Detention              by John Cusick                 Mar 2003

	The detention room was all too familiar to Caroline. She knew its dimensions (twenty four 
ceiling tiles by thirty six ceiling tiles), she knew its contents (two boxes of chalk, three erasures, 
thirteen desks, twelve posters, etc…), and she knew its population. Today, like most Tuesday afternoons, 
its population consisted of herself, and the terrible, awful, irredeemable Van Meyer.
	"Hello Caroline," Mr. Meyer said when he saw her standing in the doorway. "You may come in now."
	This was her thirty-first detention that year. Mr. Meyer hadn’t kept track, but Caroline had. She had 
counted, tabulated and extrapolated every second she had spent within that room’s four teal walls. One thousand, 
eight hundred and sixty minutes of her life had been ticked away like beads on the school’s faded abacus. 
	Dwindled.
	She was seven.
	Caroline, according to Mr. Meyer and people like him, was "troubled," at times "difficult" and in the smokey 
intimacy of the teacher’s lounge "stupid." Meyer had no taste for Carline Gerber and had made it his personal mission in 
life to make sure she paid for every last infraction. Caroline Gerber was a trouble maker, a detractor, and needed to be 
watched like a hawk.
	Today she was in detention for forgetting to wear the school’s mandated knee socks. The transgression had 
occurred the previous Monday, the twenty-fifth of October. Today was Tuesday. Tuesday was detention day.
	Among her other breaches of school code, both Mr. Meyer and Caroline could have easily listed the most infamous: 
there was the time she spilled macaroni on the principals lap, the time she mistook gym class for art class and arrived in the 
gymnasium clad in a paint spattered smock, and of course the day she raised her hand during an academic assembly and 
asked why all the history books were out of date. These major assaults to good behavior, along with numerous less memorable 
contraventions, had placed Miss Gerber under the supervision of Mr. Meyer just about every Tuesday afternoon for the past 
year. She held the record at St. Anne’s Elementary for the most detentions ever served by a girl.
	"I didn’t mean it. It was an accident," she said to Mr. Meyer as she entered the muted colors of the detention room. 
Regardless of her crime, this was always Caroline’s defense.
	"I forgot."
	"It just slipped."
	"It was an accident."
	Well, those flimsy excuses simply didn’t hold water with Van Meyer.
	"Take a seat, Caroline," he said.
	Caroline carefully wandered to the center of the classroom, stumbling twice on untied shoe laces, yet another school 
code no-no that for the moment went unchecked. Taking the farthest acceptable seat (the back row was forbidden), Caroline 
placed her books under the chair and sat facing Mr. Meyer. They were the only two people in the room.
	Mr. Meyer stood. The clock above his head read three o’clock. Until it read four, Caroline Gerber was at his mercy.
	"Roll call," Mr. Meyer said to the all but empty room. "Caroline Gerber?"
	"Here," her small voice replied.
	"Very good," Meyer nodded, and proceeded with his customary speech, "You have one hour. No talking, no gum 
chewing, no sleeping, no noise making, no reading, no drawing on the desks, no writing, no going to the bathroom unless it’s 
an emergency," Carline mouthed the last part, "Now sit quietly and think about what you’ve done."
	In the one hundred, eleven-thousand, six-hundred seconds Carline had spent in that room, she had found numerous 
ways to entertain herself not forbidden by Mr. Meyer’s standard speal. Her favorite though, by far, was rearranging the words 
of the posters on the walls to make new and interesting sentences.
	Immediately to her left was one of those smarmy, enthusiastic posters. It depicted a cat, a more or less happy but 
precarious cat, dangling from a piece of clothes line. The caption read: Hang in There!
	Caroline had had some great fun with this caption.
	Hang in there, rearranged also said "ninth her age", "thin hen gear", "heat her ginn", and Caroline’s personal 
favorite, "high teen ran."
	Over the great black chalk board, just to the left of Meyer’s pointed head, was a banner which read, "Reading is 
Fundamental." She hadn’t had as much success with this one.
	Reading is Fundamental
	Freudianism Dangle Ant
	That was all she had.
	"Miss Gerber," Meyer snapped, "you will face forward during detention!"
	"Sorry," Caroline whispered. Detention was bad enough, but receiving an extra detention for failing to be good in 
regular detention was the worst.
	"Miss Gerber, do not test me."
	Do not test me, she thought.
	Tom dents toe.
	Men do test to.
	That one made her smile, but she had to stifle it.
	Caroline thought about the future. Who she might marry. Where she might end up. San Francisco? Chicago? 
Hollywood? New York City?
	She wondered where Mr. Meyer would end up. Probably dead. Dead from a heart attack, the old coot.
	Caroline looked at the clock. Fifty-five minutes, forty-seven seconds to go.
   Caroline sighed, and began to count the ceiling tiles for the thirty-first time that year.

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