Not My Problem

There was another student sitting in the office when I got there. A Black girl with light brown skin and braids. Angela Berry. She was the kind of gorgeous that made people slow down when she walked past. And she was older, a sixth year. Social media influencer. School play star. She had her own car supposedly paid for with endorsement money. Rumor had it, though, she’d crashed it twice already.

Everyone knew her.

She was tapping her foot nervously but there was no principal, teacher, or social worker waiting for me. Orla was behind the counter. She smiled, relieved, when she saw me.

“Thank God. I was afraid to call for you again in case anyone noticed. I thought one wee quick callout wouldn’t be suspicious.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “I thought my mam had died or something.”

Orla appeared stricken by this. “Why? Is she ill? I’m so sorry.”

“No. I was exaggerating. I mean, I thought something serious had happened.”

She cringed. “I didn’t think of that. Sorry. But look, I really need your help.”

“Again?”

She nodded. Then she shook her head.

“Not me.” She waved Angela over from where she was sitting chewing her fingernails and tapping her foot.

Angela sprang up and walked toward us, giving me a once-over.

“Her? Really?” She narrowed her eyes at me. I suppose I didn’t look like the kind of person who could fix things seeing as I just about grazed her shoulders.

Orla reassured her, “I told you she helped me. You can trust her.”

“What did she do for you?” Angela asked. Orla hesitated.

That was when Kavi made his presence known.

“Oh my God, such a good story,” Kavi said excitedly.

Everyone jumped. Including me. I didn’t realize he’d followed me, but I was beginning to think he simply had the ability to materialize out of thin air.

I cut him off. “All transactions are confidential,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to tell the story,” he said indignantly. “I was just saying it was a good one.”

Angela nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s good business,” she said. She seemed to consider us for another second.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Angela said finally.

I waited. When she didn’t say anything I gave her my best go on then face.

“Out here? Where anyone can walk in on us?” Angela frowned.

“You can go in here.” Orla unlocked the supply closet and the three of us squeezed in. More dark closets, less breathing room. Kavi sat on a box of printer paper and I flattened myself against the wall. Angela somehow managed to look confident and at ease even here. That must be what self-esteem does for you.

“Why is he here too?” Angela eyed Kavi.

Kavi and I exchanged a look. Mine said, Why are you here? His said, Why wouldn’t I be here?

“Whatever, I don’t have time for this.” Angela waved off our hesitation. “So you know Mr. Walker? Super strict, minus craic, face like a slapped arse?”

I nodded. I had him for geography. We did not get along. Surprise surprise.

“Well, I had him last period and I may or may not have written some kinda rude comments about him on a sheet of paper for my friend to read.”

I nodded. We’d all been there.

“Well, I also had to hand in a long essay. I borrowed my friend’s stapler to keep the sheets together and—”

I cringed. Kavi clapped his hand over his mouth.

“Exactly,” Angela groaned. “I handed in the essay and then realized I’d also included the sheet with the, um . . . comments.”

“How bad are these comments?” I asked, barely able to breathe from secondhand cringe.

“Uh . . . I suppose they span the range from mildly rude to a suggestion that he’s a case for post-birth abortion?”

I couldn’t help but snort.

“In my defense,” Angela declared, “he shouted at me for not participating in a discussion when loads of other people weren’t and he said he saw me in the last play and said, ‘If only you had so little to say then.’ I’m not going to take that kind of attack on my performance, you know?”

“Right . . .” I nodded. “So what we’re looking at here is you getting detention, right? And you’ll be in deep shit with your parents, obviously.”

“It’s not my parents.” She shook her head. “Getting in trouble with them is fine. Yeah, they’d be annoyed and I’d have my phone taken off me or whatever but that doesn’t matter. It’s the detention. I can’t stay after school.”

No one wanted to stay after school.

“You know my dad isn’t well, right?”

I exchanged a look with Kavi. His expression implied he did know.

“I didn’t. Sorry.”

“He is. It’s fine. He’s going to be okay.” Angela’s jaw twitched and I wondered if he was really going to be okay or if this was something she had to tell herself. “If I get detention I miss visiting hours. My mam is out of town all week so he’d be all alone.”

“That’s right,” I said, a memory of what Mícheál had said in English last week coming back to me. I assumed he too often had flashbacks of that class but for different reasons. “You’re having a party on Saturday.”

“Yeah,” she said uneasily. “You can come if you want? I guess.”

I shook my head. “You’re all right. I’ll do it,” I said. You didn’t get a much better cause than this one. You had to really love someone to sit around eating grapes and catching MRSA and Angela clearly loved her dad a lot.

Angela let out a huge sigh. “Thank you so much.”

“Where is the offending item now, do you know?”

“It’s in his room. But I think he’s marking those papers as we speak.”

“So he might have already seen it?”

“I don’t think I’d be standing here talking to you if he had. But there isn’t much time.”

“We need a distraction,” I said. I gave the door of the supply closet a light nudge with my toe and it swung open.

I signaled to Orla.

“Would you be able to get away for ten minutes? We need to distract Mr. Walker.”

She checked the time on her phone. “If I’m not here when the secretary gets back, I’ll be in deep shit. But I know I owe you. Oh!” she exclaimed, suddenly excited. “What if I get the whole dance troupe to practice in the hall? He’d definitely come out and look at the racket. And let me tell you, our ‘Baby One More Time’ routine is so tight right now.”

“I appreciate the offer but I don’t want you to get fired.”

There was no point calling in a favor from someone only to get them in trouble.

“I could fall down outside and pretend to be hurt,” Angela said. “See what he thinks of my acting skills then,” she added, muttering under her breath.

I shook my head. “I don’t want you anywhere near this. Plausible deniability.”

Kavi and I exchanged a look. His look said I got this. My look said I don’t know about this.

“I did great last time,” he protested. “Very distracting.”

There was no other option that I could think of and we were running out of time.

“Okay, I need that same energy, but like . . . where you don’t get caught and get suspended. That part is vital. Can you do that?”

He nodded. Kavi in business mode was a quiet Kavi.

“Do you know what you’re going to do?” I asked.

He grinned. “I’ll improvise.”

Upstairs, I indicated for Kavi to stay put for a second. I slunk past Mr. Walker’s room. The door was closed but there was a small window you could look through. There was one student in there. A white boy with dark hair that curled around his ears. I could handle one boy. I recognized him from the year below me. Daniel something. He was one of the techy boys who did things with computers that I didn’t understand. He was bent over a piece of work but he was surreptitiously trying to pick his nose. I could just about see Mr. Walker at his desk with a pile of papers.

He didn’t look enraged yet. That was a good sign. I slipped into the classroom next door, which was empty, and sent a signal to Kavi. From where I was standing, I watched him begin panting excessively and then he ran really fast and burst into Mr. Walker’s room. I closed the door to my classroom and slid to the floor, crouching awkwardly so I couldn’t be spotted through the window, but I could hear Kavi through the wall.

“Sir! Sir! Come quick. I think I saw someone breaking into your car!”

“What?!”

I heard a scramble of chair legs against the wooden floor.

“Did you call the police?” Mr. Walker said urgently.

“Uh . . . yes. I did,” Kavi lied.

I shook my head. He could have come up with a thousand less dramatic stories, but Kavi loved a good story, after all. I briefly wondered if Mr. K still thought he was pining for Meabh.

I waited for them to leave and Mr. Walker gave a threatening “Don’t move” order to Daniel Something.

I stole into Mr. Walker’s room, feeling very covert, and gave Daniel Something a glare.

“Not a word,” I said.

He furrowed his brow. He had no idea what I was talking about.

I sat in Mr. Walker’s chair and marveled at how comfortable it was. Why did teachers get comfy chairs when we were the ones who had to sit down all day? There was a stack of papers on the desk in front of me and I flicked through them, looking for Angela’s name. It wasn’t there. I snatched the stack of marked papers, praying it wasn’t in those. It wasn’t.

“He put a bunch of homework in the bottom drawer,” Daniel Something said.

I opened the drawer. It was one of those deep ones. It was piled high with about a hundred papers. Ugh, being a teacher was so grim. I thought about some of the papers I handed in and had a tiny sliver of sympathy for my teachers. Imagine having to read that crap all day. Actually, wasn’t I really doing them a favor when I didn’t do my homework? Lightening their load?

I dropped to my knees and began flicking through the papers in the drawer. I didn’t recognize enough names to know if I had the right year group so I couldn’t even skip past any.

“What’re you at, anyway?” Daniel Something said, like it was only mildly curious that I was doing what I was doing.

“I’m doing someone a favor,” I said brusquely.

“Why though?”

“Because I do that,” I said. Seána O’Brien. Nope. Seamus Keegan. Nope. Lina Jankauskas. Nope.

“But why, though?”

“Ughhhh, because I do!”

Then, finally thinking, I popped my head over the desk.

“Why? Do you need something?”

When I thought about it later, I realized that Meabh might have started this whole thing. Kavi took that one favor and snowballed it into another. But at some point, maybe this exact point, I was the one who picked up the snowball and started chucking it in every direction.

“Like what?” Daniel asked.

“I don’t know. Like a favor. Something you need done that you can’t get done for yourself.”

I was going to have to come up with a better elevator pitch.

I didn’t know him well enough to know if he had tattling tendencies, but I figured if I did a favor for him, he’d be less inclined to rat me out. As Daniel appeared to muse on this, I returned to my papers. At least it kept him quiet.

Dylan Cheung. Nope. Conor Quinn. Natasha Farrell. Nope.

“There is one thing,” Daniel Something said.

I popped my head up again and rested my arms, folded, on the desk.

“What can I do for you, Daniel?” I asked, amiably and not at all like I was on the fucking clock. How much time had passed? How much time would it take Mr. Walker to get to the car park and realize his car was fine?

“You know Angela Berry?”

Shit. Did he somehow know what I was doing?

“Uh, yeah . . .”

“Her party is on Saturday.”

Thank God.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, I want to go.”

“And you’re not invited?” I said, thinking of Angela’s reluctant invitation to have me at her party. It seemed unlikely she’d want this random boy three years below her.

“No, that’s not it. Angela said I could go. Her cousin is my best friend.”

Okay, just me then.

“So what’s the problem?”

“There’s no way my mum will let me go. She is so strict and my grandparents are visiting.”

I felt unmoved. Although having a techy person owe me a favor would undoubtedly come in handy.

Daniel fiddled with his pencil. “I’ve never been to a party or anything. She thinks parties are all drinking and sex and so she won’t ever let me go. I get left out of everything. On Monday all anyone’s going to be talking about is this stupid party and I’ll be the only one who didn’t get to go and I’ll be the loser again.”

I didn’t care about being invited to things everyone was doing, but I did know how it felt to feel like everyone had something you didn’t. That you were the odd one out. His face was so pained and so pathetic, he reminded me of something that was so gross it was endearing. Like one of those really ugly dogs that look like they’re inside out, but they still deserve love.

“All right,” I said, sighing heavily, like this was a huge ask. Getting to a party would be a piece of cake compared to breaking into school and trying to break bones, but Daniel needed to feel indebted to me. “But you owe me one, okay?”

He pumped his fist and uttered a very intense, “YES!”

I looked back at my papers and there it was. I pulled the offending sheet off and stuffed the essay back in the pile.

“There you are, you wee bugger,” I muttered, looking over the comments with a smile.

“I could say the same thing to you,” Ms. Devlin said.