Like her faculty, February dreaded the day scientists would perfect some stem cell transplant or in-utero tweak that would rid the world of deaf people and render her native language obsolete, when there’d be no students waiting at the foot of the hill for her to unlock the campus gates. More than a few times she’d even prayed, selfishly, for The End to hold off until after she was dead and buried, so that she might be spared the pain of bearing witness to it.
For now, though, River Valley had lived to see another year. To tell the truth, the school was better positioned for survival than most Deaf schools, though that had more to do with the disadvantages of the surrounding population than with successes on RVSD’s part. Colson County struggled with both rural and urban varieties of hardship, and high poverty rates translated to fewer implants and less cash for private speech therapy, a narrower achievement gap between RVSD and the underperforming mainstream schools, and parents desperate enough for food and childcare that they’d send a kid to board at a “special” school without concerns about how doing so might look to their neighbors. For some, three meals a day and individual attention from teachers was more than their other children might get.
Geography, too, was on their side—Kentucky was just a bridge away, the West Virginia line only fifty minutes out. The next closest Deaf school was St. Rita in Cincinnati, but that was small, Catholic. With the Ohio and Kentucky state institutions each a three-hour drive from the river border towns, it was easy for parents to petition that their kids attend River Valley. The result was that February ran a monopoly of sorts, with her school at the center of a wide pool of people who really needed it. While the decline of the Deaf population might well be inevitable, for RVSD at least, it was stalled.
Now a motorcade of minivans was cresting the front drive, brimming with things the students didn’t need, more often than not missing things they did. Younger siblings carried bedrolls bigger than themselves because they wanted to glimpse this magical intersection between school and sleepaway camp to which they could not belong. Some parents in tears, some heartbreakingly indifferent in the face of their children’s departures.
February kept an eye out for those students, ones whose parents had chosen boarding as a matter not of necessity but of convenience, an alternative to the pressures of learning to communicate. Of course, in a situation like that, language deprivation was all but guaranteed, so February and the parents were in agreement—the dorm was the best place for the child. But that didn’t stop her from feeling sorry for them. Your mother is your mother, and that didn’t change, no matter where the kid slept.
She forced her eyes back to her computer. Moments earlier, Dr. Swall had sent through the projected district budget, packed with plenty for her to worry about. Beside her, on a legal pad pilfered from Mel’s stash, February had a list of improvements she’d been planning. Now she would have to cross most of them out. No new computers for the digital lab (but perhaps they could update Windows?). Graphing calculators would be on the parents. New football helmets they’d need regardless—God forbid someone cracked his head open on her watch.
Updated history texts would have to wait another year, along with replacements for the cadre of wonky desks held steady by wedges of cardboard and sugar packets. The carpet in the boys’ lower dorm had to go; she left that on the list, along with the new Spanish curriculum, designed, finally, without a listening component.
She sighed. Swall would try to weasel his way out of paying the teachers if he thought he could get away with it. And up and up the chain it went—austerity measures handed down from city council, the state senate, the DOE. Among other things, it meant that February herself was headed back to the classroom for the first time in almost a decade, to cover Diane Clark’s maternity leave. It had quickly proven impossible to find a long-term history sub fluent in ASL, and hiring a hearing one with a team of interpreters would’ve decimated her emergency reserves. So she’d jerry-rigged a plan: she’d given the middle school teacher a double overload for two of Diane’s courses, foisted a third on the English teacher, and took on the remedial course herself. She’d pored over the curriculum, made and remade her syllabus, fretted about whether she could handle both teaching and administrative duties. The weight of it all made her wish, momentarily, that summer would last a bit longer after all.
She would sleep on the school grounds tonight, in the Old Quarters above her office. The space had long served as storage—what her assistant headmaster, Phil, jokingly called “the archives,” though it was just a collection of collapsible file boxes (also courtesy of Mel’s firm), much too disorderly to be deserving of the title. Mel thought it was silly of Feb to sleep there, and said so every year. Their own home was a stone’s throw away, February could be summoned instantly by videophone should she be needed, and anyway, nothing bad ever happened when it was expected. But February was a sucker for tradition, and so she stayed in her office, peering out onto the drive at the parental procession now in reverse, until she saw Walt lock the gate for the night.
She lugged her laptop and duffel bag up the spiral stairs, navigating around the boxes to her bed, a twin with an old iron hospital frame. It had been made up with fresh sheets, and she smiled at the thoughtfulness of the dormkeepers. Good kids. On the kitchenette counter, they’d left her some Campbell’s, and jars of milk and coffee from the cafeteria. She opened a can of tomato soup and warmed it on the hotplate as the eyes of headmasters past peered down at her from their frames. Gazing up at the record of unfortunate facial hairstyles, she had an idea for how she might help the Serrano girl.
Even though February had technically settled on her course materials, she had wanted to do something different, and now, standing before the wall of her intellectual ancestors, she knew exactly what it should be. Charlie was untethered; she had no understanding of the culture to which she belonged or the history that belonged to her. Few of the remedial students did—most were late arrivals to River Valley, those who enrolled after having failed in the mainstream. So February would write her own curriculum, a series on Deaf culture. It was more than they would have learned with a random sub, she reasoned, and anyway, how could anyone be expected to learn history when they didn’t know the first thing about themselves?
As for Charlie, assuming her language loss could be rectified, the ASL would come from interacting with classmates more than any structured tutorials. But what if she was shy? What if the students shunned her for not knowing how to sign? It had been known to happen—the Deaf world was certainly not immune to pettiness, often succumbing to a caste-like system of who had the “purest” ASL. Charlie was not the only new student to arrive this year, but she was the only high schooler. Tipping her bowl to catch the last drops of soup, February decided she would call in a ringer, one who would guarantee Charlie language immersion—she would assign Austin Workman to be her mentor.
The night had finally cooled, as if the students’ presence at school had spurred the weather into feeling autumnal, and February pushed open the dormer windows. The breeze was restorative, but the moths descended upon the room immediately, so she switched off the overhead light in favor of a bedside lamp. She texted her mother good night, called Mel, who didn’t pick up, made a note in her calendar to talk to Austin in the morning. Then, in the spirit of the antique room, she abandoned her phone for the novel she’d thrown into her duffel at the last minute.
The book was about a French voyage of exploration and its subsequent shipwrecks, and though she had anticipated an anxious night—the unfamiliar bed and a big day before her—she felt the rhythm of the ocean in its pages, and soon fell into an easy sleep.