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been doing pretty steadily since last week when Renee told him she was considering following Anton to the West Coast. This morning his guts had finally given up on him. He came back into the classroom after a good twenty minutes away and found his students acting like subjects of some highly irresponsible hormone experiment. Kids were screaming at one another, climbing over desks, throwing wads of paper, doing strange things to one another’s hair, and, most irritatingly, using some kind of orange-and-black Halloween clicker, which made a terrible racket to go with the constant hammering outside.
    “Thanks for warming them up for me.” David grimaced at his best friend, Henry Rosenthal, who was supposed to be watching the class and chumming him on today’s afterschool field trip to the Metropolitan Museum.
    “It was nothing,” said Henry. “Just remember: Hendrix once opened for the Monkees.”
    Henry, with his long gray hair and black radical-chic turtleneck, was not into crowd control. He’d been involved with the Free Speech movement and alternative education programs of the sixties, but not too involved, you understand. He preferred talking fine wine to politics.
    “All right, everyone, settle down and put the clickers away.” David stepped past him. “And the rest of you. If you’re not going to let me talk, can you at least keep your voices down so I can sleep up here?”
    The day had already been a blizzard of demands and responsibilities. Parents showing up unannounced, wanting to know why their kids were doing so badly; papers for his second-period freshmen needing to be graded; Xerox machines breaking down; Shooteema Edwards, in tenth grade, finding out her mother had inoperable brain cancer. And of course, it didn’t help that there was a TV news crew outside, doing a segment about the school’s deplorable condition.
    From out of the rabble, Seniqua Rollins raised her hand. A big, tough girl with cornrowed hair and tight jeans, who’d been suspended last year for smashing another girl’s head into a locker, she was rumored to be the main squeeze of a jailed gang leader called King Shit, or something like that, and today she was sporting a tight pink T-shirt that said I’M UP AND DRESSED, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT FROM ME ? and a navy Tommy Hilfiger jacket.
    “Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Fitz, what da dilly?” she said in a voice louder than the subway. “I got a question for y’all.”
    “What is it?”
    “Why you wasting our time taking us on a field trip anyhow? It’s late, man. You supposed to let us out.”
    A little ripple of laughter went through the class, the kids titillated by the way she was challenging him. David slapped his attendance book against the side of his leg.
    “I mean, you’re always saying we shouldn’t just accept things,” Seniqua went on, getting high on the attention. “So what’s up with that shit? I rather just like go home, chill, and read my girl Alice Walker.”
    Several rebel clickers seconded her dissent.
    “Well,” said David, taking a deep breath and trying to pull himself together for the occasion. “Number one, it’s the only time we could fit it in. And number two, we’re going to be studying the roots of our subject. Egyptians. Sumerians. Even our buddies, the Greeks. Check it out. Achilles, the first great hero of Western literature, refused to leave his tent to fight in the Trojan War because his general stole his mistress. Spitefulness, pride, jealousy. Can you relate?”
    “No,” said Seniqua, authoritative and boisterous.
    “Really?”
    David noticed she was sitting unusually close to Amal Lincoln, a backup forward on the basketball team and reputedly the worst amateur rapper in Brooklyn. What would King Shit make of that little alliance if he ever got out? He’d probably fly into an Achillean rage, tie Amal’s skinny ass to the rear bumper of a LeBaron, and drag him around the walls of the school three times.
    “I ain’t with it,” said