First day of Junior High

“Fie… On… Tarn…” The teacher slowly enunciated each syllable then paused and looked round the room. And Fionntan groaned.

He was sitting right at the front of the seventh grade classroom. Behind him a student was tapping the back of his chair, whispering “Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum.” Someone else buried a laugh in a sneeze, and girl’s quiet voice began to sing “Oh Tarn-enbaum.” What a great start to the year.

Finn would have preferred to sit further back. He’d found his red hair and dark eyes attracted far too much attention in his previous school. But it’s hard to push your way to a good desk when you’re small, and the teacher had arrived before he managed to persuade anyone to give him space. Her sharp voice ordered him to sit up at the front, where he could see, and Finn could hardly tell her he’d been hoping not to be seen.

“Well?” said the teacher.

Finn looked up and decided he’d better respond. “It’s Finton,” he said, raising his hand halfway into the air and trying to wear his most innocent expression behind his freckles.

“It’s what?”

“My name Miss. It’s Finton.”

“Then why isn’t it spelled Finton?”

Finn wanted to say “It is,” but guessed that wouldn’t be a good idea. “Because it’s Irish,” he mumbled instead, dropping his gaze to his hands while he dug at some mud caught under a nail. Then he heard someone humming a feeble imitation of an Irish folk song. The tune was picked up on both sides of the room, vying for attention with the buzz of a faulty fluorescent.

“And what do we call you?”

“Finton. Or Finn.” The singing and snickering grew louder.

“Fin is it? As in fish.”

Now the boy behind Finn started humming “Dum dum, dum dum,” the shark’s theme from Jaws. The teacher banged her ruler on the desk, making Finn jump and startling the rest of the class to attention.

“I may not get to choose who sits in my class,” Mrs. Riordan intoned ominously, with a sharp look at Finn. “But I do get to choose how you behave. And I’m telling you now, I will have silence during registration.”

More coughs and snorts smothered more giggles but at least the singing stopped. Finn tried to shrink to invisibility behind his desk and turned his gaze to the window. A raven was balanced precariously on a branch, cawing loudly as if in response to its own teacher’s command, and the twigs beneath it swayed and tapped against the glass. For a moment, Finn smelled the hay-scented air of dreams, but it faded into the disused paper-dust of a first-day classroom—fake chalk, sweaty bodies, someone’s lunchtime pizza slice, and a trace of mud on the sole of somebody’s shoe. Motes floated like gold in sunbeams and Finn caught them in his mouth then started to cough.

But Mrs. Riordan was still working her way through names of the other students. “Yes Miss,” and “Here.” Arms raised; names memorized. What had she memorized for him, Finn wondered? Would she make fun of his name all year long, as Vonnie had said she did with hers? He dropped his eyes to the older names that were scratched in the wood of his desk, turning squiggling marks into worms and letting them crawl their way onto the blue-green lines of his notepaper.

“Fie on tarn O’Connell!” came a sudden shout, and a bang as Mrs. Riordan’s ruler slammed down.

“Huh?” Finn looked up.

The teacher’s gray hair stuck out from her head in a wild electric halo. And her eyes, behind wire-rimmed glasses, bulged like a frogs. A round lump bobbed up and down in her throat as she pointed her ruler soundlessly at Finn’s desk-top, where black worms wound their way between blue and red, drawing pictures on his page.

“Sorry,” said Finn, quickly transforming the creatures back to pencil marks and scratches. But it was too late.

“Oh no you don’t. Don’t go hiding your little pets in your pockets young man.”

Finn tugged a handkerchief out, dropping a pencil and a rolled up scrap of paper with chewing gum inside, to prove his pockets were empty, but Mrs. Riordan wasn’t convinced.

“I will not have students bringing livestock into my classroom,” she announced. “Livestock of any kind.” She bent to write something down then continued, “You’re going to straight to the principal young man, and you’ll take this note with you.”

The coughing and snickering had stopped. Even the raven’s mouth was closed. And the only smell was the dampness of earth left in a tiny mound where the worms had been. Finn struggled to his feet, tucking the papers back into his pack and shuffling forwards for his note. This was not the right way to start at a new school.

A fair-haired girl by the door was chewing peppermint gum. Finn smelled it as he walked by her desk, and he heard the slurping sound like snakes and worms slithering in a nest. But he kept his imagination in check. Turning back for a moment in the doorway, he saw the sun still painting the dust-motes gold, and peppermint girl hummed a final, unseasonal bar of “Tannenbaum,” with the gum tucked in her cheek. She kept her hands flat on her desk where the teacher could see them, but waved a finger delicately. And her blue eyes held midnight in their depths.

Finn wondered if she could be “one of us,” then smiled and closed the door.

© Sheila Deeth, March 2009

This follows on from Bees - chapter 2 of book 2.