I remind him I spent years as a test-prep tutor.
But you haven’t been trained by us, he says.
The teachers who they’re bringing in are coming from the middle school.
Middle school? I say, obviously disdainful.
You’re not being generous, he says to me.
I’m not.
He eats the whole time we talk, hot soup with a hulking piece of bread that he dunks into the soup and then into his mouth. He sits back in his chair, his ankle on his knee, and each time I talk he smiles.
But they’re learning, I say.
I realize that I might start crying, but I refuse to cry in front of this man whom I think of as a child.
He tells me that this was not his decision. The network, he says, smiling. Nothing I could do.
I love my students and am sad and angry, even though I know I leave sometimes for no good reason and that makes my love for them questionable at best. I tell my boss I think this is the wrong decision, and he stares blankly at me and doesn’t speak. He takes a bite of his bread and a clump lands briefly on his chin. We both pretend that I’m not crying. With all the things I hate about this job, the students are the only reason that I stay.
Teaching, I say, is ninety percent buy-in.
He nods.
They’re bought in, I say.
I try to tell him that they’re thinking and that they’ve been enjoying thinking. I try to tell him that he told me when he brought me on that he cared about helping them think.
He tells me he is grateful for my investment in the children and the vision. I will teach different kids now, kids who, he says, also need me—kids upon whom, I think, they have already given up. I’ll teach the seniors, who have already gotten into college or they haven’t, who have already taken all the tests there are to take.
I’m no longer crying, and I smile at him. I imagine he thinks I’m smiling because he’s managed to convince me of this plan I don’t agree with, but really he has spilled soup on his shirt and tie and, the way his face looks anxious and earnest at once now that he’s trying to convince me that everything is fine, he reminds me of a kid in our daughter’s pre-K class whose toes she stepped on while they stood in line for lunch because, she told me later, she did not know how else to make him be quiet like the teacher asked.
* * *
I leave the principal’s office and have to do my hall duty. Hall duty means sitting at a table in the hall as students walk back and forth between the bathroom and class. Sometimes students stop to talk or flirt and I have to tell them to move on. The ones who know me loiter and we talk about the classes that they’re taking, the social dramas that I know of. I’m trusted as much as the most trusted white teachers, which is to say kindly, generously, joking often—but also warily.
Twenty minutes in, the chat says that Kayla’s missing. I check the third-floor bathroom and see her shoes, the toes turned in again.
Kayla? I say.
She’s in the large handicap accessible stall and opens up the door and motions for me to come inside. I look back and forth, not sure if I’m supposed to do this or if I care if I’m supposed to do this. I’m not super invested, in this moment, in keeping my job.
You okay? I say.
She nods again for me to come in with her. There’s a bandage around her arm and it has slipped.
I come through the door and she locks it behind me. I sit down on the floor next to her. Are you okay?
She nods.
What’s this?
She tells me that her mother saw the bruise on her face from where her boyfriend hit her and when she told her what had happened, her mother took her to a doctor and had a birth control device implanted in her arm.
I hit him back, though, she says. My mother lets men put their hands on her, but he won’t do it to me again.
May I? I say, nodding to her arm.
I unwrap the bandage slowly and roll it in my hands. I hold it up above the mark where the device has been implanted and I slowly wrap it, asking, with each rotation, if the pressure is too tight.
Fine, she says each time, so I keep it extra tight, watching her face.
Okay? I ask, when I have finished.
Fine, she says another time.
* * *
I text the Chilean writer three days in a row and she doesn’t answer and I get frantic. I call her and I email and I’m afraid both that she is not okay in some bodily unsafe way and also that I’ve accidentally scared her off. I’m so sorry, she emails on the fifth day. My son was in town and we got busy. Everything all right?
* * *
The next Thursday, I leave work early because I leave early even more now; he’s taken my students from me and, I figure, if I’m caught now, I’ll have something to say.
I go up to the campus where I teach my night class. I’m early and am hoping to find an empty office where I can read. In the small café, at the foot of the stairs, leading up to the department offices, I see the girl who emailed, weeks ago, asking to meet.
Kate, I say, grabbing her arm. Honey, I say, more like a mom than I meant. We never met.
She reddens—on her shoulders, bare like always, on her round cheeks.
It’s not a big deal, she says.
She’s with friends, a thin boy with too-big glasses and a tall, dark girl I’ve never seen. They look back and forth between us. I’m often mistaken for a student, not because I look so young but because I don’t assert much authority, because no one knows who I am or why I’m there. I slip in and out and teach my class and am not around besides that, because I’m not sure why anyone would or should listen when I speak. I felt the same when I was a student at this vaunted institution, like I didn’t quite deserve it, like any minute, someone would come and ask me to leave.
Come up, I say to Kate. I’m getting an office; come with me.
She looks at her friends and the small boy looks down at his shoes.
Come catch me up, I say.
She has a coat slung over her arm and a big bag that she drapes across her body. There’s something sloppy about her that I admire, not unlike Sasha. She’s always seemed to take up space unapologetically.
I ask the kids behind the desk for an office, though I’m early. I tell them that I’m sorry. For the first hour that I’m required to hold office hours, I am in one office, then someone with tenure takes that office over and I’m switched to a smaller one with random extra chairs piled in the back for the remaining hour.
Either of them free? I say.
The girl who always makes my copies and who is always kind smiles, gets up. She was a lawyer before this.
413, she says. This is the bigger office, without broken chairs. I smile at her, grateful.
* * *
What’s up? I say, when the door’s closed and this girl has slung her coat across the seat, her bag still hung across her chest and on her lap in a heap.
You know, she says. Busy.
Her skin begins to splotch again and I wonder if she’s even younger than I think, teenaged, some sort of prodigy.
You wanted to talk? I say.
It’s nothing, she says. I wanted. This weird thing happened the other day.
Okay … I say.
She tells me she was at a party with other students from the program.
I was drunk, she says, and looks down at her bag, still in her lap.