“What, you mean I have to work for a living here? Somebody told me teaching high school was easy money.” I looked through the stack of forms. “What about DOA? I may need one of those.”
Anita looked at me oddly for half a second, then laughed. “We’ll just call the coroner when they bring you in.”
I smiled. Doc Homer was the coroner of Grace, and had been for the entirety of my life and then some. Obviously Anita didn’t know who I was; she looked like a recent graduate herself. Anyone in high school now would have been a toddler when I left Grace. This filled me with hope. Walking those wainscoted halls, still painted the exact same shade of toothpaste green, made me shrink into my skin, and I had to keep reminding myself: None of them knows you as Doc Homer’s misfit child. No one here has seen you in orthopedic shoes.
“The kids’ll just love you,” Anita said, surprising me. “They’re not used to anybody so…” she paused, tapping a complete set of maroon fingernails on her metal desk and presumably fishing for a tactful adjective…“so contemporary.”
I was wearing a dark green blazer, tight jeans, and purple cowboy boots. I ran a hand through my hair and wondered if I should have paid a call to the Hollywood Shop, after all. “Do you think I’m not enough of an authority figure? Will they revolt?” The teachers’ meeting, two days prior, had been devoted primarily to theories of discipline.
Anita laughed. “No way. They know who turns in the grades.”
I found the room where I would be teaching General Biology I and II, and made it through the homeroom period by taking attendance and appearing preoccupied. I’d finally paid my preparatory visit to the school a few days earlier, so I knew what to expect in the way of equipment: desks and chairs; some stonetopped lab benches with sinks and arched chrome faucets; an emergency shower; a long glass case containing butterflies and many other insects in ill repair; and a closet full of dissecting pans and arcane audiovisual aids. The quaint provisions led me to expect I’d be working in something like a museum, or a British movie. When the kids filled the room for first period, though, they gave it a different slant. So far in Grace I hadn’t seen a lot of full-blown teenagers. I wasn’t expecting skateboard haircuts.
The girls seemed to feel a little sorry for me as I stood up there brushing chalk dust off my blazer and explaining what I intended for us to do in the coming year. But the boys sat with their enormous high-top sneakers splayed out into the aisles, their arms crossed, and their bangs in their eyes, looking at me like exactly what I was-one of the last annoying things standing between them and certified adulthood.
“You can call me Codi,” I said, though I’d been warned against this. “Ms. Noline sounds too weird. I went to this high school and had biology in this room, and I don’t really feel that old. I guess to you that sounds like a joke. To you I’m the wicked old witch of Life Science.”
This got a very slight rise out of the boys, not exactly a laugh. The girls looked embarrassed. A tall boy wearing a Motley Crüe T-shirt and what looked like a five-o’clock shadow on his scalp pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and thumped it against his knuckles.
“I was told we’d need an authority figure in the classroom, so I dug one up.” I went to the closet and wheeled out a human skeleton. “This is Mrs. Josephine Nash.”
I’d found her downstairs in a storage room filled with damaged field-hockey equipment and gym uniforms from the fifties. The skeleton was in pretty good shape; I’d only had to reattach one elbow with piano wire and duct tape (provided by the janitor). The name-along with an address in Franklin, Illinois-was written in fine, antique-looking letters on the flange of her pelvis. When I discovered her in the storage room I felt moved to dust her off and hang her up on the heavy cast-iron stand and wheel her up to my lab. I guess I was somewhat desperate for companionship.
“Miss,” one of the boys said. “Miss Codi.”
I tried not to smile. “Yes.”
“That’s Mr. Bad Bones.” He enunciated the name in a way that made everybody laugh. “The seniors use him for the Halloween Dance.”
“Well, not anymore,” I said. Mrs. Nash was my compatriot from the Midwest; a possible relative, even. I could see her as somebody’s mother, out pruning roses. This isn’t a toy,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “It’s the articulated skeleton of a human being who was at one time, fairly recently, walking around alive. Her name was Josephine Nash and she lived in Illinois. And it’s time she got some respect in her retirement.”
I glared at them; teenagers are so attached to their immortality. “You never know where you’re going to end up in this world, do you?” I asked.
Nineteen pairs of blank, mostly pale-blue eyes looked back at me. You could have heard a cigarette drop.
“Okay,” I said. “Chapter one: Matter, Energy, Organization and Life.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to live through this,” I told Emelina, collapsing in her kitchen. Her kitchen chairs were equipales that took you in like a hug, which I needed. My first day had gone as smoothly as anybody could reasonably hope-no revolts, no crises major or minor. Still, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was, but standing in front of a roomful of high-school students seemed to use up a ferocious amount of energy. It made me think of those dancers in white boots and miniskirts who used to work bars in the sixties, trying desperately to entertain, flailing around like there was no tomorrow.
Emelina, Mason, the baby, and I were all exiled to the kitchen; Viola had taken over the living room with her friends for a special afternoon meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. They were preparing for their annual fundraising bazaar, and as a backdrop to our own conversation we could overhear the exchange of presumably vital information:
“Last year the Hospital Equipment Committee didn’t make fifteen cents on them sachet cushions.”
“Well, it’s no wonder. They stunk.”
“Lalo saw in a magazine where you can make airplanes out of cut beer cans. The propellers go around.”
Emelina set a cup of tea in front of me. I picked it up and let the steam touch my eyelids, realizing that what I needed most at that moment was to lie in bed with someone who was fond of every inch of my skin.
“It must be weird, going back to that school,” she said.
“Oh, sure. It is. I didn’t let myself think too much about that part of the job. Till today.”
Mason was on the floor, coloring, and Emelina was moving around the kitchen in an effortless frenzy, closing drawers with her hip, cooking dinner, and feeding the baby at the same time.
“Let me do that,” I said, scooting myself over to the high chair and taking the cereal bowl from Emelina.
“Here, he makes a pretty fair mess, let me give you Grammy’s apron,” she said, tying around me a splendid example of Stitch and Bitch enterprise. The baby snapped up cereal as fast as I could spoon it in, wasting little on mess as far as I could see.
“You’re having dinner with us tonight, right?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Honestly, Codi, if you think one more mouth to feed is any trouble you’re out of your mind. If I woke up one day and had six more kids I don’t think I’d notice.”
“No, Em, thanks, but I feel like resting in peace.”
“You’re not dead yet, hon.”
From the living room we heard Viola raising her voice now in Spanish, saying something about peacocks: pavones. The other women answered in Spanish, and I could follow just enough to know that they’d moved rapidly onto the subject of fruit trees. Doña Althea sounded agitated. Her high-pitched voice was easy to recognize, exactly what you’d expect from a very small, strong-willed woman. Emelina raised her eyebrows as she looked under a pot lid. “Do you know the boys won’t even speak Spanish to their Grammy?” she asked in a subdued voice.