The smell of the food filled her apartment as she showered, shaved, touched up her toenail polish, dusted on some inconspicuous makeup. Then she cleaned, flinging loose shoes and unfolded laundry into the closet, lighting a candle, and rubbing at the marks her ironing board had left on the carpet. Finally, to her relief and delight, she removed the dishes from the oven, each of them at just the right moment. They sat golden-edged on top of her stove, giving the whole place a sense of home. She had just dabbed scented oil behind her ears and was brushing her teeth in her newly clean bathroom mirror when she heard a knock at the door.
She opened it, greeting Nex Level with a long, slow kiss. He told her the food smelled good. She told him he smelled good. He put the gym bag he was carrying on the floor, next to her bag of ungraded papers. Lena set their plates on the coffee table and opened two beers, taking a long sip of hers and trying not to watch as Nex took his first bite.
Finally, he turned to her. “Hey, beautiful lady…”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“You got any hot sauce?”
And thankfully, she did.
EVERY MINUTE COUNTS™
“CAN WE STAY in here during the pep rally?” The pleading voice belonged to Jermaine Hadler, who spent most class periods casting longing glances toward “Professor” LaQuandrea Jackson. A hoodie sagged over his bony shoulders like a vampire’s cape.
“Sure,” said Hernan. He always stayed in his room during pep rallies, offering refuge to the shy and the crowd averse.
“Fuck yeah!” said Jermaine, though he seemed to realize even as he said it that the words didn’t roll off his tongue right. Students who learned coolness as a second language never quite lost their accents.
Hernan knew that real nerds didn’t dress up for Nerd Day Thursday. They ignored it, just as they ignored Pajama Day Monday, Halloween Costume Tuesday, and all the other school-spirit dress-up days that led to the homecoming pep rally. The rally itself usually fell on School Color Friday, which was okay for nerds because it allowed anyone in a red shirt to blend into the crowd unnoticed. This year, however, there had been a scheduling glitch. The pep rally had been pushed up to Thursday and would thus be filled with screaming non-nerds dressed in taped-up glasses and high-waisted shorts—a scene from which actual nerds would stick out disastrously.
The athletes and cheerleaders and band members had all left class earlier in the day, excused through a succession of hall passes and administrative e-mails. Unserious students also took advantage of the chaos. They ducked into bathrooms to cause various types of mischief, or snuck down the street to hang out at Taco Loco, or skipped school completely, filtering through the proverbial cracks of the proverbial system and into the proverbial streets.
In the end, the kids left in the lab were girls like LaQuandrea, with her ever-present book and unironic glasses, who got stuck nodding along while groups of boys talked about computer games. Or they were boys like Jermaine, who got stuck listening to groups of girls talk about menstruation. Most of them would not attend tomorrow’s homecoming game. Instead, they’d spend the day wishing football itself, along with all the other winner-take-all alpha-dog showdowns of high school, would cease to exist.
The class had just finished a unit on dinosaurs. Hernan always saved this topic for homecoming week. No one appreciated the Tyrannosaurus rex, that huge, awkward predator already extinct for millions of years, like sophomores with bad skin and difficulty making eye contact. Something about homecoming week called for a reminder that even the largest of us were small, that the continents were once a big, continuous land mass and might be again, and that, in the time scale of evolution, humans were no more significant than a grain of sand.
Outside, drums signaled the beginning of the pep rally. The students in the room drifted toward the noise like a siren song. They pushed aside leaves and branches to peer through the windows as the field filled with shouting, shoving teenagers. The dance-team girls wiggled their pleated skirts, their flawless makeup accentuated by identical nerd goggles. Coach Ray yelled the names of the game’s starting line as, one by one, jocks came crashing through banners made from bulletin-board paper.
“Jeffeerrrrssssoooonnn Jeeeaaaaaannnn!”
The crowd roared as “Haitian Sensation” Jefferson Jean tore through the paper, his muscles bulging through plaid shorts and high socks.
“OOOOO’Neeeeeeaaaalllll Riiiiiiiigbyyyyyyyy!!!!!”
The name brought the loudest roar of the day. Rigby stood onstage, basking in celebrity, pulling his nerd suspenders off one shoulder like a Chippendales dancer preparing for a striptease.
Hernan’s closed classroom windows were powerless against the shrieks and whistles.
“Why do people act like animals?” asked LaQuandrea, squinting through the tendrils of a snailseed vine. One strip of hair had managed to escape her ponytail. It stuck straight up in the air like a messy antenna.
“Because we are animals,” said Hernan.
“Hey,” said a voice from the doorway. “Could I stay in here?”
It was Angel, out of uniform as always but not dressed as a nerd. Hernan tried to conceal his surprise. Angel seemed an obvious pick to skip school on a day like today.
“You can, if you’re sure you don’t want to go to the pep rally.”
“Nah. I just get in trouble at those things.” Angel found a spot in a back corner of the room, put his headphones on, and laid his head on a lab table.
Outside, Coach Ray shouted a series of threats and promises about the upcoming football game. Two thousand voices roared in agreement. Inside, under the shade of the foliage in the windows, the students fell into their own natural states. They played fantasy card games, drew pictures, or talked in the hushed tones of those whose conversations were mocked when overheard. Hernan took the opportunity to tend to the plants in his window. Some of them had climbed all the way to the ceiling. Others had withered. Hernan bent to remove a clump of brown leaves from one of the pots.
“Mister. Her. Nandez.”
Hernan turned toward the voice.
Mr. Scamphers was in the doorway, clutching his clipboard in a pose that signaled moderate threat. “You do realize there is a pep rally going on outside?”
As if to underscore how hard it would be to miss this fact, drumbeats thundered through the window.
Hernan said, “Yeah. But I usually stay up here with students who…” He gestured toward the kids in the room. He didn’t want to say the words shy or awkward aloud.
If Mr. Scamphers picked up the nonverbal cue, he hid it well. “Who are supposed to be at the pep rally, you mean?”
Hernan tried a different approach. He pointed to the board, where he’d written the Research-Based Best Practice of the Day. In its entirety. “But Every Minute Counts, right? Like today’s e-mail said, forty-five seconds per day adds up to six extra days of instruction per year!”
He smiled, inviting Mr. Scamphers to join him in appreciating the joke. The assistant principal was, after all, wearing thick black nerd glasses that combined with his moustache to look like a Groucho Marx mask.
But there was no indication that Mr. Scamphers found the situation, or Hernan’s words, or possibly anything else in the world, funny. Instead, he gestured toward Angel, sleeping under his headphones in the corner. “Is this what you call making every minute count?”
“But there’s a pep rally going on.”
“Ah, so you have noticed there’s a pep rally. I guess we’re back to why these students are not at it.”
“I do this every year. Dr. Barrios has never said anything about it.”
“You’re saying you make a habit of ignoring administrative directives?”
“No, it’s just…” Hernan wasn’t sure what else to say. He had always assumed the administrators knew he let students sit out the pep rally in his room—or at least that they wouldn’t care.
“Excuse me, sir?” The voice was coming from the corner.
Everyone in the room tur
ned to look.
Angel had picked his head up and was now addressing Mr. Scamphers in a polite, deferential tone that Hernan would not have guessed was within his range. “We’re in here because Mr. Hernandez doesn’t just teach. He inspires!”
Mr. Scamphers’s eyes narrowed. “Is that right?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Mr. Hernandez is one of those special teachers who knows that a hundred years from now, it won’t matter what kind of car you drove or what kind of clothes you wore. All that will matter is whether you’ve made a difference in a student’s life. And Mr. Hernandez sure has made a difference in mine.” Angel turned to Hernan. Tears seemed to be welling in his eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Hernandez.”
Hernan watched him, speechless.
Even Mr. Scamphers seemed stunned, though he quickly recovered. “I will talk to you later, Mr. Hernandez. For now, I am making a note of this situation.” He wrote furiously on his clipboard and then stomped back into the hallway.
“Angel,” said Hernan, “I don’t know what to say. Thank you!”
“No problem,” said Angel. “I read it on a mug. Anyways, I hate that motherfucker.” With that, he placed his head back on the desk and slept until the bell set the whole school free.
* * *
“And you know what they say,” said Regina. “Men are like cars. You got your old cars with good engines. Then you got cars that look shiny but keep breaking down on you…”
The usual happy-hour crew was at Pappadeaux, a Cajun-style restaurant, next to the giant lobster tank near the entrance. Hernan had told them the story from the pep rally, and Lena had laughed so hard she’d snorted, softening the awkwardness he’d felt around her since their not-date at the poetry club. Now, however, the conversation seemed to be drifting back to a topic the women had been discussing at some earlier point.
“Well, what can I say?” Breyonna smiled. “I like luxury cars.”
“Sounds like a passionate affair,” said Lena, checking her phone for what seemed like the twentieth time since Hernan had arrived.
“Hey,” said Breyonna, “it don’t matter how fine a man is if he’s driving his mama’s car, putting in five dollars of gas, talking about I filled up the tank.”
“We talking about your brother again?” said Candace.
A brief look of anger or hurt seemed to blink across Breyonna’s face. But then she turned to the table, smiled sweetly, and said, “Candace is more of a bus-pass girl.”
“You know what I heard the best kind of car is?” said Hernan. “A Jeep. Not brand-new, but clean. And fully paid off.”
They all laughed.
“A Jeep is a good car,” said Candace.
“I’d go with a car that has a good engine,” said Regina, “if there were any cars with good engines out there. Which there are not.”
“Girl, your problem is you always test-drive cars too soon,” said Breyonna. “Then they’re not for sale anymore. Just saying.”
“That is not always what happens,” said Regina.
Lena jumped in. “Maybe she’s not trying to buy a car. Maybe she’s just looking for a really good rental.”
There was a cascade of laughter from the rest of the table. Even Kaytee laughed.
“Yeah!” Regina rebounded, eyeing Breyonna. “Just saying.”
Hernan stared into the lobster tank.
Breyonna stretched out her ring hand conspicuously. “Look—y’all can give it up on credit if you want to. I’m just saying, ain’t nothing you can do in a bedroom that can make a man love you.”
Lena seemed to be considering this as she glanced down at her phone again. Then she looked up with the smile of someone keeping a delicious secret. “Who said anything about love?”
Hernan turned his attention back to the lobsters in the tank. Their claws were clamped shut with thick rubber bands, but they climbed on top of one another anyway, programmed by nature to struggle toward the top of the pile. It never occurred to them that they’d all be on someone’s plate by the weekend.
TIMELY, SPECIFIC FEEDBACK™
COACH RAY COULD barely hear the marching band over his own fury. He shoved open the locker-room door, banging it into the wall. His players already knew better than to stand directly behind the door. They waited farther inside the locker room, leaning against lockers, sitting on benches in exhaustion. Even though it was only halftime. Even though they were down by twelve points.
Their idleness made a vein throb in Coach Ray’s forehead. “What the fuck is this? Why do I see players on a losing team lounging around like fucking mermaids?”
The players who were sitting stood up. Those who were standing straightened.
Ray pushed through the crowd. When he got to the corner of the locker room, he turned, took a long breath. Started slowly. “Boys, how is this year supposed to end?”
“Championship!”
“And how’s this year gonna end?”
“Championship!!!” They were trying to sound excited. But trying was not enough. That was the whole point.
“Well, you tell me something: How in the fuck you think we’re gonna make it to the championship when you give up on the game after the first touchdown? They score on the first drive? You come back. You score. You don’t give up and start playing like a bunch of pussies.”
“Coach?” It was O’Neal Rigby, who should have known better right now.
Coach Ray wheeled on him. It was Rigby who’d pissed away the team’s early momentum, clowning for some girls on the sidelines after his first touchdown. “Oh, you want to talk? You. Didn’t I hear you before the game talking about They can’t block me. I’m the man?”
“Sorry, Coach, I was kidding. But, Coach—”
“Were you the man when you dropped the next fucking pass?”
“But Coach—”
“Coach?” Jefferson Jean, who’d arrived only a year earlier from Haiti, was the second-biggest star on the team. He was only a junior. Yet recruiters were already talking about free rides to colleges where the professors, like his high school teachers, would continually mix up his first and last names.
Something was off, though. Jefferson Jean almost never spoke unless his coach spoke to him first. Looking around the locker room, it seemed to Coach Ray that some of the other players, too, were trying to communicate something. Coach Ray followed their eyes, the slight movements of their heads, until he saw a stranger, only slightly older than the players, nearly hidden behind the two tallest linemen. He was holding an iPad and carrying a backpack.
Coach Ray compressed a surging wave of rage. “May I help you, young man? Do you need some help finding the visitors’ locker room?”
The players turned to see the younger man’s reaction. Sometimes assistant coaches from other teams tried to spy on sideline conversations, but sneaking into the locker room was pushing it. That took serious—
“No, ha-ha.” The visitor stepped from behind the players. “I’m actually working with TransformationalChangeAdvocacyConsultingPartners to help create a climate at your school where all students are prepared to succeed academically. So I just wanted to get a sense of how the football team operates. I’m Daren Grant, by the way.”
He held out his non-iPad hand.
The way Daren Grant said “succeed academically” had revealed a glimpse of how the scene looked to him: a giant, red-faced white man with a Hill Country accent yelling at a group composed mainly of black teenagers. The consultant was black, too, but something about him suggested a delicate, bicycle-helmet-wearing childhood far away from contact sports and sharp objects and hurt feelings. All this made Coach Ray move forward until he was slightly farther into the visitor’s personal space than polite conversation would dictate. “Well, maybe you can sense the climate in some other part of the school. We’ve had a successful season so far.”
Just hearing himself say this added to his anger. He never reminded his team of their previous victories during a game. There was no past tense in football.
“I definitely understand that, but Superintendent Wallabee told me I had unlimited access to all parts of the school, and he suggested I check in—”
“Let me get this straight.” Coach Ray employed the slow cadence he sometimes used when smacking down players’ excuses, pausing after each word as if holding it to the light to examine its ridiculousness. “Nick. Wallabee. Told. You. To. Come. Into. My. Locker. Room. During. A. Homecoming. Game.”
“Uh, well, actually, he said we were welcome anytime? And I’m sure you know that today’s research-based best practice is timely, specific feedback? So it just seemed like a good time to observe how y—how the football team uses that?”
Coach Ray stared, unblinking. He was somewhat gratified that the consultant had slipped into a speech pattern in which everything sounded like a question.
“I just thought that as a coach, you might…” Grant stopped as if he’d just thought of something. A sly look of reclaimed confidence crept onto his face. “Also, this team had some issues last year that weren’t quite resolved? So Nick Wallabee was concerned about that.” He gestured as if to say, I don’t think you want to discuss this right now.
It was true. Coach Ray did not want to discuss this right now.
“Okay, well, enjoy the view.” He imagined kicking Daren Grant through the locker-room doors, field-goal style. But instead, he turned to his players. They still had a game to win, which meant he still had a talk to give before halftime ended.
“Your families are out there in the stands, and we got these players in our house. Our house. You gonna let these mother—these other people”—he struggled to keep his speech curse-word free—“come into your house and beat you in front of your families because you’re playing like little, scared…” Here he paused, mentally scrolling through the words he would normally use, dismissing most of them before finally settling on “cheerleaders?” Which got the point across well enough.
“No, Coach!” said the team in unison.
Adequate Yearly Progress Page 11
