Exit Tickets, Chapter One

Mr. J's First Day

Here's my novel’s first chapter. Martin Jordanowski (Mr. J) is a new teacher at P.S. 961 and he has little to no idea what he’s in for.

Grab a coffee – which you’d have absolutely no time for as a classroom teacher – and read on. See you on the other side…

September

C H A P T E R  O N E

Mr. J

The girl shot Martin a smile suggesting a shared secret.

“Shay just messin’ with you, Mr. J.”

The girl’s voice carried no edge. It was a matter-of-fact observation of the mundane: the sky is blue and Shay just messin’ with you.

“And you are?” Martin scanned a creased sheet with names in small type. A harried woman outside the principal’s office had shoved it into his hand a few minutes ago.

“Me? Kandra.” She relaxed that smile only a fraction.

He found the name—Kandra McKissick—but not Shay’s. Probably a nickname. And that Shay kid was messin’ with him, the boy’s unlaced white Jordans swinging as he sat on Martin’s desk, pink lips in a tight smirk below a scraggly attempt at a mustache. Martin hung on to what Kandra had just dubbed him: Mr. J. He liked it. It made him feel like a real teacher even as he got jumpy thinking she knew something that he didn’t about what might happen next.

Martin stood a few feet from his desk at the front of his classroom. The wall clock above the door hummed. It was a full hour off. The three wintergreen Tic-Tacs he’d popped into his mouth minutes earlier now left a coppery taste. The buzzing overhead fluorescent lights bathed the windowless room in a sickly yellowish green. Martin breathed in deeply, trying to ignore the desk-sitter. The opening bell had rung two minutes ago, and most of the kids were in their seats, talking with their neighbors. Two students brought notebooks and pencils, two others came with notebooks but no pencils, and the rest didn’t have either. He returned to Kandra, sitting front row center, and that smile: glossy lips framed a slight overbite beneath big dark eyes. As he turned toward Shay, Martin sensed Kandra’s eyes still on him.

“Hey, Smoke-a-J—now all ya need is a Z.”

Martin, who hadn’t said a word yet to the desk-sitter, tried staring him down. But when the boy’s smirk only spread wider across his face, Martin turned his attention back to the class.

“Okay, as you can see on the chalkboard, my name is Mr. Jordanowski, and…”

The kids erupted in laughter. Shay, who’d picked up one of Martin’s text books from his desk, deliberately turned its pages, nodding with exaggeration as he scratched his chin, miming deep thought.

“Okay, off my desk, baby lips—work on that ’stache back at your own desk.” Martin sported a full beard and mustache, so that’s where he went.

All talking stopped. Shay’s expression froze, then sagged. No way he’d seen that coming. Martin’s airless room—a bunker-like, below-street-level space with bare walls—took on the thickness of a halftime basketball locker room. As Shay slid off Martin’s desk with a shake of his head, Martin knew he’d overdone it. He thought about going contrite but he couldn’t without losing whatever control of the room he had left. He rolled his shoulders, the back of his shirt sticking to his skin.

Shay dropped into an empty chair toward the back. A bigger kid next to him put a finger along his own upper lip and got into Shay’s face, cackling at him. Shay slapped at the kid’s finger and then slumped lower in his chair. Three other boys scraped their desks closer together, as if convening a team meeting. Martin was sure the agenda involved sizing up his future, or lack thereof, as a teacher at their school. The possibility of one of them pulling a knife and rushing him came in at 50/50. He went in search of Kandra’s smile but she now sat stone-faced, her gaze fixed on a point somewhere between them, her tongue a windshield wiper, passing rhythmically across her upper front teeth.

He thought he was hearing things when the bell rang. Fifty minutes? He hadn’t connected in a meaningful way with a single student. Unless Kandra counted. And it was Kandra, at the moment the bell rang, who shot Martin a jocular, eye-rolling pity-smirk as she pranced past him to the door. Following her out, Shay wasn’t subtle about scratching his left cheek with his middle finger.

Martin took a series of deep breaths before realizing two kids still sat at the back of his classroom. It was the big kid who’d teased Shay and his even bigger buddy.

“Do you need something? I have another class coming in.”

During the period, Martin had trouble engaging either of them, to the point where he couldn’t even establish their names, both refusing to tell him. That hadn’t been covered in his summer graduate classes.

Both kids laughed as they stood, but only one walked out. The bigger kid hulked unhurriedly up to Martin’s desk. He wore below-the-knee gym shorts and an oversized polyester tank top, which seemed to be the school’s de facto dress code for its male students. They were the only two in the room now, and Martin

couldn’t help registering that they were close to the same height.

“Don’t talk to me, okay?”

Martin coughed out, “Excuse me?”

“Did I stutter? I said: Don’t. Talk. To. Me. See, I checked this whole thing out and I can still graduate in June even getting a ‘1’ in your dumb-ass class. So just go on about your teaching, whatever you gotta do,” the kid suggested. “And I’ll be sitting in the back. You don’t bother me, don’t make me do your work, I won’t bother you, make your little teacher life any harder than it is. Give me any kinda grade you want.”

For a moment Martin thought the kid would amiably extend his hand, as if shaking on a shrewd deal for both parties. But he merely sneered at Martin’s stupefied silence and sauntered out.

Martin’s head began to pound. Kandra’s smile seemed like ages ago. He’d need to check with administration, but since his Writing Enrichment cluster class wasn’t a core subject, the kid was probably right. Any student would be free to fail his class with little to no repercussions. None of these kids came close to being mindful of good first impressions, except possibly Kandra. He’d been advised by admin last week—hired on the spot: congrats, the job was his, see you the Tuesday after Labor Day—that the school was populated entirely by emotionally disturbed young teens, mostly boys. That’s what made it a District 75 school. Ms. Benitez, the assistant principal, and Mr. Cody, the principal, had repeatedly leaned into the word challenging. The school only went up to the eighth grade, but many of the kids were well into their mid-teens, given the number of left-backs during their early elementary years. Still, he’d thought the administration had been laying it on thick. The school was, after all, on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan, so how bad could it be? He secretly thought there’d be a real chance to work with his students, encourage them to write a persuasive letter, maybe even a sustained personal narrative.

Silly fucking me, Martin thought now, gurgling a groan. What could some twenty-five-year-old from Indiana, who a year ago would’ve never imagined being a teacher, do with these kids? Before he knew it, the students in his next class romped into his room.

•

“Hey, you must be the new guy.”

A short man, his hair starting to thin and go silver around the ears, stood just inside the cafeteria door, his hand extended. The fellow’s grip was vice-like. Before Martin could say anything, he added, “Good to meet you. I’m Mr. Massaro. Paul Massaro.” A final vigorous shake. “The gym teacher.”

“Hi. Mr. J.” It was the first time he called himself that. “Uhm, Martin Jordanowski.”

“Jordanowski. That’s Polish, right?”

Martin nodded.

“They told me you’d be having cafeteria duty with me every day. Lucky you.”

Periods four or five came blocked out each day on Martin’s schedule. When he told Massaro that he would be teaching writing enrichment, the gym teacher pursed his lips as if to whistle, cocking his head like a puzzled dog. “Okay. Well, welcome.”

They had to lean in close to each other; the cafeteria was deafening.

“This is quite a scene,” Massaro said with a lack of wonderment. “You’d figure, first day of school, it would be a little less like a jungle.”

Several plastic-wrapped PB&J sandwiches were launched airborne every so often, with occasional bursts of french fries, which didn’t travel as far. But most of the kids remained sitting along their lunch table benches. Other than Martin and Massaro, the only adult in the cafeteria was a massive fellow in loose-fitting canvas shorts that almost met the tops of his sneakers. He had closely shaved hair and, visible from halfway across the cafeteria, a jagged scar cutting across the top of his head. This mighty fellow sat at a table all to himself, eating his lunch as he kept an eye on the room.

“Yeah, that’s Big Henry,” said Massaro. “He’s a para. He keeps things in order down here. It’s kids out of their seats, not the noise or the flying food, that’ll get him up. And you don’t wanna be the one to make Big Henry get up.”

There were two rows of Formica tables with attached benches, seven tables to a row. Five big plastic garbage cans on wheels, two overflowing, were randomly placed around the cafeteria. Occasionally, kids strayed from their benches, but all they had to hear was Big Henry boom out “SIDDOWN, KNUCKLEHEAD!" and any kid standing dropped back into the nearest opening on the bench. It was a twisted game of musical chairs with no music, no chairs and no discernible winners.

Martin jiggled the change in his pocket. “So what are we supposed to be doing?”

“What do we do?” Massaro repeated the question with a snort. “Not a whole lot. We watch Big Henry watch the kids.”

Martin scanned the cafeteria for students from his earlier three classes as Massaro regaled him with war stories, listing on fingers requiring both hands the times Big Henry had to get up over the last two school years. Half of those times, according to this gym teacher, EMTs followed in Big Henry’s wake. Martin

found it all a little hard to believe even as Massaro pulsed with battle-high jolts in the telling.

“Anyway,” Massaro concluded, “about halfway through the lunch period we take these kids into my gym, do the basketball thing for about twenty minutes, and then your lunch duty is over. And so is mine.”

A few minutes later, at Big Henry’s signal—a piercing, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle along with a hand movement over his head mimicking an umpire’s home run sign—lunch was over. As the kids funneled through a side doorway, trash-talking on their way to the gym, Massaro paged through a marble mini-notebook, ignoring the “Oh, man” mutterings rising up from the crowd of kids.

“Okay.” Massaro looked up and pointed at two kids. “The two of you, go sit.”

“We didn’t do nothin’. It’s the first day back, B. Why can’t we—”

“You’re in my book,” Massaro intoned. Fates were obviously sealed. “And my name’s not B. It’s Mr. Massaro. I wrote your names down at the end of last year. If you want to play basketball—behave! Listen up, new kids. Let this serve as your first and biggest lesson. This is a privilege. It’s not your mandated gym time. You want to ‘Move to Improve’? Then do what you’re told the first time and you won’t wind up in my book and on the sidelines.”

Martin took it in with undisguised envy. No cooperating behavior, no basketball. If only that modus operandi could work in a writing classroom. In Martin’s first three classes, upward of 80 percent of his time and energy had been devoted to classroom management rather than actual teaching. He didn’t want to think too deeply about how many classes—how many days, how many weeks—it would take to get a decent piece of writing from even a quarter of his students.

Massaro called out a few other names in his book. The offenders slow-walked to the nearest wall and grunted, sliding into a sitting surrender. From a big canvas bag, Massaro underhand- tossed, one-by-one with great ceremony, four basketballs. Kids scrambled for control of the balls, knocking each other over. 

Massaro studied the action with a tired sneer, arms crossed over his chest. Martin positioned himself beside the gym teacher.

“Look at this.” Massaro shook his head in weary exasperation. “Jungle boogie.”

They stood underneath one of the backboards, a step out of bounds. Just before the bell rang, with Massaro holding forth on why this wasn’t going to be the Yankees’ year so he’d be concentrating instead on the Giants, an airball hit Martin in the shoulder. Several kids laughed and pointed. Acting like he hadn’t seen anything, Massaro droned on about his favorite NFL team. Martin didn’t care much about baseball or football. His sport was basketball.

Martin tossed the ball back into play. Some of these kids were really good.

•

Ten minutes later, Martin sat eating a tuna sandwich alone at his desk. Locating the teachers’ lounge presented itself as too ambitious an undertaking. He was running on fumes and still had three periods to go. He glanced randomly around his room. He’d have to get it decorated with posters, borders on the 

bulletin boards, and then start putting up student work. Classroom and hallway walls needed to be ready for the possibility of a quality review.

His cell phone rang the same moment a piece of tuna salad dislodged from his last bite. He stood up, quickly flicking the offending tuna from his tie. He thought about letting the call go to voicemail.

“Mom, hi. It’s my first day. I can’t—”

“Martin, how are you? I left you a message two days ago. I still don’t have the number at your apartment.”

“I told you calling my cell is best. I have kids coming into my classroom in a few minutes.”

“That’s so exciting! How is it going? I still can’t believe you’re a teacher.”

The piece of tuna left a tiny stain on the water-color-like children’s art decorating Martin’s tie. Happy faces of kids with diverse skin shades stared up at him. He absently turned the tie over. There was writing on the back:

DANA—AGE 12—TODAY’S CHILDREN ARE

THE FRAMEWORK OF TOMORROW

Martin had struggled in his Osceola elementary school, unable to sit still. At eleven, starting in sixth grade, it got worse. Three F’s stained his first middle-school report card and he still recalled his mother, usually kind when he needed her to be, lament, “So does my only son not have any brains in his head?”

He let go of the tie. “Yeah, me—a teacher. Pretty crazy.”

“Cassie…” His mother paused, gulping. “She would’ve been so proud of you.”

He’d knotted the Save the Children tie with pride only a few hours ago but now it had become a mocking signifier of his own naiveté. He shouldn’t have worn it, but it had been a gift from his big sister. She’d sent it to him earlier this year, unironically he had thought, after he told her he’d been accepted into the New York City Teaching Fellows program. She’d included a photo she’d taken of herself, wearing the tie over a T-shirt, with a goofy grin. He had that photo on his desk at his apartment, along with the flask she’d gotten him for his graduation from Wabash College.

“Yeah, real proud,” he muttered into the phone. He should’ve filled the flask with whiskey and taken that to school instead of the tie.

“Maybe teaching might suit you better than that publishing job,” his mother said, ever hopeful.

Martin resisted a plunge down a dark hole. Having escaped his small town by landing an editorial assistant job at a big Manhattan publishing house, he’d worked closely there with a female colleague; she’d sported an inviting smile, too. After quitting, he couldn’t flush the vision of a humiliating retreat to Osceola from his mind. It had been bad enough returning home after graduating from Wabash to find his parents immersed in some screwy battle over whether or not to get a shower door installed to replace the curtain in their bathroom, both of them agitating to get him on their side. Martin had retreated to his room, his heady college years fast receding. Whenever he emerged, his father waved five bucks in his face to get him to mow their patch of lawn, as if he were still ten, and his mother, in frowning consternation, began hinting the time had come for a haircut.

No, he wouldn’t go back to Osceola, Indiana. But the money from his grandparents was running out, and he had to pay rent. East Village rent. After nearly three months out of work, still in a wallowing funk, New York City Teaching Fellow-hood beckoned one day from the subway. His eye had drifted up from an unhappy-looking school girl with shiny hair sitting opposite him to an advertisement above her head: My students turn “can’t” into “can’t stop me now.” In the ad’s photo, an earnest teacher hovered over the shoulders of two students at their desks, all three indisputably goal-directed. Sure, why not teaching?

•

The dismissal bell rang. Martin locked his classroom door behind him; never forget that, they’d drummed into him. In six classes, different kids in each class, only Kandra stood out. He recalled what Ms. Benitez, the AP, told him toward the end of his interview: a sizable chunk of the student body resided in shelters. But he couldn’t picture Kandra in a shelter. It didn’t compute. She had it together: that ribcage-hugging, burnt- orange top with those oversized silver hoop earrings above her shoulders, still glinting in his mind.

As instructed, Martin stationed himself on the street outside the school gate. The early September afternoon sun baked the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a puff of breeze. A chemically sharp, overripe citrus odor blanketed the street even though Martin didn’t see a trash can or any garbage along the curb. Every kid wore a thickening sheen of perspiration, but the heat wasn’t siphoning their energy. The kids were to remain behind a rusted iron gate along a narrow walkway until their buses pulled up, but many of them had already spilled onto the sidewalk, squeezing past Massaro, whose shirt darkened with sweat.

“First damned day—are you fucking kidding me?!” Massaro’s face twisted in outrage.

The students still waiting up against the gate grabbed at the bars with both hands and shook it. Massaro cursed again as he body-checked a kid who accidentally brushed his shoulder. Two short yellow buses pulled up in front of the school, lights flashing, effectively blocking off the one-way eastbound traffic. A teacher holding a small drawstring backpack pulled out cell phones, handing them back to certain kids. Martin didn’t know the school’s rules on that, nothing having been said about a cell phone policy yesterday during the only school-wide meeting. Something else he’d need to look into.

Among the dozen or so kids milling around on the sidewalk between the gate and the street, two started wrestling on the ground, the “we’re just playin’” escalating. The oldest kids were allowed to leave—they’d get the subway—via the school’s second exit closer to Lexington. A few of them sauntered back up the street, laughing and taking bets on the wrestling match. Martin noticed pedestrians crossing to the north side of the street to avoid the chaos. When the wrestlers, still rolling around on the sidewalk, began throwing punches, Martin bent over to grab one of the kids. The boy’s sweat-slicked arm made it hard to grip.

“Get off me, man!” the kid screamed, as if embarrassed to be forcibly removed from his righteous battle. It didn’t seem to matter that he was the one getting the worst of it.

They recognized each other at the same moment, Shay staring back at Martin. Blood outlined his front teeth, his upper lip fattening right in front of Martin like a time-lapse of a blooming flower. Startled, Martin let Shay go. The kid Shay was fighting was the bigger kid from first period, the one who’d sat next to Shay in back, teasing him. As if confirming Martin’s memory, the kid cackled, “Ha, yeah—baby lips be buggin’, man.”

The crowd tightened around Martin, who craned his neck to make eye contact with Massaro. No luck, the gym teacher was still occupied at the gate. The ring of kids around Martin pulsed and swelled, its own organic thing.

“Shay’s cool, so why you messin’ with him,” said a short kid in a T-shirt emblazoned with the stylized WB for the Warner Bros. movie studio, with the words, If you see a cop…, above the two-letter logo. At first Martin didn’t get it, then he did.

“I’m not messing with him or anybody else,” Martin stammered. “I was just trying to break this up.”

The eyes of all the kids locked on Martin, their focus at levels he hadn’t come close to achieving in his classroom. He noticed Kandra, hands on hips, for the first time. She seemed to be waiting on him, impatient, as if he should’ve already extricated himself from his predicament.

Before Martin could do anything else, Massaro barreled in, nearly knocking two kids to the ground in his wake.

“Need some help?” The gym teacher’s eyes flared across the crowd, his hands balled into fists at his side. He seemed more eager for a brawl than any of the kids.

Then everyone’s focus reset on something behind Martin.

“Relax, Mr. Massaro. Everyone, step away. Now.” Big Henry’s deep, relaxed voice acted as a cooling spray, the kids easing back in a wave.

Principal Cody showed up a moment later in a wrinkled seersucker suit, pot-bellied, sporting a graying goatee. He was nearly a foot shorter than Big Henry.

“How did this start? I’d like to know.” Mr. Cody paused, glancing at Shay before his eyes settled on Martin. “This is unacceptable. Especially on the first day of school.”

“I was trying to break up a fight between Shay and this other kid,” Martin said. “I don’t know his name…”

Mr. Cody glanced at the kid who’d fattened Shay’s lip.

“Miguel, you should know better.”

His face a sudden burst of tics, Miguel wouldn’t take his eyes off Big Henry.

Then, to Shay, Cody said, “Son, you had a good year last year. What kind of way is this to start the new school year? You’ll be graduating next June, we all expect. So, tell me what happened.”

Martin’s mind raced at Cody’s solicitousness: What was Shay, the principal’s pet?

“Miguel was messin’ with me, making fun,” Shay murmured.

Cody turned to Miguel, eyebrows raised. Miguel immediately pointed at Martin. But before Miguel could implicate Martin in anything from that first period, Kandra sing-songed, “It ain’t nothin’, Principal Cody. Miguel and Shay, they friends, just being silly boys.”

“Well,” Cody said, “friends don’t act that way.”

“All right,” Big Henry cut in. “You all have your student MetroCards, am I right? Then you should be heading underground. That way.” Big Henry gestured toward Lexington Avenue. Most of the kids started to leave, but a few didn’t move. “Now,” Big Henry boomed. “Bye-bye. See you tomorrow. Everyone else, get on your bus.”

The sidewalk started to clear.

“Come with me to the nurse’s office to get something for that lip.” Cody, putting a fatherly hand on Shay’s shoulder, added, “We should also call your mother.”

He steered the boy back inside the school.

Kandra, the last student left on the sidewalk, stepped close to Martin. She reached out, taking his tie in both hands, appraising it. His mouth felt wadded with cotton. A desire to thank her rippled through him, but thank her for what, exactly?

Nodding to herself, Kandra finally let go of his tie. “See you tomorrow, Mr. J.”

She got on her bus, which moments later pulled away from the curb.

“Mr. Jordanowski?”

It was an older teacher he hadn’t noticed before, her hair done up in elegant Bantu knots, maybe a year or two younger than his own mother.

“I’m Shirley Holmes. It’s Martin Jordanowski, right?”

He nodded, scratching at his beard. As he ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair, her knowing smile seemed to widen. How long had this woman been observing him?

“I think we should talk one day later this week.” She turned back toward the school. “A teacher’s work is never done.”

Martin stood alone on the sidewalk, the stretch of street in front of the school now eerily quiet. He watched Kandra’s bus make a turn, out of sight. He walked to the corner and stood for a moment in front of an old Lutheran church. Constructed in the 1880s, according to a carved stone marker above his head. He’d been raised Lutheran but hadn’t been inside a church in many years. Martin placed his hand on the rough stone wall, as if seeking guidance or solace or…he wasn’t sure what. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to fend off thoughts of how he’d left her behind in Osceola, that he hadn’t even gone back for Christmas last year. The last time he could’ve been with his sister. He looked down at his tie, his hand still on the church wall. Kandra couldn’t have known it came from Cassie, that he’d landed here in New York, at Kandra’s school, because of his sister. Or could she? It was like a conjuring, a kind of bonding, Cassie’s tie in Kandra’s hands.

A middle-aged couple glanced at him with concern as they walked by. Martin took his hand from the wall. He undid the tie, balled it up, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He wandered across Lexington, searching for the nearest bar. The next morning Martin couldn’t remember how he’d made it home.

---

So, there it is. I hope your day is going a bit better than Mr. J’s.

Chapter Two, set in late-September, will be from Kandra’s POV, also over the course of a single day, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat.

Hardcover and e-book on sale November 18th.

Class dismissed…for now.