One day at noon, Zee nervily planted herself on the sagging couch beside the guidance counselor, whose lack of interest in getting to know Zee was obvious, though this in itself made Zee want to win her over. What had Zee done to piss Noelle Williams off? Zee asked her, “How long have you been working in Chicago?”
The woman looked at her directly, appraisingly. “Three years,” she said. “I was here at the inception of this school.”
“Oh great.”
“And before that I was getting my master’s. And then working in a school out in the suburbs.”
“That must have been pretty different from this place.”
“Yes,” said Noelle, and she didn’t smile with bitter irony, or add any details to show that while working here was unmanageable, they were both in it together, and the only way to try to manage it was to be ironic. She wasn’t being ironic, nor was she welcoming.
“I’m just getting my feet wet,” Zee went on. “Any tips about the teaching? It’s hard to sustain anything in there.”
“Do I have any tips about how you should teach your classes?” asked Noelle. “First of all, I’m not a teacher. But also, I imagine that you were given all the tips you need, were you not?”
Were you not? Zee almost mimicked her words back to her. What a cunt, she thought. “Well, I was given a crash course in teaching history,” Zee said, “but teaching actual high school students is something else entirely. And teaching these kids—it’s just barely happening. Too many crises, and too much tuning out. I get pretty despondent.”
“I understand.” Noelle didn’t say anything more.
There was a moment of cool silence, during which Zee ate the sandwich she had sloppily made that morning in her tiny kitchen. Now the innards were falling out of the soft and floppy thing, a spill of dissonant ingredients that should never have been put together: apple slices, and a few whole baby carrots on their way out of this world, and a stiff Elizabethan ruffle of kale, all of it vaguely pasted together by a spackle of miso and a squirt of low-fat mayo from a squeeze bottle purchased at the bodega around the corner on the first lonely night she had moved to this city, knowing no one.
Noelle watched as vegetables tumbled onto Zee’s lap, and was that actually a smile? A slightly unpleasant smile as she saw Zee get slimed by her own lunch? Zee dabbed at her shirt with a rough brown paper towel from the dispenser, leaving an oblong of oil behind, and when she looked up to say something else to Noelle, she saw that the door of the faculty lounge was pneumatically closing, and Noelle was already on her way to deal with some new problem.
It might have gone on like this for quite a while, the guidance counselor being rude and unfriendly, and Zee continuing to try to win her over, and perhaps one day Noelle would’ve said to her, “Zee, what are you doing? Why don’t you stop? Can’t you see I just don’t like you?”
But instead one afternoon, a month into the job, Zee’s student Shara Pick said, “Miss Eisenstat?”
Zee was at the whiteboard creating a timeline that stretched from 1939 to 1945. A few people seemed very interested; one student in particular, Derek Johnson, knew everything about the war already and was contributing a lot to the discussion. “Yes?” Zee said.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” Shara asked, and then she stood up and wobbled in front of her desk. She had to go, and she had to go now. She was a bumblebee-shaped white girl, and wherever she went a cloud of chaos accompanied her. Crumpled sheets of paper, pens that leaked, little plastic microbeads from some unknown source. She was generally ignored in the class, seen as trashy and pitiable, and she didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. During lunch she sat alone, staring into the middle distance as she ate a bag of Doritos and called it a meal. Zee had been informed by the assistant principal that Shara was considered “at risk.” Her parents were meth addicts in and out of recovery, and she and her sisters had recently moved in with their kind but half-blind grandmother.
The year before, the parents had both shown up for curriculum night, high out of their minds. “It’s a mess,” Zee had been told, and she had kept an eye out for Shara, who always wore a coat to class that had one of those Eskimo hoods that reminded Zee of the cover of the old Paul Simon album that her parents had listened to during her childhood. Shara dozed frequently, which worried Zee, who was on the lookout for signs of drug use in this vulnerable girl. But whenever there was an in-class essay Shara would hunch down over her desk with her elbows and tongue out in a posture of deep, touchingly childlike concentration, and would turn out something that was surprisingly impassioned. Maybe there was a hidden interest there, a hidden possibility.
“Sure, go,” Zee said, and she stayed at the whiteboard, writing up a list of factors that had led to war. She wrote and wrote so much in a tiny hand that the board appeared covered in wire mesh, though only some students were taking any of it down in their notebooks. Others were gazing out at her in comprehension or incomprehension or daydream, and a boy in front named Anthony was doodling extravagantly in his notebook, the detail work of skulls and devils impressive, if evidence of an extreme interest in Satanism that should probably be reported to the administration.
A girl in the last row was doing her acrylic nails on top of her notebook, the strong smell wafting up toward the front of the room. The smell spread, the felt pen that Zee dragged across the board uttered its occasionally shrill report, and the teenagers in the room shifted and settled and resettled. Someone howled like a wolf, at length, for laughs. The afternoon had a low-blood-sugar quality, with only thirteen minutes left until class ended. Zee would have had them write in their journals for a few minutes, and maybe let one of them play a song on the phone, which tended to focus the entire room. But then an awareness came over her, as strongly as the smell, that Shara hadn’t returned from the bathroom. Zee sent Taylor Clayton out to check on her, and while Taylor tended to be a hesitant girl, only moments later she banged back into the room, knocking against the door frame and saying, “Something’s wrong with Shara!”
Shara was curled up on the floor of her stall in the bathroom, and somehow Zee and Anthony, who’d been pressed into service, got her down to the nurse’s office. “It hurts so bad,” Shara was crying, and she held her stomach and rocked back and forth.
The nurse, as it happened, was showing a drug film to another class, and only her aide sat at the desk in the small green room, putting tongue depressors into a jar one by one, thud thud, thud, and looking terrified when Shara was half-carried and half-dragged in and was then laid down on the bed.
“I’ll get Jean,” the nurse’s aide said as she ran from the room, scattering tongue depressors.
“Tell him to leave too,” Shara said, gesturing toward Anthony.
The boy ran out, relieved, and then Zee sat beside Shara, rubbing her arms and saying whatever she could think of. “It’s probably appendicitis,” she said, talking rapidly and idly. “My brother had that once. He screamed all night. But when they took it out he felt better, and you will too. Did you know that the appendix serves absolutely no function?” she added, because she couldn’t think of what else to say, and she wanted to distract Shara from her pain.
“No,” wept the girl.
“Well, it’s true.”
Then she became aware of someone hovering, and there above them was Noelle Williams. “What’s going on, Shara?” the guidance counselor asked in her calm voice.
“I’m sick.”
“I think it’s appendicitis,” Zee put in.
“And you know that from where, your training at Harvard Medical School?” said Noelle.
“Well—”
“Or was that a unit at Teach and Reach?”