“No,” I said, remembering his sweet face out by the river that afternoon. “You’re right. Maybe it’s time. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. We’d be great parents.” I thought of seeing another pudgy, yellow face like his walking around and smiled.
“You just made me the happiest man in the world,” he said, sitting up and letting the sheet fall from his naked chest. Evan never worked out, but after years of doing work for his father’s moving company when we were teenagers, he had a naturally powerful build. In the moonlight coming in from the French doors of our bedroom, I could see the muscles in his pecs tighten as he bent down to kiss me. His lips were soft, his kiss forceful, as it always was when we made love.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away from me.
He pushed me onto my back and slid his arms between my arms and my body, opening my legs with his and then lowered himself toward me. His kissing became more passionate and he moved his hips in a way that made my body grow hot. As he pulled my nightgown over my head, I caressed his penis and kissed his chest.
“I love you,” he said, sliding off his boxers. “I love you so much.” He came down and pressed himself into me. I quickly wrapped my legs around him and kissed him on the neck.
“I love you, too.”
Chapter Six
“Fight!” I heard someone holler from out in the hallway in what seemed like seconds after the fourth-period bell rang and my students were hustling out the door. I’d just slid my purse over my shoulder and was heading to the conference room for an emergency Wednesday lunch meeting the principal, Mr. Williams, had announced via a red slip in our mailboxes on Tuesday afternoon.
“Oh, no,” I said, dropping the bag quickly and putting it back into my locking drawer. I’d broken up many fights—it came with the job nowadays—but somehow, each one had its own set of complications. The new ones sometimes included weapons and students so bold they weren’t afraid to hit teachers—knock them over the head for trying to break up the fight. We’d gotten security guards into the school to deal with these kinds of issues, but still, the teachers were expected to respond initially. This presented me with another set of worries, because even though I loved the Lord, I wasn’t sure how I’d react if one of the children put their hands on me. Help me, Holy Ghost!
The students still left in the room, bumping into each other like blind bees, began to push to see what was going on outside.
“Fight!” someone yelled again as I tried to make my way through the tight throng. Outside of the door and in the center of a chaotic circle of violence-thirsty students was Zenobia and Patrice locked up chest to chest.
“You stupid-ass bitch,” Zenobia shouted, twisting herself and somehow getting Patrice around and into a headlock. Patrice’s belly poked out far and unprotected, a stretch appearing naked beneath her tight T-shirt. She shook and wrestled to get away, but, rushing in, I could see that Zenobia had a tight hold. “He don’t fucking love you,” Zenobia went on. “He ain’t gonna ever love you.”
“Break it up,” I screamed, trying to force my way between them. “Someone call security! Security! Security,” I hollered, knowing it would be a minute before they made it to the back of the building where the music room was located. As I attempted to pry Zenobia’s hands from around Patrice’s throat, I saw that Patrice was turning red and probably losing air.
“Let her go. She pregnant,” one of the boys yelled.
“Let her go, Zenobia,” I said. “You don’t want to do this.”
“She came over here fucking with me,” Zenobia snarled. “I was minding my business.”
“Let her go!”
One of the boys jumped in and tried to help me get the girls apart and when he did, I took a hold of Zenobia to restrain her, but Patrice came swinging and nearly hit my head. She landed a punch right in Zenobia’s face.
“You want some, bitch?” Patrice yelled and I jumped back, thinking maybe she was talking to me.
Zenobia got away from me and charged Patrice, swinging her arms wildly. The entire crowd swayed with each step they took. Everything was moving so fast that I was afraid to get into it. Two boys finally grabbed Patrice again and I seized Zenobia with another student.
“Take her to the office,” I screamed, out of breath.
“Fuck that! Let that bitch go. I’ll drop that load for her! She don’t want to see me!” Zenobia was still rapping, even as I pulled her toward my classroom.
“And Mike don’t want you. He don’t want your stanky pussy no way,” Patrice cried.
“Get her to the office,” I said again to the boys. “And the rest of you, go to the cafeteria.”
When I finally got Zenobia into my room and seated at my desk, I realized that one of my earrings had fallen out in the tussle and my bun was hanging loose.
“What was that?” I asked, standing in front of Zenobia at the desk. She was still hot and looking like she wanted to race out of the room and find Patrice. If she had, she might’ve made it. I was worn out.
“I just told you,” she said. “She came over here to fight me. I was just leaving class and she came up in my face ... man, fuck this ...” She kicked my desk.
“Zenobia, don’t you dare use that language in here,” I hollered. She just looked away and didn’t say anything. “Now, it doesn’t matter who attacked whom.” I swiveled the chair around toward me. “That girl is pregnant. If you hurt her, you’d be arrested. Do you understand that?”
“Well, she’d be arrested, too ... for hitting me.” Zenobia’s voice dented and she slackened a bit in the seat.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked and suddenly I remembered the little pouch I’d noticed beneath Zenobia’s shirt the week before.
“You know what it mean.”
“You’re pregnant?”
She didn’t say anything. She just looked down at the floor and shrugged her shoulders.
“Oh, Zenobia.” I got up and closed the door. “How did this.... What happened? You just had a baby.” I stopped and looked at her. “Is it Michael’s?”
“Yes,” she said. “I ain’t no ho.”
“You’re still seeing him? Even after he got Patrice pregnant?”
Disturbed, I sat down on top of the desk beside Zenobia.
Mr. Gentry, one of the security guards, burst into the room.
“What’s going on?” he asked with his hands clutching the weapons strapped to either side of his hips. “You been fighting?” He walked over to Zenobia. She kept her head bowed and focused on her knees. Her big talk had gone with the crowd. “Wild girl. You always in trouble.”
“It was a fight,” I said. “One student is in the office and ... I’ll bring Zenobia down in a second. She needs to cool down.”
“You sure?” he asked. “This one’s evil as a snake.”
“Yeah, I’ll walk her down. Don’t worry.”
“Okay,” he said, looking at me doubtfully as he inched away. “I’m going to be waiting at the end of the hall in case something happens.”
“Great.”
When Mr. Gentry walked out and I was alone with Zenobia again, I didn’t know what to say. I was so disappointed. Zenobia wasn’t the best student. But she was smart and if she’d just lose some of the anger she had, she could actually graduate from high school and maybe one day support herself and her baby. This was saying a lot at a high school where fifty percent of our students either didn’t graduate or receive a standard high school diploma.
“How did you get into this, Zenobia?” I asked finally. “You already know what it’s like to have a baby. It’s not easy.”
“I can’t let her just take him,” she said, looking at the door. “She having a boy. He wanted a boy.”
“So you got pregnant to keep Michael?”
“No, it ain’t like that. I love him.”
“But, Zenobia, he’s sleeping with other girls. And is he taking care of your first child?”
“He be with Mikayla,” she said. “He loves he
r. And we was talking about getting a place too. But he gonna have to pay for Patrice’s baby. Her mama gonna take him to court soon as he get a job. She told him.”
“That’s not just Patrice’s baby. It’s his too. Look, what are you going to do now?” I asked. “Have you told your mother?”
“No. She gonna kill me. Tried to the first time.” Zenobia bent over in her seat and started crying.
“You have to tell her,” I said, massaging her back as she cried, “so you two can come up with a plan together.”
“Why did he have to get Patrice pregnant? He so stupid. She told him she was gonna do it.”
“You can’t think about what everybody else is doing; you have to focus on what’s best for you and your baby,” I said. “And you start by telling your mother.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t tell her.”
“We’re just waiting on Ms. Davis and then we’ll get started,” Mr. Williams said, sitting at the head of the table in our conference room, surrounded by chatting teachers and administrators. “I think Superintendent DeLong will be running a bit late”—he looked down at his watch—“so, we’ll get started without him.” A former art teacher who’d been promoted to principal after the last No Child Left Behind sweep came through our school and led to all of the administrators being fired due to low test scores, Williams maintained little respect from the staff and most times it seemed we were just tolerating his leadership. He was a short, sunken-in, yellow man, who always looked lost and boyish in the suits he wore. If it wasn’t for his balding head and graying beard, visitors would think he was a student and trample right past him. He wasn’t the type of person you’d expect to see leading one of the most troubled schools in the state, but as Evan said, there wasn’t exactly a list of people signing up for the low-paying, high-pressure position. So, he was it.
As we sat and waited for Ms. Davis, I noticed an attractive, dark-skinned woman sitting beside Mr. Williams. I’d never seen her before and I knew she wasn’t from Tuscaloosa because she was wearing a sharp, tailored wine-colored suit that I was certain could be found nowhere in the state. I wondered if she was from the government, No Child Left Behind again, and she was coming to fire everyone or, worse, shut down the school altogether.
“Sorry, y’all,” Billie said, running into the room with the look of a tardy student on her face. “I had tutorial.” She looked around the room; her eyes, which were filled with anger she’d managed to conceal with her voice, nearly set Clyde on fire when she saw him sitting in the back of the room, two suspicious chairs down from Ms. Lindsey. I coughed to get her attention and keep her from going back there—as everyone but Clyde and Ms. Lindsey had hoped—and signaled that there was an empty seat next to me. Billie had been doing a fine job of parading Mustafa around every place in town in just two days. And as I suspected, most of these places were frequented by Clyde. But against lady lovebird’s best wishes, he had yet to be in the right place at the right time.
“Thank you, Ms. Davis,” Mr. Williams said as Billie sat down. “Now I know no one is happy about this meeting, and we all want to get to lunch, but it’s necessary.”
“Don’t tell me we don’t have a speaker for graduation again this year,” Ms. Anderson, the history teacher, said. Everyone groaned at the thought. “We ain’t got but a lick to go.”
“No, no ...” Mr. Williams said. “Let’s not try to guess what the matter is. And also, it’s a good thing.”
“Good,” Ms. Anderson replied, “because I don’t need somebody’s uncle to go up there and put me to sleep again.”
People started laughing and the meeting was off to growing into an example of how it was equally difficult to manage adult teachers and young students. We too had prom queens, class clowns, gossip girls, a class president, and even a jock with the new girl making out in the back. We even separated ourselves like the kids: the school someone went to, the fraternity or sorority they pledged, the side of town they grew up on made the difference between close friends and associates, best friends and working enemies. The only difference between us and the students was age and the fact that we preferred to call each other “Mr.” and “Mrs.”—and even that could be done without being totally polite.
“Well, we could just have Reverend Cash speak since his daughter works here.... I mean, if he has time,” Ms. Angie Martin, the chemistry teacher, and my former elementary school enemy, said trying to sound helpful, but really more hateful. After our run-in in elementary school, she’d become even more sour on me in high school when Evan refused to make out with her in the boys’ locker room. Things only got worse when I went to Alabama and she went to Stillman and we pledged different sororities. Ms. Martin—Angie—was purely nasty to me and she had a circle of grown-up girls to help her out.
“No, as I said,” Mr. Williams went on, sounding a bit annoyed now—he was losing control, “we don’t need a speaker. I called this meeting for two reasons. And in order to get things going before DeLong gets here, I’ll just start by introducing the person next to me, who most of you probably don’t know.”
He gestured toward the strange woman from out of town and everyone got quiet, eager to discover who the new face was.
“This is Ms. Kayla Kenley. She’s here to take over Ms. Oliver’s biology class while Ms. Oliver is out on maternity leave. Ms. Kenley is a graduate of New York University. She’s taught science at the Math and Science Academy in Manhattan and while she mostly teaches teachers now in the education program at Columbia University, we’re lucky enough to have her for the last few weeks of the school year. We hope she’ll leave an indelible impression on our students and pray she’ll join us next year, as Ms. Oliver will still be out for a few weeks. Let’s welcome her.”
Everyone clapped and Ms. Kenley smiled accordingly, saying a few friendly words as Evan slipped into the room behind her.
“Oh, the man of the hour,” Mr. Williams said, his face brightening when he noticed Evan behind him. “You’re right on time.”
“Mr. Williams,” Evan said, imposing his stately voice and public demeanor. “Everyone.” He waved quickly toward the middle of the room, but to no one in general. He looked in my direction and nodded at a few people seated around me, and then finally at me, smiling and winking quickly. We noticed a long time ago when Evan first got into office that in contrast to his mostly white colleagues downtown, our being married wasn’t looked upon too positively by people at the school. Some argued favoritism, others put out rumors saying I made more than the principal, and many people blamed me for the fact that the school wasn’t getting more money, claiming I should be able to convince Evan to get more funds into the system and directed at Black Warrior High. It was a barrel of ugly crabbiness, and to avoid it, Evan decided to keep things very simple in front of people.
“First, I want to thank you all for taking time out of your lunch break to meet with me. And second, I want to praise all of you personally for the fine job you’ve been doing, working with our students this year,” Evan said. “I know it’s not an easy job, and I want you to know that your district supports you. Thank all of you. Go on and give yourselves a round of applause.” He smiled and led a mediocre, yet spirited, wave of claps.
“Now,” Evan went on, “I’ll be quick with my reason for having Mr. Williams assemble you all today. I know everyone wants to get to lunch.” He paused and a few people snickered, but there were no outbursts as there had been with Mr. Williams. “I’ve been having some discussions with a former student of Black Warrior, a Mr. Damien Mitchell, who the world knows as Dame—and I know many of you have taught him. Basically, he’s interested in coming to the school and bringing a crew from BET with him.”
“Dame is bringing BET here? To Tuscaloosa?” Ms. Lindsey called from the back of the room like one of the students.
“Whore,” Billie blurted out while coughing to cover up her outburst.
“Yes,” Evan responded to Ms. Lindsey. “Apparently, BET has a show where it
features a day in the life of an artist. They’re doing an episode featuring Dame and he’d like to bring the crew to our school—to Black Warrior High School—next Tuesday.”
“Next Tuesday?” Ms. Lindsey shrieked, touching her hair as if she was already planning a full makeover. “That’s less than a week away.”
“I’m sorry ... but who’s this Dame?” one of the older faculty members interrupted.
“He’s a rapper,” Ms. Lindsey added enthusiastically, shaking enough in her seat so that her breasts bounced from one side to the other. “He’s been number one on the charts since his new album, The Same Dame, dropped two months ago.”
“Is that heifer a rap groupie? Video ho?” Billie whispered to me, but the secretary sitting next to me heard her. I was sure that remark would soon get around the school.
“Well, it seems that those high sales have served him well,” Evan said, “because when he comes, he’s presenting us with a check for one million dollars in front of the whole school.”
“A million?” Billie asked. “To Black Warrior?”
I looked on stunned. Nearly immediately, I, along with everyone else, looked around the outdated, pale green conference room that hadn’t changed in one way since my own father called the building “school.” It was as if the mention alone of “one million dollars” in a room of desperate, tired teachers could make the place just change. The walls—pale green with speckled black and white nothingness—would become bright and clean; the table—an old oak, pitted and picked mass between us—would be mahogany; and instead of beat-up folding chairs, we’d be in leather swivels that turned and turned and comforted us as we taught the next generation of leaders. I could see, just as clearly as the woman next to me, but as I looked, I wondered what price we’d pay to get the pretty stuff. As my father always said, “Some things that are free cost you.”
“Yes, you all heard me right! He’s giving us a million dollars and he wants to present it to”—Evan suddenly looked toward me—“his favorite music teacher, Mrs. DeLong.”
Something She Can Feel Page 7
