English Class

It’s another fucking bullshit day, she thought as she settled behind her desk, delicately placing her venti Starbucks on the table like if she jostled it too much it would explode. All the desks in the room were facing her but not for long. It was a peer review day. Janice Michaels had passed out her three thousand word short story last class, and now the rest of the vultures would spend forty-eight minutes picking it apart.

She put her feet up on the desk, held her coffee in one hand, and mindlessly scrolled through her phone with the other. Recipes. Knitting patterns. Reels of people doing some bullshit with their bullshit friends. It all washed over her, none of it sinking in.

How did she ever end up as a adjunct professor at some bullshit community college in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t make any sense. Actually, it made perfect sense, and that was the part that didn’t make any fucking sense.

All kids think adults have their shit together. She had thought her own teachers, elementary school, middle, high, all of them, had become teachers because that’s what they wanted to do. Her father was an accountant because that was the path he set himself on, her mother a lawyer for the same reason. Decisions, decisions, one after the other, and then people ended up where they wanted to be.

Bullshit, so much bullshit. Bullshit she clung to until she was twenty-five, had graduated with an English degree, kicked around various writing jobs, and then just sort of ended up as an adjunct professor at some bullshit community college in the middle of nowhere. She’d never chosen to be here. It turned out life was a lot less something you did, and more something that happened to you. Over and over.

The kids started coming in, dribs and drabs. First class of the day, barely eight o’clock. They shuffled like zombies who only went to bed four hours ago as they moved the desks and chairs around. Reluctantly she put her phone away and made idle small talk until the class actually started.

When she had taken the job…no, that indicated too much choice on her own part. When the job was given to her and then accepted on her behalf, she had secretly feared only one thing: that her class would hold the next author of the Great American Novel. That she would read a short story that would make every word she had ever written look like grease stains in a parking lot, something that would make her weep, and she would understand why she had never achieved the things she had been sure she could achieve as long as she wanted them. She had been afraid she would be proven a hack, a fraud, all of her works would be retroactively shown to be grammatically incorrect and not even interesting.

Nothing of the sort had ever happened. Ten years. No, fuck, shit, eleven. Eleven years of teaching in this same damn freezing cold room and not once had everyone ever submitted something worthing of weeping over. It had all ranged from confusingly terrible to good. A few greats, even. But nothing ever great. And no one she had ever taught had gone on to get published. She kept track. Kept a list of names. Nothing, nothing, fucking nothing. Life did to them what it had done to her. Made choices for them. Pushed them around. One of them was very successful running a chain of car washes. Another one died.

She sipped the dregs of her coffee as the kids around her argued about whether Janice’s use of metaphor was effective or over the top and stupid. She probably should have stopped the word ‘stupid’ except she agreed with that half of the argument so she kept her mouth shut.

---