Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

may have asked you this before, but here I go again. Anytime you’re in the area, come down and visit. I’d love for you to come talk to some of the high-school students here. They absolutely idolize American culture and I think they’d be really impressed with you and would most likely listen to you more than they would me or any of their other fellow Dominican teachers.

      I read and reread it several times. Yes, he does sound like someone whom James and Kelly would hit it off with. He shared their idealistic view of the world. But he didn’t sound like a protest freak. I mean, he was using his money to improve his country. It wasn’t like he was spreading communism or building a madrassa. He just sounded like a good guy. A good, solid guy. And I liked that. I mean, he was great-looking, smart. Okay, I’ve gone over this list way too many times. There has to be a flaw. He knows I’m, er, Rubenesque. He did see my picture. There has to be a catch. But I decided to put that out of my mind. Why did there have to be a catch? I remembered the words of a famous preacher whose book I’d snapped up at Barnes & Noble. He said that if one doesn’t expect great things to happen, then great things won’t happen. There. I will put this into practice. I will expect something great to happen from now on.

      So what to do? I couldn’t write him back right away. That would seem too eager. But I wanted to know more and tell him more. But I had to wait. The way I felt now I’d probably pour out my heart to him. Telling him how much I wanted to escape my life and just live in someone else’s for a while. No family. No roommates. No students. No freezing cold, snowy winters. I logged off instead.

      The thing is, I kind of liked my life. Improvements were possible, but if it stayed this way forever it wouldn’t be too terrible. At least I wouldn’t end up like my mother, drunk, angry, and afraid to face the world, or Gerard, who seemed to be staggering onto the edge of some metaphorical cliff. I was better off than a lot of people I knew.

      It was time to make dinner. Maybe I’d make deep fried chicken and oven-baked fries. Heck, I’ll fry the fries. Why fake it?

      Chapter 7

      My last period class was angry with me again. I’d been so preoccupied with Drew on my mind and trying to drown out their insolence that I’d forgotten that I was the reason their beloved Treyon was suspended and would not be providing the entertainment this week. A part of me felt sorry for them. They had me right after History with Lashelle Thompson, who always gave them the “black perspective,” regardless of the assigned text. One of the kids, Tina, I think, had asked me once why we didn’t read more books by black authors. That had really hurt because more than half the books were by black, Asian, and Hispanic writers. But she didn’t consider García Márquez relevant to her experience. How could I explain to her that I wasn’t Lashelle, and more importantly, that the education that would take her to college was not necessarily the one that would bring her the most satisfaction or vindication. Instead, I gave her a list of books that she could borrow from the library and read on her own time, but I suspected that she would never follow through. Why did I give up so easily? I didn’t know. Sometimes I thought that I didn’t care enough anymore to be doing this. These kids were wearing me down into an apathetic, disillusioned mess.

      I asked if anyone wanted to discuss The Grapes of Wrath. Not one hand rose. Twenty-nine resigned faces glared at me. I couldn’t take this today.

      “Okay, guys. Let’s talk about anything you guys want to talk about for just ten minutes. Just ten minutes, then we’ll go back to the book.”

      At first there was silence. I’d been warned against doing this, it could backfire in so many ways.

      “Why you ain’t married?” This from Shanae, a cute but obviously nosy girl, with the most insanely multicolored braids I’d ever seen.

      I cleared my throat. “I haven’t found the right person yet.”

      “You got a man?” asked David, a 6’3” jumble of awkwardness who’s one of my better writers and known to be one of the school’s best rappers.

      “Not really. I’m too busy. Listen, let’s move on. Has anyone read anything lately they’d like to talk about?”

      “I read about Beyoncé and Jay-Z on vacation in St. Tropez.”

      I cringed; celebrity gossip was not really my forte.

      “Where St. Tropez at?” Tina asked.

      Oh, God. Where was St. Tropez again?

      “All right. Let’s find out,” I said, looking on the worn-out cabinet for an atlas. There wasn’t one. That really irked me. The freaking globe was broken and there was no atlas at all in a freaking classroom. It was bad enough that I found myself bringing in my own supplies…

      I had no idea where St. Tropez was and there was no atlas in the room to at least make it look as if I was trying to teach the class a lesson. I cursed the stingy Massachusetts Department of Education and racked my brain. I’m not stupid, I’m just scatterbrained. The entire class was looking at me as I stalled in the cabinet, pretending to look for something that I knew wasn’t there.

      Then I focused. I pictured a map of the world in my head and started mentally drawing in the continents. Okay, I thought. St. Tropez must be warm, and since Beyoncé and Jay-Z, those two paragons of ostentatious consumerism and hedonism, went there, it must have been expensive. Hmmm…South in some European country, France or Spain or Italy. Tropez. Lord help us, but I’m going to go with France. Okay, here we go, class.

      They were nonplussed by my answer; they had already moved on. My performance thus ended, I decided to stop trying to be super teacher. Back to the text.

      Everyone hated me again when I asked about the Joads. It was sad that our little rapport had ended so abruptly. But I couldn’t take the chance of them asking me another question I couldn’t answer. So, I was back to being Mean Ms. Wilson. The world was back in balance.

      I couldn’t wait till I got home. I hurried, ran, really, to the teacher’s lounge to use one of the computers there. I had broken down late last night and written him a reply as long as a New Yorker short story. I gave him the family history—just the facts without too much of the ugly truth. Told him that I liked to read, cook, and watch movies; that I wasn’t too athletic, though I did like to dance and was beginning to enjoy my cycling class (that was stretching the truth a bit); and that there wasn’t much more to me than that. It sounded spare but I had to be honest because that was me. I wasn’t like James and Kelly, who had ten billion hobbies and interests. You would not catch me climbing a mountain in New Hampshire on any given Saturday afternoon, nor would I be running any five-mile races or 10 K’s. Give me a good book and a cookie recipe and I’m happy for a week. At least until I weighed myself again. Then I’d answered his questions. What made me truly happy? When my students show some interest in literature, spring, memories of my father before he got sick, great shoes. What made me laugh out loud? My brother’s dirty jokes, though he makes few of them these days. What made me angry? The fact that poor kids got so little from public education in one of the richest states in the country. That my relationship with my mother will always be full of conflict. That I can’t seem to bring myself to care about much anymore. Or did that last one just make me sad?

      At the time I’d clicked send, I realized it had been too much. But I’d been feeling melancholy. I’d eaten too much at dinner again. Pasta with shrimp in marinara sauce. Three plates of it. And then Healthy Choice chocolate chip cookie ice cream for dessert. I could hear James and Kelly going at it in their room and I felt lonely and a little sick from overeating. So I poured my heart out. Now I had to do e-mail damage assessment. Either he wouldn’t write back or he would with some reason why he suddenly became very busy and probably wouldn’t be able to write much anymore.

      There it was, his e-mail, at the top of my in-box, right on top of one from Whitney with only exclamation marks in the subject field. I didn’t really want to know what that was about, though I knew it would be something that ultimately would involve Max, her Tunisian.

      Here goes, I thought, as I opened Drew’s e-mail. It was long, as long as mine.