“Cool.”
“But look,” she said, “next time, if you need an extension or something, just text me.” They exchanged numbers. Then they were silent. She waited for him to go, but instead he turned to her and said:
“I was thinking about something you brought up in class the other day.”
“Really? What?”
“You told us everything we see is a signifier for something else. Something deeper. Like, the word tree signifies a tree, and the word itself changes how we think about the thing. Right? What did you call it?”
“Semiotics.”
“Yeah.” He leaned toward her. His eyes were dark and flashing, his breath tobacco-spiced. “Like, if we call someone a student, how does that change how we think about them? If we call someone a teacher, what does that mean?”
“Well, what does it mean?”
“It’s crazy if you think about it, how arbitrary it is.” His enthusiasm startled her; it transcended the cool in his voice. She recalled this thrill, its promise—when in high school her own English teacher had read from A Room of One’s Own, and she’d realized that there was another way to see the world than how the Nicoll family did, an entirely different way to be. Now she had passed on this promise to Nick Brickston. Who knew what he would do with it? He shifted closer to her on the couch. “I mean, you’re a teacher, and because of that we’re supposed to think of you a certain way. But Ms. Thruwey’s one too, and you guys aren’t even on the same planet.”
“What are you saying?”
“She’s a teacher, but you’re just Molly. A person you can, like, have a conversation with. Like one of us.”
Molly couldn’t help but smile at this. She wondered at the accidental power of this gangly teenage boy—how he knew to say what she most wanted to hear. “Nick, that might be the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said.
—
That weekend, Molly’s attendance was required at the spring semester faculty dinner hosted by Principal Norton.
At the restaurant downtown, Molly chose a seat toward one end of the long, narrow table that stretched down the center of the dining room. The table was white-clothed and spotlit. Her chair was hard. Around her, everyone did just as expected, the teachers interrogating their appetizers, the servers pulling corks. How dull it was, how safe it felt. No one here would break a glass, or hurl a napkin, or empty the salt shaker on someone else’s head, or jump up and curse and storm out. Even the odors behaved themselves: gentle aromas of garlic and wine, traces of high-priced perfume. It made her throat itch. At the opposite end of the table, Beth Firestein, sipping a martini, looked equally bored.
Around the table, the other teachers complained about school board politics, lamented the price of real estate, and marveled at the massive engagement ring of Gwen Thruwey, whose fiancé had just been made partner at a venture capital firm in the city.
“Well, we knew he wasn’t a teacher!” joked Tom Pritchard, and everyone roared. There was nothing these teachers enjoyed more, Molly thought, than laughing bitterly at their own poverty.
She drank. Around her the conversation veered toward the faculty’s second favorite topic: the insanity of Mill Valley parents. These parents, said Allen Francher, somehow managed to be not only entitled, intrusive, and demanding, but also negligent. Some of them seemed delusional about their kids’ abilities, added Jeannie Flugel. In other words, they were incapable of seeing what pieces of shit their own children could be, said Tom. Worst of all, said Gwen, these parents treated teachers like they were not even professionals, as if they were in the category of babysitters and maids.
“Well,” Molly said, almost to herself, “maybe we are.” She heard too late the buttery slip of the wine on her tongue, and felt heat rise in her face as the entire table of teachers turned toward her.
“What did you say?” Gwen asked, leaning over a plate of focaccia to glare.
Molly gripped her wineglass, which felt slick and enormous in her hand. “I don’t think it matters, that’s all, what we call ourselves. What we are doing is very, I don’t know, elemental.”
“I am a professional person,” Gwen said, and the table nodded in assent. “An educator. I don’t know what you call yourself.”
“That’s not what I meant, exactly.”
“What exactly do you mean?” Jeannie asked. “You don’t seem to think very highly of your own job.”
“I just don’t think…,” Molly said carefully, and paused. She set down her glass and worried the stem. “I don’t think you’re going to get through to kids if you look at things that way.”
Tom Pritchard chuckled. “You don’t think, huh?”
“No wonder no one respects teachers the way they should.” Gwen gestured toward Molly with open palms, as if toward an exasperating child. “There’s attitudes like this coming into the schools.”
“Calm down, Gwenny. Have some more wine.”