Friday

I have to take next week off, the whole fucking week. How do I do that? She thought about Chedli, the doctor she had dated during nursing school and who had been her occasional booty call around her failed marriage and divorce. Since then, she had been relieved to not be keeping touch with that man, as she had always felt that he wanted more out of her and that now that she was single, he would try his luck with her. But perhaps he would be able to help? That was a shit idea, she saw, kept driving. Five minutes later she was in full countryside, her headlights piercing thick blackness. Later at the moment of sunrise, she knew, the skies would be grey and there would be fog, in the small town of Krainville.

She couldn’t believe most of her school crowd and pupils had been born, were growing up and would continue settling down in such a restricted environment. No wonder the adolescents in her class thought confused Australia and Austria and thought that Africa was a country: they lived in a tiny bubble that they would never leave! She sat on a bench once a week for supervision of the entrance hall with a younger coworker, Melissa, a Science teacher, who had frequented the very school where she was now teaching, from primary to twelfth grade. The concept of this existence gave Eugenie some vertigo.

Melissa had said to her once, “Don’t you think that Barry Masquevert looks like that boy in Friday Night Lights?”

“That’s such a huge show” Eugenie had answered, the wheels of her brain turning, “you’d have to be more specific”

“The prick one with the long hair”

She switched off her car, waited on the deserted parking lot of her high school, her door half open again to get some light, oscillating between the freezing temperature outside and the heat inside her coat, inside the car. She called Barry again unsuccessfully, hung up, then seriously eyeballed the cell phone in her hand and so intensely that her sight started to become blurry. I swear to you I will not call the police, she recalled her promise to Barry. But he was not picking up, and she was concerned, and she was now far away from her flat.

She could just give up now and call the police. What was her word, against urgency? You mean against plain reality, the voice corrected her, putting her current living-on-the-edge-of-delusion on the spot. Of course, that would be a whole ordeal to explain, she would have to really get her story straight, but that was more sensible than trying to save that boy’s life by breaking into school –I AM NOT BREAKING INTO SCHOOL, she barked back for the hundredth time at her inner voice— and relying on old eroded skills.

What are you doing?? The voice panicked

I am exiting my car, you hear me? I am not dishonoring my pledge, you hear me?

Barry will die.

He will NOT. Eugenie ejected her two feet out of the car, closed the door, slid the phone inside her large pockets and walked to the main entrance of the high school. She did feel like a major trespasser when she scanned her badge and pushed the heavy door, her heart beating madly in her chest. She granted one last glance at the parking lot, her little car like a dot in the center of the lot. It was empty, there was nobody at school. Such a challenge it was, to superpose images of the same place buzzing with students bumping into each other, rising the noise level outrageously, smelling like people, coursed with urgency at the sounds of the bells when the whole population was rushing to classes at the same time and creating a flow so dense and so unstoppable that it felt like it could create its own seismic wave.

She was not worried about explaining herself to anyone. Granted, such a place was loaded with security cameras but, during nighttime, the watching rooms were un-staffed and, if nothing triggered the rewinding and viewing of footage, old footage was erased and covered with new filming two weeks later. Eugenie just had to do her thing and hope that nothing would prompt a reason to examine the security tapes of the hallways and main areas of the large building for a period of fifteen days. That meant that she would, yes, intrude into the nurse’s office, but take only the minimum she needed, so as not to alarm anyone about files missing or misplaced medical supplies, then, if she did just that, everything would go unnoticed.

Eugenie proceeded from the main door to the main hall and called all the lights to burst open. They were like a thirty meter radius around anyone marching on inside and activating the motion sensors and that was a little humbling. Yesterday’s Eugenie wouldn’t have easily imagined that light could be scarier than darkness. Were there flaws in her plan to just hope for the best when it came to the rows of cameras lining up the ceilings? What would you do, if things came to worst?

I would say I was sleepwalking. Light flooding all the corridors of the school as she followed her usual maze of turns and angles, she passed by her classroom door, her steps echoing in the stillness of the place, her tennis shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and she entered the staff room. The poster near the door greeted her: Rage Against the Machine didn’t specify which machine, but it was probably a printer. She always liked that joke. She threw herself against the cubby of the chief nurse, Penny Allen, a lady from Larken, the town next to Krainville. Eugenie slid her fingers into the slit of the nurse’s drawer and rubbed them against the mess of keys inside. She retrieved them, took a nanosecond to appreciate their weight in her hand. Somewhere she had the memory of reading that the sound of keys jingling was the perfect imitating of what it sounded like when maggots were eating at a dead body, undoubtedly from all the true crime she was consuming on a daily basis.

Not keys jingling, the voice corrected, rather the noise it makes when you shuffle bead bracelets or pearl necklaces.

Ah yes, that’s what it was, Eugenie granted to the voice. Here it was! The key to the infirmary. Two floors up. She had always wondered why Penny’s office was perched like a dungeon like this, when you were supposed to send sick kids to her. So many steps! Now she was sweaty, felt damp under her arms, her hair sticking to the back of her neck. The key chain wasn’t holding just one key, but overall ten keys. Small ones, big ones. She got the right one at the first try and shoved herself into the room, her senses immediately assailed by a wave of hospital smells, which alarmed and comforted her at the same time. She waited for the lights to turn on for a long time, pressed against the door, before realizing that the sickroom wasn’t equipped with sensors. Her hands padded the wall searching for the switch and, not finding it, she used the flashlight on her cell phone.

The first thing she saw when the light came up into the room was Penny’s desk and the telephone on it, next to a pencil case that read the message This meeting could have been a fistfight. She liked Penny’s humor, she was a very skinny woman with inexplicably huge breasts and even bigger eyes of a liquidy blue color, and she acted tough, as she did in front of pupils who acted out all sorts of illnesses and plagues while their real diagnosis was laziness and un-submitted homework, but she had a big heart. She heard the silence, the absolute silence.

Slowed down by her internal conflict, Eugenie kept zooming in on the cell phone in her hand to the more traditional receptor on the desk. She could still call 911. From here, an anonymous call. You’re such a dumbass. What are you waiting for?

But this was Barry’s life that hung in the balance, wasn’t it? Her fingers slid timidly on the receiver, a standard black model, her hand picked it up and brought it to her ear. I just want to listen to the flat tone, she thought, begging the voice to hold space for mercy, for her to think things over, I just want to hear it and think about it. And decide.

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Three digits, much less than the number of fingers she owned on her right hand, and Barry would stop being her problem. She imagined it, the relief, the awkwardness at first, how angry and terrified he would be, but then, he would be safe, for sure, and she wouldn’t have to continue living in this new state of constant chest compression and shortness of breath and neurons on fire.

“I can’t” she said finally and in a sob, hanging up the phone hard. She opened her mouth wider to take in more air but found her trachea obstructed by the terror. She crouched down in a woodlice position on the floor by the desk. This infirmary was too real, it said to her: if she found something useful in here, that meant she hoped to be able to prevent Barry from dying, from blood loss, from infection, from shock, from his ordeal. That signified she shared his faith in her, or desperation in her, and gave desperation a drop of faith. She thought about her own pencil case on her own desk in her classroom, which always amused students who had read or watched Game of Thrones –it was now an old show, and an even more outdated book series, relegated to vintage, so it was not a customary teenage thing to have stumbled upon it—: Valar Morghulis.

Breathe, breathe. There was a student –no, she corrected, not a student anymore, a former student. Better? No. But yes, indeed— taped to her dining table in her apartment, awaiting urgent care for serious injuries, and he was asking her to save his life, and she wouldn’t call for outside assistance. Eugenie silenced a cry inside her thick sleeves, buried her nose in the fluff. Calm down, she told herself. It worked. Magically. She had to cease wasting precious time dwelling on her emotional responses to her situation, she had to get moving! Okay, now, if you’re going to go at it, search the fuck out of this place, the voice now seemed amused. Eugenie opened the first closet, discovered it was a spot almost entirely devoted to snacks, goldfish, peanut butter treats, granola bars, a collection of very expensive tea bags of all flavors. She slid some of those inside her tote bag without thinking. Raspberry ginger and rose petals? No question! Next closet.

At the third closet, she got her hands on the files, and then a very big box which threatened to fall apart, saying Archives and a bunch of consecutive years. What year had Barry been in high school? She rested her forehead against the door of the closet, thinking deep. Four, five years ago? She couldn’t be sure. Had she been divorced for longer than that? Certainly, she had been, as the separation had begun when she had Barry in her Geography class in Sophomore year. She grabbed the box with the year she thought was theirs, a year of antagonism and affront and power struggle, and set out to explore its content on a table at the center of the room.

As she lifted the box, its bottom tore off from the rest of it and all the archives cascaded on the floor “Shit!” she exclaimed, then put a hand on her mouth. No one can hear you right now. How could something like that be good news and bad news at the same time? She knelt on the floor next to the mount of dropped files. Whipping out her cell phone from her pocket again, her face covered in sweat, she tried her landline once more, without an answer. A needle in a haystack, she thought, observing the mess of papers and bent dossiers in front of her. Well, not really, she saw the post-it notes with the year sticking out here and there, and brought her nose closer.

On those notes, the neat and cautious handwriting of Penny the Nurse had been classifying the documents into years and months and sometimes even days, if something worth dating has occurred, for example, someone passing out from a stuffed-out joint in the restrooms, someone’s cutting their hand on art supplies, someone breaking someone else’s nose in a locker fight. Such organisation was difficult to fathom for Eugenie White, a teacher creature who would happily burn her quizzes and bell-work slips into a big Winter and Summer equinox fires due to too much struggle keeping up with the flow of material to label, organize, allocate and grade. 2012. Yes, here it was. She had to dig there and so, she did.

What would a security camera have captured if the ceiling of the infirmary had been provided with one? A Geography teacher sitting in the middle of a sea of files on th floor, stretching an arm at one or another, discarding the useless one into a new sub-pile on the left while sorting out the ones with potential on the right side.

After twenty minutes, she understood that the oldest folders were washed up green, meaning they were documenting students that no longer attended the school, while the new ones were rather apple green. When she finally located Barry’s old medical file, she was surprised on how thin it was. She had dug out some pancakes of a dossier earlier in her search, asthma, sensory overload, diabetes, lupus, lyme, ear infections, being hit in the face by a basketball, heavy menstruation, low bloor pressure, starvation, some shit that the teenagers reported at the infirmary, some dark shit that she didn’t want to linger on: mysterious bruises, crooked teeth, steadily reports of falling down the stairs, cigarette burns, hair straightener burns, poisoning from ingesting bleach. She closed her eyes, reopened them. Dark dark dark. All secrets of the little town having a trace here, blowing up and swelling down within the bubble of medical confidentiality. This world was so dark.

Did she like teaching all of those students with all their untold backgrounds? Yes, yes. She liked stepping in front of the group, making it a tale, a narrative, keeping the best part of the story she was telling for the end, interjecting cliffhangers every here and there, it was like being on stage, it was like theater. Beyond that, was she aware each of them had a personality, an identity building slowly but rapidly at the same time, emerging strongly from childhood, defining itself in the middle of the warzone that was pre-puberrty, puberty, hardcore adolescence? Yes, yes, Eugenie nodded to herself.

It was difficult to consider individuals when you had twenty-seven of them gathered in a small space, when you had a curriculum to wrap, deadlines to meet, the eye of the school board spying on you. Even more arduous when each of the twenty-seven people in front of you didn’t have any other concern than their own within the party of twenty-seven, sometimes twenty-eight, clashing against collective priorities and the real world of educating masses in a limited timeframe and society’s arbitrary decision to cram instruction into seven months of school per natural year –nothing was natural about those school years— in the hope to form adult citizens who would enter thesaid real world as functioning adutls. Had she been a school nurse, she would deal with them isolated from the assembly. Had she been a school psychologist or a Special Needs assistant, a councelor, same.

Did she care so much about geography that she agreed to sacrifice humanity over teaching? Eugenie didn’t know. Barry certainly demanded that of her, at the present moment, all that she had desired to convey to him about countries, nations being born from history, borders, socio-political agreements, economics, globalization, now rendered useless in front of the pressing matters that were his. Eugenie forced herself to not glance at the telephone on Nurse Penny’s desk anymore.

Barry’s file was just two sheets of paper. O positive, she read with great relief, and looked at the second page. It was mentioning that once, someone had dropped a chair on his pinkie finger but that the finger was fine. She went back to the first page again, looked at his photo, such a young and blasé Barry on it, who was the Barry she knew the most.

Had he already been the Bolt back then, when that photo was taken on Picture Day? She brought the photo under her nose, smelled it. It smelled like old paper and old cardbox. His hair had been longer and dirtier, back then, and he was wearing an awful and messy bandana to style it, which was really terrible in terms of fashion. A protest shone in his young eyes, an expression she had seen every day at lunch time, and everything he had done had been to trigger her and the rest of the world. She had had four years of that Barry, intolerable, uncontrollable.

She wondered why she kept having some tears as she brushed the photo with her thumb. Why? She had not known what he had been going through. She had not known his personal story, she was just trying to teach him about countries and borders and lakes and sediments. She presented him and the rest of her class with boxes of crayons to work on maps, as if it was necessary, as if it was the key to their success, as if it was meant to fill in an empty space in their lives, and she never wondered what empty space they had gaping there, in the middle of their lives, waiting to be filled, nourished. She was a kind teacher, but kind of an ignorant one. Sometimes, she thought with guilt, she was too much into her own lectures, enjoying the sound of her own voice, not wondering if she was actually drawing them in enough, interesting them enough, bringing them enough relevance. Eugenie closed her eyes, dizzy.

She folded Barry’s information inside her bag and her fingers brushed against the stolen tea bags at the bottom. She froze, sensing hairs rising on her forearms. The vision of the unopened closets which aligned against the wall landed in the middle of her brain. Now, she needed something next-level from the place, before she left it and placed the keys back into Penny’s cubby in the staff room and ran back to her car. She unzipped her coat, let it drop to the floor dramatically, admired the many keys in her hand. One of those little things had the power to unlock the massive armoires behind Penny’s desk, the ones with the medical supplies. It was winter enough, sufficiently close to Christmas, she guessed. Time for some shopping.

It’s only shopping if you actually shop.

What do you mean

If you just take, that’s called ‘stealing’.

Ah yes, yes