Believing Cedric Read Online Free Page A

desks and took them out, closing the lids with many a raucous bang and ruffling their pages to where they had left off. The unit was about professions, about the correct naming of vocations and common careers.
    The lesson began and continued unremarkably, until twenty-three minutes later, when her eyes happened to fall upon Cedric Johnson. There was something about him that struck her as odd in that moment. He had always been an inconspicuous student, unexceptional, one of those children who made up a rather plain colour in the mosaic, who made it easier for others to stand out. He was, now that she thought of it, the kind of child a teacher could spend an entire year with and, within a month after he left, forget that he’d ever existed, forever requiring the prompting of a photo to put a face to the name. Yet right now, this normally indifferent boy looked decidedly awake, his eyes shifting around with a kind of distraction, if not wonder, from one corner of the room to the next, focusing on the most commonplace objects as if they had just miraculously appeared out of thin air. He was particularly focused on the snowflakes Scotch-taped to the windows, the shapes of paper the students had folded, snipped, unfolded, and held up to the light before sticking there. Well, she thought to herself, something must be going on at home—fighting parents, nightmares, a dead relative—something out of the ordinary. She looked away, back down at her book.
    A few seconds later, Lyle raised his hand to ask a question about careers, his other hand reaching across to brace the one in the air, as if it were unbearably heavy. Mrs. O’Donnell tilted her head to the side impatiently, half-wondering who had ever come up with the phrase “There is no such thing as a stupid question,” because whoever it was had clearly never spent time in a third grade classroom, where the days were saturated with them.
    She did little to mask her irritation. “What, Lyle?”
    â€œUm . . . Mrs. O’Donnell? Um . . . did you always wanna be a teacher?”
    She had almost answered him before recognizing what his question really was. He was prodding into her private past, into her life. It was an attempt to rattle her. Yes. This was it, this was the moment she had promised herself, twenty-four minutes earlier, that she would not, could not, shrink from.
    She noticed her arms trembling. Then she looked down into her hand and saw that there was a piece of chalk in it, and, as if it were some kind of bloated insect larva that had wriggled between her fingers without her knowing, she gave it a quick, disgusted look and hurled it at the ground. It broke into several pieces, the fragments scattering under the students’ desks, bouncing between their feet and under the heating registers. The children all seemed to press their backs against their seats in perfectly choreographed unison, eyes opening wide.
    â€œI have had”—she pointed her finger at Lyle’s face like a pistol—“ enough of you!”
    Then she let herself go. She began with yelling the age-old disciplinary spiel about how Lyle had a problem with authority, and that he had better learn to toe the line or else. But somewhere along the way she lost herself. She started ranting about how far he was going to get in life. “If— if , do you hear me?—you can learn to listen, and respect others, and quell your aggressiveness, you might get to the end of grade nine. After which, I have no doubt, whatsoever, that you will go on to be a gas attendant, or have some such menial job. You, Lyle, will be bringing the change to the windows of your former classmates until you are old and grey.”
    When she finished, she seemed to come back to herself, seemed to realize that she was standing in front of a roomful of children. She straightened up, smoothed the sides of her dress down, hearing, in the sudden silence, the clack