Girl Meets Class

by Karin Gillespie

  My heart started doing a crazy little samba. It was exactly what I’d hoped would happen between us, but hadn’t dared to expect.

  “What changed your mind?”

  He pushed a stray curl behind my ear. “Sometimes if two people feel right together, you just have to go for it. Even it comes at an inconvenient time. Are you game?”

  I was so tickled I covered his face with kisses to let him know my answer.

  After we sealed the deal in the bedroom, I felt even more bothered that Carl had the wrong idea about my reasons for taking a teaching job. Deception was hardly the ideal way to kick off a serious relationship. Yet I couldn’t imagine telling Carl about the contract with my aunt. Hopefully he would never have to find out.

  Fourteen

  Many people looked slack-jawed and rubbery-faced when they were in dreamland, but not Carl. He was an extremely appealing sleeper, eyelids fluttering, lips curved into a half smile. Was it any wonder I was thrilled he wanted to take our relationship to the next level?

  It was Saturday morning, and I carefully slipped out of Carl’s bed so as not to wake him, shrugged on a robe, and tiptoed out of the room. I went into his galley kitchen to draw a glass of water. As I stood on the cool tiles, drinking and gazing out at a flat gray sky, the front door opened with a creak.

  I swallowed a gasp. Who could it be? Occasionally I’d spotted some shady characters in the apartment parking lot. Did Carl lock the door last night?

  I slowly slid open a kitchen drawer and extracted a steak knife. Then I tiptoed to the entrance of the living room. I didn’t spot anyone, but rustling sounds were coming from the hall closet. I couldn’t see who’d come inside; the open door blocked my view of the intruder. Trembling, I considered my next move. Should I scream, dash for the exit, or sneak back into the bedroom to call the police?

  While I debated, I heard a toilet flush. Carl was up. Thank God. The rummaging in the closet stopped. I took a step into the living room, holding the steak knife aloft.

  “What are you doing here?” said a female voice.

  I blinked rapidly, my mind denying who I was seeing: It was Ms. Sprague, wearing a t-shirt, flip-flops, and a pair of tight tomato-red shorts that left little to the imagination. She stared at me with a horrified expression.

  Carl strode into the living room wearing only tighty-whiteys. He surveyed the scene, and uttered an expletive. He must have been startled because the man never swore.

  His wife, on the other hand, was much more practiced in the art of profanity. “What the fudge is going on here?” (To be honest, she used a much stronger word than fudge.)

  “That’s none of your business, Deena,” Carl said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here because your daughter wants to ride her bike today, and you forgot to bring the helmet back last time.” She spit out the words like they were bitter tobacco juice. “I let myself in.”

  “Where’s Katherine?” Carl said.

  “Coloring in the car, thank you, Jesus,” Ms. Sprague said. Her glance volleyed between Carl and me. “Or she’d have seen you with this…this…whore of yours.”

  I felt like scuttling back into the bedroom and hiding under the covers.

  “That comment’s out of line.” Carl managed to look authoritative even in his underwear. “And Katherine shouldn’t be in the car by herself.”

  Ms. Sprague fixed her burning gaze on me. “I thought I’d seen it all, but you’ve definitely lowered the bar with this one. I haven’t liked her since I laid eyes on her.”

  “Don’t talk to my girlfriend like that,” Carl said. “Especially in my home.”

  “Oh. She’s your girlfriend now, is she? I guess that’s why you forgot your daughter’s helmet. Too busy screwing this—”

  Carl’s lips flattened into angry slash. He pointed to the exit. “Deena. Out. Now.”

  “Slut,” Ms. Sprague said just before she left. The word stained the air long after she’d uttered it.

  Carl rushed to my side. “You okay?”

  I stiffened in his arms. “Ms. Sprague is your ex-wife? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I assumed you knew. Everyone on the faculty knows. It’s not a secret.”

  “I barely talk to anyone on the faculty. And you and Ms. Sprague don’t have the same last name.”

  “Deena kept her maiden name when we got married. I’ve been meaning to get my key back from her. She’s always busting in here like she owns the place.”

  My mind was still careening from the drama of it all; it was like an episode of Real Housewives, only in 3-D.

  “Did you fight a lot when you were married?” I said. My guess was Ms. Sprague wielded a mean iron skillet. I could also imagine passionate sessions in the bedroom afterward, images I immediately shooed from my brain.

  “Unfortunately, yes. We even had some blowouts when we dated,” Carl continued. “But then she got pregnant and marrying her seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, the divorce was for the best. I’m not one for drama, and Deena seems to thrive on it.”

  I was glad to hear Carl was not a fan of fireworks. Most of my life I tried to keep my emotions in check. If I let them loose, I worried they’d spew out uncontrollably, like the contents of a can of Silly String.

  “I wonder what she’s going to do to me at school,” I said warily. No telling what kind of tortures Ms. Sprague could dream up.

  “No worries about that. Deena can be a witch-on-wheels in her personal life. But when she’s at work, she’s a consummate professional. She’ll never mention it.”

  Recently I’d seen a movie on the Lifetime channel called A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story. It had started out with Betty calling her ex-husband’s girlfriend an “oversexed syphilitic piece of white trash” and ended with gunshots from a Smith and Wesson.

  While I doubted Ms. Sprague would riddle me with bullet holes, after seeing her today, I was certain she’d figure out some way to make me pay for sleeping with her ex. She’d barely tolerated me before. Now she had a legitimate reason to despise me.

  Monday morning arrived, and I kept waiting for Ms. Sprague to burst into my classroom, hurling insults. Every time the door opened, my heart hitched, but it was always a false alarm. When the final dismissal bell rang with no ambush from Ms. Sprague, I wondered if maybe Carl had been right about his ex. After all, he knew her much better than I did.

  After my last class I left my portable and stopped by the teacher’s lounge. The air inside was thick with the buttery aroma of popcorn. Three female teachers were congregated around the table, talking loudly and munching popcorn kernels. As soon as they spotted me, they clammed up.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  Usually I got a hello or a nod but this time, nada. Three faces hardened into judgment, eyes sharp as flint. I didn’t have to guess why. Deena was chummy with many of the female members of the faculty. No doubt she’d given them an earful about me and Carl.

  I continued to my mailbox. The women’s gazes penetrated my backside so hard they might as well have been branding me like a prize cow. Inside I found the lesson plans I’d turned into Ms. Sprague the week before. Across the top of the page in red block letters she’d written, “REDO!” Below that it said, “Include measurable behavior objectives.”

  Lesson plans were a county requirement but many teachers dashed them off with less thought than a grocery list. I stuffed the plans into my briefcase, and slunk past the star chamber who’d yet to speak a word but said volumes with their stony silence.

  By the end of the week it was obvious that my relationship with Carl was a juicy topic at Harriet Hall. Whenever I encountered faculty members, conversations halted, giggles were stifled, eyeballs tracked me as I passed by. I heard a coach whisper “jungle fever” and wink. Just like high school, I thought,
until I remembered it was high school. One afternoon I was in a stall in the ladies’ room when I overheard a conversation between two teachers.

  “Where does that skinny blonde get off sleeping with Rutherford? Can’t she find one of her own kind?” a voice said over the sound of running water.

  The other replied, “Don’t know what he sees in her. She has the rear end of a twelve-year-old boy.”

  They had more to say but the hand-dryer drowned out their stinging words. When they left, I came out of my stall and stole a glance at my butt in the mirror. It was a bit on the slight side, but Carl didn’t seem to miss the extra padding.

  When I got home I googled “jungle fever” and discovered it was slang for an interracial relationship. In addition I learned that a white woman dating a black man was sometimes called a chocolate dipper or a charcoal burner.

  There were plenty of stereotypes about such women, none flattering. Overweight white women supposedly sought out black guys because not only did the men not mind muffin top or thunder thighs, they celebrated the fluffier female form. Female druggies were said to go for black men, hoping they could hook them up with illegal inebriants. Perhaps the most degrading stereotype assumed white women dated black men solely for the superior size of their packages. Far as I was concerned it was all a bunch of nonsense.

  During my week of torment, I barely saw Carl. He’d been holed up in the public library laboring over a term paper for one of his graduate classes. I kept quiet about the flack I was getting; he already had enough to worry about. Any interference from him would only make things worse.

  The next week I redid my lesson plans four times; each time they came back from Ms. Sprague faster than a boomerang. On the fourth go-around, she attached a note saying if I couldn’t get them right, the next time she’d place a disciplinary letter in my file.

  Meanwhile, her friends on the staff continued to give me grief. The guidance secretary, a whip-thin woman, purposely jostled me in the hall, saying, “You need to watch what you’re doing, homewrecker.”

  You can’t torch a house that’s already in ashes, I wanted to say, but decided to keep my mouth shut.

  One morning I tried to make copies, only to discover I’d reached my allotment for the year, which was impossible. I’d only used about a hundred copies so far.

  Ms. Ware was in charge of the copy machine, and when I visited the main office to ask her about my allotment, she said, “Machines don’t lie,” and turned her back on me.

  “I’ll bring extra chocolate tomorrow.”

  “Chocolate makes me break out,” she said. “Maybe Mr. Rutherford will loan you some of his copies since y’all are getting so cozy.”

  So Ms. Ware was a member of Team Deena as well. No big shock. Nearly everyone on the faculty seemed to be siding with Carl’s wife. It looked as if I was going to have to make all my copies at Kinko’s from now on.

  On Friday morning I overslept and didn’t have time to make copies beforehand. When I arrived at school and checked my mailbox, I found the last lesson plans I’d handed into Ms. Sprague, plans I’d worked on for hours. She marked them “Unacceptable” and said she’d placed a letter of reprimand in my file.

  I grabbed the plans and headed to the main office. At that moment, I was more worried about my copies, wondering how I was going to wheedle Ms. Ware into giving me a paltry few. A package of state-required paperwork needed to be reproduced and turned in that day. If it was late I’d be in big trouble. The pencil-pushers up in Atlanta did not play.

  The second bell had already rung, and I was the only one in the office. The secretary was seated at her desk feeding documents to a shredder.

  “Ms. Ware. I need more copies. We both know I haven’t used them all. What will it take to get more?”

  She ignored me.

  I opened my purse and looked in my wallet. “How about five bucks?” I laid the bill on the counter.

  I brightened when she took the cash, thinking I’d gotten off cheap. Then I watched with horror as she fed it into the shredder.

  “Ten?”

  This time I wisely left the money in my wallet.

  “Forty,” she said without looking up. “And you can’t tell a soul.”

  “I don’t know if I have that much.” I scrabbled through my wallet for stray bills. It was money I could ill afford to spend. “Wait a minute. Maybe I can scrape it together.” I counted out thirty-nine dollars and set out another dollar in quarters, laying it out on the counter. “It’s all there.”

  She stood to retrieve the money and was scooping coins into her palm, when a voice said, “What’s going on here, ladies?”

  Dr. Lipton stood in the doorway that led to his office; I had no idea how long he’d been there or how much he’d heard.

  Ms. Ware batted her lashes, long as black widow legs, and said sweetly, “Ms. Wells was paying me back some money she owed me.” Not unexpectedly the secretary was an exceedingly smooth and quick liar.

  “Ms. Wells,” Dr. Lipton said. “Why don’t you mosey on into my office?”

  I nodded and followed him; the secretary watched me, pupils shooting death-rays in my direction. I knew if I ratted her out to Dr. Lipton, the only thing I’d ever get from Ms. Ware again was a view of her backside.

  Dr. Lipton didn’t take a seat behind his palatial desk. Instead he sat in a matching chair across from me, toying with one of his slick curls.

  “Mind telling me what that was all about?”

  I thought it best to stick with Ms. Ware’s tale, because I couldn’t imagine Lipton siding with me over his sexy secretary. For all I knew they might be sleeping together. The principal had an eye for the ladies. I’d witnessed him inappropriately checking out the booties of some of our more comely female students. Some seemed to return the fascination even though Lipton was far too old for them. It was his crazy magnetism. At times it could be as thick as the smell of his hair tonic.

  “Like she said. I owed her money.”

  He grunted. “Tell me another joke. I know Ms. Ware. She wouldn’t lend you the time of day, much less forty dollars. Be straight with me.”

  I glanced at the closed door. Ms. Ware likely lurked behind it, drinking glass pressed to the wood, eavesdropping.

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “Too late. I overheard the conversation. Now I want to hear it from you.”

  Reluctantly I reiterated our exchange, leaving out the reason why the secretary was withholding copies from me. When I was finished, he was silent, banging the end of his pencil against his thigh.

  “You’re getting it all around, aren’t you? I had a reprimand from Ms. Sprague about you in my box this morning. Says you write poor lesson plans and don’t respond to redirection. True?”

  I handed him the lesson plans I’d just retrieved. “See for yourself.”

  He examined them for a moment. “These belong in the lesson plan hall of fame. How many times did you redo them?”

  “Five times so far.”

  Before speaking, Dr. Lipton tightened his gold cufflinks on both sleeves. The man was the king of pregnant pauses.

  “Don’t bother turning your plans into Ms. Sprague anymore,” he said. “Just keep them on file and go back to doing them the way you used to before she started picking on you.”

  “Thank you.” I stood to leave. I was hardly his biggest fan but I was grateful he was siding with me instead of Ms. Sprague.

  “By the way, I’m mighty pleased with your attendance numbers and your students’ grades.”

  “Glad you’re happy,” I said, even though fudging records was hardly a stellar accomplishment. Anyone with a complete lack of scruples could do it.

  “Need your help with something else,” Dr. Lipton said. “I want you to be in charge of mid-year testing fo
r some of the students who are in danger of failing. I feel confident that with you as their proctor, the scores will be much better this year than last.”

  My stomach twisted into a tight knot. I was no longer naïve. This time I knew exactly what he was asking; Dr. Lipton wanted me to help the students cheat. It was one thing to pad grades and attendance, but another to falsely skew state testing results. All kinds of weighty decisions were made based on those scores.

  I measured my words. “I’m not sure if the scores would improve just because I’m the proctor.”

  “Sure they will. In fact, your job depends on it.”

  “That’s not fair. I’ve done everything else you’ve asked.”

  He laughed. “Who told you life was fair? Is it fair that the Board of Education thinks I should magically improve test scores even though I’m dealing with the most disadvantaged student population in Luckett County? I didn’t create this social problem, yet the board thinks I can change things with a snap of my fingers. Where’s the fairness in that?”

  God. I was so bored with the board. Far as I was concerned they existed to give teachers grief. “I understand your position but I still don’t—”

  “If the public and the school board are asking for the impossible, they shouldn’t be surprised when I do what it takes to achieve my results…So I’m asking you, can I count on your help or not?”

  In a crazy kind of way his argument made sense. Since I’d been working as a teacher, I’d been paying more attention to education articles in the Rose Hill Chronicle, and it was true that everyone seemed to expect the school system to perform miracles. As far as I was concerned, No Child Left Behind was a lot of unrealistic mumbo jumbo. It was like requiring doctors to save every patient. Even someone with my limited experience knew that some kids were going to fail no matter what a teacher did.