Five Boroughs 01 - Sutphin Boulevard (7 page)

I kept my mouth shut and looked out the window. In the park behind the school, three kids shared a joint and watched an old Chinese lady stretching in the basketball court while a hipster chick wearing a long denim skirt used a hula hoop nearby. This neighborhood was my constant reminder that somewhere out in the world, weirder things were happening than the batshit teacher drama that went down at McCleary.

“You’re switching him to a different floor?”

“He can either teach Earth Science downstairs or teach using his special education license on the eleventh grade team up here. I’ll let him choose before I discuss the change with a few new hires.”

“I’m sure he will appreciate that.”

Price gave me one of her sideways stares. “Let’s make this a good year, Michael. I don’t want there to be more changes than there have to be, but we need to maintain the culture of the school and keep this a welcoming environment.”

“Of course.” I could tell my lack of ass-kissing wasn’t flying with her, but I also didn’t care. “Should I go downstairs?”

She nodded and looked down at the folders in front of her, the usual signal for dismissal.

N
UNZIO
WAS
flushed, pacing his former classroom and digging his hands in his hair. His face was set in hard, angry lines as the clock ticked and we missed the staff breakfast and opening announcements for the day.

“I should walk out right now,” he said, pointing at the door. “She had all fucking summer and last spring to tell me, but she tells me now? I have nothing prepared to switch curriculums. I should tell that old bitch some shit about herself.”

I put a hand on his arm. “Cálmate, Nunzio. Just take a deep breath.”

He jerked his arm away but stopped his cagey movements around the room. Although it had been cleaned for the summer, there were still traces of his bulletin boards and items he’d taped to the wall near his—or what had been his—desk. His eyes settled on a collage of former students who had now graduated.

“This sucks.”

“It does, but there’s nothing you can do about it now except decide where you want to go.”

“Why didn’t she switch
you
?”

“I’m assuming it’s because you have two licenses and two possible openings whereas I only have my license in Social Studies.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

His expression drifted from angry to despairing, and I could practically hear the questions populating his mind—whether or not this job was worth it, what else he could be doing with his life. We asked each other those questions every year, but this was the first time it seemed like he would follow through and walk out.

I wanted to argue that he was overreacting—this happened to teachers all the time. But on the other hand, it was difficult to argue that years of experience teaching a subject and building a curriculum being ripped away over a few instances of lateness was justifiable.

“You’d be with the kids from last year if you taught SpEd on this floor.” I sounded pathetic. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. You loved those kids. It’s better than going downstairs with the Stepford clones who think they’re Michelle Pfeiffer in
Dangerous Minds
.”

Nunzio’s lips twitched, and I swooped in on the crack in his dead-eyed mask. I put an arm around him, and his strong body melted against me. I dropped a kiss on his forehead.

“You’ll be okay. I’ll help.”

“Nah.”

“Yeah, I will. You’ll be the co-teacher for humanities classes, and that’s my thing.”

He shrugged again and turned his face into the crook of my neck. He inhaled deeply before releasing a noisy sigh, his breath ghosting over my skin. “Let’s blow this place off and go get drunk.”

“Don’t tempt me, niño.”

“I was kidding.”

I pulled away. “If we leave this room, do you promise you won’t do anything crazy?”

“Define crazy.”

“Go curse out Price or quit.”

Nunzio shrugged, still looking crestfallen. “I won’t, but don’t expect me to be fake, either.”

“You wouldn’t be my best friend if you were fake.”

As I watched Nunzio stride to the office, I could sense a hint of fight left in the set of his shoulders. He’d be willing to hear what she had to say, and maybe even take the switch in schedule, but not without talking a lot of shit that was masked by educational acronyms and big words. Nunzio was good at making his defiance sound professional. I, on the other hand, just tended to shut down and stare at the wall, or get mad and lapse into sarcasm.

In the next few hours, everyone would adjourn to their grade team meetings. It made Nunzio’s switch seem even more out of the blue. He would most definitely be using that in the case against Price and her rationale.

Unfortunately, after I caught the tail end of morning announcements and spent another hour in my social studies content team bickering about the school’s refusal to order Scantron machines because they claimed it promoted a testing culture, there was no indication that Price’s mind had changed.

When it was time for grade team meetings, I didn’t rush. I stopped in the lounge to heat my uneaten bagel and stolen coffee, and texted Raymond.

He had promised to start looking for a job today, but I doubted he was even awake. I hadn’t bothered inquiring about our father doing the same. The old man was applying for SSI, and I actually hoped he got approved. In my entire life, I hadn’t heard about him working for more than a month or two at a time in a random place. Given his deteriorating health, who knew what would happen if he tried now.

Unsurprisingly Raymond didn’t respond. I made it down the gleaming hallway to the location of the grade ten meeting, trying in vain to swallow the now-chewy bagel. After greeting one of the deans as he taped posters over the window on his office door, I approached the new science teacher’s room.

It took some amount of skill to twist the handle and shoulder it open while balancing my food, clipboard, and coffee. I started to greet my coteachers with my usual blend of gloom and genuine happiness to see them, but the words clogged in my throat once I caught sight of our new Earth Science teacher/grade team leader.

It was David.

D
AVID
HAD
a deer-in-the-headlights expression, but he masked it faster than I did. I was caught in a moment of confusion where I couldn’t figure out if this was real life or if I’d taken a couple of Xanax bars without remembering that morning and was now in some weird space-time continuum of illusions.

As ridiculous as it was, that explanation was a lot more likely than the third party in my first and only threesome finding his way to McCleary High School and landing a position as Nunzio’s replacement. There had to be another reason for his presence.

Maybe he was a new educational coach or some expert on the new national standards and would be leading a PD for the next two days.

I searched my team’s faces—Erica Larson (the English teacher), Danielle Kajowski (the Geometry teacher), and Kimberly Parker (the Special Education teacher)—for signs that David was an apparition, but there were none.

“Hey,” I said belatedly. “I’m a disaster today. Alarm went off late, and I haven’t recovered since then.”

“You’re always kind of a disaster.” Erica shot me a good-natured grin and pointed to the spot next to her. “This is David Butler, the new science teacher.”

I dropped in the chair next to her and placed my clipboard in front of me for lack of anything better to do. “Hi. I’m Rodriguez.”

David’s face flushed. With a clenched jaw, he stared down at his cute little MacBook. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, I just found out about Nunzio being replaced. You have a lot to live up to, my man.”

David shot another glance at me, and there was no mistaking his surprise. I could almost see it in his eyes; the silent chant of
please don’t say anything inappropriate
,
please don’t humiliate me
,
please just shut the hell up
.

“I heard.” David tried to smile, but his mouth crumbled under the effort. “I was originally going to teach downstairs, but they switched me.”

“Why is that? Did Nunzio want to leave the team for some reason?” Danielle was giving me the side-eye, like she thought maybe it had something to do with some drama he and I had gotten into over the summer.

I’d almost forgotten that Danielle was bochincera number one on the third floor, but she was still one of my favorite people at the school. I’d lucked out and gotten a team that was a little more real than most of the others in the building. Until now, anyway.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Got it.”

Erica peered at me but didn’t comment on my wayward best friend. “And Liz quit so we’re short an ESL teacher since she chose to do it yesterday. They haven’t hired anyone else yet.”

“How are the kids going to get serviced?”

“I don’t know. They’ll get Maria or Karen to push in—”

David cleared his throat and sat up straighter. I took the opportunity to eyeball him. He was wearing a stiff button-down shirt and had a huge, shiny watch peeking out from the cuff. Apparently no one had told his green ass that the first two days of teacher time were for cleaning and setting up, not dressing for success.

“I made us an agenda,” he said, unapologetically interrupting as he slid a little stack of half-sheet papers to the center of our cluster of student tables. “We only have this hour together for common planning today, so we need to make every moment count. After this, we break up for full staff meetings.”

“Sounds good,” Danielle replied, sounding not at all enthused as she held one of the sheets between two fingers.

With her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun and her all-black ensemble, she looked stern. The way she glared at the agenda didn’t take away from that no-nonsense impression. She was the exact opposite of Erica, who was tiny, red-haired, and perky, and was already making little annotations all over the paper. Kimberly stared at David for a moment before following Erica’s lead. A wrinkle appeared on her forehead, and she gnawed at her lower lip the way she did when she was confused. It tended to happen a lot.

Even though I’d been teaching with the three of them for a few years, they were still contained to the little box in my social circle meant for work friends, and I still couldn’t tell whether they cared that Nunzio was gone from the team. It bothered me more than it should have. They were being professional, and I was being a baby. But I wanted Nunzio back.

I hadn’t even glanced at the agenda before Erica looked up with a grin.

“I love warm-up games!”

Clearly she was not too broken-up over Nunzio’s departure.

“We really have to play a game?” I glanced at David, but he was still avoiding direct eye contact.

“Yes. Even though you know each other, I’m new here. It’s good for us to gain an understanding of how we can complement each other on a team, and what we consider our strengths and weaknesses.”

Danielle looked like she wanted to kill herself, so I took one for our little duo of defiance and continued. “Can’t we just share it verbally?”

All traces of embarrassment vanished from David’s expression as he seemed to realize what he was dealing with—a pain-in-the-ass veteran teacher who was going to give him a hard time. It wasn’t my intention, but I could see the unspoken accusation in his face.

“It won’t take long.”

With that, David pushed his chair back and stood up without asking Danielle’s opinion.

It was going to be a long year.

B
Y
THE
end of the day, I’d played the same tired team-building games that I’d been playing for years. I was supposed to be professionally developed about the new evaluation system, but I couldn’t say that I’d listened to the spiels. I’d spent the majority of the past several hours texting Nunzio and trying to drag him out of the funk he was entrenched in. He stopped responding and presumably disappeared with his new team while I stood in my classroom and evaluated how long it would take to set up. The prospect of decorating was about as appealing as wiping my ass with sandpaper.

A knock on the door took me out of my gloomy contemplation of barren bulletin boards and forward-facing desks.

David stood in the doorway, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and collar undone. He looked like a rumpled frat boy.

“’Sup?”

“I wondered if we could talk.”

“How could I say no to my new grade team leader?”

David stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. His movements were quick and secretive even though he had every right to be in my classroom now that we were coworkers.

“Relax. No one else knows about that night.”

“Nunzio does.” David came to stand next to my desk, closer than I would have liked. His mussed hair and sweaty brow reminded me of more interesting things. “And I heard he likes to talk.”

Any trace of admiration disappeared in a vortex of defensive rage. “Someone is talking shit about Nunzio already?”

“More like giving the new guy a heads-up.”

“Why would anyone feel like they need to give you a heads-up about Nunzio? He isn’t even on the fucking grade team anymore.”

“Exactly.” David waited for me to catch on while I stared at him like a dumbass and failed to see his point. After a beat of silence, David sighed. “Apparently he wasn’t too happy that I replaced him. I don’t know if he’s taking it personally or if he’s just mad in general.”

“Of course he isn’t happy,” I snapped. “He was yanked off his grade team and made to switch subjects, and he is being replaced by some Teach for America or Ivy League baby.”

David’s cheeks reddened. He crossed his arms over his chest, averting his gaze, and I knew I had his number. I could sniff out his kind faster than I could sniff out a kid who’d just smoked a joint. The TFA or Ivy teachers usually had the same style, and they almost always came from a safe little town outside the city.