The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (2 page)

Bethesda smiled impishly around her straw and
casually tucked a stray lock of her reddish tannish hair behind her ear. She had decided on her Special Project idea almost as soon as Mr. Melville had explained the assignment, and she was pretty pleased with it. It seemed like no one at lunch really got what she was talking about—and Bethesda was pretty pleased with that, too.

Pamela Preston broke the silence, addressing Bethesda as if she were telling a kindergartner not to eat paste. “Um, Bethesda? What exactly are you talking about? Ms. Finkleman is just our boring music teacher.”

“Or
is she?”
answered Bethesda dramatically, her smile widening, her foot squeaking animatedly against the leg of the cafeteria table.

“I’m sorry, Bethesda, but I totally don’t get it,” said Pamela.

“Me neither,” agreed Todd Spolin, although it sounded more like “nee never,” since he had a lot of taco in his mouth.

“It’s simple, really,” Bethesda said patiently. She took off her glasses and cleaned a speck of Snapple from her shirt as she spoke, drawing out her words to extend her time in the spotlight. “Okay. So. Mr. Melville’s assignment was for us to find a mystery in our life and solve it.”

“Wait—it was? ” said Natasha Belinsky, furiously
paging through her notebook.

“Ms. Finkleman is a
total
unknown quantity. Right? Think about all the other teachers. We know that Mr. Darlington is married and lives in that old yellow building on Hatchet Street. We know that Mrs. Howell has the cats with the dumb names. We know that Ms. Zmuda went here when she was a kid.”

“We sure do,” said Chester Hu, rolling his eyes. “She never shuts up about it.”

“We even know that Mr. Melville is married, and there are some pictures of little kids on his desk. I bet they’re grandchildren.”

“I bet they came with the picture frames,” said Suzie Schwartz.

“But what about Ms. Finkleman?” Bethesda continued. “Is there a single famous fact about Ms. Finkleman? ”

There was another long silence, but Bethesda could tell it was less of a “what is she
talking
about?” silence and more of a “huh, that’s interesting” silence. Pamela still looked skeptical, but most of the others were starting to nod.

“You know, now that you mention it,” said Shelly Schwartz thoughtfully, “she’s such a quiet lady. I wonder where she comes from.”

“Exactly,” said Bethesda.

“Yeah. And is she married?” wondered Suzie. Everyone started to get into it.

“What about kids? Does she have kids?” offered Hayley Eisenstein.

“Does she have any friends?” said Braxton Lashey.

“What about pets? ” added the new girl, Marisol Pierce, shyly.

“Mmmhfm—nn—mmfffhm? ” said Todd Spolin.

“Exactly, exactly, exactly!” Bethesda responded, waving a finger in the air.
“That
is what I’m going to find out!”

“No offense, Bethesda,” said Pamela, crossing her arms across her chest. “But I don’t think it’s the greatest idea.”

“I agree,” said Natasha Belinsky, crossing her arms in exactly the same way. “Who cares about Ms. Finkleman?”

“I do!” said Bethesda. “And so should you guys.”

Bethesda stood and addressed the other kids at the table as if she were making a big closing argument in a courtroom. “This woman is a part of our lives! She’s a part of our
community!
We take music from her
every single day.”
(Which wasn’t true, since music and art alternated, plus there were weekends and everything, but nobody interrupted. Bethesda was on a roll.) “And yet we don’t know the first thing about her! Ms. Finkleman
is a walking, talking mystery, right in our midst, and I am going to solve her! I mean solve
it!
I mean—you know what I mean! ”

And with that, Bethesda spun on her heel and exited the lunchroom.

And then, a second later, came back. “I forgot my Snapple.”

Then she spun on her heel and exited the lunchroom again.

“Well, whatever,” said Pamela Preston, when Bethesda was gone. “I am going to solve the mystery of where Jesse James is buried. I don’t know if you guys heard, but it was my great-great-great-great-uncle who shot him.”

“Yeah,” Chester said. “We heard.”

At that
very moment, Principal Isabella Van Vreeland sat at the large mahogany desk that dominated her vast, thickly carpeted office, wearing a giant foam sombrero and halfheartedly eating an egg-salad sandwich. As she chewed, she stared at her computer screen, reading and rereading an email from Principal Winston Cohn of Grover Cleveland Middle School. Finally she scowled, put down her sandwich, and shouted. “Jasper! Get in here!”

Assistant Principal Jasper Ferrars, a very thin and very tall man with close-cut black hair, rushed in with notebook and pen at the ready. “Yes! Principal! Ma’am! Hi! What is it?”

“Jasper, I—Stop looking at me like that.”

“I wasn’t! I mean, I
was
looking at you. Of course I was looking at you. But only in order to be attentive,” Jasper answered rapidly. “I wasn’t, you know,
looking
at you. How’s your sandwich? Is it okay? Good sandwich?”

“You are looking at me like I’m wearing a giant foam sombrero that says GO GROVER CLEVELAND on it.”

“Yes. I was. I
may
have been. I can’t remember. But, as you know, the fact of the matter is … you
are
wearing a giant foam sombrero that says GO GROVER CLEVELAND on it.”

Principal Van Vreeland leaped up from her desk. “And whose fault is that? ”

“Um—mine?” stammered Jasper.

“No,” snapped Principal Van Vreeland. “But good guess. It is the fault of our girls’ softball team, which was trounced by Grover Cleveland.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It is the fault of the fun little wager I made with Principal Cohn, requiring me to wear this preposterous headgear for the entire school day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In point of fact, under the terms of the wager Principal Van Vreeland was required not only to
wear
the silly hat, but to photograph herself wearing it and send the photograph
via email to Principal Cohn. And it was Principal Cohn’s one-word, all-caps reply to that photograph (“OLÉ!”) that Principal Van Vreeland had been reading over and over, causing her to lose her appetite for egg salad.

This was only the most recent in a string of similar humiliations. Every year Mary Todd Lincoln competed with Grover Cleveland in dozens of activities, from debate to chess to lacrosse, and every year they lost in all of them. But Principal Van Vreeland could not resist betting against Principal Cohn over and over, on every single competition. Such was her deeply held belief in the inherent superiority of Mary Todd Lincoln’s assorted teams, squads, and societies. As a result, over the course of her tenure at Mary Todd Lincoln, Principal Van Vreeland had been obligated on various occasions to go to school in a fake handlebar mustache, in a bright red wig, and (after a punishing six-nothing loss in the boys’ hockey semifinals) dressed as a penguin.

“Jasper,” she said now, “I have a question.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Are there any events left on the county calendar in which we compete against Grover Cleveland?” The principal paused, and then added, “Perhaps a
non
-sporting event? ”

“Well, there is the Choral Corral, ma’am.” “Ah! Yes! The Corral!”

The All-County Choral Corral was an annual musical competition. Every band and chorus teacher in the county selected one seventh-grade class to compete, and the classes could do any kind of musical presentation they wanted: marching bands, barbershop quartets, chamber quartets, anything. Principal Van Vreeland had never placed a bet on the Choral Corral before—the Corral was …

“Perfect!” shouted Principal Van Vreeland, jumping to her feet. “Who’s our music teacher again? The mousy little brown-haired lady? ”

“Ms. Finkleman, ma’am.”

“Ah! Yes!” Principal Van Vreeland was pacing with excitement, tapping her perfectly manicured forefinger against the bridge of her nose. “And what kind of astonishing performance is Ms. Finkleman preparing to wow the judges and ensure our victory over Grover Cleveland this year? ”

“Traditional English folk ballads from the sixteenth century,” Jasper said.

Principal Van Vreeland stopped and stared at him. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat that? ”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jasper replied. “Traditional English
folk ballads from the sixteenth century. They’re, um … they’re …”

Jasper was going to say that they were quite lovely, but there was something in Principal Van Vreeland’s facial expression that made him think that if he said that, she would throw her stapler at him. She had done so once before, when he suggested that her plan for a giant trophy case at the school entrance might be rejected by the county appropriations committee, since Mary Todd Lincoln never won any trophies.

Instead, Principal Van Vreeland sat down, took off her sombrero, and lowered her head down onto her desk. “You know what I should do, Jasper?” She sighed. “I should just give up. I should go live on a farm and raise sheep and goats.”

Jasper’s eyes lit up. “Ooh! Can I have your desk?”

“Get out, Jasper.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Jasper shut the door gingerly behind him as Principal Van Vreeland stared at Principal Cohn’s email, still flashing back at her from the screen.

“OLÉ!” said the email.

What the devil was she going to do?

There
is no sound in the world quite like that of a middle school emptying of its student body on a Friday afternoon. First there is the high, shrill clang of the seventh-period bell, followed immediately by a tremendous echoing
BANG!
as the classroom doors burst open like dozens of dams breaking at once. Then comes the rubbery squeak of a couple hundred pairs of sneakers all rushing over dirty linoleum, followed by and interspersing with the metallic clatter of a couple hundred lockers hurriedly being thrown open. Loudest of all is the din of the children themselves: the boys, ramming into the walls as they try to get around one another in a great ungainly race for the doors; the girls, squealing giddily and shrieking out plans to meet later at the mall, or Shira’s house, or Sheila’s house, but is it Sheila’s mom’s house or Sheila’s dad’s house? And on and on, the voices getting
louder and louder, reaching higher and higher pitches of excitement, until the last kid flies out and the big double doors shut at last. Then silence.

It was in that silence, after all her fellow students had fled, that Bethesda Fielding stood at her locker, carefully labeling a fresh blue spiral notebook.

THE SPECIAL PROJECT TO DISCOVER THE SECRET TRUTH ABOUT MS. FINKLEMAN, Bethesda wrote, in her careful all-caps handwriting, which was never as neat as she wanted it to be. And then, underneath it, SPDSTAMF. Bethesda loved to give everything titles or elaborate nicknames. Her favorite stuffed animal, for example, which sat proudly in the corner of her room in an old rocking chair, was named Teddy Who Replaced the One Whose Head Fell Off in the Washing Machine, or Teddy WROWHFOWM, or just Ted-Wo for short.

On page one of the SPDSTAMF, she wrote PART ONE: TEACHERS. Her plan was to make a thorough survey of the Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School faculty, interrogating each of Ms. Finkleman’s colleagues to find out what they knew. She paused before her locker mirror to compose herself into a serious no-nonsense detective: hair pulled back, eyes narrowed into piercing slits, lips pursed and businesslike.

Bethesda Fielding, Mystery Solver! Hmm, she thought. The pink butterfly barrette kind of ruins it.

She tossed the barrette in her locker and set off down Hallway B.

“Goodness gracious! Look who’s come to call! ”

Ms. Aarndini was a cheerful, industrious woman with a bob haircut and a collection of brightly colored cardigan sweaters. As Bethesda came in, she was busily readying her Home Economics room for the weekend, carefully tucking each Singer sewing machine under its regulation sewing-machine cozy.

“I’d offer you a snack,” piped Ms. Aarndini, “but all I’ve got is bread the sixth graders made, and, well, you don’t want bread a sixth grader made. Are you having trouble seeing, honey? ”

Bethesda relaxed her Mystery Solver squint a little and said, “Ms. Aarndini, I need information.”

“Oh? Is it about the beanbags?” (Ms. Aarndini’s seventh graders were making beanbags that week.) “Be sure to use uncooked beans, m’dear.
Uncooked.
I can’t stress that enough.”

“Noted,” said Bethesda. “But I actually need to know
about Ms. Finkleman.”

“The music teacher? What do you need to know about
her?”

“To be honest? Anything, really. Her friends, her family, her life. Anything you know.”

“Well, gee, hon,” said Ms. Aarndini, and paused at the closet with a small basket full of pincushions. “I know she’s the music teacher.”

Bethesda smiled. “All right, then.”

“Sorry not to be more help. But I’m pretty new around here. Other folks will know more.”

Bethesda called, “Thanks! ” over her shoulder, checked Ms. Aarndini off her list, and moved swiftly down the hall.

But Bethesda soon discovered that Ms. Aarndini was wrong: Other folks
didn’t
know more. In fact, they knew nothing. All that she learned, after an hour weaving her way up and down the halls, from the arts annex to the library, was that there’s a lot of ways to say “Nothing.”

“Ms. Finkleman? Nope. Not a thing,” said Ms. Beaumont.

“Zilch,” said Mr. Darlington.

“Nada,” said Mrs. Farouk.

“Zip,” said Mr. Lavasinda.

“Not a jot,” said Ms. Pinn-Darvish. “Not a tittle.”

“Never heard of her,” grumbled Mr. Vasouvian, stuffing dodgeballs into a giant sack.

“Yo no sé nada,” said Senorita Tutwiler with an apologetic shrug.

Even gentle old Mrs. Howell, who had been at the school forever and generally knew everything about everyone, was no help. She was, however, kind enough to offer Bethesda a brownie, which Bethesda nibbled as she headed for the last stop on her list. SPDSTAMF, she reflected, might be the
tiniest
bit harder than she’d anticipated.