Isabel McNally listened to the click of her heels along the long, empty corridor and tried to block out the music that played in her head.  The meeting previously scheduled for the high school had been rescheduled for the middle school and she had forgotten. As a consequence, she was arriving late. Such tardiness was unlike her and what it suggested about her current state weighed on her. She was depressed and only this morning did she realize that it was interfering with her ability to function normally. Burdened now with embarrassment as well as gloom, she pushed open one of the massive double doors. With relief, she spotted Claire Howard close by at a table with an extra chair.

Richard Leland, the high school principal, was finishing up at the lectern.

“Nice of you to join us, McNally,” he quipped just as she reached the empty chair. “We’re just breaking into groups. Why don’t you join mine?”

“Sorry,” she mumbled, not taking her eyes from Claire’s kind face.

“We’re next door,” Claire explained, rising, “Same ole stuff, different day….” She added under her breath. She put her hand between Isabel’s shoulder blades and gave her a reassuring pat.

Isabel’s innards sank. Her lateness would preclude her participation in any discussion. Leland would expect her to be chastened and therefore silent and there would be consequences if she was not. There was history between them and he was heavy-handed when she offended him. Since finding herself under his direction she had adopted a  strictly professional demeanor which he interpreted as slighting him. As a consequence, she’d been assigned daily cafeteria duty, a task as distasteful as it was impossible. Leland was waiting for her to appeal to him for reprieve. So far she could not bring herself to do it. She heaved an audible sigh; Claire turned to her.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just not feeling up to this.”

Claire snorted softly in agreement.

Leland began with testing protocols. It was essential they give all students midterm exams so there was evidence of improvement. He wanted copies of the formal exams submitted to him for approval after Thanksgiving break. There was immediate resistance. Teachers who didn’t traditionally give exams balked at being compelled. Leland’s brow darkened. 

“We have to have evidence of measurable progress. Objectives made and attained. That is what tests show. So get over it. Just prepare them.” He paused for the response and then hiked up the rancor. “Just do it. Everyone. Across the board. We are living in the time of site based management and I am in charge.”

“That’s a real problem, Coach,” Hank Gauthier, who taught health and physical education,  began. Gauthier was a thirty-year veteran who did not respond well to change or accountability. He thought of himself as a gym teacher; he taught ball sports, the rest was all so much busywork. 

“We’d be better off working on our response tactics. Code Blue protocols. You’re ordering mid-terms when we should be working on how to handle ourselves if there’s a gunman.”

A tide of mumbling rolled through. Inexplicably, Hank caught Isabel’s eye and served up a smirk. What’s this?  she wondered shifting uncomfortably. 

“You got this little lady handling the cafeteria doors. You gonna arm her next? Let her take the lead in a Columbine replay?”

Though Gauthier had been teaching for a decade longer than she had, Isabel suspected he was still using the same sparse “lesson plans” he had inherited in his first year. When the state had introduced health into the physical education curriculum, his resentment had manifest itself as scorn. Who needed to learn about bodily functions? Her son Rafe had landed in  Gauthier’s Health Class this year. Raphael, who had arrived at the high school a   creative, enthusiastic student had thrown himself into writing a term paper on the functioning of the human eye complete with elaborate drawings to illustrate his points. The drawings and the paper itself had never left his possession. Gauthier’s idea of correcting these term papers was to sit for a few perfunctory moments while the student author explained to him the salient points. Rafe had been disheartened by what felt like dismissal (Why doesn’t he want to read it, Mom?). But it was hard to argue with the A+ Gauthier had given him after not reading the paper. Isabel was unsurprised and relieved. She’d heard stories that Gauthier’s earlier method of dealing with the term papers he had been compelled to assign included grading them before he collected them and then filing them in the nearest wastebasket after they were submitted. Occasionally a wry or unsuspecting custodian had returned the papers to Gauthier, or worse, to the principal.  Eventually,  he’d taken to hauling them home with him where the wastebaskets were less carefully monitored. Most of Gauthier’s students did not complain; his was an easy course; they claimed he was a nice guy.  Rafe had learned the lesson quickly. Silence had descended regarding the details of Health Class and Isabel had been able to avoid a conversation with Gauthier. It was odd to hear him reference her now. 

Other voices were raised in rancor. Getting these “little ladies” out of the forefront and arming men was proposed. Leland erupted. The temperature in the dank room seemed to be rising.

“Enough!” he finally ordered, using a tone commonly associated with restraining an imperfectly trained dog. An ominous silence descended on the group momentarily, then Leland pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his suit jacket. He offered one to Hank before he lit his own. This building,  like all the buildings in the school system, had been designated as smoke-free since the superintendent had accepted money from the state as part of the Tobacco Grant. The arrangement guaranteed that as long as the schools prohibited smoking, the funds would be available to be used at the discretion of principals. Leland’s version of site-based management allowed him to tinker with those restraints.

Leland’s notion of managing his site did not interfere with his own addictions. He assured anyone who asked that he had cut back. If one of his teachers was bold enough to point out that the Tobacco Grant money was only assured if no smoking was tolerated in the building, that teacher’s administrative duties would abruptly change. Claire Howard, the school nurse, had been given locker duty in the boys’ locker room when she expressed her objections.  Leland used such creative leadership skills to curb the complaints of a few of his still-smoking teachers, Hank Gauthier included. Today he easily manipulated Hank to silence.

“We’re gonna need an ashtray, Hank. Hey, the little lady was the last one in this morning and she’s doing a lousy job with cafeteria duty. Let’s give her the task, “ Leland spoke with hearty camaraderie. “Go find an ashtray, would you?”

“Sure,” Isabel stood, “But not because I approve….” she mumbled, pulling one of the windows open as she left. Gauthier and Leland smirked, ominously. 

What’s with him? She wondered as she walked. She knew there was an ashtray to be had in her own car in the parking lot and she couldn’t resist the opportunity of a momentary escape. Outside the day was more Thanksgiving than Halloween. She shivered and tried to distract herself: “Whenever I feel dank November in my soul…”  but abandoned the effort. There was not much chance of going to sea, not now, not in the near future. She was here with her colleagues, her students, and her depression. Thanksgiving offered itself just ahead. Then Christmas with a full week’s vacation. Isabel did not hate her job. In her classroom, day after day, she was a good teacher who enjoyed enormous job satisfaction. She believed in what she did there, believed with Christa McAuliffe that she touched the future. Yet plucking the pristine ashtray from its nest in her old Honda, she was overwhelmed with gloom, overwhelmed with the sadness of the season,  the parade of endless days,  shortening daylight, haunting regrets. Get over it. Loss is a part of life. Years ago now. Let it go.

Just then a nondescript car materialized from nowhere and bore down on her. Fear rising, her eyes flashed at the girl in the passenger’s seat, who was glassy-eyed and grinning. 

“Rue?” she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m crusin’ with my boyfriend, Miz McNally.  See him? This’s my guy. He’s not in high school anymore…” she announced too loudly, too proudly.  “Eddie, she the one that sings!”

Isabel’s glance shifted to the driver who was balancing a small spoon in one hand as he drove with the other. Unfamiliar. Too old to be a ninth grader’s boyfriend. He bent his head toward the spoon and snorted. 

“Wanna snort, Teach?” he asked as she reeled backward, dropping the ashtray. The car engaged and tore off. Isabel bent to the ashtray, shaken, thinking: it’s not even noon.  

Back inside, the group sat silently as Leland pontificated. The ash on the end of his cigarette had reached a precarious inch in length. They all knew what this meant. She slipped the ashtray in front of him and lurched backward away from the sour smell of alcohol on his breath. Appalled, she sat back between Claire and the new math teacher, a young guy just out of state college who was occupying himself by correcting papers, half-listening as he bent over the clipboard in his lap. Isabel wished she had remembered to bring something. She looked out of the window into the parking lot. Claire handed her a notebook. 

Do you believe this? Was written across the page in the finest Palmer method. Claire, like Isabel, had graduated from Catholic girls’ schools long ago, years apart. Both had sallied forth with high ideals and excellent penmanship. 

Is he drunk? Isabel wrote beneath it and then shifted in her seat so Claire could read. The nurse snorted softly but Leland paid no attention to the women. His topic now was the shortcoming of ISS, the in-school suspension program, where misbehaving students were confined in a tiny, windowless room all day, supposedly working on the assignments they were missing in the classrooms they had been banished from for bad behavior.  Even more onerous than Isabel’s cafeteria duty was the supervision of ISS.

Herbert would say: “Hair of the dog,” Claire penned and Isabel nodded. Leland had been in detox six months before, notably during the Columbine massacre. He’d gone to one of those exclusive, expensive places that promised to bring the patient “lovingly out of addiction.” His hair had turned snow-white while he was confined but there was no other evidence that the program had curbed his habits. Neither had the DWI which had prompted him to go into detox in the first place. Currently, his addiction was in a holding pattern, as was the high school he ran. Isabel was told by those who knew that he still spent every evening at the bar where she had first met him years before. The Belmont Club no longer hired pretty young singers, but its clients still downed mid-price whiskeys, and some, like Leland,  began their mornings with Starbucks lattes spiked with the same. No one speculated as to what the principal drank for lunch. His door was always shut. 

Isabel turned back to the window. How would she get herself out of cafeteria duty? His door was shut. He wanted her to beg. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gauthier smirking at her. Could he know they had a history? So many years ago, she had been so young and so stupid. How could it he? The gloom resettled itself, a net descending that made even lifting her arms difficult. 

Rafe was home with his guitar, plucking those same songs she had sung at that club. Or maybe he was still sleeping. She did not have to worry about Rafe, he was a great kid, a healthy, responsible kid.

But there was Jared. Still, there was Jared. 

Her mind wandered back to her mother’s house that afternoon she’d found him sick, another November day. Her mother had been called from the daycare when they could not reach Isabel. And her mother in her inimitable way had decided Jared was fine and taken him to her house. There he lay on her couch, his small frame frail with the burden of his life. She’d felt his forehead – sweaty – but no fever. Had he had his Digoxin this morning, she’d asked herself. Yes, administered carefully from an eyedropper as he had had it every morning of his life. Had he had his Lasix? Yes, as he had had it every morning of his life. 

His face was pale blue, the color of skim milk, his eyes saucers of remoteness. His brother, two-year-old Raphael came crashing into his grandmother’s living room, laughing, joyous, raucous and Jared, sober and silent had watched him. 

Jared was a watcher. Life had conducted itself with all its rowdiness and painful joy all around him and he had watched, absorbed, yet apart from his brother’s spontaneity, apart from any spontaneity. Had he been in pain? Always?

“Baby, it was a bad day for you, wasn’t it? How are you now?” she’d whispered just to Jared while his brother plowed to and fro and careened into the coffee table as he enthused over his mother’s appearance. He crashed into her, clutching her forearm, grinning: “Mamer….” he squealed with such satisfaction at her proximity that she turned and kissed his tiny nose. 

“Hi, honey. Look at poor Jared. He’s sick today. But you, you’re as healthy as the day is long. Did you have a good day? What did you and Gram do today?”

She lifted Rafe to her lap and Jared watched from his pillow throne in the corner of the couch. She tickled Rafe, who laughed and still Jared watched. She planted a Bronx cheer in his sweet baby neck and he squealed with delight. And Jared silently observed.

Wordsworth entered:  A little child, who lightly draws his breath and feels his life in every limb what should he know of death…

Suddenly like the wind from a door left open somewhere in another room, she had felt the exposure. Why not before?

“Jared?”

He turned to watch her. She leaned forward and heard his labored breathing, felt like a bolt the urgency as it blasted through the deceptive familiarity of Jared’s illness. They were all so accustomed to this. But this time she felt her bones screaming; he needed help. The marrow spoke.

“Mom! Mom, come quick!” her mother arrived in an instant as Isabel was scooping Jared from the couch. “I think Jared has to go to the doctor. Please call James for me, tell him to call Boston and tell them that I am bringing him in. He’ll know who to call. Can I leave Rafe with you?”

“Izzy, calm down. You’re being ridiculous. It is just a common, garden variety grip. You are always too emotional. Jared is just sickly. He’s been lying here all afternoon on this very couch just watching everyone and everything around him….you coddle him too much. What about Raphael? He hasn’t seen his mother all day!” she scolded, automatically, as was her way. 

“Mom, humor me. I’m worried. Please.”

“Oh, all right but you are being foolish, isn’t she, Jared?”

Jared spoke not at all, but slumped comfortably into his space, head resting in the indentation of his mother’s shoulder. From there, he watched.

In the car her panic blossomed, enormous, exploding airbags slamming into her chest. Too emotional? Too emotional for what? To be a human being?

“Oh, Jared, baby boy. I am so sorry. I didn’t know you were this sick. I would never have waited this long, but don’t worry, we’ll get you to the hospital and they’ll have you on a respirator and you’ll feel much better the way you did the last time…”

She babbled on and on like that until she realized that he had spoken.

“What? What are you saying, honey? I can’t hear you.” she’d pulled to the side of the road, panting, the ache in her chest reaching up like pincers to press on her ears. His voice was so weak: she’d had to lean over to hear him. 

“Mama, just let me…”

“Let you what, honey, let you sleep?”

“Mama, just let me go….” his head against the car seat, he was already half asleep but she had shaken him, hard.

“No! No! You can’t! I can’t” she’d howled at him, then shifted back into gear and onto the highway, the little car zipping in and out of traffic. But the inevitable awaited; traffic backed up from the oil tanks to the Chinatown exit. So she had inched forward, nursing her panic, muttering to herself while her son slept his dangerously deep sleep beside her and all that kept him from death was her refusal to let him go. 

Just move forward,  she had muttered, one foot, one inch, just forward, forward. Why didn’t she know how to breathe? The music in her head, just words from songs of loss…

Startled by the cacophony of chairs scraping beside her, she realized the meeting was breaking up. She looked quickly to Claire, who rolled her eyes. They were heading back to separate schools for more meetings.

In the car, she heard him again, “Mama, just let me go…”

How could he know what he was asking? He was only four years old and she was all that had kept him alive. The arrogance of her, thinking she could keep a child alive, keep a family safe. Thinking one parent or even two is ever enough against all the cruelties and inequities of the world.

Jared, I’m so sorry. If I had only played by the rules, listened and obeyed, played by some damn rules…. Had he ever called for her, ever wanted her for a single second during that operation? Had he been awake enough to conceptualize even fleetingly, the desire for his mother? Mama, where are you? And she had not been there. Coward, huddled in a little closet, a family room with James waiting for the doctors to come and tell them. 

“You mean he’s going to die?”  James had asked that, had allowed the unspeakable to be spoken. James, who was his stepfather, his only father, had been able to form those words and then to speak them. 

“Sometime in the next ten minutes,” the surgeon had answered and that had made it so. 

What did she want all these years later? Did she want to go back in time, be young again and in love with James and have those babies so dependent on her? Others wanted that. To be happy. James had wanted that. Most simply that is why James had left. To be happy. To find some space where he could escape the awful ubiquity of loss. When she saw him now, infrequently, because of Rafe, he seemed stubbornly happy. He dated. There had been women. Maybe I should do that now, she thought. Begin dating in earnest, work toward a new life…but then she remembered that the only one who had asked her out was Richard Leland – and would again – and she laughed a humorless, bitter laugh that rattled like glass in the tiny car. 

She pulled up behind the high school, turned off the engine and pulled the emergency break with a savage resolve. Inside, in the gym, a few random kids had come to the empty building to shoot hoops.  Hank was there already, giving orders, the suddenly committed supervisor who would skip the meeting for this. She waved to them, half smiled, and turned away. Those boys, those tall healthy boys crowding into each other as they vied for the basketball, they were the age that Jared would be. 

And the Buffalo Springfield played in her head: I am a child, I last a while, you can’t conceive of the pleasure in my smile…

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

Nick had just hung up from his conversation with Elle Smith when Noah called. On the one hand, he was delighted to hear his son’s voice: he had not seen Noah since returning from London the day before. On the other hand, he was feeling very foolish and he did not like to feel this way when he was dealing with Noah. In consequence, he was more brusque with his son than was usual.

“What’s up, kid? Make it quick. I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes.”

“Oh, OK. I just wanted to tell you I’m sick.” His voice sounded far away and forlorn.

“No kidding. What part of you hurts? Tell me quick.”

“Stomach. No, everywhere. Are you coming to get me tonight?”

“Sure I am. Are you too sick? You can be sick at my house, too, you know.”

“I know, Dad, and that’s what I want to do, be sick at your house.” Noah’s voice was the voice of a sick little boy, no echoes of the recent cracking his father sometimes noticed. It stirred Nick with its truthfulness, reminded him of his younger brother’s voice from long ago.

“Then we’ll do it. I’ll get you at 5:30 and we’ll go to Safeway and you can pick up some extra juice before we come home, OK?”

“Yeah.” Noah did not seem inclined to hang up.

Worried that he really was too sick, Nick asked Noah if his mother was there.

“No, Dad. I mean yes, she is here, but she’s in her room. Mrs. McVey is here. She and Allie are in the kitchen.” Mrs. McVey was hired to help Caroline with the cooking and cleaning.

“No kidding. Is your mom all right? Are she and Hugh fighting or not?”

“I don’t know, Dad. She’s all right,” Noah answered, his voice now defensive. Nick felt they would get nowhere. If Noah had more fighting to report it would not come out in this conversation: Noah could be very diplomatic, very loyal to his mother. While Nick admired him for that, he felt something was wrong. He’d try to get to the truth later, when they were face to face.

“Well, I’ll see you later this afternoon, right after five, right?”

“OK, Dad.”

“See you then.”

Nick put the phone down and his thoughts returned immediately to Elle Smith. What a jerk I am! He laughed out loud. It had taken him fifteen minutes of conversation before it dawned on him, and then only because she had named her price.

They had been chatting amiably about various matters, her graduate class at Columbia (she had been vague when he asked what specific course, but that had not registered itself as odd), about her mother who lived in Buffalo and his own frequent trips to New York. In hindsight ( I am one hell of a whiz with hindsight, Nick castigated himself silently) he recognized that she had been the one who brought the conversation back to lascivious matters again and again. He liked women who were willing to engage in talk titillation, in fact, he had found from experience that if he could not get some kind of verbal acknowledgment of a sexual side from a woman during their initial phone conversations then she was unlikely to have one.  So in the first conversations that is what he looked for, the woman’s willingness to talk about her sexuality and evidence of a sense of humor. Although not exactly aspects of his template, women who did not display these characteristics during his first chats with them did not usually make it into contention.

Elle Smith had shown both. Perhaps that was what had thrown him. She kept returning to this lovely jabber about how sexy she was and how he should not assume because she was a night school teacher that she was the frumpy type. She’s never worn chunky-heeled shoes with laces; she preferred spike heels and garter belts. More than once she told him about her great hands and the sensational view from her bedroom. More than once he reminded her that despite his own interest in the sexual accouterments, he was in actuality looking for a relationship with other dimensions. Elle kept returning eagerly to the prospect of their getting together soon.

Nick had spoken with another woman the night before and because she had turned out to be as lively and engaging in conversation as she had been by letter, they had agreed to meet for dinner in New York Wednesday night. Now he tried to arrange to meet Elle Smith for a nightcap after his early date. Elle was evasive. She liked to get to bed early when she could.

“How about breakfast on Thursday morning before my plane?” He suggested.

“Perfect. I’ll bring a picnic breakfast to your apartment,” she offered promptly.

Nick was astonished. She really did mean business, and he had never intended to hop right into bed with the woman. He had never even seen her. Christ, there had not been a picture enclosed with her letter.  He was not some eighteen-year-old stud who followed his hormones blindly. Flustered, he tried to redirect her.

“No, Elle, you don’t have to go to that much trouble. Why don’t I take you to breakfast…perhaps at the Regency? They have a wonderful weekend brunch, perhaps Thursday morning’s would be as worthy…” He sounded awkward and stumbled over his own hesitation.

“I really don’t mind bringing breakfast. Give me the address of your apartment. I’ll meet you at seven. You won’t even have to get up. Is there a garage? I have a car, although it might be better for me to come by cab.” She sounded like she was setting up a business meeting. Nick slipped back into the earlier flirtation.

“Yes, you told me about your car in your letter….how did you describe it, ‘all American, top of the line stripped’? Wasn’t that it?”

She laughed her throaty, provocative laugh.

“You’ll see soon enough, won’t you?”

Again Nick was startled back to reality. Were they indeed setting up a business meeting?

She giggled. “I’m embarrassed.”

“By what?” He could not imagine this woman embarrassed by anything.

“Well, you know, it’s because Columbia is so expensive…” She left the sentence deliberating unfinished, waiting for him to agree. But Nick was an old hand at this: this was a business negotiation suddenly and since he recognized the finesse, he did not rise to it but waited silently for her next ploy.

“…so I have to ask….would two hundred be all right?” She rushed right on, breathless, “Oh, Nick, it is so embarrassing…” She was the delicate, demurring woman again, relying on his gallantry. The duplicity annoyed him. This was business. His answer was clipped.

“I’ll have to think about it.” It was exactly what he would have said to any unexpected, unsolicited business proposition.

But she was flustered now and apparently angry. “Well, if you have to think about it it probably isn’t worth my time….”

“I didn’t say that.” Again he was clipped, yet clearly, he was not letting her off the phone. Maybe this was the answer, he thought. Hire someone. That’s what he did to solve his other problems. A woman was paid to clean his house, another to do his errands. When he gave parties he hired two women who planned and catered. He had another woman who was available to do holiday shopping for him. Maybe he should just give up on the desire for a substantial, multifaceted relationship and settle for a forthright arrangement with a professional. He recalled suddenly the last scene in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. What he remembered was the dismal paucity of affection. He sighed heavily. Elle Smith picked right up on the hesitation, capitalized on it while obviously having her own interpretation of its origin.

“Nick, I can promise you that I can teach you ways to have sex safely that you could not imagine….that you will love…”She was back to the throaty, intimate voice.

Oh, yeah, thought Nick. There’s that, too. Safe sex. He shivered. In the age of AIDS, he was contemplating an arrangement with a prostitute and his first concern was that there would be a paucity of affection. He had to be crazy. But he was also somewhat gullible. Maybe she did know things about safe sex. Should he? He hesitated again.

“Nick, I know you want me. And that you’ll be pleased….” She gave the word a prolonged salacious emphasis. “But first, give me your New York address…” She prodded softly.

“I’ll have to think about it.” Nick was less clipped this time, more genuine. Elle’s reaction was the same.

“If you have to think about it, it may be that I am just too sophisticated for you, Nick. Too bad. I have to go now, call me if you change your mind.” She gave him a second or two to make his move, but Nick just repeated that he would have to think about it. There was this exasperated exhale on the other end, a sort of “humph,” and Ms. Smith hung up.

Nick sat at his desk, looking out the windows at the throbbing midday financial district. Here he was sitting atop his unmitigated professional success having just been propositioned by a prostitute who was probably neither a Vassar graduate nor a Columbia Business School student but who had the savvy to go looking for her clients among the wealthy, and obviously lonely, advertisers in the Boston Magazine personals.  He felt powerfully sorry for himself and for all the others who fell prey to Elle Smith’s come-on. Not because he did not admire her business acumen, because he did, just because life could be so cruelly unfair and because he had considered it, wasn’t sure he had not made a mistake in not arranging it. How could he remain so ignorant when it came to this?

Just then the phone rang. It was Noah.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

Noah Krasnow, a sixth-grader at West Blackbrook Middle School,  was sitting in the cafeteria with about forty other middle schoolers, none of whom were Noah’s friends.  Noah did not really have friends. He’d been “homeschooled” for the last few years and so had lost all the contacts of his very early school years, as well as a year in grade promotion. It had been his mother’s idea; she had been his teacher and had insisted to him as well as to his father and step-father that homeschooling was in his best interest. Noah had accepted it more and more as the years went on and the adults argued. The idea of going to a real school had become something to dread. Now, in this last week in September in his first year of middle school, he felt immersed in that dread; it held him back like an illness he couldn’t shake. This morning he had claimed that illness and been sent to the nurse, again, and she had suggested he go to the cafeteria for breakfast instead of to his health class, where all his young classmates were learning more about the cilia in lungs and how the cilia was knocked cold by the onslaught of cigarette smoke, how they recovered every night, pulling themselves together every morning, ready and willing to take on the hopeless battle again. So the lungs rallied every morning. That’s what the smoker’s cough really amounted to, the fight the lungs put up to clear themselves of the junk left behind by yesterday’s cigarettes. But then the smoker inhaled the first drags of the morning cigarette and the cilia were stunned again. Noah felt bad for the cilia when he learned all this. It reminded him of that poem he had read in  English class, the one about the English soldiers; Charge of the Light Brigade it was called: Ours not to reason why ours but to do or die. Noah found that line haunting. When he thought of that line and the cilia struggling against the new smoke every morning, he felt sort of like crying. Noah’s mother smoked. She was probably at home smoking right now.

But of course he didn’t cry in the cafeteria.  He felt sheepish and embarrassed at having been tempted and looked furtively around to see if any of these other kids had noticed how babyish he had suddenly become. No one seemed to notice him at all. Noah’s cheeks had perfectly placed crimson splashes. He looked like an angel on a Christmas card, with his high color and his white Gap shirt, but he did not know that – which was fortunate,  because he would have been embarrassed by that too. Noah found much of life in middle school a desperate battle with embarrassment and humiliation. It was exhausting.

He did not feel much better after the muffin and cranberry juice. The nurse always made you go to the cafeteria before she called your mother to tell her you were sick. Noah always felt badly when it happened. It was as though she did not believe him when he told her he didn’t feel well, or else she was afraid his mother was someone who didn’t feed him breakfast. Maybe she didn’t always get up, especially if Allie hadn’t awakened and his stepdad was away, but Noah knew how to get himself breakfast. He always got himself cereal and toast. He wasn’t one of those kids who’d come to school hungry.

At the next table a big, fat eighth-grader was bickering with his companion. Noah’s head had begun to throb. He felt wretched and not at all prepared to handle what was suddenly heading straight for him. The fat eighth-grader had shuffled to his feet and Noah was flooded by the sickening apprehension that came to a sixth-grader when he was about to be sucked into one of those weird middle school things, those unwanted encounters with aggressive, cruelly sophisticated bigger kids who seemed so stubbornly determined to educate him on matters he was not sure he needed or wanted to know. Noah yearned for his usual phalanx of sixth graders. What was he doing here alone in this stuffy cafeteria? On top of everything else, it smelled terrible in here, like wet dog and old pizza.

The eighth-grader dropped noisily into the chair directly across from Noah, his spare tire banging into the flimsy table so that it banged and rattled confrontationally. Noah pulled back, abysmally aware of how hot his cheeks were, how sluggishly his mind was functioning just when he needed all his wits about him. I gotta get out of here. He longed to disappear into the throbbing mob of six graders who traveled everywhere in sanely cohesive packs. He felt hideously young and vulnerable: a porcupine unable to roll into a ball. He knew he was about to be made a fool. Big kids in middle school were trouble. This big kid was big trouble. Deadly.

The kid’s name was Tom and he was mean as well as fat; he traveled with the other, skinnier kid whose name was Desmond. Desmond was eyeing Noah and Tom from the other table. Desmond had his hair cut too short around his ears so he always looked like his ears were open car doors. Both he and Tom wore baseball caps and tee shirts under leather jackets.  Noah didn’t understand why. It seemed odd to him like maybe they were always cold or maybe they weren’t sure if they were going to stay in school all day. But either way, he could tell that the really tough ones were the ones who wore their jackets and hats all day. Like this one and his friend who were boring down on him with predatory enthusiasm.

“Hey, kid, what’s ya name?”

Noah wanted to run, thought briefly of not answering, felt the flush of his face extend down his neck, but then responded the way he had been taught to, politely, as if with faith in the friendly intentions of the questioner, this thug, who smelled so strongly of nicotine that Noah felt his already tenuous stomach lurch in disgust.

“Noah.” He answered clearly but quickly. There was no point in giving out unnecessary detail.

“Yeah, Noah? Like the guy in the ark?”

Noah did not answer but his eye widened. He wondered desperately if Tom could be Jewish. Could this big kid have gone to Hebrew School,  had a bar mitzvah? Believe in God? Have parents even?

“So, Noah, ya like West Middle?”

Noah looked miserably at the clock. How could he get out of this? Had the nurse told him when he should come back? The cranberry juice container was empty. The white paper plate had only crumbs left on it. The unnecessary second breakfast sat like a hairball in his stomach.

“It’s okay,” Noah answered. “I gotta go to class.”

He looked down at all his stuff. The trash had to be cleared. There was his backpack to pick up. He despaired of making his exit either fast or easy. Big kids never seemed encumbered with books. One of the things they liked to do was try and leave their garbage at the table. Noah didn’t understand why they didn’t just throw it away. You had to do that everywhere there were trays, like Papa Gino’s and Micky D’s.

“Noah, don’t be an ass licker. You got a pass. Take your time.” Tom rocked his chair backward and assessed Noah, who was inwardly shaken by the unexpected harshness of the term ass licker. Whose ass, he wondered. No one had talked like that when he went to elementary school. Maybe someone had occasionally said shit or even fuck just to hear how it sounded, but ass licker was an awful term. It hurt his ears, made him shaky and nervous and he’d heard worse in the cafeteria, seen worse written on the walls of the lavatory cubicles. Sometimes he wondered what the words meant and where they came from. Slut was a word he had wondered a lot about. It seemed to be something a girl was, but what did it mean? He wanted to ask someone but could think of no one to ask. He was embarrassed to ask his father. He was sure this guy Tom would know what slut meant, but he certainly was not about to ask him.

“So you like elementary school or middle school better, Noah?” Tom pressed him.

“Elementary,” he answered impulsively, emphatically, with a passionate honesty that he knew immediately was a mistake.

“Hey, Dez, you heard that?” He called backward over his shoulder. “This baby fag liked elementary school better where they got them cubbies to keep their lunch boxes in, the ones with Masters of the Universe and Ninja Turtles on the outside…and no one knows what a pimp is,” Tom howled in pleasure, reveling in Noah’s transparent discomfort.

A pimp? Noah felt panicky. Could this big kid know he did not know the words?

“Whadda ya think, Dez? “

Desmond looked over with a bored, reserved reluctance. But he was actually interested. Perhaps Tom had found them some entertainment. This pukey-looking kid looked like a ripe one, a real geek. Maybe Tom could make him cry. Dez looked around to locate the teachers who were monitoring the cafeteria study hall. One of them, Miz McNally, was looking over, her brow furrowed.

“Maybe we should get him his own teddy bear,” Dez prodded Tom approvingly, but a bit too loudly. Miz McNally was very interested now. She was coming over, Dez would bet money on it.

Noah, unaware that rescue was on its way, was squirming in mortification. He hated middle school, hated Tom, hated himself most thoroughly. Would he ever develop the wit to save himself from this kind of encounter? What was a pimp? Why hadn’t he let his father put him in private school? Let his mother homeschool him another year? Should he know what a pimp was? Who might tell him? He was crippled with embarrassment not to know. Where did the big kids find out?

“So, kid, shall I tell ya what a pimp is? They got a shitload a’ money; that’s a hint. There’s one ‘round my neighborhood drives a lime green caddy…does your daddy drive a caddy, Noah?” Tom asked, sort of friendly.

This Noah understood. Cars he could handle.

“No, my dad drives a Mercedes sedan, it’s regular gray…” He quieted as he heard the embarrassing eagerness in his own voice. “He’s got a car phone….” he continued, but Tom’s eyes narrowed menacingly and Noah retreated to silence.

“Does he now? Bet he makes a shitload of money, too. Is he a pimp?”

Noah was trapped, torn between loyalty to his father who he suspected would not like being called a pimp and his own horrible ignorance. He clung to silence.

“Hey, Tom,” Dez interrupted, inclining his head toward Miz McNally as she crossed toward them.

“Well, look’a this, Noah, ole Lady Mac is haulin’ her bony ass our way. Whyn’t you ask her if her old man’s a pimp?” Tom suggested, very low and almost gently, but without taking his eyes off the approaching teacher.

Noah looked up at this unknown woman with such a look of unadulterated gratitude that she understood instantly that Noah was not Tom’s tablemate by choice.

“Can I see your pass?” she asked Noah.

“This here’s Noah, Miz McNally. He’s with me,“ Tom bullied in but the teacher ignored him. Noah noticed a little twitch at her mouth, so one of her dimples flashed, but without humor, not like she was going to smile with her whole face. He grabbed his backpack and got to his feet, half reeling from his fever.

“I’m Noah Kraskow. I’m sick and the nurse sent me here for breakfast, but I want to go home now.”

Tom laughed harshly but said nothing.  Miz McNally gave him one brief deadly stare and then turned her attention to Noah whose face with its vivid red splotches and pale background testified to his truthfulness.

“Okay, Noah. Go on back to the nurse’s office,” the teacher suggested kindly, handing him back his pass. He started to scurry away but she delayed him surreptitiously so he fell into step and walked politely along beside her, clear that she wanted to say something. “You know in school, we have to choose our friends carefully. Other people make judgments about you because if you hang around with…I don’t want to choose your friends for you, Noah, but let me suggest you stick with your own classmates for a while.”

He turned his yearning brown eyes earnestly on her. I don’t understand, his eyes begged for help.  Miz McNally looked suddenly, oddly stricken.

“Stick to your own classmates,” she repeated obscurely and seemed to have dismissed him, pained by something he did not fathom.

He scurried out of the cafeteria still in full panic. Middle School was a nightmare. He just did not seem to understand any of it. Not that the subjects were difficult, but everything else was so weird and foreign. It felt like another planet, one that was not fully lit.

—-

When Noah returned to the nurse’s office, it was quite crowded. Mrs. Howard herself was more harried than he had ever before seen her and so without realizing what he was about to do or even that he was doing it, propelled by illness and desperation, he bamboozled her. After one quick look at his glassy eyes and mottled completion, she told him to call his mother,  When the answering machine clicked on instead of leaving a message, Noah plunged ahead talking into his mother’s recorded voice without losing a beat or allowing a false note to hint at his own dissembling.

“Mom, I’m sick. The nurse says I can come home if you will come get  me.”

“Let me talk to her, Noah,” Mrs. Howard instructed absently, but she was clearly distracted. There was a chubby seventh-grade girl who was feeling dizzy and claimed she had taken too much or too little insulin. There was that awful skinny eighth-grade girl, too, the one with the gigantic eyes and the fat hair whose legs were like twigs. She was sitting in a chair by the scale eyeing the thing miserably. Mrs. Howard had another kid, a boy, lying on a couch in the little room that connected her office to the bathroom. Noah plunged into the fray.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Howard. My mom believes me. She’s coming to get me right away.”

Mrs. Howard looked at him curiously.

“She doesn’t want to talk to me?” she asked.

“No, she believes me,” he answered, a bit too defensively, so added, “She knew this morning I was feeling bad. She’ll be here in five minutes.”

“Okay, honey. Go wait in the foyer, but don’t leave the building until she drives up.” The diabetic again compelled her attention and Noah slipped out.

He marched to his locker, grabbed his coat, and headed out. He hesitated one moment in the foyer, wanting to be the good obedient child he had always been but the desire was ephemeral. No one was going to come for him and someone might well find him out if he lingered. He hit the street.

It was more than two miles from West Middle to Noah’s house. He walked the first half mile purposefully, his head bowed, an escapee hoping to avoid detection by avoiding eye contact. But his energy dissipated quickly and then he felt weak and weary and very oppressed. Commercial city buses passed him and he peered at them with an oblique curiosity. He had never been on a bus in his life, not even when his father had taken him to London. He hadn’t the faintest idea how you did that, took a bus. Did you flag them down like a taxi in the city? No, in movies he’d seen people waiting at bus stops, designated areas by the curb, sometimes with a little shelter from the rain. Just then he noticed a yellow-painted section on the curb and looked up expectantly. The signs above said “No Parking” and “Bus Stop.” But if he waited how would he know if he was getting on the right bus? Or how much it cost? Or when one would come?

If he had not been feeling so vulnerable and ill, he might have found the brashness to wait at the stop thinking it all an adventure; but today he did not have the energy for brashness. He just kept walking, walking, walking down streets he had only known from the school bus window, finally making his way into the remotest edges of his own neighborhood. Occasionally he willed with all his might for someone he knew to be driving by, to recognize him and pick him up. But no matter how intricate the game he played with himself – I’ll walk very fast to the next curb and when I turn that corner and look up, there will be Mrs. McVey coming around the other corner – no one he knew materialized to rescue him. Sometimes he felt so tired and overwhelmed and small and abandoned that he sort of cried, but not too hard because he kept catching himself, remembering he was on the street, remembering that he had left school under false pretenses and a policeman or a truant officer would be sure to stop a kid in tears who was walking down the street carrying a book bag in the middle of the morning. Eventually, accompanied by two newly minted heel blisters, Noah reached his own house.

His mom’s car was there but the back door was locked and no one answered when he knocked. He rooted around in the garage for the hidden key and let himself in.

“Mom?” There was no answer. Noah stood still and listened, but the pounding in his head provided too great an interference. Again he felt like crying, this time from relief as well as illness. The whiteness of the kitchen was so cool and reassuring that he didn’t care if his mother was home or not. He wished she was, sort of, but at least he himself was home and could go and lie down in his own bed.

Upstairs he heard the crying. It was Allie’s sound, that urgent and inconsolable cry she had when something really hurt. It was coming from the bathroom. Noah opened the door without knocking.

The tub was running and steam made the room blurry, but Noah saw his sister standing naked on the toilet seat cover, wailing. His mother was in there too and she looked up, startled, with that puffy angry face she had so often lately. Allie reached her arms out toward Noah, who could not quite understand why he felt embarrassed, as though he had interrupted something private. It was just his mom getting Allie ready for her bath, wasn’t it?

Noah saw immediately the two angry red crescents on Allie’s shoulder; then his eyes jumped to the cigarette burning in the ashtray on the sink next to his mother’s drink. He thought of it bouncing up and down so precariously in his mother’s slightly turned head as she buttoned his shirt when he was little. Would it burn him, he had wondered, but it never had. She didn’t button his shirts anymore, only Allie’s.

“Mom, what’s that on Allie’s shoulder?” His voice sounded too high, too upset. He had meant to ask the question very soberly. Thinking suddenly of his father, Noah entered the bathroom and turned off the spigot. The water in the tub was so hot that smoke seemed to rise from it.

“What are you doing home?” his mother asked angrily, but Noah was more interested in Allie, who was still howling and reaching toward her brother as though for rescue.

“Come’er, Allie. Let me see your booboo.” Noah’s voice still sounded peculiar, even as the room cleared of steam. “I was sick, Mom. I have a fever.”

Allie climbed down from the toilet and squeezed past her mother with her back to her. She positioned herself behind Noah who still faced their mother in bewilderment.

“Mom?”

“Oh for heaven sakes, it was an accident and she is just being such an incredible baby about it. Come on, Allie, let’s get you in the tub,” she ordered sharply.

“Mom, the water’s too hot,” Noah’s voice was ingratiating; he knew she would be angry with him for correcting her. He reached over and turned on the cold spigot.

His mother stared at him ominously.

“Noah, the last thing I need is trouble from you. Go to your room. Now.”

“It was an accident,” she snapped, again grabbing Allie by the arm.

Noah left the bathroom reeling,  febrile, powerless, trying not to listen to Allie’s whimpering.

As he walked down the corridor to his own bedroom he passed his step-father’s study with the computer and video games. Inside it was dark and mahogany. For the first time ever he noticed that the key to the gun case dangled from the keyhole. Without thinking he opened the case and reached for the revolver. It felt cool and hefty in his hand. He thought of fat Tom in the cafeteria and lifted the gun.

“Fuck you, Tom,” he muttered impulsively, astonished and energized by the sound of it. Grinning, he took the gun with him to his parents’ bedroom so he could stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on their closet door. In front of the mirror, he looked at himself, a tall, scrawny kid who looked much more ominous with a gun leveled at his reflection.

“Go ahead, make my day,” he muttered in his best Clint Eastwood, then felt suddenly sheepish and in a hurry to get the gun back into the case before his mother discovered him.

In the moment of turning away from the mirror, though, he felt the pull of the image and found he did not want to abandon the gun. One more second, he thought eyeing himself.

“Who’s the tough guy now?” he asked his reflection in the mirror. “Whattaya thinkin’  now, Tomcat?”

When he pulled the trigger the gun shot to life in his hand, shoving him backward like a disciplining hand.  The mirror splintered into a thousand shards and his mother screamed in the distance but he could not hear her. Noah could not have been more surprised.

copyright ©Meredith A Powers, 2015-2025