She knew she needed to say something before Eric took over. But the two new students wouldn’t have read any of the material that her own kids were supposed to have completed. It also wouldn’t be fair to her original students—the ones who still showed up each day—if she strayed from that day’s planned lesson.
Impatient with the silence, Eric looked at Shawn and Debbie and called out, “Just because you’re juniors doesn’t mean you can’t be anything you want. You can be anything you want to be in this world. Right, Ms. Phillips?”
Ray kept her groan to herself.
“Thanks, Eric.”
Eighth Time
The other English teacher wasn’t the only faculty member to quit. In the teacher’s lounge the next morning, Principal Wachowski told the other assembled teachers that five others had also left. The old Music teacher, whatever her name had been, was gone. So was the Art teacher. So was Al Flanagan.
“Who’s going to scare the beejesus out of the kids now?” Harry Rousner said. Then, looking at Ray, he pointed and added, “You’re it.”
“Al was a nice guy,” Ray said. “He was just scared about what the future holds.”
The principal sighed and said, “Okay, enough of that kind of talk.”
“What kind of talk?”
“The kind that had your students’ parents calling me to complain about someone insisting they can still be anything they want, even as governments are disbanding, the Nobel committee is gone, and there’s no more NHL.”
“No more hockey?” Harry said.
The principal nodded. “They announced it this morning. The league is folding.”
Harry shook his head and grumbled curses to himself.
“I’m not going to apologize for trying to inspire my students,” Ray said.
Principal Wachowski moved to the door, ready for the conversation to be over. “Inspire them all you want. Just don’t lie to them.”
Ray opened her mouth to say something else, then thought better of it and kept silent. It wasn’t the possibility of getting reprimanded or even fired that worried her. The junior class was almost nonexistent and had already relocated to her classroom. It was now obvious to her that her job wouldn’t exist in another year. In a couple months, she would be out of work, regardless of whether she spoke her peace or not.
No, she kept silent because she was wondering where this would all end. How many more students would disappear before they gave up pretenses of Fourth Period versus Fifth Period? How many more teachers would vanish before the principal would throw a couple kids in Ray’s classroom and tell her to teach them whatever she wanted, no matter if it had anything to do with English or Math or whatever else she could think of?
“Which brings me to my next point,” the principal said, as if reading Ray’s mind. Wachowski’s head was the only part of her still remaining in the doorway. “We might have to start combining classes. Like I said, we’ve had a few teachers skip town. We’ll probably have more do the same. I know a few of you had new students yesterday. Just keep up the good work and we’ll get through this.”
She disappeared for a second. Then her face reappeared, leaning into the doorway once more, and she added, “And for the eighth time, do not say anything that makes one of your students’ parents call me with a complaint. We have enough problems as it is.”
Ninth Report
She brought the television cart into her classroom so she could watch the news along with her students. It was all they were going to be thinking and talking about later in the day anyway, so she might as well view the broadcast along with them.
At first, the television showed only static.
“I think it might be broken,” she mumbled, clicking buttons on the remote control.
But then Eric came over, switched two of the cables behind the TV, and the picture came in clear and crisp.
“Thank you, Eric.”
He bowed and went back to his seat.
On the screen, a collection of men and women in white lab coats sat on either side of a wooden podium. Behind them, on a tarp hung up from one side of the room to the other, were the names of various corporations and universities around the world.
Even as the Survival Bill was beginning to ramp up, a collective effort to mass produce food processors, power generators, and incinerators for each family in the country, the government had also funded a massive study between twenty different universities and thirty different scientific groups, all sharing their experiments, all trying to find a cure for what was causing the world’s newborns to be blocked from participating in the world around them. It was the largest study of its kind, lasting nearly a decade. Once a year, the group had released its findings—its total lack of progress in identifying a way for newborns to be able to speak and move.
This was the ninth and final year of the organized study. The final report. The one in which everyone hoped and prayed that scientists would announce they had found a way to reverse the new affliction so that mankind didn’t die its slow and gradual death.
Upon receiving a signal from someone off camera, a man with a white beard, sitting in the first seat to the right of the podium, stood from his chair and moved to the bundle of microphones.
The man coughed twice, then sipped his water. He opened his mouth, scratched his neck, then took another drink from his glass.
“Get on with it!” Eric yelled from his desk.
Looking down at his notes, the lead scientist said, “I’m terribly sorry to announce that it is this group’s finding, after nine years of work, with hundreds of scientists collaborating from all over the world… of course, we won’t stop trying to find a cure. We’ll never give up… But I’m very sad to announce—”
All of the air sank out of Ray’s lungs. Her head started spinning and she felt like she were going to pass out. Gripping the sides of the desk she was sitting at, she forced herself to look at the other faces in the classroom. Shawn, her new junior, was staring at the screen while tears made their way, painfully slowly, down his cheeks. Debbie, the other junior, was lurching back and forth as she cried. All four of the senior girls were crying, taking turns between hugging each other and hugging their own knees to their chests. The only one who wasn’t in tears was Eric Tates, her class clown.
She looked at him, silently pleading with him to make a joke, to say something that could turn the sadness into choking laughter.
Instead, he shrugged and said, “I want to be the scientist who finds a cure for all of this.” Then, instead of a smile appearing from his mouth, a dribble of snot ran down his nose and onto his lips. He added, “Still think I can be anything I want?”
Tenth Quiz
Following the broadcast, she had let her students leave class as soon as they wanted. If she were their age, she would have skipped the rest of the day and played video games or gone over to a friend’s house or done whatever kids still did to pass the time. Surely, the ways kids goofed off hadn’t changed just because they knew that in fifty or sixty more years, they would be senior citizens without anyone else younger in the world except the remaining Blocks.
She planned an impromptu quiz for them the next day. It wouldn’t be a real quiz, with results that mattered. And the questions wouldn’t require them to have read any of the material she assigned to the class. She planned questions like, “If The Awakening were written today, how do you think it would have ended?” and “If Meursault shot a man on the beach today, what do you think the headline in the newspapers would be?”