In France, students can have different attendance statuses. Some are regular day students, while others are “free day students,” meaning they’re allowed to leave campus whenever the teacher in charge of the last period of the day or half-day is absent instead of staying at school.
One Thursday morning, the notice board announced that our math teacher, who was supposed to teach from 11:00 a.m. to noon, was absent. We had been scheduled to take a test, but when a teacher was absent, tests were usually postponed. As free day students, we were happy because it meant we could leave school at 11:00 am and only come back for our afternoon classes at 2:00 p.m.
However, around 10:00 a.m., one of the school supervisors ran into our classmate, Adrian. He told him that our math teacher had decided to keep the test after all. The supervisor himself would supervise it in Room 103, and Adrian was supposed to let the rest of us know.
Adrian never told anyone.
When the test was supposed to begin, Adrian was the only student in the classroom. Meanwhile, all the students who had to stay on campus—such as those eating lunch at school or those who weren’t allowed to leave during free periods—had gone to the supervised study hall, which is where students normally go when a teacher is absent.
At first, they were annoyed with Adrian for not telling anyone. However, the supervisor said, “That’s not like Adrian.”
Until then, Adrian had been a fairly well-behaved student. He wasn’t an outstanding student academically—he was much better at literature than science—but he’d never been in serious trouble. The worst he’d gotten were a few notes home for talking too much in class.
The students who had stayed at school eventually stopped complaining. After all, the test had gone ahead as planned, and they’d already studied for it.
The problem was that all of us free day students, me included, had already gone home.
When we returned that afternoon, we finally found out what had happened. We went straight to the middle school Dean of Students, who said we’d have to discuss it with the math teacher. She also admitted that the situation was surprising because, in her words, “It doesn’t sound like something Adrian would do.”
When our math teacher came back the following Monday, he refused to believe our version of events. Every free day student—including me—received a zero on the test and two hours of detention for skipping class.
The Dean of Students later told us there was nothing she could do. There was no proof that Adrian hadn’t warned us, and Adrian continued insisting that he had.
To make matters worse, some teachers criticized us for becoming more distant from Adrian afterward. But he wasn’t ostracized at all. The students who had stayed on campus kept talking to him as usual, with only two or three exceptions who sided with us.
After that incident, Adrian went back to being the same quiet, well-behaved student he’d always been.
To this day, none of us knows why he acted the way he did that day.
