Did anyone hear all the noise? I glance toward the door.
The kids take that as an excuse to depart. They grab backpacks and make a beeline for the exit, tripping over desks and chairs, bouncing off one another. They push, shove, elbow. One student attempts to escape the chaos by using the desktops as stepping-stones.
If they get out, I’m dead. The singular rule most emphasized during the teachers’ meeting was No kids in the hall during classes without adult supervision. Period. Too much fighting, skipping, smoking, adding graffiti to the walls, and other acts of delinquency, which the weary-looking principal, Mr. Pevoto, left to our imaginations.
If they are in your classroom, you are responsible for keeping them there.
I join the stampede. Fortunately, I’m nimble and closer to the exit than most of my students. Only two get loose before I plant myself in the doorway, my arms stretched across the opening. It’s at that point I revisit The Exorcist. My head must be turning 360 degrees on my neck, because I see a pair of boys sprinting away down the hall, laughing and congratulating each other, while at the same time I observe stragglers bumping into the logjam I’ve created at the exit portal. Lil’ Ray is at the front and fairly immovable. At least he’s averse to mowing me down.
“I said, get back in your seats. Now. We still have…” I glance at the clock. “Fifteen minutes.” Fifteen? I’ll never make it that long with this bunch of miscreants. They are by far the worst of the day, and that’s saying a lot.
No amount of money is worth this, and certainly not the pittance of a salary the school district has agreed to pay me for being here. I’ll find some other means of repaying my student loans.
“I’m hungry,” Lil’ Ray complains again.
“Back to your seat.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“You should eat before you come to school.”
“Ain’t got nothing in the pintry.” A sheen of sweat covers his coppery skin, and his eyes are weirdly glassy. I’m struck by the sense that I have bigger problems than the stampede. Standing in front of me is a fifteen-year-old who’s desperate in some way, and he expects me to solve the problem.
“All the rest of you, get in your seats!” I bark out. “Put those desks back where they belong. Plant yourselves in them.”
The area behind Lil’ Ray slowly clears. Sneaker soles screech. Desks clatter. Chairs scrape the tile. Backpacks drop with muffled thuds.
I hear a commotion in the science room across the hall. There’s a new teacher over there, too. A girls’ basketball coach, fresh out of college and only about twenty-three, as I recall. I at least have a little more age on my side, having worked my way through undergrad and then piddled along to a master’s degree in literature.
“Anyone who’s not in a chair in the next sixty seconds owes me a paragraph. In ink. On paper.” Owes me a paragraph was the go-to form of intimidation of Mrs. Hardy, my mentor educator. It’s the English teacher’s version of Drop and give me twenty. Most kids will do almost anything to avoid picking up a pen and writing.
Lil’ Ray blinks at me, his cherub-cheeked face sagging. “Miz?” The word comes in a hoarse, uncertain whisper.
“Miss Silva.” I already hate the fact that the kids’ default word for me at this school is a generic Miz, as if I am some random stranger, maybe married, maybe not, and with no last name worth remembering. I have a name. It may be my father’s name and, given our relationship, I have my resentments about it, but still…
A man-sized hand reaches out, grasps air, stretches farther, closes over my arm. “Miss…I don’t feel so—”
The next thing I know, Lil’ Ray is slumped against the frame, and we’re going down. I do my best to break the fall as a million things run through my mind. Overexcitement, drugs, an illness, theatrics…
Lil’ Ray’s eyes moisten. He gives me the terrified look of a toddler lost in the grocery store, searching for his mom.
“Lil’ Ray, what’s going on?” No response. I turn and shout into the classroom. “Does he have a health problem?”
No one answers.
“Are you sick?” We’re nose to nose now.
“I get hun…gry.”
“Do you carry medicine? Does the nurse have medicine for you?” Do we even have a school nurse? “Have you been to a doctor?”
“I don’t…I…jus…get hungry.”
“When did you eat last?”
“Lunch yesterday.”
“Why didn’t you have breakfast this morning?”
“Nothin’ in the pintry.”
“Why didn’t you have supper last night?”
Deep creases line his sweat-soaked forehead. He blinks at me, blinks again. “Nothin’ in the pintry.”
My mind speeds full throttle into the brick wall of reality. I don’t even have time to put on the brakes and soften the impact. Pintry…pintry…
Pantry.
Nothing in the pantry.
I feel sick.
Meanwhile, behind me, the noise level is rising again. A pencil takes flight and hits the wall. I hear another one clatter off the metal filing cabinet by my desk.
From my pocket, I snatch the half-eaten bag of peanut M&M’s left from my morning snack, stuff it into Lil’ Ray’s hand, and say, “Eat this.”
I stand up just in time to see a red plastic ruler shoot through the half-open door.
“That is it!” I’ve said this at least two dozen times today. Apparently, I don’t mean it, because I’m still here, in this outer realm of Dante’s inferno. Just trying to survive Day One. Either it’s mere stubbornness or a desperate need to succeed at something, but I start retrieving copies of Animal Farm from the floor and slamming them onto desks.
“What’re we s’posed to do with these?” That complaint comes from the right side of the room.
“Open it. Look it over. Get out a piece of paper. Write a sentence telling me what you think the book is about.”
“We got eight minutes till the bell,” a punk-rocker girl with a blue-streaked Mohawk notes.
“Then hurry.”
“You crazy?”
“There ain’t time.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I ain’t writin’ no sentence.”
“I’m not readin’ no book. This’s got…one-hun’erd forty-four pages! I can’t read that in fiv…four minutes.”