“Um…how many lesbians are there in the private school world?” I was wide-eyed.
“They’re not lesbians. They’re just lesbian chic.” Damian winked.
“What the hell is lesbian chic?” I hated how Damian seemed to know everything. And how he purposefully responded in enigmatic phrases that forced me to beg for more information. What kind of person honestly believed that lesbian chic was a perfectly understandable explanation?
“Lesbian chic, Anna,” Damian paused dramatically, “is heterosexual girls who take girl-kissing-girl pictures to get all the boys excited.”
“Oh…”
“Works for me.” He flashed me a wicked grin.
“Damian! STOP!” This was getting out of hand.
“Yeah, crazy, isn’t it?” Damian shrugged agreeably, logging off. “These punks post all this compromising stuff and they have no idea that any teacher with half a wit can log on and see what they do."
“But how do you have access to all these students’ walls? Don’t they have to friend you first?”
“Nope,” Damian announced with undisguised glee. “Half these geniuses we teach never alter their privacy settings. With our Langdon teacher accounts we can go on and see their pages, what they write to each other on their walls, and, of course, the holy grail—the pictures!”
“So, you actually check this stuff?” I asked, torn between thinking Damian was the biggest loser in the world and desperately wanting to do some spying of my own.
“Hell yes! Like last night I was just checking up on one of my students’ Facebook page because he honestly looks high every time he comes to class, and sure enough there were about a dozen pictures of him holding a joint and getting high with his friends this weekend. And then he said something about this kid Jake’s tutor being hot, so I clicked on Jake thinking I’d see Randi’s face, and then, well, then you know,” Damian looked me in the eye. “So you really got into the swing of things, huh. You learned fast, I have to say.”
I couldn’t quite tell if he was judging me, congratulating me, or condemning me, but a bell rang and a few older students walked into the library so our chat was clearly over. I followed him wordlessly out of the library and then we parted ways, my blonde hair attracting every student’s attention as it bounced and shone and reflected off all the lockers. But I was over the blonde hair already. I wanted quiet time to go on Facebook. Did Katie Carleton have a page? Did my students? Could these kids get arrested? Did the police know? Did the parents of these kids know about this…bastion of information? So many questions!
I couldn’t wait to confront Jake in our next session. I had wrestled with the idea of not telling him and just spying on him, but I also had my self-respect. This time the doorman did not bat an eye as I walked past him; nobody asked where I was headed. The hazing period was over and I was clearly Herring staff. Once again I was led to his room by a fully uniformed maid. And once again Mrs. Herring wasn’t home. Jake’s room was empty but I could hear his shower running. How transparent was this kid? His need to be in a state of seminakedness at all times was unbelievable.
Refusing to get ruffled, I went to his desk, clicked on the Internet, and opened it to his Facebook account. Smirking back at me was Jake’s own face. Where the hell did my picture go?
“Dude! What are you doing!”
I whirled around to face Jake, dripping and indignant in his white towel.
“How did you get on that?”
“I have my ways. I saw the picture you posted of me. Not cool.” I tried as hard as I could to remain annoyed, but Jake’s right-out-of-the-shower move had me a little distracted.
“You should thank me for that. Do you know how many people are going to call you now?” he asked seriously, shaking his head and reaching for a T-shirt.
“Aren’t you in the least bit curious how I can get onto your page?” I asked.
He paused for a minute and then shook his head. “Nah, I mean, whatever. I had heard some teachers knew how to do it, but who cares. Let ’em know how we roll on the weekends. It’s funny.” He sat down on the chair beside me, pulled off his towel (thankfully there were boxers underneath), and looked right into my eyes.
“You look different.”
“Yeah, I colored my hair.” I touched it self-consciously and felt myself blush.
“I like it.”
“Thanks.”
“A lot.”
“Shall we get started on the Edith Wharton paper?” I was relieved to find that at the mention of the paper, Jake was sixteen again, and completely helpless.
“Yeah, we better…Anna, I can’t bring myself to read the thing. I can’t. It sucks. My mom wants to talk to you about that when we’re done anyway.”
“About what?” I asked suspiciously.
“About prereading the books I have to read so then you can just tell me the story, you know, verbally. I’m just a lot more verbal,” Jake responded seriously. “She’ll probably offer to pay you. My last tutor got a grand a book.” A grand a book?! Hello highlights!
“What happened to her?” I asked as casually as possible.
“She was boring,” he responded evasively. “And oh, Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell my mother about the Facebook thing. She still hasn’t figured it out. She thinks it’s, like, a place pedophiles go to find teenage girls. They don’t know we all have our pages.”
“It is a place pedophiles go,” I retorted.
“Yeah, well, good for them. Just don’t tell my mom, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” I figured for $1,000 a novel (could I ask for $1,500?) Elizabeth Herring could be kept in the dark about the Facebook thing.
Like clockwork, her phone call came that evening as I was sitting down to plan the next day’s lesson.
“Anna, dear, it’s Mimsy,” she whispered. If this woman wasn’t already so wealthy, she could make a killing as a phone sex operator.
“How are you?” I asked politely, relishing the fact that I wasn’t nervous. She was obviously calling about my prereading Jake’s books, and I was looking forward to how she would manage this as a perfectly respectable and normal request.
“Jake just adores you, dear. He finds you so intelligent and warm,” Mimsy gushed. “He…we…are both so lucky to have you in our lives.”
Classic.
“I feel very lucky, too,” I affirmed, going through a pile of menus. I still hadn’t ordered dinner, and this conversation could go on for a while.
“I heard Jake spoke to you about his…dyslexia,” Mimsy breathed the last word as it if were a rare form of cancer.
“No, he didn’t mention that.” I refused to make this easy for her.
“Oh, dear, the poor boy must just be so…embarrassed. What destroys his father and me is that simply for this one fact, a brilliant boy like Jake is going to be hurt academically. It’s been a Herring family struggle for so long,” Mimsy sighed tragically.
“I had a friend in high school who was dyslexic,” I said truthfully. “But there are some wonderful programs he can—”
“Oh, Jake is much too embarrassed to go through all of that,” Mimsy dismissed. “His father and I were wondering if you could preread the books he has to prepare for English class so you could verbally cover them for him.”
“Would Jake read the books as well?”
“Of course he would, but one can never tell how much he…internalizes.”
Mimsy was a genius.
“Perhaps I can read them to him?” I shot back cleverly.
“Oh, dear, how embarrassing for him…It’s hard enough to be in his…predicament, but having to be read to as if he were in kindergarten would be so terrible for his fragile self-esteem, Anna. You do understand? We would of course pay you for however many hours it takes you to read these books.”
“Ms. Herring—”
“Mimsy.”
“Mimsy,” I echoed, “some of these books are quite hefty. They could take four, even
five hours to read.”
“Money is no object when one is talking about one’s children’s education.” Mimsy sighed nobly. “No object at all.”
Reading Jake Herring’s books, I realized, would allow me to move out of this apartment and into a doorman building. Have a nightlife. Pay back my parents for all the furniture. Perhaps even give Bridgette a run for her money. Reading Jake Herring’s books also went against everything I had believed in when first applying for a job as a teacher. I would be condoning a system of cheating. Even worse, I would be enabling a child to override the system just because his parents could afford it. I opened my mouth to tell Mimsy Herring that this proposal went against every moral fiber in my body.
Then I saw a roach the size of a puppy scurry across the living room floor and under my bed. I meant to scream, but what I said instead was, “I’ll do whatever it takes to help Jake.”
I needed to get out of this apartment, and Herring checks were my fastest ticket.
20
You’re making how much an hour?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Do you ride in on a pony?”
I glared at my father across from the turkey. Here we were, sitting at the same table we had initially had our first argument about teaching. Only this time, there was no argument. My parents were staring at me, mouths agape. My brother looked delighted.
“Can I get in on this action?”
“Shut up, Jonathan!” we shot back in unison at him, and he raised both arms in defense.
“Sorry, guys, but I’m becoming a teacher when I graduate.”
I shot my brother a dirty look and turned back to Dad. First he hadn’t believed that I could make a living off teaching in this country. Then he had felt sorry for me and bought me furniture. Now, finally, when I was telling him that I had found a way to pay the bills and maybe move to a decent apartment on my own, he still wasn’t happy.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I just don’t understand. It sounds illegal.”
“I agree with your father,” Mom chirped irritatingly, pouring gravy on my brother’s turkey and passing me the mashed potatoes. “Eat, honey.”
“I will NOT eat! God, Mom!” The world could be coming to an end and my mother would still find a way to offer a cookie with the gas mask.
“Let me get this straight, Anna. You get two hundred dollars an hour to sit down with other teachers’ students and do their homework?” Dad was not letting this go. Ever the businessman, he had this habit of questioning any topic that became his target until it lay dying, gasping for air on the kitchen table.
“I don’t do their homework,” I protested hotly. “I help.”
Jonathan guffawed and spat his Coke back into the glass. “Anna, honestly, that even sounds retarded. An Ivy League–educated teacher sitting in a room with some spoiled twelve-year-old and a single homework assignment doesn’t sound like helping.”
“Fuck you, Jonathan!”
“ANNA!” My parents both screamed.
“Okay, okay, sorry,” I muttered. I had gotten so used to hearing Katie curse around her parents that I had forgotten that I could be fifty years old and still be slapped if I so much as said “shit” around either one of mine.
“Awesome vocab, teach.” Jonathan smiled demurely and popped a sweet potato in his mouth. I hated Thanksgiving.
“Your brother is right, Anna. How come none of us knew about this before? This…this tutoring business? Finish your stuffing.” Mom was relentless.
“Mom, honestly. How much did any of us know about this private school world? I went in knowing nothing.” I briefly contemplated telling them the whole truth. That the more work I put into my lessons, the more the parents seemed to hate me. That I had never been more beloved or accepted than when I eased up on the teaching and wore the expensive clothes that tutoring afforded me.
“Anna, let me turn this around. Put yourself in a different pair of shoes,” Dad began, leaning forward.
“Dad, cut the Atticus Finch routine. I’m a great teacher, and tutoring is a fun thing on the side that allows me to shop a little. Period.”
He was undeterred.
“Think about your students being tutored by someone much like yourself. Pick any student in your class. Let’s call him Jack. Imagine that after school every day, Jack has Stanford-educated Jill come over and help him do the homework you assigned. Then you grade this perfect assignment and give Jack an A. Only it’s Jill’s assignment. So, how do you know if you’re really a good teacher? What if all the teachers in Manhattan are doing each other’s homework and none of the kids are learning anything at all?”
We were all silent.
“Jack and Jill went down the hill and Anna came tumbling after!” Jonathan interrupted, looking enormously pleased with himself.
I stared at my plate a little guiltily. I thought about how furious and betrayed I had felt the first time I had run into Randi and Benjamin at Starbucks. That had been only two months ago. How had I, in such a quick span of time, gotten over that incident? I had joined the enemy and was no better than Randi Abrahams now. Yet somehow, I had never felt more accepted by my students.
“Then, again…,” Jonathan began, raising his fork thoughtfully and finally serious, “what if all these Jills make seventy bucks a day? Honestly, if Anna and all these teachers can pull in a grand in an afternoon, I’m not sure what I would do.”
I looked at my brother gratefully. We were four years apart, and he was a freshman at Yale. Those four years allowed us enough distance that we could rag on each other and give each other a hard time, but we always came through for one another.
“A thousand dollars in an afternoon?” Apparently that was all Mom heard.
“Well, I’m not there yet,” I began, “but yeah, if I see Katie for an hour and a half and then Jake for a couple hours, I can make an easy seven hundred.”
“Hell, you should support all of us,” Dad joked, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “I just don’t like it, Anna. It doesn’t mean that I think what teachers make in this country is right. But—”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right!” Mom exclaimed fervently, pushing the cranberry sauce in my face.
Saturday night I was back in my apartment, still downcast from my long weekend at home. I had decided to come back to Manhattan early and do some retail therapy on Sunday to cheer myself up. The conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table had been repeated throughout the weekend, and it always ended in a stalemate. Dad was right, I couldn’t deny it…except to his face, of course. It did bug me that my students were probably turning in such perfect work because other teachers like me were doing it for them. But it also irritated me that, regardless of how much I put into my lessons or how carefully and promptly I graded the assignments, my students never responded to me in the same way they responded to Randi Abrahams. Until I started to morph into her.
Maybe that was it.
I needed to talk to Randi Abrahams. Really talk to her. Until now I hadn’t made a single friend in the faculty. Damian was constantly lurking with his sardonic comments, Sarah Waters always passed me with her Prozac-induced grin, and Dorothy Steeple’s weird habits continued to bug me. I had yet to find a real peer. Randi taught the same grade, the same kids, and appeared to be only a few years older than me. True, she had been nothing but cold to me at the beginning of the year, but I was willing to give it another shot. As a teacher I was lonely, but as a tutor I felt like I was lost at sea. Okay, maybe out at sea on a really expensive yacht.
My mother always told me that if you can articulate what you want, then the entire universe will conspire to get it for you. Too bad she didn’t write The Secret. The universe decided to pull through for me the very next day at the Chanel boutique.
It was the first time I had ever walked into a Chanel store with the intent of purchasing a handbag. Chanel was for window-shopping. Or splurging on a gossamer lip gloss. But it was the Sunday after a very depressing Thanksgiving holiday, and I
was quite certain that a quilted handbag upward of fifteen hundred dollars would do wonders to cheer me up.
“Welcome to Chanel,” the doorman said with a glint in his eye, as if he too knew that today was the day.
“I’d like to see totes,” I told the elegant saleswoman. A perfect leather Chanel tote to carry my schoolwork in.
“Of course.” She smiled, and began pulling down two of the softest bags imaginable in a black and a brown. The gold, interlocked Cs gleamed under the store’s lights and my heart skipped a beat.
“I like the brown,” a voice offered casually behind me. Randi Abrahams.
I couldn’t believe it. Had I literally conjured her up?
“It goes better with your boots. Black’s kind of harsh, you know?” Randi was being…nice? Charming, even! And helpful! And…smiling!
“The brown is cute,” I mumbled awkwardly, eyeing her chic figure clad in skinny jeans and high boots. Slung casually over her shoulder was the $3,000 shearling Chanel tote.
“I was just looking for sunglasses, but maybe I’ll get the brown, too. Unless you’re getting it for school?” Randi asked, looking genuinely interested in the bags before us.
“I was thinking…for school?” I managed weakly.
“Yes, it would be perfect!” Randi agreed, handling the bag and sticking her hand in its roomy insides. “Plenty of room to stuff grading and papers.”
The saleslady looked inquiringly at me, and I nodded. “I’ll take it.”
“I’ll take one, too,” Randi called from the sunglasses counter. “Don’t worry, Anna, I won’t be using it for school! You don’t mind, do you?”
I nodded dumbly. This was not at all how I had envisioned my Chanel encounter.
“Add these sunglasses,” Randi added, then looked at me brightly. “Fun, isn’t it? Are you free to grab a quick bite? It would be nice to finally get to know one another.”
“Sure,” I replied. We were buying the same bag! We were on equal footing! Why had I ever let this woman intimidate me?
Schooled Page 17