I teach one more class after our meeting and we have a debate about whether the ghost in Hamlet is real. I offer lunch on me as extra incentive for whoever wins. I give them ten minutes to plan their opening arguments. After that they craft rebuttals. After rebuttals come the cross-examinations and I egg both sides on, pointing out the holes in their opponents’ theses, pointing out how their opponents’ examples might be twisted to serve their arguments as well. We all get loud.
The twenty-four-year-old stands quietly in back. I think maybe he’s transcribing in his head the case he’ll make when he goes to our boss to get me fired. I think if I get fired I won’t mind. And then one of my students stands close to me, pointing to a moment in the text she thinks will help her team, and I think I will go over to the twenty-four-year-old and threaten to harm him bodily if he takes this job from me.
While the kids prep their closing arguments, I check my email. I’m so honored, the Chilean writer writes back to me, I can’t wait.
Third-floor hall duty. I’m reading: Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. All my life I have been searching for something that would fill me with pride, make me feel superior to everyone else, including kings, princes, and rulers, says Firdaus, as she sits in a cell, sentenced to death.
I get a message about a girl, a tenth grader, who walks out of class because of anxiety. She has a disorder, we were told at a staff meeting—amplified flight reflex. If she feels anxious, she walks out of class, sometimes out of school, and she walks often. Regularly, on the Google chat, we get messages saying that she’s gone.
Can someone check the third-floor bathroom? says the chat.
Got it, I message back.
Kayla? I say, looking under the stall doors.
Another student, who is in my class and is standing at the mirror, motions to me. Last stall, she mouths.
I knock and Kayla opens the stall door slowly. I don’t know you, she says.
I don’t teach the tenth graders. I introduce myself, tell her what I teach.
I still have to pee, she says, closing the door.
I message the Google chat. Minutes pass and no sound comes from the stall. I watch the toes of her black lace-up shoes turn in.
She comes out and the toilet hasn’t flushed. She turns the water on and washes and rewashes and rewashes her hands.
Come on, Kayla, I say. We have to get you back to class.
She doesn’t look at me. She washes one more time and grabs a paper towel, placing it in between her fingers, folding it into a tiny dark-brown square before placing it into the trash.
We come out of the bathroom and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to touch her. I’m not sure how to make sure she doesn’t run away without my touching her. I try to keep my voice calm and not to scold her. I have to chat the counselor to find out where to take her and I type with one finger, keeping one hand free in case she runs. She’s taller than me but she stays half a step behind. Twice, she tries to turn back toward the bathroom and I grab hold of her backpack and half nudge, half lead her up the stairs.
What’s your favorite subject? I say, suddenly dumb and bad at conversation.
Science, she says.
Cool, I say. I like science.
She tries to take a sharp left when we get up the stairs and I turn right and once again I have to grab her backpack to keep her with me. She’s wily and she’s fast, they told us in the meeting. I loop my arm around hers.
Come back, Kayla, I say as I let go of her to knock on the counselor’s office door and she disappears down the hall.
She was just here, I say when the counselor comes out and Kayla’s gone.
I leave after my hall duty is over. I pass the twenty-four-year-old on the escalator. He goes up and I go down and I look him in the eye and do not smile and he finally looks away.
The shift in register between my day job and my night job usually takes half an hour. The students that I teach at night are grad students. They’re so much older, paying to be there. It is both more intellectually rigorous and not as hard for me because I don’t have to convince them they should care. Because their lives up until now have all been more like mine. I’m less careful with them maybe; their out-of-class demands feel both less important to me and easier to solve.
I sit in whatever office I am given and I disappear for an hour, as long as students haven’t asked to meet with me, and I read the book I’m meant to teach or I scroll through Twitter or text my husband and ask him to send me videos of our girls. I take off my blazer if I’ve been wearing a blazer. I have, twice this year, bought a T-shirt on the magic credit card after I looked in the mirror on my way uptown and felt too professionally dressed to teach literature to graduate students.
The Chilean writer is in her fifties, I learned from the link embedded in the earlier email form the school administration office, and
