Everyone Remain Calm

by Megan Stielstra

  So I did like I did with the dining room table.

  PILL 4 SALE CHEAP

  Reply to: loopdloo@yahoo

  My insurance thinks I have a uterine bleeding problem so I pay $10 for Ortho Tri-Cyclen. My husband and I don’t need it because he got a vasectomy. We need money we are saving for a new deck. Will sell $20 per.

  Here’s the email I got back:

  The Beachwood, Sunday night, 10 P.M. I have red hair.

  I know. It’s shady as all hell.

  But you’ve got to understand: I couldn’t let it happen again.

  The Beachwood is a bar over by the Jewel. It’s a dive for sure, all dark, peeling plaster and neon signs. Dale and I went there sometimes ’cause the beers were cheap, but I never saw any other customers. The bartender was over sixty, with red lipstick colored outside the lines. She never said a word, just held up fingers for however many dollars we owed her. Dale would watch TV and I’d imagine pulling a key out of my coat and leaning across the bar. I insert it between the bartender’s red red lips and suddenly she starts talking, same as those dolls that need their strings pulled.

  “Can I ask you something?” she says, her voice two-packs-a-day, easily.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “What’cha doing with this goof?” she nods her head at Dale, who’s lost in whatever’s on. We haven’t spoken in hours. We haven’t spoken in months and I am alone in an empty bar.

  But that night, it’s not empty. That night, 10 P.M. on Sunday, I went to the Beachwood and could barely squeeze in it was so packed. I wondered if it was a bachelorette party, or a protest, ’cause everybody in there was a woman.

  “Is Sleater-Kinney playing or something?” I asked the lady pressed into my right. She had green hair and a tattoo on her neck.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m here for the pill.”

  “Me, too,” said the girl to my left. “You see any redheads?”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Is everybody here for the pill?”

  Lots of people heard that question, even over “Smooth Criminal” on the jukebox. A chorus of Yeah’s and I am’s! came from all around me. The soccer moms in Capri pants. The college students, sweatshirts embroidered in Greek. The teenagers, wide-eyed, watching their backs—and from there the voices erupted.

  “Who’s gonna get it?”

  “Me, I need it!”

  “Everybody needs it!”

  “Where’s the redhead?”

  They got louder, girls all up in each other’s faces, heads whipping from shoulder to shoulder like That’s my Ortho-tri-fucking-cyclin and I thought of movie scenes where the crowd panics and tramples itself to death. In the midst of it all, a woman stood on the bar and yelled, “Everybody, listen!” She wore a business suit, the skirt high on her thighs from climbing. Women like her come into Ace Hardware for do-it-yourself catalogues. “Is the person who posted on Craigslist here?” The group went quiet. Everyone looked around.

  “Okay,” said the woman after a few seconds. “We got screwed. We should all go home and—”

  “Fuck that!” yelled somebody in the crowd. “We came for the pill and we’re leaving with the pill!”

  Everybody cheered; somebody yelled, “How?”

  “There’s a clinic right up the street!” yelled somebody else. “They’ve got tons of samples!”

  It was well past midnight by that point, so maybe a couple hours of drinking had done its job. Maybe it was that freak mob-mentality you see on the news. Or maybe all the women in that bar had a story like mine, one we were trying to forget. Whatever the reason, we moved as one through the street that night. Old and young, ugly and beautiful and scarred. I was near the front of the crowd, close enough to hear the girl who first reached the clinic door yell out what we all must have known anyway: “It’s locked!”

  I know. What I should’ve done was walk away, but what I did do was walk forward towards that door. In my head, I’d pictured this moment a thousand times: I open a stylish trench coat and the inside is lined with keys, all identical-looking, and I grab one of them—to the untrained eye it would seem random but me? I know. I am the Keymaster, the Asian guy in the second Matrix, I can unlock a goddamn dimension if I have to! I take the key and put it in the lock and lead us into that clinic. I have another key to open the cabinets and hundreds and hundreds of free samples rain onto the floor and we pack them into backpacks and rush off through the night, thrusting the little plastic cases into the hands of women on the way. I got so excited in that fantasy that I forgot the truth of it all: the math and the broken condom and the $50 a month, all these girls showing up in some bar and me with my imagination.

  I didn’t have any keys. But I did have that bluebird, heavy and pulsing in my pocket, and I slammed it against the clinic’s front window. The glass cracked into a giant spiderweb and as I watched it go I thought I will not be held back!

  11| This Teacher Talks Too Fast

  When I first started teaching, I thought it would go like Dead Poets Society: we’d rip up our textbooks, quote Whitman, play soccer to opera music, and if ever anyone was in trouble I’d know just how to save them.

  That was a decade ago, and I’ve gotten more realistic. College textbooks are expensive, there’s no way we’d rip them up; and my students don’t listen to opera, they listen to emo; and I can’t save anybody. I teach creative writing—voice, structure, point of view; none of that’s going to help Rachel who’s pregnant or Kyle with the anti-depressants or Dennis who’s way more interested in pot than he is in class and I have these days sometimes where it’s like, what the hell am I doing? This past semester was especially rough and on the last day, as I was packing my things for winter break, I thought I could walk away.

  What if I walked away?

  On the way out, I grabbed my mail—memos, a stack of student work, and a book. I checked the cover—some lit journal from a community college—and was all set to toss it when I noticed a page was marked with a Post-it note. I opened it to a short story, saw the name of author, and stopped.

  Okay. In order to explain what happened next, I need you to imagine that I’m a character on Grey’s Anatomy. I’m thinking specifically of the episode where Izzie gives up being a doctor—she’s got eight million dollars from her dead fiancé and she goes to say goodbye to Dr. Burke who first taught her how to do a running whip stitch and she tells him, “I’m sorry,” ’cause it’s her fault he got shot and has a tremor in his hand and maybe can’t be a surgeon anymore and he says, “Don’t you be sorry because of me. You have two good hands and you’re not using them, be sorry for that!” At this point, some pop song by a new up-and-coming artist starts playing and Izzie’s face jerks as though she’s been slapped. She stands there, confused and frozen in Burke’s office until slowly, slowly, she looks down at her hands, holding them in front of her like she’s about to play the piano. She studies every finger, every wrinkle, and turns them so the palms face upwards. We stare at those hands, all of us, imaging the thousands of lives they might save, and the camera pans back to Izzie’s face, her lovely blue eyes wide and determined. My God, what am I doing? she thinks. How can I give up becoming a surgeon? and then, the song crescendos or maybe changes chord in some significant way and—she smiles. It all becomes clear. She’s not going to quit! She’s going to stay, and be a great doctor! And here, here is the important part: it might never have happened if it hadn’t been for Burke.

  Just like that lit journal in my mailbox means nothing unless I tell you about Andrew.

  It was my second year of teaching. I was twenty-three and still naive enough to think we could all recite Whitman standing on our desks—except we don’t have desks in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, we sit in semi-circles so you can look everyone in the eye. It was the first day of class and I was calling out attendance.

  “Elizabeth?”

  �
��Here.”

  “Angela?”

  “Here.”

  “Andrew—?”

  “Andrew—?”

  I looked up. “Andrew—?” and I will never forget this; he said, “I’m fuckin’ here already.” This guy was nineteen, South Side Irish Catholic complete with the accent, very baggy jeans belted just below his crotch and these giant headphones that he would not turn off unless you told him to, like, “Andrew, we’re starting class, can you lose the Eminem please?”

  “Whatever,” he’d say, which was all he ever said.

  “Whatever,” when we talked about Baldwin.

  “Whatever,” when we discussed student work.

  “Whatever,” when I told him he was failing. It was the fifth week of classes and he’d missed three already. When he did show it was an hour late, headphones blaring, sitting in the back of the room a good ten feet away from the rest of us in our semi-circle and it’s very, very difficult to continue reading Faulkner under those circumstances. Had I been the teacher I am now, I’d have told Andrew he could join us after the break, but then? I wanted to save everybody.

  “So if you don’t care about failing,” I asked, “why are you still coming to class?”

  Andrew’s hair hung past his nose—I wanted to tell him to move it so I could look him in the eye. “My mom’ll freak out if I don’t,” he said.

  “This is college,” I said. “Your mother doesn’t—”

  “Look, I fucking paid for the class,” he said. “I’m fucking gonna come to it.” In that moment I was afraid of Andrew—not that I thought he’d hurt me physically, but that maybe he could tell I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

  “Fine,” I said. “But you have to write. We’re a third of the way through the semester and you haven’t given me any writing and—”

  While I was talking, he stood up and opened his backpack, taking out a couple typed pages and dropping them in my lap.

  Then he was gone.

  His writing was really, really good, and it was about a guy who wanted to kill himself. Now, lots of students write about suicide, but for some reason this felt different. It didn’t feel like fiction. Usually, in such situations, you’ve got three options:

  Ignore it, which really isn’t an option so far as I’m concerned so—

  Contact somebody who knows what they’re doing. I called the college’s counseling hotline—and, for the record, I felt like a total asshole, like I was ratting out this guy’s creative work, but me being an asshole was better than him being dead. Turns out, there’s all sorts of legal implications to this stuff. This is college. Andrew is an adult—he has to choose to seek out counseling. I could suggest it but not enforce it, which brings me to—

  Talk to Andrew directly.

  Halfway through the semester, we do one-on-one conferences with every student—an hour-long sit-down to go over the strongest elements in their work. These are held in closet-sized cubicles in a hallway off the Fiction Office, which is good because of the privacy but also a little unnerving. Picture you and a semi-stranger locked up in a bathroom for an hour. Now picture Andrew and me during his conference, the two of us in this tiny, cramped space and I’m making suggestions for his writing, like, “Could you maybe slow down the scene? Right here, when the character is taking all those pills and drinking all the vodka?” because that’s my job, right? To focus on his work? And then say something very subtle that’ll inspire him to seek help on his own? Well, it is not, not, not that simple because sometimes those perfect words get all stuck in your throat and you end up saying the absolute worst thing possible, like: “So. How’re you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine?” I said. “Like, really fine?”

  I couldn’t see his eyes through the hair, but I knew he was looking at me like I was nuts. “Okay,” I said. “Look. Do you need to . . . talk to somebody? I mean, there are people here who—” just like last time, he was on his feet and packing up. “Andrew!” I said. I wanted to reach out and grab his arm but figured that touching him would be as far from appropriate as I could get. “I’m just trying to help!”

  He turned and faced me then. “It’s fucking fiction,” he said. “Isn’t that what this is? A fucking fiction class?” and then he was gone.

  I sat there in the cubicle for a really long time. I don’t remember my exact train of thought, but it went something like why can’t I get through to him, how do I reach him, how do I save him. I didn’t know then what I do now: his life was so much bigger than my little one class a week. Think back for a second to when you were a freshman in college. What were you the most focused on? Me? My folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing somebody else, and I shared a twelve-by-twelve foot dorm room with a girl looped on Ecstasy four nights outta the week, I tell you what, teachers were the last thing on my mind.

  My job is to help their writing, not save their lives.

  Right?

  I gave Andrew an F, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You failed to fulfill the standards and policies of this class,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good writer.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “I’m done with this school bullshit anyhow—” and then, like always, he was gone.

  At the end of every semester, teachers turn in grades and all copies of student work to the Fiction Office, at which time we’re given our student evaluations. I flipped through the stack and found one that hadn’t been filled out except for a single line in Andrew’s handwriting. It said: I can’t smoke pot before this class. This teacher talks too fast.

  I thumbtacked that evaluation to my wall and looked at it for a while. Then, I put it in a box under my bed. Shake it off, I told myself. New students, new chapter. The first day of the spring semester I walked into class, called out attendance.

  “Kelly?”

  “Here.”

  “LaTasha?”

  “Here.”

  “Brian—?”

  “Brian—?”

  “Brian—?” I looked up and it was total déjà vu. Same baggy pants, same headphones, same accent even! Except this wasn’t Andrew. It wasn’t Andrew. It was Brian, slouching in his seat and looking at me like All right, sweetheart. What are you gonna do for me?

  He didn’t show up the second week of class.

  He didn’t show up the third week.

  On the fourth week he rolled in an hour late and sat down in the back of the room. That’s when I sort of lost my mind. “All right, out in hall,” I told him. “Everybody else—read something, or something.” As I left the classroom, I tried to calm down. This is not Andrew, I told myself. Don’t put Andrew on this guy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, moving the hair out of his face. He had blue eyes. “The past couple weeks have been a nightmare.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But that doesn’t excuse—”

  “My friend killed himself,” he said. “It’s not your problem, I know, I just told you so you don’t think I’m slacking off.”

  I said I’d help him catch up after class.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But actually, my friend? He was a student here. And I know they’ve got some of his work in the office and I was wondering if you could get it for me. I know he wouldn’t want his parents to see it.”

  I said something about the legality of the situation, how I’d have to ask the chair of my department, and did he know the name of his friend’s teacher so I could speak to them directly?

  And he said—“It was you. You were Andrew’s teacher.”

  In class I tell my students there are words for every emotion and it’s our challenge as writers to find them. I have tried over and over to explain how I felt in that moment and every time I fail. I can tell about the guilt, about how part of me, the idealistic part, died right t
hen and there. I can tell you how horrible it was but I won’t even come close. “Excuse me,” I said to Brian. Then I went into the office and down the hall, locked myself into a conference cubicle, and cried. It was the first time I’d ever done that, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.

  My colleagues were really wonderful, and I might not have gotten through it without their support and advice. “Do the best you can,” they told me. “Focus on the students you have now.”

  For me, that meant Brian.

  He came to class sporadically, but when he did he was really involved and even, I think, had a good time. He told stories about growing up on the South Side, specifically a series of instances about the Catholic school he and Andrew attended when they were kids. I don’t know if it was therapeutic for him to write about Andrew, but it sure was for me to read it.

  In the end, I gave him a C, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You got a C ’cause you weren’t here half the time,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer.”

  He smiled, sliding those giant headphones over his ears. “School’s never been my thing,” he said. “And this place costs too much anyway.” He made it halfway through the door before he turned back around. “You know, Andrew told me to take your class,” he said.

  I waited. What I wanted to hear was He said you really helped him, or He said you were inspiring, or He said you almost saved him.

  What I heard instead was, “He said you were . . . interesting.”