Tom Perrotta: Nine Inches

That’s what I was thinking about when they found the weed. I was thinking about the kid who’d filled out those applications, remembering how cocky and obnoxious he’d been, so sure of his own worth, and the world’s ability to recognize it. I was lying on the street with my cheek pressed against the blacktop, thinking about what an asshole he was, and how much I missed him.

SIXTH PERIOD WAS ENDLESS. VICKI stood by the Smart Board, listening to herself drone on about the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder, but all she could think about was Jessica Grasso, the heavy girl sitting near the back right corner of the room, watching her with a polite, seemingly neutral expression. It was almost as if Jessica grew larger with each passing moment, as if she were being inflated by some invisible pump, expanding like a parade float until she filled the entire room.

She hates me, Vicki thought, and this knowledge was somehow both sickening and exciting at the same time. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at her .

Vicki hadn’t known it herself until last night, when she read what the girl had written about her on grademyteacher.com. She had stumbled upon the post while conducting a routine self-google, exercising a little due diligence so she didn’t get blindsided like her old friend and former colleague Anna Shamsky, a happily married mother of three who’d lost her job over some twenty-year-old topless photos that had appeared without her knowledge on a website called Memoirs-of-a-Stud.com. The site was the brainchild of an ex-boyfriend of hers — a guy she hadn’t thought about since college — who had decided in a fit of midlife bravado that the world needed to know a little bit about every woman he’d ever slept with (“Anna S. was a sweet innocent sophomore with boobs to die for,” he wrote. “When I was done with her, she could give head like nobody’s beeswax”). The surprisingly steamy photos — Anna’s youthful breasts totally lived up to the hype — had spread like a virus through the entire Gifford High School community before the subject herself even remembered they existed, and by then there was nothing to do but submit her resignation.

Vicki didn’t have to worry about nude photos — she’d never posed for any, not even when her ex-husband had asked her nicely — but that was just one risk among many in a dangerous world. She told herself she was simply being prudent — in this day and age, googling yourself was just common sense, like using sunscreen or buckling your seatbelt — but she was sometimes aware of a tiny flutter of anticipation as she typed her name into the dialog box, as if the search engine might reveal a new self to her, someone a little more interesting, or at least a little less forgettable, than the rest of the world suspected. She remembered feeling oddly hopeful last night, just seconds before she found herself staring at this:

OMG my math teacher Vicki Wiggins is an INSANE B*#@&! One day she called me a FAT PIG for eating candy in class. I know I’m no supermodel but guess what she’s even worse! Hav u seen the panty lines when she packs her HUGE BUTT into those ugly beige pants? Hellooo? Ever hear of a thong? Everyone cracks up about it behind her back. She might as well be wearing her extralarge granny pants on the outside. Vicki Wiggins, you are the pig!

Vicki’s first reaction to this was bewilderment — she honestly had no idea what the writer was talking about — followed by a combination of searing embarrassment (she’d had her doubts about those beige pants) and righteous indignation. In her entire career — her entire adult life! — she’d never called anyone a fat pig. She wouldn’t dream of it. As a woman who’d struggled with her own weight, she knew just how hurtful such epithets could be.

What made it even worse was that she realized she was making a mistake even as she clicked on the link, violating her long-standing policy to stay as far away from grademyteacher.com as possible. It was just too depressing, and she wasn’t even one of the truly unpopu­lar teachers, the unfortunates whose names were flagged with a big red thumbs-down icon — people like Fred Kane, the marble-mouthed biology instructor whose average score was 2.4 out of 10, or Martha Rigby (a mind-boggling 1.8), the ancient English teacher who regularly referred to the author of Great Expectations as Thomas Dickinson. Vicki herself was stuck in the middle of the pack (5.5, to be exact), with fewer than a dozen comments to her name, most of which contained a variant on the phrase “Boring but okay.” By contrast, Lily Frankel, the lively and hip young drama teacher, had received a whopping sixty-two reviews for an overall rating of 9.3, highest on the entire faculty, thereby earning herself a coveted smiley face with sunglasses and a crown.

Vicki read the post over and over — the author was identified only as “Greensleeves,” a pseudonym that meant nothing to her — wondering what she could have done to provoke such a hateful and dishonest attack. You’d think that if someone despised you enough to call you an insane bitch, you’d have a pretty good idea of who it was, but Vicki’s mind was blank, unable to produce a suspect. It wasn’t until she gave up and went to bed that the answer came to her, almost as if it had been jarred loose by the impact of her head against the pillow.

SHE’D BEEN circulating through her classroom during a quiz — this was back in February, either right before or right after winter vacation — when she spotted Jessica Grasso munching on a Snickers bar. Some teachers allowed snacks in class, but Vicki wasn’t one of them, and she’d been teaching long enough to know that you had to stick to your guns on stuff like that. Not wanting to embarrass the girl, who’d never given her any trouble, Vicki tapped her on the shoulder and spoke in a barely audible whisper as she held out her hand.

“Please give me that.”

Instead of surrendering the contraband, Jessica took another bite. She was a big girl with a pretty face — except for the ridiculous raccoon eyeliner — and sleek dark hair that swept down across her forehead, partially obscuring one eye. She chewed slowly, taking a languorous pleasure in the activity, staring straight at Vicki the whole time.

“Did you hear me?” Vicki demanded, this time in a normal voice.

Jessica’s expression remained blank, but Vicki detected a challenge in it nonetheless. She began to feel foolish, standing there with her hand out while the girl gazed right through her. It was possible — she wasn’t clear on this point in retrospect — that Vicki lowered her gaze, taking a moment or two to perform a less-than-charitable assessment of Jessica’s figure.

“It’s not like you need it,” she said.

Jessica blinked and shook her head, as if maybe she hadn’t heard right, and Vicki took advantage of her confusion to snatch the candy bar right out of her hand.

“Hey!” Jessica cried out, loudly enough that several heads snapped in their direction.

Now it was Vicki’s turn to do the ignoring. She marched back to her desk and dropped the stub of the Snickers into her empty wastebasket, where it landed with an unexpectedly resonant thud. By now, everyone in the room was looking at her.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” she told them. “Food is not allowed in this room.”

That was it, the whole ridiculous, deeply forgettable incident. Vicki was more than willing to admit that it wasn’t her finest hour as an educator, but she hadn’t called anyone a fat pig and didn’t think she had anything to apologize for. If anyone was at fault it was Jessica, who’d knowingly broken a rule and then treated a teacher with blatant disrespect. So it was frustrating for Vicki — humiliating, even — to see herself portrayed in a public forum as a nasty woman in unflattering pants, nothing more than a joke to the kids she was trying to help.