Alissa Nutting: Tampa

I realized with a bit of embarrassment that it was the first time I’d remembered to take roll all day. Suddenly I was actually curious about who someone was. His name was ordinary yet peculiar—two first names.

“Jack Patrick?”

He gave a timid smile, more polite confidence than self-awareness. “Here,” he said.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel , I thought. Reaching up to the nape of my neck, I shook out my hair and brought the pencil’s lead tip to my tongue.

When I stepped outside after my last class, the unfiltered afternoon sun was blinding. The bedlam atmosphere of the day’s end made the stoic brick walls of the junior high and all its false markers of imposed order—the perfect geometry of the landscaping, its immaculate semicircles of wood chips bordered with green hedges and palm trees—seem like relics of a recently invaded and devoured civilization. Youths walking home screamed jungle cries and sprinted past one another like feral carnivores, running together toward some invisible, felled big-game carcass just outside the boundaries of school property. I squinted against the bleached-out concrete walkway that served as an umbilical path to the school; it contained some type of mineralized rock that made it glitter in the light. Holding a stack of manila folders against my chest—student informational surveys, including all of Jack’s emergency contact information—my eyes narrowed against the reflective flash of the ground and my pumps made scratching steps across its granular surface. It felt like a daydream, like I was walking to my car across a trail of luminous sugar.

“Every summer gets shorter,” a throaty voice called.

No sooner had I heard the words than I smelled the cigarette. Turning, I straightened the fingers of my right hand and raised them to my forehead, half visor and half salute. In the faculty parking lot, Janet Feinlog was sitting down on the foot ledge of her blue conversion van’s opened door. She was looking straight ahead; a small stump of burning cigarette served as a gravity-defying bridge between her fingers and two inches of suspended ash. Unsure if she’d been speaking to me or to herself, I pressed the remote in my hand and disabled my car alarm with a pronounced beep.

“Do you know what I’d give for one more week of summer?” she asked. There was a shake in her voice that told of inner conflict in full motion: I pictured all her internal organs bouncing as they tried to keep the unfulfilled rage beneath her floppy stomach pinned down. Hers was an anger steel-strengthened against the stone of joyless decades. She coughed and let out a low, round fart that she didn’t acknowledge. “Just one more goddamn week of being teenager free.” Though the rest of her body stayed hunched in place, I watched the balls of her eyes shift in my direction: two exploratory rovers sent out to appraise if I was worth the exertion of turning her neck. I felt sorry for the young men fate had assigned to her course rosters. I couldn’t imagine being at an age where I was trying to grapple with the difference of the female body and having to somehow work Janet Feinlog into the matrix.

The moment I let out a nervous laugh, the long worm of ash from her cigarette fell to the ground. “Maybe you’ll have a better group this year?” I asked. The thought that her classes might be filled row to row with boyish, shy young men was unbearable. During her career, how many perfect specimens must have passed through her room without notice? Ogre linebackers and delicate-boned waifs would all register as the same unwanted note to her sexually deaf ears. From the looks of her glasses, she was so blind she likely wouldn’t notice if all her students were replaced with crash-test dummies except to note that their classroom behavior had improved.

When her head swiveled my way, I could almost hear the grinding sound of a long-standing boulder being moved. Her asymmetrical eyes locked onto my body in a laser stare of appraisal that began at my feet. This diagnostic continued so slowly, with such methodical rigor, that my skin began to itch.

“How old are you anyway?” she finally croaked. My head kept unconsciously turning toward the queue of packed buses; it was hard not to hear the students’ excited, youthful screams as an invitation to come join them. She inhaled a long suck from her cigarette and blew out more smoke than seemed possible; it hovered all around her and drifted along the van’s body, appearing to be a cloud of exhaust. “You definitely haven’t given birth yet.”

“No.” I smiled, perhaps with too much pride. “I don’t think I’m going down that road.”

“You old enough to drink?”

“Of course.” I cleared my throat. “I’m twenty-six.”

She nodded. “That’s the best way to get through the year.” Janet stood and began a wide navigation of turning one hundred and eighty degrees to enter her vehicle, her slow toddles calling to mind a sleepwalking badger. Her weak forearms often came alive to shoo away invisible hindrances, pawing the air with disgruntled choler. Before beginning the climb up the van’s two carpeted steps, the most athletic portion of her adieu, she unceremoniously dropped her cigarette butt to the ground without extinguishing it. I got the feeling she hoped it might roll beneath the vehicle’s gas tank and give her a true Viking burial.

She gave the long grunt of a walrus bearing a load of breech pups and ascended one stair deeper into the van, then sharply called out, “Hey!” It seemed like she was yelling at someone inside the vehicle since I could no longer see her face; perhaps she had a trespasser aboard. Hoping this was the case and she was now distracted, I turned toward my car with a rush of adrenaline but I didn’t manage to get to the door fast enough. “Why are you teaching middle school anyway?” she called out.

I looked over my shoulder. The side door to the van was still open, but Janet had now lodged herself at the helm, behind the wheel. She was gazing at me through the windshield. I had no doubt that if I gave the wrong answer, the van’s engine would immediately roar to life as her cankle, currently resting atop the gas pedal, pressed fully downward.

The question was normally easy enough to dodge— I just want to make a difference , I might say, or It’s so great to watch a child learn, to actually look into his eyes the moment the lightbulb comes on, but these canned responses would neither appease Janet nor dampen her suspicions. They could, however, get me killed in a hit-and-run.

Shrugging, I scanned the main road behind us for passing cars. Would there be any witnesses when the bottom of her rusted muffler scalped me of my blond bouquet of hair?

“Summers off and everything,” I said, trying to sound casual. The heat above the parking lot’s asphalt radiated up all around us like a calf-high field of quivering wheat. How horrible if instead of killing me her van merely laid me out on the tar facedown, scarring my skin forever with a series of third-degree burns. I looked back up but she was no longer behind the windshield. Rising onto my toes, I realized she’d reclined the driver’s seat to lie back.

“Me too,” she bellowed out. The sweat from my fingers was warping the crisp manila folders in my hands; I began fanning my face and chest with them. “Seems like a real good idea, huh?” she continued. “Work nine months, get three off. What they don’t tell you is that you spend all summer waiting for the hammer to drop come August. Have you read that story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’? Me either, but I teach it every year with the Spanish Inquisition. It’s like that. Here I am on my back, staring down another year of teaching.” I thought about Janet lying in bed, her wiry upper lip twitching as she sensed a metaphorical blade inches above her face and smelled the imagined stink of its metal.