Training was accelerated from its usual six weeks down to two and a half. “We believe you to be a fast learner,” said a guy named Tim, who was in charge of the trainees.
“Would you please write that in a note and send it to my parents?” Zee said. “They would be very amused.”
In Chicago Zee lived in a six-flat on which her parents grudgingly paid the rent, because Teach and Reach salaries were laughably low. “You’d need to live on a barge in China in order to be able to afford working there,” Judge Wendy said.
“And yet the commute would be impossible, Judge.”
“Franny, you can joke all you want.”
“Zee.”
“All right, Zee. But I have to tell you point-blank that I wish you wouldn’t take this job,” said her mother, who had steadfastly disapproved of her move, despite understanding that the job was worthwhile, even noble.
Zee began teaching history at one of the Learning Octagon? charter schools after the two-and-a-half-week lightning round of prep in their training center. The Teach and Reach teacher Zee was replacing had quit very dramatically in the middle of a school day, throwing up her hands and asking, “Where’s the learning? And where’s the octagon?” Then there was a substitute for a while, but he hadn’t been trained in the methodology, and all seven schools in the Learning Octagon? network (it was awkward that there were seven, not eight, but one building had had a lead paint issue and had been indefinitely shut down only days before the start of the term) were contracted now with Teach and Reach. So Zee started at the facility on the South Side, armed with a formal teaching plan.
She walked into her first-period ninth-grade class, which she imagined would be a scene of chaos, but instead the students seemed to have been given a sleeping potion; at 8:20 in the morning they were half-lying across their desks in the drafty third-floor classroom. Most of them were African-American, and several were Hispanic, and a couple were white. None of them looked happy to see her, or happy to be there, or even happy to be awake; she didn’t blame them at all. She remembered feeling this way herself in high school and was immediately sympathetic. So at the very least they would have a sympathetic teacher.
“Good morning,” she said as she unnecessarily straightened the few belongings on her desk and sat on the unforgivingly squeaking green chair behind it. No one replied. “Well, maybe it’s not such a good morning,” she said. “Maybe this morning sucks.”
“No shit,” some boy said. There was vague laughter, and some mild surprise that Zee joined in the laughter too, though she hadn’t found his comment funny. When in Rome, she’d thought, followed by: I really don’t know what I’m doing here.
“You will feel uncertain sometimes in the classroom, maybe a lot of the time in the beginning,” Tim had told her. “That’s totally normal.” She thought of this now as she looked out over the class. “I’m Ms. Eisenstat, and I’ll be your teacher tonight,” Zee impulsively said. “May I tell you about our specials?”
They looked at her with unimpressed faces.
“What do you mean, tonight?” a girl asked.
“And what do you mean, specials?” asked another girl in the back.
Zee was mortified at her own joke; what was she thinking—they did not go to pretentious restaurants, or probably to restaurants at all. Most of them received free lunches. She realized that any kind of bonding she might do with them wouldn’t be around her pathetic attempts to amuse them or to seem starkly different from their previous teacher, who had abandoned them. She wanted them to need her, or at least tolerate her. She didn’t want them to overwhelm her and make her feel that she too had to leave her job in the middle of the year, in the middle of the day.
Being in the world as an adult meant that you didn’t just quit. Things couldn’t necessarily be “gotten out of.” Sophomore year at Ryland, Zee had initially had a roommate, Claudia, who smelled of B.O. and had no comprehension of the importance of good hygiene. Judge Richard Eisenstat had made a telephone call to the dean after Zee had been curtly told by the dean’s secretary that she had to suck it up; there was absolutely no way she could switch dorm rooms. Somehow, though, when the judge called, a new room was found: a single. Things could be gotten out of—apparently many things, most things. But she didn’t want to get out of this thing. These students, she decided, needed her. She looked out over their unreadable faces and got started with that day’s prepared lesson on the Second World War. Almost immediately the classroom became a place of indifference, with occasional spurts of anarchy. Some days, no one listened. She found herself begging them to listen, trying to bribe them. A couple of kids were outright menacing, including a large girl who said in an incongruously babyish voice, “I’m going to fuck you up,” in response to a request to put down her pencil at the end of an exam, before immediately crying and apologizing. Always there were trips to the principal, and sometimes visits from Big Dave in Security, who made things worse, escalating whatever in-room squall was taking place.
Greer called and said, “Quit! Quit!” but Zee, almost in tears, said, “I can’t do that to them. I won’t.” Most days weren’t about fear, they were about unbelievable frustration, even rage—her own. But she also felt nearly ill with sympathy over what her kids didn’t have, didn’t know, and couldn’t do. One boy had the worst breath, and finally he shyly revealed that he didn’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste, and had no money to buy them; so she bought them for him. At Zee’s request, Greer sent cases of her parents’ protein bars, and Zee went out and bought packs of thick socks and gloves, always gloves. There was a sense that nothing did anything, that she was just another clueless person armed with supplies, throwing them into a volcano.
And then one morning that spring, when Zee was waiting for the train, a text came from Greer, saying, “Are you available? It’s an emergency.” Soon they were on the phone, and Greer in a guttural explosion told her the most terrible news: Cory’s little brother had been run over by his mother’s car and killed. You didn’t have to have met a child to know that his death was the worst thing you’d ever heard. At age twenty-two, Zee could imagine the death from the point of view of the child and the parent and the sibling, all at the same time. Greer was sobbing, and Zee wished she had something to say to her, some way to soothe her. But they were in different cities and lives now, so the best Zee could do over the next few weeks was text her frequently, saying, “How are you doing?” despite already knowing the answer.
At lunchtime each day, after a rough or maddening morning, Zee sat alone in the teachers’ lounge, mostly listening to tales of other classroom experiences—small tragedies or tense near-misses, or else anecdotes about bureaucratic stagnation, and unrelated references to weekend activities such as online dating or bowling.
She sometimes took special note of the guidance counselor, Noelle Williams, because she had been particularly unfriendly from the first day. She never spoke to Zee at lunch, but sat in a small group of administrators, daintily eating a cup of yogurt, her plastic spoon knocking against the bottom and sides, her posture freakishly straight. When she was done eating, she put her trash into a neat little bundle, her hands practically compacting it. She never left traces of herself behind. Noelle Williams was twenty-nine years old, her hair cut close to her head, revealing her skull’s perfect, pleasing shape. Her delicate ears sprouted many tiny rings, and her outfits were immaculate, never creased. Zee had always felt stylish, in her own way, but Noelle’s perfection was a reproach.