Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Throughout the first day, she kept hearing this phrase; students in the hallway yelling, “2 G’s! 2 G’s!” She finally pulled two girls aside and asked what it meant. The girls looked at each other, tottering coltishly in their clunky Day-Glo shoes, all enlarged eyes and grins, muffling giggles on each other’s shoulders. Finally one girl composed herself enough to explain, “It mean two grand. Two thousand dollars. Like the Class of 2000. Get it?”

Lynnea nodded her head quickly, feigning remembrance of something she’d momentarily forgotten. She had wondered what the Class of 2000 would call themselves when she and people she called friends gathered in the Taco Bell parking lot to celebrate their own graduation. “What’re they gonna call themselves? The class of Double Nothing?”

AT THE end of the first week of teaching, Lynnea found herself having to raise her voice to get their attention — something she wasn’t used to doing. They didn’t quite yell and scream, but their collective whimsical talk was the unsettling buzz of a far-off carnival. When she sent them to the principal’s office, they snickered and bugged out cartoon eyes, heading toward the office for a few paces, then bolting in the opposite direction. She found herself sharking the room, telling duos here and trios there that they should not be talking about their neon fingernail polish or the Mos Def lyrics in front of them, but the novel at hand, Their Eyes Were Watching God . They were quiet for a moment, controlling their grins as if they were hiding something live and wriggling between the covers of their notebooks.

One day into her second week of school, students had begun slipping to the edges of their seats during the lesson, stunt-falling to the floor whenever an anonymous ringleader gave the signal.

“STOP IT,” Lynnea said, teeth clenched. As soon as she spoke, a wave of students dropped to the floor, stricken by an invisible three-second plague. She gritted her teeth and tugged at her hair. The students hushed and slid back into their chairs, then sat straight again as if watching to see what gesture of pain she’d make next. She tried counting to ten, but only got to five when she caught the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

“All right. Who’s been smoking?”

“Smoking’s bad for you,” someone said.

First came guarded giggles, then a blossoming of laughter.

EVERY FRIDAY after school all the teachers in the program met at a bar called The Rendezvous Lounge, ostensibly to swap teaching stories and commiserate before they got drunk. The first time she’d gone to The Rendezvous, she and Robert the Cop had smoked together, making fun of Bonza.

“Forget that crack-and-bleed song and dance,” Robert the Cop said. “All I want is for the students to do what I tell them. All I want is for my fucking health care to kick in so I can get rid of this rotten molar.”

Just a week ago, Lynnea would have agreed, but now, at the end of her second week of teaching, she just wanted to be able to teach without having to shout above the students. One of the teachers at her school had said that whenever the students got loud, he whispered, forcing the students to shut up in order to make out what he said. But this little trick didn’t work for Lynnea. Her whispers went as unheeded as her yells.

She ordered a DeGroen’s and scanned the crowd of teachers, the barroom air smelling of beer and smoke. Then, to Lynnea’s surprised joy, Jake Bonza strode through The Rendezvous in a pantomime of majesty, glancing right and left; surveying the crowd before picking the person he believed would soonest buckle under the pressure of his loud piss stream of talk.

“How’s it hanging, Davis?” Bonza called out to Lynnea. Bonza took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke from his nostrils like a hero in an old western before aiming the cigarette Lynnea’s way. “You think you gone pull through this, hon?”

“Of course I’ll pull through,” Lynnea said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

She hadn’t told him anything about the past two weeks, and now felt insulted that he’d assumed — correctly — that something was wrong. Lynnea searched Bonza for an elaboration, but Bonza just winked at Evelyn, then downed half of his beer.

“I’ve been through some tough times,” Lynnea said, thinking back to her days of working at the Odair Quickie Mart. She would have to pull through: she wouldn’t get paid until the end of the month. And she was running out of toilet paper.

A FEW days later, Lynnea caught two girls nonchalantly plunking packages of fake hair onto their desks. The packages were labeled by color: Burnished Rum, Foxy Black, Champagne Kiss.

“What do you think you’re going to do with those?” she asked mid-lesson, her shaky finger still pointing to a vocabulary word on the chalkboard: expiate .

One of the girls, Ebony, looked her up and down, then rested her eyes at a point beyond Lynnea’s glare. “Whatever the hell I want to.” Ebony took out a strip of hair from the long plastic bag, doubled it, and hooked it around a spongy black clump of Kyra’s hair, then proceeded to braid. The room was quiet.

“Out!” Lynnea said.

“No,” Ebony said, then sucked her teeth as though annoyed she’d been forced to answer. Ebony kept braiding at a steady pace, as if determined to show the rest of the class she wasn’t paying attention to Lynnea. It was this calm, this nonchalance, that infuriated Lynnea most of all, and she gripped Ebony’s bony shoulder, leaned until her mouth was flush against Ebony’s ear, and blared, “OUT!”

Ebony whipped up from her seat and backhanded her, strands of Foxy Black slapping across Lynnea’s face. Chairs clattered to floor, students stood, screaming like cheerleaders. “Shit! Did you see that! Ms. Davis got banked !”

Lynnea felt her face. No blood. Barely a sting. The girl was gone. Lynnea blinked slowly, then walked out of the classroom. Behind her the class had become a noisy party, and ahead of her, a few yards down the hallway, she saw Ebony make the corner — a flash of short skirt, yellow plastic go-go boots, a trail of fake hair. She heard the squeak of sneakers and knew half her class was on its way down two flights of stairs and out the massive doors.

LYNNEA WROTE out a suspension sheet for Ebony, though no one in the school could track the girl down to give it to her. When the final bell rang, Mr. Morocco, the principal, sat down with Lynnea in her empty classroom. In low, clear tones, he spoke about the need for “greater classroom management.” Then he left, closing the door the way a parent might after grounding a child.

Alone in her classroom, Lynnea thought of Charlesetta Flew, the history teacher down the hall who carried a dish towel to wipe sweat from her face. She was a stocky, penny-colored woman, her looks reminding Lynnea of her quiet aunt Selma, but when a student so much as whispered in Ms. Flew’s class, Charlesetta Flew threatened to sit on them. They believed her and sat at their desks with the solemnity of pieces on a chessboard.

Mrs. Flew would laugh at Lynnea, how Lynnea approached the chalkboard crabwise, afraid that if she turned her back to write anything on it, the students would rearrange their desks. Or a student might just up and leave, or curse her out. Or hit her.

Without quite knowing what led her, Lynnea made her way past a sprinkling of after-school students in the lime green halls, nearly slipping on confetti left over from a pep rally before finally reaching the main office. She plunked her quarter in the normally broken pay phone and called Bonza, who promised to meet her as soon as he could.

She waited outside for Bonza in the gray weather. The front of the school was deserted and the four skimpy trees that dotted the dirt-packed school lawn evaded any pretense of bright New Englandesque fall colors, heading straight to dried-out beige. She could just make out the thunk and dribble of a basketball game getting started on the far eastern side of the school. The boys preferred to primp on the basketball courts where teachers would be less likely to catch them smoking blunts packed with weed. Lynnea had seen — and smelled — them once, watching the boys swirl and fake each other out. Most of the audience comprised girls she’d seen leisurely walking the halls. They wore their makeup like stains, propped themselves against the school walls, yelling names and dares and sexy invitations. But no one loitered where she waited on the school’s front steps, the wind making her eyes water.