The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(7)

I tried to imagine the two of them together, and it wasn’t particularly hard. My guess was that if Joan thought they were having an affair, then they were having an affair. Smoke and fire and all that. I tried to form a plan in my mind, the best way to move forward on this case, but found I kept thinking about Joan instead. And not the Joan who had been in my office earlier that day, but the Joan who had been in my classroom fifteen years earlier when I’d been a first-year teacher.

The thing about my year at Dartford-Middleham High School was that I was full of unspecified dread long before James Pursall brought a gun into my classroom. It began during Christmas break, when I’d been prepping furiously to teach my classes the upcoming spring semester. The previous fall I’d been a student teacher, my host a veteran teacher named Larry O’Donnell, who liked to go over lesson plans down at the Bullrun pub when it opened at five p.m. The good thing about Larry was that he didn’t seem particularly interested in sitting in on my class, observing me, then hitting me up later with the multiple things I did wrong. But that was also the bad thing about Larry. While I was teaching, he was in the supply closet, napping.

My hardest classes were the two sections of American lit for sophomores. It was a pretty routine curriculum, covering Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. The kids were unimpressed, and it turned out I was a less than stellar disciplinarian. I spent most of my time each class trying not to turn my back on them for even a few seconds. My third class was senior honors English, the class that Joan Grieve was taking. The kids were essentially respectful, and there were even a couple of them who seemed to enjoy reading and talking about books. Most of the kids, however, just thought the class would look good on their college applications. They were well behaved but absent.

By early December I was looking forward to the semester being over, counting the days, and wondering if I’d made the correct career choice. Then one afternoon, just after my last class of the day, when I’d been erasing the chalkboard and mentally replaying the class that had just ended, Larry O’Donnell and Maureen Block, the English department head, came in to see me, shutting the door behind them. They asked me if I’d noticed that Paul Justice, one of the veteran teachers, hadn’t been in for a few days. I had noticed, but hadn’t thought too much about it.

“He’s not coming back,” Maureen said. “And I’m not sure, but I think we’ve dodged a major bullet. The girl who made the complaint said she’s not going to the police.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Larry has kindly offered to take over Paul’s freshman classes for next semester, but that means someone has to keep going with senior honors, plus Paul’s composition classes. We were hoping you might consider helping us out.”

“Oh,” I said again.

They gave me a night to think about it, and Dagmar, my girlfriend at the time, convinced me that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. “They’ll offer you a full-time job at the end of the year,” she said. “It’s a good school.” Dagmar and I had met at the same master’s program out in Western Mass and she was teaching middle school in the Hudson school system. I had a sudden vision of the two of us fixing up a farmhouse in Central Massachusetts, and spending our lives complaining about grading papers. I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about that.

I took the job, and that December, with Dagmar back in the Midwest with her family, I holed up in my squalid apartment in Cambridge and planned the remainder of the year with my honors class. They’d given me leeway, so I planned a whole unit on poetry, and one on mid-century suburban literature, thinking they might enjoy some Cheever stories, and was considering assigning Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith or some Richard Yates. I was reading a lot, and I was trying to write poetry, but I could feel my life unfolding before me, and it felt like a life both quiet and a little bit desperate. And once that thought got into my head, it was like catching a chill from a cold swim—I just couldn’t shake it.

I started teaching again in January, and the feeling didn’t go away. Entering the classroom each morning, after walking from my unreliable Omega through a dim, freezing dawn, I was consumed with a kind of existential terror at the day ahead. Once the day began, it was okay. There were even moments of joy. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” turned out to be a hit, although the majority of the students were enraged by the ending of the story, by the way it slipped into the surreal. They were literalists, these affluent high school seniors, and they had one foot out of their high school towns and into prestigious colleges, then grad school, then good entry-level jobs in Boston or New York or Washington, DC. They comprehended suburban ennui, but they didn’t want to feel it.

I wish I remembered more about James Pursall but mostly what I recall was a quiet loner who sat at the back of the room. He handed in his assignments, and he would comment during class discussions, but only if I called on him. He had very white skin, dusted with acne, and very black hair that always looked unwashed. The classroom was cold, and I remember he never took off his jacket, a bulky winter parka that was either navy or black. I do remember that before the shooting, I had dubbed him “boy most likely to go on a killing spree” in my mind, picturing compact Russian machine guns suddenly emerging from his puffy winter coat. But I never thought it would really happen.

I do, however, remember Joan Grieve. She sat in the first row, made sure to comment at least once a class, and came to me after tests and essays to see if she could get me to raise her A minus to an A, or her B plus to an A minus. I knew she was a gymnast because the gymnastics team was good that year, and people were talking about them. She wore tights to class a lot, and hooded sweatshirts, and there was always a large water bottle on her desk. What I really remember about her was that she was a watcher, one of the students who kept her eyes firmly on me when I was lecturing or trying to lead a class discussion. She wasn’t the only student who kept their eyes at the front of the class, but it was still rare, most of my students staring into space or directly at their scarred and doodled-on desktops. She watched me when she wasn’t taking notes, and instead of making me feel as though I was making some kind of difference . . . If you reach just one kid . . . it made me feel exposed.