she freaked when she tried to stab him with her big fork

My seventh grade French teacher, Mademoiselle Torrosian, kept a pet

rock, Pierre, who looked like an average potato. She made occasional

mention of him, basking in his round holder on her desk, if it meant

including him as an example for that day’s lesson. “Monsieur Pierre

voudrais du bifteck et les pommes frites” if we were learning to order a steak

and fries. Or “Monsieur Pierre aime Juillet mais pas Janvier” if we were

learning to distinguish between the months. Mademoiselle Torrosian

dressed as a tablecloth, wearing a checkered yellow top above her dull

brown pant legs. She had short hair and wide glasses, though I once

caught her stepping out of Kramer Gifts, a shop at the mall where you

could buy dirty decks of cards and fuzzy dice. A neighbor of mine, Kev

Wilson, cooked up the plan to kidnap Monsieur Pierre, out of boredom,

maybe, but it was easily accomplished: I slid the rock off its pedestal into

my bookbag during the confusing crush at the end of class, and we had

him. I’m not sure that Mademoiselle ever let on that Monsieur Pierre had

gone missing, until we left her the first of our many ransom notes. Kev

and I had cut the alphabet out of numerous magazines, the way we saw

in the movies, and glued odd-shaped letters to construction paper, say-

ing, in terrible French, “Nous avons Monsieur Pierre” for “We have Mon-

sieur Pierre,” and if she’d like him back unharmed, she’d give everyone

in the class an “A.” Mademoiselle Torrosian took to reading the notes out

loud, correcting our French as she went, and then would utter pleas for

his return. She would say, in earnest, “Monsieur Pierre est mon bebe, mon petit

oiseau bleu, mon chanson et mon danse” or something like that, and the class

would stare ahead without much sympathy. We, in turn, would write

more and more perverse ransom notes, describing that we were cutting

off Monsieur Pierre’s ears, or putting out his “oeil” or breaking his nose.

Mademoiselle Torrosian’s brow would darken each time she entered the

classroom and saw a new note lying on her chair. It was a small class; fif-

teen or twenty kids, and she probably guessed it was me and Kev, but

then again, there was always that dickwad Marvin DeLeo, that girl,

Angie, who always pronounced besoin as “boz-wan” and was always

peeved when Mademoiselle corrected her, and Overman, too, that big,

crazy, silent loon of a timebomb just waiting to throw someone out the

window. Meantime, Monsieur Pierre resided in my backyard, in a reg-

ular area where many other rocks lived, and sometimes Kev and I would

have a hard time distinguishing him from your typical shale, or quartzite,

or whatever we were learning in earth science. One time, I put him in the

oven, after my mother had begun baking a load of potatoes and she

freaked when she tried to stab him with her big fork, scratching him

mightily. Kev and I used him as a hammer once, when we were trying to

build a wooden ladder in the backyard, and there we chipped him, but

the coup de grace came when we were tossing Monsieur Pierre back and

forth in a game of “you’re it” and he fell onto the patio and cracked in

half, perfectly. We vowed to superglue him back together, a clear thin line

of paste at the fissure, and soon afterwards, I snuck him back into position,

on his little round holder beside Mademoiselle Torrosian’s grade book,

even as Mademoiselle erased the blackboard. “Oh la la,” she said, turn-

ing around a minute later. She held him up to the light, smiling, at first,

then dropped him into the empty metal trashcan, where he landed with

a good boom. “Monsieur Pierre est mort—dead,” she said, then barked:

“Ecoutez!”

[Daniel Gutstein, 'Monsieur Pierre est mort', from The Best American Poetry 2006]