Benji and the Last Day of Term

The last day of term was supposed to be the easiest day of the school year.

No lessons. No assessments. A prize-giving in the morning, a short concert in the afternoon, the specific joy of knowing that in approximately six hours you would be free until January. The Standard Five classroom would be cleaned out, the books returned, and that would be that.

This was what was supposed to happen.

What actually happened started at six in the morning, when Benji positioned himself outside the Standard Five classroom door and refused to move.

Mrs. Clarke, who taught Standard Five and had done so for nineteen years and had therefore seen most things, arrived at school at seven-fifteen and found a brown dog with amber eyes sitting directly in front of her classroom door.

“Dog,” she said.

Benji looked at her.

“This is a school.”

Benji did not respond to this as a relevant point.

Mrs. Clarke looked at the dog. She was an experienced teacher and she had opinions about things being where they were supposed to be, and a dog in front of her classroom door on the last day of term was not where things were supposed to be.

But she had also heard, over the course of this school year, about a dog in Cliffside that showed up in specific places for specific reasons, and she had not dismissed this as children’s stories because she did not dismiss children’s stories. She had thirty-two years of experience with children and she knew that children’s stories contained more information than adults generally credited.

She looked at the dog.

She looked at her classroom door.

She looked at the dog again.

She went to find Omar Reid.

“He’s been there since before you,” Clevie told Omar. “I came past at six-forty on my way to get breakfast and he was already there.”

“He must have seen something,” Omar said.

“Or smelled something,” Nadine said. “He mostly works by smell.”

“The classroom was locked last night,” Omar said. “Mrs. Clarke locks it herself.”

“So either someone had a key or—” Nadine stopped. “The window,” she said. “The third window on the east side. It doesn’t latch properly. Everyone in Standard Five knows it. It rattles in the wind and Mrs. Clarke’s been meaning to report it since March.”

“The window,” Omar said.

“The window,” she said.

The classroom, when Mrs. Clarke opened it with her key and the three of them followed her in, looked entirely normal.

This was the problem. Whatever Benji had flagged, it was not immediately visible.

Benji came in with them — Mrs. Clarke made no comment on this — and walked directly to the supply cupboard at the back of the room. He sat in front of it.

The supply cupboard held: chalk, exercise books, art supplies, spare textbooks, and the box where Mrs. Clarke kept the term’s collected merit certificates before prize-giving.

The prize-giving was in two hours.

Omar looked at the box.

He looked at Benji.

“The certificates,” he said.

Mrs. Clarke opened the box.

The certificates were there. All of them, in their envelopes, exactly as she had prepared them. Thirty-two envelopes, one for each student.

“They’re all here,” she said.

“Count them,” Nadine said.

Mrs. Clarke counted.

Thirty-one.

She counted again.

Thirty-one.

One envelope was missing. She fanned through them to find the gap — the certificates were alphabetical, and the gap was between P and R.

“Q,” Clevie said. “Who’s the Q?”

“There’s no student with Q,” Mrs. Clarke said slowly. “But there’s one R.” She looked at the certificates again. “Rashida Reid.”

Omar Reid’s face did something quiet.

Rashida was his younger sister. Standard Three. She had been working all term on her merit rating. She was eight years old and it was going to be her first merit certificate and he had helped her practice spelling every evening for two months.

“Someone took her certificate,” Clevie said. The tone had shifted entirely out of puzzle-solving into something more specific and personal.

“Someone came through the window,” Nadine said. “At night. Went through the box. Took one certificate. Left thirty-one.”

“Why?” Omar said. He was working to keep his voice even.

“Because someone didn’t want Rashida to get it,” Nadine said. “Which means someone else was not going to get a certificate. And they wanted Rashida to be in the same situation as them.”

The standard five class had thirty-two students. Thirty-one were receiving merit certificates. One was not — a student named Damion who had had a difficult term and whose marks had not reached the threshold. This was known to the class because in Standard Five these things were known.

Damion had an older brother in Standard Two who was friends with Rashida Reid.

Benji, who had smelled the hand on the supply cupboard and recognized it — because Benji spent his days in and around the school and knew by smell more students than most teachers knew by name — was sitting outside when Damion’s brother came through the school gate at seven-forty.

He sat in the boy’s path and looked at him.

The boy was seven years old. His name was Cornelius. He stopped when the dog appeared in front of him and looked at it with the specific expression of a seven-year-old who has done something they’ve been thinking about all night and not sleeping well because of it.

Benji looked at him for a long moment.

Then he walked toward the Standard Five classroom.

Stopped. Looked back.

Cornelius followed him.

This part was handled by Mrs. Clarke and the school counsellor, not by the three children. What they knew of it afterward was: Cornelius had taken the certificate because his brother hadn’t got one and it didn’t seem fair that everyone else did. He had the certificate. He gave it back. He said sorry, which was genuine, and he cried a small amount, which was also genuine.

Mrs. Clarke handled it with the precision of a woman who had nineteen years of experience handling things.

Rashida got her certificate at prize-giving.

She did not know why there had been a brief moment of uncertainty, and Omar did not tell her, because she was eight and the important thing was the certificate and not the story around it.

He did tell her that Benji had been at the school that morning and that Benji said hello.

“He doesn’t say hello,” Rashida said. “He’s a dog.”

“In his way,” Omar said.

“Why that certificate?” Clevie said, on the bus home in the early afternoon, with the last day of term behind them and the holidays ahead.

“Because Damion doesn’t have one,” Nadine said. “So his brother thought if Rashida didn’t have one either, it wouldn’t feel as bad.”

“That’s not how it works,” Clevie said.

“No. But he’s seven.”

“How did Benji know it was him?”

“He knew everyone’s smell,” Omar said. “He’s been at this school all year.” He looked out the bus window. “He knows this neighbourhood completely. Who lives where. Who belongs where. Who was somewhere they shouldn’t have been.”

“That’s…” Clevie tried to find the word. “Useful,” he said finally.

“It’s what he does,” Nadine said.

Omar opened his notebook.

Last day of term. Rashida got her certificate. Cornelius returned it himself in the end. Q1 complete.

He looked at that last line and thought it wasn’t what he’d meant to write and then thought it was exactly what he’d meant to write. Three months of trouble. Three months of Benji finding things and leading them to what needed to be done.

New term in January, he wrote. I wonder what Benji already knows about January.

Quarter Two begins: Benji and the Christmas Surprise — someone has been adding to the community Christmas collection box at the shop, in amounts that don’t make sense, and Benji has been watching the box since the first of December.