The Measure(59)

The Parent-Teacher Association had apparently come to the conclusion that such a sensitive subject should be reserved for the parents alone.

Amie understood the challenges facing families, but she had never agreed with the new mandate, sidelining the teachers so completely. She believed the school had a real chance to add value by addressing the strings head-on, filling her syllabus with books on mortality and loss, on empathy and prejudice. Amie had even been planning to create a pen pal program between her students and a local nursing home, inspired by her own correspondence with “B.” She hoped that hearing from people who had survived so many decades of a changing world might provide a useful perspective for those coming of age now, but she feared the experience would feel stilted without any mention of the strings.

She had laid out her concerns to the principal at the end of the summer, to no avail.

“Do you have children, Ms. Wilson?” he asked her.

“Well, no, I don’t,” she said.

“Then, as much as I admire your idealism, I’m afraid you can’t appreciate how our parents feel. You know, I receive two dozen calls every year about our sex-ed class, some saying it’s coming too soon for the students, some saying it’s coming too late, and others taking issue with the content of the course itself. There’s no such thing as pleasing everyone. But the parents are the ones paying tuition. They need to decide when and where and how they discuss the strings with their own children.”

The principal paused for a moment. “When you’re a mother, I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Amie had simply nodded along, insulted, though not surprised.

A few weeks later, the numbers came out. The drop in enrollment was shocking.

And then, only four days into the fall semester, the first teacher was officially fired.

Amie arrived at the Connelly Academy that morning to see a group of her colleagues and a few displeased parents already gathered outside the principal’s office.

“This was a very difficult choice,” said the principal, trying to settle the crowd. “But we must abide by the new code of conduct that was agreed upon in August.”

“What happened?” Amie asked.

“It’s Susan Ford,” a colleague answered. “Apparently she made this whole presentation about the strings yesterday, totally off-book, telling the seniors that they shouldn’t be afraid of getting a short string . . . and that they shouldn’t be afraid of short-stringers.”

“That’s not exactly a bad message,” Amie said.

“Yeah, but . . . some parents were pissed. This is pretty touchy stuff.”

When Mrs. Ford somberly exited the office, tossing a box of posters unceremoniously into the trash, the crowd turned irate.

“This is ridiculous!” shouted one of the parents. “We don’t pay to send our children to school in a dictatorship! We should be encouraging discussion, not silencing it.”

“The board and the PTA have already made their decision,” said the principal. “We can reopen the conversation at our meeting next month.”

The clock struck eight a.m., and the first streams of pupils started to enter the building, forcing the group to begrudgingly disperse rather than alarm the students. Two of the protesting moms took Mrs. Ford by the arm, comforting her as if she were one of their children, rather than a fully grown woman.

And Amie stared sadly at the trash can outside of the principal’s office, the corners of Mrs. Ford’s crinkled posters poking out of the bin, trying in vain to escape.





Maura




On Sunday night, Maura made her way to the school, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook on her phone, skimming post after post of bad news. She could barely tolerate one more story about Anthony Rollins’s booming campaign, or the reasons why so-and-so billionaire believed we should relocate to Mars and leave the strings here on Earth, but she paused at an unfamiliar headline: “Fake String Website Busted, Owner Arrested.” Some man in Nevada had apparently been making replica short strings in his garage and selling them online. Before he could be stopped, hundreds of people had purchased the fabricated strings to pull off obscenely cruel pranks, swapping out someone’s real string with a counterfeit short one. As if that were the worst fate imaginable. The butt of the world’s best joke.

She nearly smashed her phone on the sidewalk.

A few members of the group were discussing the news as Maura entered the classroom.

“Did anyone else see that story about the fake strings?” Nihal asked. “The guy really had nothing better to do?”

“First we get that fucked-up Google doc collecting people’s string lengths, and now this?” Carl complained.

“Don’t forget the new gun law,” added Terrell. “This country used to let anybody walk around with an assault rifle and nobody cared who got killed, but now, after years of debate, they’re suddenly drawing the line with short-stringers?”

“Honestly, it pales compared to what my dad told me,” said Chelsea. “A woman in his office is trying to sue for full custody of her kids on the grounds that her ex-husband is a short-stringer. I guess she’s made up some bogus claims about his emotional stability, or protecting the kids from unnecessary trauma.”

“Oh god,” Terrell grumbled.