22 Jan 2010, Written by Matt Wood in fiction,story
Substitute
Six months after I dropped out of medical school I took a job as a substitute biology teacher at the local high school. The regular teacher was on maternity leave. Normally, the long-term jobs go to substitute teachers who’ve put in their time doing spot work, filling in for teachers who call in sick or wake up and decide it’s a good time to use up some of their personal days, but my friend, Jeff, who taught social studies at the school, called in a favor with the principal. I needed to do something to make money, and with my science background, this was the best I could do.
My first few weeks of class went smoothly because I blamed everything on the old teacher. “Mrs. Jacobsen told me that you guys need to have your reports in no later than two days after each lab,” I’d say, or “Mrs. Jacobsen wanted to make sure you all wrote out full explanations for every answer on the worksheet this week.” This avoided conflict while the kids felt me out, deciding whether I was going to be a hard-ass or one of those teachers who tries to be their friend.
I liked to think that after a month, I was still in the, “He’s okay, I guess” category. Then I ran out of explicit instructions from Mrs. Jacobsen. One Friday, I announced a pop quiz, which never happened during Mrs. Jacobsen’s tenure. The class groaned, predictably, but one student, Dominic, took special umbrage. “Are you shitting me?” I heard him say, not to me but not necessarily under his breath either. I let the cursing slide, because I figured I was liable to let one slip before I was finished, but I stared in his direction as I handed the stack of quizzes down his row.
He snatched his paper from the girl in front of him, and snuck an acid look at me before slouching back into his usual position, just high enough in his chair to reach a pen to the paper, knees splayed beneath him. He started pecking at his iPhone, laughing to himself about whatever vowelless, acronym-littered text one of his buddies had sent him. “Dominic, can you put that away?”
Heads swiveled in his direction. He didn’t look up, wagged an index finger in my direction, and went back to typing. The rest of the class giggled. I decided to make an example of him.
“That’s it.” I stomped back to his desk, snatched the phone, and said, “I’ll give this back to you after class.”
“Dude, give it back,” he said, standing up. One of the girls next to us gasped.
“I asked you to put it away twice, and you’re not even supposed to have cell phones in school during class hours,” I said, squaring up to him.
He bumped into my shoulder as he turned to sit back down. “Whatever, man, you’re not a real teacher.”
The rest of the class watched us, incredulous. “Just read the next chapter until the bell rings,” I said, and stashed the phone in the middle drawer of the teacher’s desk. I sat down and stared at the desk calendar Mrs. Jacobsen left behind. Her last day was circled in blue marker, with a rattle drawn next to it.
During my planning period later that day, I sunk into the old battleship of a couch in the teacher’s lounge. It must have docked there when the school opened in 1985, the one with the wooden armrests and calico tweed cushions that puffed out a cloud of musty, fart-smelling air every time you slouched into their grasp. It was comfortable though, the downward force of two decades of saddle-bagged asses and career resignation having punished its seats into submission. I nursed a mug of tepid coffee, slumped in my students’ favorite pose. Jeff walked in and spotted me. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I just hassled a kid about using his phone in class. I feel like an old man.”
“Well, are you?”
“Shut up. I just didn’t expect to end up somewhere like this.”
“Somewhere like what? I work here too, Dickhead, and you asked me for this job, remember?”
I got up and poured out the coffee in the sink, watching it pool in the stack of empty Tupperware containers and chipped dinnerware. Jeff was always on the watch for me feeling sorry for myself. He knew I knew better, but he always seemed to know when I was breaking down. I wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference between that specific look of frustration and the usual defeated countenance you see in a teacher’s lounge.
That Friday night, I was sitting another couch in my apartment, staring at the TV, deciding whether I wanted to turn on a baseball game or get a porno DVD from my bedroom. I started to get up and go back to the bedroom when my cell phone rang. It was Jeff, badgering me to go out drinking with him like he did every week since I quit school. I took him up a few times, but it usually just turned into sitting around at some friend’s of his, drinking cans of cheap beer and taking bong hits.
I tried to put him off, reading the credits on the back of the DVD to myself, as if it were going to make me interested in anything other than the huge pair of fake breasts on the cover. “I had a shitty week,” I said
He persisted, and told me he’d be coming to pick me up in 30 minutes. I decided I could use a night out anyway. I was still going to get shit on by kids like Dominic the next Monday whether I stayed home and jerked off to Big Boob Patrol 14 or went out. I might as well get drunk.
We drove to a shabby, vinyl-sided jumble of apartments with walkup porches and rotting balconies for a birthday party for this guy Jeff knew from his softball team. The little patches of grass in front of each building were overwhelmed by crabgrass and the remains of dandelions that had been sawed off by a weedeater. There was a crowd of people standing on a second-floor balcony, smoking and holding beer cans. I could hear a Pearl Jam song playing inside.
Jeff and I walked through a door propped open with a cooler. I got a beer and shadowed him as he made the rounds, pounding fists and giving one-armed hugs, telling me how this guy was awesome and that guy ruled. I remembered having met a lot of them at one time or another on our previous nights out. I settled in on the corner of a couch next to Jeff while he played cards across a low, wobbly coffee table, bullshitting with his friends.
I didn’t move much the rest of the night. New beers appeared in front of me every time I finished one, either passed over by Jeff or slid across my shoulder by one of his indiscriminate, goateed buddies.
There was a commotion at the front door. One of Jeff’s buddies was shouting, greeting a group of girls. They were dressed in tight halter tops and white pants, with big hoop earrings and way too much makeup, the way younger girls dress when they’re trying to look older. A bleach blonde handed a jug of margarita mix over to one of the guys. Come to think of it, they looked really young. And vaguely familiar.
I leaned into Jeff. “Who are those girls?”
“Oh, just some chicks my buddies met at the bars.”
“I swear they look like some of the girls from the high school,” I said.
“No way, dude. They go to community college or something.”
I let it drop and grabbed another unopened beer from the table. It wouldn’t matter whether the girls were too young or not. I’d never be able to put a sentence together to impress them anyway.
I watched them for a while, then got up to pee and realized I was pretty drunk. I wobbled back from the bathroom, and the exertion made me start to feel sick. I slumped over the toilet, pressing my hands against the bowl, and tried not to think about why the porcelain along the rim was so sticky. I vomited profusely, then must have passed out.
I woke up to a loud noise behind me. Pounding, then indiscriminate shouting. I was sitting wedged between the toilet and the sink cabinet. The pounding continued, and I took a deep breath to prepare to sit up. The air stalled in my nostrils as it met impacted mucus and vomit. Immediately, everything smelled and tasted like a moldering version of the canned ravioli I had eaten for dinner, tinged with the sting of bile. I sat upright and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. My knees seared with pain against the vinyl tile floor, and my right leg was asleep from the mid-calf down.
The shouting behind me began to resemble language, punctuated by the pounding on the bathroom’s hollow-core wooden door. I hoisted myself up by pressing both palms against the bowl then pushing off onto the nearby sink counter. I steadied myself over the sink on my elbows until the feeling came back to my leg. I turned on the cold water, and scooped some into my mouth.
I heard someone keying the lock, then one of Jeff’s friends, presumably the tenant of the apartment, burst in. “What the hell are you doing in here man?” I gave him a dark look while he gathered in the rest of the scene. Then he said, “You better fucking clean up that puke.”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and obliged, taking the roll of toilet paper sitting on top of the tank and wrapping some around my hand. I squatted down, losing my balance and cracking my shoulder against the cabinet, then righted myself and started wiping the orange and brown flecks off the bowl and surrounding floor.
When I came out of the bathroom, the party seemed even more raucous, the music even louder. More girls had come over, and this time I definitely recognized some of them from the high school. They were standing in the kitchen talking to a familiar group of guys, including Dominic, the kid with the phone from my class.
Jeff was sitting on the arm of a couch, leaning over one of the girls, trying to coax her into the game of quarters while she fiddled with her cell phone, ignoring him. When he spotted me coming out of the hallway, he shot up, spilling his beer on her white pants.
“Where have you been? You weren’t in there puking were you?” he said, gesturing back toward the bathroom with his cup. The girl on the couch shied away from another shower of beer.
“I’m getting out of here,” I said, glancing over at Dominic and the kids from school, hoping they hadn’t seen me yet.
I tromped toward the door, with Jeff protesting behind me. “How you gonna get home? It’s like 20 miles away!”
I had sobered up from all the puking, and the thought of riding home with him now scared me enough to make the walk, which by my reckoning was only about three miles anyway.
I walked out of the apartment complex, past the remnants of other parties in other units, reproductions of the scene I just left. I thought about cutting through some of the residential neighborhoods behind the apartments instead of walking back to the commercial drag to get home. The streets were nearly deserted, and I’d be less likely to pick up a ticket for public intoxication from one of the bored town deputies idling their squad cars in the strip mall parking lots. But I decided to walk back to the main road anyway, thinking I could hit the Taco Bell and sober up a little more.
I stepped onto the sidewalk along the main road, and headed toward the next light, the late-night promise of chalupas and a large Mountain Dew on the next block urging me forward. As I waited to cross at the light, I thought I had an opening. I started to cross, then hesitated when I saw a white Saturn coming in a little more hot than I expected. The driver, a twenty-something Latino kid, gunned it, trying to beat the light. I turned as he passed me, watching him bolt into the intersection.
Just then I saw a black Nissan hurtling down the main road from my right, straight toward the turning Saturn. I glimpsed the Latino kid’s black hair through the Saturn’s rear window. Then I watched the Nissan barrel into the Saturn’s passenger side door, shattering the window and shoving it off to the side of the street like he was driving a snowplow. It seemed like it took 10 minutes to happen; I watched the whole thing but knew exactly how it would end.
The Saturn spun around and skidded to a stop right by the sidewalk about 20 yards away from me. The Latino kid got out, cursing, holding his left shoulder as his arm hung limply at his side. The Nissan had stopped nearby. The hood was crumpled and his airbags had deployed. The driver, who I recognized as Dominic, got out, ignoring the kid and his Saturn, and limped toward the front of the car to inspect the damage.
I stood there and stared. By that time, a teenage girl had gotten out of the passenger side of the Nissan, blood on her white pants from what looked like a broken nose. It was the girl Jeff had been hitting on at the party. Another car had stopped and a matronly-looking woman was leading her over to the curb. Dominic, spotted me and shouted, “Don’t just fucking stand there, call for help.”
I looked back at the Latino kid trying to open his ruined passenger door. I looked at the woman emptying a plastic packet of Kleenexes to hold up to the girl’s nose. I looked back at Dominic, still glaring at me. Then I turned and kept walking toward the Taco Bell. I was hungry.
