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THERE’S NO NEED TO CALL roll this close to the end of the semester—you can do it just by looking around the classroom and seeing which desks are empty. But classroom routines resist variation, rightly, you think; you consider them valuable in and of themselves. They’re known rhythms. As you stand at the head of the class, reciting names whose order is a mystery known only to the massive computer that prints them out in a room it gets all to itself over in the administration building, you note that variances the students introduce to break the monotony are, themselves, now part of the score:
“Michael Adams?”
“Here.”
“Jason Fenton?”
“Present.” Two stray giggles, pebbles down an empty well.
“Anne Higgs?”
“Here.”
“Gene Cupp?” Nothing. “Gene Cupp?”
You know he isn’t here; you look over to his friend Jesse, who raises his eyes from their focus on a threadbare spot in the knee of his jeans just long enough to shrug.
Gene hasn’t been here in over a week. No one answers at his house when the secretary calls to report his truancy. No one seems to care about Gene enough to say what’s become of him, not even his friend, who must know, but who sits with his eyes averted, patiently waiting for the moment to pass.
You know how Jesse feels, you think. You remember. You became a high school teacher because you hoped always to keep the days of your youth close at hand: days when your desire to help others pricked at you like a thorn. From an early age, you’d been in love with the world: there was so much in it, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them, ready to receive the transmissions when they came. A devotee of the chance encounter, the found pleasure, the happy accident, your eyes always open, trying to spread some of your inner light around: that was you, the you everyone knew. You cheered up every room you entered when you were a child; your mother, in her plea for clemency, said you had always been “the best part of anybody’s day.”
How the press ran away with that one! In those days before cable TV, it was harder for a local killing to get national traction, but your mother’s letter proved so easy to contrast with the details of your crime that columnists from as far east as Baltimore found it impossible to resist. “She was not the best part of Jesse Jenkins’s day, however dire a piece of work he may have been,” read an unsigned editorial that ran in the Sun while the world waited out your sentencing phase; its headline was “The Good Person Fallacy.” “She wasn’t the best part of Gene Cupp’s, either.”
They were wrong about that. It’s in the nature of the news cycle to untangle knots and to cast the duller threads aside: to simplify a narrative so that readers can take in a few details, confirm opinions they probably already held, and move on at minimal cost to themselves. But the weight of the evidence about you shows that you’d often been not only the best thing about Jesse Jenkins’s day, but possibly the only good thing in it. Today, for example, Jesse’s been riding the nostalgic waves that seem to float down the halls this time of year, but for him nostalgia is the portal into horror. When you wait hopefully for his friend Gene to reply, “Here,” it gives him a good feeling. A good feeling is sometimes enough.
Jesse’s childhood had been awful: he was five years old the first time he told a teacher about the “whippings” his father doled out whenever he got angry. That teacher reported it to the police, who then visited the Jenkins house in a black-and-white car. The officers came away half an hour later with a noncommittal report that they wrote up dutifully, filed, and forgot: no bruises noted on upper or lower extremities, child denies c/o, runs a piece of it, this abbreviation at the end borrowed from medical charts and misunderstood to mean “complaints” rather than “complains of.” This misuse, quite common, points toward the actual purpose of reports like these: they’re mainly marks on paper, things to have on file in case somebody gets called to account for something later.
But no one did get called to account for leaving five-year-old Jesse Jenkins at the home of his father. Hardly anybody knew until later. Most of what we learned later about Jesse’s life at home came from his mother, Jana; her testimony against you during the trial’s sentencing phase, delivered in a wandering, looping monologue, seemed, at times, more likely to win you clemency than condemnation. It wasn’t Jesse’s fault that he was the way he was, she said. His father made him that way. He was a good boy once, but I could never handle him after he turned twelve, she said. But he didn’t deserve to die like a dog, she said finally, in audible pain, and then she said it again. My son did not deserve to die like a dog.