School & Learning
The Hour Before
Tam’s hands started at the gate. They were shaking. She knew because of the toggle on her coat. It’s wooden, and it slips through the loop easily. Normally. This morning: two hands, three tries. And nothing had even happened yet. Ten to nine.
In the coat room she hung her coat on her hook. Then her bag, on the same hook, in front. Then she straightened the bag. Then… nothing else needed doing. Her rain boots were where rain boots always are, under the bench. She stayed by the hooks. She didn’t go through the door.
Across the hallway the classroom door was open, and the ordinary noise came out: chairs, a bag going over, CRASH, two people arguing about an eraser. Through the doorway she could see the hallway clock. Ten to nine. Test papers out at half past nine. Tick. Tick.
It wasn’t the work. On Tuesday they’d done the practice ones and she got them right. All of them. She wasn’t even slow. She COULD do it. That wasn’t what this was. Her hands were doing it anyway, all by themselves. Forty minutes early.
Ms. Whitlow went past the doorway with a cardboard box under her arm, the flat kind paper comes in. She was walking fast, saying something about a cart to somebody down the hall. She didn’t look into the coat room. Thump. The box landed on a desk.
Lottie came in, flung her coat at the hook without hanging it properly, and announced that her brother’s tooth had come out in a clementine. Then she said it again, louder, because it was a good detail. Then she went through the door. She hadn’t looked at Tam’s hands at all.
Ten to nine. Hands still shaking. Nothing left in the coat room to do with them. Ms. Whitlow would come back by any minute. And all forty minutes still in front of Tam.
What does Tam do?
Every choice costs something. Let’s see what.
Go in now and put the chairs down
Tam went in. Nobody made a thing of it. The chairs were still stacked on the janitor’s cart, so she lifted them down, two at a time, one at each place. Clonk. Clonk. The legs were cold. Her hands kept shaking the whole time she carried them.
The box sat on Ms. Whitlow’s desk, flaps still shut. Tam could see it from everywhere in the room. People kept coming in: Lottie again, the twins, a boy who wanted a spare pencil. So she had to find one, and say a normal thing back.
The morning work was on the board: four math problems and a word to copy. Tam did them. Her writing went over the lines. One problem she did twice, because she lost the first one. She could see it was messy. She left it messy. Ten past.
By the time Ms. Whitlow opened the box, Tam had been in the room for forty minutes. Her hands were still shaking under the desk, same as at the gate. Lottie plopped down on one of Tam’s chairs and started on the clementine again. “In a CLEMENTINE!”
Stay in the coat room until the bell
Ms. Whitlow came back by, saw Tam on the bench, and left the classroom door open so she could see her. Tam stayed put, rain boots under her knees. Nobody who came in after Lottie stopped. Nobody asked her anything. Her hands kept shaking. With nobody to keep a face on for, she didn’t keep one. The clock hand moved in little jumps. Tick. Tick.
Through the wall the noise went down. Then one voice. Then nothing. Nobody said her name for forty minutes. That was the whole point of the bench. Tam built the room in her head out of the sounds: desks pulled apart, everybody already writing, her own place gone. And it got bigger. And bigger.
BRRRING. Tam went in with the bell. The desks were not pulled apart. Everybody was sitting the way they always sat. There was one chair left, at the end by the window. Not hers. Nobody made a thing of it.
Ms. Whitlow had already said the ordinary morning things at nine o’clock, while Tam was on the bench. Tam sat down at the window end. For forty minutes she’d imagined this room. It looked nothing like that. It was just their classroom, exactly the same as yesterday.
Say it to Ms. Whitlow as she comes back by
Ms. Whitlow came back by, and Tam stepped out and said it. “My hands have gone funny. It started at the gate.” That was all. It took less time than the toggle. And now Ms. Whitlow knew.
“Mm,” said Ms. Whitlow. “Do you need to sit down, or can you walk with me?” Tam could walk. There was a second box in the office, said Ms. Whitlow, and it was too wide for one person. Did Tam want the other end? So off they went. Ms. Whitlow walked backward up the hallway and didn’t say another word about it.
In the classroom Ms. Whitlow looked over at her. Not long. Not so anybody else would notice. But Tam noticed. Then again, while the papers were counted out. Both times Tam did the face of somebody who is completely fine. Her hands hadn’t stopped. But now she wasn’t the only one who knew about them.
Ms. Whitlow went down the rows putting papers face down, one on each desk. At Tam’s she turned the sheet around so the top was at the top. “Other way up, that one,” she said. To the paper, not to Tam. And moved on to the next desk.