Everyone Living the Dream

Every afternoon at about 3:15, Elsie Hamlet picked one task to complete: return an email to a parent, grade one essay or a few quizzes. The students had been dismissed. They were riding the bus or at sports practice or play rehearsal, and the hallway noise, the slamming of metal lockers, the laughing, shouting, screeching, running of teenagers, almost constant from 7:00 to 3:00, had finally faded away, leaving only the sound of the clock.

She turned off the overhead lights and flipped through Opal's reading journal, a pink spiral notebook with ENGLISH written across the cover in letters that looked like they'd been painstakingly stenciled. Elsie skimmed the contents. In the margins, with an erasable green pen, she added a little note or a check mark here and there, one comment per page. She was doing the thing that she hoped just meant she was tired, combining words into nonsense: Thisn't. Cadd more detail? Her erasing left the pages a dingey brown, which Opal would probably find disruptive to her mental state.

Opal was not a very good writer, but she tried hard and thought that meant she should receive an A. She longed for the A, coveted it. Elsie dreaded returning work to students like Opal. She sometimes held on to essays and quizzes for weeks because she knew what was coming.

Elsie was not a new teacher, but she sometimes acted like one. She sometimes let them get to her. That day, she'd gone too far.

It was the period after lunch. Opal received her essay on Pride and Prejudice with trembling hands. Elsie had given her a B+. The analysis was weak, and she used the same examples used by every student who had ever consulted the internet: Elizabeth walking miles to see poor, sick Jane. Lydia buying an ugly bonnet. If Opal had asked for help, Elsie could have guided her to a better thesis. The B+ was a gift, but Elsie could never say that to a student. There was so much she couldn't say.

Opal whimpered. Ms. Hamlet just didn't understand–her parents would kill her! Roughly half of Elsie's students had parents who would literally kill them if they didn't get an A.

Opal was seriously going to die. A few others joined in Opal's chorus: they were all going to die! They, too, had earned B+s. One of them had earned an A-. The kids who earned Cs worked quietly at their desks.

Elsie took a deep breath, steadied her face, and crouched down in front of Opal's desk. "Do you want to take a break? Go to the nurse's office?" Opal practically lived in the nurse's office. Once she was gone, Elsie could circulate in peace, pretending to examine her students' work, doling out praise until she could dismiss them and finally be able to use the bathroom.

But then after class, Opal returned to gather her belongings and go over what she had missed. Like Elsie had all the time in the world and hadn't had to pee for three hours. The other students had left, and it was just the two of them. In the room next door, Val, the ninth-grade English teacher, was playing a film version of Lord of the Flies. The sound of drumming was coming through the wall. Opal sat obediently at her desk, expecting instruction. Elsie sat down at the desk next to Opal's. Its surface, marred by ink and pencil, appeared older than the school itself.

"Sometimes," Elsie said. "The other students just want to slap you in the face."

________

Opal played the harp, of all things for a teenager to play. A stuffed animal the size and shape of a softball was clipped to the zipper of her backpack, a rat or maybe a sloth, the kids were obsessed with sloths. She was on the track team and ran the longest distances. Elsie was forty and had a basket of dirty laundry in her trunk, which she...