Or Not to Be (14 page)

19

Friday, November eleventh
, 11:00 a.m., first lunch. Like water escaping a
high-pressure hose, hormonal teenage bodies blasted through the narrow doors
into the cafeteria. They brought noise with their fragrant mass. I was
accustomed to these attributes of the humans with whom I spent my working life.
Teenagers are incessantly noisy, perpetually hungry, and relentlessly mad with
hormones; I understood them. I even pitied them a little as I waited, impatient
and unreasonable, for them to get on with their growing up.

Lunch duty was a dreaded event for me
every Friday. I tried to trade for Mondays. I’d rather get this over with at
the beginning of the week than have to face it, tired, at the end. I failed.
Nobody would trade. Normal, intelligent college graduates do not become
teachers because they have a burning desire to serve lunch duty. It is a
shocking and hazardous fringe benefit for teachers to learn that they are
expected to herd kids like cattle—to patrol them like a cop walking a beat,
enforcing rules laid down by administrators. Lunch duty was comprised of too
many moving parts: four hundred kids, one administrator, four grumpy lunch ladies,
twenty-two minutes, 500 milligrams of ibuprofen, and me. It was a deadly mix.

I gave myself a pep talk. I only had lunch
duty thirty-six times a year. Just twenty-two minutes each time. If I ended up
teaching for thirty years, lunch duty would only consume about seventeen days
of my life. Seventeen days. Ugh. Quit your whining, Anna. People spent more
time in lines at the bank and grocery store and DMV. Some people are shoe
salesmen. Some people scrape gunk off other people’s teeth. Some people empty urine
pans. This wasn’t so bad. I said shut up to my calculating head and went in. I
could survive this.

Two freshmen girls came in swinging their
boyish hips, doing the look-at-me stroll. They dropped their book bags on a
table to lay their claim and walked, showing their bellies and pierced navels,
to the cookie line. They didn’t even try to disguise their mission: they were
prowling some senior boys. The boys ignored them, which of course made the
flirts even louder.

The Goths sat together and didn’t eat.
Ever. One boy was busy pushing the end of a paperclip into his wiry, thin
forearm. Another was reading a magazine with dark images on the cover. At least
they can read. I held out my hand to Goth number one as I passed by. He looked
up, non-confrontational. I glanced at the paperclip and nodded, and he dropped
it in my hand. I tossed it in the trash on the way to the cookie line.

I wonder if these kids will be embarrassed
one day to remember how they behaved in high school. It’s agonizing to watch
them try to figure out which version of themselves to be.

At the cookie line I made eye contact with
one of the noisy freshmen flirters. She glared back at me, but I didn’t look
away. She became uneasy when I glanced down at her belly, which was not on
display for me. She yanked down her shirt and gave me a sneer. I smiled a
thank-you and walked away.

I was two-for-two and hadn’t needed to
yell or even speak yet. This luck couldn’t hold up much longer.

At the pizza line, some of the free- and
reduced-lunch kids were trying to buy pizza with their free tax dollars like
they did every single Friday. The cashier was once again denying them this
forbidden pleasure, and they were ganging up to argue with her. I stepped up to
the leader at the front of the line and asked if I could offer my assistance.

He said, “What? Are you the Walmart
greeter or something?” I wanted to backhand him.

I smiled my best fake teacher smile,
glanced at his ID tag, and said, “It looks like you’re in the wrong line, Pete.
Let me put that food back for you so you can step over to the
turkey-and-mashed-potato-entrée line.”

He flipped over his picture badge and
turned back to argue with the red-faced cashier. “Just ring up my pizza, will
ya?”

“No, sir, I will not. You know the rules,”
she replied with a nod of her round, curly head. She crossed her arms the best
she could across her flat, wide chest.

“But I don’t want no turkey entrée. I want
pizza.”

“That’s your misfortune,” I said to the
back of his head. “Come with me now, or I’ll call the resource officer to
escort you out of the cafeteria.”

I’d dealt with this kid—I thought of him
as Pizza Boy—for nine Fridays so far and was weary at the thought that I was
facing a couple dozen more. Two months ago, when we first came face-to-face
over his desire for pizza for lunch, I felt sorry for him. I took his side and
pleaded his case with the cafeteria staff, while they explained the rules to me
as they might to an imbecile—only the main entrée line was approved for
subsidized lunches. It didn’t make sense to me or to the kid, and I thought
he’d appreciate that I went to bat for him. My efforts embarrassed him. On a
subsequent Friday when he tried again to get the pizza, I offered to pay for
him, which sent him over the edge. He flipped me off, and I had to report him
to the administration. At this point, we had walked the tightrope of lunch
rules together and frayed the line. It made no sense that we were fighting the
same, futile battle again.

“Resource officer? Do you see him around
here anywhere? Like he has time to deal with a freakin’ lunch issue.” Pizza Boy
addressed me without turning around, posturing in front of his followers. While
I watched the back of his greasy head, I heard him say, “Don’t you know about
the gangs in this school? And the drugs? And the guns?” He turned to me then,
glaring into my eyes. “There are lots of guns, lady. You just don’t know where
they might turn up.”

On my last Friday of lunch duty, I nodded
to the cashier, and she pushed her button to call for the administration. I
should have stayed quiet and waited for help. Instead, I was furious that he
had the nerve to threaten me, and I said, “I don’t care if you have a gun.” I
could barely get a full breath I was so furious with him. “It is time for you
to stop blocking this line. If you’re hungry and have a gun but no money, your
only lunch option is the turkey. I expect to be obeyed. Immediately. Now,
move
!”
A bit loud, even in the noisy cafeteria, I managed to get the attention of a
hundred students, but there still wasn’t an administrator in sight.

He didn’t talk back this time. Somehow in
the last few years I had managed to disregard my small size, and I never backed
down to any kid. They were all children, no matter how tough they seemed. My
poor Pizza Boy realized he’d lost again. He dropped his tray of pizza on the
floor, ducked between the bars, and stormed to the back of the cafeteria.

Well, at least he was gone. Still no
administrators. I sighed.

Seventeen minutes to go. The ibuprofen
wasn’t working.

I grabbed a cup of water and trudged to my
designated post by the door. Technically, once the lines of kids died down, my
job was to keep them penned in, to stand by the door and just say no. This was
the best part of lunch duty because there was no need for discussion. The rule
was no students were allowed to leave through my door and no one could enter.
Simple. It was no longer a door, just an extension of the wall.

A big girl with long, oily hair approached
me, and I wondered why kids didn’t wash their hair anymore. Hairs, I corrected
myself and smiled. I liked plurals with and without the extra s. She asked,
“Hey, can I go to the math hall and use the soda machine?”

“No.”

Insistent and craving sugar, she whined,
“Why not? Come on. I can’t drink that crappy milk again.”

“Sorry. Nobody leaves the cafeteria during
lunch,” I said with a smile. She deserved a smile at least, if I had to deny
her a caffeine fix.

She gave up and walked away with a groan.
While I was busy with her, two other kids approached with requests. I dealt
with one—I said no—while the other tried to sneak out the door. This was a
blatant, coordinated approach to escape. I turned in time to see the door
closing on him and chased him into the hall. He came back in.

Fifteen minutes to go. When did I sign up
to be a cop? All the science and math rattling around in my brain served no
purpose on lunch duty.

There was a commotion by the wall of windows.
That meant I needed to abandon my door to investigate. Two girls were in each
other’s faces and ready to brawl. Girl fights were the worst. They’d claw and
scratch and pull each other’s hair and would not let go. I once saw an
administrator get a bloody nose trying to break up a girl fight. At our last
professional development training, we were ordered to avoid confrontation or
contact with students. Basically, we were expected to wait for the kids to
fight it out. The mom in me couldn’t stand that, though. I always thought of my
own kids when I watched one student hurt another and felt compelled to act in
their parent’s place and try my best to stop the pain. In prefight, especially
with girls when they’re just warming up and yelling, I could usually break it
up by yelling louder.

In my giant teacher voice, I roared,
“Girls! That’s enough!”

My interruption made them step apart
enough for me to get in the center of the battle. I knew one of them and turned
to her. “Ashley, how are you doing on those hurdles this year?”

“Fine,” she said, without taking her eyes
off the other girl for an instant.

I turned to the other young lady. “You
don’t know me yet, but if you fight in the cafeteria on my lunch duty, you will
never be rid of this face. Saturday after Saturday we will sit together while
you do algebra problems until the end of time. Sound like fun?”

“I thought you got expelled for fighting,
not just a Saturday detention?”

I lowered my voice and privately said to
her, “I like you. You’re a smart one—too smart to fight at school. Please, go
and sit down.”

She glared at Ashley, and I thought she’d
take a cheap swing. Instead, she turned on her heel and walked away, head held
high. I felt myself exhale and realized I’d been holding my breath.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wixim,” said Ashley before
she sauntered the other way.

Good fight. They both thought they won.

This lunch duty was never going to end. I
was getting hungry. No lunch for me on Fridays. There might be a crumbled
granola bar at the bottom of my purse. Or maybe I could eat a spoonful of
peanut butter before my last class if I could get out of the cafeteria in time
to beat the crowds to my room. But I’d need a plastic spoon. I could see them
across the cavernous room right beside the grumpiest cashier. Maybe I could
grab one on the way back to my guard post.

I was deep in my snack planning and making
a beeline for my spoon when I heard screaming from my door. The panic on the
faces of the children stunned me. Then, someone screeched, “Gun! He’s got a
gun!” and hundreds of kids were all running, panicked, across the cafeteria
toward the other door. The noise was deafening.

I didn’t hear or see a gun, so whoever had
one hadn’t used it yet. Instead of joining the throngs running for the far
door, I ran to my door. I still didn’t see anyone with a gun. That didn’t mean
it wasn’t there. Then I saw my pizza-not-turkey boy. He was walking fast.

Right toward me.

In the middle of this terror I checked my
watch again.

It was 11:11.

20

“
Mom, that’s
all I remember
. Why can’t I remember what happened next?”

“That’s all you can remember about Pizza
Boy, honey, because that’s all he let you see. I’ve watched him from here,
though, and the perspective is enlightening. He was hungry and sad, lonely and
so frustrated. He wanted to show you that you could not deny him what, in his
mind, was rightfully his. This unfortunate young man had a terrible morning.
His mom stayed out drinking all night. He rocked his baby sister until four in
the morning, when she finally settled down and went to sleep. He overslept,
missed the bus, and was late for his math test first period. He was assigned
detention on Saturday for being late, which meant he’d be late for work and
would lose some pay. He uses his own money to support his little sister when
his mom doesn’t get hold of it first to spend on gin. Every aspect of his life
spiraled out of his control. Your little confrontation made him snap.”

I tried to remember his face. It was a
blur. He was just another kid to deal with in the duties of my day. One hundred
and eighty days, a couple thousand kids a day. It was an overwhelming zoo.
Compared to the students in my classes, who I knew personally and became
completely invested in, the kids who misbehaved in the hall and cafeteria were
just part of the duty of my job. They weren’t encompassed in the joy of my job,
the real reason I pulled my body out of bed before dark each day to come back
to the brilliant students I loved. I didn’t teach the hallway kids or the
lunchroom kids; I corralled them. We were all just trying to survive the best
we could.