Friday
How was she functioning right now? She asked herself. Her hands were trembling on the wheel of her car.
Adrenaline, she heard the voice. That would soon run out. Eugenie took the time to stop at a small grocery store before exiting the city to buy a can of energy drink. Nothing like the pop of a can opening in one’s hand, the ice cold temperature against one’s skin and placing it in the cup holder of one’s vehicle to already wake one up psychologically. She realized the radio was broadcasting a weekly night show she hated, a talk show inviting guests to debate anything that was keeping people awake, from politics to cooking recipes, anything from old and new books to wellness and esotherism. There was nothing in particular to hate about this show except that it was a late-late-night and early-early-morning show and that she had listened to it while grading papers at ungodly hours in order to meet some impossible deadlines so many times that now she execrated it. She cut the radio off.
One thing Eugenie loved about teaching was teaching. She disliked the rest of her job: lesson-planning, rushing to get photocopies done, queuing at an old machine, chitchatting with some colleagues while looking stressfully at the clock. Creating documents, rubrics, emailing parents, calling parents, replacing ‘your child is behaving like a shitbag’ by ‘I have genuine concern about your child’ on the phone with them. Filling out reports at the end of terms and, cherry on the cake, marking assignments and tests and papers and slideshows. There had been instances where she had even lost quizzes and pretended that everyone got A’s or B’s. ‘Buut I didn’t answer any question on the quiz’ a student had pointed out to her. She had darted a threatening look back at her and, thankfully, the girl had been a Freshman, easily reduced to silence.
She knew she was supposed to assess all the bell-work she did every day, the quick transition exercises that teachers gave pupils at the beginning of a lesson to transition between the last and the new, evaluate what had been retained and put her class in the mood for Geography, but the task was simply too overwhelming. She had let the little bell-work sheets of papers collected from her groups pile up in a corner of her apartment until the pile had become a tower and, one day, Spring cleaning, she had trashed the whole thing, unable to fight the urge.
Stolen novel; please report.
Eugenie had never done bell-work again, except when she was observed. ‘Buut we usually skip bell-work’ the same student had remarked in front of the principal, and she had thrown her murderous look at the girl once more. The girl producing the comment hadn't been a Freshman anymore back then but, thank God, being expressed at the start of the period, when everyone was getting in position with chairs and tables raking the floors, the words had gone unheard.
Teaching was her thing, it had always been, she had always felt a natural draw to it, even though she knew that a lot of teenagers found her style lacking entertainment and engagement. She didn’t mind struggles with discipline, she didn’t mind tensions between her and her youngsters, she didn’t even mind mingling in their rowdy packs during her duties and supervisions. Thinking of such duties and supervisions, she suddenly remembered: Barry. Eugenie catastrophically swerved without activating her turn signal and parked, tyres screeching, on the side of the road, dialed her landline number on her cell phone. “Barry” she called him inside the cabin of her car, popped open her door to switch on the light next to the rear view mirror.
The little beeping warning that came with the opening of the door was comforting over the unanswered ringing of the phone. Eugenie was feeling worn out and super-aware, her vision sharp in the night, feeling like she could hear all the secret noises of the world and mice chewing on an old piece of cracker at the bottom of someone’s cupboard a mile away. She took one more sip of her caffeinated drink and hung up. Barry didn’t answer. She been in her thoughts too long and waited too long to call, forgotten, and now, he must be asleep. She hoped that he was just asleep. What if the landline receptor had fallen from the table and he couldn't reach for it, as she had taped him to the dinner table? Taped him to the dinner table, she heard her own through and buried her eyes inside her hands.
Is that what you are doing now? Taping people to tables? Breaking into school in the middle of the night?
She was not breaking into school, she had her pass, and no educator was forbidden to enter school grounds even at unreasonable times of the day or night, even during holidays. She knew that in Sweden, where her family was from, the schools she had attended as a little girl had strict policies against staff entering outside of school hours, and she admired that, so European, she thought back to those ancient times, so discouraging of people letting work overstep personal lives, imposing on even the most workaholics of teachers that they would take their breaks and unplug and not be authorized to lay eyes on the familiar landscapes of their workplaces when it was time to be away. Eugenie felt immensely glad that she lived in the United States, where such practices were not frowned upon. Now it would be to her advantage.