“Are you mute or something?”
The snark in the comment—and Fallon moving toward her seat—thunked me back to the classroom and I blew out a sigh.
“No, sorry, ladies. I was just thinking about when I was a student here at Mercy.” A few girls leaned forward, a few raised their eyebrows, showing vague interest. Fallon whipped out a file and went to work on her right hand.
“My name is”—I paused, scanned—“Ms. Lawson, and I’ll be taking over for the time being while Mrs. Prusch is on medical leave.”
“You mean in the nuthouse.”
I was beginning to recognize Fallon’s voice with every part of my body. Just the sound of her spitting words poked at my stomach.
“Shut up, Fallon.” The mumbled quip came from a girl sitting in the front row. I smiled.
“Hi, again.”
Miranda looked up at me. Sitting in front of me at her desk, she somehow looked much smaller than she had in the cafeteria. She didn’t greet me, just went back to her book. I scanned my girls, then looked back at Miranda.
In real life, she was pretty. She had deep olive skin with thick, black brows and a head of fuzzy, dark curls that rolled over her shoulder. In high school world, however, she may as well have been wearing a kick-me sign: she was enviably thin (from a thirty-three-year-old’s point of view) with curves that the mean girls would call fat. Her curls were gorgeous and natural but neglected and unruly (similar to my own, which had earned me the quaint nickname Electric Head), and she bore the high school equivalent to leprosy: a decent case of acne that peppered her nose and chin.
“I had the pleasure of meeting Miranda at lunch today.” I looked up, thinking my connection to the obvious outcast would make her seem adult and cool. But the mention of her name—as if it were the punch line of some untold joke—caused a quiet ripple of laughter through the classroom. I felt myself bristle, then grabbed Mrs. Prusch’s role book and went through the hallowed high school ritual of butchering the students’ surnames and, in this decade of Ja Net (pronounced Jenae), Niola, Suri, and Jacita, their first names as well.
Didn’t anyone name her kid Jennifer anymore?
“Uh, Kayleigh?”
“Here.” A strawberry blond raised her hand as if it weighed eight hundred pounds and her one-word response would be the last she’d ever utter.
“Finleigh?”
Kayleigh’s neighbor to her right gave me a finger wave and a dazzling smile.
“And . . . so—I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to pronounce this.”
Big blue eyes rolled backward like a slot machine. “It’s pronounced so-fee,” the other girl sandwiching Kayleigh groaned. “Sofeigh.”
I wouldn’t have believed it if it weren’t there in ballpoint and white. “Interesting. I’ve just never seen it spelled that way.”
Sofeigh gave me another eye roll and then exchanged the are-you-kidding-me gaze with Fallon and the other ’eigh-ers. I felt sweat beading at the back of my neck.
You’re the adult, Sophie.
“Okay.” I snapped the roll book shut and slid up on the front desk à la every sexy actress playing a teacher in every film I’d ever seen. “We’re talking today about The Scarlet Letter. Who wants to explain to me a little about the book?”
A heavy silence washed over the room and every eye was turned on me, every pair blank.
Where is a swirling vortex of hell when you need it?
The bell rang and it was the single most sweet, welcome sound that I’d ever heard. The girls were up with laptops, iPads, and English books packed, iPhones whipped out and already in mid-text before the thirty-second bell ceased.
“Remember to read the Prufrock poem in its entirety,” I said to the backs of their heads. I could have raised my voice or rapped my hand on the desk to get their attention, but truthfully, watching the herd of teenage girl heads filing en masse out the door took my breath away. Their desertion of my classroom was a thing of pure beauty.
Until I noticed it wasn’t completely deserted.
“Everything okay, Miranda?”
Miranda was hunched at her desk, shoulders sloped, massive waves of frizzy curls tenting whatever it was she studied. She looked up, surprised. “Is class over?”
I nodded silently, and though I knew should do something teacher-ly and admonish her for reading during my lecture, I felt a certain kinship for her, could understand the overwhelming desire to dip into an artsy world when the real one echoed with monikers like Super Dork and Forever Virgin.
I smiled softly at her. “So, was it as bad as I thought it was?”
Miranda looked up from the paper she was doodling on with a shy smile. “No.”
I held her eye and a blush warmed her cheek; she broke my gaze and studied her notebook. “Well, kind of.”