Tampa (2 page)

My heart sank when I checked the weather channel before
leaving
the house: we were due for record-high humidity. I cringed thinking of my makeup feathered and my hair frizzed by the end of the day. As I cursed, Ford sauntered out of the bedroom with a half erection and gave a large, stretching yawn in front of the window facing the sunrise. “Good luck, babe,” he called. “What a beautiful morning!” I slammed the front door on my way out.

Not surprisingly, the temperature inside the faculty lounge was nearly unbearable. We’d gathered at the behest of Principal Deegan, who wasted no time launching into a tepid pep talk. Like all of his public speeches, it heavily relied on the rhetorical device of
repeatedly
asking
Am I right?
after every sentence. “Gosh,” Mr. Sellers, the wiry chemistry teacher next to me, muttered, fanning himself. “Like the kids don’t have enough ammo already. Now I have to walk into class with wet armpits.” Janet continued making loud crunching noises; I assumed she kept eating handfuls of granola, but after a few investigative glances I realized it was actually aspirin.

I wanted to run from the room to my class; the earliest pupils would be gathering there now. There was a vague burning at the spot where my spine connected my neck and head; my whole body yearned with the tincture of possibility. I felt like an optimistic bride the morning of her arranged marriage: I was feasibly about to meet someone who would come to know me in every intimate way. “They are not the enemy,” Principal Deegan stressed; the rest of the teachers erupted in pithy laughter.

“Could’ve fooled me,” Janet barked. A knowing nod of
sympathy
made Mr. Sellers’s hunched neck begin a series of short,
conciliatory
parakeet head bobs.

Suddenly, Janet’s eyes were pinning me to the wall. The
polite
laughter of agreement in the room had softened to background static between Janet’s ears and she’d heard my silence in response to her joke echo forth like a scream; worse yet, she’d picked up my expression—a snide look of unmistakable contempt. Years of teaching junior high had likely bestowed the derision sensor in her hearing with supernatural powers. Upon seeing her stare at me I immediately melted my face into a grin, but she didn’t return it. “Bathroom cigarette monitoring cannot just be an occasional
afterthought
,” Deegan continued. I watched the clock and pretended to think on his words with contemplation. After thirty seconds I looked back and Janet was still staring at me. When the bell rang she dropped several more aspirins into her mouth like cocktail
peanuts
but didn’t blink.

“Go Stallions!” Principal Deegan finally called out, his
well-formed
words brimming with manufactured passion. With the sound of hundreds of students pouring through the hallways just beyond the door, for a moment it seemed as though his call had actually summoned a livestock stampede. I gazed back at his
smiling
face, his hands enthusiastically raised above his head. “Go
Stallions
!” He repeated this a few times with a near-animatronic flair.

I was the first faculty member out the door. In the hallway, the air had taken on the pungent weight of teenage sweat. Loud peals of laughter and shrieks, the type associated with forced tickling, came from every direction. As I made my way to the exit doors, foggy pockets of overzealous cologne hung low amidst herds of swaggering friends; the startling aluminum bangs of lockers being
opened and closed and reopened caused me to occasionally flinch. Soon the hallway population formed into a moving herd. A
competitive
speed was set as students headed to outdoor extension classrooms like mine moved toward the door in a rushing swell; it seemed as though a popular band was about to go onstage. I took the opportunity to pin myself against the back of a male
student
whose ankles revealed a tan line from athletic socks—likely a cross-country team member. “I’m sorry,” I whispered hopefully into his ear, “I’m being pushed.” Was it fate; was he the one? But the face that turned to greet mine was acneic; I quickly extricated my chest from his warm back.

My heart sank as I watched two goofy girls entwine hands and run up to the door of my classroom. From the roster, I knew I had ten boys in the first period, twelve girls. I tried to steel myself—even if there weren’t any suitable options in the first period, I had four other classes, and each one brought more opportunities. That was not to say that it would be easy: my ideal partner, I realized,
embodied
a very specific intersection of traits that would exclude most of the junior high’s male population. Extreme growth spurts or pronounced muscles were immediate grounds for disqualification. They also needed to have decent skin, be somewhat thin, and have either the shame or the preternatural discipline required to keep a secret.

The door to my classroom took a great deal of force to pull open—the suck of cold air from the window AC unit formed a
resisting
vacuum. Inside it was dark and cold. Two boys, prankster types, were standing in front of the air conditioner; they
immediately
ran to their seats with smiles, expecting some kind of
chastising
line (
You two know you’re not allowed to touch that!
) that would
set them apart and declare them more audacious than their peers. I didn’t get a good look at their faces, but from what I’d spied of their bodies already I knew I wasn’t interested: they were a hodgepodge of pre-and post-puberty. The silhouette of one’s biceps was visible from several feet away. The other had mannish curls of dark arm hair. But the room held others.

I walked straight to the AC unit and stood there, feeling my nipples harden to visibility. For a moment I closed my eyes. I had to stay calm; I had to regard the students like a delicate art exhibit and stay six feet away at all times, lest I be tempted to touch.

“Are you the teacher?” This voice was also male but slightly too deep. I turned, letting the AC cool the back of my neck.

“I am.” I smiled. “It is really hot out there.” I fingered the pencil inside the twisted bun of my hair, but scanning the room I knew it wasn’t yet time to let it down—he wasn’t present, he wasn’t in this class. Yet there was eye candy aplenty. I managed to hold it together during my opening spiel until a young man in the second row who figured no one was looking reached down between his legs and spent a generous amount of time adjusting himself. This caused a brisk tightening in my lungs and chest; I gripped the side of my desk for support, working hard to speak just a few more words to the students without sounding like a labored asthmatic. “Introduce yourselves,” I managed to say, “go around the room. State your
hobbies
, your darkest and most primitive fears, whatever you want.” But as my arousal slowly came back down to a controllable level, a new sort of panic gripped me. All the alluring males in my class seemed unusable—too boisterous, overly confident.

By the end of the second period, when it became clear that class held no winners either, I found myself wondering whether or not
to bail entirely over the lunch break. Had I simply thrown myself deeper into torture with no hope of release? Now I’d have to
interact
with them, see them daily, yet none of them seemed promising enough to attempt anything further with. Perhaps I’d be better off substituting during the fall and trying my luck again in the spring elsewhere. “So we don’t have any homework?” one student asked as the bell rang. Due to the sallow smallness of her eyes and nose, her retainer was her most prominent feature. I wanted to forcibly hold her in front of a mirror and question the image:
Can faces actually look like yours?

“Why would you ask that?” I said. “Do you want homework or something?” She gave me a helpless blink; I’d spat blood upon her face amidst the sharks. The other students immediately began launching insults at her during the group exit from the classroom in a way that pleased me. I knew I’d find it hard to cut the girls in my classes any slack at all, knowing the great generosity life had already gifted them. They were at the very beginning of their sexual lives with no need to hurry—whenever they were ready, a great range of attractions would be waiting for them, easy and disposable. Their urges would grow up right alongside them like a shadow. They’d never feel their libido a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of their mind and to only be fed in secret after dark.

Finally a last group of three male stragglers, whispering and laughing, passed my desk.

“See you all tomorrow,” I said. This direct address gave the loudest one the final hint of courage he’d been looking for.

“Kyle thinks you’re hot,” he rattled off, quick words
immediately
followed by laughter and Kyle aggressively pushing the speaker. Kyle himself managed only the gruff confessional phrase
“Shut up.” While he might’ve been suitable physically—he wasn’t yet too tall or muscularly thickened—he was far too self-assured and aggressive; the most willing boys were off-limits. They’d also be the most willing to talk.

In the minutes before third period, each time the door opened to reveal a new student the outside noise and sunlight poured in and anticipation closed my throat. Because they were coming from the bright outdoors, upon entering the darkened classroom their bodies were backlit, their faces featureless and shadowy, and their outlines seemed angelic—every tiny wisp of hair illuminated—in a way that made each one appear to be materializing from a dream. But when they came into focus, most were disappointments. I
actually
didn’t catch Jack’s entrance; some terrible creature whose chin and feet were elephantine in comparison to the rest of his body had approached my desk to talk at me about the books he’d read that summer. But I saw Jack soon after the bell rang, already seated. He seemed to be a larger, stretch-limbed version of a younger boy—chin-length light hair, unimposing features and a mouth that was devilishly wholesome. He was looking in my direction, though not in an overt way. Occasionally a friend would whisper something to him, make a comment, and he’d turn his head and nod or laugh. But then he’d shyly glance back up front. There was a hesitant
politeness
to his movements; he started to grab a notebook from his bag, second-guessed himself, looked around to see if others had taken out notebooks and only then bent over to unzip his backpack. I could imagine him pausing with the same demure reluctance as he took down the side zipper of my skirt, his alert brown eyes
frequently
returning to my face to check for a contradictory
expression
that might indicate he should stop, at which point I would
have to goad him on, say,
It’s okay, please continue what you’re doing
.

I realized with a bit of embarrassment that it was the first time I’d remembered to take roll all day. Suddenly I was actually curious about who someone was. His name was ordinary yet peculiar—two first names.

“Jack Patrick?”

He gave a timid smile, more polite confidence than self-awareness. “Here,” he said.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel
, I thought. Reaching up to the nape of my neck, I shook out my hair and brought the pencil’s lead tip to my tongue.

When I stepped
outside after my last class, the unfiltered
afternoon
sun was blinding. The bedlam atmosphere of the day’s end made the stoic brick walls of the junior high and all its false markers of imposed order—the perfect geometry of the landscaping, its
immaculate
semicircles of wood chips bordered with green hedges and palm trees—seem like relics of a recently invaded and devoured
civilization
. Youths walking home screamed jungle cries and sprinted past one another like feral carnivores, running together toward some invisible, felled big-game carcass just outside the boundaries of school property. I squinted against the bleached-out concrete
walkway
that served as an umbilical path to the school; it contained some type of mineralized rock that made it glitter in the light. Holding a stack of manila folders against my chest—student informational surveys, including all of Jack’s emergency contact information—my eyes narrowed against the reflective flash of the ground and my pumps made scratching steps across its granular surface. It felt like
a daydream, like I was walking to my car across a trail of luminous sugar.

“Every summer gets shorter,” a throaty voice called.

No sooner had I heard the words than I smelled the cigarette. Turning, I straightened the fingers of my right hand and raised them to my forehead, half visor and half salute. In the faculty
parking
lot, Janet Feinlog was sitting down on the foot ledge of her blue conversion van’s opened door. She was looking straight ahead; a small stump of burning cigarette served as a gravity-defying bridge between her fingers and two inches of suspended ash. Unsure if she’d been speaking to me or to herself, I pressed the remote in my hand and disabled my car alarm with a pronounced beep.

“Do you know what I’d give for one more week of summer?” she asked. There was a shake in her voice that told of inner
conflict
in full motion: I pictured all her internal organs bouncing as they tried to keep the unfulfilled rage beneath her floppy
stomach
pinned down. Hers was an anger steel-strengthened against the stone of joyless decades. She coughed and let out a low, round fart that she didn’t acknowledge. “Just one more goddamn week of being teenager free.” Though the rest of her body stayed hunched in place, I watched the balls of her eyes shift in my direction: two exploratory rovers sent out to appraise if I was worth the exertion of turning her neck. I felt sorry for the young men fate had assigned to her course rosters. I couldn’t imagine being at an age where I was trying to grapple with the difference of the female body and having to somehow work Janet Feinlog into the matrix.