Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

  The teachers hurried down the stairs to direct their students, who were swarming into the aisles.

  Behind them, Mrs. Rawlins was still onstage, doing her engage-the-youths thing. “It looks like a lot of you recorded our dance contest! Teachers, watch out! Some of you might be YouTube stars pretty soon!”

  Kaytee let out a long breath. “Fuck this lady. Fuck this whole fucking place.”

  Lena was so surprised to hear Kaytee say something negative that for a moment she forgot to be miserable.

  * * *

  The moment lasted precisely until she and her students reentered the classroom. The events of the morning had adjusted the lens of some internal camera so that Lena could only focus on the most annoying possible student behaviors. And there were many.

  “Stop that,” Lena growled to a boy strumming the teeth of a plastic comb.

  “Leave her alone,” she said to another boy, who was stroking the hair of the girl in front of him. “And you—stop putting your hair on his desk.”

  The best option for running down the clock on first period was the Global Schoolhouse test prep workbook. Lena flipped through passages until she found one that included the Sample Test Question of the Day: What would an additional paragraph at the end of this passage likely be about?

  The question barely even made sense to Lena. Why would there need to be another paragraph at the end of the passage? Wasn’t it complete? And, if it wasn’t complete, couldn’t a story take almost any direction after its arbitrary endpoint? But this was not life, or literature, or even the type of material any reader would ever consume by choice. This was a test-prep practice passage. Thus, even a below-average test taker had to know the hypothetical final paragraph would contain some life-affirming testament to the strength of the human spirit. The predictability of it always made Lena want to roll her eyes. Except that she was exhausted. The pilot light inside her was flickering, as if just one small breath might extinguish it completely. In this state, she found she desperately wanted whatever moment came next to be inspiring. Life affirming, even. Perhaps even a testament to the strength of the human spirit.

  It was at that moment that the door opened and in walked Rico Jones, holding a permission form for Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.

  “You’re late,” said Lena.

  “Sorry,” said Rico, without looking sorry at all. “I had to get this form.”

  “The class is more than half over.”

  “The line was long.” In Rico’s other hand was a freshly opened bag of (BAKED!) Reetos.

  He’d stopped to buy chips.

  Lena felt the anger in her bloodstream building to a toxic level. “You know what? Just sit down.”

  “But you’re gonna sign it, right?”

  “Please do a little of your job, which is coming to school and learning, before you talk to me about pretending to spend the day at your parents’ job.”

  Rico turned, slowly, toward an area where he might conceivably find a seat.

  “Teacher tryna act like she know me,” he muttered, not to Lena but loud enough for Lena to hear. Then, for the benefit of either himself or the closest sympathetic student, he added, “She ain’t even from around here.”

  Looking back, the string connecting Lena to her last bit of patience had already grown thin.

  But it was still Rico’s last line that snapped it.

  “Rico,” Lena said, her voice turning treacherously pleasant, “do you really think you need to miss school one week before the TCUP test when you read at a fourth-grade level?”

  Part of Lena saw the smile disappear from Rico’s face, but she couldn’t stop. A valve inside her had opened, releasing content packed for too long under too much pressure. Her voice grew louder and even more ominously calm as she continued. “Do you know what that means, Rico? That means you can’t understand a book that an eleven-year-old child would read for fun. That means you will never, ever hold a decent job unless your reading improves dramatically, which would take a lot of work. But instead of being worried about this and working harder, you are so… worried about whether I am going to sign a form so that you can skip school tomorrow. Because God forbid you and your fourth-grade reading level go to an extra… day of school, Rico.”

  So fucking worried, is what she’d wanted to say. Go to an extra fucking day of school. But she’d caught herself in time. She’d caught herself in time, right?

  The class was frozen like a movie on pause.

  The part of Lena that was watching the scene caught up with the part of her that was standing in front of the class.

  Stop, it said. Stop talking.

  Her fingers felt icy. The words that had just left her mouth seemed to hover, as if inviting her to reach out and pull them from the air. In front of her, Rico seemed a bright shape surrounded by shadows, staring at her.

  She became conscious of the way her body was positioned in space, as if she were watching the whole scene from outside: Lena Wright, hands on her hips, head cocked confrontationally to one side. Rico Jones, bag of chips in one hand, permission form pulled into his skinny chest. Thirty sets of wide eyes in front of her, tiny mirrors reflecting what she had become.

  It was Rico who finally resumed the action, made time start moving again. “Never mind,” he said. He crumpled the unsigned form into a ball. Then he turned, dropped the paper into the garbage, and continued out the door.

  “Keep working in your workbooks,” said Lena to the rest of the class.

  And they did. No one—not even Luis—said anything until the bell rang.

  There were three more class periods before lunchtime—three groups of students filing in and out at the sound of the bell. Lena told them all to work in their workbooks. She sat in her desk chair, trying to seem busy. Choosing words and saying them aloud seemed like a responsibility for which she was no longer suited. Why had she ever wanted to become a teacher? Why had she chosen a job that wedged her so tightly into the chain of cause and effect that when she made a wrong move, the dominos never stopped falling? She wanted to lie down forever, cover her face in a room full of silence.

  But no, she realized. That wasn’t it at all. What she really wanted was to bolt from her chair and run to the end of the hallway, straight to the plant-filled science lab of Hernan D. Hernandez.

  METHODS OF DEVELOPMENT, CONTINUED

  AT LUNCHTIME, HERNAN found his phone filled with text messages from Mayra. She was back with Jesus after another breakup and now wanted Hernan’s opinion on a whole new round of suspicions, all of which were probably correct.

  He was still reading the messages when Lety called.

  “Why are guys such assholes?” she demanded.

  “Well, hello to you, too. And thanks. Work is fine.”

  “Come on, Hernan. You know I wouldn’t call you at work if it wasn’t serious.”

  “Okay. What’s up?”

  “So, I was going through Geoffrey’s phone while he was in the shower—”

  “Nice. Very romantic.”

  “Hernan!”

  “Okay. Sorry. What did you find on Gee-off’s phone?”

  “Remember that thing he said on New Year’s about how any girl will sleep with you if she meets you while your dog is pulling you on a skateboard?”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Well, he has a bunch of texts from some girl, and guess how they met.”

  “Oh, shit. That sucks.”

  Lety stayed silent for a few seconds. Then she let out a sob.

  “If it makes you feel better, Mayra texted me six times today about some more crazy stuff Jesus is doing.”

  “Again?” Lety’s crying receded into low-grade sniffles. “Man, does this shit run in our family or what?”

  “Hey, leave me out of this.”

  “Whatever, Hernan. You’re just as bad as any of us.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, like, do you even have a girlfriend? I told you on New Year’s that my friend Maritza l
iked you, and you never even asked me about it. You’d rather spend all your time looking through a microscope at a leaf.”

  Maybe she had a point. He’d been spending all his evenings and weekends in the greenhouse, trying to figure out how to cure the bluebonnet fungus. The flowers from his classroom window were still the only healthy plants he’d seen in a month, and the mystery of this absorbed him. It would have been a fascinating puzzle if his father’s business were not also on the line.

  There was a knock on the door. Hernan opened it to find a student aide, who handed him a folder.

  “This is from Mr. Scamphers,” she said apologetically.

  There were two papers inside.

  Pending this year’s test results, said the top paper, you will be nonencouraged to renew your contract with the school district.

  Nonencouraged? Wait… he was being fired? Like this?

  “Listen, Lety, I need to call you back.”

  The other paper in the folder was a Believer Score checklist. Mr. Scamphers had assigned him a score that fell just below what was required to renew his contract. Technically, it wasn’t official until the test scores came out. But the scores would have to be near perfect to save his job, and he already knew they would be about average. He had, as usual, refused to spend the year plowing through test-prep workbooks. The science test results weren’t going to save him. But obviously Mr. Scamphers knew this.

  Hernan’s desk chair creaked as he sank into it. Maybe this shit did run in his family. Maybe the whole Hernandez crew was programmed with some epigenetic loser switch, just waiting for the right environmental factor to trigger it. His father’s plants were dying, and the business would probably die along with it. Lety, if she was anything like Mayra, would be back with Geoff in a week. And Hernan?

  There was another knock on the door, and Hernan whipped it open, half expecting to find Mr. Scamphers chuckling under his moustache. Instead, he saw Lena, sniffing and dabbing at her eyes with her sweater.

  “Can I come in? I can’t go back to my classroom right now.”

  Here we go again, thought Hernan. “Let me guess. The poet did something else you didn’t like?”

  “Yeah, but that’s… I mean, I don’t know. Maybe.” A tear escaped and trickled down her cheek. “Why are guys such assholes?”

  “I think your actual question is why women, given a choice of guys, choose the biggest asshole they can find.”

  Lena stopped crying and squinted at him. “Whoa. What’s your problem?”

  “Just what I said. If you’re not getting treated right, it’s because you selected a person who doesn’t treat you right. And I don’t have time for this right now.”

  The vulnerable look on Lena’s face turned to surprise, then anger. “You know what? Forget it.” She turned and headed back down the hall, walking slowly, as if giving Hernan a chance to call her back.

  He didn’t. Instead, he shut the door just in time to hear Mrs. Rawlins on the PA, wishing everyone a happy Teacher Appreciation Week. And with that, life seemed to be such a giant, poorly written joke that Hernan felt a sprout of hope spring up through his despair.

  Mr. Hernandez, sometimes you just gotta go for it.

  Nilda, from his first period, had said this when he was teaching the scientific method. He’d been trying to teach his students to wait, to observe, to craft a hypothesis before hurling themselves into thoughtless action. But maybe it was Nilda who was right. Maybe he had spent his whole life stuck on the observation step of the scientific method, squinting at the details while the big picture whirled by behind him. Maybe sometimes you just had to go for it.

  He pulled out his phone and called Lety back.

  “You know what? Go ahead and give me Maritza’s number. I’ll call her tonight.”

  SYNTHESIZING INFORMATION

  BASED ON THE information given, how does each part add to the main idea of the passage? Use details from all sources to support your answer. This question was written on every board as Coach Ray wandered the hallway, glancing into other teachers’ classrooms, in no hurry to get to his own. There were so few kids in the school on Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day that teachers often combined classes, the better to take turns parading through the hallways with their own children.

  Only Maybelline Galang was at her desk. The few students inside her room were bent over their math books, just like any ordinary day. She never brought Allyson to the school during these days, which suited Coach Ray just fine. Still, he passed the room as stealthily as he could. Ever since Maybelline had invited him to the birthday party, he’d felt a new sense of accusation emanating from her. Or maybe it wasn’t new. Maybe he’d just never noticed it before.

  Finally, he reached his classroom. A cluster of the younger football players were in a corner, playing cards, talking loudly, trying to draw O’Neal Rigby into their conversation. Rigby, aware of his place in the high school hierarchy, ignored them. He lounged in one of the rolling chairs reserved for assistant coaches, arms and legs spread out like an emperor. He conversed only with Daren Grant, who leaned against a student desk in his white shirt and a tie.

  Normally, Ray would have said something to Rigby about sitting in a coach’s chair while an adult stood up nearby, but there was something gratifying about Grant’s awkward pose: trying to look relaxed with one butt cheek resting on a tiny desk. If Grant wanted to stand while a student took his seat, let him.

  Ray sank into his own chair and leaned back luxuriously, as if to say this was the level of comfort a grown man demanded. “You okay standing like that, son?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t like to spend too much time sitting down, ha-ha.” There was a cheerful condescension in Grant’s voice that was just begging to be body-slammed. Then he turned back to Rigby, resuming what seemed to be a one-sided conversation.

  Grant had gotten sneaky since Signing Day. When he spoke to Coach Ray, he stuck to the topic of whatever game happened to be on TV the night before. Yet now there was this vibe he gave off, as if Daren Grant had decided that the best way to maximize the macro impact of Daren Grant was to humor the old redneck football coach while presenting himself as a role model of refined minority manhood.

  This crusade for the souls of the players included constant, grating reminders that Daren Grant was the type of fellow who went to Cornell University. Daren Grant had a five-year plan, and a ten-year plan, and all kinds of other plans that would never rest on some rickety dream of making it to the NFL. Daren Grant was quitting his consulting gig next year to go to b-school, which was short for business school. And over the summer he was going to take a break and go backpacking through Europe.

  “When you’re done in one country,” he was explaining to O’Neal Rigby, “you just get on a bus and go to the next country. And you stay in a place where you rent a bed for the night and everyone shares a bathroom, so it’s really cheap.”

  Rigby eyed him with a mixture of suspicion and boredom. “I probably rather go somewhere I could stay in a hotel.”

  Coach Ray laughed. International travel was not one of the pissing contests in which high school athletes engaged. Nor did high school athletes fantasize about the kind of travel that required carrying a backpack or sharing a bathroom. The team’s trip to Plano for last year’s state championship had been Rigby’s first stay at a hotel. Everything about the experience had thrilled him.

  And yet the moment lacked the satisfying crunch it should have had. The image of Daren Grant in Europe with his backpack and water bottle was yet another reminder that Grant lived the type of worry-free existence that would never depend on luck, or injury, or a potential knucklehead move from a teenager like O’Neal Rigby, whose post–Signing Day attitude was becoming more like Gerard Brown’s every day.

  Rigby should have known better. He’d been a junior when Gerard had left the school in handcuffs, his scholarship and future drying up within the week. For the type of kid who played football at Brae Hill Valley, life offered no s
econd chances.

  Rich kids could mess up and still go on to college. They could commit crimes and still go on to become CEOs. They could cheat on their taxes, or defraud sick people, or run banks into the ground, and leave others to clean up their messes. Hell, they could even become president.

  Meanwhile, one screwup could transform a kid like Gerard Brown or O’Neal Rigby from a superstar into a big guy with a criminal record who did menial jobs and made authority figures nervous.

  “The thing is, when you stay at a hostel…”

  But Rigby had lost interest in Daren Grant’s feats of exploration. He wanted to talk about his own feats of football. He eased his chair around to face Coach Ray. “Coach, did you get a chance to look at those game tapes? When I scored that last touchdown against Whatsitcalled?”

  One of the younger players, Marquez, tried to nudge his way into the conversation. “Yeah, ’cause we all know Rigby do whatever it takes to score.”

  “You mean, whatever it takes to win, ha-ha.” Grant corrected Marquez in the voice adults used when they were afraid of sounding harsh.

  “Shut the fuck up, Marquez.” O’Neal Rigby was not afraid of sounding harsh.

  “That’s just what I heard,” Marquez muttered, just loud enough to reclaim a bit of pride as he turned back to the card game.

  Coach Ray stared at Rigby, who waited a beat, then glanced up as if to gauge his coach’s reaction. Something was not getting said.

  “What is going on here?” growled Coach Ray.

  Marquez studied a nutrition poster on the wall next to him.

  Coach Ray kept his eyes fixed on Rigby.

  “It’s nothing, Coach. Some freshman cheerleader that used to like me is acting all crazy now. She came at me. Now she trying to act all innocent.”