“It’s giving sigma.”
At the start of the year, the principal had pulled together a staff meeting, sitting them all down to review an endless list of new slang they had to learn in order to communicate with their middle school charges.
She had glared down in disdain at the time as they reviewed the packet, a glossary of nonsensical terms she was certain would wind up displacing something far more important and valuable in her brain storage. The script to some obscure 90s horror movie, or the meticulously rehearsed dance steps to a pop song routine she’d performed with her two best friends in the school talent show when she was fourteen — all more important than committing the new meaning ofOhioto memory.
It hadn’t mattered. She had always been adept at acclimating herself to her surroundings, code switching on a dime and mirroring the behavior and speech patterns of those around her. Her students’ slang had crept into her vernacular without her full conscious approval, but no matter how many times she had looked over the list since the fall, Sumi wasn’t any more confident she knew whatskibidimeant that afternoon with just two weeks of the school year left than she had been at the start.
She wondered what would happen if she began using her newly acquired slang on the street, outside of the controlled chaos environment of the school. If she appropriated bites of strangers’ food and explained she was simply collecting a fanum tax, or if she told the handsome, unsmiling barista she saw every morning that she was earning a degree in Advanced Rizzenomics, would her friends and neighbors laugh, or would they think she was having a psychotic break?
Sliding her phone out ever so slightly from beneath the book, she continued to type.
PinksPosies&Pearls:I’m going to plant lilacs at the new house, I think.
I love the smell of lilacs in spring.
They’re all bloomed out at this point in the year, but that’s something to look forward to
Think of it — no more classes, closing my eyes in my own house,
and smelling the lilacs right outside the window.
Like I said, don’t judge me too harshly. And wish me luck!
The cat’s gonna be out of the bag after this week.
“What about you, Ms. Trent?”
Her eyes snapped up at the sound of her name, realizing the group of girls at the front table had been talking to her. Sumi smiled brightly, not letting them see her mild panic at having lost herself in one of her daydreams in the middle class.
“What about me? Repeat the question, please.”
The girls giggled, rolling their eyes before the ringleader piped up once more. “MacKenzie and I are both going to camp this summer.”
“And I’m going to Europe to visit my grandparents,” one of the other girls quickly interrupted.
Sumi smiled, nodding. She’d already heard the details of the girl’s impending trip, as had the rest of the class, the rest of the school, probably the pigeons outside. Her mind quickly filled in the blanks, catching up with the question she’s likely been asked.
“I’m going to be doing some redecorating this summer,” she told them, not mentioning that the redecorating would be taking place in a new home and that she would not be returning to the school in the fall. “My plants are all getting pot upgrades.”
Fortunately, the answer was suitably uninteresting to them and they did not press.
If this opportunity had presented itself the year before, she would have spent this week breaking the news to her students, preparing them for a new homeroom teacher and team leader the following year, making introductions and easing their impressionable minds through the change as easily as she could.Fortunately, it wasn’t going to matter to this group. Her two years with this crop of kids was up, and they would be moving on to the junior high the following year, leaving her behind and likely never thinking about her again.
That suited Sumi just fine. This was the easiest break of her plan, the most painless, the most seamless. Everything else was a bit stickier, but this, at least, she could walk away from with a clear conscience.
You said you wanted a do-over, right? No time like the present, Pinky.
It wasn’t that she disliked teaching.
She hated everything about it, had done so right from the beginning, knowing she had made a terrible, terrible mistake two weeks into her master’s practicum, before she had even completed the degree. By then, though, it was too late. Too many years in school, too much money, too much of an investment to walk away from. The sunk cost fallacy of her life.
She liked kids, or at least, she’d thought she did. She liked imparting wisdom and shaping young minds, at least in theory. But the reality of being surrounded by other people’s tweens all day long — stinky and vicious to each other with no boundaries to speak of, distracted by screens, never actually reading the books they were assigned and turning in essays that had been fed to them by an AI program — was mostly terrible. She had been kicked in the face the previous year trying to break up a fight, sent home carrying her tooth in a paper cup, only to discover her union-provided dental coverage would still require several thousand dollars from her out-of-pocket.
Since then, Sumi had mentally checked out. There were teachers who felt called to the profession, who called themselves educators, wholovedit . . . she simply wasn’t one of them.
It wasembarrassingbeing in a relationship with Jordan at this point. He was the loudest voice on the front for publiceducation in the state, with his name in the paper and his photo on industry websites, visiting rural species-specific schools and large public schools like the one in which Sumi taught alike.Visitingschools. I’ve visited the space museum; that doesn’t make me a fucking astronaut.
It wasn’t that Jordan was abadboyfriend. On paper, they were perfect — the middle school teacher and the educational activist. They’d been together for three years, three years in which he had gone from the local school board to the state board, and as he inched closer to his own lofty political aspirations, Sumi had begun to consider if she was, for the first time in her life, nothing more than a bit of arm candy. After all, she ticked an awful lot of boxes that played well with his constituency of middle-aged teachers. She was plus-sized, both mixed race and mixed species, even if she was human-presenting, and she just happened to be toiling away in the very profession he championed.You’re the diversity hire girlfriend. That’s it.
