The Faculty Lounge

Chapter Nine

Nine

M ierda , Luz Guevara said to herself when she saw the austere men in suits gathered in the hallway outside the main office, a labyrinth of conference rooms and administrators’ offices. She had been headed there to fill in her time sheet—for the final time, in fact. This day in early March was meant to be her last day as a custodian at Baldwin High School. And here she was faced with her biggest fear. Was it possible that after all this time, she was in trouble? She had managed to evade any drama in this place for months for this reason, even when it had been dropped in her lap.

Luz’s breathing suddenly became shallow and her stomach tied itself in knots as her mind was pulled back to the day it all began.

—

Months earlier, on that sad September afternoon after they had taken away Mr. Lehrer’s body, they had made her clean the couch in the lounge. Her EZ-Clean campus supervisor had said it was because she was in charge of those rooms on the third floor, but mostly Luz thought they made her do it because the job was hard, and Luz Guevara was the hardest-working custodian at Baldwin High School.

The men from the medical examiner’s office had taken his body away and the school day was already over when she was given the directive to enter the lounge and clean the couch. No one had bothered to explain to her why she was doing so. She asked what the cause was, and her sour-faced supervisor explained, openly irritated with Luz’s need for a reason. Wasn’t the reason for their jobs always the same? Something was dirty and now it had to be clean.

“It’s some substitute,” she said. “He died in there. El viejito that was always around.”

“Mr. Lehrer?” Luz asked, and her chest started to tighten.

“ Sí, el viejito , like I said. I don’t know his name, but I think he used to teach here when he was younger, sí ?” Her supervisor was ready to end the exchange. “ No sé que pasó, pero …he died. This morning. In there on the couch.” She pointed toward the door of the faculty lounge. With this limited information, she left Luz to go inside and begin her work.

Mr. Lehrer—she had tried to call him Bob per his request, sometimes even Roberto as a joke when they were practicing his Spanish—had emptied his bladder upon dying, Luz learned. While wearing thick rubber gloves and a face mask, she kneeled on the cold tile floor and attacked the stain with the industrial-strength cleaner and sponge her employer provided, scrubbing until the muscles in her right shoulder and upper back burned hot and she was forced to switch to her left hand.

After a little over a year of working as a school custodian at Baldwin High, Luz was mostly immune to the sights she encountered as part of her job. Sights like bloated pretzels swimming in pools of lukewarm milk, bread and pizza crusts stained with fuchsia lipstick and moistened with strings of saliva, and Styrofoam trays splattered with so much ketchup that they looked like murder scenes. She had cleaned her fair share of urine, too, and worse, so it wasn’t even that part of the situation that made her break down that afternoon in the empty lounge.

What made Luz rest her sponge on the tiled floor, what made her rock back on her heels and peel off the gloves and weep—really weep—into her hands until the tears and snot poured freely down her face, what made her cry like she had not cried in quite some time, was the understanding that she had lost her only real friend at Baldwin High School.

—

She and Mr. Lehrer had started at Baldwin at the same time, the fall prior. He had returned to substitute and she, brand-new to the country, had been hired to work as a custodian. She’d acquired the job through her sister’s boyfriend, Eduardo, whose family had connections with the people who ran EZ-Clean, the company to which the school district outsourced janitorial services. Eduardo had been born here, had the all-important status of citizen , and this afforded Luz certain advantages, advantages her older sister, Maritza, promised her during phone calls in which she tried to coerce Luz to join her in America.

“Eduardo can get you a job so easily, and you won’t need real papers to do it,” she said. “It’s a cleaning job in a school, but it would just be for a little while, until I can get you a nannying job like I have. You would be amazed what you could make here in cash, no questions asked. So many rich white Americans who want their babies to learn Spanish.”

Maritza had always been the dreamer, the adventurer. When they were small and their parents had taken them to El Cuco beach to swim in the cool, clear water, it had been Maritza who had swum out the farthest, dived the deepest, shouted the loudest with joy and excitement. It was Maritza who took bites of their abuelita ’s pupusas right off the pan, ignoring their grandmother’s warnings that they were still too hot. And it was Maritza who had headed north not long after their mother died in search of more opportunities, less violence. There, she had fallen in love with Eduardo. She was never going to come back to El Salvador, she declared. Not unless she was forced to.

“But there are gangs in America, too,” Luz said to Maritza on the phone when her sister tried to persuade Luz to join her. “I think they hate people like us there. It is not a paradise.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” argued Maritza. “And anyway,” she continued, her voice losing its verve and confidence, “the United States is where I am, isn’t it? Your family?”

There were cousins and aunts and uncles to miss in El Salvador, of course, but with their parents both gone—her father of a heart attack when they were small, her mother of an aggressive cancer only recently—Luz felt the tug of her closest family member. The idea of never seeing her sister again, ever—it filled her with dread. And so she had come, and not long after her arrival she had started the job at Baldwin.

Most of the people who worked at Baldwin High School were pleasant enough, especially the teachers, and when she hesitatingly entered their classrooms at the end of the day to begin her daily cleaning routine, they tried—in their broken, accented Spanish—to say hello, to wave her in with gratitude from their desks. ( Por favor, entre. No te preocupes. ) It was nice at least to live in a place where a surprising number of people could speak a basic level of her language. In a halting but pleasant back-and-forth with a young physics teacher probably only a few years her junior, she had taught the teacher how to write No borres on the board when he didn’t want Luz to clean it at the end of the week.

But mostly Luz remained reserved around the school employees and even the other custodians, women much older than her who had husbands and children, several of them grown. Luz sensed that, like her, they were all working under false papers, that there existed a quiet understanding between EZ-Clean and its employees—an understanding that EZ-Clean would provide them with work if the employees provided a good enough lie. It was an understanding, Luz decided, that seemed to extend beyond EZ-Clean to the entirety of the United States. Despite the rhetoric of the country’s previous president, despite the bigoted messaging and the red caps and the cries for a wall, within her first few months in America she had come to truly understand the extent to which people like her kept the wheels turning in this country, generating a constant hum just under the surface, operating from a place a person could simply choose not to see.

But Mr. Lehrer had been different. The first day she met him, a few weeks into her first year at Baldwin, she had been tasked with unlocking a classroom door for him. She was struck by his age, his stooped-over figure, his rheumy, tired eyes and liver-spotted hands. Luz was a few years shy of thirty, and she estimated this teacher had to be at least fifty years her senior. Did he need the work this much? Did American schools need teachers this desperately?

“ Gracias por abrir la puerta ,” he had said to her, and Luz could tell that he was proud of himself for knowing how to thank her for what she had done. His accent was horrible, his elementary Spanish funneled through the sort of twangy cadence she had become accustomed to hearing among the older employees at Baldwin. She smiled uncertainly.

“ Sé que mi acento es terrible ,” he told her, reading her mind. At this she couldn’t help but laugh gently. She answered in her tentative new tongue that her English wasn’t much better.

“ ?Podemos practicar? ” he asked her, his old man hands gripping a folder full of attendance rosters as if he were afraid he’d fall over if he didn’t hold it tightly enough. He went on to explain that he was a substitute teacher, here only a few days a week at most, but that if she saw him and had a few moments, they might be able to practice their Spanish and English. He seemed so eager to try that Luz felt she had to say yes.

And so they practiced. She and Mr. Lehrer would exchange words in passing whenever she had a few spare minutes during the day or in the afternoons after school when she was cleaning a classroom. (He never rushed to leave at the bell, like some teachers did. She inferred that he enjoyed simply being in the place.) Their practice sessions would be as short as a few back-and-forths, sometimes as long as ten minutes if she had the time.

The conversation was ongoing, covering topics that were mostly mundane: food, weather, the sorry state of the stairwells, where students were known to leave so much trash behind. What was the word for this, for that? How do you say this phrase, this sentence? But the moments brought Luz a lot of happiness, a sense of connection that was sorely missing during her workdays. Once, she even created a little quiz for him to test his understanding of ser and estar . He reacted with delight upon receiving it, insisting he would take the quiz without any outside assistance. (When he returned it to Luz the next day, she quickly marked it for him; he’d gotten seventeen out of twenty correct.)

Early on in their conversations, Mr. Lehrer explained to her that he had taken to practicing his Spanish on a language app on his phone. His hand trembled a bit with age as he pulled out the device to proudly show her each level through which he had advanced.

Luz pulled out her own phone to reveal that she had the same app, and soon they became “friends” on it. Mr. Lehrer used it to send her encouraging messages in Spanish when she broke through another level of English learning. His written Spanish was often riddled with errors, but he could make himself understood. Luz fought the urge to constantly correct him, mostly because she thought there was something charming about being so dedicated to learning something new, even at an advanced age, and she certainly did not want to discourage him. Of course, his enthusiasm for Spanish was not a surprise to her. Mr. Lehrer had been a teacher at Baldwin for many years, and Luz knew that the best teachers never tired of learning themselves.

Along with her conversations with Mr. Lehrer, Luz sometimes practiced her English in the postage stamp–sized bathroom in the apartment she shared with Maritza and Eduardo. Staring at her reflection in the mirrored medicine cabinet, she would watch as she spoke first in Spanish, then in her thickly accented beginner’s English. When she spoke in this new language, her brow furrowed, and the skin around her dark brown eyes wrinkled. Her full lips thinned out, retracted inward or pursed angrily at every attempt at a vowel. She didn’t think she looked as pretty when she spoke English. She certainly didn’t think she looked as smart, and being smart was something Luz Guevara had always prided herself on. Still, she kept trying, and during her first year at Baldwin, in large part because of her interactions with Mr. Lehrer, her confidence with her new language grew with each passing month.

In addition to working hard at learning English, Luz worked hard at her job. Over time, she adjusted enough that she no longer felt like gagging each time she had to unclog a toilet or empty containers full of used sanitary napkins. It became routine, and the entirety of the situation impressed upon Luz how resilient she could really be. How much she could endure if she had to. But what would she do with all this resilience? she wondered. How far could it really take her in a country in which she was not even supposed to exist?

At home, Eduardo and Maritza made her feel welcome in their apartment; Eduardo was a kind man who truly seemed to love her sister and talked often of marrying her and having children. It was wonderful to be around Maritza again, to be the receiver of her warm embraces, her back scratches, her mugs of atole de elote like their mother used to make.

Still, she often felt like the tagalong baby sister. An obligation and a responsibility of sorts. And she was quickly reminded of how different she was from Maritza. How bookish and quiet she was in comparison, and how this difference had always existed between them.

One Saturday evening not long after she had met Mr. Lehrer, Maritza and Eduardo insisted Luz join them at the house of some friends. A large party was promised, full of friendly people with ties to their homeland. It would serve as a sort of welcome for Luz. There would be music and dancing and good food, too. Tamales and horchata and panes con pollo . Please come, they both urged. Luz agreed, even if part of her longed to stay in the apartment alone, enjoying the rare moment of peaceful solitude.

Once there, Luz smiled and nodded as gamely as she could while Maritza guided her around the party as if Luz were a child too shy to attend her own birthday celebration. How at ease Maritza seemed here, how she squealed in excitement at each familiar face she encountered and embraced each friend with enthusiasm. In a few short years, Maritza had made this place her home, Luz marveled. After a time, her older sister became absorbed in a conversation in the kitchen, and Luz found herself moving quietly through the noisy crowd, grateful for her smallness, grateful for her ability to slip out of sight so easily. She decided to hide in one of the bedrooms, and opened the language app on her phone. She found a message from Mr. Lehrer.

Otro bueno trabajo para ti. ?Excelente, Luz!

Grinning, she responded.

Thank you Mr. Lehrer. You keep going too with your Spanish.

The bedroom door opened; it was Maritza, frowning.

“Why are you hiding in here?” She tugged on Luz’s arm, pulling her in the direction of the door. “Come on back out there. One of Eduardo’s cousins is asking after you.” At this Maritza raised an eyebrow meaningfully, and Luz flushed. Maritza read this as a signal of interest, not the rush of discomfort it actually was. Luz had absolutely no interest in Eduardo’s cousin.

Later that night, once they were finally back in the apartment and Maritza and Eduardo had gone to bed, their giggles and chatter laced with beer and louder than normal, Luz carefully transformed the couch she slept on into her bed and slipped between the pale pink sheets, pulling the worn-out floral bedspread that had come from Eduardo’s sister’s house up to her chin. She peered out the set of windows that ran the length of the living room and overlooked a parking lot. It was usually at night when she felt the most unmoored, almost a stranger to herself. Who was she now? She was not an American, even though she lived here. And because she no longer lived there, Luz wondered if she could even still be considered Salvadoran.

—

Toward the end of her first year at Baldwin, a chemistry teacher on the third floor whose room she cleaned regularly went on maternity leave. In her place appeared a tall, dark-haired man with a well-trimmed beard who looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. Mr. Lehrer explained to Luz that the man was what they called a “long-term sub.” Unlike Mr. Lehrer, who was placed wherever he was needed when a teacher called in sick or took a personal day, this substitute had some understanding of the subject, and he would be in the same classroom every day, almost like a real teacher.

Almost instantly, Luz did not like this long-term sub. Unlike most of the teachers at Baldwin, he never said hello when she entered his classroom to clean after the bell. In fact, he did not acknowledge her at all, once brushing past her to leave the room as if she were invisible.

But what really bothered Luz was the overly familiar way he seemed to speak with the young female students, as if they were his peers. There was one in particular, a blond girl who had a streak of purple in her hair, whom he seemed to focus on especially. As Luz pushed her janitorial cart down the hall, she would often catch him outside his classroom during passing periods, joking and laughing with her. She was clearly enamored of him, Luz could tell, and a few times after the bell to begin class rang, the two would linger near the door of his classroom, talking in low tones and laughing.

At home, she shared her concerns with Eduardo and Maritza, who cautioned her to stay out of it.

“It’s probably nothing,” Eduardo told her as the three of them sat in the living room watching a variety show on Spanish television, Eduardo in the recliner and Luz and Maritza on the couch. “He probably just wants to be liked by his students.”

Luz shook her head. “But it’s always the girls that he talks to in that way.”

Maritza reached out to her little sister and gave her a squeeze.

“I know you mean well, Luz, but it’s too risky to say anything,” she said. “And anyway, the school year is almost over.”

Nevertheless, Luz could not suppress the sense that something was wrong and growing more wrong with each passing day.

One afternoon after the long-term sub had been there almost two months, she approached his classroom after the school day had ended to begin her regular cleaning routine. She could see that the lights to the classroom were off, but the slim window in the door did not allow her to get a good view of the entire room, including the teacher’s desk, which was tucked into a corner. While she could not be sure, she assumed that at this hour the room would be empty, and she used her key to unlock the door.

There, sitting close to his desk—he in his teacher’s chair, she on a small, low stool—the long-term sub and the girl with the purple streak in her hair were speaking barely above a whisper. Their knees were practically touching, and the expressions on their faces revealed a level of intimacy Luz knew in her core was entirely inappropriate.

“Oh!” shouted Luz, her surprise sincere. She stood there next to her cart, her heart beating hard.

Startled, the man and the student quickly pulled apart from each other, and Luz thought she saw a flicker of annoyance cross the man’s face. Murmuring something to the man, the young woman flushed scarlet, then stood up, grabbed for her nearby backpack, and made a fast exit, keeping her eyes on the floor as she did so. Uncomfortable around the sub—who was clearly pretending to be busy with papers on his desk—Luz completed her duties in record time and left the room as soon as possible.

That entire evening at home, she could not get the scene out of her head. The next morning, before the first bell of the day, she found Mr. Lehrer in a classroom on the third floor, not far from the long-term sub’s room. He was writing the lesson plan on the whiteboard with a blue Expo marker.

She recalled Maritza and Eduardo’s constant warnings. Don’t bring too much attention to yourself. Don’t give anyone a reason to question you. Don’t get involved. It was not just her status in the United States that was at risk, but Maritza’s, too. And Maritza and Eduardo loved each other.

Still, Luz thought of the girl with the streak of purple in her hair and her flushed cheeks and that dark corner of the classroom. She recalled how close to each other she and the man had been seated. She trusted every alarm bell ringing inside her.

“Mr. Lehrer,” she said, and the old man turned to look at her. He was dressed in his usual work uniform: gray slacks, a cream-colored button-down shirt, and a solid blue tie that had seen better days.

“ Hola, Luz ,” he said, smiling broadly. “ ?Cómo estás? ” When he saw how concerned Luz appeared, he stopped smiling and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Luz described as best she could—moving from Spanish to English and back—what she had witnessed. Mr. Lehrer nodded, taking it in. His face read deep concern.

“I understand,” said Mr. Lehrer. “This is not okay. It has to be reported.”

At this, Luz burst into tears, surprising even herself.

“Luz, what is it?” Mr. Lehrer asked, alarmed.

“I cannot…,” said Luz, placing her hand on her chest, pressing her palm hard against her pounding heart. Her face was hot, and warm tears streamed down her cheeks. “I cannot…be involved.”

At this Mr. Lehrer’s eyes went wide. Holding up his hands as if he were attempting to stop oncoming traffic, he shook his head vigorously side to side.

“No, no, Luz, do not worry, no…” He struggled to find the words, and then he remembered them: “ No diré que me dijiste .”

I will not say you told me.

“I will take care of this,” continued Mr. Lehrer. “Right away. No te preocupes .”

She had never told Mr. Lehrer that she did not have papers. Perhaps he had guessed that this was the case. Regardless, he had never asked about her status. But she sensed that he knew why she felt she could not speak up herself.

Two days later, the substitute was no longer at Baldwin High School. Instead, an older woman was there. She smiled at Luz when Luz came in that day to clean.

Mr. Lehrer found Luz that same afternoon, in an empty classroom she was sweeping. He explained in the English-Spanish hybrid that was now so familiar between the two of them that he had shared his concerns with the administration, that he had said this substitute should be investigated. He had not mentioned Luz. After a bit of digging, the administration discovered that several other people on campus had shared Luz’s worries but no one had known if they should speak up. While there was nothing to suggest that the long-term sub had fully crossed a line, he had been removed and flagged in the substitute system and his name shared with neighboring districts. Hopefully, he would never set foot inside a school again.

Luz smiled and thanked Mr. Lehrer. What a relief to know that the man was gone. Mr. Lehrer said he had been happy to help, but he told Luz that he hoped she would answer a question for him. In Spanish, he asked Luz how she had sensed from the beginning that something was wrong. Where had that instinto to look out for that young female student come from?

Luz considered giving him a simple answer: That she didn’t know where it came from. That she hadn’t really thought of the situation as one requiring any sort of special insight.

But she trusted Mr. Lehrer. She liked him.

And there was a not-so-small part of her that wanted to share. That wanted to let Mr. Lehrer know that the Luz he knew was not all of who she was.

She began to tell him a story.

—

In her native El Salvador, in the city of San Salvador, Luz had also worked at a school. She had taught mathematics at an all-girls Catholic institution called Nuestra Se?ora de Fátima. By her mid-twenties, a few years before leaving for the United States, Luz had established herself as a gifted and nurturing teacher, the type that encouraged her teenage students to excel, to challenge themselves, to grow. She was small, just over five feet, and most people outside of her school life found her unassuming and even shy. But in the classroom, she had a commanding voice and a way of delivering lessons that felt even to herself like some sort of magic. Of course, she was not so egotistical as to say that out loud. She struggled, in fact, just to admit it quietly to herself, despite the transcendent sense that settled over her when she witnessed the click of understanding blooming on a student’s face.

Curious and brainy, Luz had loved school as a little girl, loved its rhythms and routines, its pure mission of learning and self-improvement. And she had loved mathematics for its certainty, its promise of a right answer lurking somewhere inside a formula or a proof. Teaching math was all she had ever wanted to do, and so she had done it, starting first at a government-run school and then moving on to Nuestra Se?ora. She liked teaching only girls, liked the camaraderie and solidarity that developed between them, liked the way their confidence grew over the course of the school year, a confidence Luz knew they deserved and needed.

She was firm and demanding, but she could be silly, too. Once, shortly before the end of term, she acquired a student uniform—a navy blue skirt and a white blouse with dark blue piping around the collar and sleeves—and she wore it to school on the last day before the break. The students found it hilarious, urging her to sit in a student’s desk and playact like she was one of them, mimicking their confusion, their frustration, their adolescent enthusiasm and angst. Luz eagerly complied for her girls, exaggerating their movements and their sayings into magnified expressions of themselves, expressions so easily recognizable by the teenage girls that they burst into peals of unrestrained laughter, and several started to cry tears of amusement.

The director of the school, Se?ora Flores, a serious, brilliant woman in her sixties who held her staff to the highest of standards, once told Luz that when she taught her students, she was like an artist creating a brand-new, brilliant canvas each day. These words of affirmation would never leave her, Luz knew.

Maestra. Profesora. These were the titles Luz dreamed of being called for the rest of her life.

Once, during her first year of teaching at Nuestra Se?ora, Luz had found herself on a city bus while running errands when a student of hers named Idalia climbed aboard. A tall girl with an angular face who often seemed lost in thought, Idalia reminded Luz of herself because of her bookishness, her shyness, and her deep desire to learn. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Idalia flushed a little when she climbed onto the bus and spied her teacher. Clearly, she wasn’t sure how to react.

“Come sit next to me,” Luz said with a smile, setting the young woman at ease. The bus was nearly full, but Luz was sitting toward the back, and the space next to her was empty. She patted it to signal to Idalia to join her. The girl did, and as the bus bounced along, Idalia explained that she was off to visit a cousin who had just had a baby.

“How nice,” Luz said. Then she commented on how hot it was. She took a tissue from her skirt pocket and blotted her cheeks and temples. Idalia pushed her dark locks away from her sweaty forehead, dotted with adolescent acne.

As Luz slipped the tissue back into her pocket, she noticed the bus suddenly lurching to the side of the road. The stomping of heavy boots accompanied the shouts of four young men as they climbed aboard; two of them were brandishing pistols. They could not have been much older than Idalia.

“ ?Esto es un asalto! ” the tallest one shouted. He held his pistol casually, with experience.

Idalia gasped in panic, but Luz had been through this before. Glancing at Idalia, she noticed that the young girl was wearing a gold chain around her neck. Motioning with her fingers and whispering, Luz calmly guided the young girl to quickly tuck the necklace underneath her top, where it stayed unseen as the four men—boys, really, Luz realized—raced up and down the aisle, snatching purses, demanding wallets, and snatching jewelry off women’s bodies with grins on their faces that could only be described as cavalier.

One middle-aged man toward the front of the bus resisted, and the leader brought his pistol down hard across the man’s face, sending a spray of red mist into the air. Idalia squeezed her eyes shut, and Luz was grateful that they could see only the back of the man’s lolling, balding head.

As one of the assailants approached Luz and Idalia, the two young women held their hands open to show that they had nothing. The young man had a hint of a mustache, a desperate attempt to appear older. He was not much taller than Luz. He sneered and motioned at them to empty their pockets; Luz’s tissue tumbled to the floor of the bus. Idalia’s pocket held a few coins, which she dutifully turned over. Tucked inside her sock, the folded-up bills Luz had hidden there almost seemed to pulse. She wondered if the man would somehow read her mind and find her money, but instead his eyes lingered on Idalia, who was seated next to the aisle. Reaching out with a smirk on his face, he cupped the young girl’s left breast with a rough hand and squeezed, hard. Idalia pressed her eyes shut as if by doing so she might disappear.

“Leave her alone!” Luz shouted. “If you want to bother someone, bother me.” She reached over and smacked the offending hand away. Shocked, the young man stared at her, his brain trying to catch up with what Luz had just done to him. As he attempted to calculate a response, the leader of group yelled that they were done, it was time to take off. The young man did nothing more than scowl before trooping off the bus with the others.

As soon as they were gone, Idalia collapsed into Luz’s arms, sobbing. She pressed her face—damp with sweat and tears—against Luz’s shoulder and cried.

“ Gracias, maestra. Gracias. ” Idalia repeated these words over and over, on a loop.

Thank you, teacher. Thank you.

Luz held Idalia in her arms, comforting the girl until she was calm again, until the last of her tears were all dried up.

—

She told this story to Mr. Lehrer while they were seated side by side in student desks. He had understood the weight of what she was telling him early on, and he had suggested they sit. She had shared all of this with him in her careful, awkward English, switching over to relatively simple Spanish phrases she knew he would understand whenever the English she knew was not enough. He had waved a hand in the air every so often to signal her to pause, asking her to repeat a phrase, a word. Luz sensed it was important to him to understand every detail of the full story.

“How scared you must have been,” he told her. “But also, how brave. You are a teacher. You know that part of being a teacher is to look out for your students.”

Luz smiled shyly, feeling truly, fully seen in this place for the first time since she had started working there.

Then Mr. Lehrer asked her what she missed the most about teaching. She appreciated that he did not ask her if she missed teaching; being a good teacher himself, he already knew the answer. But Luz struggled to put into words what pained her most, in part because of the language barrier and in part because the sentiment seemed so difficult to convey.

“What I miss most is the feeling…that…the work is so important,” she said at last. This wasn’t totally right, but it was at least somewhat close.

What Luz wanted to say was that while she certainly didn’t think she was above her job or better than the other custodians (her mathematical mind even appreciated the efficient design of the plastic yellow janitorial cart she pushed around—one streamlined device that could carry a trash can, a mop bucket, and a crate of cleaning supplies all at once), what she missed most was the feeling of usefulness that came with being a teacher. At Nuestra Se?ora, she’d believed that every bit of knowledge she imparted to a student floated somewhere inside that student’s brain, and even if certain mathematical models and steps were lost to the passage of time, she knew that she had forever altered that young person’s ability to think, to process, to deduce. Some days it hadn’t even been about mathematics. She had simply been there to encourage a child. To make them feel better in a difficult moment. That child would remember her. She’d made a permanent difference. But as a janitor at Baldwin High, she was aware that every floor, toilet, or table she scrubbed clean would be dirty again, often within minutes or hours. She hated the seeming futility of it all and how ineffectual it made her feel.

Luz tried again to explain: “With teaching…the work is…good work.” She shrugged, hoping her point had been made.

Mr. Lehrer nodded, agreeing with her. “ No es trabajo ,” he added. “ Es una vocación. ”

“ Exactamente ,” said Luz, smiling. He understood her after all.

Their conversations continued, as did their mutual encouragement on the language app. When Luz returned for the following school year, she was cheered to see that Mr. Lehrer was back as a substitute. The last time she ever saw him was the morning of the day he died; he was substituting for a Spanish teacher, and she saw him standing in the doorway of the classroom during passing period. Luz was pushing her cart.

“ ?Puedo ense?arles algo aquí! ” he said to her proudly as she walked by. He was smiling at the idea that he knew enough to actually teach the children in the class.

“I need to make another quiz for you to take to be sure!” she teased, grinning.

His smile, his pride in his learning. She thought back on them fondly. But what Luz knew she would never forget was that day when they had sat next to each other and she had trusted him with her past. Toward the end of the conversation, as she had gotten up to leave, Mr. Lehrer had stopped her. In his accented Spanish he had said he had been wrong to call her Luz.

“ En realidad ,” he had told her, “ eres Profesora Guevara. ”

—

On the day that Luz was made to scrub the couch in the lounge on which only hours before had rested the body of her friend, an assistant principal by the name of Ms. Garcia entered the room and discovered her weeping. She rushed to Luz and dropped down to her knees, instinctively putting one arm around Luz and rubbing her back in a maternal sort of way.

“Are you okay?” Ms. Garcia asked. “Can I help you?”

Luz wanted to spill out an explanation in the language that felt most comfortable to her, Spanish, but she had lived in America long enough to understand that here a person’s surname was not always an indicator of their ability to speak a certain language fluently. Here, there were plenty of Americans with the last names of Garza, of Hernandez, of Rios who had lost their ancestral tongue after generations of their family had lived in the United States. She knew that Ms. Garcia was one of those people. Still, she appreciated the kind gesture.

“I am okay,” she said, wiping her wet face with the backs of her hands. “I am okay.”

Ms. Garcia, still next to her on the floor, looked at Luz, her expression uncertain.

“Do you need… puedo llamar alguien …for you?” She was trying, pulling back from the recesses of her brain the Spanish that someone had once taught her, perhaps an abuela or an aunt.

“No, no,” said Luz, shaking her head. She took a quavery breath and tried to prove that she was fine by continuing her task at hand. She picked up her sponge and started scrubbing away again.

Ms. Garcia stood up, and Luz could feel the assistant principal staring at her, trying to determine if it really was okay to walk away. Eventually, she decided it was, and Luz was alone again.

She later heard through the gossip of her fellow custodians that Mr. Lehrer’s ashes had been spread in the school’s front courtyard not long after he died, and now the school was in trouble because of it. She would have liked to have been present when Mr. Lehrer’s remains were dispersed into the autumn air, but no one on campus would have invited her. They could not have grasped that she could have known him or been his friend. Luz was not really seen by so many of the people she came into contact with each day. Upon her arrival in the United States, Eduardo and Maritza had explained to her that it was shockingly easy to exist in a country that did not, at least on paper, want her there. Because the truth was that, in many ways, it did. It needed people like Luz. It depended on them to clean their buildings and tend to their babies and fix their homes. It did not want to extend to them their full humanity—that was clear. But as long as she didn’t open her mouth, ask for too much, or rock the boat, she could stay. As long as she could agree to exist only in a certain way. Like, half a person.

As the school year passed, the rumors that kind Principal Kendricks was in big trouble only increased. She worried that more eyes on the school could mean she was at an even bigger risk. And truth be told, without Mr. Lehrer around, going to work wasn’t the same.

Toward the end of February, Maritza secured a nannying job for Luz. It paid more than double what she made at the school, and it paid in cash. Easier. Safer. The parents were nice, Maritza claimed, having met them once. And just one little baby to care for, too. The family was friends with the family Maritza worked for. They could take the babies to the park together. It would be impractical for Luz not to take the position, so she did.

On her last day, Luz completed her routine on the third floor, finishing with the faculty lounge. When she was done cleaning the bathrooms, emptying the trash cans, wiping down the tables, and sweeping and mopping the floor, she returned her janitorial cart to the supply closet and headed to the main office, where the EZ-Clean employees signed in and out on a time sheet.

It was just outside the office that she spotted the dreaded suits standing in the hallway. But as she continued to walk toward them fearfully—she figured it was best to act normal until she knew what was going on—she saw Principal Kendricks emerge to meet them.

At first afraid to take it all in, Luz at last forced herself to look in their direction as they headed inside the main office, clearly not paying her any attention. Her thudding heart began to slow as she tentatively followed them in and walked up to the front desk, where she pretended to search for her name on the time sheet as she tried to assess what was happening. She saw the principal frowning as he headed into one of the adjoining conference rooms, followed by the others.

After a moment of immense relief that this had nothing to do with her, Luz felt sorry for him. He seemed like a decent man. He’d even stayed behind after the school play earlier that year to help her clean up, which was certainly unusual for someone of his station.

But most of all, she sensed that it was good she was leaving this place.

Yet, a part of her—the part of her that was still a teacher and always would be—would miss working inside a school.

Carefully and with precision, she signed her time sheet for the final time. And then Profesora Guevara left the building.