The Faculty Lounge

Chapter One

One

You really had to hand it to Mr. Lehrer. While dying at work is never ideal, he had the decency to do it during his off period. And not only that, but at the start of it, too, giving the clerks in the main office plenty of time to find someone else to cover Ms. De La Rosa’s Spanish II classes, even as they scrambled to figure out who should be telephoned when an eighty-two-year-old substitute teacher lies down on a ratty couch in a high school faculty lounge and dies.

He was found in a poignant, circle-of-life sort of way by the youngest teacher on campus, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old named Ms. Sanderson, who taught geography to remedial freshmen, although Ms. Sanderson insisted on referring to them as “first years” in an effort to avoid sexism. Short and cherubic, with hormonal acne scattered over her chin, she was regularly stopped in the halls by colleagues who hadn’t yet met her and asked to present a hall pass, something she found beyond infuriating.

While grading in the lounge during her off period, she had noticed Mr. Lehrer splayed out on the couch, his skinny frame draped almost comically over the dated patterned fabric. At first she thought he was just napping, but something seemed off. Although she called his name loudly more than once, he didn’t stir. His long, slender face seemed paler than normal, his thin-lipped mouth was open and twisted, and when she collected the bravery necessary to approach him and hold her hand inches away from his nose, trying not to look too closely at the graying hairs poking out of its nostrils, she counted to one hundred before she had to admit that the worst was probably true.

Racing down two flights of stairs to the clinic, she was out of breath by the time she pulled open the door.

“Mr. Lehrer, the substitute,” Ms. Sanderson began, holding out her teacher’s badge on a lanyard as she spoke, prepared to have her identity questioned. “I believe he’s…expired?”

These young people and their soft language, thought Nurse Honeycutt, frowning at Ms. Sanderson. “Do you mean he’s dead?” she asked, already standing up and moving for her medical kit.

“Yes,” Ms. Sanderson said, as scared of the nurse as she was of most of the adults in the building. In truth, she was scared of the students, too.

“Let’s go,” announced the nurse. As they left the clinic, Nurse Honeycutt realized this was the first dead body she’d had to deal with on campus, and she was struck by the fact that even after all these years, she still held the capacity for surprise.

An hour or so later, an all-faculty notification had been sent out from Principal Kendricks, received via text and email.

Baldwin family, I have some sad news to report. Bob Lehrer, former Baldwin High English teacher who retired in 1997 and who returned last year to substitute for us, has died of what appears to be natural causes. Sadly, Mr. Lehrer passed away in the third-floor faculty lounge, and we have been informed that it may be some time before the medical examiner’s office is able to remove his body. Nurse Honeycutt has covered him with a sheet, and we ask that those who must use the third-floor lounge be aware of this extremely sensitive situation. Students are never allowed in the lounge, but on this day it is absolutely imperative that they not be allowed entry nor should they be informed of this development. I want to take a moment to express my appreciation to Mr. Lehrer for his years of service to the Baldwin High community. Ms. Jackson and the counseling department are available should this event bring up any feelings for you that you would like to discuss.

Of course, this news immediately caused a stir.

“Did you see this?” said Ms. Brennan incredulously as she stepped into the classroom of her neighbor Mr. Williams during a brief and hectic passing period between classes, her phone outstretched in her hand. The two of them taught advanced English to juniors.

“How can he offer his appreciation to Mr. Lehrer if Mr. Lehrer is dead?” responded Mr. Williams, peeved. “It should have been worded, ‘…to express my appreciation for Mr. Lehrer’s years of service.’?” Ms. Brennan nodded in agreement. The English teachers loved to pick apart the principal’s frequent, wordy missives; after all, Principal Kendricks had taught geometry before heading into administration. Following their exchange about the message, naturally Ms. Brennan and Mr. Williams crossed the hall and entered the third-floor faculty lounge, the one closest to the English department, to see the evidence for themselves.

There was the body, tucked under a snowy white sheet from the clinic. Teachers were gathering in clumps, assessing the situation and murmuring quietly to one another. One veteran, a curmudgeon of a man named Mr. Fitzsimmons who taught math to sophomores and had worked with Mr. Lehrer for much of the 1980s and 1990s, shook his head in disbelief.

“So it’s really Bob Lehrer under there,” he muttered. “What a way to go.”

Suddenly, a loud voice punctuated the relative quiet.

“Is it true there’s a dead fucking body in here?” asked Ms. Jimenez upon arrival. Ms. Jimenez was a teacher of U.S. history, the longtime campus smart-ass, and a total terrorist known for jamming the copy machine on a regular basis before walking away, blissfully unbothered.

“See for yourself,” said Ms. Brennan, motioning toward the figure on the couch.

Ms. Jimenez peered at the body of Mr. Lehrer, and for a moment half the room thought she just might march over there and lift the sheet to be sure.

“This is a hell of a way to start the school year,” said Ms. Jimenez, pressing a forefinger into the deep vertical wrinkle that ran between her eyes. “And the crazy thing is that this isn’t even the most fucked up thing that’s happened at this place.” Many of her colleagues in the lounge nodded in agreement.

Depending on the length of time they’d served at Baldwin, they had either experienced firsthand or learned through oral tradition about the following events: the time a young math teacher was caught receiving a blow job from a female student in the faculty parking lot after hours; the time an eleventh grader delivered a full-term baby in the girls’ second-floor bathroom; the time it was discovered that one of the assistant principals, Mr. Ellis, had lost his home to foreclosure and was essentially living at the school, showering in the boys’ locker room and sleeping in his office; not to mention the time there was a four-hour lockdown due to an alleged gun on campus and poor, beloved Mrs. Cardoza had been forced to urinate into a trash can while partially hidden in her classroom’s storage cabinet. (She had taken early retirement that spring.)

So Ms. Jimenez had a point. A dead body in the lounge was not, in fact, the most fucked up thing to ever happen at Baldwin High School.

“I’m eating lunch in my classroom today,” continued Ms. Jimenez. “It doesn’t seem sanitary to eat near a dead body, right?”

At this some of the teachers looked meaningfully in the direction of the biology teacher Mr. Rayfield, who merely shrugged his shoulders, as unsure of the answer as the rest of them. Mr. Rayfield had taken this teaching gig only after spending his years at a prestigious university on a consistent diet of mushrooms, marijuana, and benzodiazepines, causing him to flame out on his MCAT exam and destroy his father’s biggest dreams.

“I always found it strange he came back to substitute after so many years away,” said Mr. Williams. “I mean, the man was eighty-two years old.”

Of course, it was natural for retired teachers to return to substitute in an effort to supplement their meager pension checks, although Mr. Lehrer was exceptionally old for such a taxing venture. While these retired-teacher subs could be revered for their ability to do the job better than most, they had a tendency to annoy younger teachers with their constant litany of what was different now, ranging from the surprising to the offensive. ( “Back in my day, you could smoke in this lounge.” “Back in my day, we had to calculate grades by hand.” “Back in my day, there weren’t so many Mexicans here.” )

“He told me he was bored,” said Ms. Sanderson, the young teacher who’d discovered the body. There was a ripple of confusion over her presence until some of her colleagues spotted her teacher lanyard. She continued on, her voice still uncertain and high-pitched, that of a child more than a woman’s: “I talked to him a few times when he substituted for Ms. De La Rosa, next door to me.” Her cheeks were pinking up now that she realized she had the attention of the room, but she went on, glancing at Mr. Lehrer’s body as if looking for permission to share all of this. “He said coming here was better than sitting at home alone and reading crime novels and watching PBS, and that substituting reminded him of some of the best times of his life, just being with students and other teachers and stuff.”

“The best times of his life?” said Mr. Rayfield, disbelieving. He was desperately trying to imagine an exit strategy after four short years at Baldwin.

“Yes,” Ms. Sanderson said, nodding. “The best times of his life.”

“Did he have any family?” asked Ms. Brennan. She was an experienced teacher, but since she’d only recently moved to the area, this was her first year at Baldwin, and she was still getting to know names and faces.

“I don’t believe he ever married,” came a voice from the back of the gathering crowd. Everyone turned to look. It was Ms. Fletcher, a respected veteran English teacher with a full load of advanced seniors. “At least, he was unmarried when I first met him. He had a son who lived with his mother in…” She wrinkled her brow, trying to recall. “Arizona, I think. I mean, this was ages ago, of course.”

“I didn’t realize you’d worked together,” said Ms. Brennan. “Did you know him well?”

“Not really,” said Ms. Fletcher, shaking her head. “We only overlapped for one year, his last full-time and my first.” As she said this, she looked at the body in front of her and her mind was transported.

—

In the fall of 1996 and right out of college, Amanda Fletcher had taken a job teaching English to sophomores at Baldwin High, a comprehensive public high school in Houston, Texas, with four thousand students and a good reputation, housed in a three-story red brick building constructed in the middle of the century on a campus with large, mature oak trees that gave the entire place a solid feeling. It was located not far from the university where Amanda had secured her degree and roughly two hours from her hometown, which to Amanda seemed like a good enough distance away to start her adult life.

Her parents were not pleased with her choice of career. Amanda was smart, they said. She should aim for something in law or finance. Something that made real money. But Amanda loved literature, she loved school, and she loved learning, and her time as a student teacher at a smaller high school in the same district had cemented for her the belief that the classroom was where she belonged. She couldn’t quite explain it, not even to herself, but in her gut she knew that this was what she was supposed to be doing with her life.

She rented a one-bedroom apartment just five minutes from the school, in a neighborhood known for its eclectic, artsy shops and ethnic restaurants that stayed open late for the young people who were curious enough to try them. Not that Amanda planned on going out much. Her longtime high school boyfriend turned college boyfriend, Dave Saunders, was in graduate school in Colorado, earning his master’s degree in engineering. Dave’s parents and Amanda’s parents and Dave and Amanda themselves were all certain of Dave’s eventual return as well as the couple’s eventual marriage, children, and grandchildren. Dave’s secure financial future helped buffer the anxiety Amanda’s parents had over what they considered to be her otherwise poor life choices.

During the week before classes began, Amanda worked tirelessly in her classroom, trying to stretch the small decorating budget she’d allowed herself to make the space look homey and welcoming. Peeking shyly into the rooms of others, who’d had decades to make their classrooms look inviting, only sparked frustration. Veteran teachers kept coming by to introduce themselves, but their names exited her mind just as soon as they’d entered it. She also quickly discovered that they seemed to see her as a dumping ground for all their old materials, donated under the guise of helping out their new young colleague.

One afternoon, as she sat flipping through dusty textbooks from the mid-1970s, there was a knock at her open door. She looked up to see a tall, slender man with salt-and-pepper hair, a large nose, and a kind smile. Since graduating from college, she’d realized how bad she was at guessing the ages of other adults—they all seemed to be anywhere from twenty-five to fifty-five—but she would later learn that this man, Mr. Lehrer, was fifty-six and planning to retire in May. He taught the seniors taking AP Literature, he told her, and he enjoyed encouraging young teachers.

“What made you get into this profession, Ms. Fletcher?” he asked, leaning against her doorframe, relaxed, his smile open and warm. He was the first teacher to stop by that she didn’t wish would leave right away. He didn’t try to foist any materials on her, and he seemed genuinely friendly.

“I think teaching was just always what I wanted to do,” she said, wishing she had a smarter answer. Then, because she felt compelled to keep talking, she added, “My parents wanted me to go into law or finance.”

“Ah, law or finance,” said Mr. Lehrer, nodding sagely as if he partly agreed with Amanda’s parents. “Impressive professions to be sure. But they’re not teaching.”

“No, they’re not,” said Amanda as if she had the experience to know.

“It sounds like you were called to this career,” he said. “For some of us, it is a vocation, not just a job. It’s what I have always referred to as good work.”

She nodded in agreement, and privately, she liked how he seemed to be putting her in the same category as him, a respected veteran teacher with the top students in the school.

The first day of the academic year arrived, and Amanda quickly sensed that she was drowning. She came to realize almost immediately that one reason her lessons had gone off so easily when she was a student teacher was that her cooperating teacher had already established her as the authority figure. Now Amanda had to establish that for herself, which was difficult when she looked almost as young as the students.

She spent hours at home crafting lessons down to the minute, practiced delivering them in the mirror, and annotated every story and novel she had to teach within an inch of its life. She lived in fear of a student asking her a question she wouldn’t have the answer for, and despite all her hours of extra work on the weekends and in the evenings, she fretted that when it came to their writing and reading-comprehension skills, her students were going backward. When administrators wandered through to observe her, she could feel her face and chest bursting into itchy red hives, and she almost expected them to fire her there on the spot.

She was exhausted most nights, and when she wasn’t working, she watched stupid television or tried and failed to read for pleasure. She wrote a letter to Dave every Sunday, and late on Friday nights, the two indulged in an expensive long-distance phone call that could last hours.

“You work too hard,” said Dave as she recounted the week. “How much do you get paid again?”

When she told him, he quickly calculated the hourly rate based on the extra time she put in outside of the school day. The amount stunned Amanda.

“You’d make more money working at the mall,” he told her.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” she said.

One October afternoon after a particularly lousy fifth period class, she found a folded note on the floor that a student had left behind, on purpose or by accident she’d never know. She opened it to read the message, written in a worn-out pencil.

This class is so fucking booooooring.

Grateful that she had sixth period off, she shut the classroom door, sat at her desk, folded her arms, and buried her face in them. Then she sobbed.

A few moments later, there was a knock at the door. Wiping her eyes, she sat up and tried to make herself look professional.

“Yes?”

It was Mr. Lehrer. He’d come to ask her if she had any staples, but upon seeing her face, he knew something was wrong. When he asked what it was, Amanda burst into tears again. She held out the note before embarrassment could stop her.

Mr. Lehrer took it from her and read it.

“Little shits,” he said. The response surprised her, but it also made her laugh a little, too. “God bless them and everything,” Mr. Lehrer continued, “because their brains are still developing. But sometimes they can really ruin our days.”

“They’re right, though,” said Amanda, sniffling. “The lesson was boring. I was bored. One of my professors always said if you’re bored, the kids are bored.”

Mr. Lehrer nodded sympathetically. “It’s not a bad point,” he said. “But we’re also not here to entertain, remember that. We’re here to teach. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself. It takes time to be good at this job. Even for someone who was called to it like you were.”

“I’m not sure I was called to anything,” Amanda said. She sighed.

“Listen,” Mr. Lehrer said. “How would you like to come and observe me? I could give you a couple of pointers. Aren’t you off third?”

Amanda nodded, and they agreed she would visit his class the next day.

When she arrived a few minutes before the bell, Mr. Lehrer motioned toward an empty desk by the windows. It was just the two of them for now. The classroom had a cozy, lived-in feeling, the walls covered with all sorts of blown-up book covers, including The Great Gatsby and Brave New World ; there was hardly any blank space left. The bulletin board behind Mr. Lehrer’s teacher desk was jam-packed with thank-you cards, handwritten notes, pieces of student artwork, and wallet-sized photographs of graduating seniors dressed in caps and gowns.

This class changed my life! read one note, written in bubbly cursive. Thank you Mr. Lehrer!

Mr. Lehrer noticed Amanda’s eyes coming to rest on the photograph of a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, tucked into the corner of the bulletin board. He looked remarkably like Mr. Lehrer.

“That’s my son, Matthew,” he said. “Sort of a late-in-life surprise. I’ve never been married, but…” He paused, suddenly uncomfortable. He’d never spoken of his personal life. “Anyway, he lives with his mom in Arizona most of the time, but I see him during the summers. Good kid, but he prefers video games to books, so…” His voice trailed off.

“Maybe you can spend more time with him once you’re retired,” she offered, unsure if this was the right thing to say.

“Yes, possibly,” said Mr. Lehrer. “I also have a novel that’s sort of in progress. Something I’m trying to finish and hopefully get published. But I don’t know.”

“What’s it about?” asked Amanda, but Mr. Lehrer just smiled and shook his head.

“I’m too bashful to share,” he said. “It’s probably not very good.” Mr. Lehrer’s reaction surprised Amanda. Normally, he seemed so assured. At this, the bell rang and students began to stream into the room, and suddenly his confidence was again on full display. Almost instantly, Amanda was reminded of what she loved about school. What she loved about sitting in a classroom with a beloved teacher who could make the material explode with color and feeling.

But she watched him like a teacher now, not just as a student. She noticed how, when two boys started goofing around in the back row, Mr. Lehrer didn’t call them out. He simply went to stand near them; his hovering presence made them stop. When he read a passage of the story they were studying out loud, he wasn’t afraid to do the characters’ voices, even if this was a class full of seniors. And in a moment that shocked Amanda, when he made a spelling error while writing on the overhead projector, he took a moment to call attention to it.

“See?” he told the class. “Even I make mistakes. There’s a lesson in that. Everyone screws up sometimes.”

When the bell rang to end class, Amanda felt inspired. She rushed up to Mr. Lehrer and told him so.

“Well, I’m glad,” he told her. “You’re welcome anytime. And be patient with yourself, okay? You’ll get there.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thanks a lot.” As she started to head out—her fourth period class was entering her room as she stood there—she turned back and asked, “Why are you retiring now? You’re still so great at this.”

Mr. Lehrer smiled, obviously flattered. “That’s nice of you to say,” he answered. “But I’ve been teaching since longer than you’ve been alive, you know. I actually could have started collecting my pension a few years ago. There’s a part of me that wants to make sure I quit while I’m ahead. I never wanted to be one of those teachers who was phoning it in.”

Amanda nodded like she understood, but the idea of retirement was something so far away and foreign to her that she couldn’t grasp at all what Mr. Lehrer meant.

As the months passed, things improved for Amanda in the classroom. She was learning to anticipate things, trust herself more. She was finding ways to meld her teacher personality with her actual personality, and the results weren’t half bad; once, when she made a wry joke about the ending of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and some of the smartest kids in the class cracked up, she felt a shiver of happiness. She wasn’t great. Not even close. But she was getting better. She was becoming Ms. Fletcher. She took to observing Mr. Lehrer whenever she needed a boost, and she also liked dropping by his room to share little victories, like her first thank-you note from a student or a lesson that had gone especially well. He cheered her on every time.

“See?” he said, smiling. “You’re getting there!”

On a Friday in April, just six weeks or so before the end of the year and not long before the bell to begin seventh period, Mr. Lehrer popped his head into Amanda’s room, where Amanda sat during her off period grading papers, or trying to.

“A few of us are heading over to La Casita Bonita for a little happy hour,” he said. “You should come.” It was not the first time he’d asked.

“Well,” she said, trying to drum up an excuse that sounded plausible. She’d grown friendly with Mr. Lehrer, yes, but the idea of interacting socially with him and lots of people decades older than her seemed strange, and interacting socially with people she worked with even stranger. She was aware that some of the other veterans probably saw her as standoffish or even rude, but she wasn’t. She was just twenty-two and somewhat shy.

“Come on now,” he said, slapping the doorframe for emphasis. “Almost the entire department will be there. It’s sort of an early retirement party for me.” He smiled, and the skin near his eyes crinkled. He looked like such a dad. “You won’t last in this profession if you don’t unwind from time to time.”

Amanda glanced at the papers in front of her and thought of her apartment at home, the Lean Cuisines for one stacked like little monuments to loneliness in her freezer. She could arrive late and leave early, and be back in time for her regular Friday evening phone call with Dave.

“All right,” she said. “What time?”

“Just right after school,” he said. “You’ll find us there.”

When she got to the restaurant, she found her colleagues at a cluttered table in the back, half of them smoking and all of them drinking.

“Ms. Fletcher!” Mr. Lehrer shouted out, waving her down. She forced a smile and found an empty seat toward the end of the table, in between Mrs. McCarthy and Ms. Gray, the latter a notoriously easy grader students referred to as “Get an A with Gray.” Sweating goblets filled with melting margaritas and half-empty red plastic baskets of tortilla chips dotted the table. Amanda ordered a margarita and made a silent prayer of gratitude when the waiter didn’t ask for her ID, then sipped her drink slowly, making sure to alternate between the alcohol and a glass of ice water.

She pasted a smile on her face as her fellow teachers—the one closest to her in age was almost thirty, she guessed, and had already had a baby—gossiped with the ease of those who’d known each other and worked together for years. The room was raucous and loud and the conversation was so full of inside jokes as to make Amanda feel even lonelier here surrounded by people than she would have been at her apartment. Not to mention that it was hard to keep track of who everybody was when they referred to each other casually and affectionately as Gary and Carol and Sharon and Donna. In her mind, these people existed only by their last names. It struck Amanda, not for the first time, that all of them could have easily been her own teachers when she was in high school.

Amanda sipped on her margarita, trying to laugh at the right moments and trying not to chew on her plastic straw, a nervous habit she knew made her look twelve years old. At last Mrs. McCarthy seemed to remember she was sitting there and turned toward her.

“Well, Ms. Fletcher, you’ve almost made it through your first year!” she said, holding up her drink in a little salute. “It really is the hardest one, you know.”

“ Not true!” bellowed a teacher named Mrs. Dixon, raising a finger to accentuate her point. “The first five years are the hardest. You gotta get through at least five years before you know what the hell you’re doing in this business.” She shook her finger at Amanda and cackled, and Amanda could see smears of pink lipstick on Mrs. Dixon’s yellowing teeth.

“For God’s sake, Dorothy, don’t frighten her,” Mr. Lehrer said, rolling his eyes. “I swear to God, this profession eats its young.” He gave Amanda a sympathetic look, and Amanda smiled back. She longed to get out of there.

After a little over an hour had passed and Amanda had uttered about three sentences, she felt she could leave without appearing rude. As she motioned to the waiter for her check, Mr. Lehrer waved his hand.

“It’s on me,” he said, pretending not to hear her protests. “I’m about to be making that retired-teacher money, you know.” He laughed a little too loudly. After thanking him, Amanda stood up and pushed her chair back, then noticed that Mr. Lehrer was mirroring her actions.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said. “Just to be safe.” La Casita Bonita was in a decent part of town, and Amanda could see through the big pane windows covered in string lights and painted-on notices advertising dinner specials that it wasn’t even dark yet.

“Okay,” she said.

Her ancient Honda Civic was parked around the side of the restaurant, near the dumpsters. It had been the only spot she’d been able to find when she’d arrived.

“Pee-yew!” said Mr. Lehrer, wrinkling his nose as Amanda pulled her keys out of her canvas tote. “Sure does stink back here.”

“Yeah, it does,” she said, sliding the key into the lock. She sensed him hovering behind her, and she wondered why he wasn’t leaving. “Well, thank you.”

“Amanda,” said Mr. Lehrer, and as she turned to face him, she realized just how close he was. So close she could see how red his cheeks were under his five o’clock shadow, so close she could see his pores under the field of gray and black hairs blooming from his ruddy face. He blinked slowly. His blue eyes were glassy.

“I just want you to know that I’ve really enjoyed working with you this year,” he said. Was he slurring his words? “Your enthusiasm,” he continued, “your youthful energy and idealism…” He struggled to pronounce that last word. “Anyway, it’s helped me remember why I got into this profession in the first place…and I’m…really going to miss you.”

“Oh,” said Amanda, her mind blank but her well-trained polite response functioning on autopilot. “That’s…so nice of you to say.” He was inches away. No, centimeters.

In the instant it took for Amanda to consider what could happen, it happened. Mr. Lehrer was kissing her, his lips were on hers. His body was pressed up against hers, too, and his stubble scraped the bottom of her mouth, just under her lip. It lasted maybe three seconds and an eternity, and it was the least sexy thing in the whole wide world.

“Mr. Lehrer!” she said, able to react at last, pulling back, her heart racing. Her mouth was wet from his spit in a way that could only be described as disgusting, and she longed to wipe it off with her hand but didn’t. “Mr. Lehrer, I have a boyfriend,” she said. Her cheeks were aflame.

But Mr. Lehrer was already stepping away, looking down at the ground.

“Oh my God, what am I doing,” he murmured, more to himself than to Amanda, and then he backed up even farther, turned, and headed toward the restaurant. Somehow, Amanda managed to open her car door, get inside, and drive out of the parking lot and onto a side street before pulling over and exhaling. Her body was shaking ever so slightly, and she was already imagining what she would tell Dave over the phone. She finally did wipe her mouth, then grimaced with repulsion.

Glancing at her reflection in the mirror, she asked loudly, “What the hell was that?”

At home she got a beer out of the refrigerator and called Dave and told him everything.

“Did he, like, slip his tongue in your mouth?” Dave asked.

Amanda frowned. It had all happened so quickly she couldn’t be sure, but anyway, why did Dave care about this fact?

“I’m really not sure,” she said.

“How could you not be sure if he put his tongue in your mouth?”

Amanda took a sip of her beer. “Dave,” she said, annoyed, “my fifty-something-year-old coworker kissed me in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. Why are the specific details so important to you?”

Dave didn’t respond right away. When Amanda didn’t say anything else, he finally said, “Well, he’d better not try it again.”

This statement struck Amanda as funny. She was an inch taller than Dave and probably weighed more, too. “Or what?” she asked. “You’re going to beat him up after school?”

Dave didn’t like this reaction. “I guess I just don’t find this whole thing funny,” he said.

“Like I do?” responded Amanda. Part of her was regretting saying anything to Dave in the first place, but since they were basically engaged, how could she not?

Given the era they were living in, neither one of them brought up the possibility of reporting Mr. Lehrer. It had been a kiss between two adults, off campus and after hours. And honestly, as Amanda made clear to Dave before she hung up the phone, mostly she wanted to forget it. What had Mr. Lehrer been thinking? He had always struck her as so smart, so capable. She’d been in awe of his command of the classroom. His brilliance. His charisma. Upon reflection, Amanda had to admit that what upset her most of all was not the kiss, but the realization that adulthood did not prevent otherwise reasonable, intelligent people like Mr. Lehrer from doing stupid things. The thought made her nervous about her own future.

On Monday morning in her faculty mailbox, Amanda found a small envelope, cream-colored and thick between her fingers. It reminded Amanda of the paper on which her high school and college graduation announcements had been printed. Her teacher name was written on the front in well-practiced cursive. Ms. Fletcher.

Curious but able to delay gratification enough to wait till she was alone, she quickly climbed the stairs to her classroom, shut the door behind herself, kept the lights off so no one would know she was there, walked to her desk, and opened the envelope.

Ms. Fletcher,

I must apologize for my unprofessional, thoughtless, and downright rotten behavior on Friday evening. I am old enough to know that alcohol is not an excuse in such situations, but I fear that contributed to my idiocy. It was an impulsive and stupid act, and I ask for your forgiveness. Certainly, you are not under any obligation to extend it to me.

In a few weeks I’ll be gone from this place, and you’ll never have to see me again. I can only hope this incident does not prevent you from continuing on as a teacher here at Baldwin. You are too gifted to leave us, and Baldwin surely needs you.

Again, my deepest apologies.

Amanda’s first reaction was to wonder why on earth Mr. Lehrer would think she was a gifted teacher, given that he’d never seen her teach and, more importantly, that she certainly was not. She read the card through a few more times, then slid it into her tote bag so she could take it home. She resolved not to share it with Dave. That day as she moved through her lessons, at least 10 percent of her brain was at all times focused on the card in her bag.

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Lehrer made every attempt to avoid her, including one horribly awkward moment when they both happened to walk toward each other in an otherwise empty hallway during a shared off period. Amanda slowed down, uncertain—she would have been willing to say hello and nod and keep going—but Mr. Lehrer spun on his heel and raced in the opposite direction, the tap tap of his feet on the tiled floor growing more distant by the moment.

Amanda thought about writing him back, but what would she even say? It’s weird that you’re older than my dad and you kissed me in the parking lot of a Tex-Mex restaurant, but thanks for the note of apology. No, best to let it go. It was awkward for only a few weeks and then, as Mr. Lehrer had promised in his note, he was gone for good.

Almost.

Years later, when Mr. Lehrer started substituting at Baldwin, he looked so radically different to Amanda she could hardly believe it. So much older, his skin mottled with liver spots, the wisps of his thinning gray hair forever askew. Wizened was the word that came to mind. Naturally, Amanda was older, too. She had stayed at Baldwin, married Dave, had two boys back-to-back who were now by a good twist of fate regulated and mature college students, amicably divorced Dave when they both realized that they had very little left in common and even less to talk about, gained thirty pounds and lost ten, lost her father to pancreatic cancer, lost two students to suicide, and graded approximately twenty-three thousand student essays. In recent years she had fallen into a comfortable, low-stakes relationship with a widowed father of one adult daughter who lived two blocks over and who had a rescue dog named Elvis, after Costello, not Presley. The sex was good and the conversation was even better, and on Sunday mornings she would leave his place with a tender kiss and head off to grade student essays over morning coffee and then sink into a good book. All told, it had been a pretty good life thus far.

Although Amanda was uncomfortable admitting it because it felt like such a brag, on her best days she thought Mr. Lehrer had been right about her being a gifted teacher. Over the years she had experienced moments of divine transcendence in the classroom, tiny treasures full of sacred meaning, exchanges she would think back on fondly and sometimes recall and retell to her closest teacher friends and the young ones she mentored, both formally and informally. Books and poems and stories and essays had been cradled gently, like fragile, breathing things, and on good days she pressed them carefully into her students’ open hands with so much love. Students liked to keep in touch with her, come back to visit, send photographs of their weddings and their babies. Her desk and bulletin board were filled with sweet little thank-you notes dotted with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that rhapsodized about what a wonderful English teacher she was. (As for Mr. Lehrer’s note, she’d felt compelled to save it, too, but it was stashed in a shoebox in the hall closet at home.)

She had also experienced difficult moments, lately more often than before. She questioned her relevance, her ability to connect with the kids, the way every text she introduced in class was classified as problematic by her students, who struck her as far more sensitive and humorless than she had ever been at that age.

She bemoaned the way public education had become corrupted, seemingly never able to escape an ever-growing obsession with metrics, data points, objectives, strands, formative assessments, standards-based learning, and the weeping lesion that was high-stakes, state-mandated testing. Old enough to recall the world before the Internet, she grimaced with embarrassment when she was forced to ask her younger colleagues for help with all the online platforms she was now expected to master and was admittedly turned off by that generation’s dependence on Kahoot!, Nearpod, Padlet, Pear Deck, AppleTree, DooDad, ClickClack, and so on. Still, she kept at it, being in as deep as she was. She could collect her pension in just six more years.

When the #MeToo wave crashed ashore, Amanda, like countless men and women, performed an inventory of her life. The old man’s grope in the supermarket when she was only seven. The father of the family she babysat for in high school casting glances at her breasts, rather than her face, as he drove her home in the dark. The frat boy trapping her in a cramped, sweaty corner until she managed to dart under his arm in escape, catching a whiff of his Old Spice that would stay with her for so long that she refused to buy that brand for her own sons. But Mr. Lehrer? Surely some would think what he did counted. Probably most would. Amanda could even imagine the language she could use in her Facebook post, and the vitriolic comments she could command with a few choice words. (“I was a shy, 22-year-old first-year teacher when an older male colleague pushed himself against me and kissed me without my consent by the dumpsters at a Mexican restaurant.”)

But the truth was, this was not how she considered the situation with Mr. Lehrer. When she had cause to think back on that evening in her life, which was actually not often at all, mostly she just felt sorry for him in his middle-aged loneliness, his graying-at-the-temples awkwardness. She could easily picture his walk back to La Casita Bonita as she drove away in her Honda Civic, his tequila-filled head already swimmy and aching with regret. It was not difficult at all to visualize him sitting in a poorly decorated bachelor’s apartment, writing out his apology note, ripping up draft after draft before taking out a fresh piece of good stationery. Or perhaps he went and bought the stationery for that very purpose? That detail seemed plausible, and this made Amanda even sadder.

The situation had not been pleasant, certainly. But it had not been horrific. It had not ruined her. She hoped it had not ruined Mr. Lehrer.

His return to substituting at Baldwin the year prior struck Amanda as a bizarre sort of swan song. She was one of a handful of teachers left on campus who had worked with him back in the 1990s and the only one left in the English department. Naturally, they ran into each other here and there, and there were pleasant nods of the head, hello s, and hasn’t it changed s. She almost asked him if he’d ever published that novel before realizing that she already knew the answer. The awkward kiss in the parking lot of La Casita Bonita seemed so long ago to Amanda it was as if it had happened to someone else. She hoped that Mr. Lehrer, being in his eighties, had almost certainly forgotten about it by now, but Amanda suspected that because he was the sort of good man who had the decency to die during his off period, probably he had never forgotten it.

Now, instead of being just a few years older than her students, Amanda was much closer to the age Mr. Lehrer had been when he’d kissed her. Time was a funny thing. Very slowly and then all at once, she was closer to the end of her career than the start, a black-and-white fact printed on her annual state pension statement that was impossible to ignore.

Would she suggest to a young, bright-eyed college student that she should go into public education? On her worst and hardest days, probably not. Things had changed, and not for the better. This job now felt less like an art form and more like a factory line.

That said, and all things considered, Amanda could say with total honesty that when she sat down and thought, really thought, about how she had spent the past twenty-six years of her life, she was glad that she had not gone into law or finance.

—

Mr. Lehrer’s body lay on the couch in the third-floor faculty lounge under the clinic’s white sheet for all of second, third, fourth, lunch, fifth, and sixth periods. Teachers darted in and out all day on an as-needed basis, occasionally texting photos of Mr. Lehrer’s covered body to colleagues on other floors.

Still here. #bodywatch

Can you believe we work here? #lehrerbodywatch

How long before he starts to smell? #iamgoingtohell

Toward the end of sixth, one of her off periods, Ms. Fletcher went into the lounge to use the bathroom. She avoided glancing in the direction of the body. Upon exiting the bathroom, she found young Ms. Sanderson standing off to the side, gazing at Mr. Lehrer. She also noted that Ms. Jimenez was busy and unbothered at the copy machine, most likely jamming it up again.

“I can’t believe I found a dead man at work,” said Ms. Sanderson, not really to anyone but perhaps just to herself. Her voice was flat.

“It’s got to have been disturbing,” said Ms. Fletcher. She allowed herself to glance toward the couch. Mr. Lehrer’s feet looked like two snow-covered mountains.

“He was always so nice to me, so encouraging,” said Ms. Sanderson. “Poor old man.”

“I know,” said Ms. Fletcher, her throat a sudden ache. “He was nice.”

The two stood there for a moment, the zip-chunk of the copy machine the only noise in the room.

“It’s almost like a soldier dying on the battlefield, isn’t it?” said Ms. Sanderson in a soft voice. The language was a little much, to be sure, but after all Ms. Sanderson taught social studies, not English. Ms. Fletcher noticed that Ms. Sanderson’s voice had cracked when she’d spoken and that little tears were pooling in her dark eyes, so she went over and wrapped an arm around her young colleague and gave her a little squeeze.

“Yes,” said Ms. Fletcher. “In some ways it is just like that.”

“Well, I sure as shit am not dying here,” said Ms. Jimenez from her reign at the copy machine, a hand on her hip. “I have my time-share in Tampa. That’s where I’d like to be when I go.”

At this, the lounge door opened and three men entered, rolling a gurney. They wore black jackets that announced they were from the medical examiner’s office.

“Excuse us, we need the room,” said one of them.

“But I’m not finished with my copies!” said Ms. Jimenez, annoyed. Just then, the bell to signal the passing period to seventh, the last class of the day, rang long and loud. Ms. Jimenez cursed.

Ignoring the others and turning her attention to Ms. Sanderson, Ms. Fletcher asked, “Are you okay? I mean, can you go back to class?”

Ms. Sanderson sniffed and nodded, but she didn’t seem sure.

The men from the medical examiner’s office crowded around Mr. Lehrer, murmuring to one another in technical language. Ms. Fletcher figured that at any moment they might remove the sheet Nurse Honeycutt had so carefully placed. Gently pivoting Ms. Sanderson toward the door of the lounge, she began to move her colleague in that direction.

“You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you?” said Ms. Fletcher, reaching for the door handle.

“Yes,” said Ms. Sanderson. “Oh my God, yes.” She was crying in earnest now.

They exited completely into the hallway, and Ms. Fletcher made sure the door to the lounge was shut behind them. As they huddled off to one side, silent tears running down Ms. Sanderson’s cheeks, Ms. Fletcher placed a hand on the younger teacher’s shoulder and waited. A few minutes passed like that, with neither one of them speaking. The hallway was filled with the shouts of teenagers liberated for a few moments between classes. Profanity mixed with the screech of shoes on tiled floors. The odor of cheap perfume mingled with sweat. The children did not seem to notice them.

“There are some days when all you can do is just make it until the last bell,” said Ms. Fletcher. As she said this, she was somewhat embarrassed she’d offered such oft-repeated advice, but the advice really was true, which was one reason why veteran teachers kept giving it.

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Ms. Sanderson, pressing her fingers to her eyes to wipe away her remaining tears and taking a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” said Ms. Fletcher, lifting her hand from Ms. Sanderson’s shoulder. “Now, you’re sure you’re okay? They can find someone to cover for you, you know. You can go home early.”

Ms. Sanderson shook her head no. She had managed to compose herself.

“Thank you so much, Ms. Fletcher,” she said.

“Of course. Anytime. And you can call me Amanda, you know.” But Ms. Fletcher knew Ms. Sanderson never would.

Just then the staccato warning bell went off, alerting them to the fact that there was just one minute left until seventh period officially began. In front of them was a churning sea of adolescence, full of trauma, curiosity, anxiety, and joy. The two teachers were drawn into it, swept up by it. Unable to resist, they allowed it to carry them all the way to their classrooms, where their students were waiting for them.