The Impostor Carla Cluckins

By Craig Francis Coates

Craig is this month’s winner of $552.50 for his ability to add tension and mystery to even the most common of birds.

Bio: Craig Francis Coates’ short crime and mystery fiction has been published by Tough, All Due Respect, Manzano Mountain Review, and The Dark City. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Derringer Award.

Without further ado, “The Imposter Carla Cluckins” by Craig Francis Coates.

Aiden Harcourt knew she was smarter than me. It didn’t matter I was her teacher. Aiden Harcourt knew there was not a single person—student or faculty—in all of Pine Woods Middle School who was half as bright as she was. And because the Pine Woods school district had a robust gifted and talented program, she spent every day between Kindergarten and seventh grade being told she was special, and smart, and full of potential. God wrote her a golden ticket, and He stuck it in her skull, and only an idiot would get in her way.
            Today, that idiot was me, standing beside her outside the school chicken coop.
            “That rooster is not Carla Cluckins,” Aiden said.
            “It’s a chicken. And yes,” I said, “it is.”
            “Carla Cluckins is this big.” Aiden held her hands a good foot apart. She was actually being too generous; Carla was only ten inches from beak to tail when she exploded.
            “That was a week ago,” I said. “Chickens grow.”
            “He has a wattle.”
            “I’m sorry, Aiden. You’re a smart kid, but you have failed to sex this chicken.”
            She turned bright red and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt. It was the first full week of April, and the students’ first day back since the end of spring break, but the days were still cold and gray.
            “There’s something else,” she said, not looking at me. She tugged the drawstrings of her hood so that it cinched up around her face. “I know that rooster.”
            I should never have agreed to come out to the coop. I should have said no as soon as she asked. But she didn’t say a thing during fifth period, when we came out to check our rain collectors. When she came back to class after the final bell, asking if she could check her rain level one more time, I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t figure it out until we walked out the door, and she marched straight past her rain collector and up to the Carla Cluckins. Or rather, the bird I stole to replace her.
            “What do you mean,” I asked finally, “that you know that chicken?”
            “I saw him at the Everest School of Academic Excellence,” she said. “I’m applying to go there for high school. And that rooster is definitely theirs.”
            “It’s not that easy to get in to that school,” I said.
            “It is if you’re smart.”
            “Well, you’re still completely wrong,” I said. “That is not their chicken.”
            It was, though. It absolutely was. Because Everest was the only place I knew I could get a chicken on short notice. The school has chickens, and goats, and I hear they’re thinking about getting a moderately-sized cow. They’ve practically got a working farm over there, run on child labor.
            It was bad luck that I stole a rooster. Bad luck, and a question of convenience, and certainly the vodka played a factor. And also the fact that they apparently have an aversion to normal chickens, chickens with white fluffy feathers and yellow beaks. The chickens at Everest were all colors and sizes and shapes, obscure breeds that students obsessed over the way other kids might study Pokémon. Look, mummy! A Belgian Mechelse kalkoenkop! Fucking ridiculous.
            That's why, when I stole the new Carla Cluckins, I just went for the plainest bird I could find. Carla Cluckins was the only surviving chicken from a set of six chicks, and the kids were pretty sensitive about it; I couldn't shoulder the blame for killing the last of them. At three in the morning, the possibility I might accidentally grab a rooster never occurred to me. I was pretty drunk by then and winding down a very bad night.
            “They’re looking for the thief, you know. There’s even a reward.”
            I looked at her. With her hood up, she was inscrutable. But I suspected that, if she wanted the reward, she wouldn’t bother to bring me here. She must be after something else.
            Aiden turned to me then, like she followed my thoughts. She pulled the drawstrings tighter.
            “I want an A.”
            I waited for the other shoe to drop, but there was no other demand.
            “That’s it? You want a good grade?”
            “I know you don’t have any money.”
            “You don’t have to blackmail me to get an A in science class.” I didn’t have to say why. We both knew she was smart.
            “I want an A for doing nothing,” she said. “You’re going to say I’m in independent study. I’m going to sit in the back of fifth period every day and use it as a study hall.”
            “And that’ll be it?” I asked. “You won’t drop hints to the other kids, or ask them if they notice anything different about Carla Cluckins, or post her picture on Facebook? You’re not going to draw any attention to me or the chicken whatsoever?”
            “Rooster,” she said. And then she stuck out her hand. It was oddly formal, but I shook it. “You’d better figure out eggs. People are going to wonder why it’s not laying.”
            “Maybe she’s shy,” I said, but Aiden had already turned to walk back toward the school. I stayed outside a while longer. It wasn’t hard to see how the boards on the coop didn’t match anymore, or how there were chunks of twisted chicken wire that had been peeled back and stapled down for no clear reason. The thing always had a “homemade” look, but now, even at a casual glance, you’d be generous to describe it as “hastily-cobbled.” It looked exactly as though somebody had run it over with a car and tried to patch it back together.
            It had been a very, very bad night.

*****

            I knew I wanted to be a teacher at sixteen. That’s when I had Mr. Tilden.
            Every kid has a favorite teacher, but if you’re going into the profession I think you’ve got to experience something special. A real-life Dead Poets Society, you know? That’s what Mr. Tilden was like. He was my junior-year English teacher, and sometimes the way he taught class — it was like being at a revival. You’d stumble out all keyed up, crying over Ma Joad or furious at Jay Gatsby, and you’d have to work to pull yourself together before your next class so you could plot a sine wave on your TI-84.
            Not every day was like that. Sometimes he’d just talk to us. He’d sit in his chair behind the wooden podium, and he’d get this faraway look staring at the back of the room, and he’d ask us a question. There was no wrong answer, but you had to be careful anyway, because he could pull things out of you that you’d never normally say in front of twenty-eight classmates.  Things like how you felt scared or alone or like you couldn’t be loved, or how your parents treated you like an adult in all the wrong ways. We weren’t just taught by Mr. Tilden. We loved him, all of us, because he told us his truths and because he listened to ours.
            That’s when I knew what I wanted in life. I wanted to be the one up there, sitting in front of the class. I wanted to tell them all the stuff I knew, share my hard-won lessons, teach them everything I could about how to live your life, and what matters most, and what real success actually looks like.
            I got a D in English because I couldn’t write papers for shit, but that didn’t matter. I was pretty good at science, and I enjoyed it, so when I got to college, that’s the track I took. Sure, book discussions might lend themselves a little more to Mr. Tilden’s style of teaching, but there was just as much magic in the universe. The birth of stars, the vastness of infinity, the miracle of life; I had plenty to work with.
            So I thought. But once I got in a classroom? Nobody—not one student—actually gave a shit.
            It wasn’t just the Gifted and Talented kids who liked to get smart if I misremembered some fact about the universe. It was everybody. Nothing I said got through to anyone. I’d get a couple minutes into class, get warmed up to introduce them to the hard truths of entropy, and Roland Luttrell would stick his hand up from the back and ask if it would be on the test. And I learned real fast that if I said no, they’d all check out. Heads down, phones out, papers footballed. I couldn’t do anything about it, either, because I was already falling short by Common Core standards. I couldn’t start knocking the mandatory questions off tests to make room for something like, In light of Earth’s destiny to be swallowed by her own sun, how does Man make meaning? Not with the state board of education on my back.
            Pine Woods was the only job I ever had where I didn’t wear a nametag, and it only took one semester to make me hate teaching.
            When I heard there was an opening at Everest, I cautiously applied. I made it through two rounds of interviews, and even sat in on a class, where I realized a teaching job there was everything I imagined: The kids cared. The teachers inspired. The school had a mission. I was desperate to be a part of it.
            So, yeah. I took it pretty hard when I didn’t get the job. I bought a bottle of vodka, and I felt sorry for myself, and at some point that night, I realized I’d forgotten to feed the last Pine Woods chicken. I meant to park next to the coop, not on top of it. Things only got worse from there.

*****

            For the first three weeks of our arrangement, Aiden’s plan worked perfectly. The other kids all knew she was smart, and not a single one of them asked why she worked at a table alone with her back to the class. It didn’t look like a privilege to them. It just looked like a smart kid getting stuck with more work.
            But after those three weeks, the countdown to testing began. The red lessons came out of the drawer. And that’s when it all went to shit.
            During part of the school year, I can teach what I like. Those lesson plans I keep in a blue folder. But when it comes time to teach to the test, I pull out the red folder, a sequence of lessons on the scientific method. The “final” for each class is a series of short presentations, a science fair, in which students take turns explaining their experiments from hypothesis to conclusion. Since it’s seventh grade, they can’t really do anything that interesting. They can’t test drugs on animals or run a fake prison. Mostly it’s boring stuff, like “Will bleach kill a gardenia? Hypothesis: Yes.” That kind of thing.
            For the first ten minutes of the first red lesson day, everything was fine. I showed the class a short video to explain the scientific method. At minute eleven, I assigned them all small groups. At minute twelve, Tyson Whittaker’s hand shot up.
            “No bathroom breaks right now,” I said. “Class just started.”
            “Why doesn’t Aiden get a group?” Tyson asked.
            “Aiden’s doing independent study.”
            “Why’s she get to do that?”
            “Because she’s gifted.”
            “I’m gifted,” Tyson said. He wasn’t lying. He came from the same G&T cohort Aiden did.
            “This is test prep,” I said. “You need it for the state exam.”
            “So does she.”
            About this time, I realized that the entire class was listening. Tyson had challenged their assumption that Aiden was sequestered for being smart. Now they were realizing there might be some injustice afoot, that Aiden might be getting away with something.
            “Aiden’s doing her own experiment,” I said. “The whole thing, by herself. If you don’t want to work with a group, you’re welcome to do one all by yourself, too.”
            The mood shifted. The classroom was back on my side again. All except Tyson.
            “So, what, she’s going to present all on her own?” he asked.
            “Obviously.”
            “She’s the quietest kid in class!”
            “Why don’t you mind your own business? Unless everyone wants to work on their own?”
            “Shut the fuck up, Tyson,” somebody hissed. I pretended not to hear, studying the loose papers on my desk.
            “Okay,” I said loudly. “If nobody has anything else…?”
            They didn’t. The lesson resumed.

*****

            Aiden confronted me after school.
            “I’m not doing a presentation.”
            “What was I supposed to tell them?”
            “I don’t know,” she said. “But if you make me do the presentation, I’m going to tell everyone about the rooster you stole.”
            “Nobody’s going to remember. It’ll take us three days to get through all those presentations. Trust me, they won’t be clamoring to hear from you. We’ll do the last ones on Friday, and they’ll forget over the weekend.” She didn’t look convinced, so I forced myself to smile. “Hey, I’ve been doing this for a while. I know how kids think.”
            “I want this time to study.” She growled the words to sound tough, but it came off like she had a sinus infection. “I need it.”
            She grabbed the keyboard off my desk and started digging her fingers into the keys.
            “Jesus, take it easy. What are you trying to do with that, break it? Give that to me.”
            She pulled loose a handful of the keys and threw them across the room before dropping the keyboard on the ground.
            “Don’t mess with me,” she said. Her growl turned into a cough.
            As soon as she left, I went out to the coop. I wondered if I was pushing Aiden too far. What was I doing, anyway, negotiating with a seventh grader? The way you win a hostage situation is that you shoot the hostage. That way nobody’s got anything over you.
            I went inside the coop with Carla Cluckins. I could just leave the gate open. Maybe the bird would wander out, or a fox would wander in. But if the bird did wander out, and some dimwitted Good Samaritan found it before a predator did, would they take it to Pine Woods, or return it to Everest? What if somebody posted a picture online and people figured out that our bird was the same one as Everest’s?
            But I couldn't just kill it myself. That would be too obvious. Unless—and I knew this was a crazy idea, but I was just brainstorming, and there are no bad ideas in brainstorming—unless I bit through the bird’s neck myself so it would look like the work of a fox.
            I picked up the chicken. How hard could it be? I was a human being, the top of the food chain. I was made for this, baby! I took a deep breath and opened my mouth. In the distance, a car door slammed, and I glanced back. That’s when I saw it: The security camera mounted on the side of the school. It was pointed straight at the coop.
            I set Carla Cluckins back down.

*****

            Harry Hudlow was the principal of Pine Woods Middle School, and the man who hired me. He was forty-nine years old and had a master’s degree in school administration, but he’d never been a teacher. So far as I could tell, what qualified Mr. Hudlow to be the principal was the fact that he was our principal. But qualification concerns were not why I was in his office.
            “When did we get security cameras?” I asked.
            “We’ve had them for years,” he said. “Not very observant, are you?”
            His office assistant snickered. Every year, there was a new snotnose employed by the front office to make copies or run out hall passes. I didn’t recognize the kid in Mr. Hudlow’s office today, but I knew the type of bully-bait that took the job. Send this kid to Soviet Russia and he’d sell out his parents to Stalin.
            “I just noticed the one watching the chicken,” I went on. “I wondered if it caught anything. I thought I saw some fox tracks out there.”
            “Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Hudlow said. “Jesus, what do you think, I watch this stuff for fun?”
            “But it is recording.”
            “Yes,” he said slowly. “It’s a video camera.”
            “So if something happened…”
            “We’d catch it.” He crossed his arms and rested them on the top of his belly. “Roland Luttrell’s dad paid for that. Said his son had been traumatized by the number of dead chickens this school has produced. I meant to tell you, but …” He searched for the right choice of words. “I didn’t. It was a pretty good donation, actually. School security funds. We got the resource officer a new gun.” He pointed his finger at me, cocked his thumb, and pretended to shoot me in the gut. Then Mr. Hudlow shot his office assistant. The boy played along—he jumped up, spun around screaming, then collapsed on the couch.
            “Safety school,” Mr. Hudlow said.

*****

            Two weeks into the red lesson plans, everyone was required to present a short, extemporaneous update on their experiments. It caught me completely off guard. Students should be able to state clearly their hypothesis, a brief overview of the data collected so far, and their anticipated results. 30 min. Did I write that? I had to scrub it, for Aiden’s sake, but thirty minutes was an enormous gulf of time to fill. I called the media center.
            “I need a TV cart and a video for fifth period.”
            “What video?”
            “I don’t care. Anything with Bill Nye.”
            “Okay, let me check,” the librarian said. I stared at the microwave burrito on my desk, trying to get back my appetite. “All our carts are checked out.”
            “What?”
            “All our carts are checked out,” she repeated. “After lunch is a pretty popular time for videos.”
            “Give me some options. What do you have?”
            “We don’t have a TV, but we do have Bill Nye at the Earth’s Core. Do you want it?”
            “What the fuck am I supposed to watch it on?”
            “You could see if it’s on YouTube.”
            I hung up. The librarian was an idiot, but that wasn’t a bad idea. The bell rang. I was still looking online as the kids filtered in, and I called Aiden to my desk.
            “Can you ad-lib something about your experiment?” I asked. “Like if you had to present?”
            “I don’t have an experiment.”
            “Hence the ‘ad-lib,’ Gifted. You might have to make something up if I can’t find a good video.”
            She stepped around my desk and pushed me away from the computer. I half-expected her to break my keyboard again.
            “What are you looking for?” she asked.
            “Something about science.”
            Aiden glanced back at me, just long enough to make sure I registered the disgust on her face, and about two seconds later, she had the PBS Science Kids channel pulled up. Each video was about three minutes long.
            “Will these work?”
            “We’ll have to watch ten of them.”
            “So, yes?”
            “Sure,” I said.
            The second bell rang. I filled the class in on the plan and then put on the videos. As soon as I did, half the class put their heads down to nap, which was fine by me. The goal was to run out the clock for Aiden.
            Everything was going fine, and I was just about to start a video on magma when my door opened. I coughed, trying to wake up the nappers, but there wasn’t time to get their attention. I just hoped my visitor wasn’t Mr. Hudlow or one of his stool pigeon lackeys.

            It wasn’t. It was someone much worse.

*****

            Aiden's mother demanded an explanation.    

            “My daughter tells me you're not assigning her homework.”
            We stood in front of the science hall bulletin board, the one each classroom gets to decorate for a month. Right now it was Mr. Murphy’s turn, and each of his kids had written a poem about their favorite planet. Mars and Jupiter were over-represented, but at least one kid had managed to slip in a poem about Uranus.
            “That’s right,” I said, thinking quickly. “She’s doing independent study.”
            “And what’s the rubric for that?”
            “It’s kind of a pass/fail thing. She’s on track for an A,” I added.
            I tried to guess what, specifically, Aiden told her mother. Mrs. Harcourt wasn’t the kind to let things slide. She would have grilled Aiden for hours, and eventually Aiden would cough up some half-convincing lie, and she was smart enough that it would be pretty good. I just had no idea what that lie was.
            “I’d like to see the criteria she’s being graded against,” Mrs. Harcourt said.
            “Ah,” I said. “It might be easier to show you.”
            I stuck my head in the door and told the kids to hang tight. I ignored the moans coming from my computer speakers, which did not sound like publicly-funded content about the solar system. Mrs. Harcourt walked briskly beside me as I led her through the double doors at the end of the hall, down the path along the soccer field, and out to the coop. The impostor Carla Cluckins strutted toward us, expecting feed, but we'd come empty-handed.
            “Aiden is raising this chicken,” I said. “She feeds it, she waters it, she cleans up the shit. And she’s done a great, great job.”
            “That,” Mrs. Harcourt said, “is a rooster.”
            I squinted at the bird.
            “Huh.”
            Mrs. Harcourt knelt down, her fingers hooking around the chicken wire for balance. Carla Cluckins came so close that its vicious little beak could have gouged holes in her knuckles, but instead, it only regarded her curiously. Something passed between them, and my instincts told me I’d better interrupt. I clapped, loudly, and scared away the bird.
            “Sorry,” I said. “It got that look in its eye. It was going to peck you.”
            “That’s the missing rooster from Everest,” Mrs. Harcourt said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even an accusation. She was just stating a fact.
            “Is it?” I whispered.
            “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why is it here?”
            “It’s complicated,” I said, “but, the truth is, Aiden stole it.”
            Mrs. Harcourt’s mouth fell open. “Excuse me?”
            “She came to me with the chicken,” I said, the lie uncapped and pouring out. “I’m not sure why she stole it, but she did, and she said if the principal at Everest found out he wouldn’t let her into his school. So I said, hey, we’ve got a chicken coop, and it’s not like Mr. Hudlow’s the brightest bulb. Why don’t we just keep him here until we figure something out?”
            “Oh my god.” Mrs. Harcourt’s face told me she understood the full gravity of her daughter’s crime. This one impulsive act could undermine everything they were working toward. “Oh, Aiden.”
            “She seems stressed,” I said. “That’s why I’ve been so easy on her lately. What are grades, really, compared to a kid’s mental health? We both know how smart she is. And we both know she should be at Everest, right?”
            Mrs. Harcourt nodded, but said, “It’s too dangerous to keep that bird here. If I recognize it, someone else will.”
            “Absolutely agree,” I said. “But don’t you worry. I have a plan.”

****