Tampa Read Free

feasibly about to meet someone who would come to know me in every intimate way. “They are not the enemy,” Principal Deegan stressed; the rest of the teachers erupted in pithy laughter.
    “Could’ve fooled me,” Janet barked. A knowing nod of sympathy made Mr. Sellers’s hunched neck begin a series of short, conciliatory parakeet head bobs.
    Suddenly, Janet’s eyes were pinning me to the wall. The polite laughter of agreement in the room had softened to background static between Janet’s ears and she’d heard my silence in response to her joke echo forth like a scream; worse yet, she’d picked up my expression—a snide look of unmistakable contempt. Years of teaching junior high had likely bestowed the derision sensor in her hearing with supernatural powers. Upon seeing her stare at me I immediately melted my face into a grin, but she didn’t return it. “Bathroom cigarette monitoring cannot just be an occasional afterthought ,” Deegan continued. I watched the clock and pretended to think on his words with contemplation. After thirty seconds I looked back and Janet was still staring at me. When the bell rang she dropped several more aspirins into her mouth like cocktail peanuts but didn’t blink.
    “Go Stallions!” Principal Deegan finally called out, his well-formed words brimming with manufactured passion. With the sound of hundreds of students pouring through the hallways just beyond the door, for a moment it seemed as though his call had actually summoned a livestock stampede. I gazed back at his smiling face, his hands enthusiastically raised above his head. “Go Stallions !” He repeated this a few times with a near-animatronic flair.
    I was the first faculty member out the door. In the hallway, the air had taken on the pungent weight of teenage sweat. Loud peals of laughter and shrieks, the type associated with forced tickling, came from every direction. As I made my way to the exit doors, foggy pockets of overzealous cologne hung low amidst herds of swaggering friends; the startling aluminum bangs of lockers beingopened and closed and reopened caused me to occasionally flinch. Soon the hallway population formed into a moving herd. A competitive speed was set as students headed to outdoor extension classrooms like mine moved toward the door in a rushing swell; it seemed as though a popular band was about to go onstage. I took the opportunity to pin myself against the back of a male student whose ankles revealed a tan line from athletic socks—likely a cross-country team member. “I’m sorry,” I whispered hopefully into his ear, “I’m being pushed.” Was it fate; was he the one? But the face that turned to greet mine was acneic; I quickly extricated my chest from his warm back.
    My heart sank as I watched two goofy girls entwine hands and run up to the door of my classroom. From the roster, I knew I had ten boys in the first period, twelve girls. I tried to steel myself—even if there weren’t any suitable options in the first period, I had four other classes, and each one brought more opportunities. That was not to say that it would be easy: my ideal partner, I realized, embodied a very specific intersection of traits that would exclude most of the junior high’s male population. Extreme growth spurts or pronounced muscles were immediate grounds for disqualification. They also needed to have decent skin, be somewhat thin, and have either the shame or the preternatural discipline required to keep a secret.
    The door to my classroom took a great deal of force to pull open—the suck of cold air from the window AC unit formed a resisting vacuum. Inside it was dark and cold. Two boys, prankster types, were standing in front of the air conditioner; they immediately ran to their seats with smiles, expecting some kind of chastising line (
You two know you’re not allowed to touch that!
) that wouldset them apart and declare them more audacious than their peers. I didn’t get a good look at