The Red Pen

Mathieu

She is dead now, that Ms. Beasley who wielded the nastiest red pen this side of the Atlantic. I saw with my own eyes the drops of blood punctuating the white tile floor. I heard with my own ears the frantic call for help. I listened as the breathing became still, due to the poison of my dart.

Generations of upper-year science students had to suffer the indignity of Beasley’s red pen as she reigned supreme in her laboratory. I was a student, a damn good one too. I had to take her lab class—I needed that course for my degree, and I had to do well, to carry the scholarship into its final year.

Classmates had warned me away from Battle-Axe; how I had scoffed! I specialized in cracking the hard-to-please professors, those cynics who’d given up on pedagogy. I studied hard; I worked hard; I showed my ardent passion for their pet area of research. And finally, if they did not reward my efforts, I would play my trump card: I was an international student fleeing a war-torn country. (In truth, my daddy has impeccable connections with the current regime and our family has lived abroad, comfortably, for years.)

But none of these gambits worked on the Battle-Axe.

It is all because of that horrible red pen.

Fridays, how I grew to hate Fridays! Our lab reports were due at 6 PM, and we would slide our humble lab reports under her door.

Battle-Axe Beasley would then lock herself in her office with that razor-nibbed red pen and twenty reports spread on her big ThermoRock laboratory table and carve away at the reports, spraying a bloodbath until late in the evening.

Finally, she would emerge with that pen held high like a war-flag in battle, and post the pathetic list of results: B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s. Rumor has it the red pen once disgorged an A, but the recipient went insane before completing the semester.

Each week’s report was basically the same as the one before: solving the chemical composition of an unknown inorganic mixture. Every Monday one vial of white powder was randomly assigned to each student to carry out one analysis after another in Beasley’s lab. “Old style, wet-bench chemistry. Just like Michael Faraday,” the Battle-Axe said. We had to report what was in the sample, an amount by percentage weight, for example, “48 percent vanadium and 52 percent oxygen.” Heaven help you if there was a trace of molybdenum that you missed—the red pen of Battle-Axe Beasley would slice through the sloppiness of your report! You might have stayed twice as long, repeated every titration thrice over, but the red pen would scrawl “Only two out of three elements identified” and give you a D for your efforts.

At the beginning, I fought back. I was an excellent student, and I knew it. Did I not have a list of scholarships and awards as long as my arm to prove it? Did she not see that I was working as hard as a team of mules? Did she realize how greatly her mark for me differed from the estimation of her colleagues who’d had the pleasure of teaching me? Throughout it all, she presided over the laboratory, the scene of my subjugation, and brandished the red pen, that instrument of my torture.

The more I argued, the more tightly she clenched that pen.

I grew to hate the sight of that pen; I hated too the sight of her pale old-ladyish hand with the spidery web of wrinkles wrapped around it. Her fingers were blotchy, white and pink, and got blotchier with each assertion I made. I did not like to see how tightly she held that pen. I had not even squeezed so tightly the handbrakes of my childhood scooter as it flew along the back roads of home.

My eyes, fixed first on the wilted pages of my report, then shifted to the red pen and there they stayed, hypnotized by the straightness and the redness and the pen-ness of that straight red pen.

I often wondered if Beasley knew its power. She always carried the red pen with her, if not in her hand—where it acted like a sergeant’s bully-stick as she moved from one student’s lab station to another—then firmly clipped to the pocket of the starched white lab-coat that hid her dry and shriveled heart.

One time I passed her in the hallway in that castle where the Dean of Science has his well-appointed office. I had gone there to discuss the endangered status of my scholarship. I assured the Dean that my flagging grade in Analysis of Inorganic Compounds was but a temporary setback. I was striding back to my rooms, confident in my ability to rise to a challenge, when I saw Battle-Axe Beasley.

She recognized me first. She gave a brusque nod and clapped her right hand to her chest. For anyone else, it would be a gesture of astonishment. For the Battle-Axe, I am sure she was reaching for the red pen.

As if that could protect her.

Mary-Anne Beasley

He is dead now, that arrogant young man with the difficult name. Mathieu.

Yes, I had a passing acquaintance with the deceased. “Passing”: aha, I see you caught that pun. I did teach him, yes. Never flunked him. He worked tremendously hard, he did, but alas he was burdened by a magnified sense of entitlement. Just because he breezed through the coursework of every other Tom, Dick and Professor Harry, that did not mean he would succeed with me.

At first, I’m sure he thought I “had it in” for him. Perhaps he thought I begrudged him his international status. No, I welcome excellence from all nations.

I have neither favorites nor villains. The grades I give are strictly objective. I have a very simple system. The numbers don’t lie. They don’t allow personal bias to contaminate the evaluation. In my lab, the grade depends entirely on the accuracy of the student’s analysis. It’s all inorganic compounds, like cobalt chloride and calcium persulfate. And mixtures thereof. As the students’ analytical skills improve over the semester, I assign more difficult mixtures.

That young man gave me a hard time for a while. Some students do, but then, do you know what? The worm grows to love the plough. I suspect he even complained to the Dean of Science.

I tell you, it’s not comfortable being on the outs with everyone else in the faculty, especially when they all have doctorates and I only have a master’s degree.

I worked in forensic labs for decades. I helped crack some devilish cases before I ascended the ivory tower. Most of the faculty here have gone directly from being students to grad students to professors, with scarcely any experience outside academe.

One of my superiors, a top-notch detective, called me into his office shortly before I left. “Mary-Anne,” he said, “you must never forget the value of what you are doing. The quality of our future forensics experts depends on the quality of instruction you give them in basic chemistry. In the police force, we picture ourselves forming a thin blue line, separating good from bad. As an educator, you will form the thin red line, the line separating ignorance from excellence.”

Then he handed me a black oblong box. I snapped it open, and there it lay, sleek and shining in its bed of velvet. A beautiful red pen! I scarcely dared to pick it up. But its shiny nib seemed to wink at me, and before I knew it, I had picked it up, hefted it, and pointed the business end down. That red pen had uncommon grace and balance.

From that day forward, I have carried this pen. Ruby: my constant companion. Ruby wards off any aspersions on me and my junior status. Ruby defends the fairness and justice of my evaluations. It is infinitely calming to hold this red pen.

But to get back to this student, Mathieu. He was very anxious about his grades. He would sometimes wait around until well past supper on Friday when I would post the weekly marks.

One time he bellowed “No-o-o!” as his eyes fell on the letter beside his name. “Not another disappointment to pin on the shroud of my mother!”

“It’s only a mark. A C+ is actually higher than average this week,” I said. I admit I am a hard marker. Who else can be counted on to uphold the standards of the academy?

“I live and die by these marks, Ms. Beasley! Oh, God of my forefathers!” He was loud, he was big, and it was late in the evening when no one else was around.

I looked him straight in the eye, holding onto my pen in case I needed to poke him in the face, and retreated into my office, where campus security was only a phone call away.

Last week, I said something a little different. “Maybe next week,” is what I said. I did not mean to offer false hope. But it all depends on context, doesn’t it? Now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on it, I think my off-hand comment, “Maybe next week” was the wrong thing to say.

Expectations management is important.

The Dean summoned me to his office recently, to compliment me on the promptness and rigor of my evaluations. “You’re the old style of lecturer,” he said. “Tough but fair.” Then he shook my hand. It was the most surprising visit to a VIP’s office I’ve ever had. I was walking on a cloud by the time I left. My smile was as wide as a boulevard.

On my way back to my laboratory I couldn’t resist patting the pocket of my shirt, Ruby’s cosy little home when she is not defending the integrity of academe, that is. “You and I,” I whispered, “we’re a team.” I barely noticed Mathieu when he passed by.

The very next Friday, there was Mathieu, pacing up and down the corridor while I prepared, compared, and cross-tabulated the lab marks. This time, his mark was lower than usual, a C-.

“Look at it this way: you did not fail,” I said to him. “Everyone had a tough time with hygroscopic salts this week.”

He stared at me, his eyes wide and his chest wheezing. He didn’t say a thing. That was the scariest part.

So, I held my trusty little Ruby aloft, and backed slowly away.

At this point Mathieu whipped out his red pen. It had a shining tip—it was a dart!—but it was shaped and painted like a pen. He started to come at me, lunging again and again with his dart.

I could see I wouldn’t make it into my office before the dart would make its way into my heart, so I leapt into the nearest washroom. I bolted the cubicle door, wishing I had my cellphone.

“Hello? Hello, is this Campus Security?” I said, my voice trembling, as I pretend-called. I was sick with the thought he might squeeze through underneath the cubicle door. But no, it’s only six inches or so.

I said, “Send someone to sixth floor of the chemistry building! Right away! I am trapped in the washroom by a madman…. Am I injured? Oh dear... hang on, actually I do seem to be bleeding.”

At this point, I squeezed the little ink reservoir in my red pen. Bip, bip, the scarlet drops fell onto the tile floor.

I heard Mathieu’s labored breathing in the washroom. I knew he was waiting, peering at that small space under the cubicle door to confirm that I had been gravely injured by his dart.

I carried on with the fake phone call. “Um... yes, I’m bleeding and... the room ... it’s getting dark... drifting away ... drifting ...” I had never been stuck with a dart, poison or otherwise, so I was really making it up as I went along.

I could hear him gasp. Then I heard him fumbling at the washroom window. The window has a latch, and it looks out onto a steeply pitched roof.

Too bad Mathieu misjudged how well his sneakers could grip the tiled roof. That’s what I found out later, after I had wiped up the ink and gone to my office to actually phone the campus police.

In my real call, I reported that when I looked out the washroom window, “some guy, either a stuntman or a suicide, seemed to have slid off the roof. Would security come by and take a look?”

I didn’t want to allege Mathieu been attacking me, and go through the whole hullabaloo of reporting a crime in progress, arguing self-defense, and so on. You see, it wasn’t him against me.

It was really his red pen, his talisman, against mine.

THE END