Gwendy's Button Box

4

Castle Rock Middle turns out to be okay. Gwendy reconnects with her old friends and makes some new ones. She notices some of the boys eyeing her, which is okay because none of them is Frankie Stone and none of them call her Goodyear. Thanks to the Suicide Stairs, that nickname has been laid to rest. For her birthday in October, she gets a poster of Robby Benson, a little TV for her room (oh God, the joy) and lessons on how to change her own bed (not joyful but not bad). She makes the soccer team and the girls’ track team, where she quickly becomes a standout.

The chocolate treats continue to come, no two ever the same, the detail always amazing. Every week or two there’s also a silver dollar, always dated 1891. Her fingers linger longer and longer on the red button, and sometimes she hears herself whispering, “Whatever you want, whatever you want.”

Miss Chiles, Gwendy’s seventh grade history teacher, is young and pretty and dedicated to making her classes as interesting as possible. Sometimes her efforts are lame, but every once in a while they succeed splendidly. Just before the Christmas vacation, she announces that their first class in the new year will be Curiosity Day. Each pupil is to think of one historical thing they wonder about, and Miss Chiles will try to satisfy their curiosity. If she cannot, she’ll throw the question to the class, for discussion and speculation.

“Just no questions about the sex lives of the presidents,” she says, which makes the boys roar with laughter and the girls giggle hysterically.

When the day comes, the questions cover a wide range. Frankie Stone wants to know if the Aztecs really ate human hearts, and Billy Day wants to know who made the statues on Easter Island, but most of the questions on Curiosity Day in January of 1975 are what-ifs. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if George Washington had died of, like, starvation or frostbite at Valley Forge? What if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub when he was a baby?

When Gwendy’s turn comes, she is prepared, but still a tiny bit nervous. “I don’t know if this actually fits the assignment or not,” she says, “but I think it might at least have historical… um…”

“Historical implications?” Miss Chiles asks.

“Yes! That!”

“Fine. Lay it on us.”

“What if you had a button, a special magic button, and if you pushed it, you could kill somebody, or maybe just make them disappear, or blow up any place you were thinking of? What person would you make disappear, or what place would you blow up?”

A respectful silence falls as the class considers this wonderfully bloodthirsty concept, but Miss Chiles is frowning. “As a rule,” she says, “erasing people from the world, either by murder or disappearance, is a very bad idea. So is blowing up any place.”

Nancy Riordan says, “What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Are you saying blowing them up was bad?”

Miss Chiles looks taken aback. “No, not exactly,” she says, “but think of all the innocent civilians that were killed when we bombed those cities. The women and children. The babies. And the radiation afterward! That killed even more.”

“I get that,” Joey Lawrence says, “but my grampa fought the Japs in the war, he was on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and he said lots of the guys he fought with died. He said it was a miracle he didn’t die. Grampy says dropping those bombs kept us from having to invade Japan, and we might have lost a million men if we had to do that.”

The idea of killing someone (or making them disappear) has kind of gotten lost, but that’s okay with Gwendy. She’s listening, rapt.

“That’s a very good point,” Miss Chiles says. “Class, what do you think? Would you destroy a place if you could, in spite of the loss of civilian life? And if so, which place, and why?”

They talk about it for the rest of the class. Hanoi, says Henry Dussault. Knock out that guy Ho Chi Minh and end the stupid Vietnam War once and for all. Many agree with this. Ginny Brooks thinks it would be just grand if Russia could be obliterated. Mindy Ellerton is for eradicating China, because her dad says the Chinese are willing to start a nuclear war because they have so many people. Frankie Stone suggests getting rid of the American ghettos, where “those black people are making dope and killing cops.”

After school, while Gwendy is getting her Huffy out of the bike rack, Miss Chiles comes over to her, smiling. “I just wanted to thank you for your question,” she says. “I was a little shocked by it to begin with, but that turned out to be one of the best classes we’ve had this year. I believe everybody participated but you, which is strange, since you posed the question in the first place. Is there a place you would blow up, if you had that power? Or someone you’d… er… get rid of?”

Gwendy smiles back. “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s why I asked the question.”

“Good thing there isn’t really a button like that,” Miss Chiles says.

“But there is,” Gwendy says. “Nixon has one. So does Brezhnev. Some other people, too.”

Having given Miss Chiles this lesson—not in history, but in current events—Gwendy rides away on a bike that is rapidly becoming too small for her.