The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  Susanna was sipping a can of Slim-Fast and pretending to listen to her partner that day for cafeteria duty, Nathan Guthrie, who was on a tirade about state physical fitness mandates, when there was a scream and a crash over in the eighth-grade section. She was on her feet before Nathan could even furrow his forehead, and though the students had now erupted with shouting and laughter, some even standing on the benches to get a better look at the action, Susanna could spot the epicenter of the disturbance almost instantly: by the windows, where the popular crowd gathered. Here a knot of students had formed, and Susanna worked her way over, calling, “Knock it off! Take your seats!” and getting ignored by practically everyone.

  She had to elbow her way through the circle of gathered students before she could see what had happened, and when she finally broke the barrier of bodies, pushing Monty Higgins to the side with a sharp exhalation of breath and getting ready to yell at the lot of them, she stopped in her tracks. Everyone fell quiet around her, and the quiet made its way to the back of the room as quickly as the shouting had, the quiet somehow worse than the noise had been. She’d expected to find a couple of boys hitting one another or wrestling on the floor, but there were no boys. There was only the figure of a girl, down on her knees with her hands covering her head as though the principal had called a tornado drill, battered with food from today’s lunch line. It was all there: the soupy spaghetti with ground beef, the tossed salad and Thousand Island dressing, chocolate pudding. A piece of garlic bread clung to the filth on her back like a tick. “What is this?” Susanna said helplessly, and the girl lifted her head at the sound of her voice. It was Emily Houchens, her eyes huge and unblinking, and Susanna felt a chill race through her until the girl suddenly broke with sobbing, and then there was no chill, only heartbreak and horror.

  “Who did this?” Susanna said, turning to each face in the circle, but it was obvious who had done it; they’d all done it. They’d picked this poor girl out for some reason and pelted her with their uneaten lunches, and those who hadn’t done the throwing had stood on their seats and watched, screaming with laughter. She walked from student to student, forcing eye contact, jabbing the shoulders of the ones who were biting back smirks. She reached Christopher Shelton, finally, and he had the good sense to look at his feet in apparent remorse—but Susanna recognized the taunt in his arched eyebrow, noted how he crossed his arms behind his back and bobbed on his toes a little, as though he were holding back laughter. “Is this funny to you?” she said, and he shook his head vigorously left and right.

  Nathan finally joined her, puffing up into coach mode and pointing his thick forefinger. “I want to know who started this,” he yelled, and the students bristled more under his demand than they had Susanna’s. They liked him. They feared him. The smirks slipped from their faces now, she noticed enviously, and a couple even flushed.

  “Well?” He circled the students as Susanna had, and she yielded to him, ashamed of herself. Her role in this was painfully clear. She went to the nearest napkin dispenser and pulled out a thick wad, then approached Emily, trying not to let the disgust she felt show on her face. She placed her low-heeled dress shoes carefully between streaks of tomato sauce, gathered her skirt a bit with her free hand, and stooped next to Emily, who was still leaking tears but no longer sobbing.

  “I’m just going to try to clean some of this off,” she whispered. Emily didn’t say anything or look at her. So Susanna took one of the napkins in her hand and started using it, awkwardly, to pull strands of spaghetti off of the girl’s shoulders and hair, sick at the cheerfully bland smells of canned pasta and sweet instant pudding. She threw the first soiled napkin on the floor—she wasn’t the janitor, she would not start sweeping this mess up—and then tried, best she could, to sop up the bigger smears of filth, feeling exposed, as though these students were witnessing her in an act of intimacy. There were other teachers on the scene now, and then Wally Burton with his shouted promises of detention and restricted cafeteria privileges, and Susanna thought she heard a few sobs that weren’t Emily’s, and that softened her a little, made her think of Abby. But these weren’t children. They were eighth graders a semester away from high school. Teenagers.

  “May I go to the bathroom?” Emily said hoarsely, startling Susanna.

  “Of course you can,” she said. She fished in her pocket for her keys, removing one from the ring. “Use the teachers’ lounge. I’ll come find you when I’m done here.”

  The students pulled away as Emily passed, their faces a mix of disgust and guilt and a dazed sort of confusion, as though they were under a spell.

  Wally Burton waved over Susanna, Nathan, and the two other teachers who’d dropped in. “Rita”—he pointed to the middle-aged woman on Susanna’s right—“get the seventh grade out of here and explain to their teachers why they’re coming to class early. Tell them I’ll make an announcement later on.”

  “Will do,” she said.

  “And send the janitors over!” Wally called after her as she left.

  Nathan crossed his arms and huffed, the action almost feminine. “Damn,” he muttered. “Great day in the morning.”

  “You see who started this?” Wally said. Behind him, the eighth graders were clustering in groups of three or four, holding their own whispered council. They should have been separated already, Susanna thought. They should have been put at different tables and made silent, not given time to compare notes.

  “It was a riot by the time I made it to this half of the room,” she said. “But I’m sure it started at the table by the windows.”

  Wally turned to Nathan. “That sound right to you?”

  “Susanna was the first one out here,” he said. “You better take her word on it.” She didn’t know if he was standing up for her or covering his own ass, but Susanna felt a rare moment of gratitude to Nathan Guthrie.

  “All right, then,” Wally said. He walked back to the center of the room, holding up his hand for silence. The eighth graders, a group of about ninety, stared. “Which of you were sitting at that table?” He pointed.

  No one moved.

  Wally paced in front of the students, his shiny black loafers making intimidating clicks—or what Susanna supposed he hoped were intimidating clicks—on the asbestos tiles. “I’ll punish every one of you if I have to. You all deserve it.” He stopped in front of Sally McIntosh, who paled. Sally wasn’t one of the popular girls in the grade. She was best known as the class’s only diabetic, her silver bracelet with the red cross flashing on her wrist when she raised her hand, her ritual afternoon snack of Lance peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers so reliable that Susanna could have set her watch by the sound of tearing cellophane. Sally hadn’t been anywhere near the window table.

  “What about you?” Wally said, staring her down. “Did you start this?”

  “No!” Sally said, trembling. Her eyes shifted involuntarily to where Christopher Shelton and his friends were gathered. “I wasn’t even over there!”

  Wally’s expression was cunning. He was a short man with narrow shoulders and a slumped protrusion of stomach hanging over the waistband of his khakis. His button-down shirt was rolled up on the forearms and unbuttoned at the collar, his cheap-looking red tie yanked loose and dangling, and there was something simian about the odd crook of his arms and the way he put his knuckles rather than his palms on his hips as he talked.

  “So did you try to help Emily?”

  Sally’s eyes were damp. She pinched her lips together and shook her head.

  “How does suspension sound to you?” He was practically smiling. “A week, maybe? You and every person after you who plays dumb?”

  She was crying now. She put her hands out in front of her, palms open, and waved them—Susanna thought at first she was pleading.

  “I didn’t do any of it!” she said. She shook her open hands again. “See?” She turned to Susanna and Nathan now, still holding out her hands. “See?”

  And it hit Susanna like that, so quickly
and obviously that she wanted to kick herself for her stupidity. “Their hands, Wally,” she said. And then, because she knew it would take him another beat or two to catch up, she called “Show me your hands” to the group and made a beeline first to Christopher Shelton.

  He’d wiped them, of course. But Susanna could make out the faint red of tomato sauce in the lines of his palm, and there were streaks of red and brown on the sides of his trousers. “Your mother didn’t teach you not to wipe your hands on your pants?” she said, motioning. She couldn’t help herself.

  He shrugged.

  Susanna leaned in, lowering her voice. “Don’t you feel ashamed at all?”

  He shrugged again, but Susanna thought she saw a shadow cross his features. His lips pulled at the corners, his eyebrows dipped down. He swallowed.

  “Go over there,” she said, motioning to a table in the corner. He did, not getting there in a hurry, and when he was seated he folded his hands on the tabletop as if he were about to deliver the State of the Union address. Susanna looked at the dozens of eighth graders left in the lunchroom: some wide-eyed, almost panicked, others scowling behind crossed arms, the rest keenly interested, confident enough in their relative innocence to watch with curiosity as the ones with stained hands were identified and sent to separate tables, to stew. The group of guilty students assembling by the windows was enough to make any small-town schoolteacher sick with dread. There was Leanna Burke, class valedictorian, whose father was one of the most prominent attorneys in town. She seemed the picture of nonchalance—her slim, tan legs were crossed prettily at the ankles—but her foot planted on the floor was twitching nervously, and she was tearing with relish into the cuticle on one of her thumbs. Maggie Stevenson’s mother taught at the elementary school; Maggie stared straight ahead, eyes unfocused, and wrung her smeared hands in her lap. Craig Wilson, doodling on the sole of his high-top sneakers with a black pen, kept casting furtive glances Christopher’s way. He was already starting for the high school baseball team, and Dale, who cared about such things, had told Susanna that he’d almost certainly get drafted to the majors, and maybe even right out of high school. He was the kind of kid that a whole community rode its dearest hopes upon, and Susanna took comfort in one small favor: at least it wasn’t spring.

  There they all were, a baker’s dozen, trying to whisper—“Quiet,” Susanna hissed—to wipe the drying food off their hands: RMS’s best and brightest, the students who would pepper the “Superlatives” page of the yearbook when copies arrived next May. And poor, chubby, filthy Emily Houchens still awaited her in the faculty restroom.

  2.

  Emily was humming to herself when Susanna found her. It was an eerie sound: tuneless and phlegm choked, her breath hitching each time she tossed a wet, filthy wad of paper towels into the wastebasket. She had slipped out of the oversized flannel shirt she was wearing and now stood in front of the sink in a tank top and high-waisted blue jeans, which were buttoned so tightly around her midriff that Susanna wondered how she could sit comfortably. Her small breasts, which would have been hidden by the flannel, now puckered, childlike, through the thin cotton of her tank, and her stomach, rounded with fat like a toddler’s, gave her the paradoxical illusion of age, as though she were an old man slumped in front of a shaving mirror, hot towel around his neck. What a sad figure she cut with her stout little body and cheap clothes, her grimed hair, which, at its best, was a brown so lusterless that it could seem almost gray in some light. There was a latent prettiness in Emily, though. She had pale, baby-fine skin, a straight nose with a delicate upturn, grayish-green eyes, and naturally long lashes. She’d never be a beautiful woman, but she might one day be a woman whose inner light—the sensitivity and intellect—would animate these better features. Susanna hoped that with all her heart.

  Emily cranked out a couple of feet of brown paper from the dispenser, folded it methodically, dampened it under the tap. She started wiping the hairs at her temple, facing the mirror but not appearing to actually see herself. The broken humming continued.

  “How are you feeling?” Susanna said.

  Emily shrugged, working the towel across her hairline.

  Susanna went to her and took the towel, turning Emily away from the mirror. She held Emily’s chin firm, the way she would have held Abby’s, and started blotting the towel, working fast, thinking that only a shower would help at this point but wanting to startle the girl out of the creepy trance she’d worked herself into. A tear leaked out of the corner of Emily’s eye and rolled back toward her earlobe; Susanna blotted it, too.

  “Will you tell me what happened?” Susanna whispered.

  Emily’s throat worked. She nodded her chin against Susanna’s hand.

  “Who started it?”

  She pinched off another flow of tears. “Christopher,” she said.

  Susanna nodded. “Do you know what set him off?”

  Emily’s eyes shot to the left and back. “No,” she said.

  Susanna let go of her face. “You sure?”

  Emily nodded, eyes on the ground, and Susanna knew that she was being lied to.

  “Okay, then,” she said. She wouldn’t push her. “Is there someone who can pick you up from school? Mr. Burton’s given you permission to go home for the day.”

  “No. My dad’s at work and my mom can’t drive.”

  “He couldn’t take off work for a few minutes?”

  She shook her head. “They’ll dock him points.”

  “We’ll get you a cab,” Susanna said. “Is that better than waiting here until the buses run? You could stay in my class all afternoon if you want.”

  “The cab’s all right,” Emily said. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

  They parted ways fifteen minutes later. Susanna had given her fifth period a practice open-response question so that she could wait with Emily on the school’s front steps, and she knew that they were probably all just talking in her absence about the scene at the cafeteria, but she didn’t much care. She handed the cabdriver a five-dollar bill from her own purse. “Her mother’s expecting her,” she told him.

  Emily had slid into the car’s backseat, windbreaker hiding her stained shirt, unraveling rayon backpack resting on her knees. Her eyes were damp and swollen. She looked as though she had blood under her fingernails.

  “You come to me if you ever need me,” Susanna said, hunching to see through the rolled-down window. “If you need a break or quiet time or whatever, just come to my classroom. I’ll excuse it with Mr. Burton.”

  “OK,” Emily repeated. And, huskily: “Thank you, Mrs. Mitchell.”

  Susanna swallowed hard. “Anytime, sweetheart.” She wasn’t usually like this with students. She didn’t talk about her own life, she didn’t make jokes, she didn’t give hugs. It was getting to where those things could land her in trouble, anyhow. But she reached through the window and squeezed Emily’s hand, and when the cab pulled off she had to turn and wipe a tear of her own quickly away.

  3.

  The school day passed slowly. Susanna was finally slipping into her light coat and heading for the door when Wally Burton blocked her path, his tie now loose, his thin hair wagging sadly from where he’d raked his fingers through it. “Damn Burke girl’s dad is raising hell,” he said. “I hadn’t even gotten out all of what she’d done before he started hollering lawsuit.”

  Susanna huffed, exasperated. “Of all the nerve.”

  “I’m going to give them all a day’s suspension and a week in ALC,” Wally said, stiffening his back and lifting his chin, as if he were prepared to brook no argument. ALC, the “Alternative Learning Center,” was a trailer on the school’s campus where punished students were kept in isolation from their peers. “I think that’s fair.”

  “One day? Come on, you’re not serious.”

  He had the decency to look sheepish. “Burke was demanding only a week in ALC, so this is a compromise.”

  “It’s not even meeting halfway!” Her voice cracked.

/>   “He said that ALC’s more punishment to them, and I think that’s right. I mean, it’s not high school. Their GPAs don’t mean anything here. They stay at home and they’re just going to think they got rewarded with a vacation.”

  “Wally.” Susanna stopped, took a deep breath. She put out a hand, a “stop” gesture. “You saw what they did to Emily. It was, it was like”—she waved helplessly—“like a lynch mob or something.”

  “Now come on, that’s over the top.”

  “Well, tell me this. Just tell me this. If ALC’s more punishment to these kids, and if their GPAs don’t matter, why is this Burke guy pushing so hard for it?”

  “On principle,” Wally said without a second’s hesitation. “He just wants his way. He thinks a long suspension would be embarrassing for the kids.”

  “God forbid,” she said bitterly.

  “I know it’s no fun seeing him get his way on this one. And am I protecting my hind end? Absolutely.”

  Susanna fought rolling her eyes.

  “But he’s right about the ALC thing and he doesn’t even know it. We can make it hard on them here. You can assign them whatever you want. I’ll back you up. They get to do no extracurriculars this week, they can’t ride the bus, they can’t go to any athletic events.”

  “They can’t go to a middle school football game? They can’t ride the damn bus, Wally? These kids don’t use the bus.” She laughed, sharp and humorless. “I wash my hands of this. I dealt with Christopher’s mother last week, if you recall. She didn’t like her son’s punishment then, and I didn’t get a whole lot of backing up from you.”

  “This is different,” he said.

  “No, it’s worse.” She glanced around to see if they were being watched, then lowered her voice. “If this had been Thad Morrow and some of his friends, you’d have suspended them for at least a week, and you might have even expelled them. You and I both know it.”

  The redness, his blush of awkwardness, drained from Wally’s face. The set of his mouth hardened. “I don’t appreciate what you’re implying. It isn’t fair.”