Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

“Neither, bro. I’m a hermaphrodite.”

“See,” mutters Howie. “Didn’t I tell you he was a little light in his loafers?”

“Hey, bro,” says the teacher, who must have had radar ears, “I’m wearing sandals.” He perches on one foot like a stork and shoves the leather sole in Howie’s face.

“You from this planet?” tries J.D.

“Spaceship Earth,” the new teacher says, sitting down cross-legged on Miss Large’s always neat desk. “Species, Homo erectus.”

“Me, too,” says J.D., “especially when Leah bends over to pick up a pencil.”

The class all breaks up, except Leah, of course. I expect Waverly to jump all over us just to show his authority, but there he is, probably laughing the loudest. In fourteen years of education I’d never heard a teacher laugh before, like it was against their professional code or something.

“What’s this ‘bro’ stuff?” I ask.

“You must have heard some Afro-Americans use that term,” answers Waverly. “Listen some—”

“There are no Afro-Americans in Clement County,” volunteers Leah.

“Or black people, neither,” adds Brad.

The new teacher picks up a textbook from Miss Large’s desk. “Molding Young Minds,” he reads slowly.

“That’s ‘mold’ as in ‘fungus,’ ” says J.D., who was cleverer than the rest of us combined. “You going to start by having us write one of those ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ papers, because we already—”

“Right now I’m not interested in your summer vacation,” says Waverly.

“No?” says Howie. “How’d you spend your summer?”

Without blinking, the new teacher says, “In the Cook County jail.”

The room grows quiet. After a while Brad says, “What’d you do, man? Jaywalk?”

Waverly grins. “A bunch of us staged a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention, and we were carted off by the Windy City pigs.”

“I resent that word,” says Howie. “My dad’s the local sheriff and he works hard.”

“Listen carefully. I didn’t say your father was a pig,” returns Waverly, still not raising his voice or crying like Miss Large did when we said something she didn’t agree with. “I said the Mace-in-the-face, jackbooted, baton-wielding Gestapo dressed in Chicago police uniforms were pigs.”

“Be that as it may,” says J.D., using a phrase I know he picked up from Laugh-In, “what hieroglyphics you gonna make us read this year?”

“Yeah,” charges Howie, “you gonna hand out the same textbooks my mom and dad used to read here?”

Waverly stands and opens his hands as if holding a globe. “What would you like us to read this fall?”

Now we don’t know what to say because as long as we had been part of the Clement County School System we had just read what we’d been told.

Leah says, “You’d let us read anything we want?”

“As a class, yes. I’ll make you a covenant—”

“A what?” says Howie.

“A deal, a bargain,” explains Waverly. “I’ll promise to let you all read what you want if you promise to actually read, think, discuss, and write about it.”

“How can we lose?” I say.

“But what are we going to study?” poses Brad.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Waverly, “as long as you do the work on your own.”

The room grows silent again, which makes me very much aware that for the first time in my educational existence we’ve been discussing something, not being lectured to. While Waverly stands there as solemnly as if he were Moses waiting for the Lord to present him with the Ten Commandments, a frog suddenly jumps out of Whitley’s bib overalls. Now Whitley is a little slower than the rest of us, and this is long before any one of us has ever heard the term “special education” or “mentally challenged.” Miss Large and Principal Pike always let Whitley keep Delbert, his pet frog, with him because it kept Whitley happy and out of their hair. But suddenly there is Delbert, hopping across the classroom floor tiles like they’re a bunch of lily pads on Plummer’s Pond.

Right about the time Waverly bends over and picks up old Delbert, J.D. says, “That’s it. We’ll study frogs, warts and all.”

Without hesitation, our new teacher walks over to the board and with bold left-handed strokes writes two words in chalk: TOAD LIT.

“My Lord,” says Howie, burying his head under his arms, “I’m going to spend my final year in high school being taught toad lit by a hippie.”

Throughout the fall we kept Waverly’s covenant, and although at first you couldn’t have gotten any of us to admit it — in public, at least — English IV meant more to all of us, except maybe Brad, than Friday-night football games. Waverly stuck to his part of the bargain in trying to make us stand on our own. He found all sorts of “fab” things to study about frogs. Sometimes with unexpected consequences.