“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”
She smiled. “Good, that’s good.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’ve got to get to the gym. We should talk sometime.” She reached out and touched my arm again and held her hand there a moment before taking it away and slipping out of the staff room.
Heading to my first-period creative writing class, it struck me that anyone who’d construct a high school timetable in such a way as to make anything “creative” come first thing in the morning either had no understanding of high school students or was possessed of a wicked sense of humor. I had mentioned this to Rolly, whose response was, “That’s why they call it creative. You have to be, to find a way to get kids to care that early in the day. If anyone can do it, Terry, you can.”
There were twenty-one bodies in the room as I walked in, about half of them sprawled across their desks as if during the night someone had surgically removed their spines. I set down my coffee and let my satchel hit the desk with a fwump. That got their attention, because they knew what had to be inside.
At the back of the room, seventeen-year-old Jane Scavullo was sitting so low in her desk I almost couldn’t see the bandage on her chin.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve marked your stories, and there’s some good stuff here. Some of you even managed to go entire paragraphs without using the word ‘fuck.’”
A couple of snickers.
“Can’t you get fired for saying that?” asked a kid named Bruno sitting over by the window. There were white wires running down from his ears and disappearing into his jacket.
“I sure fucking hope so,” I said. I pointed to my own ears. “Bruno, can you lose those for now?”
Bruno pulled out the earbuds.
I riffled through the pile of papers, most done on computer, a few handwritten, and pulled out one.
“Okay, you know how I talked about how you don’t necessarily have to write about people shooting each other or nuclear terrorists or aliens bursting out of people’s chests for something to be interesting? How you can find stories in the most mundane of environments?”
A hand up. Bruno. “Mun-who?”
“Mundane. Ordinary.”
“They why didn’t you say ‘ordinary’? Why you have to use a fancy word for ‘ordinary’ when an ordinary word would do?”
I smiled. “Put those things back in your ears.”
“No no, I might miss something mun-dane if I do.”
“Let me read a bit of this,” I said, holding out the paper. I could see Jane’s head rise a notch. Maybe she recognized the lined paper, how the handwritten sheets had a different look to them than paper pumped out of a laser printer.
“‘Her father-at least the guy who’d been sleeping with her mother long enough to think he should be called that-takes a carton of eggs out of the fridge, breaks open two of them, one-handed, into a bowl. There’s bacon already sizzling in a pan, and when she walks into the room he tips his head, like he’s telling her to sit down at the kitchen table. He asks how she likes her eggs and she says she doesn’t care because she doesn’t know what else to say because no one’s ever asked her before how she likes eggs. All her mom’s ever made her that’s even remotely egg-like is an Eggo waffle out of a toaster. She figures whatever way this guy makes them, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be better than a goddamn Eggo.’”
I stopped reading and looked up. “Comments?”
A boy behind Bruno said, “I like my eggs runny.”
A girl on the opposite side of the room said, “I like it. You want to know what this guy is like, like, if he cares about her breakfast, maybe he’s not an asshole. All the guys my mom hooks up with are assholes.”
“Maybe the guy’s making her breakfast because he wants to do her and her mother,” Bruno said.
Laughter.
An hour later, as they filed out, I said, “Jane.” She sidled over to my desk reluctantly. “You pissed?” I said.
She shrugged, ran her hand over the bandage, making me notice it by trying to keep me from noticing it.
“It was good. That’s why I read it.”
Another shrug.
“I hear you’re flirting with a suspension.”
“That bitch started it,” Jane said.
“You’re a good writer,” I said. “That other story you did, I submitted it to the library’s short story contest, the one they have for students.”
Jane’s eyes did a little dance.
“Some of your stuff, it reminds me a bit of Oates,” I said. “You ever read Joyce Carol Oates?”
Jane shook her head.
“Try Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang,” I said. “Our library probably doesn’t have it. Bad words. But you could find it at the Milford Library.”
“We done?” she asked.
I nodded, and she headed out the door.
I found Rolly in his office, sitting at his computer, staring at something on the monitor. He pointed at the screen. “They want more testing. Pretty soon, we won’t have any time to teach them anything. We’ll just test them from the moment they get here to the moment they go home.”
“What’s that kid’s story?” I asked. He needed to be reminded who I was talking about.
“Jane Scavullo, yeah, shame about her,” he said. “I don’t even think we have a current address for her. The last one we have for her mother has to be a couple of years old, I think. Moved in with some new guy, brought her daughter along, too.”
“The fight aside,” I said, “I think she’s actually been a bit better the last few months. Not quite as much trouble, a little less surly. Maybe this new guy, maybe he’s actually been an improvement.”
Rolly shrugged. He opened up a Girl Scout cookie box on his desk. “Want one?” he asked, holding the box out to me.
I took a vanilla.
“It’s all wearing me down,” Rolly said. “It’s not like it was when I started. You know what I found out behind the school the other day? Not just beer bottles-if only-but crack pipes and, you won’t believe this, a gun. Under the bushes, like it had fallen out of someone’s pocket, or maybe he was hiding it there.”
I shrugged. This wasn’t exactly new.
“How you doin’ anyway?” Rolly asked. “You look, I don’t know, off today. You okay?”
“Maybe a bit,” I said. “Home stuff. Cyn’s having a hard time giving Grace any kind of taste of freedom.”
“She still looking for asteroids?” he said. Rolly had been over to the house with his wife, Millicent, a few times and loved talking with Grace. She’d shown him her telescope. “Smart kid. Must get that from her mother.”
“I know why she does it. I mean, if I’d had the kind of life Cyn’s had, maybe I’d hold on to things a bit tight, too, but shit, I don’t know. She says there’s a car.”
“A car?”
“A brown car. It’s been by a couple of times when she’s been walking Grace to school.”
“Has anything happened?”
“No. A couple months ago, it was a green SUV. Last year, there was a week or so there, Cyn said there was some guy with a beard on the corner, three days in one week, looked at them funny.”
Rolly took another bite of cookie. “Maybe, lately, it’s the TV show.”
“I think that’s part of it. Plus this is twenty-five years since her family vanished. It’s taking a bit of a toll on her.”
“I should talk to her,” Rolly said. “Time to hit the beach.” In the years after her family’s disappearance, Rolly would occasionally take Cynthia off Tess’s hands for a while. They’d get an ice cream at the Carvel at Bridgeport Avenue and Clark Street, then stroll the shore of Long Island Sound, sometimes talking, sometimes not.
“That might be a good idea,” I said. “And we’re seeing this psychiatrist, this woman, you know, once in a while, to talk about things. Dr. Kinzler. Naomi Kinzler.”