Ned Drucker, in brown jacket and pale blue tie, a tatty brief clutched in one hand, hustled up the three granite slab steps that addressed the double-doored entrance to Easton Public High School. Embossing the lintel above his head was a frieze, an elaborately carved American bald eagle, also of granite, which spread its green-gray wings and pressed one vast, watchful stone eye toward the grassy front quad with its towering single maple tree. Beneath the maple stood hundreds of students chatting, or sneaking cigarettes, as they waited for the toll of the morning bell, at which point they would migrate like prisoners through the bottleneck beneath the eagle’s eternal wings and into the school. “You!” said a voice. The gray-haired secretary in the front administrative office waved at Ned. He turned hard left, forced by this action to pass a large beveled mirror that hung on the wall beside a corkboard smothered in paper bulletins. Some of the bulletins were haphazardly taped to the glass. He didn’t look into the mirror.

"What happened to your hand?” said the secretary with disinterest.

“Accident.” Ned didn’t address his loosely bandaged thumb, which hurt very much and was covered in nappy tape, dark red at the tip. But when he scratched at his tangled beard, the secretary got a healthy glance at the monstrosity.

“Chase wants a meeting.”

“When?”

“Later is better. After lunch?”

“Ethan Pederson?”

“No, no,” she said, shuffling papers. “The other one...”

She waved her hand about in the air, her mind already on other things.

Ned nodded, for he understood her meaning. He wandered off toward his office.

* * * 

Ethan Pederson, a junior student, had been expelled the previous day. The charge was roughhousing on school grounds. It was Ned who’d received the call later that night—late last night—on his home landline no less—from Mary Pederson, the boy’s mother. She was hysterical. But Ned hadn’t yet given much thought to the incident. And why should he? The life of a senior-class humanities teacher who’d recently been given part-time administrative duties at a big and sprawling school, he thought walking the empty corridors, is highly preoccupied. He’d heard of the case of the Pederson kid, of course, but as things go it was ordinary hijinks—schoolyard stuff, horseplay, a matter of hormones. Not to mention that Ned had plenty of other things to worry about. But schoolteachers gossip far more about student intrigues and affairs than any parent can imagine, and that afternoon in the teacher’s lounge Ned had been called upon by a gang of colleagues to give his view of the Pederson matter. The reason for the inquisition, Ned had surmised, was that the other boy with whom Ethan had been fighting had once been in Ned’s class. Ned knew that boy rather well, in fact.

His name was Arnold White, a tall boisterous tough kid in a white t-shirt who’d read surprisingly well into his Chekhov, earning a solid B in Ned’s course and even a bit of Ned’s respect. A rough young guy, and indeed something of a bully, but handsome, and getting serious, finally, about his life now that he was so close to graduating after being held back a year. His drop-out girlfriend was pregnant, of course. His father worked as a construction hand. He lived in one of Easton’s two small backwater trailer parks, and this was a large part of the reason why Ned had so empathized with the underdog senior. Like most teachers, Ned did have his preferences: he tended toward the hearty, the confident, the beat-down-but-optimistic, the swaggering crotch-punching troublemaker lowbrow types. He couldn’t help this. The bullies, they made him feel young, alive. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was fairly sure the other teachers, after a glass of wine or three, would concur. Quiet, troubled, nice boys and girls were a dime a dozen, and if you got too involved with them all you learned was that they were agonizingly in need of attention in every aspect of their squalid little lives.

When Ned had intoned in the teacher’s lounge the day before, “I don’t have an opinion on the Pederson matter,” the others had urged him to come clean, to speak up. They’d insisted that, if he felt so indifferently about it, he simply couldn’t have all the facts at his disposal—not as they knew them anyway. “Possibly not,” Ned had added. “But why should I care to find them out?” Ethan was an intelligent kid, bespectacled, unwashed, puny, bony and covered in acne, in love with natural history and dinosaurs, and he’d never once caused any teacher or student a single bit of trouble in his time at Easton High. Yet he’d been expelled for five days by the zero-tolerance man, Principal Chase, chucked out just the same as his aggressor, Arnold White. This was the new policy at work.

But as the teachers beseeched Ned, what resulted only was this realization: with his new title as part-time assistant to the vice principal—which came with a slight pay raise, a small office, and an etched name plate—his presence in the teacher’s lounge now smacked of implicit power imbalance, like a duke on caparison horseback appearing at a child’s birthday party. So he’d left the lounge that day, vowing to eat alone from then on, in his new office, which happened to be located in the damp, disused, pre-war eastern wing of the school beneath the old Voc-Tech. There, at least, he could enjoy some privacy.

Ned had come home that day uncommonly tired. Later in the evening, when he’d picked up the phone, he found himself telling the lively Mary Pederson that there was little he could do for her, that he hadn’t been there to witness the incident, and that anyway he wasn’t vested with any powers to reverse disciplinary action...

“No, Teacher,” she said. “You don’t get my meaning. I’m wondering if there is more we can do.”

“What can you mean by that?” he asked.

“What happened was perverse. Arnie White is twice my son’s size—he has arms like tree trunks—and my Ethan the one getting expelled! But, okay, I accept that. I want my boy to get his licks, you see...”

Ned had to be careful. Parents were as erratic and machinating and sensitive as students, often more so. And he wouldn’t simply admit that Ethan’s expulsion for taking a beating from Arnold White was grossly unjust. Which it was. But Ethan wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last student, to be subjected to Principal Chase’s medieval rulings.

“The regulations are clear in this respect,” he said. “For any incident of fighting on school grounds, both parties are expelled. It’s the way it is.”

“I hear you. My Ethan,” she continued, “he’s not generally a courageous kind of a person, you know, but very, very practical. He sits around the house, he’s very—” She was reaching for the word.

“Somewhat passive.”

“Yes. Passive. Bookish. His father was embarrassed of him. But now he’s blown up, got his blood up here, you see, and he won’t go outside because he’s afraid Arnie White’ll be waiting for him with a brickbat. He’s abandoned his computer and he crawls around the house. It’s the most energetic I’ve seen him since before his father left.”

“I don’t think I’m the man to speak to about this, Mrs. Pederson. I have no power here.” He picked a spec of lint from the lapel of his pajama shirt. “And I’m not sure what you’re asking me to do.”

“I want my boy to get into a decent college, have a decent life, sure,” she said. “But he’s a goody-goody. Never been disciplined in his life. But tough discipline helps to make a man less—what do you say?—less passive.” She was breathing into the phone. “It’s shaken him up, livened him up. Made him take a look at his life.” A pause. “The two of those boys should finish this thing between them. Do you get me? They should finish it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get you, Mrs. Pederson. You may come in and speak with Principal Chase about the matter any time.”

He hung up.

* * * 

The next afternoon, after morning classes, while taking his lunch alone in his office, Ned drew up what information he had on Ethan Pederson on his computer. He hadn’t slept well.

As it turned out, he was a recent transfer student, so recent that there was no photograph of him on his intranet profile, just a full name and a smattering of details. According to his birthdate, he’d skipped a grade. Or possibly two. Also ... Easton High was his third school in as many years. That was interesting to note. And also, he and his mother apparently lived in an apartment on Tanning Lane, which was a middle-class address for their town, if he recalled correctly, so Ned knew they were dealing with a kid who probably didn’t go hungry. Troubled, maybe, but not hungry, as some undeniably are, unfortunately.

None of which mattered anyway. Ned had nothing to do with the issue.

He gathered his brief and his books and walked around outside in back of school grounds, where there was a rear emergency door to the main building. He entered and began making his way down the now-crowded halls, toward the stairwell to his classroom, to the sound of hand slaps and shouts and fast-moving babble from the streaming jumble of pimply teenagers. In the overflowing school, helpless little Ethan had probably felt as insignificant as a single goldfish at sea, or one of his prehistoric insects alone in some primordial garden. Or as helpless, often, as Ned himself had felt. Ned could often enjoy being a teacher, yet he actually didn’t like being seen at all; that was the thing he struggled with most, the seenness, the clean unscathed little furtive quiet teen eyes tracking his movements down the corridor. He wanted above all to be the invisible official, a stealthy agent of silent, effective service and justice to the higher good. Unnoticed. An unacknowledged hero to his kids. He adored those kids, in his own way, in this way. This was why he took up the offer to assist the vice principal.

The job of looking after children did not get harder with these new responsibilities, there was just more of it to do.

He’d begun to think lately of the early days, in his mid-twenties—back when teaching had seemed so very simple—when there were fewer students, fewer rules, and when the carefully manicured spread of the massive rear athletic field, which now glowed luminous green in the shining New England sun, had been a useless vestigial forest with a mud floor where students had used to sneak off to kiss among the birch and flowering maples. Time had changed all these things. And everything had changed everything else. After Principal Chase came on board three years ago, the old school was repainted, the grounds rolled flat in a hurry, everything filled in, made orderly, efficient, scrubbed clean, with no waste permitted, and the students now were lither, smarter, taller, stronger—like quarter-horses—more beautiful and less tolerant of incompetence as they sprinted about like gazelles from class to club meet-up to sporting event and back home again.

It was exasperating, actually. Innocence was gone. There were fewer and fewer of the rough-and-tumble types that Ned had so enjoyed.

The tides eventually wash away continents, Ned’s father had used to recite. His father had been a poet, a minor poet. Time transforms all, etc. The little river town of Easton had been transformed, too—of course it had. As had the nation itself, perhaps. Across this nation, the Principal Chases of our world had been hatched and were moving into every corner to busily reorder all domestic territories for efficiency, productivity, decrying unnecessary costs at every turn, and spilling out in crowds over the new ruins of late-stage empire, consolidating the wreckage. But if Ned disliked politico-social hypothesizing of this type, well, he also disliked the Principal Chases.

The bell blared for late afternoon period. And the anonymous, quickly depopulated halls fell quiet. Doors clapped shut, one by one, down the long corridor. Ned turned into his classroom, taking in his own door creakily behind him.

* * * 

Later, during a free period, Ned Drucker went down to Chase’s office, as requested.

“I don’t have much use for you,” Principal Chase was saying. “You’re very little use to me, or to Vice Principal Eustus. Awarding you the office and the additional duties was a cost-cutting measure I’d dreamed up, but I tell you we’re not sure if it’s working out at this point. What have you done with your new role, anyway? Anything?”

“I’ve done what I can.”

“Hm.”

“But teaching takes up a lot of my time.”

“I knew that was a risk,” said Chase, standing up to approach the back window, where he uselessly adjusted the blinds and then sat again with his great weight behind his desk. “But I wagered you could handle it. I suppose I was wrong.” He sucked at his teeth. “Was I wrong?”

“I’ve barely begun,” said Ned. “I need more time.”

Chase nodded without expression. “I tell you, I feel trapped. It’s a nightmare. We’re thinking of eliminating your role completely. We’d have to hire somebody new, of course. A stuffed-shirt specialist. The student population is exploding, and we need someone who can keep their eye on the ball—on many balls, all going at once. And we don’t have the budget to just hire people whenever we feel like it. I care about these kids, and I want to do right by them. Do you hear me? This is about them.” He made a brief fist, then brought his hands together to form a clump of sweating, interlaced fingers. “They’re the future of this country.”

“I’ll try harder,” said Ned. “I’ll do the best I can.”

Chase didn’t respond to this. “Before you go. We have an issue,” he said, “regarding one of your students. Arnold White.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He’s a troubled kid, but not dumb. He’s been dealt a difficult hand. I understand why he was expelled.”

“Obviously,” said Chase, wiping sweat from his temple. “But he got a B in your class. Isn’t that right? Speak up.”

“Yes, a strong B.”

“I’m very concerned about graduation rates here at Easton High as well as the—I shall say—the composition of our student body? And Arnold White has been held back one year already. Isn’t that so. But he passed your class, and he passed shop and gym with flying colors, of course. Turns out he’s not so bad in Spanish either. But he failed science. He failed his math course, again. He’s failed or nearly failed many things, despite great effort. Now. Arnold White is on the verge of graduating from Easton High, just right on the very verge of it. But the boy needs a bump.” Chase lowered his nose at Ned, placing both palms flat on the desktop. “But only a small bump, of course. Just enough to obtain a D average.”

“What do you propose?”

“All he needs is an A-plus in your class, and he’ll have his D average, and the boy can graduate. That’s all that’s needed. And not an A, mind you—an A-plus. I’ve done the math on this one.”

Ned sat, quietly considering. He didn’t disagree with Chase’s reasoning, necessarily, he simply hated Chase, the man himself, with such fire that any indictable wrong, any provable sign of corruption or rule-breaking that came to light, gave Ned pleasurable sparks behind his eyes, hope that one day Ned could use this information to crush Chase, crush him and bury him, so as to register at least one measly victory for the ordinary aboveboard people all around Chase, whom the skilled bureaucrat drew in close as he consolidated his puny grip on power.

“What do you say?” said Chase. “Don’t be a brute! The boy needs our help. Be kind!”

Ned waited. He imagined suffocating Chase in one of the boys’ room toilet bowls, as the students cheered him on.

He shifted in his seat. Chase said something more. Ned stood up. They shook hands. Ned had one last class to teach, which he did in a mild haze.

* * *

At the end of the day, Ned sat in his dark little office, peeling back the tape from his bloody bandage. Revealed beneath it was a ghastly thumb, all bruised blue around the joint and mangled and sorrowful looking, the fingernail half severed and all dark red with a blister, and a long gash down the center of the flesh, a bloody ravine that led from thumb tip halfway down to soft edge of the palm. Ned didn’t have the spiritual connection to his own body in the way he supposed others did. The injury—which he’d sustained when the bathroom mirror was suddenly smashed to pieces as he stood in a towel preparing for the day—hurt like Hell. If there had been some way of quickly, painlessly removing the digit, Ned would have done it. Blood made him ill, and the other noxious stenches of the human body, methane, sulfur, lipid, bacteria, urine, cum, sweat, acids, the roiling enzymes and mucus and hormones living in saliva, these literally made him squirm and spit and shut up his eyes.

As he finished applying a fresh bandage, Ned detected a gentle rumble at the door, as if someone were in the hall waiting for him, but before he could respond, a small, athletic figure burst into his office, leaping into his midst. Stinking of chemical perfume and faintly of pot smoke, in a blond bob and a collared dress coat, a woman marched forward and leaned over his desk. It was Mary Pederson.

“You and Principal Chase,” she shouted, “you two thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t play stupid. You helped him! Arnold White!” She was enraged, hands up in the air, shined crimson nails flared. Ned felt instantaneously caught out, terrified, watching in his mind as his entire career as a teacher retreated helplessly behind him, like an object seen through the window of a speeding train.

“Calm down. That was an entirely unrelated issue. An issue of graduation rates.”

“Unrelated how!”

Ned stood up and closed the door behind her, then walked back around and beseeched her to take a seat, which she did.

“What, you let the criminal go and you jail the victim—is that how things work around here now?”

She began to weep. 

Confusion came over Ned; he knew Mary Pederson couldn’t have known about Arnold White’s grades and Chase’s request. He stared at her with his head titled to one side, considering this.

“Tell me what you’re talking about.”

“I came in here today to talk to someone about my son. And who do I see chatting up a girl, in the hall after class—Arnold White! So I ask him, aren’t you expelled? And he gets all meek, he must have thought I was an administrator at the school. So he pulls out an official-looking sheet and hands it to me. So, I read it. It says his expulsion was revoked, scrubbed from his record!”

“That can’t be.”

“It’s true!” she said. “ ‘Clemency allowing attendance to all classes until the end of the year’!”

“I didn’t know.” Ned’s heart was desperately trying to escape his body, his mouth dry and bitter and burning. When he pressed his hand to his forehead, moving to massage his temple with a thumb, he screeched out in pain. He thought he might faint.

“Jesus. All the teachers here look like shit, but you look by far the worst.”

“I’m sorry. I’m having a difficult week.”

“Are you!” she said. “What about my son? You all think you can just let the boy who beat the piss out of him go, and I won’t find out about it?”

“I didn’t think that at all. I had no idea he was allowed to attend classes.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it? Don’t be a monster to my son.”

“I don’t have anything to do with your son,” he said. “I don’t know the boy.”

“How not!” she said. “You’re an administrator here, aren’t you?”

“I’m something like that, Mrs. Pederson. But I mainly teach. And I don’t control what the principal chooses to do. If you’d like to handle this, I suggest talking to him.”

“I went to his office. He’s gone for the day. Fat ass.”

“I thought you were happy Ethan was being disciplined.”

“But it’s unfair. Are you crazy? What do you have against my son?”

She positively gleamed with righteous anger. Ned could see who was on the right side of this thing now—and it wasn’t him or Chase or even the two boys. Clearly, in an effort to help Arnold White graduate, Chase had offered him a rare forgiveness regarding his short-term expulsion, probably with the requirement that he have no more disciplinary issues. But what was perfectly reasonable from Chase’s perspective, Ned could see, was an undeniable, unconscionable crime to Mrs. Pederson. And rightly so.

“I can help you. I will.”

“Oh, will you now?”

“I can talk to Principal Chase. We can do it together.”

Mary Pederson shot to a stand, her red face bunched up as if she might cry. She drew back, in pure disgust:

“I don’t want your help—you puny little kitten of a man!”

And she turned and bolted out of the office, the thumps of her sneakers echoing down the hall, terminating in the wheeze of a far double door, which swung open and slammed shut behind her.

* * * 

Driving home, Ned decided the thing to do, to save his soul, to be able to sleep again, was to pay a visit to Ethan Pederson. He could explain; they could chat. He remembered the address. He thought he even knew the building. Easton was not a very big town.

In his mind, he was composing a blistering resignation email he would send to Principal Chase that night, filled with subtle indictments and cunning sub-textual devastations. For sure, he was going to quit his role as assistant to Vice Principal Eustus. But, inevitably, the option to retire early from teaching altogether was also there. Staying on as a teacher, he could retire in ten years. But ten more years of teaching, a job he once loved, now seemed like a senseless waste of time and life, a grueling eternity culminating in suffocating unfulfillment and humiliation. The whole practice of education was like some berserk gizmo now, a wasteful scheme feigning at improving the citizenry. Failed, failed—and Ned had only added to the failure.

Passing the center of town, Ned was pleased by the day’s remaining brightness, the late sun lighting up the big statue that stood across from the courthouse. The figure was a tall stone rendering of Reverend William Wheelwright, founder of the town of Easton some 260 years ago, holding aloft an open Bible and, in his other arm, a baby child. Though this statue had been funded and put up decades before, only recently had the town begun regularly to bathe it—it stood at the center of the main traffic circle and often became grimy with exhaust fumes and graffiti—and plant colorful flowers around its base. The streets, too, had been repaved. The candy shop and the café were bustling with local business and, down Water Street, Ned saw that they were busy repainting the front of the old shoe seller, as well as the next-door wine shop, a pleasing shade of deep maroon.

Ned turned right, heading away from his neighborhood, toward the outskirts. The long Route 101 was crowded on either side by thick forest, old farm country, and Ned passed a small lake surrounded by split-rail fences. There was even a white farmhouse out there, hay bails. He never had time to enjoy these things, though day-tripping tourists often came through in summer. Up ahead, after a few minutes of pleasant driving, was Tanning Lane.

It was not as he’d remembered it. What in his mind had been a street lined with fetching middle-class homes and friendly communities had deteriorated to a degree that he could hardly fathom. And he realized: the old trailer parks were near here somewhere too. If Easton had a wrong-side-of-the-tracks, this area was it.

Tanning Lane went on for a while, getting worse and worse, the houses more slumped and dilapidated, as the sky’s light waned, and the energy seemed to go out of the day. Here the apartment building, which looked like nothing more than an ordinary unpainted dumpy little house, appeared. Behind it was more forest, and on the other side of that forest, less than a half-mile away, would be the two trailer parks. So, it was clear why Ethan Pederson hadn’t wanted to leave his house—Arnold White only had to make a pleasant ten minute walk through the woods to stand terrifyingly at the boy’s door.

Ned parked in the street. He got out of his car.

Just one memory came back to Ned Drucker then, suddenly. At a parent-teacher meeting, three years back, Ned had found himself provoked beyond all rationality at the temper of the conference and, standing up among a roomful of his peers, he’d broken his silence to passionately, madly defend the incoming administration to a crowd of incredulous parents, shouting about the future of their children, their safety and needs: physical order, moral order, spiritual order, all of it. The budgetary issues were very important, he insisted, and maybe a new tack was required to get things in line. Yes, maybe Principal Chase was our man. The words flew out; he could hardly recall his own meaning by them. Listening to this, the other attendees seemed primarily surprised to see Ned there at all. One woman leaned to the side, and Ned could see her lips asking her frumpy husband: Who is this man? Once done with his speech, Ned had plopped down in his collapsible chair in a hot sweat, as if stupefied. He marveled then at his own inexplicable behavior. The words seemed to have emerged miraculously from his mouth, sailing out of him in the absence of any compelling force, like an endless harlequin kerchief called forth from a stage magician’s empty fist.

As Ned made his way to the house, Mary Pederson emerged on the porch. Alone, she stood on the jamb, leaning back, one arm extending into the still-open door. Ned saw that she was urging forward her son, Ethan, who at last appeared there, the eternal long-suffering victim in all this, leaning one small shoulder hard into the wall, almost embracing the wood, seemingly attempting to vanish into it. The boy was diminutive, stunted almost, malnourished, looking younger than his fifteen years. He had a black eye and wore an arm brace, and with his split lip it looked like Arnold White had bruised the kid up pretty good generally. Short, wearing thick new glasses, nerdy, shy, yes, and funny looking with red hair, and appearing like a small and scared or confused animal—but no more than other students Ned had known in his years of teaching. In fact, Ethan looked altogether healthy. He seemed all right, after all that had happened to him.

With relief, Ned advanced toward the porch. The house’s unlit windows loomed in darkness, seeming empty inside, and getting closer to the well-kept shrubs one could see within them nests and tent bugs and spiders and large areas of what looked to be small-scale blight browning the leaves. As Ned leapt up the steps, he felt an impulse to genuflect, to fall to praise of Mary Pederson as a strange figure of calm dignity, a semi-deity more competent, kind, strong, more restrained and gentle than he.

“Say hello to the man, Ethan.”

Ned reached out to shake the boy’s limp hand. But shivering Ethan Pederson, with his suspicious nervous one-eyed glare, rapidly withdrew with his little hand back into the house before Ned could touch him, asking his mother in a retreating whisper just who the odd man was. Who was he, who was that man? And as the boy disappeared, Mary Pederson, leaving off to pursue her child with her singular and unswerving devotion, disappeared too, dropping shut the heavy front door, which fell closed in Ned Drucker’s expectant face like a judgment.