From the Novel Call It In the Air
The Report Card
By: Gregory Light - Jul 16, 2026
By the time summer of 1962 finally came around, shelving another endless year of school, Joey had tossed his 1936 penny with the strange dot exactly one thousand, three hundred and seventeen times. Sad, he admitted. Less than four hundred a month. And, to his amazement, he had checked off six hundred and ninety-one heads and six hundred and twenty-six tails. He couldn't believe that so many tails had turned up as he was sure the last few months of his life had wavered between ‘fred-awful’ and boring. He had even re-counted, painstakingly wading through the collection of ticks and scrawls he had, until then, been marking under two long, lopsided columns. (If nothing else, his marks on his weekly arithmetic tests were improving; but the other side of the coin revealed a big, sour dip in the rest of his grades.)
To make the notation process easier, Joey had recently persuaded his mom to buy him ten thin exercise books on the premise that they were for schoolwork. Into the first of these, he carefully transferred his list of ticks and marks for heads, and into the second for tails, unaware that the disparity between the number of heads and tails was beginning to resist the laws of probability. He was even alarmed at how close the two totals were. They were not the same as Uncle Frederick had said but there was less than a hundred between them; not very much when talking in terms of a million. Joey knew it could change overnight now that he had decided to toss five hundred a day.
He had to catch up. In the excitement that had followed the last day of school, and with the summer holidays stretching out in front of him, Joey had forgotten his penny for over ten days. His totals now lagged even further behind. Although it wasn’t entirely his fault. His penny had gone into his front jeans pocket and then into the laundry and from there through the washing machine. His mother eventually retrieved it a few days later when she was unclogging the drainage system of the old wringer-washer. She gave Joey a lecture about emptying his pockets of everything before putting his jeans in the laundry and then she put the penny on his desk. He wasn't badly yelled at because in the same load of laundry, his father had left a pink tissue in his shirt pocket, and everything was covered in a pink linty substance.
Five hundred flips. That's a lot, Joey thought, digging at small bits of wadded pink tissue which had embedded themselves into the raised edges on both sides of the penny. As he worked away at it, he was a bit distressed to find that the coin's voyage through the washing machine had reduced its lustre in those spots which hadn't been moulded in tissue. The penny looked strangely splotched when he'd finished. 'Well, as long as it still flips okay,' he said brushing the little bits of pink into his wastepaper basket.
At the same time, he heard the telephone ring downstairs. His mother answered it. He hoped it wasn't Gary. If he was to get through all these tosses, he knew he couldn't be disturbed. He heard his mother say hello. Then, after a long pause, he heard her voice take an urgent and serious turn. He couldn't make out what she was saying but the gravity of the tone reminded him of Miss Grant's voice on the very last day of school. And that had been deathly serious.
Miss Grant had asked Joey to remain at his seat a few minutes after all the other students had left. She said it just before the last bell of the day, while she was handing out their final report cards. Joey didn't think too much of it until Gary leaned over and whispered to him. 'I bet you failed, Dan Spear.' (Gary still regularly called him Dan Spear. Even at serious times like report cards.)
The possibility that he might have failed had never even occurred to Joey. To him, as your age increased every year, so, too, you progressed further in school. It was a fact of growing up. He knew that some people didn't pass but he had always assumed those to be exceptional circumstances, which you just heard about. Like a car accident, it happened but it didn't "really" happen. He was willing to admit his marks were not the greatest, but they'd got him to grade five.
Gary's remark suddenly made the possibility of failure real. It was a numbing feeling, very much like his toes felt when he'd stayed out skating too long in the winter. The social implications were the worst. It was bad enough that his birthday was in February which meant he was already one of the oldest in his class, and if he failed a year, he'd be ancient. He'd be like one of those guys who goes to school because he has to but didn't play with the others, a loner.
'I'll still be your friend next year,' Gary whispered to him. 'But we'll probably only see each other on the weekends. My mom may not even let me see you. She might think I'd fail if I hung around with a guy that failed.' At which point Joey recoiled in genuine horror. His life was beginning to fade. Seeing the horror on Joey's face, Gary tried to put Joey at ease by telling him that whatever his mom said, he'd sneak out and see him anyway.
'What are you two whispering about?' Miss Grant had arrived at their desks with the report cards. 'You'll have the whole summer to talk.' She handed Gary his report. To Joey, this innocent piece of folded yellow paper with the official school crest stamped on it was the most ominous object in his whole life. He weakly stretched out his hand for it, his heart thumping quickly under his tee shirt.
'I'll give you yours after class, Joey,' said Miss Grant.
Oh no! That was it, he thought, devastated. He quickly scanned her face for a sign that this wasn't happening, for the barest hint of a reassuring smile or a gesture of hope from her eyes. But Miss Grant simply turned and walked back to the front of the class. Inside, Joey collapsed. His stomach gurgled, slurping loudly like the whoosh of standing water abruptly whisked away in a sudden unclogged drain.
Gary was shaking his head slowly. His eyes glanced over at Joey with genuine fear in them. Joey had never seen them so wide, dark, and watery. He wondered what his own eyes must look like. Gary was trying to whisper something, but the words were not coming.
'You didn't fail did you, Gary?' Joey asked, alarmed.
''No. I passed.' Gary showed Joey the bottom, inside page of his report where the words "has been promoted to grade six" had been written after his name. 'But what about you, Joey? Last year when Mike failed, he didn't get his card until after everybody else had gone.'
Mike Johnson was the boy Joey had been thinking about. He was still in grade four. Last year he and Gary used to fool around with him sometimes when they were playing football or road hockey. Since he'd failed, however, there'd been hardly any contact at all, even in the schoolyard. He'd played some football with them at the beginning of the year but the humiliation of having to line up in the grade four line at recess was too much for him and he began to keep more and more to himself. Every recess Joey had noticed him by the fence, staring out through the wire netting.
'What are you looking at, Mike?' he asked him one day.
'Nothing. The street. Look at all those people walking around free out there.' Joey felt uncomfortable when Mike talked like that.
'You wanna play touch football with us? We need another guy.'
'No, Joey. I just wanna look out the fence, okay?'
Joey nodded and ran back across the schoolyard, shouting to the other boys. 'He doesn't want to. I told you it'd be a waste of time.' Joey hadn't meant to be cruel.
The tears that had been welling in Mike's eyes suddenly flooded out and he burst off, fleeing the school grounds. Joey never found out where he went but after that day, Mike changed. He was also the first young kid Joey ever saw smoking. He came to school one morning and hung outside the school doors with a cigarette in his mouth. Miss Grant was the first teacher to see him. To Joey's surprise, rather than getting upset, she asked Mike if he was enjoying it.
'Yeah, I like 'em,' Mike coughed defiantly.
'Sounds like it,' Miss Grant replied. 'Listen I'll make you a deal. If you give me that cigarette now, then after school you can - .'
Before she could finish, the vice-principal, Mr. Shand burst through the door, slapped the cigarette out of Mike's mouth, grabbed him by the collar and shook him roughly. 'I've warned all you boys about smoking,' he barked at Mike, dragging him into the school and down the hall. As he ploughed through the door, Mike dangling off his large hand like a fish, he turned to Miss Grant and glared at her as if she was a student also. 'After your last class, Linda, I shall see you in my office.'
Everybody knew that Mike would get the strap, so they were not surprised to see him at lunchtime, his eyes red from crying. When asked about what happened, he just showed his hand which had ugly red welts across the palm. Mr. Shand had made Linda (as he insisted on calling Miss Grant) stay and witness the punishment. Indeed, the severity of it, he told her, was more for her benefit than Mike’s.
The next day Mike didn't come to school. When he failed to show up on the second day, his parents were contacted and summoned to Mr. Shand's office. When Mike's parents heard what happened, Mike received even worse treatment at home. Neither Joey nor Gary ever saw him at school again. The rumour was that he had been in the hospital. They both knew that Miss Grant knew, but she wasn't saying. It must have been bad though because she got in such a fight with Mr. Shand over it, that she ended up handing in her notice for the end of that school year.
'I shall not be teaching at this school next year,' she told her class after she had handed out all the report cards. 'I want to say how much I enjoyed having you for students and how much I hope you enjoy next year in grade six.'
Then the bell rang. All the kids shouted, 'good-bye Miss Grant,' and began filing out of the class in a cascade of exuberant cheers and hollers. Joey slumped deeper into his seat, his mind miles away in the dark, gloomy depths of the hospital where Mike had ended because he had failed last year. Gary got up slowly, looking hopefully at Joey.
'Good luck, Dan,' he said.
'You'll visit me in the hospital, won't you Gary?'
'Is your dad going to beat you?' Gary asked.
'No,' Joey paused. He hadn't thought about what his parents would say. 'I don't think so.'
'Oh. Well, see ya.' There was a finality in Gary’s words and tone.
After Gary left, Miss Grant shut the door behind him. The general commotion of hundreds of children celebrating the last day of school died down in the background. He wondered how many other kids were sitting alone in their classrooms, going through the same ordeal he was. The room seemed so different from the room he'd spent the last year in; more hostile and uncaring. It was genuinely awful. Any second now Miss Grant would be turning towards him with the verdict. At that moment, while her back was still partially turned from him, Joey took a chance and flipped his penny for the 1,317th time, hoping with all the power that his mind could muster, that it would be a tail. If ever he needed a tail, this was the time. But he didn't get a chance to look at it. Miss Grant had turned towards him.
'What are you doing?' she asked.
'Nothing.' Joey replied, his voice higher than usual, his hand remaining flat, palm down on his desk, covering the penny.
Miss Grant walked up the aisle towards him, his report card bristling ominously in her hand. She sat down on top of Gary's desk and looked at him. 'I want to talk to you about your report this year, Joey,' she said gravely. 'It's not very good. It is very disappointing.' So, this is how they tell you, thought Joey. Her words hurt more than the elbow in the neck Gary had given him a week ago. But that had been an accident, Miss Grant’s words were deliberate, more like an indictment. It was like being sentenced to a year in prison: he was going to lose one whole year of his life. At his age that was almost ten percent of the entire length. 'You know, I seriously thought of failing you, Joey,' she continued.
"Thought of failing ... thought of failing ... thought of failing"—the words bounced back and forth in his head. It felt like the path of the super ball he had once thrown as hard as he could in his father's garage. He couldn't think for all the noise. Then or now.
'As you know, this is my last year at this school. Next year Mr. Shand will be teaching grade five. If I was to stay, I think, very possibly, I would fail you because I know you are capable of doing much better. I partly blame myself and would like to have a second chance. But that's not going to happen.' She paused. 'I am going to pass you ...' The words "pass you" almost made Joey faint. He went weak for a moment, both his arms slipping from his desk down to his sides. He was so relieved that he didn't notice what the uncovered coin on his desk was. '... for two reasons. Firstly, because, although many of your marks are bad, you have shown a marked improvement in arithmetic. Your skills for adding and subtracting, even fractions, have been excellent in the last few months. And secondly, I know that you are going to spend much of your summer re-reading your English and history books. Right, Joey?'
Joey nodded in agreement, but he wasn't able to speak. For the first time, he noticed how beautiful Miss Grant's eyes were. Yeah, her whole face looked wonderful and lovely. She was beautiful. Gorgeous. He suddenly had a confusing desire to touch her.
'I am writing your mother and asking her to have you read at least two books a month during the summer.'
Again, Joey nodded. Then he watched Miss Grant lean over and after the words "This is to certify that Joey Edwards", she wrote the following shattering phrase: "has been promoted to grade six." He was jubilant. While she signed his card, he thrillingly scrutinized her every gesture, from the slight moisture her tongue flicked onto her lips to the soft folds wrinkling her dress below her stomach when she leaned forward. Unable to control himself when she handed him the card, he suddenly thrust himself forward, grasped her around the neck and kissed her as hard as he had ever kissed anyone straight onto her lips.
When he finally let go of her, Miss Grant was even more surprised than he. Her face was flushed and red like Marlene's had been that day in line. And she looked a lot younger than twenty-four; no older than Gary's sixteen-year-old sister, Susan, he thought. She looked more like a Linda than a Miss Grant. But her bewildered expression frightened him. What had he done? He started babbling.
'I … I ... I'm sorry. I don't know what made me? I?'
Then Miss Grant burst into a happy wave of laughter. The initial surprise over, she suddenly found the entire situation hilarious and flattering. 'Don't worry, Joey,' she said. 'I enjoyed it. Certainly, more than when Mr. Shand did the same thing in the staff room last week.'
'Yccch!' Joey exclaimed, squelching his face. He didn't want to be compared to Mr. Shand.
'That's exactly how I felt,' Miss Grant said. 'Now you better get going or you'll miss the summer.'
'Oh yeah,' he cried, jumping to his feet, and starting down the aisle.
'Aren't you going to take George with you?' she asked, picking up the penny from his desk and tossing it to him.
'Oh, I forgot,' he said, catching it. 'Thanks.' And he left, dashing out through the door to catch Gary and tell him the good news. I passed. I passed. I passed. But Gary already knew. He had been lurking behind the door the whole time, listening to their conversation. He was ecstatic that Joey had passed; it meant they could remain best friends, but he was puzzled about what else had happened in the room.
'What happened in there?' he asked. At the same moment, Joey came bubbling out and stepped on his toe. 'Oww!' he cried in the same breath.
'Sorry,' Joey said, then he grabbed Gary around the neck and shouted, 'I passed! I passed!'
'I know that dummy. But what else happened?'
'Nothing,' Joey said, releasing Gary's neck and feeling his face flush.
'Then who's George?'
George? Joey suddenly remembered the coin. So, it had been a head beating away under his hand all along. A head? It didn't make any sense. Heads were unlucky. How could George's profile have landed upwards, and he also passed at the same time? Within the limits of his theory, it was too weird. But not earth-shattering. And in his excitement, he promptly forgot about it. He was happy that Gary hadn't asked him about Miss Grant. About how he’d kissed her.
It wasn't for almost two weeks, on the day his mother answered the telephone after having dug out his lint-embedded penny from the guts of the washing machine, that Joey remembered the one thousand, three hundred and seventeenth toss of his coin. It came back to him like a sharp explosion in his belly; a sudden unbearable ache that made him curse the last day of school with an intense passion. Every moment of that last afternoon had dropped into a menacing pattern which he only realized now. If only he hadn't flipped the penny. If only he hadn't been such a coward and had braved what Miss Grant was going to tell him without flipping the coin. If she had turned towards him more quickly after having shut the classroom door, he wouldn't have had a chance to flip it. He had no idea of what action to blame; what precise occurrence to single out; how to comprehend how each distinct event had solidified into the fate they did. In the end, he blamed himself. And it crushed him.
He heard his mother hang up the telephone downstairs. A long pause and then she appeared at his bedroom door. Her face was utterly pale. He had never seen his mother's face so white. She sat down on the blue chair inside his door. Her thin frame was visibly shaking. Joey's chin began to tremble in sympathy and horror.
'Joey,' her voice was soft, trapped in her throat and physically faltering. 'Joey,' she tried again. 'I'm so sorry, so terribly sorry,' she stretched out her arms towards him. He wasn't sure who these arms, weakly held out to him, were meant to comfort. He remained very still on the edge of his bed. He couldn't move, feeling that any movement, no matter how slight, would somehow split the air and space around him and reveal a reality much worse than the one that his mother was trying to reveal. Her arms held for a moment, then dropped back into her lap.
'That was Mrs. ... Gary's mother on the telephone,' his mother said, tears forming in her eyes, tears for her son. 'Gary ... oh Joey ... Gary has been killed in a traffic accident.' She turned her face into her shoulder and wept.