I read the sentences again. They are set in a paragraph about the “group.” The next paragraph is about going to church and how God can “transform everything unto something better.” Smoke wafts from the toast that is now burning in the toaster oven. I unplug it and look again at the paper. On the last page, he writes in his conclusion, “I had done a lot of things in my life. I’m am changing who I am and what I’m going to be.”
I look again at “pray to god for mercy because stabbed him.” He has left out the personal pronoun that should precede the word, “stabbed,” but obviously, someone was stabbed by someone. I make another piece of toast and get into bed.
The quiet in my house is so loud, I put earplugs in to muffle it. My bed is cold as dirt. I turn and face the wall and think, Because stabbed him. I see a young man, maybe twenty-five, the age of my daughter Zia, bleeding, too hurt to even beg for his life, being kicked. And Frank — maybe this stabber — standing there, watching. I will need to report the paper to someone in the morning. The campus police, perhaps the dean.
My alarm goes off at six. I’m exhausted and can’t imagine teaching “citation” in my morning English 1A at Cabrillo. The more tired I am in class, the more my students tend to slip away from me, into their phones, or wherever it is they go in the space they stare at, when I call their names. It will be another day where I won’t be able to hold their attention. I still owe them grades on papers they turned in two weeks ago.
Over coffee, I check my campus e-mail accounts. Two students who’ve been absent in my West Valley “Intro to Lit” write to tell me they were absent. An e-mail at Cabrillo alerts employees that e-mail will be down for maintenance. The dean at San Jose City College writes about an upcoming division meeting I can’t attend. The SJCC union sends another reminder about the union picnic. And I have an e-mail from Frank: Don’t tell anyone what I wrote, okay. It is confidential. I just want to be descriptive. And then, under that: 54028 Love Creek Road. My address.
For a moment, I don’t register what the e-mail means. A spring of nausea bubbles up from my stomach and percolates into the tips of my fingers. Frank knows where I live. Frank is telling me he knows where I live.
I stand up and walk to the other side of the room, as far away from the computer as possible. I want to run outside, away from 54028 Love Creek Road, and I want to check the locks on the door and windows and stay inside 54028 Love Creek Road. I don’t do either. I am having trouble breathing.
I turn on my phone to call the campus police but stop after the area code, my index finger hovering over the number. Frank knows where I live, and if he got in trouble, he could come to my house. And even if the police took his description of the stabbing seriously and arrested him, he could always send someone else.
I pace around the house. It’s too small for my belongings, and I don’t have time during the semesters to clean. Each week of the sixteen-week semester it gets messier. Now, eight weeks into the fall term, dishes sit on the floor under my futon with dried pasta noodles, the recycling bag overflows with yogurt containers and diet soda cans, a flow of dirty clothes erupts out of the open drawers of the small dresser I picked up at the Abbot’s thrift shop in Felton. I stare at a pile of clothes on the floor. I imagine a bleeding man being kicked over and over again by a heavy boot.
My ex-husband Ben is a lawyer, and our daughter Zia is in law school. I want to call them both to ask advice. But I can’t get them involved. The paper might be evidence of a crime, and they would want to report it to the police.
I’ll just pass Frank. That’s it. He doesn’t want anything else from me. I’ll tell him his descriptions are good in his paper and leave it at that. It’s none of my business what he’s done. It’s between him and his conscience. Besides, he never actually says he stabbed anyone, just “because stabbed him.” Without a subject in the sentence, anyone could have done the stabbing. I imagine the grammar lesson I could give with Frank’s sentence — I stabbed him / You stabbed him / They stabbed him / Frank stabbed him.
I reply to his e-maiclass="underline" I got your note. I understand. I add, No problem, in an effort to sound casual.
Frank is absent the next class. I spend the three hours of class time working on run-on sentences, fragments, and paragraph organization, while eyeing the classroom door for any sign of him. Jorge, a dance major with thick, beautifully shaped eyebrows, asks if you can begin a sentence with “and.”
“Sometimes,” I say unhelpfully.
Jorge writes down my answer. He is a diligent student.
Yesenia, who is studying to become an occupational therapist, asks if you can begin a sentence with “because.”
“Of course.” I catch the curt impatience in my voice, but I’m too nervous to speak gently. “You begin sentences with ‘if,’ don’t you?”
Yesenia looks down at her desk. “I was just wondering. My other English teacher said you can’t.”
“I’m sorry; let me show you how to do it,” I say. And then I try to demonstrate how to begin a sentence with “because,” but my purple whiteboard pen gets fainter and fainter and disappears entirely at the end of: “Because the cat was hungr—”
“Sorry,” I repeat, “I’ll e-mail you a handout about all this.”
My students look back at me, blank and disbelieving.
At the end of class, I collect a new batch of papers and add it to the file folder bulging with last week’s papers.
On the way home, my steering wheel starts making a moaning sound, punctuated by a sharp squeal on tight turns. The steering gets less and less responsive as I make my way past the stoplight by the Ben Lomond Market and onto Love Creek Road. My headlights catch the red memorial toy box at the mudslide where those little boys died in the 1980s and were never found. As I pass the memorial, I see that someone has arranged a group of dolls in a semicircle as though they are holding a little class. I leave the paved part of Love Creek behind and rumble along the narrow stream canyon, my steering column bleating and my car bottoming out on the dirt road.
The house smells of old milk. I put half a burrito I saved from lunch in the microwave and check e-mail. In the four hours since I last looked, I’ve received forty-three new messages, mostly about campus events and items — a flash drive, a stack of papers, a jacket — left behind by faculty in classrooms. I have the usual absent-student-excuse e-mails, and then I see a subject line, Probation Check — Important.
It’s Frank’s probation officer, a woman named Lindsey Johnson, doing a “routine evaluation.” She asks me to answer a few questions:
Has Mr. Gonzalo missed any classes? If so, how many? (Please provide dates.)
How would you characterize Mr. Gonzalo’s behavior as a student in your class?
Finally, do you have any concerns about Mr. Gonzalo that you would like to share?
I am overcome, for a moment, by a sense of relief, as though I had been in a dark room but found, finally, a rectangle of light around an unlocked door. I’ll unburden myself to Lindsey Johnson, a sensible-sounding person — a professional — who will know exactly what to do about Frank’s paper, about the pressure he’s putting on me to pass him, about his intimidating e-mail.
But then I remember Frank’s gang. I can’t tell Ms. Johnson the truth.
I click out of her e-mail and scan my inbox. I have an e-mail from Frank. Dear Miss Janet, I need to talk to your office hours ASAP that is about some new issues.