Today, she’s wearing a pair of light-wash jeans and a color block sweater that hugs her hips and makes my mouth go dry every time I look at her, my hands itching to reach out and touch it, to see if it’s as soft as it looks.
She’s dragged me out to the local high school—a building that looks and smells exactly the same as it did when I attended class here—to help fix up some things. At first, I didn’t understand the correlation, but then Kendra Prentice brought a group of kids in for some sort of class, and I understood Amy’s angle.
I should have told her that it would never work. Kendra and I were one grade apart in school. She never liked me.
In high school, she was eclectic, starting a fashion club and walking around in outfits that weren’t technically against the rules but drove the administration crazy. Now, she’s an English teacher, and she dresses like one, wearing a maxiskirt paired with a punny T-shirt about Oscar Wilde, large dangling earrings, and a scarf that’s looped around her neck enough to completely hide anything up to her chin.
“Break up into your groups based on the book you’re reading, and go over the questions in your packet,” Kendra says now, her eyes sweeping over the room. “I’ll be right back.”
The moment she leaves, of course, the room erupts into a quiet, controlled chaos, several of the teens closest to me turning around in their chairs. They’re young girls, babies, practically, but they’re giggling and pushing one another, pointing to me with quick whispers.
“Hey,” one in the front says, a little streak of blue in her hair that I’m sure took some convincing for her to get. “Sir? Do you think you can help us with this question?”
I can feel Amy watching me with interest. Kendra is going to come back any moment, and if she sees me distracting her students, it’s going to be worse than if I hadn’t come at all.
“Not a good idea,” I mutter, but the girl forges ahead, lifting up her paper and reading what is, ostensibly, the first question on it.
“Why do you think the author chose to tell the story from the perspective of Nick, a friend of Gatsby?” she reads in monotone, before lowering the paper.
I’m quiet for a moment, then I clear my throat, unable to resist the question. “I mean, what do you think the story would have been like from Gatsby’s point of view? Do you think he would have told the story the same way?”
“I guess not,” the girl says, pursing her lips. “I mean, he might think of things differently.”
“He would lie,” another person in the group says, folding and unfolding his paper. “If he was telling the story.”
“You don’t think Nick is lying?” I ask, and I realize the entire room has gone quiet, focused on this exchange. Normally, if I were around this many people, all of them looking at me, it would make something inside me lock up.
Maybe because they’re kids, it doesn’t feel quite so bad.
“Wait, wait—” A boy across the room stands up, reading from his paper. “How would you describe the atmosphere inOf Mice and Men?”
“Uh…” I pause, shifting, wanting to sayfucking sad, but knowing that won’t be appropriate. “Lonely? Isolating? Each of the characters is kind of struggling with their own problems, aren’t they? I guess you could argue that the ending negates the story of friendship throughout the book.”
“It doesn’t,” Amy says, shaking her head and coming to lean against one of the desks. I’m still perched at the top of the ladder, which gives me a strange vantage point on the scene. “The ending is the ultimate act of friendship.”
I shrug one shoulder, not sure that I could have done it myself. Maybe that means I’m a coward.
“What do you think made the creature in this book a monster?” another student asks, shyly, before adding, “It’s Frankenstein.”
“But he’s not a monster,” I counter. “In fact, he acts with more integrity than some humans might in the same situation.”
“What situation?”
“I mean, would you say people were nice to him?” I ask, setting down the drill and looking at the kid. “The only person who was kind to him was the blind man.”
“And he didn’t even stop his kids from chasing him off,” says another person in the group.
“I didn’t plan for this to be a full class discussion,” a voice says from the other side of the room.
We all start collectively, turning to see Kendra standing in the doorway, and the students hush quickly. She balls up a tissue and tosses it in the trash, walking in and looking up at me.
“But you actually wouldn’t be a half-bad teacher, would you?” she says.
“Uh…” I say, glancing at Amy, feeling completely out of my depth. But Amy gives me two thumbs-up from over Kendra’s shoulder, and I guess that means this entire thing was a success.
By the timeevery odd job at the high school is finished, the kids are waving to me in the hallways, and one asks me if I’m going to start working there. One of the secretaries gives us a program for the upcoming school play, saying it would be great to have us in the audience.
“I’m glad we got out of there before the final bell,” Amy says, reaching around to tuck the program into her purse. Like she might actually think about coming to the play. “Those kids were in love with you.”
