Rock Bottom Girl(21)

“Yo, Cicero!” I heard Floyd call through the gym door.

I exited my office and stepped out into the gym. The floor gleamed with its new coat of wax, and the HVAC system groaned in the rafters above us.

“You ready for this?” Floyd asked, bouncing a basketball at me.

I caught it and dribbled without enthusiasm. The lump of dread in my stomach had unfurled into a large, winged dragon.

“You look like you’re gonna hurl again,” Floyd observed.

“Very funny,” I said, passing the ball back to him.

He dribbled to the hole, tongue out like Jordan, and made a peppy layup.

“You can be nervous, but don’t be palpably nervous,” he advised, sending the ball back to me. “Miss it, and you have an H.”

It was 7:45 a.m., and I was playing HORSE. Not a bad gig if I could rescue myself from my own terror.

“Palpably nervous?” I drove in, nearly tripping over my own feet, and heaved the ball at the backboard. The gods were smiling on me because the ball dinked off the backboard and swished neatly through the net.

“Don’t let them smell the fear.”

“How does this team-teaching thing work. Good cop, bad cop?”

“Ooh! Dibs on bad cop! Nah. We just tag team two classes at once. You grade your students, I grade mine, and we both get to yell at all of them.”

I was good at yelling. I could do this.

Second period was off to a bang-up start when sixty percent of the kids didn’t show up with a change of clothes. “It’s like the first day of school,” a girl in a purple bodysuit and high-waisted jeans complained. “We’re not, like, supposed to do anything.”

We weren’t asking them to do anything. We were asking them to stand around in the gymnasium and take the pieces of paper we handed them that listed suggested clothing and shoes and laid out the fall curriculum. Floyd introduced me to the class. Two of my players were in the class. Two that didn’t totally hate me. I felt good about that.

A guy with floppy blond hair and a dark tan purposely shouldered another small, less surfery-looking student out of his way to get his paper. “Watch it, Amos,” Floppy said in an excellent imitation of Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He looked vaguely familiar.

Amos hunched in on himself as if he was used to the douchebaggery.

Floppy snatched the paper out of my hand, spun around, and shoved his face into Amos’s. “You got a problem?”

“Start running,” I said pleasantly. The entire class and Floyd gasped.

Floppy turned around and looked at me. He pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Say what?”

“I said start running. Laps. You know. In a circle.” I made the shape with my finger in case he’d flunked Sesame Street.

“I’m not dressed to run,” he said, waving a hand over his pink checkered polo and pressed golf shorts.

“Should’ve thought of that before you displayed the manners of an entitled toddler. Go forth and run, Floppy.”

“Floppy?” He didn’t find it funny, but the rest of the class did.

“You heard the lady,” Floyd said, clapping his hands. “Hit the court, kid. Blue line. No cutsies.”

I rolled my eyes at the “Ooooooh!” that arose as Floppy kicked off his flipflops and sullenly jogged to the edge of the court.

Floyd held up his clipboard in front of his face. “That’s Milton, by the way.”

I held up my clipboard to join him in the cone of silence. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Milton Hostetter.”

Hostetter. As in the son of my ex-high school sweetheart and his horrible, perfect wife. As in owner of Manolo the honking swan. As in stirrer of shit between Ruby and Sophie S. Just freaking great.

Some of the kids were taking video of Floppy Milton. “Are they allowed to have phones?” I asked Floyd. He shrugged.

“They’re supposed to leave them in the locker room. Can’t pry ’em out of their carpal tunnel, selfie-taking hands otherwise.”

“O-M-G, look at this Snapchat filter,” one of the kids said, and the rest of the class crowded around him.





We went through the same thing two more times in a row, and then, according to my schedule, I pulled early lunch duty. Gross. There was something nauseating about a hundred bodies simultaneously going through puberty in one room that already smelled like hot dogs and milk. I found my way to the cafeteria, which was remarkably unchanged since I graduated.

Same rickety folding tables with red and blue stools. Same jukebox, which had appeared during my junior year. It had been enjoyed until it became tradition for some joker to play “Cotton Eye Joe” on repeat every single day. I wondered if the administration had removed that particular song from the playlist.

Kids were pouring into the space, talking at full volume, jockeying for spots. The lunch ladies and gentlemen, I noted, were unveiling the day’s culinary specials. Spaghetti, salad, and dinner rolls.

“Excuse me, Ms. Cicero?” A woman in a cat sweater and dangly cat earrings approached.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Huh? I mean, yes?” I was Ms. Cicero. I was a teacher. Not a troublemaking student.

“Principal Eccles would like to have a word with you,” Miss Kitty said.