You couldn’t say anyone in the class liked Miss Day. She had a square, mean old face, she had a lipless slit for a mouth, and she had helmet-shaped, yellow hair, which looked like hay and which everyone said was a wig. She dressed in heavy wool outfits, pink or beige, with giant, round buttons up to her chin. And on her feet she wore lace-up leather boots, the heavy, square-toed stomping kind. All of this together was enough to not like Miss Day.
Tom Bell especially didn’t like her. Tom was pudgy and smelled of sour milk. What he liked was to race around the room between the rows of desks and along the back by the sink. So Miss Day put him in a carrel in the corner and said she'd call his father. She knew he was afraid of him. We knew it, too. He’d shown us purple welts on his back during gym class. We felt sorry, but Tom was nobody’s friend. Not even his father’s.
One day, Tom raced and raced—up one aisle, down another. Susie Powell, who thought she was the teacher's pet and who we said had fleas, frowned and twirled her curls with her finger. Miss Day wrote real slowly on the blackboard. She was shivering like she was cold. She kept writing, but the letters got all sloped and stretched out. The back of her neck under her helmet hair had turned as pink as her buttons.
"Hey," I called to Jimmy, a pale under-sized kid with sunken cheeks who sat next to me. "Look at Day."
"Tom’d better cut it out," he whispered.
"Stop it, Tom," Suzie Powell said, like it was up to her.
Miss Day spun around, holding the piece of chalk up like a baton. Tom was on his way. He fell face forward, hit the floor on his knees and sprawled onto his belly. Miss Day swung her boot into his face. She was crying she was so angry.
Tom didn’t cry, like he was used to getting a boot in the face. He just got to his knees, and the blood started to spew. He grabbed his mouth, ran to the sink, turned on the water and put his face in it. I swear I saw a tooth fall off his chin.
Miss Day stood dead still like she was pinned to the blackboard. Her face white, her lips moving up and down. But nothing came out. She dropped the chalk on the floor, and it smashed into pieces. She turned and walked in a daze to the door. She stopped at the door, her back to us, like she was wondering what was out there. Susie Powell sat up straight with a worried, hurt look on her face and looked around like for a signal to tell her what to do. Miss Day pushed the door open and stepped out and was gone. We waited and waited, then the bell rang.
After that, Miss Day was almost nice for a while. Nobody's mom or dad ever came to make a fuss. If Tom told his old man, he probably just got more welts. Maybe I should’ve told mine, but they did their stuff at their work and I did my stuff at school and they never talked about work, so I figured school wasn’t anything to talk about either. I guess I was afraid of them, though I don’t know why. They never gave me welts.
Jimmy, who sat next to me, was afraid of his father, too, and he had a sad mom who never came out of her room. Everybody mostly ignored him, except when they wanted to trade their tomato and baloney or peanut butter and banana sandwiches for his Oreos and Dr. Peppers. He lived by me, so I became his friend. Then people ignored me, too.
Jimmy and I liked poking pins into our pink erasers so they could skate on the tops of our desks like water mosquitoes. The erasers had a sleek shape and weighed enough to get good distance with a little push. They bounced neatly off each other in crack-ups. It was fun when our erasers flew off the edge of the desk because they flipped and crashed like racecars.
One day, Miss Day was moving up and down the aisles, peering over our shoulders at our work. She walked slowly, stopping sometimes like she had to catch her breath. Jimmy zoomed his eraser around his desk.
"Hey, Jimmy," I called, but he didn’t hear me.
The eraser dove off the edge of his desk. He bent over and strained hard to reach it. He grunted and let his desk tip onto two legs.
Miss Day’s knee caught his face hard. The way she swung into him looked like it was just part of her way of walking down the aisle. Jimmy screamed and started crying, holding his face.
Miss Day said, "Stop it Jimmy, you’re fine. Serves you right for horsing around." She grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the sink. She didn’t go white this time, and she didn't leave. It was like she’d learned she should just clean up the mess she made and carry on.
Once Miss Day asked me to get art supplies out of the cupboard. Her voice was raspy soft, her face blotchy. She said, scissors and glue, construction paper, string. I can’t remember the rest. I couldn’t hold it all, and I dropped everything onto the floor in a heap. I got to my knees, and Miss Day grabbed me by my hair, twisting and tightening, and then pulled me up to standing.
I yelled how much it hurt. She yelled back, telling me to give everybody the stuff. She sounded mad, frustrated and hurt, all at the same time. It was like I had done something to hurt her feelings and that made her angry. Then she yelled at Susie Powell to help because I couldn't do it myself. I saw a ‘why-me’ look of surprise on Susie's face. I think she was surprised that she was not the teacher's pet, and never had been.
I tried hard to keep from crying, but I let myself hate Miss Day and wished with all my might that I could get even.
On a rainy day, Jimmy and I, Susie Powell and another kid were in the covered area playing four-square. Miss Day stood at the edge of the area, half in the rain. She held a beige umbrella straight and stiff and looked out at the woods beyond the monkey bars. Her eyes were squinty, her mouth tight. When she was grounds monitor, almost anything could happen and she’d let it go, like she wasn’t even there, or we weren’t. Kids didn’t believe the stories about her, even the kids who had her before. They said she was crabby, but she never kicked anyone. On the playground she wasn’t even crabby.
We bounced the ball around for a few minutes, and then Tom came by. He watched, and I waited for him to grab the ball and run away like he always did. Then he called time like he was part of the game. "Beat it, Susie," he said and came up to me, whispering in my ear: we had a perfect chance, he said, just keep it going and when he signaled, throw the ball as hard as you can at Miss Day’s head, then we’ll see if her hair’ll fly off. That’s what he said.
Tom found a place on top of the monkey bars in plain view of Miss Day. I didn't wait long. He stuck up his thumb; we kept bouncing; the recess bell rang. Jimmy bounced the ball to me, I bounced it to Susie, who bounced it back, and then I let it fly. The wind picked it up. It spun wide, a long slow curve. I was sure it’d miss or just nick the umbrella. But everything went right. Smacked the back of her neck dead on. She fell forward, the umbrella flipped out of her hand, and her helmet of hair slipped up, across, over her eyes, and flopped upside-down onto the wet pavement.
Except for a few thin brown hairs on top and by her ears, she was totally bald. I watched her bend, reach to pick up her hair, then drop to her knees. She lifted it slowly in both shaking hands and stared at it like it was a small dead animal, a boy’s trophy kill, which in a way it was. She closed her eyes. Her slit of a mouth seemed to go away.
Then he pulled herself up, clutching the wig close to her chest. She was bright red, trembling. She whipped herself around, glaring. "Who did it?" she said with effort, like she was in her own dream crying for help and her voice didn’t work.
I looked around, scared, wanting to see what the kids would do. Some stared stupidly and some laughed. Tom laughed loudest, braying and pointing. Susie Powell giggled, but shut up fast. Miss Day's crying eyes weren't looking at anyone or anything now. Still, she might see me, I thought, and find the answer to her question. I stepped back, looking away. But I didn’t feel bad inside, I felt good. In the line to get back in school, when some kids came and punched me on the arm and said, "Way to go," I felt even better. I was a hero.
For a while, kids stopped ignoring me. Miss Day sat at her desk a lot just looking at stuff -- papers, the sink, the window, the door. Nobody ever came to ask who did it or to tell us how bad we were. Maybe Miss Day didn’t tell anyone. A month after, she left the school. Some said she was fired. Actually, she was sick. She died in the summer before the next school year. It felt weird and bad and it made me angry, like I should've known. It was cancer, they said. But I knew it wasn’t only that.
Alan Girling lives in British Columbia, Canada where he writes whatever seems to need writing: fiction, poetry, memoir, essay, whatnot. When he's not doing that, he's either making a living teaching academic English or spending time with his family.