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"I've got papers to grade,
I've got a family to raise,
I've got a wife to love,
and then I've got you two bozos."
-- ERIC TAYLOR, 4x4
Tami pets his head in sympathy, but she’s laughing. “You know what they say, honey, those who can’t do, teach.”
“Uh-huh.” It’s the last week of July. The air from the open window smells like hot pencil sharpeners, soft with exhaust from the sorghum harvest. Summer’s final quarter has come with a dusky turn in all the leaves and an addendum to his contract at East Dillon, printed on cheap white paper. “And what’d they say about those who can’t teach?”
Tami dips her chin into his shoulder, reading from behind him at the kitchen island. She smells like coffee with the last of their creamer. Her hair falls into her face, then his, obscures the words REMEDIAL and ALGEBRA and FRESHMAN. But not so much that he can’t make out what they mean.
She says, “They pretty much teach, too.”
—
The classroom is nearly as bad as the locker rooms, but at least it’s easier to get the door open. The light coming through the grime on the windows is arid, like the fields out behind the rambler in Abernathy where he and his father used to play ball.
Sue-Ellen in the front office had informed him that these last days before the kids come back were for inventory and preparation. She’d given him a form. Just check off what materials you have and make note of what you need. With the wrong end of a pen she’d tapped her cheek and left a blue streak nearly the same color as her off-white hair. And then bring the list back to me and I’ll shred it.
Eric opens drawers and checks under tables. They have stale bubblegum in bulk, in overstock; the underside of every desk is littered with the pastel fossils of teenage girls past. They have six fragments of chalk that, fit together, might make up one actual adult-sized piece. They have a poster on the far west wall that sees a petrified kitten clinging by his claws to a thin branch. It reads: LEARNING IS FOR LIONS.
He lists these dutifully on the form, under the “have” column. While he’s leafing through the wet-cardboard pile of century old textbooks, Tami calls to let him know that Julie dented a fender backing into a tree and everything is fine, yes, everything is alright, great, it’ll cost the Riggins a couple hundred to fix it, and yeah, that’s with the discount. But, she reminds him, everything is fine, alright, really great. Eric stares at the kitten for a while and feels they share some common understanding.
He huffs into the big chair at the front of the room and finds it can’t be cranked to any reasonable human height.
He leans against a student desk and the top snaps off.
He opens a window and unleashes a smoker’s cough of dust, a handful of bee carcasses, and some very-much living wasps.
Under the “needs” column, he just writes MIRACLE.
—
The first day is a disaster.
He tries to keep in mind what Tami had said in the car this morning. You already are a teacher, babe. You taught Matt how to be a leader. You taught Tim Riggins how to run a pass sober. How to do anything sober. She’d rubbed his shoulder. You taught Jules to ride a bike. A keen glint in her eye, the entirely unhelpful kind. You taught me to drive stick.
But none of it was the same. None of it was staring down a long gray room full of pock-faced 14-year-olds, one of whom had snorted and said, what the hell kinda name is Coach when he’d introduced himself the same way he had for the past 18 years. None of it is the sharp nub of chalk, the fraying duct-tape on textbook spines, the smell of mildew and rust. The pairs and pairs of expectant eyes. Youth in them like a meanness, like a thing they had to scrap around with, beat, or else lose forever.
They make it through about a third of the attendance roster before a boy who swears his name is Seanathan Seans spills orange Fanta all over the desk of a tall girl named Maureen, who immediately smacks him upside the head. He tries to bite her, growling. A chair hits the floor. Maureen gets her hand in Seanathan’s hair. Somebody starts to yell, and it’s probably him. A mousy kid near the back shakes his head, repeating, this is a shit show, this is a shit show.
It’s pretty much the smartest thing anybody says until one o’clock when the bell, bless it, chimes them all out of his classroom.
—
“Maybe you need to break the ice or somethin’, huh, d’you think?” Tami offers another consolatory sip from her glass of chardonnay, like he’s an invalid. Which he might as well be. Almost three decades kissing close with the most violent sport in America, and this, remedial algebra, is gonna be the thing that finally takes him out at the knees.
“Oh, it’s broken, babe, it’s plenty freakin’ broken, along with three desk legs and my damn watch.”
“Why’s your watch broken?”
He isn’t sure, actually, but he suspects it might have had to do with how hard he’d hit his palm against the desk, shouting for some goddamn quiet. “It doesn’t matter, point is, ice’s broken, watch’s broken, and these kids are going to take your husband out before his time so you better have a back up plan comin’.”
“Mmm.” Tami scruffs his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “Meant to tell you Glenn asked me to Bingo next Friday. You plannin’ on being alive by then?”
“Dunno.” He tries not to look forlorn.
“I’d like it if you lived. I really would.”
“You take that up with Seanathan Seans,” he says.
Tami tells him that’s nobody’s name. “They’re messing with you, baby.” It’s this kind of shattering insight that earns her the medium-sized bucks at West Dillon High and, in this living room, his unquantifiable devotion.
—
His name is not Seanathan: it is Andre, and he is the middle brother of three sisters, plus an ace at something called American Idol - Sing It! At this last disclosure, he tosses off a quick spin and a kick so high it makes a girl named Penelope scream. The energy coming off him is like the day after Halloween. A queasy sugar rush that makes Coach drink deeply from a thermos full of weak teacher’s lounge coffee.
“Alright, alright, sit down, shut up. Who’s next?”
It was Julie who had suggested two truths and a lie, something she’d played at theater camp back in middle school. It had sounded like a great idea, in her chipper back-seat morning carpool tones, with the radio on and her too-long bangs in those eyes she’d gotten from his father. But Julie thought Persona on a Friday night with the baby was a good idea. She thought a medley of Sinead O’Connor songs adapted for the keyboard were right for the talent contest in Dallas. His brilliant daughter, who never seemed to know her audience.
After three kids in a row stand up proclaiming to be the offspring of Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and “Edward and Bella,” respectively, he has had about enough. “Anybody wanna be serious? Anyone want to grow up for a minute and play this damn game like adults?”
A hand goes up behind Maureen, who is bent over at her desk, filing and repainting her nails. The hand belongs to a mess of dark hair over thick-rimmed glasses. Coach thinks the kid’s name is Addie or Allie or something like that; he’d studied the roster that morning until Gracie had spilled cereal milk all over the thing.
“She’s not gonna talk,” Maureen says, as the girl makes her way to the front of the classroom. “She like, literally never wants to talk.”
Addie or Allie says, what else, nothing. She turns and faces the board. The nub of chalk fits perfectly in her hand, she’s so absurdly small. Maureen looks closer to college than to ninth grade. Addie or Allie looks closer to kindergarten.
When she starts to write, her penmanship is neat and high. Letters for diner windows or legal documents.
1) MY NAME IS AGGIE.
The class groans, a sound like an eye roll. “We know!” Aggie is unfazed.
2) I AM FROM A PLACE WHERE PIGS CAN FLY.
She pauses to brush chalk dust off her blue t-shirt. A spitball lands in her hair, and she cards it out with careful fingers. When the sound of Maureen’s emery board is the only thing in the room, the even scrape, scrape, scraping, Aggie picks up the chalk again.
3) I THINK MR. COACH SUCKS.
Pandemonium. Cheers like they’d like to cover her in Kool-Aid, the whole class full of clowns and future nail technicians. Aggie bows deeply, her hair going leonine and batty around her face. She returns to her seat, silent as she came.
Eric looks for something to clean the board with, but erasers hadn’t been in the “have” column. Later, he’ll use the hem of his t-shirt.
“You do one Mr. Coach,” Andre badgers. The class takes up his request, the tenor in the room reaching a high, mosquito-like keen. “You gotta play fair. You made us play! Mr. Coach! Don’t be like that.”
So, fine. He crosses his arms at the front of the classroom. Aggie is watching him from over Maureen’s still-bent head. Her eyes are green under her glasses, and they look older, louder, than the rest of her does. For not the first time in the past week, he wishes it were acceptable to wear shades inside the classroom.
“Alright. I was QB1 for a couple years in college.” He is saying whatever comes to mind, not really thinking about the format of the thing; the clock informs him that whatever he comes up with will not be enough to fill the time. “I’ve got a two-year-old and a seventeen-year-old at home, and I’m real happy to be teaching this class.
Maureen sits up straight like a valedictorian. “The last one’s a lie.”
He hadn’t known it until she said it. Maybe someone today, finally, will learn just one single goddamn thing.
He says, “Yes, it is, Maureen.”
Maureen slouches back into her seat. Her nails, long and magenta, skitter across the desk as she drags them into her lap.
Aggie turns to look out the window, her chin dipped like she might smile. Nobody wants to go next. He lets them out early and sits in the parking lot with the radio turned off.
—
The Lions lose two games, back to back, and even Tinker can’t feign good cheer. On Monday it rains and on Tuesday it rains and on Wednesday it rains some more. Tami thinks the garage is leaking, and he thinks it's probably just the gutters again, and so they argue gamely about that for a while like it’s their favorite way to spend half an hour. It is a week for disappointments. For being battered and bruised.
The math class takes their first unit test, and what concerns Eric most, next to how badly most of them do, is how many of them do pretty well. Better than pretty well, even. Aggie’s test is a perfect 100, and at the bottom, in the twenty minutes of time she’d had leftover to finish, she has drawn a picture of him -- or some guy in a ball cap he assumes is him -- standing in front of a blackboard sipping on a speech bubble that reads BLAH! BLAH! FREAKIN’-BLAH!
“The way I see it, Eric,” says Buddy on Thursday night at the pool hall behind the Walmart, “it’s like the two guys who went bear hunting, and one of them was faster than the other one.”
Eric squints over his scotch, thinking of Tami’s deep frown and Aggie’s churlish balloon, her perfect quadratic equations. “Uh-huh,” he says. “What’s that now.”
“The two guys who went bear hunting, and one guy says to the other guy, ‘What if we can’t take ‘im down on the first try? How’re we gonna outrun him?’ and the other guy says, ‘I don’t need to outrun this bear, I just need to outrun you.’”
Perhaps it is the purpling haze of the badly lit bar, or the drink, or the sore way he’s felt since before September, but Eric wonders if Buddy Garrity just made a profound amount of sense. Outside, it has stopped raining, and on the drive home, windows down, the streets will gloam under yellow lights, smelling like clean turf and turpentine.
“You don’t have to outrun the bear, pal,” Buddy repeats, collaring Eric around the nape and signaling them another round, “you just gotta outrun them kids.”
—
Andre goes flying down the hall.
“X + 3 = 10!” calls Coach through the open door.
Inside the classroom is the sound of pencil scratches and tapping feet. Drills are a thing Eric understands. The stopwatch in his hand feels right and familiar.
“Seven!” comes Andre’s echo. His sneakers skid against the door jamb when he comes into view, a jangle of grins and elbows. At his desk he had been unable to complete a single timed test without breaking into song, or kicking the chair in front of him, or flicking paper at Maureen. Mocking laughter when Coach had told him he was gonna run laps. But he had not been joking.
“That’s right, Einstein. Gimme 5 = X + 2.”
Andre takes off again. A coltish swag in his step. Answers, all of them, on the tip of his tongue.
—
“So they killed my dear Aunt Sally?”
“They didn’t kill her, dad, it’s just that PEMDAS is easy enough to remember on its own.”
Julie underlines the phrase in the glossy West Dillon textbook, a sheen on it like the helmets of the football team, then copies an equation onto notebook paper. “But you see how the order of operations is the same?”
“I see it.” He worries at his bottom lip. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Learning isn’t about liking everything,” Julie says easily. “It’s just about doing it anyway.”
He frowns at her. The light over the dining room table is grafting a halo onto the streaks of gold in her hair. When she was three, Julie had had moppy curls and had snorted if you poked her behind the knees. With the eraser of his pencil, he just-barely parts the hair at her temple, suspicious.
“Dad.” Julie shies like she never used to. “What’re you doing. Can we focus on you cheating off me, please?”
“Just tryin’ to see something,” he says. His pencil eraser scrubs briefly at a freckle, then lists toward her left ear again.
“Dad!”
“Oh, hush. Would you hang still a moment. I’m just trying to see where it’s at is all.”
“Where what is at?”
“Whatever little device ya got in so your mom can feed you lines like ‘learning isn’t about liking it,’ that’s what. She’s gettin’ real subtle.” He drops the pencil to tug her closer. “Can’t see a damn thing but it’s gotta be there.”
“Stop,” Julie says, “stop it.” But she snorts the way she had when she was just big enough to carry with him everywhere. “That was a Julie Taylor original.” As if this isn’t what scares him, in the way that hang time scares him, all that deep blue hope and sky: “Dad, that was all me.”
—
Principal Levi has a little tree planted in a tiny dutch oven on his desk, and he tills the rocky soil around it with a miniature rake. “You know what I’m going to say,” he’s saying, “so why are you gonna make me say it?”
Coach is sweating through his polo. The AC has been out for three hours, and the little fan in Levi’s office is just rattling heavy air around. “Is it gonna be the word budget? Or cuts?”
Levi looks up with a face like a platitude. Coach takes off his hat to smack the air with it. “Aw, hell, Levi, couldn’t you at least change it up and say ‘funds’ or somethin’?”
“Coach Taylor, we don’t have the funds or something.” Levi rakes a straight line into his very level garden. His voice is the same flat graveled thing. “And you already know that. So my question is: why are you standing in my office when you could be making teenagers run laps? Get some joy out of life.”
“I just don’t get it,” Eric says. “You tell me we gotta meet state testing requirements to get the money for new textbooks, but the state tests are based on the new textbooks. Which we don’t have. Make it add up for me, why don’t ya?”
“You’re the math teacher,” Levi says. “The funds went to West Dillon last year because they met the score minimum. You can thank your wife for that one.”
“I thank my wife for plenty.” Eric glares back at the afternoon glare in Levi’s office window. “Get serious, Levi, these kids don’t even have PEMDAS. West Dillon’ll get new calculators next year and what’ll we get? Squat, that’s what. And squat’s what they’ll think they deserve.”
Levi lays down his little rake with the utmost care. He has the hands of a man who has, at some point, handled delicate tools of all sorts and sizes. In the same even voice, he says, “I suggest you work with what you’ve got, Coach. You’re decent at it.”
The fan makes a dying kind of sound as Eric turns for the door. The office gets the still of a parking lot in late summer.
“And Coach?” Levi calls, making him pause a moment. “Remember: it’s not a competition.” When Eric looks back, the principal has kicked back in his chair, just a little. Somehow he has yet to break a sweat. “But if it were,” he says, low like his tree might hear him and disapprove, “it’d be damn nice to win it.”
—
Maureen misses three days of school, then shows up early outside the classroom on a Thursday, sitting with her knees tucked up under her chin, her nails bare. It’s the youngest he’s ever seen her.
“Hey, Mr. Coach,” she says, scrambling up as he unlocks the door. “I saw that game last Friday. You guys sucked.”
“Thank you, Maureen.”
He leaves the lights off to try and keep the temperature down. The room is its usual bruised gray, cooler than the hallway and the field had been. “It’s weird in here,” she says, “without everybody else. Uh, and can I say something?”
Maureen has never not said something she wants to say. Not once. But he appreciates the question. “Shoot.”
“You know how you have a baby at home?”
Startled, he can only blink.
“‘Cuz you said when we played truths and lies that first week, and um, I just wanted to tell you that, uh, so do I.”
He manages a squint.
“So do I have a baby at home,” she clarifies. “His name is Samson, and sometimes when my mom or my sister can’t watch him, I’ve gotta stay home to be with him, ‘cuz he’s real little, and all.”
Maureen is tapping her nails on the edge of his desk but, unmanicured, they make just a soft steady drumming sound, like rain.
“And I don’t feel bad about it or anything like that ‘cuz I don’t need math to go to beauty school, which is where I’m gonna go once I pass this class, and this is my last class, Mr. Coach, like, I’ve been in high school forever, but this is it, so I guess I don’t know why it matters. But we got this state test coming up, and sometimes I feel like we’re as good as you guys on Friday, like, we’re just gonna get creamed, just absolutely destroyed, just totally--”
Finally he can hold up a hand. “I get it.”
Maureen stops her drumming. She says, “I’m not a loser, Mr. Coach.”
On her last test, Maureen’s score had shot up from a 55 to a 71. The floor around her desk had been covered with little pool-blue chips from where she’d picked off all the polish on her nails while staring down a word problem. The only person in the whole room who can make Andre sit down and shut up longer than fifteen seconds is Maureen. She sits up straight even when she’s slouching. “I know that,” he tells her. “I do know that.”
Tuesday next Samson pats a chalky hand against the board, against Coach’s black polo, against the poster of the wide-eyed kitten, while Maureen wraps up a quiz. He’s a good kid, like his mother, and though he’s three times Gracie’s size, he is easy to hold. Andre stays quiet. Aggie finishes her test and draws another cartoon before she passes off the paper. This time it’s of the baby, who has a mane like a lion’s, and who is counting panthers like sheep.
—
The creak of insomniac crickets ambles in with Tami sometime after eleven. “What’re you doin’ still up?” she’d like to know. “It’s only Wednesday, baby.” With some alarm: “And the TV’s not even on.”
“Not prepping for the game,” he says. “Preppin’ for the state test.”
“Eric Taylor.” Tami clears a stack of papers off the other dining chair to stare him down with her chin on her fist. She’s got that look like she and Glenn had had a couple after the PTA meeting. Even her eyes are hoppy. “Are you tellin’ me you’re studying right now?”
“Yeah, I’m studyin.’” He scrubs at his hair. “I been known to study. I study. What’s so damn surprising about me studying?”
Tami makes a mild face, but her eyes still have that summer grass sway. “I didn’t say it was surprising.”
“Then stop lookin’ at me like that.”
“Like what, honey?”
“Like it’s so damn surprising!”
“Oh, babe. Oh, please.” Tami reaches across the table to pluck his beer up from its textbook coaster by the neck, settling it on a half-hidden placemat. “It’s the opposite of surprising. I’m not lookin’ at you like it’s surprising. I’m lookin’ at you like you remind me of about 1988 right now.”
In 1988, Julie had still been just an idea he got when Tami glanced over her shoulder at him on a Saturday afternoon. Their apartment had been nearly the same size as the futon in the middle of it. She had gone to classes in the morning and worked late shifts at the quiescent smoker bar on I-7 at night, and then they’d swapped. For about three hours on a good day they were both awake in the same place at the same time. He’d be up cramming over some textbook, bone-sore from practice or lifting packets at the Home Depot, thinking of nothing but the nothing they’d scraped by on for another month. And then Tami would come in the same, hoppy and out of breath, with her summer grass eyes, and suddenly he’d have all these ideas again.
He closes his textbook, settling back. Her smile like a souvenir. “1988, huh?”
Tami nods. “Mmhm.”
“You wanna remember anything else about 1988?”
She reaches out to straighten an improbable cowlick near his eyebrow. “How bad your hair was.”
“Hey. That mullet was all the rage.”
“Yeah. Thank God hat hair came into style, huh?”
Pressing his cheek to her wrist is a reminder of what that is and is not a passing fad. Where she used to smell like other people’s cigarettes, and sometimes her own, she’s now all the Lysol of school tables and the mild detergent they use to wash their baby’s clothes.
“Any other highlights?”
“Maybe,” she admits, leaning across the table. Her kiss is so familiar, and so is the slow way she pulls away to shrug. “Too bad you’re not studying history, honey.”
There’s history in all of it. The way she does and does not make him work for it. The way she comes home. He tells her, “But surely not for lack of trying.”
—
Maureen tells him that when Aggie was in the sixth grade, her favorite word was one they’d fine you for saying in the state of Alabama. “Just ‘eff this’ and ‘eff that’ comin’ from this crazy little pipsqueak.” She shifts Samson to her other hip. He snubs his nose into her shoulder while she fits him into a little jacket. “It was hilarious, Mr. Coach. I wish you coulda heard it. But then she got suspended for a coupla days and came back like.” Maureen zips her lips, hands Samson the invisible key.
Cartoons aren’t cutting it anymore. Aggie has taken to petty vandalism when she finishes her tests early now, carving lewd limericks into the desktops or throwing pencils at the ceiling until they stick. When he tells her to knock it off, she looks at him with that still-unfamiliar exhaustion in her stare. If he hasn’t always been able to corral his football players, he is reasonably sure he’s never bored them.
The Clarke kid is amenable to the plan if it means he doesn’t have to fill Gatorade barrels at practice anymore. Coach introduces him to Aggie that same afternoon. When asks her to hang back after class, she scribbles something in her notebook, then turns it his way.
WHY?
This kid. “‘Cuz I asked you to, that’s why.”
Aggie frowns. Sometime last month she had dyed a strip of green into the fray of her curls, and hangs over her glasses. She taps the notebook again.
“Want you to meet somebody,” he says, gesturing to the door. “This is my friend Lance, but you can call him Landry.”
“That is my actual name,” says Landry. “Nice to meet you, uh -- ?”
Aggie says nothing. “Aggie,” says Coach.
“Aggie. I hear you might wanna do some math together sometime?”
Turning to Coach, Aggie doesn’t have to tap the notebook again for him to get it. Kids all wear confusion the same way, even if it fits them differently. “You’re good at math, Aggie,” Coach says. “You know it, I know it, Andre knows it. Thought you might want to do some of the stuff Andre and them can’t do.”
Aggie ducks her chin, unexpectedly red at the nose and cheeks. Coach had swung by her parents’ place the other night--a donut joint out past the Landing Strip with Aggie’s straight letters in all the windows. “She talks plenty at home,” her mother had said, her own moony face pinking. “She’s just a little coarse, ‘sall, on account of her daddy used to do donuts at the truck stop down near Laribee. She liked to chat ‘em all up, our Aggie, telling them all kindsa things they wouldnta ever thought to know. I wish I could tell you where she came from, Mr. Taylor.” A bittersweet edge in her voice, same as the coffee she’d poured him when he came in. “But I’m sure I don’t know myself.”
“Could be kinda fun,” Landry tries. “You know, exponents and triangles and calculus, oh my.”
The kid curls her lip. Rolls her eyes toward Coach. It’s maybe the nicest way she’s ever looked at him. Her pen taps the notebook, then scratches again.
“I mean," says Landry, "if you don’t want to, we -- “
“Hey.” Coach holds up a hand. “Anybody ever teach you not to interrupt when somebody else is talking?”
Aggie flips the notebook in Landry’s direction: SO YOU’RE SMART?
Landry is pink everywhere but his eyebrows, which go up to his hairline. He scratches his neck. “Uh,” he laughs, “I mean, yeah, I guess I -- “
The pen again. Coach takes up behind the desk, feeling the kind of satisfaction he feels after a shut-out game, or two beers, or a morning when he gets up early enough to beat Tami to the coffee percolator.
Aggie’s notebook says: PROVE IT.
Landry carries no more Gatorade at practice, but he still limps in looking sore.
—
The Thursday before the state test, Eric is up before the sun with the team, running suicides and scrambles. In his head he is doing calculations. If they beat South King, they might be able to handle Westerby. If he and Tami carpool for another two months, they can cover Julie’s gas when she goes up to Austin that spring. If Aggie scores a 95 and Maureen manages a 72, they can pull the rest of the class up with them like stubborn root vegetables, comfrey and dandelion.
In the classroom, there is a square of yellow sunlight across his desk. He settles a hand into its warmth. The mood is dismal. Aggie is chewing her lip in the front row. Penelope and Rajan have stopped playing footsie for once. Even Andre’s deflated, lying with his head against his elbow and his arms outstretched, skinny left wrist dangling.
Coach clears his throat. “What’s the problem now? None of y’all had breakfast?”
Maureen: “I had a waffle.”
Andre perks up. “I had four,” he says. “Waffles.”
“You didn’t have any waffles.”
“I did, too, and how would you know, Miss Baby Ma—”
“Shut up,” Coach says. “We all had waffles. So none of us should be looking so damn sorry for ourselves.”
“But we’re gonna fail the test,” offers Andre.
“That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said, Andre, you know that? Real stupid. Anybody else wanna say something stupid?”
Nearly every hand goes up.
“You wanna be stupid, fine, you can be stupid. Hell, I been stupid lots a times. A lot of ‘em right here in this classroom. But if you’re gonna be stupid, it better be because you damn well want to be and not because you think it’s the only thing you can do.”
Today, with the windows open, the weather finally feels like fall. When he’d gotten up before first light this morning, there had been a cold blue dew on all the grass. Hay barrels have come up against the fence lines. This time of year in Dillon everything that doesn’t grow right burns.
“We’re not gonna fail this test,” he says. “We are not gonna fail this test. You understand me? We are gonna be smart. We’re gonna do what we came in here to do, which is some goddamn good algebra. I don’t wanna hear anymore of this stupid failing crap. Now, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what you’re gonna see on Friday. But I do have one word for you, gentlemen-- ”
Maureen scoffs. The shushhhh that goes through the room is a bracing wind, the good early morning kind.
“—and ladies,” he amends. “I got one word for you, ladies and gentlemen. And it’s a word that’s gonna keep us in this game, even if our textbooks are from 1940 and our chalk don’t work for crap.”
The class is scrawny with quiet, holding on with just their claws. They watch him with pairs and pairs of eyes. Youth in them like a pale greenness, like a thing they’re afraid somebody’ll plant and then forget to harvest.
“That word,” he says, “is PEMDAS.”
There is a clamor in the room that is not unlike roaring.
—
On Friday, he sweats through the silent hours of the test, then through the last quarter of a suffocatingly close game. Vince throws like he’s afraid to hold onto anything too long lest it get used to him. It comes down to Landry, in the end, and the field goal he kicks is so unexpectedly pure and right and fine, so straight and excellent, that for a genuine moment, Coach is afraid he might cry. Winning turns the team into boys again. They pile into each other like milktooth dogs.
An unfamiliar peal, neither Tami’s nor Julie’s, greets him from somewhere high in the stands.
“Fuck yeah, Mr. Coach!” it rings again, unignorable, and so he turns his head.
Goddamn if it isn't Aggie. With her mouth open and her teeth white under field lights, silent, surly, pigs-fly, 98th-percentile Aggie.
“Fuck yeah,” she calls again, grinning, and he raises a hand like, I hear you. Like, alright now, alright.
—
The scores come in the same cheap envelope his new contract had, back in late summer. The mail is a mess of bills and college admissions brochures, and then this thin white thing, somehow scary as any of them.
“Whatever happens, honey,” Tami says, “remember: it is just high school algebra.”
“You know that sounds a lot better when you’re putting ‘football’ at the end of it.”
“I know,” she admits. Her arms around his shoulders. “Didn’t know you knew it, too.”
Tami reads from behind him at the kitchen island. Her hair falls into her face, then his, obscuring the words STATE and MINIMUM and CLEARED, but not so much that he can’t make out what they mean. His wife laughs a full laugh, a 'we have enough creamer for good coffee' laugh, a laugh that wants for nothing. She says, “Textbooks!” like they just won a brand new car.
The paper blurs in front of him but for a second. They fix it to the refrigerator next to Gracie’s finger paintings and Julie’s Honor Roll report cards, the whole kitchen washed in warm hands and things hard earned.
—
The last day of the semester falls on a Friday and most of the kids just don’t come in, heading out early for Thanksgiving or helping their parents in fields and kitchens. Maureen and Aggie are gone, and he lets the stragglers leave early, too, listening to them cajole and clamor, a general murmur that sounds smaller than it did inside his classroom. Only Andre is distinct: the squeak of his sneakers familiar as he tears off down the hall, quieting 'til it's just a heartbeat hum.
Coach turns back to the empty classroom. It is worse than before the year began. There’s the broken desk legs from the first day, and Aggie’s ceiling pencils. There is the ghost of equations and rude sentiment on the blackboard. There is the apple at the center of his desk, yellow and bruised and faintly gleaming. There is, underneath it, a scrap of notebook paper:
1) MY NAME IS AGGIE.
2) I COME FROM A PLACE WHERE THERE ARE DONUTS TO BUY.
3) I THINK MR. COACH SUCKS.
Two truths and a lie. Coach tucks the page into his pocket. The apple will not be good to eat. It’s the kind of thing that hits the ground and stays there at the end of a long harvest. In his hands it is almost soft and nearly green.
He carries it home like he's won it.