Coasters. Gerald Duff

help three times before one of them took notice and brought him a sheaf of papers telling him where to go when for the next several hours.

      “Just go into the classroom and do it, huh?” he said to the woman who handed him the packet, and she gave him an appraising look and said nothing until he finally dropped his eyes and left her presence to find his way to the first room listed on the top sheet of paper she had given him.

      It was on the second floor, and most of the seats were taken when he walked into the room, though not much noise was going on and none of the students staring randomly about themselves seemed to notice that a stranger had just come in. Not like the days when he was putting in his own time at Thomas Jefferson, Waylon considered. This generation of kids was probably doped to the gills by eight o’clock each morning, though, and wouldn’t have noticed if a kangaroo in overalls had hopped up on the desk at the front of the classroom, dropped trou, and moved its bowels.

      “I’m not your regular teacher,” Waylon announced, “those of you who’re able to tell the difference. She’s taken ill.”

      “Who has?” asked a blonde girl in the front row, so thin, Waylon noted when he looked at her to respond, that he could see tendons in her neck.

      “Your regular English teacher,” he said and looked down at the sheet of paper on the desk to find her name. “Mrs. Watts.”

      “That’s not our teacher’s name,” said a Hispanic kid in the middle of the room. “I ain’t never heard of no Mrs. Watts.”

      “It is, too,” several voices said together.

      “It is not, neither,” others countered.

      The dope’s beginning to wear off, Waylon told himself, must have been really stepped on by the time it got to the sophomore class. They’re sounding like kids ought to when a substitute teacher walks into the room. “Cut the horseshit,” he said in a loud voice. “I’m a Viet Nam vet, and I feel a flashback coming on. I won’t be held responsible for what might happen if I see any enemy in here. Agent Orange has just eaten my nerves slap up.”