Tampa Read online

  My heart sank as I watched two goofy girls entwine hands and run up to the door of my classroom. From the roster, I knew I had ten boys in the first period, twelve girls. I tried to steel myself—even if there weren’t any suitable options in the first period, I had four other classes, and each one brought more opportunities. That was not to say that it would be easy: my ideal partner, I realized, embodied a very specific intersection of traits that would exclude most of the junior high’s male population. Extreme growth spurts or pronounced muscles were immediate grounds for disqualification. They also needed to have decent skin, be somewhat thin, and have either the shame or the preternatural discipline required to keep a secret.

  The door to my classroom took a great deal of force to pull open—the suck of cold air from the window AC unit formed a resisting vacuum. Inside it was dark and cold. Two boys, prankster types, were standing in front of the air conditioner; they immediately ran to their seats with smiles, expecting some kind of chastising line (You two know you’re not allowed to touch that!) that would set them apart and declare them more audacious than their peers. I didn’t get a good look at their faces, but from what I’d spied of their bodies already I knew I wasn’t interested: they were a hodgepodge of pre-and post-puberty. The silhouette of one’s biceps was visible from several feet away. The other had mannish curls of dark arm hair. But the room held others.

  I walked straight to the AC unit and stood there, feeling my nipples harden to visibility. For a moment I closed my eyes. I had to stay calm; I had to regard the students like a delicate art exhibit and stay six feet away at all times, lest I be tempted to touch.

  “Are you the teacher?” This voice was also male but slightly too deep. I turned, letting the AC cool the back of my neck.

  “I am.” I smiled. “It is really hot out there.” I fingered the pencil inside the twisted bun of my hair, but scanning the room I knew it wasn’t yet time to let it down—he wasn’t present, he wasn’t in this class. Yet there was eye candy aplenty. I managed to hold it together during my opening spiel until a young man in the second row who figured no one was looking reached down between his legs and spent a generous amount of time adjusting himself. This caused a brisk tightening in my lungs and chest; I gripped the side of my desk for support, working hard to speak just a few more words to the students without sounding like a labored asthmatic. “Introduce yourselves,” I managed to say, “go around the room. State your hobbies, your darkest and most primitive fears, whatever you want.” But as my arousal slowly came back down to a controllable level, a new sort of panic gripped me. All the alluring males in my class seemed unusable—too boisterous, overly confident.

  By the end of the second period, when it became clear that class held no winners either, I found myself wondering whether or not to bail entirely over the lunch break. Had I simply thrown myself deeper into torture with no hope of release? Now I’d have to interact with them, see them daily, yet none of them seemed promising enough to attempt anything further with. Perhaps I’d be better off substituting during the fall and trying my luck again in the spring elsewhere. “So we don’t have any homework?” one student asked as the bell rang. Due to the sallow smallness of her eyes and nose, her retainer was her most prominent feature. I wanted to forcibly hold her in front of a mirror and question the image: Can faces actually look like yours?

  “Why would you ask that?” I said. “Do you want homework or something?” She gave me a helpless blink; I’d spat blood upon her face amidst the sharks. The other students immediately began launching insults at her during the group exit from the classroom in a way that pleased me. I knew I’d find it hard to cut the girls in my classes any slack at all, knowing the great generosity life had already gifted them. They were at the very beginning of their sexual lives with no need to hurry—whenever they were ready, a great range of attractions would be waiting for them, easy and disposable. Their urges would grow up right alongside them like a shadow. They’d never feel their libido a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of their mind and to only be fed in secret after dark.

  Finally a last group of three male stragglers, whispering and laughing, passed my desk.

  “See you all tomorrow,” I said. This direct address gave the loudest one the final hint of courage he’d been looking for.

  “Kyle thinks you’re hot,” he rattled off, quick words immediately followed by laughter and Kyle aggressively pushing the speaker. Kyle himself managed only the gruff confessional phrase “Shut up.” While he might’ve been suitable physically—he wasn’t yet too tall or muscularly thickened—he was far too self-assured and aggressive; the most willing boys were off-limits. They’d also be the most willing to talk.

  In the minutes before third period, each time the door opened to reveal a new student the outside noise and sunlight poured in and anticipation closed my throat. Because they were coming from the bright outdoors, upon entering the darkened classroom their bodies were backlit, their faces featureless and shadowy, and their outlines seemed angelic—every tiny wisp of hair illuminated—in a way that made each one appear to be materializing from a dream. But when they came into focus, most were disappointments. I actually didn’t catch Jack’s entrance; some terrible creature whose chin and feet were elephantine in comparison to the rest of his body had approached my desk to talk at me about the books he’d read that summer. But I saw Jack soon after the bell rang, already seated. He seemed to be a larger, stretch-limbed version of a younger boy—chin-length light hair, unimposing features and a mouth that was devilishly wholesome. He was looking in my direction, though not in an overt way. Occasionally a friend would whisper something to him, make a comment, and he’d turn his head and nod or laugh. But then he’d shyly glance back up front. There was a hesitant politeness to his movements; he started to grab a notebook from his bag, second-guessed himself, looked around to see if others had taken out notebooks and only then bent over to unzip his backpack. I could imagine him pausing with the same demure reluctance as he took down the side zipper of my skirt, his alert brown eyes frequently returning to my face to check for a contradictory expression that might indicate he should stop, at which point I would have to goad him on, say, It’s okay, please continue what you’re doing.

  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.

  My phone came alive with a text summons from Ford. Gift for you at home! it announced. I suppose he could sense the wane of my pretended attentions now that the job was finally starting; he was so desperate not to get left behind.

  “Really nice chatting!” I called to Janet. “Gotta get home, duty calls.” I waited a few seconds for a good-bye to emanate from the blue van, but none came.

  I put the convertible’s top down and sat upon the stack of manila folders so they wouldn’t blow away. My peel-out from the parking lot was a bit louder and more theatrical than I’d planned, but so be it; I had to let off a little steam before seeing Ford. I drunkenly careened through the long semicircle drive for student drop-offs and pickups, clipped a curb and a bit of the hedge as I rounded past the entrance lane with its large sign: a digital clock and thermometer served as subtext for a scrolling marquee declaring student vaccination requirements; next to these was a large illustration of a stallion, the school mascot, kicking up on its hind two legs. STALLION POWER! it declared. I revved the engine but it was hard to speed away. My eyes kept returning to my rearview mirror, hoping the figure of Jack Patrick might somehow materialize in the middle of the road. I glanced back several times just to make sure he wasn’t in the distance chasing after my car and flagging me down, inexplicably barefoot with the fly of his jeans unzipped, calling out my first name in a desperate whimper.

  *

  That evening Ford sat my present at the dinner table, in its own chair, as though a guest who’d been wearing it while eating had spontaneously disappeared: a bulky bulletproof vest.

  “It’s huge,” I said. Ford smiled a grin of goofy pride, assuming I meant this as some sort of masculine compliment.

  “Kevlar.” He chewed and the word seemed a judgment on his pork chop’s texture. “Beautiful protection. Armor plated inside. Some little punk comes up to you, puts a gun against your spine and says he’ll kill you if you don’t give him an A? Tell him to pull the trigger until his finger falls off. You won’t even get a bruise.”

  “That is peace of mind,” I said. Had my little bump against the desk yesterday made a bruise on my asshole? I sent a finger down beneath the tablecloth to inspect for tenderness. The vest would transform my body into an asexual cylinder and visibly add fifteen
pounds. The only way I’d wear that vest in front of the class is if I was otherwise completely naked and accessorized it with riding boots and a leather crop. I began to imagine presenting my bare legs to the male students as I rubbed the flesh beneath my tailbone.

  Ford caught my pleased expression and winked at me, masticating with wide, flapping jaws that engaged his entire face. His eyes were glazed over and tinged the slight color of yellow onion; he’d been drinking wine. The thought of his tongue leaving a sour film upon my skin was enough to make me stand and intervene. “Let me freshen that for you,” I said with a smile, grabbing his empty glass. I kept a series of pre-crushed Ambien pills inside emptied tea bags at the back of the pantry where he’d never look. Ford loathed tea; it just wasn’t American.

  “Thank you, babe.” He took a long sip that left a purple shadow on his teeth and spoke for a while about guns. “Another big day tomorrow, huh?” he finally conceded. I guided him toward bed, playing zookeeper to his tranquilized bear. His unconsciousness afforded me the luxury of getting to watch a boy-band music video on the bedroom television with my vibrator on its highest setting roaring like a speedboat.

  Every one of the young singers’ mouths was open in a wide O of reception as they harmonized. Due to the oily lubricants of puberty’s machinery, their skin looked nearly wet in the stage lighting. It was the boxy flatness of their chests that made my wrist quicken its tempo, the effortless feather of their side-swept bangs that were just slightly too long and in their eyes. To make eye contact with the camera, the teens had to brush their bangs back by running their fingers through their hair during a close-up shot; when they did, various paths of shining forehead were exposed. These glimpses of previously hidden flesh lasted only a second but made my heart quicken just as much as if they’d collectively dropped their pants.