The History Student

By Robert MacMillan

Bobby Brandon’s days as a high-school football star are years behind him — but he never had to let them go. He teaches in his old school and has an easy life in the town that raised him, a town that is changing more quickly than he realizes. When a new teacher arrives and two unusual students come into his care, he discovers that his community thinks far less highly of him than he does of himself. Bobby tries to help his charges while attempting to live up to his own image, a mission that will have permanent consequences for them all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664188693

Robert MacMillan

Robert MacMillan has worked as a reporter and editor since 1995, covering the media business, local news, Indian current events and more. He is the author of “Haiku 61 Revisited: The songs of Bob Dylan, interpreted as haiku.” This is his first novel.

Book preview

Chapter 1

American history. Such an epic. Revolutionaries, indig- in- indigenous peoples. Did I say that right? And us, the immigrants and the children of immigrants and the grandchildren of immigrants and… OK. Last year, we learned how we got here, how the USA was born. This year, we’re going to learn what happened when we grew up.

Bobby paced the boards before his class. The history teacher who used to teach the course said it was important to frame the year on the first day of school. That sounded good to him.

There’s a lot to learn here. A lot of people and places and dates. Oh jeez, dates. He grinned and wiggled an eyebrow. You can forget it all in June.

The students laughed. Bobby liked teachers who had a sense of humor. It kept the boredom of learning away. Awareness of learning was drudgery.

The previous teacher was Mr. Reid, a serious man.

Make the light come on in their eyes. That’s the most important thing, he told Bobby on his last day at the high school. They might be seniors, and bad teachers might have neglected them. But the light is still there. You are the one who can turn it on.

Bobby thought Mr. Reid was earnest. He liked that, even if he found it nerdy. Mr. Reid also was dull. Bobby did not like that.

He rested his right hand on a textbook on his walnut partners desk. The book was open at the answer key for the quiz questions. He would tilt his head down during his classes, looking up the answers he forgot and pretending that he was contemplating what he wanted to say next.

Bobby pressed his left hand against his stomach. He wore a white shirt with thin sky-blue checks from the Van Heusen Wrinkle Free Flex line. It came from a variety pack, $16 a shirt. He took confidence from touching his rock-solid abs. To his surprise, they hid under fat. Where did this come from? he asked himself.

He regrouped.

You will hear the amazing story of America, Reconstruction to the present, at ten to eight in the morning, five days a week, until next June. Try not to get hammered at Crows every night. I don’t teach in jail.

He winked.

This is U.S. II, he said. He wrote the letters on the board with a pink stick of chalk that came from a box with a rainbow of pastel colors. That’s II like ‘I I.’ We have the massacres of the Native Americans, the railroad and the end of western expansion, presidential impeachments and assassinations. We have monopolies, unions, fires, two world wars and a bunch of other things. The Gilded Age, the Atomic Age, the Space Race, the Arms Race, Watergate.

Ancient history! interrupted a boy with manic eyes and a dullard’s smirk. He cracked up. His friends sitting next to him brayed.

No, James, ancient history is when I had a mullet, said Bobby.

Pics or it didn’t happen! James cried.

Don’t make me do it, kids. Don’t make me! Bobby said as their laughter echoed off the windows. The children wriggled in their seats, making the metal desk legs thump on the floor.

Five dollars a picture! His face flushed. I don’t do this for everybody.

He fished in his desk drawer for the prom photos. He did this for every class, every year.

Bobby handed a Polaroid square to Michelle Morris in the front row. Pass that one around. He was posing in his little-boy-blue prom tuxedo in front of his parent’s gingerbread Victorian house on Washington Avenue. Ruffles cascaded down his white shirt. He wore a pink cummerbund and tie. His eyes were merry, his even teeth gleamed under a wispy blonde mustache. In another photo, he posed with Debbie Dingerman by the driver’s-side door of his red Camaro with the top down. Bobby had to stop the car on the way to prom to replace the roof panels when Debbie said it would ruin her coiffure. The hairdresser at the Mane Stop had permed and teased her hair half up. Bobby wanted to eat her from the feet up when he saw her in that white see-through tulle ballroom gown. The slit revealed her legs and the fabric clung to her hips. Appliqué blossoms barely hid the front of her thong. His father practically drooled as he shot the photos. Bobby appreciated this mild-mannered lechery, despite knowing that Aggie was Debbie’s history teacher. His mother clucked over the dress. A week later, she went into a mood that mystified Bobby. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, Miriam sniffed to her husband.

He showed the students another picture. Bobby was standing on Colonial Avenue by the house where his friend’s dad Frank had done a photo shoot with Bruce Springsteen. Bobby’s back faced the camera at an angle. His head was turned toward the lens with a wolf’s grin that said, I’m ready to chase some skirt. His eyes hinted at insecurity, a need to be needed. This good-boy-bad-boy image was his ticket to a girl smorgasbord. He wore blue jeans with flared bottoms and a tight seat. His varsity letterman’s jacket with black sleeves and red front showed off his muscles from dumbbell bicep curls and tricep extensions.

One day, this style’s going to come back, said Bobby.

His stomach hung over his braided belt. His shirt covered his stomach like a sausage skin. He tightened his muscles and sucked in.

What does American history mean to you? What’s the value add, as they say in the world of business? He tapped his fingers in a wave on his desk. It gets your asses out of bed at sunrise to help you learn to be the valuable citizens of tomorrow. Right?

The children groaned.

Sunlight reflecting off the windshield of a parked car in the driveway below caught his eye. The parking spots lay perpendicular to the driveway that ran down the side of the school. The cars faced a stretch of grass and a wire fence. On the other side was an unkempt lawn, speckled with dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace.

The buildings around the lawn were long rectangles of two stories each, dorm rooms at the Greentree Center for Mentally and Physically Disabled Children and Adults. Their vinyl siding was buckling, coming loose or missing. Closer to the high school sat the reception building. Flaking tar covered the roof in clumps. Bobby preferred the Victorian house that sat near Kings Highway. It was the home of Eliza Greentree, who founded the school in 1883 when she was 25 years old and looking for a fresh life across the Delaware river from her hometown of Philadelphia.

The other buildings could have been laid out by the school’s graduates. The dorms, sheds and physical plant sat on poorly drained land, their foundations lay at perplexing angles to their neighbors’.

A black Chevrolet Suburban turned into the driveway off Hopkins Lane. It idled on the fractured pavement at the entrance to the reception building. Four men dressed in navy suits climbed out, their black monk-strap brogues glinting in the sunshine.

Bobby noticed James standing next to him, twitching. What are they doing at the retard school? he asked.

He and Bobby leaned forward with their hands on the radiator grille.

‘Retard school’ isn’t nice, Bobby said. Imagine how you’d feel if you were one of those kids.

Bobby’s stomach soured. James inhabited the borderland between heavy-metal freak and plain old dork. He wore the standard costume: an Anthrax T-shirt with an image of Scott Ian and his distinctive beard in electric blue, and tight acid-washed jeans. James’s balls strained against the denim. Acne streaked his face with bright busy nodules, pimples and bumps. His hair was stiff with dandruff and oil. No doubt he spent summer nights watching wrestling matches on TV in his parent’s basement and jerking off with one hand while eating sour-cream-and-onion potato chips with the other.

Other students could have taken their dress cues from the Official Preppy Handbook. The boys wore collared shirts better suited for law firms than a schoolroom. Some sported sleeveless argyle sweater vests with blue and red diamonds. The girls wore skirts and tops with thin straps, or gossamer white blouses and jodhpurs. They awaited acceptance letters from Princeton and Trinity.

Some of his students were dumpy or ugly. One or two frightened him, like James, or the kid in the back whose name he forgot. That one might as well have worn a shirt displaying the words, I’m going to shoot everybody in the school. Bobby smudged them out of focus.

Seriously, guys, he said as he stalked down the aisle between two columns of desks. We have a lot to learn in here. I took this same class back when I was your age. It’s a bear.

James stayed by the window. The men gathered at the fence that separated Greentree from the high school. One spoke, the others wrote in tiny notebooks.

Alright, have a seat, Bobby said.

What’s going on? James asked.

Who cares?

Hey Coach B! called one of the preppy boys from the back of the room. How’s your girlfriend?

He winced. The girls giggled. She’s so hot, said one.

Chapter 2

Bobby loved the first day of school. He started looking forward to it on the second day of school. He would bound out the door at 6:30 in the morning, rejoicing at the top of orange and blue September as the earth tilted and turned the days of dappled light into nights of cool stars and low, red moons.

It’ll be chilly soon, he would say to anyone he met on the street. Great running weather. Clouds, football, pumpkins, corn and Thanksgiving. Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

He would walk the floors of the school, dazzled by the light reflecting in the marble flecks and glass chips laid into the terrazzo floors. It was like treading on diamonds. He would josh with the athletes at their lockers and enjoy the sound of the students calling to each other to make plans after practice.

Today was different. A shadow walked next to him, cast by Maya, ever since she reoccupied her apartment for good.

At 2:40, the bell clappers thrummed against the fat metal discs in the hallways. Do your homework, he called over the chatter of the students as they rushed to the doorway. It builds character.

He closed the door and dropped into the five-wheeled chair behind the desk. The mahogany full-grain leather cushions with their brass buttons smelled like age.

Doctor Strand, the humanities department chief, said the desk might have been older than the school. The great teachers of yesteryear, Bobby told himself. I’m just sitting in their seat.

His classroom was in the A building. This was the original school, colonial architecture in red brick, built a hundred years ago. It had tall, wide, white-paned windows and an entrance sealed at night by iron gates. At the far end of the courtyard, columns supported a gabled roof with a cupola and pediment.

The high ceilings made an illusion of space. They were classic schoolrooms, to Bobby’s mind, saturated with learning and floor polish. Bobby wished they had no air conditioning, like in the old times. On hot days when he was a student, a breeze would cool the rooms. Natural air was good for learning. He was glad that he did not teach in the C wing. The town bolted that three-story brick box onto the school in the 1970s. Its rooms were low and cramped, and they smelled of community college. On humid days, the cinder blocks sweated through putty-gray paint.

In his free periods, Bobby patrolled the perimeters of the buildings. A walkway connected the structures, and he would walk the deserted asphalt corridors below, taking notes with a nubby No. 2 pencil in a spiral-bound pocket notebook on facades that needed cleaning or loose grout in the A-gym outer wall.

In the B-wing cafeteria, he would greet the short, round lunch ladies in their plastic hair caps and white smocks. He would cruise the hallways as the students were arriving and learn everybody’s name. Through the year, he asked them how were their days, their classes, their lives. He liked to watch the kids scurry, they were sure that they would get in trouble if they missed the bell that announced the next period. Nobody got in trouble for being late.

You can come see me if you need to talk about anything, he told anyone whose faces evinced teenage trauma. Plenty came to see him. They gave him heartburn when they whined about problems he could not imagine having. Every time he lingered to coax a freak through a juvenile crisis, he thought, I could be out on the field at doubles.

He preferred talking to athletes. He liked the football players most because he had been one. He admired the girls who played field hockey and the cheerleaders who balanced each other in pyramids while chanting:

You may be good at basketball, you may be good at track, but when it comes to football games, you’d better watch your back!

The nerds favored Klingons, hobbits, Daleks, wizards and Magic with a k. That was no way to blend in to the social life of the school. He wished he could tell them to snap out of it, to get laid if they could find someone drunk enough to take pity on them and forfeit good taste at a late-night party at Crows Woods at the town’s southern extreme.

He turned his mind to trying to remember the facts that he would have to teach. There was the Andrew Johnson impeachment. The machinations eluded him. A bare recitation of what happened and who did what would suffice. The Garfield and McKinley assassinations were tough. After that, it would be a drag to teach. Rain would blur the windows and obscure the views of Greentree and the cemetery across Kings Highway. These days would drain everyone’s color. Bobby would pine for the first day of school and think, how much longer is this going to last?

He opened his desk drawer and took out a snapshot of Maya. He had kept it in a frame on his desk until the day before school began. It lay underneath his prom photos, the empty frame lay next to the stack of pictures. She sat on a blue towel on the beach at Cape May, frowning at the camera, wearing shades with oval lozenge lenses. He turned the photo upside down and closed the drawer.

He slid out of his chair, onto his knees. He crawled underneath his desk, where he could smell the fug of leather, fungus and sweat that his shoes left behind. In 1985, he carved a song lyric on the bottom of the center drawer: What a long strange trip it’s been.

You were supposed to save that one for senior year, said his nerd-buddy Dave as he lay on his back and shone a flashlight on Bobby’s work. You haven’t had a long strange trip yet.

He shook his head to think that he carved this pseudo-philosophical nonsense into furniture that Doctor Strand told him was modeled on the Resolute desk at the White House. He thought of Maya again. She once lived in Germany. She told him there was a monastery there, eight hundred years old or more. The student monks left writing on the walls. Bobby thought Maya would share wisdom from the twelfth century. In fact, their graffiti amounted to, Brother Konrad is an oxen’s butthole and Father Wyprecht’s class sucks.

He put his arm behind his head and smelled his right armpit to see if the deodorant had lasted. He wrinkled his nose.

Long strange trip.

He wandered through the room. Cork bulletin boards hung on screws. By winter break, his students would have tacked on them scrolls of paper with timelines of late 19th-century American history and other dumb assignments. Little Big Horn, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Washita Creek, they were fresh to Bobby every time. So were the trusts and the trust busters, the muckrakers, the gold standard and the Know-Nothing Party. He wondered why anyone had to learn this stuff apart from making it through graduation, getting into college and earning. He extended his lower lip and blew a puff of air, tousling his bangs.

Ten textbooks and novels with creased and broken spines sat on the front of his desk, balanced between bronze Haddonfield Bulldawg bookends. He bought the books when the library held a discount sale during spring cleaning. He thought they would look good in a classroom. One day, he swore, he would read them. Our Mutual Friend, The Golden Notebook, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, they were the first three.

He saw students pass by in the hallway, distorted by the wire-reinforced Aquatex glass in the top half of the oak door. A locker slammed, their voices faded. The clock ticked above the door.

His phone vibrated. His hammy fists would not fit easily into his pockets.

That’s going to be the challenge for you in your forties, you skinny bugger, Aggie told him when he was a teenager. Suddenly one day you’re fat.

Come on, Dad, he said.

Football, said Aggie.

He read the text message. Drink? It was Doctor Strand. He put the phone in his pocket and sat at a student’s desk. He barely fit. The chairs were made of metal frames with wooden seat backs and seats with front lips that curved downward. Metal tubing was attached to the sides of the seats, supporting the desk tops. The seats were raised in the middle with shallow wells for thighs. Bobby the student would strike the desk with his knees and feet when crossing his legs to stay awake. He would fight off daydream hard-ons, jamming his palm against the denim over his fly.

He sniffed. It was the same wood and varnish, same dust in the air. The scent of mimeograph ink, gone so many years from the school, clung to the corners.

He sprang up, the desk clung to his waist. He pushed it off, and it clattered on the floor.

He should have been going over the syllabus. He should have been riding the Southside Railroad line into Appomattox, finding ways to tell the tales of Grant, Lee and the Reconstruction. He should have been dwelling on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his funeral train rolling through 180 towns and 1,700 miles to Illinois, his dead children and the addled Mary Todd.

The hell with it.

Bobby left the room, locking the door with a Yale key. On the right side, lockers reached to the end of the hall. On the left, windows overlooked the grass, the benches and the cement walks that divided the courtyard. Three bicycles parked in metal racks leaned between hedges on the green. A girl in frumpy khakis and a half-tucked white shirt held her backpack to her chest as she hurried toward the arches. Bobby’s heels clicked on the floor. He brushed the combination locks with his hand as he walked. Mrs. Pierce’s alto voice, richly Scottish and deliberate in instruction, came from a half-closed door.

At the end of the corridor, he turned left and pushed open a white door that slammed shut behind him on a busted hydraulic hinge. More doors, windowless, led to the auditorium. He gripped a handle, pressed the thumb latch and slipped into the theater.

He walked to the orchestra pit and faced the seats made of black metal and dressed in scarlet chenille. He padded down the aisle to the stage, which was lit by yellow and magenta bulbs operated from the booth in the balcony. Bobby figured a drama student left them on, maybe was up there making out with a special friend.

He moved toward the stage door, washed in the red of an exit sign. He opened it and mounted a cramped staircase that led down to the old girl’s gymnasium and up to the stage entrance and the props room. He came to an alcove where there was a door shut tight, painted glossy black, blobs betraying a messy job. Whispers and stifled laughter emanated. He smelled dryer sheets, doubtlessly shoved into paper-towel cardboard tubes to mask the scent of marijuana.

He and Debbie Dingerman used to horse around in that room during study hall. Drama fags, as the student body called them in the old days, hung out there too. Bobby would pretend to be a bully to scare them into leaving when he and Debbie were in the mood. They crept up there on game days when she wore her cheerleader skirt and sleeveless V-neck sweater. Bobby would cadge the key from his dad, who kept it on a large circular chain in his office.

They traded each other their virginity on a heap of vermillion Hussar uniforms in junior year. He blushed at the memory of how he moved like a train on a short journey. They sat on the same uniforms five weeks later when Debbie missed her period and learned how to read a pregnancy-test kit. She giggled before she ran to the toilets. What is green supposed to mean? she said as they crouched under the light of the tungsten bulb that hung by a rayon cable.

In between? said Bobby.

I’m going to suck your dick if I’m not pregnant, she said.

It was Bobby’s lucky day when she got her period. At the last second, she yanked him out of her mouth and whispered, Come on my tits.

Where did she get that dirty talk? He saw Debbie last week with her three boys at the Acme supermarket. They talked about football season. She had become fat. Her poodle hairdo flopped over her sleepy face and wide blue eyes. She would look at home selling discount dry goods or funnel cakes at the Pennsauken Mart, were it still around, or out at PJ’s with her girlfriends at happy hour. He blanched at the memory of coming on those breasts, exhausted by brats. She could not have forgotten the way she talked to him or the things they did. She must still think about it.

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He walked