Eleven Twenty-Three (9 page)

I graduated from college with no clue what to
do next. I had a vague idea about attending grad school, but my
grades the first time around weren’t awe-inspiring except maybe in
their absolute adherence to mediocrity, and the necessary GRE
scores to get into the schools I liked were more intimidating than
I cared to deal with at the time.

So I just sort of slipped into teaching. What
I promised myself wouldn’t last more than a year while I figured
out what I was going to do next quickly became the next four. I was
looking at a Tier 5 contract. After the head retired and died
shortly thereafter and one of the other guys transferred to
Pensacola, I became a veteran of the history department. I judged
at our annual pie eating contest-cum-fundraiser for breast cancer.
I went to basketball games. I got involved with the school debate
team. The administrators thought I was great.

And I hated it.

The time when I really thought I made the
most difference quickly passed, and the idealistic part of me
killed himself around the end of my first year. After that, I cared
less and less but put up more and more of a powerful front of
absolute educational obsession with each passing semester.

By the time I was in my fourth go-round of
high school history, things had collapsed for me. There were
mornings when I was absolutely certain that I had pink eye, mono,
ringworms, lice, body odor, a hangover or maybe even full-blown
next-morning intoxication, menthol cigarette-induced
lightheadedness—everything the kids brought with them into my
classroom. There were other mornings when I only came in because I
had nothing resembling lunch in my apartment. Sometimes when I
couldn’t make it all the way down the long empty corridor to the
faculty bathroom, I’d stand against the urinal that the teenagers
used and be tempted to write something much more imaginative and
degrading than “
ms. chinaski is hot! her boobs
.” I
occasionally considered the prospect of completely destroying the
feelings of two of my female coworkers who both had a crush on me
for no reason other than curiosity regarding how I would feel about
it afterward, if I would feel more empowered or simply racked with
guilt.

It was qualities like these that resulted in
my Teacher of the Year award that last semester. It was also around
that time that I got into all the trouble with the girl.

Olivia Glatz was a junior. Her favorite
period of history was the Fifties. She took little interest in the
trendy Sixties era, except as an interesting post-script to the
revolutionary events of the decade prior. Her favorite stand-up
comic was Lenny Bruce and she could quote lines from his book and
from Eisenhower’s speech on the dangers of the military-industrial
complex in equal measure. She wore Dr. Pepper lip-gloss that I
could smell when she breezed past me in the doorway before fourth
block. She had eyes like cerulean galaxies. Her shadow was a
furtive goddess. She drank Yoo-Hoo she brought from home. Her hair
was brunette but not
too
brunette, and her body was tall and
lithe and feminine and just pale enough to be striking. She didn’t
wear jewelry, and she didn’t ever have a cell phone picture to show
classmates or a story to tell about how crazy her mom was.

Olivia was the most un-high school student I
had ever taught. She was an enigmatic genius’s sketchbook taking
human form each day. An orchestra inspired by synesthesia.
Non-Euclidian geometry: all of her parallel lines somehow
intersected.

I considered myself lucky in some small way
that I could always end my day on a high note, since Olivia was in
my final block. I used her as a catalyst to initiate conversations
in class on Vietnam, Kent State, the Personalists, Chernobyl, and
on the death and rebirth of God somewhere between the 1980s and
Post-9/11 America. I could always count on Olivia, whose only major
flaw was frequent absenteeism, to keep the class chugging along,
even at the end of the day when all my students were thinking about
was whatever students think about at the end of the day.

“Mr. Prescott,” she said on the first day of
school, “I’ve been looking forward to this class all summer. Are we
going to be talking about the Fifties in here?”

I smiled in delight.

Tara met the girl once. There was a
pre-Winter Break dance with a goofy winter-in-Florida theme. It was
being held at some minor country club just outside of town near the
river. I offered to chaperone since I was out of illicit substances
that weekend and Hajime was in Costa Rica with his then-girlfriend
Clementine.

Olivia was wearing a strapless indigo dress
by Calvin Klein. Tara and I both sported dark blue jeans and
collared shirts. We were going out for drinks after the dance. In
between ghastly pop songs and bass that gave me a heart murmur,
Olivia stopped by the table that Tara, Mr. Newley, and one of my
bosses, Andrea Chinaski (the target of many bathroom wall
scribbles) were sitting at. We exchanged pleasantries and smiled
awkwardly. I introduced Tara to one of my favorite students and the
conversation died immediately thereafter. Olivia nodded, bored, and
hung around for only a moment before excusing herself and
vanishing.

I made an inane comment about the boxes of
pizza remaining uneaten on a nearby table and not long after that
Tara and I left the country club and spent the rest of the evening
getting quietly drunk at a local Tiki bar on the beach. We spotted
sea turtles digging nests in the sand behind a grassy dune but
didn’t say anything.

Olivia came into class wearing the same newly
mandatory uniforms as the other kids, and yet always managed to
stand out, whether it was the long flowing hair tie or black
fingernail polish or Mojito-flavored bubblegum in her mouth or the
way she looked at me standing awkwardly in the front of the
classroom trying to explain the Cultural Revolution to morons.
Fourth block was the only class I made sure to put effort into
teaching, and Olivia sometimes found excuses in other teachers’
courses to leave and come by my room to visit. She knew I didn’t
care about what happened before World War I, and smiled secretly to
herself as I gave a lecture on the Reconstruction. Once in January,
I winked at her but felt ashamed afterward since I knew it was not
the kind of wink my own octogenarian history teacher used to give
me back in high school. Olivia and I didn’t speak directly for
three days after that.

By two-thirty every afternoon, I was a new
man, invigorated and certain that I had found my true calling in
life. It would begin to fade during the faculty meeting or the
parent conference after school, disappear completely by the time I
awoke the following morning, and reappear like clockwork every day
during fourth block.

This went on until early April. I ignored the
curriculum for February and didn’t focus on Black History until
late the next month. Olivia was working on a paper dealing with
apartheid in South Africa, a country that she herself had visited.
Twice.

“You realize that those female students of
yours probably flirt with every male teacher at Kennedy High
School, right?” Tara said to me one night over dinner.

“Of course I realize that,” I said, eating a
quivering piece of tortellini.

“Sometimes I’m not so sure you do,” she said,
and went back to eating. “Just be careful, Layne.”

Olivia Glatz never dated. I never once caught
a glimpse of her conversing with any of the awkward, fidgety guys
in the school corridors. They ogled over her, to be sure, and I
once cut short a rather brash conversation between Marc Somers and
Luke Totnap in second period economics class on how much they’d
like to penetrate her, if only she wasn’t such a bitch. I also
ended up scribbling over someone’s bathroom insight that Olivia
Glatz was “an evil cunt” on the wall of the second guys’ stall. One
of my coworkers, upon hearing me mention Olivia in the lounge, felt
the need to roll his eyes and leave the room without explaining why
he would do this.

I didn’t understand any of it. Olivia Glatz
was a precocious high schooler more interested in Abu Ghraib and
the Far East’s escalating pollution problem than drinking Smirnoff
Ice or letting some pimply classmate ejaculate three minutes into
sloppy backseat sex. This was a beautifully self-conscious girl
that wouldn’t wear a bathing suit the day the entire junior and
senior classes went on a field trip to a dolphin preserve near Cape
Canaveral. This was one of three people under twenty-five in
America who did not ascribe to Myspace antics. Olivia wasn’t any of
the things that other students said she was. I just knew there had
to be a huge misunderstanding, a mind trick, raging jealousy, a
conspiracy suitable for Hajime—something,
anything
other
than what these assholes were all saying.

“Mr. Prescott,” Olivia said to me one day
after school had just been dismissed. It was a Friday in mid-April.
The hallways were hazy that day with smoke that had blown over from
a warehouse fire down the street from the school.

“Yes, Olivia?”

“This is a weird question, but…”

I stopped erasing the white board and turned
to face her. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting to hear just then,
but felt reasonably certain it was the most important thing anyone
would ever ask me.

“Do you believe that some people are just
inherently evil?”

Until that moment when Olivia Glatz asked me
if some people were just born evil instead of how old I would be
when she graduated and if I thought that was too much of an age
difference, I never realized the extent of the disappointment one
was capable of experiencing.

“Actually, Olivia, this may surprise you, but
no, I don’t believe anyone is born bad. I think everyone is born
neither good nor evil, and they’re all just a clean slate, like
this white board here. But
like
this white board, after I
write up bell work on it and names of important people and events
and scribble lessons on it, pretty soon what was once a clean slate
is now a mess of outside influence.”

“So you’re saying what, exactly?”

“I’m just saying that I believe people’s own
psychological nature and society around them
combined
is
what damns a person to a life of ignominy, not some cosmic
disposition or a mark of the Beast or something.”

We laughed together and one of the other
teachers slouched down the hallway in front of my room. It was Mr.
Kowalski, one of the math goons. Kowalski was a big guy who hobbled
a little bit because of a “motorcycle accident” that he had when he
was a young badass in Columbus, Georgia, many years ago. He always
smelled like the floor mat of a Ford truck. I didn’t like him, but
he would never know that. As Mr. Kowalski passed my room, his eyes
shifted and became stuck on the two of us: young male teacher and
precocious female student, chatting flirtatiously in the middle of
a closed classroom with no adult witnesses.

And it was in that moment that I had the
strangest certainty that someday soon, for one reason or another, I
would lose my job.

Attempting to ignore the gloom that had
suddenly settled on my character like a thick Bay fog, I smiled at
Olivia and asked, “Where does all this come from? Are you worried
about living in a world where inherently evil people are out to get
you?”

“No, Mr. Prescott. Are you?”

“I don’t think I could handle being so
paranoid. My best friend is like that, and the lifestyle looks
exhausting. So then what
are
you worried about? Are you
concerned that certain figures in
current
political power
might be inherently evil? I have to admit, I worry about that
myself, sometimes…”

“No,” she muttered, looking away. “Bush will
be out in a couple of years; things will be all right. It’s two
sides of the same coin anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Well, are you worried about anything at
all?” I asked. “Or am I just reaching here?”

“No, I
am
worried, Mr. Prescott. I was
worried about something else.”

“What is it, dear?”

“That I was one of those people.”

“One of what people?” I asked cautiously.

“One of those people who were just born
inherently evil.”

Now I would get to the root of the problem. I
would finally understand that afternoon what it was about this girl
that gave so many of her classmates and even teachers the wrong
idea about her. Because it
was
the wrong idea. It had to be.
But instead of me immediately pursuing the topic, there was instead
a sweat-inducing pause after she said this. I couldn’t speak.
Olivia quietly grabbed her back pack and gave my clean white board
and I one last preoccupied stare before she said, “See you Monday,
Mr. Prescott. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No, Olivia, it’s fine. But I’ve got to tell
you, you’re not a bad person. You weren’t born that way, and you
certainly don’t behave that way.”

“But you don’t really know me that well, Mr.
Prescott. How can you say that?”

“I can just tell,” I said. “You’re not a bad
person. Listen, Olivia, if you ever have anything you need to talk
about—”

“Have a good weekend, Mr. Prescott,” she
said, taking furtive steps backward, away from me, toward the
exit.

“You too, dear,” I said. “Be safe.”

And she was gone, and I wrote Monday’s lesson
on the board, shut down my computer, braved the empty corridor that
so many of my freshmen had heard was haunted by the ghost of a kid
who shot himself and his girlfriend there (which really did happen,
I found out later), went home that last Friday with absolutely
nothing to do with myself, and it didn’t even once occur to me that
I would never see Olivia Glatz again.