Page 40 of All These Beautiful Strangers
At this point, the throbbing vein in Mr. Franklin’s forehead looked like it might burst. “What did you say to Mr. Kensington as he passed by your desk?”
“I didn’t say anything, sir,” Auden said. “I coughed. My mother’s always told me I have a funny-sounding cough, that it sounds like I’m saying—”
“Forty-five!” Al shouted, jumping away from the board and lifting his arms in triumph. “Forty-five. The answer is forty-five.” He pointed to his work on the board. “You can use a trig identity to get a quadratic in cosine.”
Mr. Franklin let out his breath slowly. “Another teachable moment—gone. Mr. Kensington, you may take your seat.”
“But I can explain it,” Al started, “I understand it now. What you have to do is—”
“Mr. Kensington, take your seat!” Mr. Franklin snapped, and Al drew back as if he had been slapped.
If Auden had been anyone else in the class, Mr. Franklin would have called him to the board and given him an impossible equation to solve in front of all of us. But Auden was too smart—he was some sort of math prodigy—and Mr. Franklin wasn’t about to provide Auden with a stage on which he would shine.
“Is this your idea of a practical joke, Mr. Stein?”
I glanced back up toward the front of the room, toward Mr. Franklin, who was squinting at the picture on the edge of his desk like he had never seen it before, when it’d sat there for as long as I could remember. It took me a moment to realize that was the picture—the picture one of the A initiates had stolen for their first ticket. The last time I remembered seeing it was at the Ledge a week ago. Had it been on Mr. Franklin’s desk this whole time, and if so, what was it doing there? Had the A’s returned it? And if they had, what had been the point of taking it in the first place?
“I asked, do you find this amusing, Mr. Stein?” Mr. Franklin repeated himself, a deep fury in his throat.
Everyone turned to look at Auden.
“Do I find what amusing, sir?” Auden asked.
“The defacement of my personal property,” Mr. Franklin said. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
Auden shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Mr. Franklin turned the picture around so he could see it. At first, I didn’t notice anything different about the picture at all—there was Mr. Franklin in uniform in the Oval Office. There was President Nixon, shaking his hand. I leaned forward in my seat so I could see it better. And then I gasped.
Someone had photoshopped Auden’s grinning face onto Mr. Franklin’s body. The juxtaposition of those two things—Auden’s silly grinning face on Mr. Franklin’s stern, uniformed body—was so ridiculous I had to choke back a laugh. In the seat next to me, Sheila Andrews was losing the battle of being discreet, trying to cover her giggles with a coughing fit.
“Sir, I didn’t—” Auden said.
“To the headmaster’s office this instant, Mr. Stein,” Mr. Franklin said, his mouth so tight I barely saw his lips move.
“Sir, that wasn’t me,” Auden said. “I mean, that is me—in the picture. But I didn’t do that.”
“Mr. Stein!” Mr. Franklin growled, and the whole class fell silent.
For one long moment, Auden sat and stared at the back of Dalton’s head, as if willing him to turn around and look him in the eye. Dalton was sitting in the front row, staring nonchalantly forward, as if nothing interesting were happening at all. Finally, Auden gathered his things and marched out of the room, shutting the door so forcefully in his wake that the wall shuddered.
Mr. Franklin followed him without even bothering to dismiss us. When he was gone, Sheila collapsed forward on her desk, laughing and gulping for air.
“That—was—classic,” Sheila said to me.
I almost couldn’t hear her over the roar of the room. People were turning around in their desks to talk to one another. There was a buzz of energy, a sense of excitement, which felt foreign to Mr. Franklin’s trig class.
“How long do you think Auden’s been planning that one?” Sheila asked. “I mean, genius. I wish I had that kind of balls.”
I wanted to tell Sheila that she didn’t even know the half of it, that she had only gotten part of the joke, and only fourteen students in the whole school would get the full joke—that Auden had been framed, literally and figuratively.
I glanced over at Dalton, who was talking to Crosby. Crosby had a wicked grin on his face. I tried to make out what they were saying, but they were too far away.
The A’s had made their first move of the year—a prank that had simultaneously taken everyone’s least favorite teacher down a peg and reprimanded the one initiate who had failed to retrieve his first ticket—a prank that everyone on campus, from students to faculty, would be talking about for the next week, and I hadn’t been a part of it, hadn’t even known it was coming. Why? Why had I been left out? Were any of the initiates involved? After all, we—or at least one of us—had done the heavy lifting. Shouldn’t we, at the very least, have been allowed to know what we were stealing the ticket items for?
I tore out a sheet of paper from my notebook, balled it up, and chucked it at the back of Dalton’s head. It missed him by a mile. I called out his name but he didn’t hear me over the noise of the classroom. I crossed my arms, slouched in my chair, and stared in Dalton and Crosby’s direction, willing them to look my way, to give me some kind of clue as to what was going on, but they didn’t.
None of us moved from our desks until the bell rang. We were all too nervous to leave in case Mr. Franklin came back and found our desks empty while class was still supposed to be in session. But he didn’t return. I should have known then that my annoyance at Dalton and Crosby and the rest of the senior A’s was the least of my worries—that a bigger storm was brewing. But I didn’t. I spent the rest of class looking idly at the spot on Mr. Franklin’s desk where the picture had sat. I couldn’t help but wonder how long that picture had been there, waiting for Mr. Franklin to notice. I wondered if it had been there since the morning after the A’s meeting, just sitting there like a bomb waiting to explode.
