The Faculty Lounge

Chapter Three

Three

Mr. Rayfield did not like teaching biology to tenth graders, but his fifth (and hopefully last) year at Baldwin High had offered a respite of sorts.

He had discovered a hiding spot.

On the third floor of the school, at the end of a rarely used hallway, sat the English department book room. It was a dusty, musty space, about fifteen feet by fifteen feet, a breeding ground for wolf spiders and disturbing patches of dark mold, and it served as a repository for haphazard stacks of Romeo and Juliet and The Stranger and A Farewell to Arms that threatened to collapse at any moment.

Most of the English teachers kept sets of the novels they needed in their classrooms; the younger ones allowed and encouraged e-books. So the book room was often empty, a quiet space for Mr. Rayfield to come during his off period. There, he could feel sorry for himself while sitting on the floor, which was covered in a tattered gray carpet that had not been vacuumed since the first Clinton administration.

The cell reception was terrible inside the cinder-block walls, so he didn’t come to fool around on his phone. He didn’t come to grade. He didn’t even come to cry. Mostly he came to enjoy the quiet.

Oh, how much he craved quiet, and oh, how not quiet was Baldwin High School!

But in the book room? In the book room there were no teenagers asking him for extra credit or hall passes or extensions on already-extended homework assignments.

There were no administrators asking him to reply to parent emails and attend meetings and keep discipline logs.

And there were no colleagues asking him to watch their classrooms for five minutes while they went to the bathroom or darted out early to a dental appointment. But on this Thursday morning when he unlocked the door to the book room, he was surprised to find not a place to hide away but, instead, his colleague Ms. Sanderson, the teacher who had discovered the body of Mr. Lehrer a few weeks ago, standing in a corner wiping her face with a Kleenex. She was crying. Not sobbing, but definitely and audibly shedding tears.

“Uh, hello?” said Mr. Rayfield, caught off guard and unsure of what to do. Ms. Sanderson startled, taking in Mr. Rayfield’s presence just outside the doorway.

“I can come back,” he said, trying to brush off the irritation he felt because someone else had discovered his spot.

Just then, three electronic blips crackled over the school’s PA system, indicating an incoming announcement.

“Attention, faculty, students, and staff, at this time we are asking that everyone follow procedures for a lockdown,” came the voice of Principal Kendricks. “Again, please immediately follow the procedures for a lockdown drill as stated in your emergency manual. We will be back shortly with an update.” While the principal’s voice was steady, Mr. Rayfield could hear a sliver of anxiety coursing through it.

Mr. Rayfield froze, but Ms. Sanderson immediately moved past him with purpose, peeking her head out the door, scanning the empty hallway.

“We’re supposed to gather any roaming students inside with us,” she said. She was no longer crying; instead, she seemed calm and in control. “But I don’t see anyone.”

Stepping back into the book room, she said to Mr. Rayfield, “Well, I think you need to come in.” Following her order, Mr. Rayfield stepped inside. Ms. Sanderson locked the door behind them and shut off the lights. Now the only light in the windowless space came through the glass transom above the door. It cast a small spotlight in the center of the room.

“Is this for real?” said Mr. Rayfield. “I mean, did they say we were having a drill today?”

Ms. Sanderson was peering at her phone, biting her bottom lip. “I barely have reception in here,” she answered. “And no, I don’t remember them saying anything.”

Mr. Rayfield moved as close as possible toward the door and held his phone toward the glass above it, as if the magical ether that made the Internet work could move more easily that way. He briefly got a single bar of reception, but there were no emails or texts offering more information.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “I hope it’s not for real.”

“Same,” said Ms. Sanderson, setting her phone down next to a stack of tattered Frankenstein s on a shelf near her. She placed her Kleenex from earlier there, too.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Mr. Rayfield, trying his best to listen for any commotion coming from outside and sensing nothing.

“I guess we could sit down,” said Ms. Sanderson. “I mean, the carpet is gross, but…we’re probably going to be stuck in here for a while.”

At this suggestion, Mr. Rayfield lowered himself to the floor, then leaned back against a bookshelf full of well-worn copies of The Catcher in the Rye . He pulled his knees up to his chest. Ms. Sanderson, a fair-skinned, petite brunette who was wearing a black pencil skirt and a pink Oxford blouse, carefully arranged herself across from him. As she did so, Mr. Rayfield could not help but notice that she possessed a pretty great figure, with ample curves in just the right places. He took in a careful glance, making sure he didn’t let his eyes linger. Mr. Rayfield wasn’t a particularly good teacher, but he also wasn’t a creep.

“Maybe it’s just one of those things where they want us to practice without a heads-up,” said Ms. Sanderson. “I mean, a drill you know is coming is sort of pointless, I guess.”

Mr. Rayfield let his head rest against the shelf behind him. “There’s a lot of stuff about this job that seems pointless sometimes,” he said. “Honestly, I guess I’m something of a fatalist. If some asshole is going to come in here shooting, it’s going to happen whether we do these drills or not.”

At this, Ms. Sanderson nodded, acknowledging his point. Born just months after the Columbine shooting, she, like Mr. Rayfield, had been performing lockdowns since elementary school. Even now in the book room during this unexpected drill, the two young teachers possessed a preternatural calm that came only from growing up aware that at any moment they might be shot dead at school. First as students, now as teachers. While their older colleagues were known to hold back tears during these practices or post long social media diatribes about how they should not have to work under such conditions, Mr. Rayfield and Ms. Sanderson were part of a generation that had absorbed an absurd atrocity as normal.

For a while, the two sat in something of an awkward silence, until Mr. Rayfield said, “So, current situation notwithstanding, how have you been holding up since the ashes incident?”

Ms. Sanderson sighed in response and gave Mr. Rayfield a knowing look. Among Baldwin faculty and staff, the situation involving Mr. Lehrer’s ashes was referred to as “the ashes incident,” “the Lehrer debacle,” or “the craziest shit since Cardoza,” among other even more colorful phrases. In the two weeks since its occurrence, it had sent the school into crisis mode.

“I just feel so bad for everyone,” said Ms. Sanderson. “I feel horrible for Mr. Lehrer, for Principal Kendricks, and even for that mom. I mean, she was just on campus to try and help prevent stuff like this from happening.” At the word this she waved her hand in the air, indicating their current lockdown status.

“Yeah,” agreed Mr. Rayfield. “And now the aftermath. It sucks.”

To say that Jessica Patterson had been upset would be speaking in the mildest of terms. She had been livid. While the indignity of being stood up by Principal Kendricks for the all-important fall safety walk and her disgust at being covered with a dead man’s cremains were probably at the root of her reaction, her angry claims on social media, in PTO meetings, and with local television reporters were focused elsewhere. Her well-crafted, clearly delivered comments homed in on Principal Kendricks’s decision to dispose of Mr. Lehrer’s remains on the school campus (“unsanitary, disrespectful, and traumatizing to our community”) and on her discovery of how Mr. Lehrer’s death had been handled in the first place. (“Regardless of the medical examiner’s response time, school administrators should have contacted parents to inform them of a body on campus, yet they never did. Imagine if a young person had accidentally walked into the lounge and encountered a dead body! The potential for trauma could be enormous!”)

Jessica Patterson had her supporters—many of them—and soon the district initiated a formal investigation into the matter. There was talk of repercussions in the form of heavier oversight from Central Office, and even a concern that Principal Kendricks’s position was at risk. Not to mention the damage done to the Baldwin High reputation. As was true with all school communities, the adults who worked at Baldwin and the students who attended it wanted to be proud of their school, not see it serve as the butt of jokes. (At the last away football game, against Baldwin’s biggest rival, Lanthrop High, several Lanthrop students had chanted, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Baldwin High is gonna get crushed!” Baldwin had lost 21–0.)

“I heard that the district is going to mandate some sort of trauma counseling session for those of us who attended the ceremony in the courtyard,” said Ms. Sanderson. “I’m not sure if they actually will, though.”

“You know it would just be for the optics if they did,” said Mr. Rayfield, waving his cell phone in the air again, fruitlessly searching for a signal or any sort of communication from outside the book room. Ms. Sanderson nodded in agreement.

“God, that was a weird afternoon,” Mr. Rayfield added.

“My roommate is an accountant at a consulting firm,” said Ms. Sanderson, “so I definitely had the better work story that day.” She raised a single eyebrow.

Mr. Rayfield smiled, pleased by her witty remark. While he’d had the bad fortune to grow up during a time when school shootings were commonplace, he’d been lucky enough to be born into a generation of men who were not as threatened by funny women as their fathers and grandfathers had been.

“And the day you found him in the lounge,” Mr. Rayfield continued. “That must have been…” He searched for the right words.

“Oh, it definitely messed with my head,” she answered. “I should have gone home early, but I hate to miss a day.”

At this Mr. Rayfield gave her a suspicious look. This was not something he could relate to. He used all ten of his personal days every year, and he told Ms. Sanderson as much.

“You’re not that into this job, are you?” Ms. Sanderson said, tilting her head and assessing him. “I was surprised to even see you at the memorial.” She flushed slightly. She didn’t want him to think she’d noticed him, even if she had.

“I can’t quite explain it,” said Mr. Rayfield. “I mean, why I chose to attend. I guess I just felt like it was the right thing to do, you know? I used to see that guy walking down the halls, all hunched over and old and, like, gripping his substitute teacher folder for dear life. And the way he would just nod and smile at all the kids even if they didn’t smile back.” Mr. Rayfield sighed deeply and his voice dropped into a softer register: “The whole thing sort of broke my heart.”

Privately moved by Mr. Rayfield’s display of sensitivity, Ms. Sanderson pressed her hands together, forming her response. “I found his death heartbreaking,” she said. “But I don’t think he was heartbreaking. It’s like Ms. Fletcher said. He loved it here. He loved being good at this job.”

Mr. Rayfield nodded in acknowledgment and then—because he felt at ease with Ms. Sanderson—bluntly stated, “I suck at this job.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” said Ms. Sanderson, even though she wasn’t actually sure. It was only mid-October, but she had been at Baldwin long enough to know that her colleague wasn’t a joiner or a leader or a rising star on campus; in fact, he often sat at the back of the auditorium during faculty meetings, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. She had noticed his forlorn face and his brooding brown eyes, and she had also noticed that he was not bad-looking. In fact, there had been an appeal to him, even in his disaffection.

“No,” insisted Mr. Rayfield. “I do suck at it. I think that’s why this guy’s death just hit me. Like…what if I don’t get my act together and end up here at the age of eighty-two, dead in the lounge after having sucked at this job for decades?” He grimaced. “This isn’t the sort of job you should stick with if you aren’t good at it.”

“I think I might suck at it, too,” said Ms. Sanderson, trying to cheer him up. “But I also think I like it? Which makes for a difficult situation. I don’t know. It’s just…the kids make me laugh, I guess. I love it when I explain something and they get it. Or if I see a kid having a hard day and something I say cheers them up? I like feeling useful. Needed in that way. My roommate just sits at a desk all day and answers emails. She says work is boring. This place is never boring. I never leave here thinking I wasted my time, you know?”

“Well, it’s for sure never boring ,” acknowledged Mr. Rayfield. “I mean…” He motioned around himself for emphasis before pulling out his phone and holding it up toward the glass yet again. Still one bar. Still no information. Still only silence outside the door.

“At first I thought I sucked at it because I was new at it,” he continued, dropping his phone into his lap. “Or because of the pandemic. I kept waiting for some magical switch to flip or whatever. Like some moment when I’m like, Yeah, it’s working . But that hasn’t happened.” He did not tell Ms. Sanderson that he often felt like a fraud in front of students, leading them through biology lessons that brought him little joy. He was overwhelmed by the grading, by the paperwork, by the constant demands that started from the moment he entered the building and continued even after he left. He could not even take a piss when he wanted to. Put simply, it was not the vocation that it seemed to be for other people. It was just a job. If he was going to have just a job, perhaps he should find one that paid more and did less residual damage to teenagers.

“Why don’t you quit then?” asked Ms. Sanderson. “Find something else?” Ms. Sanderson was a proactive person who thrived off to-do lists and monthly goals. She was the sort of young woman who color-coded her planner and loved organizing her desk. On weekends, one of her favorite things to do was to put on a podcast about popular culture or politics and listen while she rearranged her closets.

“I should,” said Mr. Rayfield, his voice flat and with zero promise that this acknowledgment would translate into action. “You’re right.”

There was a pause, and the two glanced simultaneously at the glass transom, then checked their phones. Still nothing. There were no sounds outside the door, either. No footsteps, no shrieks, no gunshots.

“I guess it’s good we’re at least a little hidden back here,” said Ms. Sanderson. “This is a very underused area of the school.”

“Is that why you come here to cry?” Mr. Rayfield asked. The question came out directly, but not unkindly.

Ms. Sanderson smiled softly, grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge why she’d been in the book room in the first place.

“This was actually my first time coming here,” she said. “I just remembered it existed this morning.” She frowned a bit, picked at her thumbnail. “What set me off was a nasty email from this mom about her kid’s paper, about how I didn’t give her kid an extension even though she was allegedly sick.” At the word sick Ms. Sanderson made air quotes and rolled her eyes. “But actually ,” she continued, sitting up straighter now, clearly frustrated, “she was on vacation in Costa Rica . Some of the other kids told me they saw it on her Instagram, and I looked, and her profile is public, so I could see it was true. So the mother was just straight up lying to me to protect her daughter’s precious GPA!” She harrumphed after this little speech, clearly still prickly over the entire situation.

“See, me?” said Mr. Rayfield. “I would have just let it slide. Give the extension. It’s not even worth it.” He shrugged.

“But it’s the principle of the thing,” said Ms. Sanderson, holding up an index finger for emphasis; even in the poorly lit room, Mr. Rayfield could see Ms. Sanderson’s cheeks redden in anger as her original indignation came flooding back. In addition to being born full of executive function, Ms. Sanderson had also been born with a finely tuned moral compass, and she was not yet old enough to realize that its guidance sometimes made her come across as self-righteous. But Ms. Sanderson really was a person of principle. Mr. Rayfield could not know that the week before, she had unloaded all her groceries into her car at Kroger before realizing she had not paid for the twelve-pack of Diet Coke on the bottom rack of her cart. Well aware that her carton of chocolate ice cream was melting in the backseat of her used Honda, Ms. Sanderson had dutifully headed back inside to pay for the soda.

“I get it, I get it,” said Mr. Rayfield, holding his hands up in surrender. They had not been in this book room for very long, but he liked Ms. Sanderson. He also thought she was cute. He did not want to offend her.

“So why were you coming in here?” she asked, eager to change the focus.

“I come in here all the time,” Mr. Rayfield admitted. “Mostly just to get some peace, I guess. To think. To escape. Like I said, I’m really not happy here.” It felt good to admit this truth out loud inside the school building. In fact, it was the first time he’d done so. Even though his displeasure at the job was fairly obvious to his colleagues, Mr. Rayfield had been cautious about speaking too explicitly about how miserable he was at Baldwin. The truth was, most of his older coworkers were nice people who had tried to help him, and he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Mr. Rayfield could be a procrastinator, a depressive, and something of a misanthrope, but at his core he was also a good person, which was one reason why he felt guilty about his inability to unstick himself from his current job.

“Like you said, this job is too difficult to stay in if you don’t like it,” reasoned Ms. Sanderson. “If you want, you could send me your résumé. I’m a good proofreader.” She smiled at him. This offer of some sort of communication beyond their current strange circumstances sent a charge of excitement and pleasure through Mr. Rayfield.

“Thanks,” said Mr. Rayfield. “That’s really nice of you.”

Ms. Sanderson nodded, then stood up and went toward the entrance of the book room. She leaned her ear against the door as if she could somehow hear something, her face screwed up in concentration. From her vantage point, she could see the way Mr. Rayfield’s dark hair fell over the collar of his navy blue polo shirt. She could observe how his dark jeans were faded at the knees and that his legs were long and lanky. She was supposed to be listening for a school shooter, yet she was examining—no, she was admiring— this young man in front of her. It seemed ridiculous, but the month before she had found a dead body in the faculty lounge, so really, what was ridiculous?

“Do you know what this all reminds me of?” she said, taking her seat again on the floor across from Mr. Rayfield. They hadn’t been in the room very long, but Ms. Sanderson had to admit she felt comfortable here with Mr. Rayfield, who was young like her and would get all her references and would not try to regale her with teaching stories of long ago or express shock that she was too young to remember 9/11.

“What does it remind you of?” asked Mr. Rayfield, leaning back and knocking a copy of Catcher off the shelf with his head. He put it back carefully.

“It reminds me of this time in tenth grade when we had an unannounced lockdown, only I was in the bathroom when it happened,” she said.

“Oh shit,” said Mr. Rayfield.

“Yeah, oh shit,” said Ms. Sanderson. “And they hadn’t really told us what to do, you know? We’d always had these planned drills, which is one reason why I think these are stupid in the first place, because you can’t truly plan for a random school shooter, but anyways, this one time we had this one that was unannounced. It was still just a drill, but I didn’t know that at the time, of course.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Rayfield, nodding.

“So I’m in the bathroom, and I’m all alone,” Ms. Sanderson continued. “There weren’t any other kids in there, which was odd in and of itself and also made it scarier.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Rayfield, his voice serious, his face lined with concern as he imagined a younger Ms. Sanderson in this frightening situation. “Could you lock the bathroom door?”

“No, I couldn’t,” said Ms. Sanderson, appreciating the fact that Mr. Rayfield was a very good listener. He had been born that way, just as Ms. Sanderson had been born full of principle and executive function.

“Why not?” Mr. Rayfield asked.

“There actually weren’t doors,” she said. “It was one of those open-air designs, you know, so they could catch kids smoking weed? Not that I smoked weed.”

Mr. Rayfield nodded.

“So this lockdown starts, and I’m totally scared and clueless, right?” She frowned. Mr. Rayfield could sense that the same principled indignation that had bubbled to the surface earlier when she’d relayed her story about the vacationing liar of a student was making itself known again. This time, Mr. Rayfield understood it totally.

“So I venture out into the hallway, and my heart is just racing, and there is no one, I mean no one in sight,” Ms. Sanderson continued. “No kids, no adults, nothing. It was like a ghost town. And I thought, Shit, this is the real thing. There’s some asshole with an AR-15 somewhere in this building, and I’m out here all alone .”

“Jesus Christ,” said Mr. Rayfield, placing his own teenage self in the same situation and imagining the surge of panic Ms. Sanderson must have no doubt endured. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t know what to do, so I ran back to my classroom,” said Ms. Sanderson. “I was in world history class, and the teacher was this woman, Ms. Jefferson, who was really cool. It was my favorite class, and she was basically my favorite teacher.”

Mr. Rayfield nodded, sensing from the tone of Ms. Sanderson’s voice that this story was headed nowhere good.

“So I tried to open the door, which was stupid because of course it was locked,” she continued. “And then I wiggled the knob a few times, and then, well…I just knocked. I was like—in this sort of loud whisper—I was like, ‘Ms. Jefferson, it’s me. It’s Hannah.’?”

Mr. Rayfield was pleased to know her first name at last, and happy that it was a name as soft and lovely as Hannah, but he didn’t say this, of course. Instead, he asked if Ms. Jefferson opened the door, even though he was fairly certain he knew the answer already.

“No,” said Hannah Sanderson, first-year social studies teacher at Baldwin High and only seven years removed from this awful event. “She didn’t . I knocked and knocked, and I basically begged to be let back in, and I was really starting to panic, you know? I was literally all alone. I didn’t know if any second some madman was going to run around the corner and shoot me dead, right there in front of my world history classroom.”

There was a pause in this story. Mr. Rayfield could see the spots of indignation starting to bloom on her face again, and even the base of her throat. She frowned and then continued.

“I started to cry. Like out of total panic. I was totally abandoned.” At this Hannah let out a shaky breath.

“I would have lost it, too,” said Mr. Rayfield. “I would have freaked the fuck out.”

Hannah nodded, acknowledging that it had been a very freak-the-fuck-out situation. “I ended up running down this stairwell and out a door that led to the faculty parking lot, and every second I was flinching, like, convinced at any moment that a bullet was going to take me out. And then it turned out it was a drill anyway, unannounced so we could get a good practice in and learn from our mistakes. And one of the things the school learned because of me is that they hadn’t planned for what to do for kids outside the classrooms during a lockdown.”

“What are you supposed to do?” Mr. Rayfield asked, realizing he didn’t know the answer.

“Well, teachers and clerks are supposed to immediately go outside and scoop up any kids in the halls and take them into their rooms and offices.” He remembered how she’d checked for any such students when this drill had started.

“But what about kids who can’t get swept into a safe place fast enough?” said Mr. Rayfield, frowning.

Hannah shrugged and sighed. “They should hide on top of a toilet in the bathroom stalls,” she said. “Or make a break for it like I did. That’s what I’ve told my students to do.”

“Great,” said Mr. Rayfield, his voice thick with sarcasm. He leaned back and again knocked the copy of The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf. He picked up the book and peered at the iconic brick-red cover. “Holden Caulfield may have suffered from, like, postwar angst and Waspy ennui, but at least there weren’t school shooters at Pencey Prep.”

At this Hannah laughed loudly. The specifics buried inside Mr. Rayfield’s witty comment pleased her greatly.

“So many kids hated that book in high school,” she said, “but I loved it.”

“Same,” said Mr. Rayfield, and with this exchange each young teacher suddenly knew much about the other.

He left the book at his side and asked Hannah what happened to the teacher who hadn’t let her in during that awful lockdown drill.

“Nothing,” said Hannah. “I mean, she was following protocol. She wasn’t supposed to open the door, you know? If there had been a shooter holding me hostage, he could have been using me to try to get inside, right?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rayfield said, pretty sure he would have broken that protocol.

“I was so upset that day, they let me go home early,” said Hannah. “But when I came back the next day, Ms. Jefferson hugged me and cried and cried. I felt sorry for her, I really did. And I understood the position she was in, but…she was relatively safe in her classroom, you know?”

The entire horrible event had been a lesson for Hannah that she had not yet fully absorbed and, in fact, would spend most of her adult life trying to willfully ignore: A person could color-code and list and organize, but in the end, life sometimes just happened to you.

“I’m really sorry you went through that,” said Mr. Rayfield, his voice soft and full of genuine compassion. “Really sorry.”

“Thanks,” said Hannah, simultaneously grateful and uncomfortable with her young colleague’s sympathy. “I mean, it’s no I found a dead body at work ,” she continued, anxious to lighten the mood, “but it’s still one of my wildest stories.”

Now it was Mr. Rayfield’s turn to laugh loudly. He really liked this girl.

Before Mr. Rayfield could fully appreciate what was happening, Hannah was crouching right in front of him—just inches away, really—and carefully lifting up the teacher identification badge hanging around his neck on a red lanyard. As she twisted the ID around to examine it, her knuckles grazed his polo shirt, leaving behind a pleasant, tingling sensation Mr. Rayfield found hard to ignore.

“Jake Rayfield,” said Hannah out loud, nodding appreciatively. “It’s like the name of a detective from a black-and-white movie.” Then she sat down, but this time, instead of sitting back down across from Jake, she placed herself next to him, directly to his left. Jake could smell her strawberry-scented shampoo. She could tease out the cool, clean scent of Irish Spring mixed with some guy deodorant.

Each liked the smell of the other quite a bit.

Just then, the crackling static and the three blips of the PA system startled them both.

“Everyone, I’d like to thank all of you for your composure and compliance during this lockdown,” came the calm, collected voice of Principal Kendricks. This time, the sliver of anxiety Jake had picked up on earlier was absent. “We went into lockdown purely out of an abundance of caution, and while we have determined that thankfully there is no threat to our school at this time, we need to remain in our classrooms for just a bit longer. We hope to release right before lunch.”

Hannah exhaled. “Thank God,” she said.

“I wonder what the hell happened,” added Jake.

As soon as Jake finished speaking, Hannah’s phone buzzed with an incoming text.

“Wow, something made it through,” she said. “Oh, it’s Ms. Fletcher. She really looks out for me since everything that happened with Mr. Lehrer.” Hannah’s eyebrows popped up. “Look,” she continued, showing her phone to Jake, leaning into him in a way that felt warm and pleasant.

Rumor is a homeless guy with a big backpack somehow got inside the building. They finally found him and I’m sure he is harmless, but I think they need to check all the lockers and stuff to make sure he didn’t put something dangerous somewhere. Kendricks has to be super cautious with absolutely everything since the ashes incident. We should be on lockdown for at least another hour. Hope you don’t need to pee!!! Did you ever hear about the poor Spanish teacher Mrs. Cardoza who went to the bathroom in a trash can during a lockdown? I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.

“Jeez, that’s going to take a while,” said Jake. He said it in the world-weary tone he thought was warranted, but secretly, he was not at all disappointed.

“ Do you need to pee?” asked Hannah, putting her phone aside.

“No, do you?”

“No, thank goodness.”

Jake drew his knees up to his chin and shifted a bit, trying to get comfortable. Hannah thought it made him look younger, more like a teenager himself. She wondered what he had been like in high school, and if they would have been friends. She’d heard through the grapevine that he had attended a prestigious university in the Northeast, one she probably never would have gotten into, even though she had been a very good student herself. She tried to square the young Jake who had clearly been intelligent and ambitious with the handsome, aimless man who’d wandered into a profession he didn’t seem to care for very much.

“Can I ask how you ended up here?” she asked. “Teaching, I mean?”

Jake turned to look at her. Hannah adjusted her posture, too, turning her body toward him. They were relaxed now around each other. It was hard to imagine that not that long ago they had been essentially strangers.

“I worked my ass off in high school,” began Jake. “You wouldn’t have recognized me. I was the biggest nerd. Obsessed with my grades, obsessed with my college applications.” His forehead crinkled a little at this, as if he was trying to picture someone he had met quite some time ago, and only once. “I used to joke that it was because I had an Asian mom, but the truth is, most of the pressure came from my dad, who’s your standard-issue white guy.”

Hannah had wondered about Jake’s background, but she knew it would have been weird to bring it up right away. Still, since he’d mentioned it, she asked for details.

“My mom is Korean,” said Jake. “But her family has been here forever. Honestly, my mom is the chill one. Like I said, it was my dad that was always pushing me at the start, demanding A’s, really cheering me on when I made them, talking about how I’d end up a surgeon like him one day, and then, I don’t know, somewhere around eighth or ninth grade, I started pushing myself. He didn’t have to do it anymore. It was like I became obsessed with being perfect.” What being perfect had meant for Jake had involved him staying up all night on a sometimes weekly basis, tapping on his laptop and annotating his readings and working his problem sets over and over until he knew his work would earn nothing less than a 100. It had meant enduring anxiety attacks on a regular basis, usually in the mornings while brushing his teeth or trying to eat a bowl of Cheerios, still groggy from a lack of sleep. It had meant a wave of relief over his college acceptance letters, accompanied by a surprising, lingering worry: Congrats, you made it. Now what?

“Okay, so you were this rock-star teenager. But college?” asked Hannah, knowing that the next chapter in Jake’s story would provide the crucial turning point.

“To say I didn’t adjust well would be an understatement,” Jake told her. “I was sort of a disaster, actually. My freshman year I ended up pledging a frat. It was stupid, but I was desperate to find my place, I guess.” Jake did not tell her about his horrible homesickness or the beginnings of something that would evolve into a long depression that he would self-medicate with every substance he could find. He did not tell her how he’d spent the first few weeks of college doubting all of his abilities and missing his parents and his bedroom and his dog, a rescue mutt named Banjo. He did not tell her how he’d spent those early days not meeting others, but instead in constant communication with his equally driven high school girlfriend Olivia—his first love and the first girl he’d had sex with, then at a college on the other side of the country—or how it had taken her exactly one month to jettison him in a thirty-minute phone call that had left him a crumbling shell of an eighteen-year-old who quickly became vulnerable to his worst instincts.

He did not tell her any of these things, there in the book room. But there was something about Hannah that made Jake think that one day he just might.

Hannah’s small liberal arts college hadn’t had a Greek system, something she was grateful for. Her knowledge of fraternities came from movies, and she quickly conjured up an image of sweaty, shirtless white-dude bros chugging cheap beer and crushing empty cans on their foreheads before doing backflips off poorly constructed wooden decks. This didn’t square with Jake Rayfield, who was tall and thin, with a brooding face and a big brain and a cynical sense about him.

She had loved college. Loved her professors and her friends and the nights she’d spent with them drinking cheap wine by the small lake on campus, belting out lyrics by earnest female singer songwriters in her terrible voice. She felt sorry that Jake hadn’t had an equally wonderful experience.

“So you join this frat…,” she said, leaving space for him to continue.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “And…it sucked. Honestly. It was so disgusting and stupid and absurd. And one night we got super wasted and…” Jake stopped. He looked at Hannah. At her open blue eyes and her kind face. At the face that was probably meant for something like this. Meant to listen and nurture and comfort and advise. She was younger than him by a handful of years, but suddenly to Jake, she seemed older. Wiser. In some ways she probably she was.

“What happened?” she asked. Her voice was a whisper, her pretty face full of concern.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Jake, looking down, looking away. But somehow, he knew that he would tell her right now. That he could tell her. That he could tell her about the night the president of the frat—a muscular, wealthy white boy from Greenwich nicknamed Trip—had forced all the freshmen pledges to consume large amounts of grain alcohol and strip naked, then watch a gay porno in the frat house’s common room. And how Jake, to his horror, had realized he’d gotten an erection in front of everyone. And how all the other pledges had laughed at him and Trip had laughed at him and how he had run out of the frat house naked and puked in the bushes out back, then stumbled back inside to try to find his clothing so he could escape.

It had been the most humiliating moment of his life.

“I dropped out of the frat, of course,” Jake said. “I ended up hanging around with this other sort of lost dude in my dorm who smoked weed every morning before class. And that led to me doing, like, every other drug I could find for about four years. I barely graduated. My dad’s dream of med school was over. When I did finish, I moved back in with my parents, and they insisted I had to get a job. My mom actually had to help me finish the application for the district’s alternative teacher certification program.” He stopped here, taking in his narrative, realizing that it was, in fact, his. “Anyway, five years later, I’m still here.”

Hannah’s eyes were wide. She was horrified.

“Oh my God, Jake,” she said. “That was abuse. What happened to you at the frat, I mean. That was, like, actual abuse.”

Jake shrugged. He didn’t know if that was the word he would have used, but he also didn’t think Hannah’s choice of it was too far-fetched, either.

“I’ve never told anyone about that,” said Jake. “I mean, what happened that night.” Then, aware of how that might sound, he added, “I know that’s something guys say sometimes to endear themselves to women, but I’m telling you the truth. I’ve never talked about that with anyone else.”

Hannah nodded seriously, taking this in. “I’m glad you felt you could tell me,” she said.

“Also,” added Jake, “I know that whole stunt the frat president pulled was homophobic as hell, and so immature and absurd, but…I mean, what I’m saying is…my reaction to that video? I’m, uh…I’m actually into girls.”

Hannah shrugged, brushing aside this comment. “Human sexuality is very complex,” she said. “I took a whole course about it in college. Our bodies can respond in ways that surprise us sometimes.” She spoke with an air of authority despite the fact that at this point in her life she’d had sex with exactly one person, her college boyfriend of seven months, a directionless theater major who had been a tender and interesting lover and with whom she’d enjoyed an amicable breakup.

“Well, maybe so, but I wish my body hadn’t chosen to respond in that way on that night,” said Jake. “Although, I don’t know…maybe it was meant to be. Otherwise, I might have been stuck in that fucking frat for four years.”

Hannah grimaced at the thought. “Gross,” she added.

“Yeah, gross,” said Jake.

“His nickname was actually Trip?” asked Hannah, incredulous.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “His real name was, like, Archibald Pierce the Third, or some shit.”

Hannah laughed out loud at this. “Archibald Pierce? Seriously?”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Seriously.”

“Are you sure his name wasn’t Chandler Brooks?” asked Hannah, affecting a posh English accent. “Or maybe Bergstrom Cooper? Or, like, Clayton Graham?” She stuck her nose in the air and peered around the book room with the bored mannerisms of a member of the effete aristocracy.

“You may be right,” said Jake, enjoying himself. “He’s married to a Bitsy now. Or a Muffy. Or maybe a Topsy, if he’s really lucky.”

“Well, he’s certainly not married to a Hannah ,” said Hannah, her fake English accent gone all at once, replaced by her flat, middle-class American one.

“No,” said Jake, “he’s not that lucky.”

At this Hannah looked at Jake, looked him right in the eyes, and Jake leaned in to kiss her.

Oh, how good it felt to kiss Jake! How warm and soft and inviting was his tender, gentle mouth. In Hannah’s relatively limited experience, she’d found that some boys were terrible kissers. Too forceful or too wet. But kissing Jake felt like sinking leisurely without a fear of falling. Kissing Jake felt like cozy-on-the-couch.

Jake sensed that she liked it, that he hadn’t made a mistake. He pulled away for a moment, and she opened her eyes and smiled at him. Their faces were centimeters apart. They laughed, their laughs coming out in soft hushes. They laughed with delight both at what they had just done and at the awareness that they could do it again, right then.

So they did.

They weren’t going to have sex in the book room, obviously, although that was a fantasy both would revisit later, in private. But for now, fantasies were filed safely away, and they turned their attentions entirely to each other in the here and now, to their pink mouths and the napes of their necks and the swell of Hannah’s breasts pressing into Jake’s warm chest. They kissed and they kissed and they sank all the way down until they were lying next to each other on the floor. There, they stopped briefly to breathe before they kissed and kissed some more. Hannah was eager, like Jake. Hands went under shirts and skated over soft skin. Palms pressed into heated places and were met with little sighs of bliss. The whole thing reminded Jake of high school, back before he had lost his virginity and he and his girlfriend had negotiated all sorts of pleasurable positions on the sofa that always left him aching and full of desire.

It all felt wonderfully youthful, and it occurred to Jake as he kissed Hannah that he was, in fact, still young. That yes, the world was on fire and for their entire lives damaged men had brought guns into schools and their generation had been dealt a terrible hand and nothing good had seemed to happen for years and years, but! His knees and his back were still strong. He did not have to be a teacher forever if he did not want to be because there was still time to be something else. And this beautiful, smart, funny girl wanted to kiss him. She wanted to touch him and let him touch her. There, in the book room, anything and everything seemed possible. Jake’s heart surged with joy at the realization.

They made out for a good twenty minutes, until the piercing PA shattered the silence again.

Grinning, they pulled apart and looked at each other, full of happiness. They could barely take in Principal Kendricks’s voice as he explained that the school was secure and, soon, they would all be dismissed for lunch.

“I have to say,” said Jake, his smile growing, “this isn’t at all what I thought was going to happen to me today.”

Hannah beamed back. “Same. But…I’m glad it did.”

“Same,” said Jake. “Like…incredibly glad.”

They sat there, unsure of what to do next, not really wanting to move, even though they knew they must. Suddenly, they were interrupted by the sound of a key in the door.

“Oh my God,” said Hannah. The two quickly scrambled to their feet.

The bright fluorescent light of the hallway blasted into them, as did the presence of Mr. Williams, one of the veteran English teachers, who stood in the doorway of the book room with a rolling cart.

“My God, did you spend the entire lockdown in here?” asked Mr. Williams, incredulous. He was a balding middle-aged man who enjoyed weekly sex with his middle-aged wife, but he had not made out with anyone in many years. He stared at his two young colleagues.

“Yes,” said Ms. Sanderson, actually giggling. There were three buttons undone on her pink Oxford blouse, but Mr. Williams knew he could not be the one to point that out.

“We’re fine, though,” said Mr. Rayfield, not even trying to cover up a satisfied smile. He was almost glowing with happiness, and Mr. Williams thought this was the first time he had seen him seem pleased to be at Baldwin.

“Well, it’s lunch now,” he informed the two, filling the space between them, realizing they were far too intoxicated by whatever had just happened to feel in any way awkward about this moment. “I just came in to get these.” He motioned at several stacks of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“We’ll help you,” said Ms. Sanderson, peering carefully at Mr. Rayfield, almost as if gripped by a sudden shyness. Mr. Rayfield gazed back at her, captivated.

“Yeah, we’ll help,” he answered, not taking his eyes off Ms. Sanderson.

After the three of them had loaded up the cart, Mr. Williams thanked them and told them they should go on and get lunch. Standing in the doorway of the book room, he watched as his two young colleagues made their way down the hall, their shoulders nearly touching. He thought, not for the first time, that the two could have been his students at one point, or even his own children. He read the subtext of their body language with the careful eye of someone who had made a living out of analyzing and interpreting stories. Not lifting his gaze until they rounded the corner, Mr. Williams found himself smiling. He wished the two young teachers a satisfying conclusion, or at least a very good next chapter.