Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
I FOLLOW MS. SHYWILL OUT of the parking lot, wading through a chorus of snickers and Oooohs, mostly coming from the stupider male lowerclassmen, one of whom I casually flick off behind my back. He collapses to the asphalt, laughing and clutching his chest in a mock heart attack. If only.
Ms. Shywill uses her key card to open the door to the front office.
The air inside is moist with human tears and the tiny wastebasket under the front desk is overflowing with thin Costco-brand tissues.
Mr. Rosen, the receptionist, is fully sobbing.
I’m talking raking, gasping breaths, shuddering shoulders, the whole deal.
Like, I’m concerned he’s going to work himself up to a vomit situation.
I wonder if he did the afternoon announcements like this, wailing into the mic while alerting everyone to the district bus changes.
“Take all the time you need, Yosef.” Ms. Shywill puts her hand on Mr. Rosen’s shoulder, and he looks up gratefully and gives her manicured fingertips a squeeze.
She doles out one more sympathetic shoulder pat before moving on.
I suck down the fat, salty lump of other people’s sadness in my throat, and follow her into her office.
She gestures to one of her peeling blue leather chairs and I take a seat.
“One moment,” she says, and turns her back to me, shuffling through some of the papers on her cluttered desk.
I grip the wooden ends of my armrests and try to keep my foot from shaking.
I scan the room for something calming to focus on, but there’s fuck all for inspiration in here.
There’s a photo of her and her husband with the inscription LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE at the bottom of the silver frame that looks like it was ordered off , but aside from that, Ms. Shywill’s office is dark and sad, bordering on fully depressing.
That’s not really a surprise, seeing as there’s no natural light in most of the classrooms and offices.
Part of the district’s active-assailant protocols are to have all windows covered with black paper so that when some 4chan incel with his daddy’s AR-15 rolls up ready to take us all out he’ll think, Wait a minute, all these classrooms and offices are dark and silent!
Gosh darn, it must be Sunday! I guess I’ll have to come back and blow everyone’s heads off tomorrow.
Ms. Jegstrup didn’t play by the rules, though. She left her windows paperless and was even known to endanger our young mortal lives by cracking them open on particularly nice fall days.
Everyone knows the black paper thing is bullshit.
Theater to make us feel like politicians actually give a shred of a fuck if chunks of our shiny pink brains end up splattered on the whiteboard.
I’ve never known a kid that doesn’t have a plan for what they would (or will) do when it’s our school’s turn.
Most of the boys have a fully delusional vision of how they’ll single-handedly take down the shooter with blunt-force trauma from a plastic chair or a leg tackle (as if they’d ever make it close enough).
And most of the girls have a long, cloying draft in their Notes app of the text they plan to send their mom after smearing their classmates’ blood on their stomachs, attempting to look as dead as their friends.
Someone dropped a textbook in the hallway once and it made this loud echoing clap.
And when it did, I saw untamed terror flash in Emma’s eyes for just a millisecond.
She went right back to expounding on the virtues of her new Free People high-tops, but I swear she was this close to pissing her pants.
And Jules once told me she picks seats closest to the windows so she can use her backpack to break the glass, slither out through the shards, and make a run for it.
No one’s impervious.
Except me. If I don’t see a cluster of pink Doom Scrolls when I walk into school in the morning, I know at least the next three days will be mass-shooting–free.
If I ever did walk in and see a mess of pink in the hallway …
I mean, fuck. I don’t even let my subconscious go there in my worst nightmares.
Like, hats off to David Hogg, but I’d rather be fucking dead too.
Ms. Shywill clears her throat and turns back around to me.
“Here it is.” She hands me a manila envelope with my name on it.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a Welcome to Detention packet.
I look up at Ms. Shywill, waiting for her to explain. I know better than to open my mouth and incriminate myself.
She smooths her gray bob and sits down on the ripping leather chair next to mine.
“This was from Ms. Jegstrup.” She must see my face go completely ashen because she quickly follows up with: “Not from her will or anything like that. It’s just school stuff.
She was planning on giving it to you today but, well … I’m giving it to you now.”
“School stuff?”
Ms. Shywill looks up at the ceiling and blinks, like she’s trying to use gravity to force her tears to stay put. “Nanna and I were close friends and—”
“Sorry,” I cut in. “Did you say Nanna?”
Ms. Shywill lets out a choked half laugh. “Yes, honey. That was her name. It’s actually quite a common Danish name. She was born in Denmark. Did you know that?”
I shake my head. Of course I don’t know the fucking birthplace of my English teacher.
“Well, she was. And”—she pauses—“and she was a dear friend of mine. Her husband was often away, and she and I would spend our holiday breaks …” She stops herself, like she’s suddenly remembered she’s talking to a random teenager and not her telehealth therapist. “Anyway, she was quite fond of you. Saw a lot of potential. Teachers aren’t supposed to have favorites, but alas. ”
“Oh.” Fucking shit. I’d rather be suspended.
“She told me she had a wonderful talk with you last week.”
“She did?”
Ms. Shywill nods. “Teachers spend their professional lives chasing after some To Sir, with Love idealized version of what education can do for someone. For most of us, that moment is as elusive as a date from Sidney Poitier himself.” She smiles at me as if I’m supposed to know who that is or what the hell she’s talking about.
“Not to say that you’re an unruly city kid in need of a firm hand!
The point is, it meant a great deal to her that you were coming around. ”
“Um, thank you,” I say. I scooch to the end of my chair, trying to signal to her subconscious that I would very much like to escape, but in a polite way.
Ms. Shywill takes a sharp inhale through her nose and stands up. “Right, well.”
“Yeah.”
We muddle through an awkward exit, and I power-walk through the front office, keeping my eyes down, and push through the double doors into the bright parking lot, which is now deserted.
I get in my truck and stare at the manila envelope on my lap.
My hands shake a little bit as I go to open the flap and I get a sliver of a papercut on my pointer finger.
It stings like a bitch and for some reason that sharp pain is the first thing that makes me really want to cry today.
But I don’t. I just want to get this over with.
I reach in and pull out a thick, glossy purple packet.
NYU PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
COURSE OFFERINGS