Four
Trudy
The first day of school was much too hot for wool, but Trudy’s best skirt—her navy-blue pencil skirt with the kick pleat—was wool.
She glanced at herself in the mirror for one last hair and makeup check and reminded herself to schedule that perm.
For one last jolt of courage, she popped the tape she made of last night’s Casey Kasem’s Countdown in her boombox and danced to “Eye of the Tiger.”
Before she had time to react, Miss Duffy, the school secretary, startled her from behind. “Trudy! You’re here! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am!”
Trudy welcomed the interruption and made a mental note to look away whenever she passed Jimmie’s shrine in the future. She stilled herself with a breath, taking in the scent of Pine Sol and floor wax, that ubiquitous institutional smell of churches, schools, and government buildings.
“How you doing?” Miss Duffy asked. “Nervous? Excited? Happy as a clam?” Her golden eyes shimmered through her cat-eye glasses, the same ones she’d worn for as long as Trudy could remember.
Miss Duffy’s bright red eyebrows matched her bright red hair, and she’d teased out her perm and pulled it up in a banana clip, a hairdo that was way too young for her age if you asked Trudy; she looked like a fifty-year-old GoGo.
Trudy gave Miss Duffy a sideways hug. “A little nervous, I guess? Happy, but maybe not as much as a clam?”
“Honey, you’ve got nothing to be nervous about.
Why, look at you—just pretty as a picture, and that’s half the battle ain’t it?
” Miss Duffy glanced at Jimmie’s photo and then back at Trudy over the rim of her glasses.
A corner rhinestone was missing. “Oh, you poor thing. I reckon it’s hard coming back here, ain’t it?
” She threaded her free arm through Trudy’s elbow, and they walked toward Trudy’s classroom.
“I want you to know that I, for one, think everything Barbara Beaumont has ever said about you is a bunch of malarkey. Bless your heart.”
Trudy forced a smile but didn’t say anything.
They arrived at Room 108 and Trudy stepped inside and took it all in: the students’ lab desks all in perfect rows, each with a gas spigot for Bunsen burners, her own desk much larger, but with two spigots and a sink. Next to that, an overhead projector on a rolling cart.
“Oh! Almost forgot!” Miss Duffy shoved a stack of pamphlets in Trudy’s hand. “Brochures for school-day insurance. Be sure the first-period students take these home to their parents,” she said.
On the cover, an elementary student swung from monkey bars. For when the unfathomable becomes the unfortunate, the headline read. “We do this? We sell school-day insurance?”
“And the school board gets real mad if we forget,” Miss Duffy said. “Good luck, dear,” she trilled over her shoulder as she left.
The clock above the chalkboard said it was 7:36. On her desk sat three roses in a vase. She set her satchel down and tugged the little card out of the envelope.
You’ll be great.
(And I should know; I’m the superintendent.)
Love, Haskel
She grinned. If Haskel was anything, he was thoughtful.
She opened her grade book and read the reminder she’d written herself on a scrap of paper.
Do NOT smile until after Christmas . Meemaw Aberdeen had given her this advice when Trudy told her she was majoring in education.
Meemaw had taught in the one-room schoolhouse up on Aberdeen Mountain.
“Not even a grin,” Meemaw had said, a memory that made Trudy smile very generously now.
Before she knew it, a river of teenagers flowed in two directions in the hallway. A few students buzzed by her, some repeating “Mornin’” as they came into class. After a moment, the swirl and frenzy of her classroom incited so many sensations she hadn’t felt since she was in high school herself.
She had tried to prepare for the moment when June Bug Moody arrived.
She’d seen his name— Moody, Leon Jr. —on the roll, but she couldn’t dodge the awkwardness of being his teacher.
June Bug was Haskel’s nephew, the son of Leon Moody, the current and outgoing Mayor of Bailey Springs.
Having him in class added pressure, not only to teaching, but to assimilating into the Moody family, which Trudy had been trying her best to do.
June Bug’s hair, the color of a golden retriever, was the perfect mix of feathered layers and side-swept bangs, so thick and soft, any girl with eyes would want to touch it.
He strutted in wearing two popped-collar polos, one apparently not being enough, a blindingly bright blue one over a yellow.
She wouldn’t have looked, but two girls sitting in the second row gawked at the backside of his madras plaid shorts held up with a white belt.
Trudy raised her eyebrows, but that only made them giggle more.
She couldn’t concern herself with her future nephew now, though, because the eight o’clock bell rang, and everyone got quiet.
The students stared at Trudy.
Trudy stared at the students.
And she smiled.
Damnit!
She quickly regained her scowl and tugged at the hem of her cardigan as a realization hit her: how in the world, after four years of college, including nine months of student teaching, had not a single professor ever prepared her for this moment?
The classroom door was shut, the bell had rung, and twenty-eight students waited for her to teach.
No supervision, no witnesses, just Trudy Abernathy and her State of Alabama teaching certificate.
It felt like one of those naked-on-stage dreams come true.
She looked down, instinctively, to make sure she was clothed.
“Um. Good morning, class,” she managed to get out without grinning. “My name is Miss Abernathy, and this is first-period Chemistry. Now, before we begin, there are several things we need to ...”
“You got lunch tickets?” a student in the back called; Trudy didn’t see who.
A girl on the second row added, “Yeah, we totally need lunch tickets ...” An explosion of neon fabric and hair turned the half-up ponytail on the side of her head into a work of art. “ ... so we can eat lunch. Duh .”
Trudy looked around. No one had mentioned lunch tickets. In the seventies, they’d been pink; she remembered that.
“Top drawer, ma’am?” another student suggested.
“Oh, right.” Trudy opened the desk drawer.
A roll of pink tickets sat atop a manila envelope where Miss Duffy had written, Lunch Money, Room 108, in magic marker.
Trudy hadn’t planned on collecting lunch money.
To save time, she passed the tickets around with the envelope and told the students to use the honor system.
They must’ve jumped to hyperspace on the Millennium Falcon because by the time she distributed textbooks and called the roll, it was 8:25.
She only had twenty-five minutes left to deliver her forty-minute lesson, the one for which she’d missed The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and had stayed up late Saturday night writing.
Plus, she still hadn’t handed out those insurance brochures.
She was determined to teach, however, and she needed to be tough. She pulled, from deep within, her best tough-lady voice. “Chemistry will be a challenge,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”
When she turned to write on the chalkboard, one student called out, “I can’t believe they let freshmen teach Chemistry.
” The remark was rewarded by laughter from everyone except Trudy, who stopped writing and spun around slowly.
The students’ faces went from lively to flat.
A boy with a pair of mirrored aviators perched on his mullet looked particularly guilty; he opened his Trapper Keeper with haste and pretended to take notes.
“Not that I should regard a cowardly anonymous comment in the first place,” Trudy said. “But to whomever did notice my youthful appearance, thank you. It’s nice to receive a compliment on my first day. Now, someone please read the paragraph where it says, What is chemistry? on page ten.”
No one budged, except for one girl, who sat obsessively scratching and sniffing all the new stickers on her spiral notebook.
“Fine.” Trudy glanced down and called the first name she saw on the roll. “Carter?” She looked around. “Carter Sissoms?”
A boy in front wearing an oversized Prince concert T-shirt, Carter apparently, snapped upright, clearly surprised he’d been called on.
“Yes, ma’am.” Carter shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, and nervously adjusted his Casio calculator watch, then traced the words on the page with his finger. “Chemistry deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed ...”
Snickers floated through the room, the students obviously picking up on Carter’s pitchy voice and the way he hissed the s’ s in the word, substances . Hints of rose peeked through Carter’s cheeks.
The name, Carter Sissoms, came back to her now. Carter was the new boy Miss Duffy had told her about; he’d just moved from Dallas. “Between you and me,” Miss Duffy had whispered. “I think he’s got a little sugar in the tank, bless his heart.”
The heel of Carter’s stark-white, high-top Reebok bobbed up and down as he nervously bounced his knee. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He was about to continue when, “brUINS!” collective voices from across the hall burst out. Exuberant laughter, yelling, hoots, and hollers followed.
Unruly kids. But where? The hallway? Fooling around while their teacher was away? Trudy held up a finger to shush her own students’ giggling. “Quiet,” she said. “Stay in your seats.”
She poked her head into the hallway. The location of the disturbance, still going on, was clear: the typing lab, Room 109. She turned back to her class and said, “Not a word until I get back.” She made sure to speak as if the ruckus in the other classroom was somehow their fault.
Her short heels click-clacked across the hall, and even though she tried to make them sound more powerful, they just sounded like the feet of a peeved little petite woman, which Trudy was at five-foot-two.
She made a mental note to wear heels that sounded like she meant business from now on.
She peered into the tall, skinny window beside the door of Room 109.
Inside: pandemonium. Students jumped and yelled.
Some threw paper wads. Others stood in chairs.
One boy paraded atop another’s shoulders; it was a classroom of students acting like a bunch of bird dogs, and with all those new IBM computers Principal Hendon had bragged about at Friday’s faculty meeting.
A male’s voice yelled, “Gimme a B!” And all the kids yelled, “Beeeee!”
“Gimme an R!”
“Arrrrrr!”
“Gimme a U!”
“Yuuuuu!”
Less than an hour in, and already another phenomenon no one had prepared her for.
What, exactly, was the protocol when a fellow teacher’s class was out of control?
She swiped her bangs out of her face, took a breath, rolled her shoulders back, and then stomped into Room 109.
She bellowed, “Excuse me!” and clapped her hands to get them quiet. “What is going on here?”
A hush fell over the students. She stood in front of the first row of typewriters and felt a particular rush of heat: the power to make teenagers obey.
She might just be good at this after all.
But then a couple of students snickered, and then a few more, apparently at something behind her.
Trudy spun around and saw him, standing on the teacher’s desk behind her, right between an IBM 5150 and an IBM Selectric.
He wore a blond wig, held two orange pom-poms, and his cheeks were bright red.
“Mornin ma’am.” The pom-poms swished to the floor, he lowered his head, removed the wig, and held it over his heart. “Coach Shug Meechum.” He stuck out his free hand.
She’d only heard of him before now; her freshman year, Shug Meechum had been the star quarterback for the Sweetwater Yellow Jackets, Bailey Springs’ biggest rival across the river.
On Friday, when she’d asked Miss Duffy where the teacher across the hall was, Miss Duffy had laughed and said, “You don’t think coaches come to faculty meetings, do you? ”
Now, he towered above her. His legs—except for his calves, which were covered by tube socks with three bold orange stripes and pulled up high—were shamelessly naked in front of her face, rippling out from beneath his ridiculous blue polyester coach’s shorts, which clung to him.
If only she’d seen him before, she could have waited—there were only three more letters in Bruins after all—and spared herself the embarrassment.
“I’m sorry, but ...” She sounded all scratchy because her throat had gone dry. “ ... we’re having class across the hall.”
“Oh yeah, of course,” he said through an unfolding grin, “Mrs. ...?”
“ Miss Abernathy.” She rubbed her cardigan’s hem again and flicked her head around to the snickering students, then back to the football coach.
He smiled, revealing perfectly white teeth above a perfect dimple in the middle of his perfect chin.
The typical perfect jock. “Miss Abernathy !” He slapped his forehead.
“That’s right! The chemistry solution!” He raised his eyebrows, shrugged his impossibly broad shoulders, and showed the palms of his hands. “Give us an I?”
The students roared. The tips of her ears caught fire, and her jaw ground tighter. She narrowed her eyes, and when he saw her expression, the coach’s grin vanished.
“I!” Trudy said. “Would appreciate it if y’all could keep it down.”
Coach Meechum opened his mouth to reply but apparently decided against his instinctive response. “Yes ma’am,” he said instead.
Trudy stood there taking in the arrogant sight of him—his eyes were the blackest brown she’d ever seen, but she couldn’t seem to stop looking at them—until he asked, “Was there anything else, ma’am?”
“Oh!” She cleared her throat and pulled her gaze from his. “No. Thank you.” As Trudy reached the doorway, he called, “Have a lovely day, Miss Abernathy!” followed by more students’ laughter.
She click-clacked back to Room 108 airing her grievances aloud.
“What a jerk! This ... this ! is what’s wrong with our schools today.
Give us an I? Well, I’ve never!” Trudy was certain she was sweating through her cardigan like a snowman in the swamp.
The only upside was that it would be easy maintaining that pre-Christmas grimace when she got back to Carter Sissoms and the definition of chemistry .