copy them.”

I opened the book and flipped through the pages. Chapters one through three were about twenty densely worded pages. My bruised knuckles ached at the thought of it. Tuttle leaned over a stack of papers, making quick little check and X marks down the length of them. I couldn’t concentrate. Every time I tried, I saw Jackson’s face growing more and more angry as he looked from me to Jenny after the fight. I had tried to explain, tried to pass him a note even, but he’d ignored me, that hard fury like a wall between us. Stupid, I thought, over and over. Why didn’t I just walk away?

What made it worse was Jenny, twirling a pencil in her bruised fingers, totally unconcerned.

Tuttle cleared his throat and I leaned over my paper. I swallowed the anger as best I could and started to write. I only had two pages done before something bumped against the side of my boot. When I looked down there was a folded piece of paper lying on the floor. I checked on Tuttle, then leaned down and picked it up, unfolding it onto my notebook.

How are the war wounds, tough guy?

Jenny had her head down in her book, copying away, the slightest shadow of a smile on her bruised face. I refolded the paper and went back to work, ignoring her. Minutes later another piece of paper knocked against my foot.

Awww, what’s wrong, pal? Mad at me?

Leave me alone, I scrawled across the paper in heavy black letters before kicking it back to her.

Oh come on, Stephen, she wrote back. You’ve been dying to hit somebody since the night you got here.

Well, thanks, I wrote. Now I’m in detention. Everybody hates me, and your whole family, my dad, and I are all one step closer to getting thrown out of here.

She answered: The sky’s not going to fall because of one little fight! No one’s going to throw you out. Jackson and his band of doofuses will get over it.

I made sure Tuttle was still busy grading before writing back, And if they don’t?

I could feel Jenny shaking her head as she read it. When the paper returned it was nearly torn through.

Food for thought. If someone can’t handle seeing who you are — are they really your friends?

She was wrong, of course. Jackson and the others were my friends, and fighting those guys was not who I was. Jenny hadn’t been there at the game or the quarry. She didn’t know.

What would you know about who I really am? I wrote back.

Jenny wrote something immediately, then quickly erased it. Almost an hour passed before she kicked the paper back.

Sometimes I can’t sleep, she wrote, her messy scrawl replaced by small deliberate letters. Because it’s like I can feel the whole world spinning so fast beneath me, and I’m thinking, what am I doing here? Is this where I belong? Do I belong anywhere? Some nights it gets so loud in my head that I want to break something, anything, everything, just to make it stop.

I didn’t move for several minutes. I just stared down at the words, the letters so tight, so precise and dark, they looked like they might rupture at any moment and tear the page to pieces. My pencil was near my fingers, and in one strange moment I thought, Did I write that, or did she?

I checked on Tuttle, then looked back at Jenny, but she was slipping out of her chair and heading toward the door.

“Miss Green,” Tuttle called out, but she ignored him, didn’t even correct him. “Miss Green, come back here!”

I wanted to stop her too, but the double doors behind me flew open and slammed shut. Tuttle settled into his chair, and I was surprised to see a strange look on his face, almost concerned. Maybe even a little bit sad.

“This does not mean that you are excused, Mr. Quinn,” he said when he caught me looking at him. “Get back to work.”

I read Jenny’s note twice more before I did, lingering over each word. Tuttle cleared his throat pointedly, and I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket so I could finish my work. About an hour later, I finished the assignment and, my hand cramped into a claw, I set it on Tuttle’s desk before turning to leave.

“A moment, Mr. Quinn.”

I returned to my desk and slumped down while Tuttle took his time making a neat stack of graded papers and sliding it into a leather folder. The waiting was driving me crazy.

“Mr. Tuttle, we were just defending our —”

Tuttle held up his hand to silence me. He slipped a paper out of his folder, then crossed the room and dropped it on my desk. It was my Great Expectations quiz. Down one side of the paper was a long column of check marks and a single X. A large A was written at the top of the page.

“The question you must ask yourself, Mr. Quinn,” Tuttle intoned, towering above me, “is this: Are you a boy or a man? Human being or savage?”

Tuttle’s cool blue eyes were on me, unwavering.

“Obviously you’ve never had to make that choice before. Running around the ruins of this world as your sort of people do, you acted on instinct and self-preservation — an animal — no doubt quivering before rainstorms and amazed by fire and shiny objects. But you’re here now, Mr. Quinn, and this is civilization, so now you do have a choice. So, what do you want to be?”

Tuttle waited for an answer.

“The fact that you pause does not fill me with confidence.”

“Look, as soon as my dad is better, we’re leaving, so you don’t have to bother.”

Tuttle surprised me by folding his long body down into the cramped desk in front of me. He twisted around to face me, his knees nearly pressing into his chest. “Do you like to learn?” he asked.

“I like to read.”

Tuttle’s thin lips curled into a tight smile. “Yes. So do I. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like the world has much use for people like us, does it? No, most of the world only has time for people who can build or break things. It won’t always be that way, I think. A time will come when society, as it always has, will turn for its salvation to the learned. Now, to my surprise, you appear to be intellectually capable, but the question remains: Do you want to be one of them?”

It was a ridiculous question. Did I want to be one of the learned? I tried to think of an answer that would satisfy him, but he might as well have been asking me if I wanted to be an astronaut.

“The times we live in, Mr. Quinn, are teetering between the chaos behind us — an infancy made up of smoke and terror and withering plague — and what adulthood lies ahead for us. Wisdom? Peace? Oblivion? Whatever it is, to get there we must let go of the past. It is dead and gone. It will never return and it cannot be changed. All we have now is one another and whatever new thing we make together.”

Tuttle unfolded himself from the desk and strode to a shelf along the wall. He pulled down a small stack of books, then laid it on my desk. Mechanical Engineering. Chinese History. World Political Systems.

“If you have a desire to be more than what you are, if you want the world to be more than it is, study these in addition to your regular work. If not, please feel free to escape to a warm cocoon of petty violence and team sports.”

With that, Tuttle turned his back on me and planted himself at his desk to begin grading a new stack of papers. The books sat in front of me; I ran my fingers across their glossy covers.

This is how we got here in the first place, Grandpa would have said, sneering at the books. But then there was Dad’s voice, whispering to me that night in the plane as we watched a doomed woman and boy.

Grandpa is gone.

In my head, it sounded like a fallen leaf blowing across a grave.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a thin smile grow on Tuttle’s lips as I scooped the books up into my arms, and dashed into the twilight.