Page 2 of The Death Row Club
One of my students, a third grader named Ava, stands in the doorway, a braided pigtail hanging over each of her shoulders. The ends are stiff from being sucked on all day. “Are you leaving?”
I walk around my desk and lean against the edge. “Yes.”
“Will you be back next year?”
“I don’t think so.”
“My mom says if you come back next year, I have to go to another school.”
I’m not surprised. Last week, someone accidentally CC’ed all the teachers on a PTA email chain about my “continued employment at our school.” Devon Brewster’s mother called me a “distraction”; Kamryn Geary’s claimed her daughter felt “threatened.” More than forty messages followed with various complaints: I’d invaded their children’s personal space, raised my voice without cause, was overly critical of their work, created an “unsafe environment for learning.”
The worst part was that even after fifteen years of teaching—after running after-school programs without pay, coordinating field trips, and setting up gallery shows—I still found myself mentally replayingevery lesson from the past month, searching for signs that I’d been the bad teacher they all said I was.
Ava seesaws the joint in our wooden manikin’s elbow up and down. “Art class is my favorite. I don’t want you to leave.”
“I’m sure your new teacher will be just as good,” I say, but deep down, I hope their new teacher is a screw-up who sends half the students home with acrylic paint all over their clothes.
“I don’t think anyone could be as good as you.”
The space behind my eyes grows warm, a surefire sign I’m about to start crying. That’s what matters. Not what parents say, not what the administration says. Parents see me for—what?—three minutes at pickup? Ava spends a hundred and fifty minutes with me each week. We’ve painted watercolor landscapes on paper plates, sculpted papier-mâché birds out of soupy newspaper. We’ve practiced drawing in one-point perspective, and then reversed that perspective because there’s always more than one way of looking at things.
Ava doesn’t know anything about what happened with my father. All she knows is that I care about her. I hold out the set of markers I’d been about to take home. “Here.” I shake it, and the plastic barrels rattle against the cardboard. “For your drawings.”
She tentatively steps forward and takes them. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
Ava grins at me. She’s missing one of her front teeth; I remember her trying to give a closed-mouth smile on school picture day, just like her mom had instructed.
“Thanks, Ms. Fischer,” she says before sprinting out of the classroom, the untied laces of her sneakers skipping against the floor.
I press my thumb and index finger against the bony ridges of my nose and take a deep breath.Wait until you’re outside. Wait until you’re in your car, and no one can see. I pick up the cardboard box, balancing it on my hip, and flip off the overhead fluorescent lights.
It’s the last period of the day, and the hallways are empty. My sneakers squeak against the vinyl floors as I make my way toward the foyer. The door to Ms. Landry’s classroom has been left open. “—heard the PTA refused to release the funds for the new playground equipment unless they agreed to do something.”
Ms. Landry—Jenny—sits at her desk in the corner. Across from her in the metal student desks are two of our coworkers, Mrs. Walsh and Ms. Camus. I hover in the doorway, out of their direct sightline.
“Can you blame them?” Mrs. Walsh gestures at the cracked-open blinds, the news vans already congregating just beyond the wire fences. “How are our students supposed to learn withthatoutside our windows?”
I knock on the doorframe. Three sets of eyes slowly turn to meet mine. Mrs. Walsh’s mouth tics down at the corners, but other than that, their faces remain impassive.
“Sorry, I was just heading out”—I readjust the cardboard box in my arms—“and wanted to say goodbye.”
Mrs. Walsh fiddles with her bracelets; Ms. Camus looks down at her phone.
“Take care of yourself,” Jenny says. We were both hired at the beginning of last year and quickly bonded during the district-wide training sessions that all new employees were required to attend, the ones where you write your reason for teaching on a Post-it note and stick it on the cafeteria wall. Fresh out of graduate school, she was nervous about managing her classroom, so I volunteered to spend my free periods sitting at her back table, handling any discipline problems that arose. Every Friday, we’d order a pitcher of room-temperature lager at Barry’s and toast to being one week closer to summer.
I wait for her to say something else, invite me out for a farewell drink maybe, but instead, she picks up her purple felt-tip pen andstarts marking quizzes. I search for something to break down the wall between myself and them, but no matter what I come up with, it won’t change the fact that those news vans are parked outside because of me.
“Well,” I say, “have a good rest of the school year.”
No one looks up as I leave. I get a few steps down the hall before I hear from inside the classroom, “Can you believe her?” Mrs. Walsh. My sneakers seem to stick to the floor as they continue talking.
“It’s her last day—” Jenny starts, but the other two aren’t having it.
“Thank god for that,” Mrs. Walsh says.
“Are you watching the show?” Ms. Camus has dropped her volume, but her words can still be heard up and down the hallway. “She knew what her father was doing. That last girl—what was her name?”
