It wasn’t that I was bad at teaching. All the qualities that had made me a terrible student in high school made me a great teacher now. I moved fast, I made a lot of jokes, and it was okay if I went off topic. (The only useful thing I learned in my teacher credential program was how to get myself back on track by holding up a hand and saying: “…But I digress.”) And I always knew when the students in the back row were cheating off each other’s tests, because I used to try the same tricks.
Okay, so I was always behind on grading, but that’s every teacher. More or less.
After five years at the school, most of my lessons were already planned. So that was a good thing, right? I could just take it easy. Coast for a while.
The problem was, I was getting bored.
I liked my students, I really did, but it was the same thing every year. The same five kids had always done the homework. Someone was always in the hallway crying over a breakup. There was always some new, increasingly convoluted procedure for taking attendance. And yeah, the kids thought my physics experiments were fun because they hadn’t done them before. But I had.
Other things stayed the same too. The wealthy kids got SAT tutors, and the working-class kids got after-school jobs with long hours. I’d grown up in a mixed family (one side wealthy, the other working class) so I knew how they both felt to a certain extent, but my point is, inequality is so fucking predictable. Just another reason for the boredom.
Like last week, I was helping my favorite group develop their ideas for “It’s All Your Fault,” the second-semester earthquake project.
“Ms. Blaine,” said Elwin, who had actually shown up that day. He was re-tying his ponytail. That kid cannot keep his hands off his hair. “Tell Gabe my idea is a good one.”
“I didn’t say it’s not good,” said Gabe. “I just think it’s too hard.”
“Too hard for us, but not for Elwin,” said JC, lifting their palm up toward Elwin, who gave them a gentle, slow-motion high five.
“It’s good to think big!” I told the group. “Otherwise, you’ll be stuck doing the same boring things every project.”
“But what if we spend all our time trying it, then it doesn’t work?” said Gabe.
“That’s called taking a—” I raised my voice and cupped a hand to my ear: “—what?”
“Taking a risk!” called out five or six students from nearby tables.
“That’s right! You have to take risks to learn.” I patted Gabe on the shoulder. “You have three days to work on it. If it’s not working tomorrow, you can always start over.”
The smell of weed wafted over to me from Elwin’s side of the table. It smelled old, like yesterday’s fumes, not fresh from a before-class smoke break. But still. I squinted at him. He squinted back at me. I beckoned him to follow me out into the hallway.
“So. How ya doing?” I raised my eyebrows at him so he knew I wasn’t playing.
“Más o menos,” he said carefully, as if answering in Spanish would get him out of having to give a full answer.
“Listen. If you’re gonna smoke at night, you gotta change your clothes in the morning, so you don’t come to school smelling like the new dispensary on Broadway.”
He didn’t try to deny it. “You gonna write me an office referral?” His tone wasn’t accusatory, or even apprehensive. He just wanted to know so he could be prepared for whatever was coming.
I sighed. “You want to talk to González about this?”
“Nah, not really.”
“Okay, well, can you talk to someone about how much you’re smoking? The counselor, maybe? You know Mr. Eric?”
He shrugged and nodded, a flicker of relief showing in his eyes now that he knew I wasn’t going to send him to the office.
“I’m gonna make a counseling referral for you.” I made a mental note to do the referral as soon as I got back inside, so I didn’t forget again. “Just try to be in class when Mr. Eric calls you out, okay?”
“Of course, Ms. Blaine.” He widened his eyes in mock innocence. “Don’t I always do whatever you tell me?”
“Not really,” I said, and he grinned. “But if you’re actually going to do whatever I tell you, try this one: show up to my class every day from now till the end of the school year.”
“You got it.” He saluted me with two fingers and went back into the classroom.
I wished I thought he would actually do what I asked. He usually showed up two or three days in a given week: enough not to fail, but not enough to succeed. I followed him in, drawing the door closed, but the handle tugged back against my palm. I looked behind me to find Emma Lawrence pulling the door open.
“You’re late,” I said. It was thirty minutes into a fifty-minute period.
“I have a note,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“I gave it to the attendance office.”
Usually I’m not a stickler for attendance, but because it was Emma and I can’t stand her attitude, I checked on my laptop. Sure enough, she was marked excused, with a comment: “Note from mom—she had appt.” Whatever that meant. Knowing Emma, it could be “She had a spa appointment” or “She had an appointment with her private college admissions counselor who charges $300 an hour.”
Meanwhile, Alvin’s dad had just been deported to Cambodia last month, but was he ever late to class? No.
Emma didn’t wait for me to approve her excuse. I watched her walk over to her group, who had been quietly working away all period on their project. She sat down at her seat and started scrolling on her phone, just like I thought she would. A lot of things went through my mind to say to her, but I managed to filter them all out in favor of: “Emma, please put your phone away.”
Which she did, for about three minutes, until she took it out again to check her makeup. Her foundation was a little over the top for my taste, but as always, she looked nice. Very conventional and put together, the way Grandma Louise (my white grandma) wished I were.
And the work Emma turned in was always solid and neatly organized. (Like my cousin that my abuela was always comparing me to: “You know, your prima finished her college degree in four years.” “You know, your prima and her boyfriend just had their two-year anniversary—she really sticks with things.” If I called my abuela on it, she’d just say “What? I’m not talking about you.”) Then again, I suspected the rest of Emma’s group had done all the work for the final project last semester—I just hadn’t gotten any of them to admit it.
But I digress.
So I meant to put in the counseling referral for Elwin right away, and I did try, but I couldn’t find the referral form in my email, so I figured I would ask Eric at the staff meeting on Friday, but then he was out sick. And after that I forgot. Just like I knew I would.
For Elwin’s part, he’d only been to my class three out of five days since then. Just like I predicted.
See what I mean? Same thing over and over. Any way I looked at it, teaching was getting kind of stale.
Today I was going to get some answers from the universe.
Some people get out their tarot cards for guidance on a tough decision, but my go-to source is the radio. My best friend Annika calls it radio divination. Get in the car, ask your question, turn on the radio, and listen for a message from the universe in the first three songs you hear. (I usually tune into the ‘90s station. The synchronicity is better.)
Radio divination had given me the answers before. Like last year when I was dating Kalevi, this Finnish guy. We had been going out for six months and I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He was understated, drily funny, and patient. Super good looking, sandy hair pulled back in a short ponytail, cool blue eyes, not too tall.
He did pronounce his vowels a little weirdly—partly because Finnish has more vowels than consonants, but mainly because he was an obsessive Tori Amos fan, and had learned a lot of his English from her when he’d fallen in love with her rock-piano-playing bad-assery as a teenager.
Anyway, the point is he was a great guy, and everyone said I was lucky. But one night we went out for drinks so I could introduce him to my best friend Annika. When Kalevi left for the bathroom, Annika squinted one eye at me and said, “Gabby, aren’t you going to get bored with him?”
How did she always see through me? I had fooled everyone else, including myself, but you can’t fool your best friend.
(Although when it comes to love and lust, Annika’s just as susceptible to the dopamine and oxytocin rush as the next person. But I digress.)
After that I couldn’t stop asking myself Annika’s question. I wasn’t exactly bored yet. I still had a good time with him when we went out together. But I wasn’t not bored either. His patience was starting to irritate me. Why was he always so calm about everything?
So I got in my red Honda Civic, asked the universe: Should I stay with Kalevi? and tuned in.
The first song that came on was Tori Amos.
I got chills: the gods were definitely sending me a message about Kalevi.
But what? Tori Amos is a worst-case scenario for radio divination. Her cryptic lyrics can mean anything you want them to mean, like Bible verses—and every song contains so many different images and messages, it’s impossible to figure out which one refers to your situation. In this case, the lyrics to “Caught A Lite Sneeze” sounded bad, but what did they mean? I felt like I was back in high school English, trying to decipher T.S. Eliot. This idea of hiding, for instance: Was Kalevi hiding something? Was I hiding something?
And what was a “girl zone”? Should I be dating a woman instead? Should I ask Annika for relationship advice? Should I spend a day at a women-only spa?
Ugh. I should have stuck with tarot cards.
But when the last chords faded out, a rhythmic, poignant guitar started in: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2. Well, that seemed like an answer. Of sorts, anyway. Had I not found what I was looking for because Kalevi wasn’t the right person? Or because I was never satisfied, no matter how many times I climbed the highest mountain and felt the healing fingertips?
I decided Kalevi was definitely the problem when the third and final song came in with its off-balance syncopated rhythm: “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child, where young Beyoncé wants her man to say her name to prove he’s not cheating on her.
Wait, was Kalevi cheating on me?
I turned off the radio. I had heard enough. Probably. Más o menos.
After some investigating (nothing witchy, I just went through his text messages when he was in the shower), it turned out that yes, Kalevi was cheating on me, with this homesick Finnish girl who’d just moved to the U.S. Ugh. Why had I thought European white guys would be better than American white guys?
Radio divination FTW. (If it’s a win to find out you’re being cheated on.) Kalevi was out.
To recover, I went on a spring break/breakup vacay with Annika. We volunteered at this wildlife sanctuary outside Mexico City where they rehabilitated injured birds. I texted bird photos to my abuela every day and she wrote back “¡Qué lindo!” with a heart-eyes emoji. I texted Grandma Louise too, and she said it looked like a great learning opportunity.
While we were there, Annika started a romance with Nelson, one of the wildlife biologists. And I had a three-night stand with another volunteer, a cute college girl from the Midwest. That explained the whole girl zone reference.
My point is, radio divination had given me the answers before, when I knew I needed a change. That’s what I was thinking about on Saturday morning when I turned the key in the ignition and asked the universe: Should I leave teaching, and if so, what should I do instead?
Radio divination works best when you’re driving, so, with no particular destination in mind, I headed toward the freeway.
Where there was traffic. At eleven on a Saturday morning. Of course there was. Bay Area drivers can’t handle driving in the rain, even when it’s just drizzle, and even when it’s March and they’ve had a few months of rain to practice.
But I digress.
The first song that came on the radio was “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz, a parade of guitar chords striking on the downbeat. Lenny Kravitz is not really known for subtlety (except when he played Cinna in the Hunger Games movies, that was really understated), and there’s no subtext to this song. It’s purely and simply about leaving.
If that wasn’t clear enough, the next song was “Once in a Lifetime,” where the Talking Heads philosophize about how you may find yourself asking, how did I get here and where does that highway go to and whose life am I actually living?
Weird, but in line with Lenny, more or less. Did I want to get stuck in a life that wasn’t satisfying me? No, I did not.
So far, the universe was definitely suggesting I should quit.
I knew this was one topic where both of my grandmothers would have the same opinion: Quitting teaching was a bad idea. I had a stable middle-class job with, maybe not a good salary, but a dependable salary. No grandma in her right mind would want me to quit without a solid plan for what came next.
I pictured them in split screen, their heads shaking at me in unison.
But my grandmas didn’t know everything. Grandma Louise went swimming at the Y every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 7-8 am. She read romance novels by the same three authors on her e-reader. My abuela volunteered at my little primo’s school every Tuesday and Wednesday, and worked Thursday through Saturday at the same hair salon where she had worked for thirty years.
They both thrived on routine. They wouldn’t understand what it was like to feel trapped by it.
So I was just driving along in the freeway traffic, starting and stopping and starting and stopping and asking myself where the fuck was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when, boom.
Technically, it was boom, boom. The car in front of me stopped suddenly and I ran into it; then another car hit me from behind. A pileup: my Civic caught in between a Lexus and an older model SUV.
My airbag swelled up. The Talking Heads were still talking. There was yelling and cussing outside the car. And the yelling voice was familiar. Why?
I eased out from behind the airbag and opened the door.
Light rain pattered on my head and shoulders as I peered at my front bumper. Shit. That was going to be expensive and I’d already asked my landlord for an extension on the rent. I didn’t even want to look at the back bumper. I stretched my neck—wincing—and saw one car ahead of me and at least three cars behind. We were all going to be standing around in the rain forever to sort this out. And it was my fault. Legally, rear-ending someone was always your fault even if the other car had stopped so suddenly there was no way you could react in time. What would this do to my insurance premium? How was I going to afford to pay it?
I leaned into the car and reached around the hot distended airbag for my wallet, then approached the Lexus in front of me, steeling myself to apologize.
The driver’s side window was open. I realized why the voice was familiar. It was Emma.
She was cussing like a sailor, if that sailor was from deep East Oakland. Which, if it wasn’t clear already, Emma wasn’t. Her family was all fair-trade designer clothes and performatively progressive politics and spacious house among eucalyptus trees. But her mastery of East Oakland slang was impressive for a white girl from the hills. I’d never heard her talk like this before; usually she had her wholesome SGA president act going.
When she saw my face at her car window, her blue eyes went big and her voice went satiny smooth, plaintive. “Oh, Ms. Blaine, it’s you! Are you all right? I can’t believe this!” She gestured in front of her. “The road is so slippery.”
The idea that I was at fault here really galled me. Who the fuck buys their teenager a Lexus, anyway? And I smelled weed emanating from the car window.
I glanced at her sidekick in the passenger seat.
“It’s not Emma’s fault, Ms. Blaine,” said Sidekick Girl earnestly.
“I know. It’s my fault,” I said shortly. “Okay, Emma, I need your insurance info.”
“Oh, my dad always says we should never go through insurance,” Emma explained, still wide-eyed. “It’ll just, like, make both of our premiums go up. I’ll just give you my dad’s Venmo, and you can send him the cost of the repairs.”
“I need the insurance number,” I repeated, running a hand over my damp hair.
“I’m just not sure where the card is, but it’s really no prob, Ms. Blaine, you can just Venmo my dad. It’s Joseph-Lawrence-73.” As she spelled it out—did she think I couldn’t spell Joseph Lawrence? —she glanced in the rearview mirror. I knew why: she didn’t want to make a police report or deal with insurance in case it came out that she’d been smoking. She was a smart kid, I had to admit.
Venmoing her dad would make my life easier, too. No change to my insurance premium. Win-win, right?
That made me even madder. Emma was used to winning all the time. Winning was her whole thing.
My chest was full of something gritty, my breathing rough, adrenaline spilling into my veins. I knew this feeling. I knew it from right before every time I’d ever done something stupid.
“You just don’t want anyone to know you’re stoned out of your mind,” I snapped.
“Ms. Blaine, please don’t tell anyone,” pleaded Sidekick Girl.
“Oh my god, I’ll get in so much trouble with my dad.” Emma was crying now. Were her tears for real? Or was it just another act?
What I wanted to say was: “Trouble? You’ve never been in trouble in your life. Your dad will just buy your way out of it. That’s why you’re such a selfish brat.” I clenched my teeth over the words to keep them inside, but I knew I was cutting my eyes at her.
My abuela’s voice said in my mind: Tranquila, m’ija, tranquila.
My Grandma Louise’s voice said: Slow down and think.
I backed away from the Lexus. I ducked back into my own car and sat in the back seat, fumbling around on the floor for an umbrella. How did you even deflate an airbag anyway? My neck was starting to ache.
The radio was playing the third song now: Nelly Furtado. Nelly wanted to fly away like a bird. Very relatable, Nelly. Maybe she had looming rent payments too.
I sighed. I’d better go back and explain to Emma about how car insurance works, and how even if I Venmoed her dad, I still couldn’t afford to pay for my own repairs too, which was the whole point of having insurance.
I was good at convincing teenagers to do things. I could do this.
I was about to open the car door when my phone buzzed. It was a voicemail from Annika, who hated texting. I pressed play on the message.
“GABRIELA!” Annika shouted. Annika often talked in all caps. It was one of my favorite things about her. “Nelson proposed to me. I SAID YES! I’M GONNA GET MARRIED! This is for real! I’m moving to Mexico City in May. AND HE GOT ME A JOB! At that wildlife place! Please go with me, Gabby! You can teach English in the city! Remember how much fun we had last year? It’ll be like that, but ALL THE TIME!”
Nelly Furtado was still singing about flying away.
I looked over the airbag, through the windshield, toward the space in front of my car where the Lexus had been. Emma had driven right the fuck off before the police could get here, and I hadn’t even gotten her entitled-ass license plate number.
Fuck Emma Lawrence. Fuck grading. Fuck the rain. I was going to take a risk. I was going to Mexico City with Annika to teach English and rehabilitate some motherfucking birds.
I got out of the car, leaving the umbrella on the floor. The SUV driver behind me approached warily, holding his wallet. “Hablas español?” he ventured hesitantly.
“Sí,” I threw back jubilantly, “pues, más o menos.”
Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Gulf Coast, Salamander, Penn Review, Cleaver Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.