The massive analog clock above the sink in the staff room reads 8:47, six minutes before last morning bell. Doris, the secretary, is the only one in here, strangely. She turns from the coffee machine balancing her cup in her palm and inspects him, sniffing at him with her avian nose, as though she isn’t certain whether he is truly the math teacher or an impersonator.
“Good morning, Mr. S,” her greeting a question as she flits past him and away to her office. He assumes her offbeat tone is because he’s never arrived later than 8:00 a.m. in over twenty years. He steals a glance in the small mirror beside the staff room door. His eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks flushed, but otherwise he looks the same: thinning, red-blonde hair revealing a long, shiny forehead, thick lenses perched on a somewhat bulbous nose, and a thin, downturned mouth. An image of his college graduation photo oddly flashes at him then, and he understands with a sudden sharpness how his mouth has changed. In his youth he purposely wore a ready, engaging smile, as a way, he thought, to give the students confidence. He was excited, then—hopeful, even. Now, he sees with lightning-strike alacrity that his mouth has worn down into an unmistakeable upside down U.
He rushes to the classroom before the students swarm in. Usually on the mornings Georgina comes to class he makes an extra effort to be prepared, though he’s always been prepared, certainly, every day of his teaching career. He glances at her empty seat at the back, imagines her staring angrily at the numbers on the board. Her eyes dark slivers. She never puts up her hand for help. She barely passed the quiz last Friday, and he knows she could get a higher mark if she tried. But she doesn’t seem to care. Today, it’s going to be different. He’s going to make sure of that.
He leans back in his chair and tries to inhabit a sense of calm. He pushes away the familiar thought: why bother? Today, he wants success. Today, he wants to show his students what can be loved. His heart bounces and a wave of nausea rises to his throat. He feels sweat at his temples and wipes away the moisture with his buttoned sleeve. He rises and forces himself to saunter slowly to the window with his back to the door, willing his heart to beat regularly again: one and, two and, three and breathe out. Be prepared, Roy.
Every class begins the same way: he hears them, then he smells them as the first students march in, always the keen ones, rather neatly, followed by the others, the ones who don’t want to be there, in their sloppy clothes and their long, curiously coiffed and coloured hair, their foul mouths and pitted cheeks. He hears the shouts and scufflings down the hall now, the kids a small, raucous herd sowing teenaged sweat, pungent and sour, and above that the girls’ hairspray and scented lotions: vanilla, floral musk, hard candy.
Before he turns to face them his periphery catches something white on the floor to his left. He bends down to look more closely. At first, he thinks it’s an envelope, stark white against the green-brown tiles. But then he sees it’s the class calendar, fallen off the wall. It’s flipped to today, Monday, December 5th. And he remembers with a peculiar rushing in his throat—it was twenty-two years ago on this date that Martha left him. A Thursday. But instead of Martha’s irritated face pushing into his internal vision, it’s Georgina’s he sees as he turns to watch her tromp in last, the real her, remote and angry, as always. He doesn’t know that she’s ever looked directly at him. What colour are her eyes, anyway? Blue? Brown? He wouldn’t know.
Some of the students’ eyes flare with fear, followed immediately by hooded resignation, once they see the equations written in large numbers on the board in his white-chalk scrawl. He spent some time after school yesterday writing up formulas in anticipation of today’s class. His once-a-month ritual, his awful surprise, when he calls up a few students—random, lottery-style—to come to the board and work out the numbers in front of the others.
He does it immediately, he calls her name as they are still shuffling their things, a few of the boys chucking eraser bits from the floor at each other, several more slumped in their seats glaring at the board, and then he calls her name again, a second time, before he has taken the few minutes he always gives them to settle down. His heartbeat is shushing in his ears, louder now. Today is the day and he can’t wait any longer.
She looks as though she hasn’t heard him. She is bent over, tucking her tiny bright yellow backpack with the fuzzy ball attached to the zipper at her feet. When she lifts her head, her eyes are wide ovals. So she did hear him, then. He’s never called her name before, he realizes. She still hasn’t looked at him.
“Georgina, could you come to the front please?”
This is the third time now and there is no mistaking it and her narrow back straightens. She’s taken on the look of a trapped animal, her eyes darting from one space to the next, looking at anything but him. He can see in these few seconds that the veil of her angry aloofness has been pierced with panic.
And then as she stands she snaps the shell back over her eyes again, to try to keep her position. It takes a millisecond, it’s truly astonishing, like some kind of transmogrification ancient reptiles might have used to fool their prey. How does she do that? He steps beside the equation on the board, writ large and white and dusty, and gestures with his hand to the numbers. They all know this move. Most of them hate it. He wishes they would understand his purpose behind this. No one ever knows when one will be called, so one must always be ready. They don’t want to be looked at, to be made fun of, to be shown to be wrong, though all of this happens anyway. Why does he insist on continuing with this ritual? Because he wants to push them past their fear so they may gain a love they didn’t know they had. But how can he explain this to them? He can’t. Instead, he impels them with action, and maybe someday in their distant futures as they look down at their kids whining at their feet and their softening paunches and their failed businesses, they’ll get it. Maybe they will remember, and know what to do, and what they have to face. Perhaps.
She stomps up to the front of the room and her steps seem to, remarkably, match the rhythm of his whooshing heart, and she’s beside him now, and her scent is unbearable: vanilla mixed with tobacco, much too strong. Her face is lightly made up today, and her acne stands out against the white skin of her cheeks. She takes the chalk from him and looks to the equation warily. She touches the tip of her index finger to her thin upper lip. He believes in her. He can see that she wants more than anything to know the answer, to know why. He cannot help but admire her consternation, the way the corners of her eyes draw down, her finger pressing against her upper lip, whitening it. She stares at the formula and he cannot look away from her. His heart leaps as she turns to face him and throws the chalk onto the ledge in a swift movement where it breaks into three pieces.
His heart does its old thump-thump with its rim of pain spreading out like a secret, and with it the soft, high screech emits inside of him, decades old: primordial. And he remembers now what he’s never figured out. His body, this whole, necessary, pumping organ, containing joy, anger, hatred, love, confusion, all of it, the whole universe is encased within his skin and all of its various stars surge through him and he’s astonished it’s taken him so long to understand it, to truly, finally get it. The one thing.
“I can’t do this.” She turns to him fully now and he can see the narrow cords in her neck protruding slightly. She’s so small. Her hips can’t be wider than the math book he instructs them to read each night. Sections, chapters. They never do, though. Just the ones who care, who seem so very far away right now. It’s really just him, all alone. He watches the hollow at the bottom of her throat rise and fall as she breathes. Her eyes have turned now, and he sees their colour, finally, they are black, angry. Seething. Why is she so angry? What can she hate about this? He looks to the board: If x2 – y2 = -12 and x + y = 6, find x and y. The numbers are embossed on the dull green board like raised, fresh scars in 3D, and he feels his head tilt sideways to try to understand its appearance. He has given her the easiest one. The easiest one! He wants her to feel the freedom of it, the joy at finding the solution. Can’t she see that?
He seizes one of the broken pieces of chalk to start it for her but it slips from his fingers and falls to the floor, breaking again into more pieces. One of them rolls near his foot, a short, jagged point. He reaches down for it in the new, vast silence and her scent catches him like a fatal wave: vanilla, tobacco, mango. Body lotion, cigarettes, hairspray. He does not know how he knows this. He grips the ledge to stand up. He looks down to her open palm to see that she has a piece of chalk now but everything seems murky, blurred, like he’s underwater. Is she trying to humiliate him, to drown him? Why does she hate him so much?
And he falls down on one knee, a proposal, and he feels the light clamp of her cold hand on his damp shoulder through the thin cotton of his shirt. He can’t see it in the sudden and intimate darkness but he feels her touch through to his skin and it’s like a very cold heat, so cold it’s burning, and her voice sounds like she’s across the room but she can’t be because he feels her and he smells her.
“Mr S? Mr. S!”
She’s shouting his name, screaming it, and it matches exactly the years-old screech in his heart, she has manifested its unbearable voice into the open, it is finally outside of his body for him to hear. And in his final heartbeats, Mr. S. believes she’s done it: she’s finally solved the equation he never could. His small hero. He knew. He always knew it would be her.
