A steady stream of purrs could be heard after she offered her hand and the cat started pushing the corner of its mouth against her knuckles.
For some reason, she had never gotten around to naming it. It hadn’t been wearing a collar when it arrived at her doorstep, and she wasn’t sure if it was because the owner didn’t want anyone to know who had abandoned it or if it was because the cat had always been more of a neighborhood cat than a house pet. Instead of coming up with a new name for it when it arrived at her doorstep, she had simply begun calling it You.
“Hey, You, you want some food?” and “You’re so cute, You,” and so on.
She couldn’t think of what was keeping her from giving the cat a name. It wasn’t as if she were going to leave it behind when she migrated south. The cat had come to depend on her. And her on it. She couldn’t just put it back out on the street when she decided it was time to start travelling down the highway with the rest of the caravan.
Trixie? No. Sprinkles? No. Fluffy? Definitely not. She looked around at all of the empty beer cans. Tipsy? Maybe.
Then the name came to her and she was discouraged she hadn’t come up with it earlier.
Holding the phone away from her mouth, she whispered, “Where did you come from, Stranger? Where do you want to go?”
In response, Stranger purred and circled, purred and circled.
A thought occurred to Ray then, and she pulled the phone back to her mouth: “Hey, mom, what did I want to be when I was little?”
“Is everything okay, honey?”
“Everything’s fine, mom. I’m just curious what I wanted to be when I was young.”
“When you were little?” her mom said, her way of repeating something to make it sound absurd.
“I was trying to tell my students what I wanted to be when I grew up and I couldn’t remember.”
“Well, that’s easy, honey. A teacher.”
“No, mom. Not what I’m doing. What did I want to be when I was little?”
“A teacher!” her mother said again. “A teacher! A teacher!”
Ray shook her head, unsure why she bothered to ask questions like that when the conversation never went the way she wanted it to go.
Her mother added, “You came home from your very first day of Kindergarten and told your father and I that you wanted to be a teacher when you grew up. We laughed and thought it was the funniest thing in the world. But then you said the same thing in first grade when you were asked. And second grade, too. You don’t remember that?”
“No,” Ray said, frowning. “I don’t remember that at all.”
Rubbing the back of Stranger’s head, she wondered how she could forget something like that.
“You never said what subject you wanted to teach,” her mom added. “You didn’t even know teachers could focus on a certain subject back then. All you knew was that you wanted to be a teacher.”
“Are you making this up, mom?”
“No! I’m being serious. I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
As if joking about becoming a teacher was something that should be off limits if you had any decency.
“Thanks, mom.”
“For what, honey?”
“For remembering.”
Final Chance
The rest of the weekend was spent thinking about the scientist’s report and the diminishing student population. She remembered the things Eric Tates had said before storming out of the room, and she also replayed the conversation with her mother over and over.
By the time school started on Monday morning, she was on a warpath. She stormed into the teacher’s lounge, ready to tell everyone there exactly what she thought about Al Flanagan and Harry Rousner and all the others who had left before the school year was finished.
The only person in the lounge, however, was Mr. Turkow, the janitor.
The man, hunched over his mop, looked up from the wet floor and said, “Another migration this weekend.”
“Oh.”
Next, she went to the principal’s office. She was on her way into Principal Wachowski’s office, without knocking, when a voice called out behind her: “She’s not in yet. If she’s coming in at all, that is.”
Ray turned around. The mousy-looking secretary was standing behind her, next to a metal filing cabinet. The secretary had a stack of folders in her hands. Looking down, Ray saw that two trashcans were already full of the folders.
“Permanent records?” Ray said, rolling her eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing.” If her class clown had been there, he would have laughed—or cried. Ray said, “It doesn’t matter if Wachowski is here yet. I’ll leave a note.”
She wrote down everything she had planned on saying to Wachowski’s face. She wrote so quickly that when she was done, she had to go back and make some of her handwriting more legible so the principal would be able to read it all. Her fingers gripped the pen as if it were a sword and she were fighting for her life. In a way, maybe she was.
Dear Principal Wachowski,
You may think it’s wrong to tell the students they can be anything they want. Some of their parents might even get upset and call you when I say such things to the kids. Make one thing clear, though: I will not stop telling my students that they can achieve anything they dream up in their young heads.
Yes, the human population is steadily declining. And yes, unless the scientists make some miraculous discovery, which none of us expect to happen, the decline will continue until there are only a few people scattered around the world. And then, no one at all.
However, that does not mean the students can’t be anything they want! It turns out I wanted to be a teacher when I was little. Can you believe that? A teacher! I didn’t want to be a teacher who won awards or a teacher who had a full class of kids every day. I just wanted to teach.
So, if one of my students wants to be a hockey player when he grows up, he can sure as heck be a hockey player. I admit, the NHL won’t be around. My student will never win a Stanley Cup. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a hockey player, of some sorts, all the same.
If one of the girls in my class wants to become a lawyer, then she can do that! I’ll be the first to acknowledge the Supreme Court has already discussed disbanding and that some local courts have already begun to turn their lights off. But until the very last pockets of society break down, everyone will rely on people who can mediate differences.
Which brings me to my larger point: accomplishments do not make a life; our actions each day are what define us. No young kid says he wants to win the Stanley Cup when he gets older. He simply says he wants to be a hockey player. Well, let him! And no kid says she wants to win a case in front of the Supreme Court. She merely tells her parents she wants to be a lawyer. Well, let her too!
The world is changing. The human race is fading away. We all know this. But until the day I die I will continue to tell my kids that they can do anything they want as long as they keep trying and never give up. I will never tell them they can’t be anything they want.
And if you don’t like it, you’ll just have to fire me and go without an English teacher.
It felt good to tell her principal how she felt. It felt even better to stand up for what she believed. But she wasn’t done.
Next, she raced down the hallway so fast that if she were a student one of the other teachers would tell her to slow down unless she wanted detention. She jogged past one empty classroom after another. Al Flannigan’s room was dark. All the lights were off in Harry Rousner’s room as well.