Mean by Ann Cwiklinski

A few years ago, I had a teacher named Mrs. Gardenia. Such a pretty name. You’re probably picturing a cheerful, white-haired lady in a flowery blouse, right? She threw holiday parties with cupcakes and put cat stickers on everyone’s papers? Well, you’re wrong. Mrs. Gardenia was, in fact, the meanest woman ever to teach 5th grade. She would happily eat you alive.

Even her appearance was terrifying. She had an angry red face and bristly gray eyebrows and spiky gray hair. Her body was squat—like a block of modeling clay too cold and tough to shape properly. Her humungous jewelry looked like it was stolen from the natural-history museum—carved rocks and chunks of metal that were probably steeped in ancient curses. She never actually hit anyone that we knew of, but boy, could she yell. She would lean right into your face, with one of her enormous pendants clunking against your desk, and shout horrible things like, “You’re the worst student I ever had!” (She actually yelled that at a boy once because he was reading two chapters ahead in his American History textbook, as if his curiosity was disgraceful.) 

We all called her “Mrs. G.” because we considered it dangerous to say her full name out loud. (Yes, we copied that from Harry Potter.) Tony sometimes referred to her as “Mrs. G Force” because he claimed her yelling could blow back the skin on your face, like in those pictures of fighter-jet pilots. Tony was pretty funny, and actually smart, for a boy.

A few kids—I’m thinking of Sarah Elizabeth, mostly—tried hard to get on her good side.   They’d raise their hands constantly—“Ooh, ooh! I know! Pick me!”—and tell on other kids who hadn’t done their homework. But—too bad for Sarah Elizabeth—Mrs. Gardenia didn’t have a good side. She was just a big ball of rage. Some boys—the ones who spent recess huddled together, lying about their video-game scores—didn’t get upset by her yelling. They even mimicked her behind her back when she ranted over someone’s poor penmanship. But most of us, I’d say, were terrified of her.

I’m usually a good student—I was even gifted in 4th and 5th grade. (I wasn’t gifted the next year in 6th grade, though, because Mrs. G. didn’t recommend me. I felt like that fairy tale guy who wasted his magic gift by wishing a sausage onto his wife’s nose. I’m not sure what I did to become ungifted, but I’ll admit that if I could have wished a sausage onto Mrs. G.’s nose, she’d be sniffing through kielbasa right now.) But even if 5th grade, when I was supposedly still gifted, I sometimes couldn’t remember a state capitol, and Mrs. G. would wedge herself between my desk and the one in front of me, glare down, and announce, “Anyone who doesn’t know the capitol of Arkansas should go back to 4th grade!” Like that was a well-known law or something.  Like it was in the Constitution. I’d clench my teeth super hard to keep the tears inside. 

Once when I handed in homework I’d torn from my spiral notebook, and it had all those little fringy bits down the side, she waved in around in front of the whole class, yelling, “Who’s the slob?” even though it had my name right on top, in my big handwriting. I had to stand next to the wastebasket in front of the class and pinch off the fringe because Mrs. Gardenia was big on Making an Example of You. Awful Sarah Elizabeth sat in her front row seat doing that fake thing where presses her fingers over her mouth, like, “Oh, I really don’t want to laugh but I can’t help it because you are just so stupid.”

Mrs. Gardenia was also big on math drills. Once my friend Abigail thought 9×12 was 98, and Mrs. Gardenia exploded, “Do you like being so ignorant?” We were all kind of surprised, because no one had ever yelled at timid, shaky Abigail before. Abigail started crying and hiccupping so hard she threw up—just a tiny bit of Fruit Loops, you could tell—on her $85 textbook. (Mrs. G. reminded us daily that our math books cost $85. Closing a pencil inside your book got you a good screaming and at least two days in detention. Vomit, we figured, would get you Alcatraz.) Abigail went to the school nurse and never came back. Homeschool, everyone said later, even though both her parents both worked full time. And even though they were super nice, they didn’t seem like the type of parents who would be thrilled to teach 5th grade grammar:  if you trick-or-treated at their house, they’d always ask, “Hey, don’t you want no more?”  

Here’s the thing: The principal liked Mrs. G. because our scores on the state math tests were the highest in the county. But you know what I think? You don’t teach kids to swim by throwing them into a shark-infested pool, do you? Maybe they’ll swim faster, but they’ll probably hate water for the rest of their lives. Mrs. G. made us hate math. To this day, if I hear the phrase “order of operations,” I break out in a sickly sweat. 

Unfortunately, Mrs. G. had our parents well fooled; she was totally unctuous with them. (That is one of my vocabulary words this week in 8th grade English: “oily in speech or manner”. I’m back in gifted English now, and it is by far my best subject.) Once at open house, Mrs. G. said to my mother, “Your sweater is such a pretty azure!” Only she sighed it out, “azuuuure,” like she was about to faint in appreciation. Unctuous! They chatted and Mrs. Gardenia did not scream once. Afterwards, my mother insisted Mrs. Gardenia seemed “pleasant.” 

It got to be totally like Alice in Wonderland—this crazy lady yelling “Off with their heads!” and everyone acting like it’s normal. I didn’t know how I would survive the school year. 

But one Tuesday in Art class, Miss Bowen, who was super nice, instructed us to draw characters from our Silent Morning Reading books. We had 10 minutes of SMR first thing every day because reading is super good for you, and teachers need time to check their e-mail. SMR was part of our Interconnected Curriculum. An Interconnected Curriculum is, frankly, a pain. It means you can’t draw something just for fun in Art class; Language Arts and Geometry keep creeping in. And in the middle of reading a History chapter on the Spanish conquistadores, you have to go online and look up the hardness, luster, and cleavage of gold to satisfy some Science requirement. And then you have to make a puppet of Pizarro for homework and try to keep his stupid clay head from falling off on the bus to school the next morning.  

Anyway, for SMR that day I was reading Alice in Wonderland for about the 15th time. I loved that book. And I loved Art class, even though the colored pencils were too short and had other kids’ teeth marks on them. (“State budget cuts,” Miss Bowen always said, like that’s what chipped the pencils.) So on this day, Interconnected Curriculum wasn’t so bad.

I drew Alice first: She looked like me, with straight hair, a smallish nose, and a big mouth. I dressed her in that old-fashioned apron thingy from the book illustrations but let her wear sneakers like mine—purple running shoes—because I always thought Alice’s buckle shoes looked too tiny to be comfortable. I personally can’t think straight if my shoes squeeze. 

Then I started drawing the Queen of Hearts towering over Alice. Here’s the weird thing: without meaning to, I gave her Mrs. G’s fierce, bristly eyebrows. When I added a wide-open mouth, howling, “Off with her head!” in giant letters, she looked so much like Mrs. G. it was startling. That’s when I decided that instead of a playing card, I’d make her body a math book; I decorated it with division and multiplication signs and an $85 price sticker. Then I printed “Uglification and Derision”—like the Mock Turtle says—in curlicued capital letters as the title on the front of the book. My picture came out great. Better than old wobbly-headed Pizarro by far.

I didn’t intend to show it to anyone. Miss Bowen never, ever collected our papers, because Art is a “Special” with no grade. But that day, wouldn’t you know, Miss Bowen announced that she would be displaying the pictures in the hall for Spring Open House. Sarah Elizabeth sprang out of her seat and grabbed everyone’s papers.

I felt like a venomous spider had just bitten me and dissolved my insides. Mrs. G. was going to kill me when she saw that picture! I couldn’t think straight the rest of the day and cried all the way home on the bus. I arrived home so sad and crumpled my mother decided I was sick, so we skipped Spring Open House. I cried all night, almost.

Which, unfortunately, doesn’t affect a thermometer one bit: I had to go to school the next morning. On the bus, I whispered, “Expelled, expelled…” to myself, so it would be less of a shock when the principal announced it to me. 

But guess what? Nothing happened when I got to school. Except that Tony, who’d had to go to Spring Open House to help his mother run the cookie table, ran up to me laughing and said that Mrs. G Force had been greeting parents in the front hall with her loudest, phoniest, teaching-is-joy voice when she glanced at our art projects and started staring at my picture.

“It was like she froze for a few seconds.”

“Did she scream?”

“No. Just froze. It was weird.”
“For how long.”

“Maybe 10 seconds? Not too long, but long enough for it to be weird.”

“Then did she scream?”

“No. She just turned away and started talking to Travis’s mother about his nose picking or something.”

Which normally would have made me laugh, but I was still feeling too scared. And a little strange—like, could my picture have hurt Mrs. G’s feelings? Did she actually have feelings? I never found out for sure because she never punished me for the picture. In fact, she didn’t punish me for anything the rest of the year. She seemed to avoid looking at me.

Who knew a silly drawing could have such an effect on someone? Without meaning to, I had either discovered Mrs. G.’s weakness, or my secret strength, or both. I felt as surprised as Dorothy must have when she threw water on the Wicked Witch of the West. 

That afternoon, before I left school for the day, I tugged my Alice picture from its thumbtack in the front hall and slipped it into my backpack. Later at home, I sat on my bed and stared at that picture a long, long time, trying to feel whatever it was Mrs. G. felt when she saw it. I thought maybe I should rip it up, because I didn’t like to think of myself as a mean person. But, it was one of my best drawings ever, so I instead—I couldn’t help myself—I laid the picture on my desk, got out my really nice tin of unchewed colored pencils, and added a fussy White Rabbit wearing Sarah Elizabeth’s favorite green polka-dot cardigan and raising its paw—“Ooooh! Ooooh!” Then I admired the picture for about a minute before hiding it deep in the second drawer of my desk, so I wouldn’t have to think any more about how mean I was.

The next year, my teacher was named Mrs. Wacker, but she was as sweet as could be.  She played kickball at recess and looked a bit like Maid Marian. 

Ann Cwiklinski started writing short stories while raising four children in rural Pennsylvania. Her stories have won first prize at The Baltimore Review, CentralPA Magazine, and local arts events. She is proud to say that this is her fourth story to appear in Minerva Rising. Her stories have also appeared in pacificREVIEW, The Flexible Persona, Belletrist Magazine (Pushcart nominated), Crack the Spine, and Blackwater Press Short Story Collection 2021.