Free The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman by Ben H. Winters

again and got up to go to the bathroom.)
    “What do you think? ” said Lisa Deckter, rhythm guitar.
    “The Careless Errors,” Bethesda repeated, and then, after a pause: “Huh. That’s, like—that’s perfect.” The Careless Errors it was.
    At last the other bands had their names as well. The members of Band Number Two agreed that Hayley would reach into her backpack, and they would name themselves for whatever she pulled out—and so Half-Eaten Almond Joy was born.
    Band Number One gave up and decided to just call themselves Band Number One.
    When the bell rang, the students of Ms. Finkleman’s sixth-period Music Fundamentals streamed out, happily chattering about band names and rock songs and who was playing what and how totally, ridiculously fun this whole thing was going to be. “Tomorrow, children,” Ms. Finkleman called after them. “Tomorrow our preparations for this performance shall begin in earnest.”
    Tenny was the last one at the door. “Hey, maybe don’t say stuff like ‘shall begin in earnest,’” he said quietly. “It doesn’t sound very, you know, very rock.”
    She gave a little nod, and he shut the door behind him.Ms. Finkleman’s gaze fell to her desk and her teacher’s edition of
Greensleeves and Other Traditional English Folk Ballads.
She looked sadly at the tattered green volume for a second, sighed, and slipped it into the top drawer.

13

GOPHERS
    In the
cafeteria on Wednesday, Todd Spolin reached across Natasha Belinsky to get to Pamela Preston’s half-eaten lunch, which consisted of homemade chicken salad on sprouted grain bread, four carrots, Greek yogurt, and a fun pack of M&M’s for a treat.
    “Pammers? You gonna eat this?”
    “What? No. You can have it.”
    “Sweetness.”
    Todd happily tore open the bag of M&M’s and smooshed them into the yogurt. Pamela wasn’t hungry. Not after this morning, and her Special Project, which had been
significantly
less than perfect. She spoke for four and a half minutes about the mysterious rock formations ringing the school’s athletic field, showed numerous close-up photographs neatly displayed on pink poster board, and paused dramatically before revealing herconclusion about the alien invasion force.
    It wasn’t until she was halfway through her first bow that she noticed no one was clapping. And that Mr. Melville, instead of beaming and pronouncing hers a Special Project of extreme ingenuity and penetrating insight, was …
laughing!
He was laughing a low, throaty laugh that caused his sizable gut to slowly roll up and down beneath his crossed arms. And when a teacher begins to laugh, especially a teacher as serious and self-contained and unsmiling as Mr. Melville, his students naturally begin to laugh as well.
    Laughing.
    At her!
    “What? ” Pamela demanded, her note cards trembling in her hand.
    “Alas, Ms. Preston, if you had checked the recent archives of our local newspaper, you might have discovered the truth, which is a tad more … picayune.”
    “Picayune?” Pamela didn’t know what the word meant, but she didn’t like where this was heading.
    “Gophers, my dear. The rock rings were caused by gophers, and I believe they’ve already been taken care of. Not so much a mystery of the unknown as an inconvenient rodent infestation.”
    “But—I—Mr. Melville—”
    “All right. Who’s the next victim?”
    “Stupid gophers,” Pamela grumbled now, furiously drumming her fingers on the cafeteria table.
    “You never could have known, Pammy,” Natasha offered.
    “That’s true,” Pamela said, tilting her head reflectively.
    “Acphhhly—” Todd interjected, talking through a thick mouthful of Pamela’s chicken salad.
    “What?”
    “I said, actually—I knew. That it was gophers.”
“What?”
    “My dad is an exterminator, remember? He was the one they called in to smoke out the little buggers.”
    Pamela narrowed her eyes at Todd and grabbed her lunch back. “For god’s sake, Todd, why didn’t you