Sub Plot

"Did you pee on your seat?" I looked down at the puddle on the teacher's chair. An eighth-grade girl with tight red curls held a half empty glass of water.

I'd taught twenty-five years in a familiar classroom and then taken time away to reinvent myself. When I was ready to go back to teaching, the economy had crashed. As I looked for a new teaching position, insolvent school boards were laying off staff. Experience counted against me; if schools had an opening, they hired a young teacher who cost less. I applied to every posting in the state for a full-time teaching job and received one reply—for a job helping severely autistic children. After the interview, the principal left a message on my machine saying that someone in house had been chosen. I drove to the sau office (School Administrative Unit) and picked up an application for substitute teaching, one page long, which asked two questions: "Do you have a reliable means of transportation?" and "Have you been convicted of a felony?"

By my cell every morning at six, coffee in hand, I hoped to be called for a day's work. Sometimes my phone rang, sometimes it didn't. When it did ring, I discovered whether I would spend my day as a high school technology instructor, a seventh-grade art teacher, or a kindergarten aide. At seven, I drove to the appointed school and checked in with the secretary, who told me where to go. Usually the regular teacher left plans for a substitute, but occasionally there was no suggestion of what I might do. Soon enough, the bell rang and kids swarmed in. "Hey! A sub!" meant, "Hey! We can go wild!" Most plans called for a light day—watching a movie, designing posters, or filling in worksheets. As I passed out paper, I heard students chat. "Hairy old men shave their backs." "Once I saw an alligator with a worm coming out its eye."

During eighth-grade basketball practice, I separated the class into teams, handed out pinnies in different colors, told them to take their positions, and shouted "Go!" The students collapsed on the gymnasium floor, playing dead. A substitute teacher is like someone you sit beside on a bus or an airplane, to whom you can say whatever comes to mind. The kids knew I was not responsible for grading them. I had detention slips, but I seldom used them. Because I didn't matter, kids told me school stories. I heard about a teacher who threw a chair at his student. I heard about students smoking pot in the bathroom, exhaling through the air vent.

It was second-grade snack period; I brought out a banana from my bag. The seven-year-olds were shocked; their regular teacher loathed bananas. When I ate it, they wouldn't let me throw the peel away in the classroom wastebasket. A girl disposed of it down the hall in the bathroom trash. In seventh-grade English, students took turns reading out loud a young adult novel about World War II which described gas chambers. A boy leaned his head against the wall, closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and made loud snoring noises.

Looking over each classroom, I guessed what the regular teacher was like. Some seemed imaginative, lively: cardboard boxes became robots; painted furniture showed penguins jumping off icebergs. Other classrooms were predictable: punched-out hearts for Valentine's Day, punched-out four-leaf clovers for St. Patrick's Day.

News came that fifteen more teachers were to be cut; no one knew which ones. In the middle of the year, support staff—aides, janitors, kitchen help—lost health insurance. A boy in Spanish class, wearing goth bracelets, told me he was a witch. One day, we were on a break from sixth-grade social studies when a voice over the intercom asked me to help out in a seventh grade. I arrived during a lesson on substance abuse. I started to talk about the effects of alcohol on the liver, and the intercom voice told me to go back...