The Faculty Lounge

Chapter Eight

Eight

It was the first Friday of the second semester of the most ridiculous year of his career, and Principal Mark Kendricks desperately wanted to walk out of Baldwin High School and go home and collapse, maybe drink a beer, maybe listen to some music. Maybe just sit and stare at a wall. Instead, he was trying to manage a mountain of emails so they wouldn’t completely crush his spirit the next time he walked into this office. Which, while it technically wasn’t supposed to happen until Monday, might end up being the next day, depending on how bad the inbox was.

There was an email from his AP Denise Baker letting him know she was doing well and would be back by the end of January, as planned. Fortunately, that was just weeks away. He hadn’t exactly been surprised when she’d shared that she was struggling with a drinking problem. While she’d succeeded in keeping it secret, he had always sensed that the grief over losing her wife had never lifted, not even a little, and she hadn’t been herself in some time. Of course he was glad she’d asked for help and was taking the time she needed. But selfishly, he wanted her back as soon as possible.

As usual, there was another frustrated rant from Mr. Fitzsimmons, this time about the morning duty schedule; that could wait until later. Much later. The truth was, Mr. Fitzsimmons probably didn’t expect a response. Like most members of the hardworking faculty, he just wanted to vent and be heard. Mr. Kendricks made a mental note to try to catch the veteran educator in person sometime next week before he moved on to more pressing messages.

In a few quick keystrokes he confirmed with Ms. Jackson that their meeting next week about the administration of the T-SOAR was still on. He purposely evaded addressing the part of her email that gently inquired about how Central Office had been treating him lately. Only Ms. Jackson and Denise Baker knew how tense things had been with his higher-ups recently, and he wanted to minimize anyone else’s anxiety.

That said, these days his own anxiety had been off the charts. He honestly had no regrets about any of his actions this year, but he also wondered, not for the first time in his career, why doing the right thing was so often punished and toeing the company line was so often rewarded.

Trying to push his worries out of the forefront of his mind, he continued to scroll through his messages, even gathering the mental fortitude needed to respond to a frosty request about an upcoming fundraiser from Jessica Patterson. He double- and then triple-checked that his response could be considered nothing but professional and exceedingly polite before hitting Send .

Just then, Ms. Kitty Garcia, one of his APs, stuck her head into his office.

“Wow, Mark, you’re still here?” she asked.

Recently, Principal Kendricks and Ms. Garcia had crossed over into almost constant first-name usage. It was something of a dance in the world of education—learning the first and last names of colleagues, understanding when it was appropriate to use first names and when it wasn’t, appreciating that there were some veteran colleagues who commanded such respect that they would never be known by anything other than their last names, like Ms. Jackson.

“Looks like it,” Mark answered.

“Sorry, that was a stupid question,” said Kitty, stepping all the way inside. “I mean, obviously, you’re here.”

Mark smiled good-naturedly. He didn’t mind when Kitty dropped by, something that had been happening with greater frequency this year.

“What’s up?” he asked, pushing back from his desk, which was covered in messy stacks of papers and manila file folders and sticky notes in a variety of colors, each one representing some urgent task that had to be handled yesterday.

“That district curriculum thing I was scheduled for got pushed back to next week, but I can still make it,” she said. “Given all the eyes on us, I didn’t want you to worry I wouldn’t.”

It was a message that could have been sent via email or text, but Kitty had decided to deliver it in person. Mark appreciated her dedication, particularly since things had been so difficult lately on their campus. And, perhaps as relevant if not more so, he didn’t mind the in-person announcement because in addition to being dedicated, Kitty Garcia was also cute.

No, cute wasn’t right. Kitty wasn’t a baby penguin or a newborn. She was a grown woman, and the truth was, she was sexy as hell. Funny and smart, too. About ten years younger than he was, she’d started working at Baldwin a few years prior, after transferring from one of the local middle schools. Even though they’d worked together for some time, he’d been compiling a mental dossier on her only recently, including information gathered both from their in-person interactions and from his recent, frequent visits to her social media. The act of doing so often served as a pleasant distraction in the middle of so much stress. She was divorced with one daughter, a freshman at Baldwin. Her legal first name was not Kitty but Katherine. She was a fan of sushi, mystery novels, and long, solo walks. And she was the author of several witty status updates about life and culture, but not an oversharer of personal dramas or food pictures.

“I just wanted to let you know about the date change,” she continued, “in case Central Office said anything to you.”

“Well, I appreciate your making the time,” Mark answered, aware of the fact that his heart had picked up its pace ever so slightly.

“No problem,” she said, lingering. Kitty had long, jet-black hair she kept up in a lazy twist. She wore red lipstick. Mark could easily imagine how incredible it would feel to rip her clothes off right there in his office, cup her ample breasts in his eager hands, and let his hungry mouth explore them in one frenzied moment. This vibrant visual image traveled merrily through his mind as he sat at his desk, speaking to this attractive woman who also happened to be his colleague and subordinate.

“Any plans for the weekend?” she asked, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She wasn’t making any motion to leave. Mark sensed she didn’t want to.

“Recovering,” he answered, motioning to his messy desk. “Plus, I’ll be heading back here tomorrow night for the play. And maybe tomorrow morning, by the looks of my inbox.”

Kitty gave him a sad look, then leaned back against the doorframe. “Well, I should make a move,” she said, although she didn’t.

Should he ask her if she wanted to walk out together? Would that be weird?

Just then, there was a ping from his cell, breaking the silence.

“Anyway, I’ll let you go,” said Kitty again, motioning at his phone and quietly disappearing.

Mark looked down at the incoming message. It was from his wife, Lisa.

If you want any half and half in your coffee tomorrow you’ll need to go by the store on your way home because we’re out. Also great news! The dog has diarrhea again. Happy Friday.

Mark stared at his phone for a moment before giving his wife’s text a thumbs-up react. He knew Lisa would understand that the thumbs-up was an acknowledgment of her message about the half-and-half, not the dog’s diarrhea. It was the texting shorthand of married people.

He sighed again, answered a few more emails, and packed up some papers before turning off his office lights and shutting the door behind himself. It was after six on a Friday and he was finally heading home. His would be the last car in the faculty lot, he knew.

The entire walk there he thought about Kitty Garcia.

—

To say that Mark Kendricks had ever imagined himself as a high school principal would be an inaccuracy of epic proportions. It would be like saying he’d imagined being the king of England or an NFL quarterback with a handful of Super Bowl rings. Yet here he was. Much to his surprise.

No, he’d had no dreams of entering the field of public education. In fact, when Mark—who had recently crossed into his fifties—was growing up in the same city in which he currently served as principal, his sole ambition had been to play in a punk band. This important turning point in Mark’s life had occurred during the tail end of the Reagan years; there was a vibrant punk scene in town, which he’d discovered thanks to an older cousin, and he had quickly jumped in with all the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old former junior high nerd who had finally found his people. Mark loved the camaraderie and the joy of the pit, the shock and the boundary pushing of punk aesthetics, and, perhaps most of all, he loved the unleashing of a fury he did not realize was buried inside him until he heard it revealed in a two-minute song made up of only three chords.

By the end of high school his bedroom was papered in flyers from the all-ages shows he’d attended at a local club called the Death Trap; his walls served as a visual catalog of bands he worshipped, from Operation Ivy to the Dayglo Abortions (the latter name so delightfully transgressive Mark could barely stand it) to a lengthy list of local acts with names like the Pain Teens and Devastation. He hung out almost exclusively with other kids in the scene, spending hours at the local record store poring over and discussing the latest 7”s. He stopped eating meat and started hating capitalism, politicians, and the police as much as he hated major record labels. He was suspicious of all those in charge, including every teacher, every school administrator, and every adult in his life, much to the dismay of his loving and congenial middle-class parents.

Punk was an ethos Mark genuinely believed in, a way of living that valued individualism, rebellion, questioning authority, and doing the Right Thing always. It provided him with direction, purpose, and a sense that he was aligned with something that truly mattered. Something that made life meaningful in a way it had never been before.

He loved every second of it.

After a couple false starts, he finally formed a band with a few other guys in the fall of his senior year. They called themselves No Tomorrow. Mark served as lead singer and guitarist, and he wrote most of the songs, too—earnest, driving anthems that spoke of alienation and rage. The night of their first gig—they were the first band in a Thursday night lineup of five local acts, not exactly a huge audience getter—right before the show, their bass player puked behind the club, from nerves. But Mark Kendricks did not get nervous. As he walked onto the stage and plugged in, he had only the feeling that he was fulfilling his destiny.

“Hey, we’re No Tomorrow,” he said into the microphone, a sense of purpose, even a sense of calm, washing over him. “And this song is called ‘Fuck the CIA.’?”

—

While he had always thought of Kitty Garcia as a reliable and hardworking AP, she had only really appeared on Mark’s radar in a more significant way that fall, on a Monday morning when he was supposed to be gathering department chairs and his administrative team in his office for a scheduled meeting. Upon opening his door, he’d discovered an overpowering foul odor. As he’d walked around sniffing corners and inside desk drawers, trying to find the source of the smell (later assumed to be a dead rat inside the crumbling infrastructure), Kitty had appeared for the meeting.

“Oh wow, gross,” she said upon entering. “This is bringing back memories of my nights at the Death Trap.”

Mark turned toward her, startled. Her remark was enough to distract him from the stink, at least momentarily.

“You know the Death Trap?” he asked. The club had closed in the mid-aughts as part of the city’s downtown redevelopment plan.

“ You know the Death Trap?” she answered, clearly surprised.

What followed was a conversation that spilled out into the hallway as they headed to a new meeting location; it picked up again later that day when they were both monitoring the main hallway of the building during lunch. Being that she was ten years younger, Kitty’s punk rock past had taken place in an almost entirely different era than his, but they shared memories of the fabled club’s graffiti-covered bathrooms, frighteningly unstable stage, and infamously rude bartenders. They even realized they’d been at the same Fugazi show in 2002, a performance Mark had dragged himself to even though his oldest son had been a toddler who still didn’t sleep through the night and Mark had known he would be exhausted the next day.

“So back then, were you in the pit?” she asked as they monitored the main hall. She seemed amused by the possibility. Maybe, Mark found himself hoping, even a little impressed?

“Yeah, I was in the pit,” Mark insisted, enjoying himself quite a bit. “I was even in a band. We went by the name No Tomorrow.”

“ Very punk rock,” said Kitty appreciatively. “I guess that all comes in handy when you’re breaking up fights in the courtyard.”

What began as the occasional conversation before or after meetings or when they had cause to be near each other in the building had transformed in recent weeks into Kitty stopping by his office. She always came with a work-related reason—and there were many at the ready, given the state of the district’s tight hold on them this year. But then the conversation naturally meandered to other things, mostly music. One morning after Mark regaled her with a story about the time he’d been rushed to the emergency room for stitches in his chin after a particularly vicious MDC show, Kitty wondered aloud about his trajectory from punk to high school principal.

“Well, you know, life happened,” said Mark. “Babies. A mortgage. Joint income taxes.” He felt a twinge of guilt when he mentioned his family, for reasons he could probably articulate but didn’t want to dwell on.

One evening as he was finally getting into his car after spending the hours following the final bell sorting through upset teacher emails, bullshit district directives, parent complaints (they felt weightier this year, given everything), pressing legal matters—it never ended, the work; it was totally all-consuming—his phone pinged. It was a text from Kitty.

Look what I found! So wild. Like 20 years ago.

Attached was a picture of a young Kitty at the Death Trap, leaning back against the bar and staring into the camera. The girl in the picture was undeniably gorgeous, dressed in combat boots, a fitted black NOFX T-shirt, and shorts paired with black fishnet stockings that snaked up curvy legs. Her expression was one of practiced insouciance. Her breasts looked incredible in that shirt. Standing by his car, keys in hand, he stared intently at the image, which made him feel slightly creepy, because even though Kitty was forty now, she was only twenty in the picture, and he was (as was often almost impossible for him to admit to himself) fifty fucking years old.

Yowza! Blast from the past! he typed. I’ll have to find one of mine if any still exist from that era.

Yowza? Blast from the past? God, he sounded like an idiot. He slipped his phone into his pocket and started the drive home. When he arrived, he found his wife at her usual spot at the dining room table, which had become her de facto office after the pandemic made her job permanently remote. She had an actual office—the bedroom of their eldest son, who’d recently finished college and moved in with his girlfriend—but she preferred the dining room table because it was big enough for her to spread out. She worked as a grant writer for the local state university, the same one she and Mark had attended ages ago.

“Hey,” she said, glancing up from her laptop screen a few beats after he’d entered the room. “How was your day?”

“The usual,” said Mark. “Yours okay?”

“Mostly fine,” she said. Then she yelled down the hall: “Evan, please, I am begging you for the millionth time to plug that in and take a shower.” Turning her attention back to Mark, she rolled her eyes. “He is addicted to that fucking thing.”

“I know,” agreed Mark, heading down to his youngest son’s room—their third and last boy, a surprise of a child who’d come along when Mark and Lisa had both been in their late thirties. “Evan?” He rapped on the door before opening it.

“Hey, Dad,” answered Evan from his spot on the bed, his eyes not leaving his Nintendo Switch.

“Did you hear your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you finish your homework?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have a good day?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go take a shower.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it. Now, please.”

“ Okay. ”

With their oldest gone and their second son away at school, it was quieter than it had been when all three had wreaked perpetual havoc in their modest ranch house, smearing food and mud and Lego pieces everywhere they went. But Evan kept them on their toes.

Mark changed clothes and found Lisa in the kitchen, where she was staring at the humming microwave.

“Waiting for it to talk back?” he asked.

“Ha ha,” she answered. “Evan already ate, but I’m heating up some of that orange chicken for myself, if you want some.”

“Sure.”

Once an earnest vegetarian, Lisa had given up the practice during her first pregnancy when her iron levels plummeted. Mark, out of laziness or solidarity—probably the former, if he was being honest with himself—had joined her. They’d never gone back. In many ways they were both still godless leftists who eschewed tradition; they’d gotten married on a Thursday afternoon at the courthouse after their first baby was born, and only because it had made sense for insurance purposes. But most markers of their shared iconoclastic youth had faded away, as they always must.

The microwave beeped and Lisa began spooning leftovers out into two green Fiestaware bowls. “Hey,” she said, a thought occurring to her, “did you make your appointment for your colonoscopy?”

Mark winced internally. She’d been after him about this for weeks.

“Damn it, I forgot.”

Lisa said nothing at first, just continued to spoon the chicken into the bowl, metal clanging on ceramic. But now the spoonfuls of orange chicken— clang, clang, clang— held a deeper significance.

“It was crazy at work,” he started, sensing her frustration.

“It’s always crazy at your work,” she said, looking at him with sad eyes. No, disappointed eyes.

“That’s definitely true,” he responded, irritation creeping into both himself and his voice. “It is always crazy at my work.” A part of him wanted to go on. To tell her that not only was it crazy, but that it sucked to live with the daily fear that he would be transferred out of his position as Baldwin principal or let go from the district altogether. What would that mean for their family? Their financial situation? It wasn’t that they hadn’t talked about it—they had, endlessly—but tonight, he just couldn’t stand the idea of putting it out there again.

Another part of him wanted to bitch that she worked from the quiet dining room table all day and knew nothing of true stress, but all of this would make him sound like an asshole, he knew. Lisa was a good partner. She tried to understand, and she, too, worked hard every day. This he knew.

So he kept his mouth shut.

Lisa opened the silverware drawer—a little too forcefully, to be sure—and removed two forks, one for his meal and one for hers. He could tell she was formulating her response and braced for it.

“I just wish you’d take this shit seriously,” she said, glowering at the orange chicken.

“Fine choice of words, given the topic,” Mark answered, unable to stop himself.

“ Please don’t joke right now,” she said, her voice hardening, her eyes turning toward him, boring into him. They were now in a fight, it was clear. “And please don’t do that thing you always do where you act like some mischievous little boy and make me feel like the mean mom who has to chase you down to clean your room. I hate that dynamic and you know it.”

“What, you think I like that dynamic?” Mark answered, incredulous. He was exhausted.

“I don’t know, maybe?” she said, her voice withering. “I mean, you keep playing into it, so maybe you do. It’s a simple phone call, Mark, and it’s important. I think subconsciously you’re avoiding it because you don’t want to do it.”

Mark threw up his hands. “Of course I don’t want to do it!” he said, exasperated. “It’s a goddamn colonoscopy!”

Lisa stared at him evenly. She always managed to remain calm in these situations, while he got worked up. It drove him insane.

“I’m going to go eat at the dining room table and try to finish up some stuff,” she said. “Your chicken is on the counter.” She walked past him coolly.

Sighing, Mark shoved the chicken in the fridge. He wasn’t hungry now. Instead, he threw in a load of laundry, made his lunch for the next day, and continued to cajole Evan to get ready for bed. The entire time he had a sense of where Lisa was in the house. Eating her dinner, taking a shower, scrolling on her phone in the living room. But they avoided each other.

Finally, after Evan was in bed with the lights out and Mark had eaten his orange chicken at last, he loaded the dishwasher and found a stack of Post-its in the kitchen junk drawer. He took a Sharpie and wrote COLONOSCOPY in big letters on one of them.

Lisa was in their room, sitting up in bed reading a novel, one of the thick domestic dramas she preferred. She gazed at him over the book when he walked in.

“Hey,” she said. Her tone was mostly neutral, but it invited a response.

He held up the Post-it in surrender.

“Look, I made myself a reminder,” he said. “I swear I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Since we’re talking about a colonoscopy, maybe you should staple it to your ass to be sure,” she said, resting the book against her chest. The tone of her voice had shifted again. She was making a joke. He could sense the ice starting to melt.

Mark climbed into the bed next to her. “If I stapled it to my ass, then I wouldn’t see it.”

“Here,” she said, taking the note from him and pressing it firmly onto his forehead. “Now you’ll see it.”

Mark laughed and left the Post-it there for a moment to amuse her before unsticking it from his face.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” he said. “And I’m not just saying that like a little boy asking for forgiveness. I mean I’m genuinely sorry. And I know it’s bullshit that you have to remind me to make doctor’s appointments. It is bullshit. It shouldn’t be on you.”

Lisa picked up the grocery store receipt she was using as a bookmark and slipped it inside her novel, then set the novel on the nightstand. “I know you’re sorry,” she said, turning toward him. “It’s just that I don’t want you to die, you know?”

“I don’t want to die, either,” said Mark, taking a moment to kiss her on the top of her head. “But we’re all dying.”

“Gee, thanks for the pick-me-up,” Lisa said, gently shoving him. The fight was truly over now. Lisa slipped down onto her back, sinking into the bed, and stared at the ceiling. Mark kissed her gently again on her forehead, then once more on her mouth. She responded, her soft lips opening slightly. Mark felt something stir in him, and he reached out and placed a hand on her left hip, squeezing meaningfully before he sent it searching inside the extra-large YMCA T-shirt she often wore to bed.

She pulled back.

“I’m sorry but I’m so fucking tired,” she said. “And I’m really not in the mood. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Mark, taking his hand away, the stirring inside him suddenly vaporized, his ego slightly bruised. Then he remembered something. “I have the PTO meeting tomorrow night. If I don’t show, Jessica Patterson and the others will have my head for sure. So I’ll be home late again.”

Lisa yawned in response, the gaping inside of her pink mouth now not sexual at all but just an indicator of middle-aged exhaustion.

“Okay, so let’s do it Thursday,” she said, rolling over, half her face pressed into the pillow. “Can you hand me my mouthguard and let the dog out one more time?”

Mark found the dental appliance she wore each night to prevent grinding and handed it to her, watching as she slipped it in. It made her lips protrude like a prizefighter’s. She told him she loved him and wished him good night, but with her mouthguard in, it came out like “I luff yah goo nah.” Within minutes she’d be snoring.

As he let the dog out, he checked his phone. As always, there were half a dozen messages about school stuff, but nothing urgent. There was nothing from Kitty. He found himself pulling up the picture of a younger version of her at the Death Trap and was immediately aroused by her twentysomething bee-stung red lips, her flashing dark eyes, the fishnets and combat boots underneath tight black shorts. He gazed at the picture. His mind wandered to places that sparked pleasure and guilt in equal measure.

—

Mark had met Lisa the summer after their freshman year of college; both were taking classes at the large state university in town, a place that when Mark attended had been full of bright but not particularly ambitious young people who had applied to this school without much serious thought or consideration. During those years, applicants had only to provide a copy of a high school transcript and middling SAT scores. (As a principal, Mark had found it almost incomprehensible that this same school now seemed to require that most applicants have multiple letters of recommendation, a heavy class load full of AP courses, membership in a variety of clubs, and several examples of how the student had expressed their leadership potential.)

Mark had forged an agreement with his parents: He would take classes at the university if they supported his moving into a group home on Lexington Street, where members of No Tomorrow lived with other punks. In this house, a rambling old Victorian that had seen better days, band practice seemed to go on at all hours. The living room—its walls covered in show flyers and original artwork and political slogans ( Anarchy is order! Government is chaos! )—was a meeting space for rotating groups of young socialists, young feminists, and young radical vegans who ran the local chapter of Food Not Bombs. Staying there made Mark feel like he was in the middle of something deeply significant, as if the house were the heart of some transformative, living thing.

On the hot July night he met his future wife, No Tomorrow had played on the same bill as a popular local band called the Tentacles, whose biggest claim to fame had been briefly touring with Black Flag before the latter had broken up. Mark felt that No Tomorrow had performed their tightest set in a long time, and the crowd had responded enthusiastically.

After the Tentacles played, he ordered a whiskey and Coke at the bar and waited for the headlining act, some band from Milwaukee that was supposed to be pretty great. As he sat drinking alone, she approached him. The first thought Mark had when he saw her coming toward him was that she was one of the best-looking girls he’d ever seen.

“Hey,” she said, pausing to take a long pull of her cheap beer and sidling up next to him like she’d known him forever. “I really dug your set.”

“Thanks,” said Mark. “Getting to play on the same lineup as the Tentacles still feels surreal.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Honestly? I thought you guys were better.”

Mark gave her a confused look as he dragged a hand through his sweaty mop of dark hair, which back then was full and thick and gave no indication of its future demise. She had to be messing with him.

“Yeah, right, we were better,” said Mark, rolling his eyes. After all, they were talking about the Tentacles.

“I’m not bullshitting you,” she answered, her voice a mix of indignation and amusement. “I mean it. I liked your set better. Especially the second-to-last song, with that weird little riff in the chorus.”

So she was serious after all.

“I wrote that song,” Mark was quick to inform her.

Her name was Lisa, and while they quickly discovered they went to the same university and had gone to many of the same shows and even hung out in similar circles, they’d never run into each other before, a fact that mystified both of them and that later, in their middle age, they would always mention whenever they retold their origin story. (“And to think I almost didn’t go to that show,” Lisa would always add.)

She was tall and had green eyes, long dark brown hair, and an interest in music that Mark found deeply appealing. She had compelling thoughts about Mission of Burma. She could defend her favorite choices off Fugazi’s Repeater with confidence and ease. She read Maximum Rocknroll even though she found its emergence as the so-called bible of the scene to be disconcerting and the publication itself almost too egotistical to be authentically punk. And she put out a zine called Fuck You, Dad . (She told Mark she wanted to do an interview with him for her next issue.)

First tucked into a corner of the Death Trap, shouting over the music, then later in a quieter backroom where he and Lisa continued to drink and talk (they decided to skip the headlining act), Mark couldn’t believe the turn his evening had taken. He kept waiting for her to mention a boyfriend, or for said boyfriend to walk up and join them, but it didn’t happen. As the time moved closer to two a.m. and Lisa pressed her hand almost possessively on Mark’s chest, he knew it wouldn’t.

“Why don’t you, like, come with me?” she asked, her voice a seductive whisper, her plump lips inviting and pink. Her left eyebrow arched, full of meaning.

Silently, Mark followed her out a backdoor and through the parking lot, the moon hanging high above them, the gravel crunching underneath their Doc Martens. They were covered in a sheen of summer sweat, and Mark’s entire body was buzzing, both from the alcohol and from the sight of Lisa’s ass in tight dark jeans as she led him to her 1979 Ford Fairmont, which was plastered with bumper stickers, including one that read i’d rather be smashing imperialism!

Without a word, Lisa opened the door to the backseat and pushed him into it, then crawled in after him and undid his jeans. Before he could grasp that this was actually happening, her mouth was on him and his eyes were rolling back in his head.

It was not long after that Lisa moved into Mark’s bedroom in the group house. They slept together in a twin bed underneath taped-up show flyers from the Death Trap and a tattered, photocopied photograph of the Chinese student staring down tanks in Tiananmen Square. They had sex every night, often after long, meandering debates about art, music, books, politics, and films. They participated in Food Not Bombs. They skipped class and went on road trips to see bands play. They got jobs at a local gelato place, where Mark once went down on Lisa in the supply closet during a shared break.

Lisa laughed at all of Mark’s jokes, which were frequent, dumb, and often dirty. It was so easy to make her laugh. They were sardonic punks who were supposed to be too cool for sentiment, but on Mark’s birthdays, Lisa would always craft homemade cards that looked like little mini zines, full of silly poems and cartoons about their relationship. In one she wrote:

I have to say

You make me laugh every day

You’re so funny to me

In my pants I will pee

Mark saved it, along with the others, in a shoebox under their bed, a box that held such important artifacts as No Tomorrow’s inaugural set list and a show flyer from the first time he saw Social Distortion.

They eventually graduated, Mark with a math degree, Lisa as an English major. Mark managed the gelato shop full-time, and they got their own small one-bedroom apartment after a particularly nasty cockroach infestation took over the group house. No Tomorrow kept playing gigs; they even did a short regional tour that involved sleeping in a van at rest stops and playing a long list of squalid clubs. But eventually their bass player decided to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior, and the drummer surprised everyone by applying to and getting accepted into law school. Replacements didn’t really work out, leading to the band’s slow yet eventual demise. Things started to shift perceptibly in Mark’s life.

Lisa was the first to get a real grown-up job, as an editorial assistant at the university press on their old campus. She had health insurance and a retirement account, which they both made fun of even as Lisa found herself making use of them.

When Mark’s mother gave him a newspaper clipping about the local teacher shortage and an alternative certification program that was accepting recent college graduates, he showed it to Lisa, but he resisted the idea at first.

“It just seems gross,” he explained as they lay in bed talking about the possibility. “Like, being a part of a system that’s just all about compliance and these bullshit, arbitrary markers like grades and test scores.”

“Yeah,” said Lisa, taking the clipping from his hands and studying it. “But I think you’d be a really good teacher. Like the kind of teacher who could actually help kids think for themselves.” She also gently pointed out that their rent was going up, and his gelato shop wage wasn’t exactly bringing in a lot of cash.

Lisa was right about Mark’s potential as a teacher. He was a great one for the same reasons he had been a great front man. He never got nervous in front of the kids, even during his first year in the classroom. In fact, his was a dynamic presence that engaged his ninth graders and endeared them to him. They hung on his every word and trusted him, and he loved them for it. He won New Teacher of the Year for the entire district (he had to go to a ceremony at Central Office in a jacket and tie, of all things!), and in just a handful of years he was being groomed for chair of the math department. Lisa became pregnant with their first son, he got accepted to graduate school, he kept advancing, he was sucked deeper into the system, into the pension program, into an administrator’s salary schedule, which was pretty useful for a household with three growing boys. His faculty and staff appreciated him for always defending them the best he could within the bureaucratic system in which they all operated, but he became the thing he’d never thought he would be: the bureaucrat.

A few years before his fiftieth birthday, he was named principal of Baldwin High, the biggest high school in the city, a position that was not just a cog in the machine, but in many ways representative of the machine itself. He still got joy from interacting with teenagers (especially the rebellious ones), and he still saw himself as something of a defender of the public good, during an era when conservatives wanted nothing more than to destroy one of the country’s few remaining public institutions.

But like so many in middle age, Mark found it difficult to not sometimes look around at the life he had built, the compromises he had made, the paths he hadn’t taken, and to wonder at the strange turns that had brought him to this career, that had brought Lisa into his life. The punk who had rebelled and fought back and believed in a strict code of living that he swore he’d never stray from had softened and transformed into something different, even though he trusted that a part of that boy was still alive somewhere inside him, or so he hoped.

Mark and Lisa had grown up together, and now they were grown. The gelato place where they’d worked so long ago had become a Starbucks. The group house on Lexington had been razed for high-end townhomes. And the Death Trap had been closed and shuttered before their third child had even been born.

—

Not long after Kitty shared that picture of herself from her younger years, Mark made her a playlist, throwing in some of his favorite deep cuts from the Damned and the Penetrators that he hoped would impress her. For the last few tracks, he added several No Tomorrow songs; the drummer turned lawyer had digitized their early recordings a few years back. When Mark listened to the playlist from start to finish, he had the same reaction he always had when listening to punk now: Did he still genuinely love it, or did he only love the memory of it? It was an unanswerable question.

He sent it to Kitty.

The next morning, she came to see him before school.

“I loved that playlist so much, thank you,” she said. Her cheeks were pink. She grinned, tucked her hair behind her ear. He recognized this now as her nervous habit, which meant that he made her nervous. It was flattering beyond measure.

Mark had never cheated on his wife, had never even considered it. But he could do it now, should he choose to. He had never had such an appealing possibility so easily available.

“I wish I’d seen you play in No Tomorrow,” Kitty continued while standing in his office, her eyes holding his gaze, the air between them charged with possibility. Mark’s entire body tingled with pleasure and excitement, like he was nineteen again.

—

The band No Tomorrow did not survive. But the irony, of course, is that there actually was a tomorrow for Mark. Several, in fact. And in those tomorrows Mark and Lisa had found the following (not an exhaustive list): countless broken appliances, car accidents with uninsured motorists, aging parents with early dementia, trampoline incidents followed by emergency room visits, teacher emails about failing grades in algebra, adult siblings with drug problems who asked for cash loans, nerve-racking mammogram results, colicky infants, cancer in beloved dogs, adolescent depression, a miscarriage, an urgent roof repair that coincided with an empty savings account, and a burst hot water heater that once spilled forty-six gallons of water all over their already disastrous garage.

For his fiftieth birthday, Lisa made Mark one of her old mini zines, something she had not done in ages. Although it had been years since she’d pulled out her Sharpies and rubber cement, she still had a knack for creating little photocopied gems full of witticisms and silly drawings. The zine included the top ten reasons she loved him (reason three being that he was an excellent father and reason four being that he was particularly skilled at oral sex); she also included her “Mark Kendricks’s Fiftieth Birthday Soundtrack,” which listed all the songs that reminded her of him, including Black Flag’s “Slip It In” and “I Want You Around” by the Ramones. On the back page was one of her little poems.

Yes, you are fifty

You don’t think that’s nifty?

Young we are not

And we’ve been through a lot

But I haven’t forgot

That you still make me hot

You know it’s true

I really love you

On the top shelf of the hall closet he kept the old shoebox, the same one that had lived under his bed at the group house more than thirty years before. He carefully placed Lisa’s creation in this sacred place, which held many of his life’s treasures.

—

The Saturday after Kitty had stopped by his office to let him know about the change in the district’s curriculum meeting, Mark attended a performance of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in the Baldwin auditorium. He tried to make it to as many sports events and arts performances as he could because it built goodwill in the community; it made the kids and their families feel recognized and important. Of course, he’d sat through enough crippling losses on the field and botched monologues on stage to last a lifetime, but still, he went. It was part of the job, and it was the right thing to do.

As he sat in the dark auditorium, he spotted her a few rows down from him to his right. She was the administrator on duty, charged with making sure all the students were picked up and the doors to the school were locked tight when the event was over. He knew she’d been assigned to this night, which, he had to admit, was one reason he’d decided to attend this evening’s performance.

After a boisterous final round of applause for the young thespians, Mark circulated through the crowd, saying hello to the parents and students who were flooding up the aisles. Even in the midst of this year’s crisis, there were many who approved of his direct nature and open leadership style. Despite the fact that his job as principal was in a precarious position, he knew that when it came to the community he served, mostly, he was liked. It was no wild crowd at the Death Trap, of course. But it was still nice.

Once everyone else had left, Mark and Kitty helped the young custodian assigned to the event clean up all the left-behind programs and other trash from the floor of the auditorium, then went through the business of shutting off lights and locking doors. Mark found himself oddly grateful for the presence of the custodian as a sort of chaperone and simultaneously annoyed at her presence for the same reason.

A few minutes past nine o’clock at night, they were free to leave the building at last. The custodian had a ride waiting. She waved to them before getting into the beat-up hatchback sitting outside the main entrance, its engine running.

It was only Mark and Kitty now.

They continued through the courtyard to the faculty lot together, their feet taking steps in unison over the pavement. It was mid-January and cold, even in Texas, but Mark could barely feel it. A gust of wind made the nearby flagpole clang. He and Kitty didn’t speak to each other. Every sound and movement seemed heightened to Mark. All of it was a prelude to whatever was going to happen next, and what that would be Mark wasn’t entirely sure.

They reached her Honda first. She was parked only two spots over from Mark, and of course they were the only cars left in the lot. “So,” she said, turning to look at him, a soft smile on her lips, “we’ve survived another student production.”

“We sure have,” said Mark. His chest was tight. His breathing was shallow. If anything was going to happen, it would happen now. He knew it. She knew it, too. But she was waiting for him to initiate it.

He could have sex with this woman. Exciting, different, wild first-time sex. It would almost certainly be pretty great.

And then what? Mark asked himself. What would he be then but some middle-aged man having a predictable midlife crisis turned work affair, covering his pathetic tracks, concocting stories and hurting people he loved like some dumb ex–frat boy who’d had his bachelor party in Vegas and still quoted old episodes of Entourage ?

Mark Kendricks had become many things he’d never expected to be, but he knew with certainty that he had never been and would never be that guy.

For a few moments he gazed at Kitty Garcia’s pretty face and her red lips and understood that this marked the end of something. And then, in as friendly and professional a tone as he could manage despite the pounding of his heart, he wished Kitty a good evening and a safe drive home, and he headed to his car.

—

Mark walked into the kitchen, where he found Lisa loading the dishwasher. Her hair was piled into a loose, wobbly bun on the top of her head. She was wearing her favorite ratty T-shirt, the one with a faded picture of Chrissie Hynde on the front and a hole in the right armpit.

“Hey,” she said, pausing to wipe her wet hands on the yoga pants in which she never did yoga. “How was the play?”

“The usual,” said Mark, hanging his keys on the hook where they’d been hanging their keys for decades, a reflex as familiar as brushing his teeth every morning. “You couldn’t hear half the kids, and a backdrop fell over in act two. But they had fun.”

“That’s nice,” she said, tossing in a detergent pod and getting the dishwasher started. How many times had they run that dishwasher? Mark wondered. How many more times would they run it again?

“Where’s Evan?” he asked.

“At Jonathan’s house. Spending the night.”

“Oh.”

“Want to watch something?” Lisa asked, moving toward the adjoining den and collapsing onto the couch.

“Okay,” said Mark. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and plugged it into the charger on the kitchen counter without checking it for messages.

“We never watched that documentary about Mister Rogers,” Lisa said, scrolling through the various streaming apps on the television screen. “What about that?”

“Sure,” Mark agreed, joining her on the couch. “I’ve heard the sex scenes are amazing.”

At this, Lisa tossed one of their throw pillows at her husband’s head.

“You’re such a sick asshole,” she said, but she was laughing when she said it. After all these years, Lisa still laughed at Mark’s jokes. Not tinkly giggles of wifely obligation, but real laughs, loud and from the gut. For more than three decades his wife had shown genuine appreciation for his sense of humor. He knew this was no small thing.

Lisa curled into a ball on her side of the couch. As she scrolled through, searching for the documentary, Mark reached over with his right foot and nudged Lisa’s rear end with his big toe.

“What?” she said, turning to look at him.

This time he nudged her with his whole foot. “Speaking of sex scenes…,” he said.

“Are you trying to turn me on with your foot?” said Lisa, her voice coy. She was going to make him work for it.

“Come on,” said Mark, grinning. “We have the whole house to ourselves.”

“What about the dog?” Lisa responded, arching an eyebrow.

“We could let him watch,” offered Mark.

Lisa laughed even harder than she had before. She set the remote on the coffee table. Then, in one swift movement, she pulled her Chrissie Hynde T-shirt off and threw it across the room.

Principal Mark Kendricks, former lead singer of No Tomorrow, had chosen to be here with his wife, to whom he’d been loyal for the entirety of his adult life, when even just an hour before he could very easily not have been. As he and Lisa sank into the couch and he pressed his lips against her familiar, welcoming mouth, he knew he had done the right thing. The ethical thing. Maybe even the rebellious thing.

It was the most punk rock moment of his life.