The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

It was Brody Tollefson. He had stood up, with his script in one hand, and he was not tall, and his face was the color of a brick. I thought, Please, not now, not him, let him sit down, and I did not know which of them I was praying for.

“Take your time, Nate,” Brody said.

That was all of it. He did not look at the teacher or at us. He said it to the back of Nate’s jacket, at ordinary volume, in a voice that shook only on the first word. Then he sat down again and studied his script as if there might be a quiz.

Nobody laughed. I listened for it, the way you listen for a stair creak at night, and it did not come. Down the bench, Ryker Neddermeyer took his hands out of his pockets.

Mrs. Lindgren looked at Brody for what felt like a long while. She opened her mouth. Then she closed it, and she set her pen down on the clipboard, and she laid her hand flat on the table, and she did not look at the clock again.

Mr. Hartman, at the piano, had not moved. He held very still, the way a man does when he is trying not to be in a room.

Nate stood on the tape. His shoulders came down an inch. I do not know what he heard in it. Maybe only that someone else was waiting too.

“Mister,” he said, and the M came loose like a nail out of a board. “Mr. Scrooge. The Founder of the Feast.”

He did not stop there. He went on, the whole speech, Bob Cratchit’s plain stubborn goodness. He stuck on “Founder” for a long time. The F sat in his mouth and he pushed against it, his chin jerking, and nobody in that gym so much as shifted a foot. Then it came, and he finished the sentence, and the speech, and stood on the tape with his chest going up and down.

Nobody clapped. It was not that kind of room. It was an audition on a Friday afternoon, with a bench of fifth graders and eight parents on folding chairs, and what had happened was smaller than clapping.

“Thank you, Nate,” Mrs. Lindgren said. Her voice came out thin and almost level. “Brody. You’re next.”

Brody read Scrooge. He read it badly and too loud, and he got a laugh, an ordinary one, in the right place, and he looked so surprised that he lost his line and had to find it again. Nate sat down at the end of the bench and watched him with his hands under his legs. They were not shaking.

I did not go to Mrs. Lindgren that afternoon. I had thought about what I would say if I got her alone, and some of it was ugly, and I found I had no use for it now. I had been a teacher’s aide for six years myself. I knew a little of what the clock on that wall does to a person.

In the lot, beside the flagpole, I stood at the truck door and watched the nine children come out to the late bus in twos and threes, with Nate and Brody at the very end of the line, not saying much. Brody said something. Nate shrugged. Brody said something else, and Nate almost smiled.