The Walk

“Do you have any water for those dogs?” the patronizing voice asked, but it wasn’t really a question. Both my arms were being pulled out of their sockets while I tried desperately to hold on to the twin leashes tugging roughly from my hands.  Yes of course, but I forgot the lemons slices to use as a garnish, I felt like saying, as I took a few more involuntarily steps forward as strangers only spur on my already energetic pets.

The voice belonged to a squat woman adorned in black athletic spandex. I made a quick mental note to personally find and punish whoever was responsible for creating and distributing anything made in that stretchy material in such large sizes. They have to know that someone will buy them and worse, wear them in a public place. The compression suit aggressively sucked the woman’s body in, while at every exit bulges hung thankfully out, as if gasping for air. The overall effect reminded me of a tube of toothpaste that someone has squeezed from the middle.  

“Well no…” I faltered and then feel an immediate need to defend my dog-owning capabilities to this stranger in spandex. “But we’re actually on our way back now. There’s a doggy water fountain at the start of the trail-”

“Oh no, they need water now! Their tongues are swollen!” the woman cut me off, her voice reflected genuine concern, but she eyed me warily with a look that seemed to say, “You should know better.”

Before I could tell her we had only been walking for about ten minutes, the over-enthusiastic do-gooder had crouched nimbly down onto one pudgy knee and extracted a thermos from her backpack. “You really should be carrying one of these around,” the woman commented, shaking the container in my face. “You can get them at any sporting good store,” she continued, helpfully, as if I had never heard of carrying around water with anything besides my cupped hands.

I felt a deep sense of regret for not taking the time to teach at least one of my dogs to bite people on command.  And I was reminded again just why I don’t take my dogs on walks.

I have two dogs. Hutch is short and white. Patton has brown and white spots. Taking them for a walk (especially together) is usually not a very good idea.

My first problem with the ritual of dog walking is that trying to control my so-called-domesticated pets is like training a team of adolescent oxen. A leash in each hand, my forearms flex and strain with the effort of controlling the two bundles of canine fury. Their powerful efforts jerk me forward in giant steps that I try to counteract by using my body weight as leverage. The end result it not unlike a water skier, my body leaned back to a 75-degree angle, both arms straight out in front of me. The dogs racing away like a turbo twin engine as I gallop along at impossible speeds down the sidewalk.

To compound the problem, my little darlings refuse to move in a straight line, constantly switching sides, cutting me off, or running behind, creating a tangled mess that leaves me caught in the middle. However, I was certain that all of this would be resolved when I stumbled upon a duel leash, a rather ingenious invention that succeeded in simultaneously delighting and infuriating me. Some enterprising idiot had simply cut the bottom off of two dog leashes, fused them together with a silver ring, expressed ordered a patent and made a million bucks. Why didn’t I think of that? Millions of morons like me thought, and then I snatched it up and ran to the register.

I decided to try out my wonderful new acquisition in the comfort and privacy of my living room before taking off on the open road. Stroking their backs and speaking calmly, like a jockey to a jittery racehorse, I carefully put my dogs in place and tethered them to the overpriced contraption.  As soon as I had clicked them both in, Patton took off running madly around the room with Hutch sailing in the wind behind him like a kite. The little white dog might as well have been hooked up to a minivan, as the much heavier Patton careened around the living room, smashing little Hutch against the couch, raking him across the coffee table, and just narrowly avoiding a fatal collision with the doorjamb. I have never used that evil device again.

Yet another obstacle is that I don’t like to walk my dogs in my neighborhood. I don’t even like to leave my front yard unless I’m in my car with the doors locked. This is primarily due to the fact that in an effort to ditch apartment living and yet not pay a king’s ransom in monthly mortgage payments, my husband and I live in a neighborhood that is either “up and coming” or “on the downward slide,” depending on how you look at it. Hunter’s Chase has a nice sign at the entrance, a well-maintained pool, and a truly ridiculous monthly newsletter that I look forward to with enormous anticipation, but don’t let any of these perks fool you as to the level of luxury in which I currently reside.

Half of the houses on my street look awful and their fences look even worse. The fence on the corner is particularly horrifying. Rather than replace the decrepit structure in one efficient motion, the home owner instead waits until one of the warped and rotting boards falls to the ground before replacing that single plank, adhering it in place with something about as sturdy as thumb tacks. I doubt there’s a single piece of the original fence left. Such structures are no match to the growling creatures throwing their bodies against these flimsy barriers that could not contain so much as a blind Shetland pony. Many of my neighbors don’t even bother to feed their dogs, letting them roam the neighborhood to hunt for cats or small children to sustain their dietary needs.

But on this beautiful April afternoon, the sun shining shyly while a cool breeze rushed across my face, I decided that I might give dog walking another try. Some excellent walking trails had recently been completed near my house and it might be nice for my little brood to see the outside world, something they had heard about but never knew actually existed.

“It’s true,” a gossipy Golden Retriever once whispered furtively through the fence, “some owners actually let their dogs leave the house to go places just for fun, not just the groomers or the vet. It’s called a walk.”

“No, I don’t believe that for a second,” Hutch replied. He’s always so practical.

Patton didn’t say anything then, but he thought often about what the Golden Retriever had said. He wasn’t sure he was naive enough to believe it, but he wished for it all the same.

The woman poured water into the lid and offered it first to Hutch, but he didn’t seem to approve of this pushy stranger and he turned his little black nose up at her insufficient offering. I wasn’t surprised, since his birth Hutch has rejected authority like a 17-year-old rebel. Sometimes he won’t eat for days, not because he’s not hungry, just to remind me that I’m not actually the boss of him.

I started to say something smug and annoying like, “see, I knew they weren’t thirsty,” until Patton knocked the little white dog over and started taking greedy gulps out of the canteen, flopping on the ground, even licking the woman’s hand, as if every drop of moisture was imperative for his survival. You traitor! I said to Patton with my eyes, but he didn’t notice because he was licking the wet spot on the concrete where a few drops of water had splashed.

Patton exhausted the woman’s water supply within seconds and I thought that surely this uncomfortable episode was over. “Well, thank you for the water,” I said, trying to edge away from her with sly shifty steps, but she wasn’t finished.

“The sweat glands are on the dog’s stomach, this is how you need to cool them off.” Dumping the ice that remained in the bottom of the container, she started pressing the cold cubes against Hutch’s middle. “You don’t say, well that’s interesting,” I said, Who is this person? Caesar the Dog Whisperer?

“And you know,” she looks up at me, giving me a few seconds of stern eye contact, “you really shouldn’t be walking them in the afternoon. No, no, no, you need to be walking them in the morning, or at dusk.” She continued to rub the ice cubes into the dog’s fur until they melt, clearly enjoying this little teaching session.

I looked to the woman’s small daughter, sitting forlornly on a pink bicycle with training wheels. The child sat patiently, her elbows resting on her bike’s handlebars. Clearly she was used to her mother’s impromptu information sessions with strangers. I was slightly confused by the logic that it was irresponsible of me to rip my dogs out of the comforts of air conditioning if the outside temperature hits 80 but it was ok that she had a preschooler sweating it out next to her.

I might have pointed this out but that would have involved prolonging this already miserable conversation. In a rare moment of complete self-control which will no doubt earn me a few extra jewels in my crown in Heaven, I thanked the woman for the water and her insightful advice. Trying to appear casual, but walking about as quickly as a skeptical Israelite during the crossing of the Red Sea, I had begun to gain ground and I started to relax again as I neared the end of the trail.

“Hey!” I heard the voice yell. “What are your dogs’ names?” I was tempted to yell “Get and Lost” over my shoulder while I continued my escape, but I tried to remember that she was kind for giving my dogs all of her water supply and she was probably just trying to be nice. I politely stopped and waited for the woman to shuffle up next to me so that I could answer her at a reasonable volume, but she took this opportunity to serve me another helping of unwanted advice.

“Now, why are you holding the leash like this?” taking the lead from my hand in an authoritative manner, the way an adult takes away a sharp knife from a child.

“You should be holding it like this,” she demonstrated, pulling Patton closely next to her thick thigh.

That was too much. I ripped the leash from her chunky fingers, and fled.

Hacker

Between the months of August and June, I spend more or less eight hours a day cooped up in my classroom. Relatively large, it is equipped with 30 student desks, two whiteboards, two teacher desks (neither of which my students are allowed to touch), a number of bookshelves, and a thermostat that does absolutely nothing. It is common knowledge that only the office has the power to adjust the temperature of the air that we breathe, but in an effort to give teachers some semblance of power, they installed small control boxes that have exactly two settings, cool and warm. Changing the switch to one or the other has no impact whatsoever on the air that enters the room.

Some teachers prefer to hang students’ work on the otherwise bare walls, but that tends to clutter up the place. Most of their creations look so amateurish. Of the four bulletin boards provided, I have devoted one as the “Wall of Fame” on which I may or may not hang a few examples of truly superior student accomplishments as I deem fit.

“Why didn’t you hang mine up there,” a student whines, “you gave me a 100!”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to look at it all day,” I explain, “now go away.”

What I do spend a great deal of time looking at is the view from the single window of my classroom. The medium square framed by cinder blocks looks out onto the football field and the parking lot. Neither of which are particularly exciting but I still spend a tremendous amount of time looking out. I sometimes touch my fingertips to the glass longingly, like a bird in a cage. Or a mime.

Every so often, I schedule a trip to the computer lab. I don’t usually have a specific lesson in mind, but much like a beach vacation, sometimes you just need to get away.

Using the computer lab as a mini-vacation has turned out to be somewhat difficult in recent years due to administration’s perverse demands. For reasons I do not entirely understand, they now insist we provide seating charts and lesson plans and activities and worst of all, I’m supposed to email results and end products which is particularly difficult because 1) I never really know what we’re going to do at the computer lab until we get there and 2) because I put off planning something, whatever lesson I do come up with is usually worthless so we spend an enormous amount of time on a website featuring educational math games. True, some might venture to argue that math has absolutely nothing to do with my content area of reading, but those people have never taken 30 children to a computer lab.

Nevertheless, the computer lab is one of my favorite places to visit thanks to an ingenious bit of technology that I was introduced to earlier this year. In an attempt to be helpful, the Campus Instructional Technologist (code for a person the district pays to alleviate teacher’s technological frustrations) clicked on an unobtrusive icon, typed in a password, and presto, my monitor was transformed into some sort of military control center. I could suddenly see every student’s screen on my monitor in a series of neat rectangles.  

“What is this?” I gasped, in wonder.

The CIT explained that the software would allow me to immediately access any of my student’s computers, manipulating their screen as if it were my own. Apparently the intention was that teachers use it to better monitor and help their students.

I realized that this program had a much higher calling and tremendous implications for my Wednesday afternoon entertainment. I felt an immediate sense of power. With my eyes on every screen I was suddenly not only omniscient but with a click of my mouse, I was all-powerful as well. It was all I could do to not raise my arms and cackle like some maniacal evil villain. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

On this particular day, I had uncharacteristically put a substantial amount of time in the planning and coordination of a clever little assignment that would require minimal effort by me and maximum effort by the students. With plenty of free time on my hands, I began experimenting with my new toy immediately.

Suppressing a chuckle, I chose screens at random and started making subtle changes to my subjects’ projects. Moving a picture slightly. Deleting a word. Changing the background color. The student would give the screen a double take, give the mouse a good shake, and undo whatever alteration I had made to their project. Perturbed, but unscathed.

To my troublemaking students, I could be vicious; deleting, rewriting, adding, moving text and objects as served my will. The student, almost weeping with frustration would raise their hand high and demand that I come take a look at their computer. I would calmly walk over as the indignant student pointed to their possessed computer screen. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it,” I said, smugly.

But soon, it wasn’t enough to toy with my subjects indirectly, soon I realized that I could actually communicate through a message system. Choosing an unsuspecting student, I laid my sights on Sydney Mendez, a tall but unassuming girl who was philosophically waiting for the entire male population of middle school to catch up to her tremendous height. Ducking behind my computer, I selected her screen and typed “Hello Sydney.”

Skyler’s mouth dropped open and despite years of training her shoulders to hunch over to knock off a few inches, she straightened up suddenly at this extraordinary turn of events.

I would often offer helpful advice to my students. “Perhaps you should change the font color,” I might suggest, and then use my own mouse to do the task for them. “That’s better,” I would comment, as my subject’s eyes widen with wonder as they look around the room and I covered my mouth with my hand to keep from laughing.

Sometimes I would adopt a more formal approach. “Be advised, you have been selected to be monitored by a district employee.” Or, “Your conduct is being reviewed, please discontinue all illegal activity.” The student’s head swivels around the room, wondering if anyone else saw this secret message of doom. Catching the fearful gaze, “Is something wrong?” I ask casually, innocently.

I chuckle to myself as I swivel my desk chair back to the control center and select another student’s screen.

Housekeeping

When I was about six, my mother told me that she had hired a housekeeper. This was the best news I had heard in years. I had always felt overburdened, what with having to make my bed every day and occasionally unloading the dishwasher. Not to mention the endless chore of putting my dirty clothes in the hamper.

I pictured our future housekeeper to be an older, grandmotherly-like woman in a starched maid’s uniform, perhaps with a little white hat. I envisioned her cleaning my room and making cookies. She would probably call me “dear” and pat my head in a loving manner.

As it turned out, our first housekeeper was a rather haggard woman of questionable legal residential status named Alejandra. She wore no uniform and she made no cookies. I don’t think she even bothered to learn my name. Alejandra would diligently clean the house, and then she would leave. That was it.

I was completely disillusioned with the whole idea.

I do not know how much English Alejandra spoke or understood because she made precious few efforts to interact with us. This became particularly apparent and progressively awkward during the car rides. She had no transportation of her own, so my mother would load us all up and we would drive a considerable distance to Alejandra’s home to pick her up and then return her there at day’s end.

During these sojourns to the South side, my mother went to great lengths to create a light friendly mood and steady conversation, but it was hopelessly one-sided. Nods or an occasional grunt from the passenger seat were Alejandra’s usual contribution when my mother would carry on her cheerful chitchat.

“Just look at those clouds,” my mother said one day, as we were stopped at a red light, pointing to magnificent white puffs that scrolled back to reveal a brilliant sun. “When I see clouds like that it makes me think today is the day Jesus is coming back.” Alejandra had no reply to that and instead gestured for my mother to turn on the radio.

At some point, my mother decided she would rather vacuum her own floors than run a taxi service and Lala was no more.

And that’s when we met Lucy. A woman of tremendous strength and an enormous affinity for do-it-yourself hair dye, she has been our housekeeper for longer than some of my siblings have been alive.

Lucy was initially part of a team of Mexican housekeepers that worked for my mother and many of her friends. This was an organized outfit equipped with their own cleaning supplies and a ramshackle old van that transported them from house to house. Erma, their merciless leader, kept her cleaning crew on a blistering schedule with the speed, precision, and efficiency of a double-lane McDonald’s drive-thru.

The group suddenly disintegrated after a number of valuables mysteriously went missing from some of the neighboring homes. One day, Lucy was the only one who showed up to work. She very simply explained that Erma and her gang had made off with the loot and as far as she could tell, had made it back across the border, never to be heard from again

All of the neighborhood ladies hailed Lucy as an angel, but I wasn’t so sure. I’ve always harbored a secret theory that my housekeeper is actually a criminal mastermind. Perhaps after growing tired of sharing the profits, Lucy developed a devious plot to run off her competition while simultaneously plundering her employers’ jewelry boxes. I wouldn’t put it past her.

I base this suspicion after years of observation of Lucy implementing a carefully constructed plan that centers around a steady demand for more money while doing substantially less work. Even at the very beginning, she had us all trained at a very early age to pick up all our toys.

“Isn’t that your job?” someone would timidly ask.

“No,” was her matter-of-fact and authoritative response. We shrugged our little shoulders and started scooping up our Legos in handfuls.

During the summers when school was out, Lucy would often begin working before my siblings and I were out of bed. “You’re laaaazy!” Lucy would exclaim in the condescending tone most employers are not accustomed to hearing from their workforce. “Its summer!” we would counter. She would shake her head at us, clearly disgusted by our sluggishness.

Before long, Lucy learned to use our laziness to her benefit. If we were not awake when she was ready to clean our rooms, she simply skipped them altogether. Soon my mother was the one banging on our bedroom doors. “You better be up by the time Lucy gets here,” was my mother’s steely warning in a tone most people reserve for robbing banks.

Lucy also has very explicit directions for her birthday. For weeks before the blessed day, she starts reminding us of her upcoming personal holiday. The general expectation is that we buy a cake, sign a card, and gather around to sing “Happy Birthday” to our beloved housekeeper. The most important requirement is the supply of additional funding. “You give me 200 dollar,” is a phrase Lucy is fond of saying as her birthday draws near.

Because Lucy does virtually no cleaning, a few years ago my mother surreptitiously hired another housekeeper to come on Lucy’s days off to do all of the work we pay Lucy to do. She swore us all to secrecy for fear that Lucy would find out and we would all be subject to our housekeeper’s considerable wrath. My mother lost sleep at night worrying that Lucy might show up unannounced and discover her indiscretion.

Years later, I’m not sure if Lucy has ever found out about the secret second housekeeper, but I’m inclined to believe that she would not entirely disapprove. Lucy is much happier that the house is cleaner because there are now fewer tasks for her to avoid during her working hours.

We try to overlook Lucy’s little idiosyncrasies because after all, she is very old (probably close to seventy), and also because we realize we can be somewhat difficult clients.

When I was sixteen, I threw my old truck into reverse and gunned it as I backed out of the driveway. I had forgotten that Lucy usually parked right behind me, but I was promptly reminded of this when my car came to a sudden and unexpected stop. The crash was terrifically loud, but I was still hopeful that perhaps the damage was not too bad.  I had tremendous experience in the way of smashing cars.

For reasons that are still not all together clear to me, administration at my high school allocated all of the side streets next to the campus as sophomore parking. This meant that while the juniors and seniors, the kids with more driving experience, glided seamlessly into allocated parking spots, the sixteen-year-olds played bumper cars as we were forced to experiment with parallel parking. It was not uncommon for a fellow student to bash your car two or three times as they backed in, backed out, backed in, backed out. I was always surprised how loud each bump was and also how little damage occurred.

Keeping all of this in mind, I held feebly to the hope that perhaps the damage incurred might go unnoticed. But as it turned out, my truck had smashed into Lucy’s car with such force that it dented the driver-side door completely in half. That door would never open again. My parents were nice enough to pay for the damage, but in the meantime until it could be fixed, poor Lucy was forced to climb through the passenger-side door for weeks, dragging her elderly carcass over obstacles like the center console and the stick shift to get into position behind the steering wheel.

Over the years, I think Lucy and my family have developed a mutual understanding and an enormous amount of patience with the other. We had to.

As it stands now, Lucy shows up more or less when she feels like it. She may or may not iron a few shirts as the spirit moves her. After an hour or so of moping around the house, chastising us for not making our beds, she sits at the kitchen counter and spends a great deal of time preparing, eating, and generally enjoying a bologna sandwich. We never used to have bologna, but Lucy can be persistent.

“Where you bologna?” she demanded of my mother.

“Bologna? We don’t have any, nobody here likes bologna,” her employer explained.

“You get bologna.” Lucy declared in a tone of finality.

My mother now buys a pack a week.

A few months ago, Lucy became seriously ill. After returning from a stint in the hospital, she informed my mother that she would be unable to work anymore.  My mother was sad, but of course she agreed.

Lucy had but one reservation, “What about my birthday?”

“Your birthday? That’s months away.”

Lucy nodded, patiently.

“You mean, you want to celebrate your birthday now?”

“Yes!” Lucy immediately agreed, as if the whole thing had been my mother’s idea.

“But I don’t have a cake,” my mother lamented.

Once again, Lucy was silent.

“I guess I could just give you your two hundred dollars.”

Lucy nodded her approval.

After her impromptu birthday celebration, there were many tearful goodbyes and promises to visit. Lucy would never clean our house again.

Or so we thought.

Sometime later, Lucy called my mother with the joyful announcement that as it turns out, she was feeling quite a bit better and would be returning to work immediately.

My family recently celebrated Lucy’s birthday for the second time this year.

Child's Play

It usually happens around 6^th period. At this point I have now taught the same lesson five consecutive times in 50 minute intervals which means whatever bounce was in my sensible teacher flats during 1^st or 2^nd period has diminished to a determined shuffle as I once again go through the motions of shaping the minds of America’s future.

 I can feel the lines in my once youthful face deepen as I repeat yet again something about the protagonist or point of view or whatever the hell I’m supposed to be teaching them that day which sounds boring and pointless even to myself.

Some kids are smart and they’ll ask, “When will we need to know this?”

“Friday, for the test,” I answer, all matter-of-fact and like a smart aleck because we both know that’s not what they’re talking about.

“I know, I mean after the test,” they persist.  

“Don’t worry about that.”

What everybody knows is that nobody needs to know this stuff, but we have to go through the motions because they have to go to school and I have to pay my mortgage, so here we are.

Sometimes, to help pass the time, I draw a little thermometer, label each class period, and then shade it in with each passing hour, like money for a Junior League fundraiser. Pie charts can also be pressed into service as time measuring tools when I feel like being spontaneous. This is a method I developed during high school, perfected during college, and still continue to use quite frequently today. I find them particularly useful during meetings. Grade-level meetings, department meetings, faculty meetings, counselor meetings, parent meetings…

Finding myself in particularly desperate circumstances, I could not hide my delight when an office assistant walked into my class bearing a message. It would make a lot more sense if someone from the office just called us on our classroom phones, but in an effort to minimize any distractions during valuable instructional time, a trustworthy child was routinely sent up to various classrooms to deliver a message from the mother ship.  Constantly surrounded by children, I for one would have greatly benefited from any additional adult interaction a phone call might bring- no matter how brief- but alas, this is yet another administrative action that has resulted without the opinion or influence of myself.

While this particular summons was nothing more but a notice from the attendance office that one of my student’s parents were here to pick her up.  I took this opportunity to bring some much-needed entertainment to an otherwise lifeless Tuesday afternoon.

The student in question was one Raven Atkinson, complete with the glossy black hair that the name would imply. A quiet, well-meaning little girl who had never given anyone any trouble in her entire eleven and a half years, she was sitting in the back of the class diligently working on whatever useless assignment I had come up with minutes before the commencement of classes and would no doubt simply throw away upon it’s completion as I had already acquired all the grades I needed for the six-weeks and I had no intention of grading any more than absolutely necessary.

The class is silent, the result of some much needed training implemented at the beginning of the year in which I explained in no uncertain terms that I would prefer that children speak only when spoken to, particularly when there is 30 of them in close proximity to my person.  Despite the serenity, I say rather loudly to attract the attention of the other students, “Raven, you need to go to the VPO office.” This is a ridiculously redundant reference to the Vice Principal’s Office. It would make more sense to simply say the “VPO” or “VP office,” but I am neither one to begin nor buck the ways of this world.

Several of my students who generally do not bother to tune-in to what I am saying, whether that be about children’s literature or that a small fire is burning in the classroom, wake from their stupor as they try to hone in on this uncharacteristically interesting development in reading class. Raven however simply nods obediently and starts to neatly shuffle her papers and replace her pencil in her neatly organized pencil pouch to prepare for her departure.

Perturbed by this calm and unexciting response, I realize that perhaps I need to explain the situation in a little more detail. This little cherub probably doesn’t even know what the VPO office is. This is not code for high fives and stickers, it means you got written up, which means you’re going down. There’s paper work, and administration monitoring security cameras, and teachers writing official statements about your bad behavior and phone calls home and lunch detention and after-school detention and in-school suspension and out-of-school suspension and maybe even alternative school. It is the end of your miserable middle school career that has only just begun!

I lean in closer, “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

Her eyes flash fear, but she could hardly be described as panicked. The kid is clearly thinking there has been some kind of misunderstanding that will be quickly ironed out.

I persist in a harsh whisper, “I heard about what you did last period. You should probably go ahead and clean out your locker. Your parents are here to pick you up. You can’t go to school here anymore.”

A look of pure horror washes across her innocent little face and I feel the tiniest twinge of guilt for causing this unnecessary stress for no reason other than my own entertainment. A flurry of excited whispering strikes up across the room.

“But I didn’t do nothing last period, Miss!” Raven’s eyes are wide, her hands extended pleadingly to me. I feel like Caesar as a gladiator begs for his life in the arena. I have to struggle to keep from laughing and I am tempted to keep up the charade but I have learned from experience that some kids just can’t tolerate being teased for very long, particularly if it is from an authoritative figure that they blindly trust. Tears are inevitable if pushed too far. Drawing from my vast personal experience I glumly realize that we have arrived all too quickly at the threshold.

“I know, I know, calm down. I was just joking with you. They need you at the attendance office. You were probably skipping or something.”

Raven snatches the pass out of my hand- much too roughly- and stalks out of the room, crashing the door behind her. A few of the National Honor Society types give me disapproving looks, clearly annoyed by the unnecessary disturbance.  

I walk dolefully back to my desk and sigh. I still have 57 more minutes until school gets out.