Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies Read online

  He asked me if I minded going to the very back. “This way the others won’t disturb you as much when they come in or when they leave. And nobody will accidentally bump your foot.”

  He handed me the examination papers, made sure I had two pens, and left me to start my exam. He returned a few minutes later with a bag of ice wrapped in a white hand towel which he handed to me silently, pointing to my throbbing baby toe. I spent the exam trying to do some French between waves of pain. I would use my right foot to very gingerly push the cold towel against my aching toe and then, a few minutes later, slide my freezing foot away. At one point Mr. Nichols brought me a second towel-wrapped ice pack and took the first one—now melted—away.

  At some point, and it must have been after Mr. Nichols brought me the second towel, it happened. I had just raised my head to stretch my neck and shoulders and my eye caught a flutter of movement. Just ahead of me, in the middle of the aisle, I saw a paper float to the floor.

  I was sitting in the very last seat closest to the wall. Two desks in front of me sat Tamara Lockwell and beside her, in the second row from the wall, sat Maggie. Three seats in front of Maggie sat Manon. The four of us were the only ones in that corner of the gym which was four-fifths empty because, except for my French, Math was the only exam being written that afternoon.

  I saw the paper float downwards, swaying like a jerky pendulum, and settle on the hardwood floor half way between Maggie and her best friend, Tamara. I had not seen where it came from; but I did see, half a moment later, Maggie’s right leg reach out and try to touch the paper. It was an awkward motion and her leg wasn’t quite long enough. She started to make a second attempt to reach the paper with her foot when I saw Tamara’s head and shoulders make a short quarter turn to look behind. For one of those moments which feels long but is probably very short, her eye caught mine. Tamara quickly swung back but she took the briefest fraction of a second to wag her head as if to say no to the girl beside her. Maggie’s leg retreated casually back under its desk, as if perhaps it had been innocently stretching.

  The paper lay inert on the gym floor for no more than two or three minutes. Mr. Nichols was invigilating the exams with a second teacher whom I didn’t know although I had seen her around. It was she who, perhaps because her invisible antennae had picked up some unusual vibration, strolled down our aisle a few minutes later. She picked up the paper as if it were a basketball or volleyball which had innocently rolled out of the storage cupboard. She didn’t look at anyone and glanced at the scrap in her hand as if it were of no more interest than a week-old advertising flyer.

  A few minutes later, a grim Mr. Nichols, holding the same scrap of paper, marched down the aisle and stopped pretty much where it had landed. He stared at the bent heads below him for a long couple of minutes before spinning on his heels and marching back up the aisle.

  Despite the few minutes I’d lost watching this scene unfold, and despite the recurring waves of throbbing pain from my baby toe, I finished my exam not too long after the last of the math kids left the gym.

  As I gave my papers to Mr. Nichols he asked, “Were you able to write your exam just the same?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Do I have all your papers? These will be mailed this afternoon. I’m sorry to ask you because I’m sure you want to get home and have your foot looked at, but would you come to Mr. Mulroney’s office? Something happened. I know it doesn’t involve you in any way but he wants to speak with you as well.”

  Limping gamely, I followed Mr. Nichols out of the gym, across the lobby and down the hall to the principal’s office.

  “Is there someone you can call to come get you?” he asked as we crossed the lobby.

  “Yes, I’d like to call my grandmother.”

  “I’ll have the secretary call her for you.”

  He knocked perfunctorily on the closed office door and I followed him in. Mr. Mulroney was seated behind his desk. Maggie and Tamara were seated in the two plush chairs in which my mother and I had sat a few months before, while Manon stood near them. The girls, thin-lipped and tense, turned towards us as we came in. Mr. Nichols closed the door behind us.

  “Something very serious seems to have happened,” Mr. Mulroney began. “Someone, it seems, brought a crib sheet into the math exam. These three girls, Mr. Nichols has told me, were all near the spot where this crib sheet was found. I’ve seen these three girls together and I’ve heard what they had to say. In a few minutes, I’m going to speak to each of them again, individually this time, and ask them a few more questions. You were also near the spot where the paper was found. I know you had nothing to do with this but it’s still important that I question you. Mr. Nichols told me you hurt your foot this afternoon? I’ll start with you so you can get home and get it looked at.”

  Mr. Nichols and the three girls left the office.

  “You can sit,” he said to me.

  He said it nicely but I was suddenly tense and stiff, hardly able to move. I limped two steps to the nearest chair and sat uncomfortably.

  “How are your exams going? You’re writing exams that come all the way from England, I think?”

  “Yes, my O-Levels.”

  “Do you have many more to write?”

  “No. This was my last one.”

  “And what exam were you writing?”

  “French.”

  “Did it go well?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You say this was your last exam?”

  “My last O-Level. I have to do my Art exam tomorrow, but it’s in Montreal.”

  “So, we won’t see you here anymore? Where did your mother say you were going to school next year?”

  “Edinburgh, but it’s not certain yet.”

  “In Scotland?”

  “Yes, in Scotland. But it’s not certain yet.”

  “Are you spending the summer here?”

  “No, or rather, I don’t know. We’re flying to England on Monday…”

  “This Monday?”

  “This Monday, yes. We’re going to be there for a couple of weeks and after that I don’t know.”

  “Well, I hope you have a good trip. Now, about this afternoon. Have you said anything to Mr. Nichols?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all? Did Mr. Nichols ask you anything?”

  “No. He just asked me to follow him to the office.”

  “So, you didn’t speak to him about anything at all?”

  “No, just to call my grandmother to come and get me.”

  He seemed momentarily at a loss for words, as if he had to think what to do next.

  “I have to ask you this,” he said, “just as a formality. Did you bring this paper into the gym this afternoon?”

  The question startled me so much I almost laughed. A sound came out of me and I tried to cover it as a cough. “No, of course not,” I said.

  With a very straight face, as if he had asked a serious question, he said, “No, I didn’t think so. I’ll let you go now to get that foot looked at.”

  I was startled and it may have taken me a moment to move but, as I rose to go, he really surprised me.

  “It was nice to have you in our school,” he said, rising and coming around his desk towards me. “I hope you learned a lot.”

  Then he reached forward and I realized he wanted to shake my hand.

  I had barely stepped out of his office when I spotted my grandmother at the far end of the hallway. I passed by the others who were standing along the wall near the door. I nodded goodbye to Manon who looked back at me with strangely frightened eyes and said thank you to Mr. Nichols in little more than a whisper. The other two girls, Maggie and Tamara, were looking away as I went by them.

  And that was it.

  I disappeared as suddenly as I had arrived and, for more than a decade, the story remained unfinished.

  Not that I didn’t think about it. In my mind, I would go back and replay my last meeting with Joseph Mulroney over and over
again. What at first made no sense at all, eventually made me feel duped, and taken advantage of, and especially it made me feel worried and apprehensive for Manon. I knew that whatever else Joseph Mulroney’s inquiry might find, I was absolutely certain that it would find his own daughter perfectly innocent of any involvement whatsoever with the crib sheet. Several times, over the years, I found myself back at my grandmother’s—and then my parents’—place for a few days at a time. Once or twice I thought of calling Manon and then it seemed that so much time had passed that it didn’t really matter any more. In the scale of things, Joseph Mulroney’s transgression, however much it bothered me, was laughably trivial. Still, it stayed with me even as life went on.

  Despite my broken baby toe (which swelled to remarkable proportions and displayed an impressive palette of colours) I sat my Art exam the next day in Montreal and did quite well. Wearing an oversized and unmatched shoe, I went to Charlie’s graduation and visited Edinburgh, but that fall I enrolled at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. This permitted me to live at home for two more years; my parents, after more than a decade of wanderlust had opted to return to Canada and had landed in Dartmouth. Much as they liked Nova Scotia, they moved two years later so my mother could go from babying a daughter to nursing a mother. After my grandmother passed away, my parents stayed here because the house was comfortable, and convenient for my father, who had only a short half-hour commute to his hospital across the river in Ottawa. Then, when my father suffered his first stroke, I came here with the intention of helping out my mom for a few weeks. To my surprise, I never left.

  It was at the hospital that I bumped into Manon, a day or two after my father had his stroke. I had just arrived from Vancouver and driven a rental car directly from the Ottawa airport to the hospital. I was walking down a corridor when I saw a face coming towards me that I couldn’t quite identify although it looked familiar.

  “Suzanne from Sarajevo?” she said.

  “Manon?”

  She was now a doctor at the same hospital where my father had suddenly gone from being a dispenser of medical services to a consumer of them. An hour later, we sat over two cups of bad coffee and stale muffins.

  “That’s your dad? I’m so sorry. Everyone is,” she said when I explained why I was there. We exchanged our stories: she was happily married to a stay-at-home architect who was raising their two children. She had gone into medicine and become an anaesthesiologist. She had frequently worked with my father. Inevitably, we talked about our final exam.

  “I can’t believe it!” she said after listening to me. “I always thought I owed my life to you. I called your grandmother’s place several times. I wanted to thank you because I was sure that you had saved my skin.

  “I was really scared that afternoon. I finished my exam and, as I was handing it in, Mr. Nichols asked me to follow him to the office. I couldn’t understand why I was wanted at the office, but the moment I walked in and saw Maggie and Tamara sitting in front of Mulroney, I knew that I was in big trouble. And I was scared. I’d never liked Mulroney, either of the Mulroneys. I had never had anything to do with him, but I thought she was a witch. But right then, when I walked into that office, I was physically frightened, and when he asked Mr. Nichols to go and get you I was desperately searching my mind for clues as to what this could all be about. And the moment Mr. Nichols closed the door behind him, I realized that, whatever was going on, the only person who might possibly have protected me had just left.

  “He looked at me for several seconds, staring at me so that I felt there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t look back at him. ‘Something was found in the examination room,’ he finally said. ‘Close to where you were sitting. Would you take a look at it?’ He handed me a piece of paper—half a sheet of lined paper torn out of a binder. It was creased and a little crumpled. It was full of math. And then he started questioning me. He kept his voice soft, but his questions came one after the other and with each one I felt more and more as if I had something to hide. ‘Have you seen this paper before? Can you explain how it came to be near your desk? Could you tell me what some of the writing is? Are you sure you haven’t seen this paper before?’ Finally I put the paper back on his desk and I told him it wasn’t mine and I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t know how I did it, but I said it to his face, staring right at him. And I was the only one he spoke to, as if Maggie and Tamara weren’t even there.

  “I don’t know what would have happened next if you hadn’t arrived. I knew I was in big trouble even though I was innocent. I was just praying that you might be able to say something because if you didn’t, I knew that I was the one who would be blamed.

  “Maggie’s parents wanted one thing for their daughter, that she graduate at the top of her class. She couldn’t be caught cheating on a final exam, which might even mean losing her year. And her father wouldn’t be likely to let anything happen to Tamara either, because for the last five years Tamara had been Maggie’s bodyguard. This left me as the guilty party.

  “I could see all that as clearly as if it had been written on the wall. But I grew less scared when I was waiting out in the hall,” she continued. “For one thing Mr. Nichols was there and somehow I felt good about that. As I stood there, I grew more and more determined that I was going to fight. I was ready to demand that they bring in a handwriting expert or demand a lie detector test. Don’t laugh. I remember those ideas going through my head. Math was my best subject, always had been. You know how Maggie always got the highest marks in Language Arts class? Well, that never happened in Math. She was scraping by. Whereas, if I wasn’t at the top of the class, I was always near the top. I was the last person in that room who needed a crib sheet of any kind, and I knew Mr. Nichols would back me up on that. Still, I was afraid when I walked back into his office. As you can probably guess, I was the one who went in last. After you came out of the office, Mulroney called his daughter in. After maybe five minutes he called Tamara in even though Maggie hadn’t come out. He was a little longer with Tamara, or maybe it just felt longer. Then he called me in.

  “I remember being startled that neither Maggie nor Tamara were there. It took me a minute to realize that they would have left by the door that led to his secretary’s office. They would have gone out through the main office and into the lobby and out the front door without seeing or being seen by anyone.

  “He told me to sit and I felt stiff and uncomfortable. He took a long time to start talking. He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and his hands together as if he were praying. Anyway, for a moment, because he hadn’t said a word, I thought he was going to close his eyes and pray.

  “He didn’t pray, and he didn’t bombard me with more accusatory questions, which is what I was expecting. What he did was lecture me. He talked, in a serious, fatherly voice, about the gravity of cheating and the importance of hard work and effort. It was all platitudes and I couldn’t understand where he was going. I kept wondering when he was going to say, ‘You did it!’ but he didn’t. He talked about reasonable doubt, and how he would not want an innocent person to be punished. He said that, despite what one of the other girls had said, he could not be sure beyond reasonable doubt who had brought the crib sheet into the exam. And at that point, in my head, I wanted to give you such a hug to thank you. I was sure that you must have seen something and told him. I don’t know if any of this showed on my face. It must have.

  “All of a sudden, out of the blue, he asked me if I had cheated on the exam and would I be willing to swear on a Bible that I hadn’t? I said yes, I would swear on a Bible that I hadn’t cheated and that was it, he dismissed me, and sent me out through Wendy’s office.

  “He was a smart man. He implied I was the guilty party without ever actually saying it, and then let me know that I should be grateful that he was lenient and forgiving. The truth is, all I felt was relief. At that point, all I cared was that I wasn’t being blamed.

  “And all this time, in my heart, I�
��ve been saying thank you to you,” she said. Then her pager must have gone off because she reached into her pocket and said, “I have to go. We’re all thinking of your dad. He’s getting the very best care. It’s remarkable, sometimes, the extent to which people can recover from a stroke.”

  My dad, who had been so remarkable all his life wasn’t so this time. His recovery was slow and limited. He suffered a second and then a third stroke before dying unexpectedly and quietly in his sleep a week after his seventieth birthday.

  Manon, who had been my father’s colleague, became again, and remains, a close friend. Her story answered my questions while raising others. At graduation, both Tamara and Maggie collected their diplomas. Maggie, as expected, took the top academic prize. According to Manon, there were a lot of kids, and a lot of adults as well, who didn’t applaud. Mr. Nichols did not return to the school the following September. It seems he’s now teaching at a private school somewhere near Toronto. Both Manon and I are curious to hear his story, and we occasionally promise ourselves that we will look him up one of these days although neither of us has yet done so.

  I COULD TELL THAT LARA WAS GLAD TO BE HOME, and so was I. We had walked much further than we normally do. From Craig’s field, we followed our path through scrub brush to the Cemetery Road, but instead of taking our usual downhill stroll, I surprised Lara by turning up the hill. As we reached the crest of Cemetery Road, the sun evaporated the remaining mist. In no more than a few minutes, the sky became almost blindingly blue. The air would no doubt grow heavier through the afternoon, but at that moment it felt crisp and we could see into the folds of the Gatineau hills. We walked the last half hour of our five-mile jaunt under an increasingly hot sun.

  I fill Lara’s water bowl and pour a tall glass for myself. I drink half the glass at once, refill it and bring it with me to the studio. I reflect on how fortunate I am. My job (or my profession—where is Mr. Nado when I need him?) is to render with pencils, or ink or paints, the images that a writer has previously created with words. I encounter any number of difficulties and problems in my line of work, but most are of a technical nature and can be overcome or corrected or solved by careful application of my art. The tasks presented to me are ultimately straightforward, as are the people I work with: authors, editors, publishers, printers. I have met no Mulroneys in the course of my work.