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“No—no—shut it down! Shut. It. Down!”
The music cuts off and the cheerleaders look crestfallen.
“There is no stripping on the football field!” McCarthy declares. “Where’s Ms. Simmons?”
Kelly Simmons is the special-ed teacher and cheerleading advisor. Back in high school, she and I used to bang each other’s brains out—in-between relationships with other people, and sometimes during those relationships. She was the hottest girl in school and kind of a bitch. Now she’s the hottest teacher in school, and still kind of a bitch.
“She’s in the parking lot with her husband,” one of the cheerleaders volunteers. “I think they’re having, like, marital issues.”
McCarthy’s finger swings like an axe in the air. “Regardless—you’re not doing that routine on the field. Clothes stay on. You’re students, not strippers!”
Ashley stomps her foot. “Strippers are people too, Miss McCarthy.”
“Not in high school, they’re not!”
Lucas Bowing, our starting quarterback walks up next to me. “I don’t see what the problem is. I think they looked good.”
Beside him, sophomore defensive end Noah Long stares hypnotized at the bikini-topped girls. “Yeah. Mickey is F-I-N-E, fiiine.”
Then they both start dancing, and grunting, and swinging their hands as if their tapping imaginary asses.
“For God’s sake, stop twerking,” I order. “Badly—I might add. You’re supposed to be hydrating, go drink some frigging Gatorade.”
As he moves to go, Long lifts his chin in the direction over my shoulder. “Hey Coach—Dork Squad’s looking for you.”
I turn around and spot three of my students standing at the fence.
I teach Honors and Advanced Placement Calculus around here. I have a genius level IQ—some guys will say that just to get in your pants—but for me it’s actually true.
Math was another thing I was good at in high school. I loved it, I still do—the symmetry and balance, the patterns I could see so easily. There’s a beauty to a solved equation—like a symphony for the eyes. It’s another reason teaching ticks all the boxes for me.
“Lay off the Dork Squad.” I stare hard at Long. “Any of you screw with them, I will drill you into oblivion. If you guys act like dumbasses, trust me, I will run you like dumbasses.”
My students are considered the easy kids by other teachers. They’re invested in their grades and they’re smart—but they’re also fragile. Because they’re different. At a place and time in their lives when different isn’t an easy thing to be.
So I make it my mission to look out for them.
Long shows me his palms.
“Nah, Coach—the Dork Squad’s cool. The Mathletes are the only reason I passed algebra last year.”
The Mathletes is an academic club I supervise. They tutor other students free of charge and travel from school to school to do battle in mathematics competitions. Sometimes, the math games are just as brutal as the football games—sometimes more.
“Good. Make sure you spread the word.”
I turn and trot over to the fence.
“Hey, Coach Walker.”
“Yo, Coach W!”
It’s Louis, Min Joon and Keydon—juniors—I had them all last year and they’ll be in my class again this year.
“Students.” I nod. “How’s it going? You guys still have a few days of summer left, what are you doing here?”
“We wanted to check out the renovations to the private study rooms in the library. They’re dank—Miss McCarthy didn’t scrimp.” Keydon answers.
“How was your summer?” Min Joon asks. “Did you play with the band?”
“I did. And it was awesome as always. How about you guys—did you do anything cool?”
Most teachers have to ride their students’ asses to make sure they do their schoolwork. I have to ride mine to make sure they do something—anything—besides schoolwork. So they have fuller, fleshed-out lives—and so they don’t consider offing themselves if they don’t make valedictorian.
I joke around, but . . . that’s a genuine concern for my kids. One I take serious as fuck.
“I took a couple summer classes at Princeton,” Louis says. “Just to keep myself fresh.”
“O-kay. Did you meet anyone interesting?”
“The professor was nice. On the last day I gave him a list of strategies that I thought would make him a more effective instructor.”
“I’m sure he appreciated that.”
Right before he set the list on fire.
“I did the YouTube Up All Night challenge,” Min Joon offers. “I was awake for forty-nine hours, thirty-seven minutes. It’s a record.”
“You gotta sleep, Min. At your age, you grow when you sleep—that’s why you’re so damn short. Sleep, dude, it’s not hard.”
I look to Keydon. “What about you?”
“I did a physics program in London with a hologram of Stephen Hawking.”
“You spent your summer in a basement in England with a computer-generated image of Stephen Hawking for company and you’re happy about it?” I ask.
He smiles broadly. “It was righteous.”
I press my thumbs into my eye sockets.
“I have failed you. Utterly and completely failed you.”
They laugh—they think I’m being funny.
“But it’s okay.” I clap my hands, regrouping. “We’ll work on it this year.”
