The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  I poll others for advice: my parents, friends, other teachers, my therapist.

  “Can’t you have him transferred to a different class?” asks my mom.

  “What are you doing for self-care?” asks my therapist.

  “Is the student a white male?” asks the school’s learning specialist, before giving me a printout of the same article I already read online.

  I visit the principal’s office, with its always open door. He sits me down in a leather chair normally reserved for parents.

  “The key is classroom management. Try to be firm.” He makes a fist to indicate firmness. “And have you tried deflecting with humour? A little humour can go a long way,” he advises.

  “When I have a difficult student, I just shower him with compassion,” says the other English teacher, with concerned eyebrows. I’ve seen her ratemyteachers.com profile, where anonymous students have evaluated the size of her ass, the quality of her breasts.

  * * *

  We read a story in class about a woman who has a double mastectomy, a term Caleb doesn’t know. After Sarah McIntosh explains it to him, Caleb asks, “So she had her boobs chopped off?”

  “She had cancer,” says Sarah McIntosh. “My—”

  But Caleb doesn’t let her finish.

  “Caleb, Sarah was talking,” I interject.

  Sarah tries again: “My aunt—”

  But it’s too late. Caleb forcibly takes the floor and holds it. One by one, the girls in the class begin to say something, but he interrupts them all. I shut him down repeatedly and request that he give someone else a chance to speak. He refers to the character only as “the girl with the chopped-off boobs.”

  “This is a real thing that happens to people,” Colleen tells him.

  Sarah McIntosh crosses her arms and doesn’t try to speak again.

  I ask Caleb to stay after class. As he approaches my desk, I realize I’ve again made the error of standing behind it, allowing him to block my exit. I make a mental note to move the desk tomorrow, to create more exit routes.

  “Caleb,” I say, directly but calmly, as the internet has advised. “It’s great that you’re so engaged in class discussion, but I need you to work on your professionalism—”

  “How much more professional can I be?” he asks, his voice rising as his eyes dart wildly. “I participate, like, all the time. I’m not failing this class, am I? My participation grade must be really good, right?”

  I roll the chair to position it between us, grasping the back of it with both my hands. “It’s important that we share the space and give others a chance to participate, too. Part of participation is listening—”

  “I listen! Are you saying I don’t listen?” He starts pacing a short path back and forth beside my desk, his shoulder bag swinging with him each time he turns. I have to get around him to reach the door.

  “Not all language is appropriate for every setting. I’m just asking you to pause and think before you make a comment in class. It’s okay if you don’t express an opinion on every—”

  “Am I, like, in trouble? I have a lot of opinions.”

  “As I said, I appreciate that you’re so engaged. But there are some people in the class we rarely get to hear from—”

  “I can’t help it if I have a lot of opinions.” He places his hands flat on the side of my desk and pushes down so hard it slides forward under his red knuckles, almost hitting the wall.

  I stuff my papers into my bag, not hiding my haste. “I have to get to my next class.” He doesn’t move. To get to the door, I must walk out from behind the desk and pass him. I count to three. I count to three again. Then I hold my breath and go. My arm brushes his as I pass, and I recoil but keep going. I know he’s behind me, but I don’t stop. I’m dreading and anticipating a large hand reaching for me, grabbing at my shoulder, at my waist. I hear the classroom door slam. I work up my nerve and turn around: “Caleb, please stop following me.”

  “I’m not following you—”

  “If you want to discuss this further, we can meet with the guidance counsellor, or you can bring in your parents and we’ll have a chat about—”

  “My parents?”

  “I have to leave now,” I say. Then I turn and walk as fast as I can down the hallway, my shoes scraping blisters across the backs of my heels. I walk past the door of my next class and keep walking until I’m at the school’s front doors. I go straight to my car, almost running, though it’s morning and I have a class starting momentarily.

  He’s behind me.

  “Are you going to call my parents?” he asks. “Miss, where are you going?”

  I get in the car, shut the door, lock it.

  He’s right by the driver’s-side window. “Are you going to call my parents?” he says again, louder, through the glass.

  I pull out of the parking spot as his palm lands hard against the glass. I drive around the block. I’m ten minutes late to second period.

  * * *

  The Grade 9 dance is like every high school dance. Fourteen-year-olds gyrate to music I can’t quite identify, as its insistent bass radiates up through my feet. The gymnasium lights are off, and a spotlight scans the room as though seeking criminals. It flashes on the handful of kids standing in a loose line against the wall, holding their elbows or making half-hearted conversation, pretending they don’t want to dance. Dress code compromises abound. Black bicycle shorts peek out from a girl’s rising hemline as she hops to the beat. A boy takes his shirt off and his skinny chest undulates like a snake. A large standing fan—typically used to air out the gym after basketball practice—spins across the crowd, circulating sweaty air. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do—do teachers dance? Only popular and well-liked teachers dance. I am not going to dance. My job here is just to stand and watch the spectacle, confiscate alcohol if necessary. Jeffers does a dance-walk through the gym that fades as he arrives at the soda and chips. He’s surrounded by a group of girls, including two from my first-period class—Madeleine and Renée. Four weeks in, I’ve finally learned the names of my eighty students. I wander over and put some potato chips in a napkin and hold it in my cupped hand. I eat a chip to have something to do.

  “Mr. Jeffers, did you ever go to the Lobster Trap?” asks Madeleine, who is standing beside him.

  “The Lobster Trap?” says Renée. “Seriously?”

  “That might’ve been before my time,” says Jeffers.

  “And then there’s Ralph’s, of course.” Madeleine tips her head to one side, exposing her neck.

  These are the names of Halifax strip clubs.

  “Sooo gross,” says Renée. “Who would want to take their clothes off in a place called the Lobster Trap? Like, which is the lobster and which is the trap?”

  I move a little closer to them, so I’m between Madeleine and Renée. “Interesting choice of topic,” I tell them. I eat another chip.

  Jeffers shrugs. He’s attractive, I realize—at least, the kind of attractive that teenage girls have crushes on. His hair is a soft brown; his face is radiant and dimpled. I wonder if he exfoliates.

  “So, Mr. Jeffers, have you been to a strip club before?” asks Madeleine. She turns her body towards Jeffers, so they’re in a cocoon of space.

  “No comment,” he says, to a burst of laughter.

  How many teachers are lechers? One in a hundred? One in ten? In teachers college, after we were told to keep a desk between us and our students, a guy behind me said, in an artificial whisper, “The desk is to hide your erection,” and the whole class erupted in laughter. Every television show I’ve seen set in a high school also features a teacher prowling the hallways for nubile flesh. Even Buffy toyed with that trope, though the teacher turned out to be a paranormal praying mantis.

  When a slow song comes on, Dean comes over to ask Renée to dance. I see Caleb across the room. He has replac
ed his usual T-shirt with a dark purple button-down, not unlike the one Walter White wears after he turns to a life of crime. He strides purposefully towards an unsuspecting girl, opens his mouth, says maybe five words. In response, the girl scrunches her face into a question, and then into disbelief. He moves right into her personal space as she tries to escape into the concrete wall. Caleb scowls in dejection—or anger?—and hunches his shoulders, ape-like. He pivots, sees me, and starts heading in my direction, arms swinging.

  I crush my napkin in my palm. Jeffers’s face grows curious as I turn abruptly away from the group. Ignoring him, I rush towards the door farthest away from Caleb, and out and down the hallway to the washroom. Inside a stall, I breathe rhythmically for five minutes, then ten. They will wonder where I’ve gone. When some girls enter the washroom, chattering and giggling, I press the flush and exit the stall. I wash my hands and dry them with a paper towel. I walk back down the hallway. It’s empty, yet I walk faster, imagining him waiting by a locker for me.

  I stand through two more hours of fourteen-year-olds dancing. Because of his height, I can watch Caleb’s head bobbing above the others as he dances alone at the periphery. During slow dances, he weaves over to the wall, then stands there twitching with an energy he can’t seem to contain. Other kids wind their arms around each other’s necks and waists and I wonder which ones are falling in love. I eat two squares of Sobeys sheet cake from a flimsy paper plate. I shift my weight from foot to foot to keep the blood flowing, purposely staying offbeat so that this isn’t mistaken for dancing.

  The dance finally ends at eleven. When I search for Jeffers, the group of girls around him has dispersed, except for Madeleine. In the dim gymnasium, her face sparkles with makeup. She gazes up at him, and I don’t think she realizes he’s a solar eclipse. She’s wearing a white bodycon dress she must have bought for the occasion, with sleeves like orchid petals. I picture her at the Halifax Shopping Centre, popping into a Le Château dressing room as her mom stands outside shaking her head. There’s something sweet about kids who dress up for school dances. This dress, chosen to make her seem older, does the opposite. Her collarbones stick out at the base of her reedy throat.

  Kids start to leave. The back of Caleb’s purple shirt disappears out the gym doors. I want to see who comes to pick him up, but I stay inside the gym, scrunching up the plastic tablecloths now dotted with tortilla chip crumbs, stuffing them into garbage bins. I fold the metal chairs scattered around the room’s perimeter and stack them on a rolling cart. I kill time. Jeffers and Madeleine stand under a brown paper banner painted with Grade 9 Welcome Dance in the wobbling hands of budding artists. The parent volunteers head out, and the last scatter of students exits. I walk out with them to the hallway and help the caretakers clean up, though they try to wave me away.

  I wait until I see Jeffers say goodbye and turn in the direction of our office—Madeleine’s smile falters but recovers quickly. Then I wait in the dark of my car, until I see a mom in a minivan drive up. Madeleine gets in. They drive away.

  I wait another minute. Then I drive away, too.

  * * *

  On Monday, we review procedures for the lockdown drill that will happen on Tuesday morning. “When we hear the announcement, we’ll turn off the lights and shut off all our devices. That means phones off.” I look pointedly at a student who’s checking his hair in his phone screen. He puts it away.

  “In a real emergency, wouldn’t we keep our phones on to communicate with our parents?”

  “Yeah, or the police.”

  “The protocol says devices off,” I tell them. “We’ll close the blinds and barricade the door. Then we’ll all go under our desks and wait while security clears the building. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and then we’ll get back to the lesson.”

  I spend the rest of the class grading short stories as the students complete a quiz. I brush eraser grits off the page with the side of my hand, and begin to read Caleb’s story:

  “She always graded in pencil because she was too nice for red pen.” Good characterization, I scribble, in pencil. “She was barely older than he was. He couldn’t even believe she was the teacher.” I know who this story is about. How could I not? In the story, the narrator is the teacher’s favourite. “She always answered questions after class.” In the story, the narrator is the smartest kid in the room, dazzling the teacher with his insights. I write, Point of view: How does he know she is dazzled?

  In the story, the narrator and the teacher exchange eye contact as other students say idiotic things. “The girls in the class were superfissial. They wore way too much makeup. But not her.” In the story, the teacher gives the narrator a ride home after school. In the car, they discover they have everything in common. She parks in front of his house. She reaches over and undoes his seatbelt. I put down my pencil. He brings the teacher inside his house, upstairs to his bedroom. Nobody is home. “She was eager,” the story says. They undress. “She was experienced. She knew exactly what she was doing. He realized she was a whore like the rest of them.” The scene continues for a page. “Her nipples,” the story says, “were the colour of shit.”

  I shove the pages away from me. My pencil clatters to the ground, and the students all look up to see what’s happening. The room is silent, and my hands are shaking; my stomach is a centrifuge. I need to get to my office. I need to vomit. I get up, grab my keys but leave my things. “How much more time do we have, Miss?” I hear someone call after me.

  In the hallway, I hear the clomping of his shoes. The halls are empty; everyone else is in class. I pass by other classrooms and think of banging on the doors for help, twenty-two student faces turning my way. My office isn’t far. If I can make it there, I can shut the door and lock it and call somebody and ask them what to do. I turn into the area where my office is. The key is already in my hand, between my fingers, ready.

  I unlock the door, open it, enter, and Caleb is behind me.

  He grabs the edge of the door so I can’t close it. “Miss, I have a question.”

  “Caleb, please leave.” I step backwards, holding my key out in front of me. The office is cramped, and my back is already up against Jeffers’s desk. I try to remember self-defence moves from a class I took years ago. Poke his eyes in with two fingers. Knee him in the groin. Shove the base of your palm up into his chin. Stomp your heel down on the bridge of his foot. Use your strongest body parts against his weakest. I won’t freeze. I won’t hesitate.

  He pushes his way inside, closes the door, and stands in front of it.

  “No!” I shout. “Get the hell out of here! Please.” At please, my voice cracks.

  Poke his eyes. Knee his groin. Stomp on his foot.

  “I just want to ask a question!” His eyes bulge down at me. Only now does he seem to realize how scared I am. “Miss? Why are you crying?…I’m not…”

  “Please just go.”

  The door opens.

  “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but I heard…” It’s Jeffers. He’s holding a clipboard and wearing a lanyard. “What’s happening here?” He looks quizzically at Caleb, and then at my wet face, and down to the key I’m grasping like a knife. He assesses the situation in an instant, grabs Caleb by the shoulder, and hoists him back into the hallway. I fall into my chair. Jeffers hauls him away.

  Alone, I wipe my face with a Starbucks napkin I find in my desk drawer. I breathe in to a count of four, hold it for seven seconds, breathe out to a count of eight, eyes on the world map the geography teacher has taped to the wall. She’s used a rainbow of pushpins to impale the cities she’s been to—there seem to be hundreds of them, spanning at least forty countries. There’s even a pin in Mongolia. I wonder if she took these trips alone. She’s the kind of woman who would—the brave kind.

  Several minutes later, Jeffers returns, knocking gently before entering.

  “Thank you,” I say. I’m embarrassed. Suddenly
the situation seems much smaller.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me, gently. “I took him to the guidance office.” He sits at his desk. He clasps his hand over the clip of his lanyard, unclasps it. “Anyway, I owed you for the other night.” I lift my face. “At the Grade 9 dance. That girl, Madeleine. I…I didn’t know how to handle it. Thanks for sticking around. These girls”—he shakes his head—“one of them makes up a story and it can destroy your life.”

  I’ve arranged the shelves above my desk with books I’ve brought in from home. They’re almost full. It occurs to me that the books and I could be in this office for another forty years.

  “I was looking out for her,” I say, matching his gentle tone.

  Jeffers pauses. Then he nods, meeting my eyes.

  * * *

  We crouch under the desks. We turn off the lights, the classroom computer, the overhead projector, our phones. We barricade the door. I don’t mention that I’ve noticed the door opens outward, and barricading it is a meaningless exercise. When a student mutters, “Why do we need a school shooting drill in Halifax?” I don’t tell him that drills are a school’s insurance policy, that nowhere is safe. Caleb is under his desk, too. He makes eye contact with me from across the room. I look away.

  His story is with the principal. His parents have been called. A meeting has been scheduled.

  We close the blinds. Some slats are missing—a person could see us if they wanted to, our faces peering up, targets. The PA system blares, “This is an emergency lockdown alert. Remain calm. Do not leave your place of shelter unless advised to do so. This is an emergency lockdown alert.” We crouch under desks in the dark and wait for instructions. So much time passes I wonder if instructions will come at all, or if we’ll just stay here forever, in this unprotected space. Nobody makes a sound.

  Good Enough Never Is