1
JOEL
Iused to think I knew my daughter. Parent-teacher night suggests otherwise.
The plastic chair squeaks under my weight as I shift, and the man across the desk coughs as if he’d rather be anywhere else.
“If she applied herself more, I’m positive Dana will have a better outcome.”
My gaze wanders to the faded poster behind his head, depicting a cheerful-looking human skeleton with every bone labeled. The femur, the patella. I read the tiny print on the poster as the teacher talks about tutoring and extra homework.
He’s talking about my daughter as if she’s a problem to be solved, instead of a person to understand.
Beside me, Dana slumps in her chair, her finger tapping on her thigh, no doubt aching to reach for her phone, which I confiscated when she pulled it out in the first parent-teacher conference.
It’s been the same message all evening. If she applied herself, if she focused more, she’s capable, but she doesn’t try.
I run a hand over my face, and it catches on the stubble on my chin. Mina used to deal with all this when she was alive. I was deployed for every single parent-teacher conference until the day I was honorably discharged so I could nurse my wife through her final days. She never told me how harrowing it is to sit across from teacher after teacher telling me my daughter is failing at school. But then, Dana’s grades were fine until her mother passed.
That was four years ago. It was tough on the girls, especially the then thirteen-year-old Dana. When her grades dipped, I didn’t push her. I was lost in my own grief for the first few years. And now I’m seeing the consequences of those lost years. Dana’s grades never recovered, and I’m the parent who didn’t support her schoolwork when she needed me the most.
The teacher, Mr. Stubbs, I think, lets out a long, wheezy breath and hands over a piece of paper with an email address scribbled on it.
“The school can match her up with a tutor, but she’s got to want to do the work.”
I glance at Dana, and she’s picking at a loose thread on the seam of her jeans. All I see is wasted potential, and there’s a nagging voice inside that tells me it’s my fault, that I’ve already failed her.
“Thank you.” I take the paper as I stand up.
I’ve had the same message from her English literature, history, geography and Spanish teachers.
She could do better if only she tried. When did my daughter give up trying?
Her phone weighs down my pocket, and I experience another stab of guilt. Is it too much screen time? Too much social media? As a single parent, I can’t be everywhere at once, and I don’t even know how many hours she spends glued to her device. More than once I’ve gone in to check on her before bed and found her with the screen still on watching videos.
We shuffle into the hall, and the door closes behind us.
“Dana...” She puts a hand up to stop me.
“Don’t, Dad. I know what you’re going to say. But would you be inspired by a teacher like Mr. Stubbs? He makes biology as boring as watching grass grow.”
She puts her hands on her hips, and we square off in the corridor. Another family shuffles past us, both parents with a perky boy smiling between them.
I stare at my daughter. Her dark hair falls into her eyes, and her expression is hard, much harder than any seventeen-year-old should look. But then, not every seventeen-year-old has watched their mother die.
And she’s right. If I had to listen to Mr. Stubbs wheezing through lessons every day, I’d be bored too. Maybe I’ve been trying to make her fit a mold she isn’t made for.
“What do you want to do when you finish school next year? Do you even want to do something in biology?”
My daughter clams up whenever I try to talk to her about the future, and here we are, halfway through her first semester of her senior year, and she still doesn’t know what she wants to do.Her collection of classes seems as though she randomly chose them out of a hat. And knowing Dana, that’s probably what she did.
Another stab of guilt. A good parent would have been guiding her for the past three years to make sure her subject choices matched what she wanted to do. It’s as much my fault as hers that I’m here, squaring off in a fluorescent-lit corridor with a bright daughter who refuses to apply herself and has no idea what she wants to do with her future.
She shrugs. “I dunno.”
The bell rings, signaling it’s time for our next meeting. I glance at the schedule in my hand. “Media Studies.”
Dana’s already walking down the corridor, and I follow behind, bracing myself for more disapproving looks from another teacher.
