She wakes up in a fog, as part of every day’s ritual of wishing she could find a school that started later, that catered to the night owls. We want to teach and get a good night’s sleep, she thinks. But she does the rote morning ritual, rolling out of bed into a warm and enveloping shower, brushing teeth, brushing hair, finding pants with the least amount of dog hair to roller off. The usual.
She gets coffee at school, she can’t waste time in the morning waking up at home. School days on Tuesdays are the worst, it’s so far until the end of the week and yet so much of the week feels like it has already passed. She doesn’t show it though, once she walks into the building and greets students and fellow teachers. This is what she does, day after day, smiling and awaking herself for the sake of everyone else.
The school day starts off with an aggravating class of teenagers who persist in thinking they know so much more than they do. She was also once a privileged suburban teen so she knows what they think, and she doesn’t hate it any less. She survives through three classes of advancing literature, hearing from her students ideas that are so unique, she hasn’t heard them since last years’ classes. She’s usually much more enthusiastic than this, it’s just, well, Tuesday. Tomorrow she’ll be impressed that they are once again able to come up with ideas that, for them, are new and enlightening. It’s exciting to find an idea and figure out how to put it forward, even she can remember that pleasure.
She forgot about the other reason this Tuesday is such a slog – she agreed to have lunch with the history department, under the auspices of co-department friendship. It’s just that she doesn’t understand why the history teachers seem to think what they do is so much important than her classes. They are just wrong, as usual, but funny enough, historians don’t see the irony in repeating the same mistakes over and over.
Lunch is in the cafeteria, so they get in line at the salad bar surrounded by the shouts and laughter of teenagers. It’s the least relaxing place to be, next to a holidays at the mall. So many sounds and so loud, it hurts her psyche to have to deal with this barrage of noise. But the kids are full of such joy, for the most part, free to make noise and be themselves, or even an exaggerated version of who they are. It must be nice to be able to be so free, she thinks.
The lettuce looks wrong. She was afraid of this, that the salad bar was going to be inadequate. Of course she forgot to prepare, to pack her own, because she was avoiding thinking about this whole day. This Tuesday. So now she’s panicking just a little bit, because the lettuce doesn’t have the right shape.
She thinks about taking the iceberg, but just can’t stomach the idea. There’s no dressing, nothing that can imagine away the horrors that come with a wet piece of iceberg, too much crunch for something so wet. It’s starting to hurt, knowing that she isn’t going to be able to look normal, that the history department will talk about her for days and days after this. She takes a few peppers, some tiny tomatoes, thinks maybe no one will make too much of a fuss if she’s eating more of a vegetable tray than a proper salad.
The teachers take seats at one of the long tables in the middle of the cafeteria, proclaiming their invasion on the student’s turf in the most definitive way. Students are stopping by the table, saying hello to their favorite teachers, making jokes, enjoying being in with the faculty, at least this once. She feels the eyes of several students on her, silently acknowledging her lettuce-free plate, she knows they are going to spread the word and add to the things she knows they talk already say. She takes a pepper slice in her fingers, chews slowly, looking from side to side, hesitant to catch anyone’s eyes.
The pressure is too much. She jumps up, makes up something about a call she forgot to make and how she’s going to be in trouble, grabs her tray and heads for the door. She leaves it by the garbage, not wanting to spend any more time on the plate that failed her, on the lettuce that’s missing and upsetting any sense of normalcy she thought she had. She rushes out the cafeteria doors, then through the glass entryway and out into the parking lot. She knows she can’t come back, she knows this is the end. She walks down the sidewalk, away from her car, her school, her life, she has to get through this Tuesday. She has to find the right lettuce.
Worlds 