The rich woman says: I feel hollow all the time.
I can’t look at her. She is a person who has lost things, who has felt things. I don’t have space left in my brain to worry about her too.
I’m sorry, I say.
I liked you so much, she says, the night we met.
I think how good I am at pretending.
Jeremy said things haven’t been easy for you guys, she says.
My hand is, once again, on my stomach. Fuck you, I think.
Jeremy says your husband says you’re miserable at your job.
We could offer you— she says.
I think she is about to offer us an amount of money that we could not say no to, and I almost reach up as if to place my hand over her mouth.
When I leave her I walk an hour before getting on the subway. As we wait underground, because the train’s delayed, I scroll through to Sasha’s Instagram and then I see her: squished face, thick, dark patch of hair, and mottled skin. Sasha’s baby. And Sasha smiling, her face perfect, holding her.
6
THERE ARE ONLY two weeks left of school and everyone has mostly stopped pretending that they have a job to do. Everyone has stopped pretending they know how.
I went into the meeting in which I was meant to get my offer for the next school year and the principal ate grilled cheese. He showed me a contract with a two percent raise and told me he thought I was more well suited to teach ninth grade, though I’ve been teaching the juniors and seniors all year, though I was hired to help to prep the upperclassmen for college.
I told him I wasn’t sure kids that young would be the best fit for me.
My background is university teaching, I said.
He nodded, already knew this, wiped tomato off his face.
Ninth grade doesn’t take any tests, though, he said. I know, he said, test prep isn’t your thing.
A week later, I went back into his office and I quit.
There are people I like who are staying, or who are finding jobs at other schools like ours. Both my co–homeroom teachers plan on leaving also, one for grad school, one for another school. I think briefly of thanking them for covering for me, all those times that I was absent, but then I’d have to tell them that I left and so stay quiet. I look down at the floor each time I tell another person that I’m leaving. I pick at the edge of whatever shirt I’m wearing and give some heartfelt, earnest talk about the system being broken. But it won’t get better when I leave it. I’m leaving because I love my students but not as much as I wish I loved them, not enough to work harder and be better; because I love my children more.
I’ll be paid through the summer and, with Melissa’s help, I’ve picked up three more adjunct jobs for the next semester. We cannot live outside the systems and the structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them either anymore.
There are murmurings—they’ve reached a higher pitch this past month—that the corporation to which we send our rent check is going to take the opportunity of Josslyn’s death to turn the apartments in our building into co-ops. I sleep later and later and my runs get shorter. I eat the free junk food at work and feel lethargic and my clothes start to feel tight. I am no longer willing to have sex with my husband. This does not happen all at once, and I still sometimes give in. But each time he reaches for me—I can’t stop thinking about that asshole professor at my night class, every man I see each time I read the news—my skin crawls and I want to hide in the corner of the bed and go to sleep.
It’s complicated, I say, when he looks at me.
I just can’t right now, I say.
It’s not complicated that you don’t want me, he says.
It’s not about you, I say.
Except it is, he says.
It’s men, I say. I don’t want to give anything to any man right now.
He’s a good husband and this isn’t fair. I understand this. And yet I still don’t want to. Sometimes I give into it because I want him to be happy, because I love him and I like him and he’s a good dad and he loves me. I curl even closer to the wall afterward.
Every morning, before school, I meet Kayla and I buy her breakfast at the diner across the street from school. She texted me from the train to school three months ago that she was hungry and she was early and I offered to get her food. We met here and then again the next day. I get coffee and she gets a four-dollar sausage, egg, and cheese, and we sit and talk or we are quiet and she eats. I sip my coffee with extra milk and try hard not to put my arm around her as we walk to school.
Be careful there, says my co–homeroom teacher as she watches Kayla and me walk through security together, laughing.
I am, I tell her, without wholly knowing what she’s saying, knowing that whatever line she’s warning I not cross is long since past.
I’ve texted Sasha Congrats even though she didn’t tell me. Thanks, she responds a day later, another emoji, and I want to call or go to her, but I can’t, so I just wait for her to call and every day, when she still hasn’t, I check again for pictures but there’s none. I see the same one she posted twice more, posted by her mother and her sister, and, late at night, I stare at her, click through each version, wondering what she’s like.
I get home from work late because it’s the end of the year and I’m starting to realize
