Bottle Game

Bottle Game

Cadence was mortified one day to find a substitute teacher in her government class. The government class was full of rowdy boys, including one in particular, DaVon, who scared her. He didn’t scare her the way some boys scared her – with physical intimidation that implied she’d be in trouble if they were ever alone together – no, he was a personal friend, or rather, his mom knew her mom, so they considered each other friends outside of class. The reason she was afraid of him was that he knew a secret that she didn’t want him to tell. And he was dangerous because he’d say or do almost anything.

DaVon was part of a group of pretty wild boys, who got much wilder when there was a sub. In this case the sub was a woman, a young woman of about 25 who thought she might want to be a teacher someday. She was trying to explain to the class that the nation was in a constitutional crisis, and the very balance of powers was endangered and being tested as never before. But the class was apparently not interested. After all, she was a sub; why should they listen to her? In the back DaVon and another boy, Antonio, were playing the bottle game, but they were being very careless about it. They kept hitting each other with the bottle. Two other boys also started the bottle game.

In the bottle game you take a half-full bottle of water and flip it, and try to land it on its base. The more you flip it, the better. While you flip it, the water that’s in it sloshes around and makes a terrible noise. Teachers don’t take the water away from the students because they think water is good for them and even encourage them to drink it. But this has nothing to do with drinking. It’s something to do with your hands; it’s a kind of dance; it’s a way to get attention. If kids throw carelessly, they hit other people with the water, in a casual, semi-aggressive kind of way. If the teacher lets them, at the beginning of class, they get water for everyone. Then lots of people can play the bottle game.

Cadence felt ill about the whole game, about the class, about everything. These were kids she’d known for years. Now, the games didn’t seem so fun. She alternated between putting her head in her arms and resting, and trying to listen to the teacher, or perhaps open the book. Actually, like most people, she had mastered the art of noticing things very carefully, even when she appeared to be sick, or unable to pay attention, or unable to read. She was still watching her friends. But she wasn’t able to concentrate very well. The book wasn’t helping. She couldn’t concentrate on balance of powers.

There was an assignment they were all supposed to read out of the Government textbook. About half the kids in the class actually did the assignments, including Cadence, but almost nobody did them in the class time when the sub was supposed to be overseeing them. They were young and full of raging hormones, and the girls really wanted to shake their full heads of hair around and look at the boys with dreamy eyes, while the boys played the bottle game or showed off their rakish enthusiasm for almost anything but studying. Some boys threw little spitballs, often at the girls. Others played the bottle game so erratically that it was hard to tell when they’d do it again. One boy, Xavier, couldn’t sit still, and he often got up to argue with nearby boys or walk around. He would go sharpen his pencil, for example, even though he had no intention of writing anything. The few kids that studied during the class hour, one of whom was Robert Brown, got angry about the general anarchy and the sub’s inability to control it. But the kids were many; she was just one, and as they got rowdier, it got harder for her to assert any control at all. Cadence kept a wary eye on everyone even as he had her head down, and tried to clear her mind of everything except making it to the end of class. She especially kept her eye on DaVon, though, because he could do anything. He was kind of a leader, a leader of the wilder boys, but he seemed somehow different today, like he was going through the motions. His passion, his temper, his edge, were a little blunted.

The sub had brought a whistle to this class this time, because she had had trouble controlling her class before. So at one point, she brought out this whistle, and used it. It made her sound like a policeman in a crowded street. She pleaded with them to keep down the noise and the general mayhem. But somehow the whistle and the pleading had the opposite effect. They took it as a challenge. The boys went around harassing the girls, and they harassed Robert Brown, or they would scold Xavier, who was a short kid, and at one point one girl even lit into another, in some dispute that involved a lunchroom incident and another guy, who was not in the room at the time.

Cadence knew these girls too; she knew everyone pretty well. Often they would eat lunch together, and gossip about other girls who were pregnant or something that happened in one of their eleventh grade classes. Some of these kids were growing up early; Antonio, for example, had a new job, and another kid’s parents were splitting up, causing him to go back and forth at a time when he needed stability. These personal issues often made them wilder; when a sub came, it was almost as if pressure were released from a bottle. She shared many classes with many of these people, but today, she felt sick of them all. Some days she just wanted to go home and go back to bed.

Back in the corner, DaVon and Antonio started shoving each other. At first Cadence thought it was about the bottle game; one had perhaps hit the other in the face with the bottle. But no, it appears hot cheetos were involved. DaVon had simply taken a bag of them out of a girl’s pack, and Antonio was trying to retrieve them for her. They both had their hands on the one small bag of hot cheetos. Unfortunately a few hot cheetos were lost in the struggle and went flying onto the carpet. Some kids were alarmed that it went that far, Robert Brown in particular yelled out at them. The girl herself, Yvette, who had lost the hot cheetos in the first place, didn’t seem to mind having two boys fight over her, or over her cheetos. She giggled and led them on.

Hot cheetos were like the currency of the ninth grade, for some reason. Their bright red stringy appearance made each one seem like a valuable coin. To the boys, constant starvation was the norm, and they didn’t mind doing whatever they had to do to alleviate it. Cheetos, anything was fair game. They didn’t even have to enjoy eating it. But the girls, it seemed, were at that age where they felt intense dramatic guilt over every single thing they ate, in their attempt to starve themselves down to a level that the boys would notice them better. To Yvette, it was easily worth a few cheetos to watch two boys have this epic struggle over the little bag. Yvette truly didn’t mind losing the cheetos; she considered them everyone’s now.

To Cadence, at the moment, even the sight of hot cheetos made her sick, as she didn’t feel well, and certainly wasn’t hungry for that kind of very hot junk food. It was strictly against the rules to have food in the classroom, and everyone knew it, even the sub. Cadence was such a rule-follower that it didn’t even occur to her to bring food into the room, generally. But today, she had no appetite either. She couldn’t bear to watch the struggle, and put her head back between her arms.

The cheetos were not allowed in class, unlike the water, and the sub knew it, so she went to the back of the room to confiscate them. But she was no match for DaVon and Antonio, who simply turned so their back was to her, and kept up their tugging battle. She was yelling shrilly at them, but she had left her whistle on her desk. She told them to stop, and to give her the cheetos. They continued to struggle, and acted like she hadn’t said a word. The tension in the class rose as her shrill orders were being totally and completely ignored. A few cheetos were still flying, too.

Now Cadence took another quick look around the room. Nobody was doing the homework, as far as she could tell. Having a sub meant taking a day off of doing anything serious. Xavier was going from desk to desk trying to get something to eat or find somebody to bother. Robert Brown had given up on his homework and had a look of disgust on his face. One girl simply got up and left the room. Maybe she needed what they called a “safe space.”

Xavier, who was a small, nervous wreck of a kid, never sat still. They could ask him to read a page of the book, but he wouldn’t get more than a sentence into it, and pretty soon he was throwing a pencil, or playing with his jacket zipper. He’d play the bottle game, if he had a bottle, and today he’d gone over and thrown the bottle a few times before Antonio and DaVon’s game got a little rough. Xavier wasn’t into trouble; he didn’t intimidate people or take cheetos, but he never sat still, either. And he was sensitive, so the struggle at the back of the room bothered him. The teacher was yelling at the boys in a high voice and the boys were ignoring her. It looked like the boys were hurting each other, although all their actions, all their tugging and slapping, were deliberately designed to not hurt each other, to simply look like violence.

So now Xavier stood on the teacher’s desk; he stood right up on the papers and everything, and blew the whistle, with all the force of his lungs, a high pitched continuous whistle. He just let it out. And everyone was shocked, and more or less stopped in their tracks. Robert Brown laughed out loud.

This brought a teacher from the other room, who was shocked upon stepping in the door, and who reprimanded the students sternly. This teacher, an older woman from some other social studies class, seemed to have an authority they listened to; Antonio and Davon stopped their struggle, and most of the students now slunked back in their seats with low “yes ma’ams” and tried to start to appear to be reading the textbook again. Some kids who hadn’t even got their book out now reached below their chairs to get their books so they could pretend to start reading about balance of power. The older teacher apologized to the sub for the class’s horrible behavior, and promised they’d be better from now on. There was only ten minutes left in the class now. The sub, more than slightly ruffled, went back to her desk. She thought about saying something else about balance of power, but gave up that idea. There wasn’t much use trying to get them to think about balance of powers, she figured. Just get out of the hour alive.

The drama continued, though. It happened that a necklace had come out of Yvette’s bag, with the cheetos, and had even come apart in the struggle. Yvette hadn’t known about the necklace until later, but Antonio had known about it all along, and was quite mad at DaVon for starting the whole thing, just because he was so hungry he would steal hot cheetos from a girl’s pack. There was a kind of rancorous exchange of accusations, and this is what scared Cadence the most, because a kid who’s in the middle of an accusation war, who knows what he’ll say?

Cadence’s secret, in fact, was that her older sister, in the tenth grade, was pregnant. It was a family scandal, not well known by everyone, but DaVon knew it. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he knew it. And DaVon was not one to keep secrets, even if everyone around him demanded that he not tell a soul. He was accusing Antonio of stealing a bicycle and said bitterly that nothing was beneath Antonio, that Antonio wouldn’t mind stealing even the necklace if he thought he could get away with it. Antonio in return accused DaVon of every bad action known to the eleventh grade, hitting people, stealing food, locking a sub out of the room, beating someone up; in fact, Antonio knew quite a bit and was probably not lying.

This whole argument was in the last minutes of class, and spilled out into the hallway, on their way to the next class. Cadence tried to slip away in the other direction, so as to not be involved. The boys were still pushing each other; the sub had disappeared. But now there were hallway monitors to deal with. You could hear them a mile away. Cadence had fled down a back stairwell, but she knew that DaVon and Antonio would be in some trouble. They just couldn’t help themselves.

In a later class, Geometry, she had DaVon and Xavier and a few of the other kids from her government class. She was still worried about DaVon. After a kid gets in trouble, that’s when he’s most likely to say bad things about other kids or in general get other kids in trouble. DaVon, to her relief, never said a word to her, or about her. Xavier was enjoying praise, the praise of having done a heroic deed in the midst of battle, in the earlier Government class. It was a story to be told and retold, how he climbed right up on that desk and blew the whistle. The Geometry class, like the Government class, degenerated into general anarchy and not doing homework. It was afternoon now; kids had been inside most of the day; they were restless. Several boys were playing the bottle game again. Cadence couldn’t believe she was still in school; would school ever be over? The water sloshed around in the bottles when they were tossed. It made her feel like throwing up, again.

The ironic thing was, DaVon had not only fixed the necklace, but had also given it back to Yvette. He and Antonio, having gotten in trouble together, were fast friends, and this friendship hadn’t really been disturbed by all the bad things that had been said, although most of those were true, and quite severe. Each kid knew enough bad things about the other to get them in serious trouble, yet, the secrets were safe. As bad as these boys were, on a day-to-day basis, they actually had a sense of morality, of not stealing what they really truly weren’t supposed to steal, of trying to stay on good terms with each other. The sub, in her panic, had left behind both her phone and her wallet, the wallet full of money, a commodity in desperately short supply, of course, but one of the boys made sure she got it, untouched.

The afternoon sun came into the back of the geometry class, just as DaVon, by some coincidence, landed the water bottle right on its base. This was actually quite rare, and he spread his arms in a kind of victory gesture, and everyone was impressed. It was a tiny moment among many; they went back to their usual roughness immediately afterward. Cadence didn’t know it, on that day, but DaVon was the father of the baby, and she also didn’t know whether he knew, at that moment. Either way, life in the eleventh grade is temporal; they’d all have more serious concerns soon enough. Cadence, now feeling a little better, and having survived the school day, felt that she should enjoy these friendships while she had them. The bell would ring in minutes, and she’d be off to her last class, English. It occurred to her that it was possible that life itself had all the anarchy, but none of the camaraderie that her eleventh grade had.

(2-17)