Someone’s made the coffee; there’s no set rotation for the task, and some days the pot sits clean and empty until after Advisory, almost certainly a symbol of unvoiced petty resentments: I made it yesterday, it’s somebody else’s job today. But this morning, you catch the rich, bright scent as soon as you enter the building; it feels part of that early-summer charm today, a general enchantment in the air. You take down a cup—one of many hanging from hooks on a fiberboard rack; these are the unclaimed cups, left behind, possibly, at this very time of year by teachers whose contracts weren’t renewed, or who moved elsewhere, or who retired—and, filling it, flash briefly on your station.
You are young: you’re older than your students, but not so much older as they seem to think you are. You’re certainly not older than anybody else in Humanities; the two other history teachers are from different generations, their hair short and greying, their shirts starched. But they’re not stuffy: you’ve been here four years now, and you’ve come to see your trio as the intellectual wing of the department. Mr. Leavitt teaches both the general and advanced placement sections of U.S. government. His students reflexively defer to him; his presence in the classroom demands it without requiring any extra effort on his part. Soon he’ll retire, and his replacement will almost surely come from the new breed of teachers, the ones who want to be their students’ friend.
Mr. Grenning, who teaches the non-elective economics class every college-bound student is automatically enrolled in at the beginning of senior year, seems like a man from a different age. Whether that age has passed or is off somewhere in the hazy future is difficult to say. His dress is stern, his glasses stark and horn-rimmed, and he parts his hair to the left with a careful comb and a little oil: it’s Vitalis, you can’t miss it. But his manner is gentle, and his eyes have a dreamy cast to them that’s lost on the kids, but not on you. Sometimes you find yourselves lunching together, both brown-bagging it: there’s a general-use table for lunch and breaks in the lounge, an ashtray in the middle of it, almost always half-full.
Today, you sit together briefly before heading off to your morning sections; he reads the paper. He looks up to ask if you’re going to the year-end potluck next week, always held ahead of finals to boost attendance—when the grading of exams has begun and the specter of commencement exercises looms, people tend to start making excuses.
“Yes, but I can’t think of what to bring,” you say.
“Dibs on the deviled eggs,” he says. “Wouldn’t want to break with tradition.”
“‘Tradition!’” you sing, not too loud but clenching your fist dramatically: the drama department has just closed out their year with Fiddler on the Roof, and the teachers all attended opening night.
“Your predecessor used to bring a Crock-Pot full of Swedish meatballs every year,” he says, smiling warmly, his eyes on yours: he’s old enough to be your dad, there’s nothing untoward in his look unless affection between colleagues is strictly off-limits, which it isn’t. These are changing times. The hippies still talk as though older people had nothing to say worth hearing; but when you’re talking to Peter Grenning, you feel glad about your place between extremes. You’re not too square, but you’re skipping the protest. You’re casual, but you’re certainly not a slob.
“You’ve mentioned it!” you say, laughing. Last June, around the same time and certainly at this same table, he’d pined aloud for the days of Mollie Brunhardt’s Swedish meatballs until you’d taken the hint. Finding a recipe in an old cookbook from the library, you gave it a test run a few days ahead of time; on the morning of the potluck, you made a few final adjustments to make the dish your own. It came out light, and tangy, and delicious; everyone came back for seconds.
“Well, they’d certainly go well with my deviled eggs,” he’d said, rising; it was time for class. “I’ll see you later!” You nod, following him out: the hallways are humming with young bodies, bustling at their lockers, chattering like squirrels. At the end of the school year, you take stock of how much youthful energy you’ve absorbed, and it feels like a real accomplishment. You wonder how you made it all the way to the end. Everything ought to be as free and easy as planning potlucks with Peter Grenning, you think, idly. Maybe someday.
* * *
THERE’S NO NEED TO CALL roll this close to the end of the semester—you can do it just by looking around the classroom and seeing which desks are empty. But classroom routines resist variation, rightly, you think; you consider them valuable in and of themselves. They’re known rhythms. As you stand at the head of the class, reciting names whose order is a mystery known only to the massive computer that prints them out in a room it gets all to itself over in the administration building, you note that variances the students introduce to break the monotony are, themselves, now part of the score:
“Michael Adams?”
“Here.”
“Jason Fenton?”
“Present.” Two stray giggles, pebbles down an empty well.
“Anne Higgs?”
“Here.”
“Gene Cupp?” Nothing. “Gene Cupp?”
You know he isn’t here; you look over to his friend Jesse, who raises his eyes from their focus on a threadbare spot in the knee of his jeans just long enough to shrug.
Gene hasn’t been here in over a week. No one answers at his house when the secretary calls to report his truancy. No one seems to care about Gene enough to say what’s become of him, not even his friend, who must know, but who sits with his eyes averted, patiently waiting for the moment to pass.
You know how Jesse feels, you think. You remember. You became a high school teacher because you hoped always to keep the days of your youth close at hand: days when your desire to help others pricked at you like a thorn. From an early age, you’d been in love with the world: there was so much in it, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them, ready to receive the transmissions when they came. A devotee of the chance encounter, the found pleasure, the happy accident, your eyes always open, trying to spread some of your inner light around: that was you, the you everyone knew. You cheered up every room you entered when you were a child; your mother, in her plea for clemency, said you had always been “the best part of anybody’s day.”
How the press ran away with that one! In those days before cable TV, it was harder for a local killing to get national traction, but your mother’s letter proved so easy to contrast with the details of your crime that columnists from as far east as Baltimore found it impossible to resist. “She was not the best part of Jesse Jenkins’s day, however dire a piece of work he may have been,” read an unsigned editorial that ran in the Sun while the world waited out your sentencing phase; its headline was “The Good Person Fallacy.” “She wasn’t the best part of Gene Cupp’s, either.”
They were wrong about that. It’s in the nature of the news cycle to untangle knots and to cast the duller threads aside: to simplify a narrative so that readers can take in a few details, confirm opinions they probably already held, and move on at minimal cost to themselves. But the weight of the evidence about you shows that you’d often been not only the best thing about Jesse Jenkins’s day, but possibly the only good thing in it. Today, for example, Jesse’s been riding the nostalgic waves that seem to float down the halls this time of year, but for him nostalgia is the portal into horror. When you wait hopefully for his friend Gene to reply, “Here,” it gives him a good feeling. A good feeling is sometimes enough.