UPHEAVAL
There was a sign on the door: School Counselor. The sign was faded and it made me wonder if it really was the school counselor or if it was now used for another purpose. Like many areas of this school, signs didn’t mean much: an old janitorial closet could be a new teachers’ break room.
The door opened. A pudgy woman who was about my height, with fluffy curls around her head peered out at me through the thick lenses of her purple-framed glasses. “Sang Sorenson?” she asked, her lips tight and cracked around the corners. Her voice was steady, clear.
I nodded. My heart thumped hard in my chest. This was wrong; I was supposed to be meeting Mr. Hendricks. He was going to ask me where I’d been. He was going to ask me about the Academy.
I wasn’t prepared for whatever this was. I wanted to feign sick. I wanted to request to see Mr. Blackbourne.
The door opened further, revealing the rest of her. She wore dark slacks and a dark burgundy sweater, the collar making it appear that she had no neck at all, just shoulders and her head sitting on top. She was shaped like an apple, round in the chest and torso.
She motioned for me to enter the small, windowless office. The room was furnished with file cabinets in each corner, a desk in the middle and three ugly orange chairs sitting facing the desk. “Have a seat,” she said.
I went in, placing my book bag on one of the extra chairs before I sat on the middle one, folding my hands into my lap, lips pressed tightly together. Would Mr. Hendricks come in soon? I hoped Mr. Blackbourne was paying attention, as I had no idea what to expect. I planned to mostly not talk at all unless forced.
The woman sat back in her chair, an old wood and black leather one with some duct tape patched in the corner. Her age was hard to tell; she seemed old with cracked lips and squinty eyes behind her glasses and her outdated hairstyle, but her eyes burned with a sharpness of someone younger. She lifted a folder on her desk to read whatever was inside. “You’re new to this school?” she asked before scowling at me over the folder.
“I started the beginning of the school term,” I said, my voice monotone. I didn’t want her to think I was nervous, although I wasn’t sure how well I was hiding it.
A small brass nameplate sat on her desk: Ms. Wright, School Counselor.
I wondered why I was here. Was she with Mr. Hendricks? How come I hadn’t noticed her before?
Ms. Wright dropped the file folder onto the desk, and then folded her arms over her ample breasts, leaning forward to peruse the file some more. “I didn’t approve this schedule,” she said.
I hesitated, unsure of what to say or if she was even looking for an answer. She hadn’t asked me a direct question. She called me in to go over my schedule? “Another administrator approved it,” I said nervously. “I wanted to take some specific classes.”
“And you didn’t come to me? You don’t go above my head to get classes,” she said in a hostile voice. She shook her head, reaching for a red pen on her desk and making marks across the printed paper. “This breaks all the rules of scheduling for new students. You’re not allowed more than three college prep classes in a year. And how are you in Japanese? There’s a course requirement and you don’t have it.”
My heart raced, fear filling in every corner of my brain. “I got special permission.”
“He’s not your school counselor,” she said. She looked up, narrowing her eyes at me. “You may have gotten permission from Dr. Green to take his class, but that doesn’t give you the right to take it early. How was I not notified for this long about this? Every seat you take up means other students are not able to have a spot in those special classes. We don’t have enough to go around for everyone.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. But wasn’t it too late to move people in and out of classes? “I didn’t realize, and he might not have known it, either.” It was on the tip of my tongue to negotiate and say I wouldn’t take any special classes next year. Not that I knew what was going to happen next year, but…
“We’ll have to fix this,” she said. She lifted her eyes to the computer and then started typing into it, her eyes darting to the paper as she entered the information. “Sang... Sorenson...”
My heart raced, feeling positive this shouldn’t be happening. I pushed my hand to my chest, afraid to ask, “You’re...changing my schedule?”
“I’ll have to leave you in the English class, all the other ones are full.” She looked at her screen.
“I can’t keep what I’ve got now?” I asked, unable to stop myself. It was ludicrous. I’d be forced out of the classes I shared with the guys. “Isn’t it too late to change it?”
Ms. Wright snapped her head around, her eyes fired at me. “Are you kidding me? Did you hear what I just said? You can’t have this schedule at this point.”
She was changing it! My brain flew into a panic. It was hard enough scheduling now with the boys following me to escort me to class. But how would we work it if I was in different classes? What about all the work I’d missed in two months of school? “Are you going to move someone into my spots?” I asked. Once I’d started questioning her, the questions kept coming. I tried to sound polite about it, but inside, I was panicking. “Is someone waiting to take my place?”
“That’s not the point, Ms. Sorenson,” she said. She released her mouse and turned her plump body until she was facing me head on. The edge of her mouth twisted up. She’d been waiting for a fight, and she was armed. She pulled a piece of paper from my file and held it up for me. “I might have overlooked your schedule if you bothered to show up for classes.”
My lips stumbled to say I had a doctor’s excuse for this past week. My fingers itched to gather the slip I’d gotten from Dr. Green if anyone asked. “I…was sick…”
“You couldn’t have been sick twenty-five full days of school since we started,” she said. “Not to mention all the times you skipped out on your P. E. class, and in some cases skipped out of...” She glanced down at her file. “You missed third period, attended fourth, skipped fifth and went on to the next class after lunch.”
“There are times when Mr. Hendricks called me into his office,” I said. “And then all those fire alarms. Everyone missed classes that week. And then...”
She shook her head, and then while she was frowning, her eyes lit up in amusement. She seemed to like the drama. “While you might have technically been in school, you weren’t in class, which means you were absent. As it is, the law states you can only have ten unexcused absences for the year. The only reason you haven’t been called down before now is that someone has been going into the school system and marked you as there, but when I was double checking with the individual books from teachers, I found more absent marks. I did what I could to save you from getting turned into truancy officers for this. You’re already looking at summer school.”
My head snapped back, surprised. Why would she go back in and investigate my records? “They were excused absences. And...my grades...”
“Yeah, sure, you turn in your homework and get A’s. That doesn’t matter. The law says you have to be here for so many days, and you’re not. If this went unnoticed, who knows how many additional days of school you might miss. You still have to attend summer school to make up for the lost attendance.”
My mouth fell open. Was this normal for schools? What if a child was sick a lot? I remembered in grade school getting chicken pox and I was out for a week. Teachers asked what happened, I explained, and they said it was fine. There was never a problem before when I’d been off sick.
It was hard for me to believe I’d been absent for so many days. Then again, between missed classes, and the times I was out for a week, perhaps it was adding up.
I swallowed hard, afraid to say anything more and knowing defending myself wouldn’t matter. My silence and lack of a reasonable defense seemed to fuel her irritation. What could I say? Most of why I was out had to do with the Academy, and how could I begin to defend that?
Where was Mr. Blackbourne? Was he going to stand by while this happened?
“I don’t know how you did things back in Yankee-ville,” she said, her disdain clear. “Whatever they taught you up there is not how we do things around here. You don’t get to waltz down here like you’re in charge and do whatever you want and enroll for whatever you want, going around me to do it. I’ve talked to your mother, and she sounded very surprised to hear you were skipping classes. She said she wasn’t informed. She even suggested your notes had to have been forged somehow.”
The stab at where I came from was forgotten the moment she mentioned who I could only assume was my stepmother. “You called her?” I asked, my hands in fists under my folded arms. My eyes watered and my throat thickened in emotion.
This woman didn’t know me at all, but she was lashing out at me for things she didn’t understand. She probably was following the rules, but did she have to be so mean about it?
And she was bringing my step mother into this...how?
“Of course I did,” she said quickly, rolling her eyes. “I had to tell her I was calling you into the office to discuss your truancy, and to warn her that you were going to summer school, not to mention all the in-school suspensions you’ll be required to complete for all those absences.”
I strained to keep still, to not surrender to the bullets she was firing at me. Suspension, too? Why? There was something suspicious about her speaking to my stepmother, though. I couldn’t let it go. “What did she say?” I asked.
“She was surprised and said she had no idea where you were during all of your absences,” she said. “If she wasn’t aware of you being sick, as was the excuse on a few of them, then what else could I think? Maybe you forged them. I had to mark most of those absences as unexcused.”
I stiffened, but then suddenly couldn’t stop myself. “The excuses weren’t signed by her, but by a doctor. And you managed to reach my mother who has cancer and is in the hospital undergoing treatment?” That was the part I couldn’t believe. The boys had my mother at the hospital where Dr. Green works so they could monitor her. Wouldn’t they have told me if someone from the school had called for her and what was said?
Not to mention, my excuses were often signed by Dr. Green, or Mr. Blackbourne, never my mother, so forging her name shouldn’t have come up at all.
Was she lying? She seemed pretty confident.
Ms. Wright snapped her head back and glared at me. “You will not talk back to me, young lady,” she said instead of answering the question. She leaned forward against the desk, the weight of her body making the wood in the old desk creak. “Twenty five absences is enough to give you a withdrawn from all classes you’re attending this year. You’ll have to take all of them over. Some you can make up in summer school since you’ll be there anyway.”
This wasn’t right. Where was Mr. Blackbourne? Was he listening? Was he just as shocked as I was? I had to trust if he wasn’t interrupting, there was a reason.
She sat back, looking again at my schedule on the computer screen. “You’ll keep the English class, but...” She scrolled through, from the odd angle that I was at, I couldn’t read much of what she was looking at, just the shapes of windows and the flicker of a mouse cursor moving around. “Pre-Algebra...”
“But I had algebra last year,” I said. “I had to take Geometry this year, and then the second Algebra I’ll take next year.” Should I work with her on this? I wondered. Could Mr. Blackbourne fix it after she made changes? Would she even notice as long as my attendance records showed I was in class? Maybe that’s why Mr. Blackbourne wasn’t coming in. He would simply change it later. Maybe I should just help her and move things along.
“You have to take some sort of math class, and you can’t be in college prep classes. You’re lucky you get to keep your English class.” She looked again. “Violin? Class of one? That’s ridiculous. Who approved that? I’ll need to move you anyway, as the only available Pre-Algebra is in that time slot.” She clicked some buttons. “US History instead of AP World History. We don’t have another science class open. I might have to put you into one of the health classes.”
I sat back in my chair, fighting a sigh. It wasn’t like what I said mattered, but I said it anyway. “I took Health last year,” I said quietly, more to point out I’d be repeating a class I already taken. Had she even looked at my records from last year?
She looked back at my folder. “You would probably have had to have taken it again anyway,” she said. “It’s not the same curriculum. If you would have come to me instead of other administration, I would have been able to fix it.” She returned her gaze to the screen.
Was health class different for different schools? I gave up trying to do anything. She didn’t really seem to care, and was just trying to give me as useless a class schedule as she could, as long as it fit her own agenda. I was in a daze, thinking about what she’d said about suspension.
She clicked on the mouse, looking over the screen. “Japanese is out. The class is being cancelled, so you’re lucky to get a new schedule now before the other students. You’ll get first pick of what’s left over for that time slot. Some might have to just sit in study hall.”
“What?” My eyes widened. Why would they cancel the entire class? “What do you mean the class is cancelled?”
“That Dr. Green is about to be suspended without pay himself, from what I’ve heard,” she said. She shrugged dismissively. “Maybe going to trial. Some investigation about a student.”
My mouth formed an ‘o’ while that sunk in. A student he was seen with? I pictured Dr. Green’s face as he had escorted me to the office this morning. I didn’t think he knew then what he was headed in for.
Was it even true? She seemed to have lied about talking to my step mother. She glossed over it after I questioned her, yet she seemed certain when she was saying it.
However, her reasoning for mentioning Dr. Green wasn’t clear. There wasn’t a reason for her to lie in that instance. She had the authority to change my classes without bringing it up.
If it was true, why would Dr. Green be suspended?
I had a dreadful feeling right then. I’d slept at his condo. I’d kissed him there, and then later in his car.
I couldn’t think of any other instances that would be considered questionable. Had someone spotted us together off of school grounds? Ms. Wright gave no indication that might even be the case.
Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was another student complaining about something else. I didn’t know what Dr. Green did here when he wasn’t in class. Was it the same as the other boys? Breaking up bad fights, and investigating teachers?
Poor Dr. Green, getting blindsided by this. How much trouble would he be in? What could he do? Maybe that’s why Mr. Blackbourne couldn’t walk in right now. Maybe he was dealing with Dr. Green.
What would happen when those in charge, or if Ms. Wright, found out I was the student? That’s if it was me at all. Could I be double-suspended? Was that such a thing?
I wouldn’t admit anything. I could deny it. Tell them it was all rumors.
She continued changing my schedule, and for the most part, I wasn’t paying attention, only that she removed class after class. The only two classes I kept were English and P. E., but P. E. got swapped with another time slot, so it got all mixed up. Everything else was completely new.
“What about my grades so far?” I asked. I assumed it was the same process as admitting a new student mid-school year.
“You’re looking at withdrawn on your record,” she said. “You’ll have to take all of these classes again.”
“You mean the old ones?”
“The new ones, too. Your grade will be a W for Withdrawn.”
I paused for a solid minute, letting what she was saying sink in. Another exasperated sigh escaped me. “You’re changing my classes but even the new ones won’t count at all?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“So why is my schedule changing? What does it matter if I take these or anything else?”
“Oh my god, child,” she said, pointing a thick finger at me. “Did you not hear me say that your butt has to be in a seat? It doesn’t matter which seat you sit in, as long as you’re in one, and consistently.” She rose slightly, lifting herself to hover over the desk. “But what if I have a student, top of her class, missing so many days, hm? Am I supposed to just let her continue? If anyone collected your records at the end of the year and really looked at the details, they’d say it would be impossible to be a top student if you were never here. They will look at your records, too. Don’t think they won’t. I’m doing this so they don’t put you on the express lane.”
“What’s an express lane?”
“Where they put the kids they think will drop out before graduation. They’ll put you in GED training classes, and have you take the test over and over again until you pass. You’ll be sixteen with a GED and out of school, which means no college, no real career to speak of. This isn’t a good route.”
I pressed my lips together to hold back any more questions. Clearly, there was some rules I wasn’t familiar with. Did Mr. Blackbourne know about any of this?
Why would they push a kid missing classes into a GED? Maybe for most kids, if they at least give them a GED, there’s some restitution. They did their best, but if a kid wasn’t going to stay in school anyway, maybe it did make some sense.
When I didn’t respond, she resumed her changing my schedule and typing at the keyboard. What else could I do? Ms. Wright had her mind pretty set. If I was going to
“I’ll do you a favor,” she said. “If you manage to get through this year with good grades and don’t miss another single day of school, I’ll change these Withdrawn marks for your new classes to a passing grade. But only, and I mean only, if you don’t miss another class. Not a single one.”
I pressed my lips together. Was that going to be possible if Mr. Hendricks called me out of class? Or if I really was sick?
I hoped Dr. Green was doing far better than I was.
Mr. Hendricks might have arranged this; he might have found out about me being at school, figuring out it wasn’t me in the car going around town. That would be like him to punish me, blaming me for it all.
That was until I saw the notice on her desk, in one of her many paper trays. It was on letterhead for the school. The page was upside down, but I could still read it.
It was a formal notice from someone on the school board, asking Ms. Wright to send in a report about any students whose attendance was more than ten days, excused or unexcused. The name requesting it was unfamiliar: Vera O. Lottie.
Coincidence? Was Mr. Hendricks even aware?
Ms. Wright’s annoyance might have been fear because she hadn’t been doing her job. She’d only now looked into the absences, and uncovered my large number. Most other school counselors probably would have done something about it ages ago.
That must have been the trigger. She was making it look like she had been paying attention and had noticed before Vera Lottie—whoever she was—came back and asked her why no one had talked to me or what was going on.
Ms. Wright printed out my new schedule and then stood up with it. “Come with me,” she said, putting one hand on her desk as she leaned on it to walk around it. “You’ll go to in-school suspension starting now and for the rest of the week. You’ll start your new classes when you return from break.”
I clamped my mouth shut, taking the paper from her. In-School suspension. What was suspension like? Was it anything like detention? I hadn’t even completed an actual detention, thanks to Mr. Blackbourne. Could he even fix this?
Ms. Wright moved around the desk and opened the door. “I’ll escort you there.”
No chance to escape. Ms. Wright had me walk in front of her, giving me directions as we went, so I couldn’t even send a quick message from my cell phone.
Out in the office hallway, everything was quiet. I expected to hear Dr. Green, maybe Mr. Blackbourne lurking around. Or if they were in a meeting about Dr. Green, that there would be some sort of uproar, a fight. I wished I could hear their voices or bump into one of them. Anything to let me know they were aware of what was happening.
Nothing. All I could do was what I was told. I had to hope that going along with Ms. Wright’s plan was what they needed me to do right now.
There was just the low murmur from the main office: the tapping of keyboards, someone on the phone, the hum of a printer. The woman at the front desk looked up as we passed through. Ms. Wright shared a look with her, and the secretary shook her head, seeming in sympathy for Ms. Wright, like she’d seen this before.
They had no idea…not a clue. They would never know why I was missing for so many days. The reason was usually because the Academy requested it of me.
Without me being able to tell them, I was shoved in with the bad kids.
There was no way I could defend myself. I couldn’t go into details about Mr. Hendricks. I couldn’t tell them about the Academy, how I was involved, or anything that could possibly save myself.
I was now just Sang Sorenson, a new girl who couldn’t hack it, who appeared to be very spoiled and skipped for whatever reasons they decided to dream up.
But as Ms. Wright walked me out, I couldn’t help but wonder where was Mr. Blackbourne? If he hadn’t come to interrupt, what did it mean?