She thanks me as if I could have just told the school counselor I wasn’t coming.
I sit in the chair across from her. Her office is like a hospital gift shop: fake cheer abounds. You never go to the school counselor when you’re happy, but the room is floor-to-ceiling motivational posters, bright boxes, hot-pink feather boas and, as if that wasn’t weird enough, a frog puppet inside a frog basket that looks more appropriate for a kindergarten than a high school. She pulls an iPad off a table that’s covered with magazines and bits of what look like colored index cards. She swipes at it languidly, without a lot of commitment. Its brightness glints off her glasses.
“Well, your SATs were stellar. Really good work there. You were in the top four percent of the school, and even better statewide. Your grades, though. Talk to me about that.”
“I...uh.” I leave it at that. She’s going to have to ask a better question. Or give me time to come up with a better answer. My throat is full of things I want to hold and not say. To explain it to her would require so much backstory. It would be like asking someone to read a book before teaching them the alphabet. Just the thought of trying makes me want to curl into a ball.
“Top of your class freshman and sophomore years. Pretty good the first half of junior year. So you can obviously do the work. And then the second part of junior year and here at the start of senior year you’re in...well, I was going to say ‘free fall,’ but that’s not very counselor-y, is it?” She actually winks. She’s not very old, so I guess she thinks she can still get away with the I’m-not-like-all-these-other-oldsters-who-just-don’t-get-it stance.
“I guess free fall is a fair term,” I say. I’m not going to make it easy for her. Some part of me thinks it’s her job to see more.
“Your attendance is not great either,” she says. I guess I should appreciate the fact that she’s being straight. I do not. I run my nails over the rough fabric of the sides of the chair. Her solutions to my attendance problems will probably involve watching videos and writing essays. I need a lawyer. Not even that. New laws. A magic wand.
I keep my gaze on the space just above where her eyebrows meet. I read somewhere that people think you’re looking in their eyes when you do that.
She puts the iPad down. “Is there anything you want to talk about? How are things at home?”
“Fine.”
She nods her slow I-know-what’s-up nod. I saw it during junior year, when my grades first started slipping and she called me in. I wonder if she remembers. She’s acting like this is the first time we’ve talked about this.
“I spoke to a few of your teachers. Their sense is that you’ve lost your motivation. We have a creative solution for you. If you’re open to hearing it.”
I slide up the chair a little. Creative solutions aren’t going to fix my problem. But they’re like a scent I can’t ignore, and I let myself listen even through the ammonia smell of what’s-the-use. So the deal is this: come here, to the public library, Tuesday nights, teach ESL, and they’ll count it as an independent study, which can supplement either my English grade or my history grade. I have no idea what ESL class has to do with history, but maybe they picked the two classes I’m most sucking wind in and organized it with those teachers. I’m not sure how this is even okay by the rules, but it was their idea. I know some of my classmates have hustled Senior Independent Instruction Programs—SIIPs—for senior year. Like Amanda from my math class is supposed to be helping to file at her mother’s law firm, but I know for a fact she goes to the mall and her mother’s law clerk signs the slips so that the school doesn’t get wise to her. I wanted to do one, but I had no idea where I could get an Independent Study gig, so I didn’t even try.
ESL is on the second floor, at a set of light wood tables set up next to an enormous circle window through which you can see the town hall and the leaves turning showy shades of yellow and red, and some going straight to brown. I know how you feel, brown trees. It seems a lot of work to turn something gorgeous only to have it all fall off and get carted away in big yellow garbage trucks.
The woman who runs ESL looks like she started working here roughly around the time George Washington got inaugurated. She’s all wispy white hair and powder-blue sweater pulled primly over bones and old boobs. She greets me as I walk through the door.
“Jennifer called and said you’d be coming. Do you have any experience teaching ESL?”
“I speak Spanish,” I answer. It’s weird to hear her calling Ms. Scofield by her first name.
She regards me through sharp blue eyes. “That’s too bad,” she says. “Slows it down, actually, if you speak their native language. Although a few of the day laborers speak Mam and K’iche’. Don’t suppose you speak either of those, do you? It’s good to hold most of the class in English, but we’re in desperate need of some way to communicate basic things in Mam and K’iche’.”
“I...no.” I don’t tell her I’m not even sure what those are.
She turns away, leading me toward a table. “That’s too bad,” she says again. I appear to be a deep disappointment to her even though we’ve only just met. She gives me a stack of photocopied pages from a book. “I’m Betsy, by the way,” she says.
I am tempted to answer, Ross? But I don’t.
My first student is a man named Florencio who sits across from me looking nervous. I use the word man loosely, because he looks nearly as young as I am, and he’s slight. His hands are rough, full of scars and with a dry patch on each index finger. Betsy tells me most of the students who come to learn English at the library are the same guys who wait for work by the overpass near the highway that runs through the next town over. But I have a hard time squaring that with Florencio’s dark blue jeans with the white stitching and his fresh haircut, which looks just like the one a bunch of the guys in my school have—short on the sides, spiky in front. I squint at him to make sure I don’t actually know him from school. This seems to make him more nervous.
“Hello, Florencio,” I say, following Betsy’s instructions to speak to the students only in English. “I am Luisa.”
He smiles and nods. He looks unsure.
“Have you done any ESL classes before?”
He smiles nervously, his eyes blank.
I side-eye Betsy. She’s sitting down with a student several tables away, and there are three other tutor-student pairs between me and her.
I drop my voice lower and ask again, this time in Spanish. Hearing me speak a language he understands makes Florencio’s eyes light up, and he raises his voice an octave as he responds. This is his first ESL class. He arrived in the US only two months ago. He is staying with his cousin, and he already has a full-time job working for a landscaper. I want to ask him how old he is, but he doesn’t volunteer the information, and it seems rude to ask.