curtis

      It was almost like waking out of a dream, or rising out of the haze of anesthesia. One moment I’d been on the roof of the school cafeteria, trying to gather the momentum to make my way downstairs, and the next I was a passenger in my own SUV and Bill Meyers was behind the wheel.

      Bill was an old-school principal, over sixty-five but so far not even hinting at retirement. I’d been a teacher on his interview panel ten years ago; since then, he’d been my evaluator and sometimes friend. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye, and more than once as the chair of the science department I’d been in his office, sitting across the heavy mahogany desk, with Bill in his fancy leather executive chair, the sort of chair that principals had and teachers didn’t.

      Since Daniel died, our relationship had deteriorated—my fault, of course. He’d been at Daniel’s memorial service, a handshake in the long reception line afterward. Once or twice since then he’d mentioned Daniel’s name to me, and I’d recoiled, stung. At most we exchanged a few minutes of chitchat in the hall between classes, cordial rather than companionable. So it was surreal to show him into my home, to take a seat on the gold couch while he putzed around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards in search of a box of tea that I wasn’t sure existed. When he finally produced some Earl Grey, I was sure it was something Kathleen had purchased years ago and hadn’t been used since. Did tea have an expiration date? I wasn’t sure.

      By this time I was feeling more myself, which is to say, incredibly embarrassed about the entire thing. Bill had already referred to it twice, gravely, as an “incident,” and I realized that the “Mr. K on the Cafeteria Roof” episode would be the stuff of school legend, like the time Janet Young, a ninety-pound English teacher, had separated two basketball players who suddenly realized they had the same girlfriend. It would be all over the school by now. For all I knew, one of my more enterprising students had captured the entire scene—such as it was—on a video that was even now making the rounds of the internet.

      For the first time, I thought about Olivia and how pale she’d looked when I’d passed her. Oh, God. Liv.

      “I’m feeling better already,” I told Bill, taking the too-warm mug of tea and shifting it awkwardly from hand to hand.

      He lowered his lanky, six-three frame into a turquoise armchair, one of Kathleen’s “reclamations” that had been on the side of the road one day and reupholstered, refinished and situated in our house the next. Our entire house was a riot of Kathleen’s color choices that—it occurred to me only now, as Bill’s eyes roved over the decor—not everyone might appreciate. The Meyers house was probably done in complete neutrals, like sand and stone and khaki and beige.

      “Curtis, we’ve known each other a long time now, haven’t we?”

      It sounded like the opening line of a rehearsed speech. I nodded.

      “I knew you before your son died. Before Kathleen left. Right?”

      I nodded again, bristling. Rub it in, why don’t you?

      “I remember a time when you were larger than life on that campus. You were involved, you know? You were department chair. You were excited about trying new things. Kids looked up to you, right? But it’s been a while since those days, hasn’t it?”

      These seemed like rhetorical questions, so I took a sip of tea, and remembered why the box of Earl Grey had gone untouched since Kathleen left. I hated Earl Grey. Earl Grey was Kathleen’s tea, not mine.

      “Now I see you walk around campus, and it’s like you’re not even there, except physically. Students call your name, and sometimes you don’t even react. You haven’t returned a single email all year, and sometimes when I pop in to see you after school, you’re just sitting behind your desk staring at nothing.”

      I flinched at each of his statements. It was like getting a glimpse into my private file, seeing all the evidence that had been amassed against me.

      “Now, I’m not trying to downplay in any way what you’ve been through, Curt. I can’t say I would handle this situation any better than you’ve done, but I think it’s time you faced certain realities. You’re not giving one hundred percent—” He raised a hand to cut off my protest. “It’s true. You’re not giving one hundred percent to your students, to yourself or to Olivia.”

      I set the mug on the trunk that served as our coffee table. I must have set it down harder than I thought, because some tea splashed over the side, and Bill reached forward, dabbing at the spill with a napkin. It was an old steamer trunk, transportation stickers still affixed to the side. Olivia, her stocking feet on its surface, had once wondered out loud if it had belonged to someone from the Titanic, if somehow a trunk had survived but its owner had not. Impossible, I’d said. But it’s an old trunk, anyway, she had pointed out. The owner is probably dead, shipwreck or otherwise.

      “Don’t bring Olivia into this,” I said now, a note of warning in my voice. Maybe he was right about things at school, but that didn’t mean he knew a thing about Olivia and me.

      Bill raised his hand again, as if I were a dog who needed to heel. “It’s only because I like you and respect you that I can say this, Curt. But Olivia’s floundering, too.”

      “What do you mean? She’s doing fine.”

      “She’s failing P.E. I talked to Jessie Ryan only yesterday, and she says Olivia has missed at least a dozen classes since January.”

      I shook my head. “She’s only been sick once this entire semester.”

      “Well, she’s not sick. She’s skipping class, Curtis. Hanging out in the bathroom, the library... We all know she’s bright. We’re all rooting for her, and that’s why Jessie came to me, to figure out how we can help her. You must have seen it. She’s lonely. You never see her talking to another kid.”

      “Wait,” I said. “You might be right about P.E. I don’t know. I’ll talk to her today and get to the bottom of things. But Olivia is not lonely. She has that group of friends.” I didn’t add, the ones who wear all black and call themselves the Visigoths, the ones who scare the hell out of me half the time.

      “She eats her lunch in the library.”

      “Sometimes,” I felt myself being too defensive, but couldn’t stop it. “She eats there sometimes.”

      “Every day,” Bill countered.

      I closed my eyes, fighting off a sudden stab of pain. Olivia, eating alone in the library, taking a listless bite of the egg salad sandwich she’d made the night before, peeling a mozzarella stick in tidy, industrious strokes. “I’ll talk to her,” I said. “And Monday, when I’m back at school—”

      “Let’s talk about that, too,” Bill said. He leaned forward in the chair, a hand on each of his knees. Dress slacks, a button-down shirt, a sports coat with leather patches on the elbows—that was part of his style. No khakis and polo shirts for this man, ever.

      Here it comes, I thought. Maybe I’d been waiting for it. Maybe I’d known since the moment Bill Meyers had appeared on the cafeteria roof. He was going to do it—he was going to release me, quickly and painlessly as pulling off a Band-Aid.

      But instead, Bill laid out a rationale over the next hour or so, and everything he said made perfect sense. I was struggling. I wasn’t giving one hundred percent. The state testing—that grasping, insatiable god all public school teachers worshipped—was over, the year was winding down. It was nearly May, so I could limp through the last month of the school year, doing right by no one. I could keep going through the motions. But it wasn’t fair to my students. It wasn’t fair to my own sense of integrity. I stiffened again when he mentioned that it wasn’t fair to Olivia—but