accordingly, the rest of the day spirals down the shithole.
— Hanged himself is the correct grammar, Mrs. Mochinski corrects the goth girl in the afternoon English class, and immediately she wants to kick herself, correcting grammar about hanging on this day of all days, the dead boy’s desk a gaping hole in the middle of the classroom. The goth girl swearing like a trucker.
— This will be on the next quiz, she continues, trying to recuperate some kind of control. — Fumiko, quit swearing! And by the way, you people, Romeo killed himself with a vial of poison, not through hanging. Pay attention. This will be on the next quiz!
The students’ antennae spring up and they all write down Quiz on shreds and sheets of paper, backs of books, backs of hands. Then the class bursts into whispers. The worst little fucker of them all at the back of the class stands on top of his desk and whinnies into his hand.
— You at the back of the class, says Mrs. Mochinski. — You can raise your hand like everyone else, she says, and then her vocal cords kick back so she coughs. — Let’s have some respect around here, she croaks. Her voice dying early today. She tries to inhale a deep yoga breath, yoga breaths are supposed to keep the anger away.
Jésus raises his hand.
— Yes? she asks.
— Because he was a homo-sek-shhhhyoo-al, says Jésus.
The baseball caps at the back of the room howl with laughter, and she wants to shove a bar of Irish Spring soap in his mouth and scrub until it foams. She chokes on her yoga breath.
— What’s your problem, Unicorn Girl? he smirks to the unicorn girl.
— We don’t talk that way in class, Jésus. You know I think that attitude smells like poo, says Mrs. Mochinski. She grabs up her copy of Romeo and Juliet from the desk. — Where have all the manners gone? And there is no obvious indication in the play that Romeo was a homosexual, but if you have proof to support your statement, by all means educate us— using respectful and appropriate language. Please—
Her voice too shrill, the control seeping away, she coughs again, these students make her sick!
— What’s wrong with the word unicorn? asks Jésus. — Is it pronounced unicorn-ee? Shit!
Mrs. Mochinski crosses her arms over her copy of Romeo and Juliet. She wants to boil Jésus’s guts in a pot. She wants to go home and pour herself a salad-bowl-sized glass of wine.
— Homosexual? says Jésus. — What’s wrong with the word homo-sek-shhhhyoo-al? Well, he was.
— You can talk about that with the veep if you keep pushing it, Jésus.
— All right! I’m sorry.
Jésus and his little crew giggling and poking. She will get through this day. She will live to the end.
— Now, asks the dead boy’s teacher, pretending her students are nothing but the hum of the furnace, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, — Now, she repeats. — Can someone please tell me how we know Romeo’s love for Juliet is the real thing?
Mrs. Mochinski does not want to die on this Jésus hill, her hands full of paper and chalk dust. God, her underwire bra is stabbing a major artery and she may be dead before the last bell, the thousands of students trampling her body as they buffalo-jump out the door. The dead boy’s desk sits in the middle of the room and she isn’t allowed to say anything to the students because the principal doesn’t have all the facts. Why would having the facts matter?
She turns her back to the class, her copy of Romeo and Juliet clutched in her hand. She rolls a piece of chalk between the fingers of her other hand, the many eruptions in the classroom only a background hum. Her face to the board, her fingers picking up then clinking down roll after roll of chalk. Her nose moist, just on the verge of running, her wedding ring dull under the dust. The dead boy a homosexual.
Romeo and Juliet. Two dead teenagers. This is what she needs to concentrate on. Even though who besides their parents cares? Even these kids in her class care only about the sex.
— So what if he was gay? says the unicorn girl.
Good for you, Mrs. Mochinski wants to say. A++.
— It’s a sin, chirps the chinless one behind her.
That’s an F for you, Chinless, thinks Mrs. Mochinski. F–!
— Where on earth does it say in this play that Romeo was gay? splutters Mrs. Mochinski.
The class dissolves into a buzzing like she has stumbled into a flight of mosquitoes, an infuriating whine needling every nerve in her body.
Mrs. Mochinski whirls from the board and wheezes out another cough. She slams the play down on her desk, the chalk in her other hand jumps, shatters on the floor. Hands on her hips. — That’s it! I have had it. You people! Stand for prayer please, stand for prayer.
The students rumble and screech their chairs to standing.
— In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen, she says, making the sign of the cross, accidentally chalking her left boob. Then she leads them in the Lord’s Prayer, squinting through her partly closed eyes at them, ready to quash any hijinks.
— So sit down and do your Silent Reading. And by Silent Reading, says Mrs. Mochinski, — I mean Silent and Reading. Stop doodling, Faraday, she says, suddenly remembering her name. — Now that’s a nice waste of paper and ink. Fumiko, she says to goth girl, — Try to stay awake for longer than a minute.
Little Jésus fuckface jumps onto his desk and belches.
At 3:45 p.m., Mrs. Mochinski beetles through the icy school parking lot to her car, yanks open the door and dives into the driver’s seat. Back to her own life. The divorce papers in their neat manila envelope lie on the passenger seat. She left the car unlocked this morning on purpose, hoping someone might steal them. The only thing she cared about this morning. Patrick Furey gone for good, then. A boy she hardly knew in her third-period English class. Grade 12, then. Nearly at the end. Gripping the cold steering wheel, she coughs and coughs, lets the coughs erupt unimpeded, the tears gushing and streaming from her eyes.
Walter
Tuesday morning, with the memo with its bullshit instructions sent out to every teacher, the news of Patrick Furey’s suicide flinging itself against the bars of its cage, Walter strides busily through the school hallways, checking the bulletin boards for inappropriate material as a way to avoid his own office.
Finally in his office, he snacks on a power bar and sips tomato juice. He sucks up the juice too fast and droplets splash out his nose onto the keyboard. He stares at the bloody drops, breathes the stale air in his little pod of an office. Walter’s back crawling because that dead boy is sitting in that chair, still and silent, sweater resolutely inside out. Walter keeps his back to the dead boy, slides the binders back into their correct places above his desk, but it makes no difference: the surface of his desk, the computer screen with its hundreds of rows of tiny folder icons, are a multiplying landfill.
