“We could make it two more reports and stay after the last bell,” she warned.
The class quickly quieted.
Professor Trout nodded and turned to her desk. One finger traced a list of names and moved to the next victim in line to present an oral report. Jake found it amusing to watch her thin shoulders pull up closer to her ears. He knew whose name was next in line alphabetically, but it had somehow caught the teacher by surprise.
She straightened with a soured twist to her lips. “It seems we will hear next from Jacob Ransom.”
A new round of groans rose. The teacher did not even bother quieting them down. She plainly regretted her decision to squeeze in one more report before the holiday break. But after almost a year in her class, Jake knew Professor Agnes Trout was a stickler for order and rules. She cared more about the memorization of dates and names than any real understanding of the flow of history. So once committed to her course of action, she had no choice but to wave him to the front of the class.
Jake left his books and notes behind. He had his oral report set to memory. Empty-handed, crossing toward the blackboard, he felt the class’s eyes on him. Even though he had skipped a grade last year, he was still the second tallest boy in his class. Unfortunately it wasn’t always a good thing to stand out in a crowd, especially in middle school, especially after skipping a grade. Still, Jake kept his shoulders straight as he crossed to the board. He ignored the eyes staring at him. Not one to set fashion trends, Jake wore what he found first that morning (clean or not). He ended up with scuffed jeans, a tattered pair of high-top sneakers, a faded green polo shirt, and of course the mandatory navy school jacket with the school’s insignia embroidered in gold on the breast pocket. Even his sandy blond hair failed to match the current razored trend. Instead it hung lanky over his forehead.
Like his father’s had been.
Or at least it matched the last picture Jake had of the senior Ransom, now gone three years, vanished into the Central American jungle. Jake still carried that photograph, taped to the inside of his notebook. It showed his parents, Richard and Penelope Ransom, smiling with goofy happiness, dressed in khaki safari outfits, holding up a Mayan glyph stone. The photo’s edges were still blackened and curled from the fire that burned through their hilltop camp.
Taped below it was a scrap of parcel paper. On it, written in his father’s handwriting, was Jake’s name along with the family address for their estate here in North Hampshire, Connecticut. The package had arrived six weeks after the bandits had attacked his parents’ camp.
That had been three years ago.
It was the last and only contact from his folks.
Jake fingered the thin cord around his neck as he reached the front of the class. Through his cotton shirt, he felt the small object that hung from the cord and rested flat against his chest. A last gift from his parents. Its reassuring touch helped center him.
To the side, the teacher cleared her throat. “Class, Mr. Ransom will be teaching us…well…I mean to say his oral report will be on…”
“My report,” he said, cutting her off, “is on Mayan astronomical techniques in relation to the precession of the equinoxes.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Equinoxes. Very interesting, Mr. Ransom.” The teacher nodded, perhaps a bit too vigorously.
Jake suspected Professor Agnes Trout didn’t fully understand what the report was about. She backed toward her desk, as if fearful he might ask her a question. Like everyone else, she must have had heard the story of Mr. Rushbein, the geometry teacher. How after Jake had disproved one of the teacher’s theorems in front of his whole class, he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Now all the teachers at Middleton Prep looked at Jake with a glint of worry. Who would be next?
Jake picked up a piece of chalk and wrote some calculations on the board. “Today I’ll be showing how the Maya were able to predict such events as the solar eclipses, like the one that will occur next Tuesday—”
A balled-up piece of paper struck the board near his hand and caused the piece of chalk in his fingers to snap with a loud squeak on the board.
“Were they able to predict that?”
Jake knew the voice. Craig Brask. A linebacker for the junior varsity football team. While Jake had skipped a grade, Craig had been held back. Ever since, Jake had become the target for the beefy troglodyte.
“Mr. Brask!” Professor Trout declared. “I’ll have no more of your shenanigans in my classroom. Mr. Ransom listened to your report with respect.”
With respect? Craig’s report had been on Custer’s Last Stand. He even got the ending wrong: The injuns got whooped good!
As the few snickers finally died down, Jake took two steadying breaths and prepared to resume his report. In preparing for his report, Jake had delved deeply into how the Maya were skilled astronomers, how they understood the grand movement of the cosmos. Such research made him feel closer to his parents. It had been their life’s work.
But now, standing at the chalkboard, Jake sensed the boredom of the class behind him. With a small shake of his head, he picked up the eraser and wiped away the calculations he had already written. That wasn’t what the class wanted to hear. He turned to face them, cleared his throat, and spoke boldly.
“It is well known that the Maya practiced ritual human sacrifice. They even cut out their victims’ hearts—and ate them.”
The sudden change in topic shocked away the bored looks of the class.
“That’s so sick,” Sally Van Horn said from the front row, but she sat straighter in her chair.
Jake drew an outline of a human body on the chalkboard and went into great detail about the method of ritual sacrifice: from types of knives used in the slaughter to the way the blood was collected from the altar in special bowls. By the time the bell rang, no one moved. One student even held up his hand and called out, “How many people did they kill?”
Before Jake could answer, Professor Trout waved him to stop. “Yes, very interesting, Mr. Ransom. But I think that’s enough for today.” She looked a little green, possibly after Jake’s description of how the Maya used bones and intestines to predict the weather.
Jake hid a small smile as he dusted the chalk from his hands and returned to his desk. A few students clapped at the end of his report, but as usual, he was mostly ignored. He watched the others leave, clutched in groups of two or three, laughing, joking, smiling.
New to the class, Jake hadn’t made any real friends. And he was okay with that. His life was full enough. Determined to follow in his parents’ footsteps, he had to prepare himself—mind and body—for that goal.