Some Things I Never Want to Hear Again
Neil Anthony Smith
I make a list of some things I never want to hear again: Know what I’m sayin? Thinks she’s all that. Word. It’s all good. Babydaddy. I don’t know.
Mr. Hock watches over my shoulder.
“What have you got against black people?”
He’s black, about fifty, and still wears a tie to teach here. Junior History. I’m stuck in Special Ed a few days.
“Nothing,” I say. “I just don’t like rap talk.”
We’re the only ones in the flaking yellow teacher’s lounge – someone’s old kitchen furniture and wooden desks with the arms off so now they’re just chairs. I’d got a pizza slice and fries from the Cafeteria and brought it here. Mr. Hock grades papers.
I’m miserable. Not much teaching in substitute teaching, but a year after getting my BA, nine interviews for middle and high schools scattered across the Gulf Coast, no luck.
So now I wake up at six every morning and wait for the phone to ring so I can make forty bucks a day being insulted by teenagers. I always bring some guitar magazines to read. I write notes to myself and song lyrics and doodles and things like “Some things I never want to hear again.”
Mr. Hock tries not to grin at me. It would not have been a happy grin, either. “You can’t separate the rap from them. It’s the culture.”
“But it’s not black people. All the kids talk like that.”
Shrug. “You wouldn’t like them any better if they talked like you.”
I’ve got thirteen kids in the room, which used to be a Home Ec kitchen. File folders in the pantry, a sink that doesn’t work. Particleboard tables and folding chairs instead of desks.
Two of the girls are pregnant. The one showing keeps having to go to the bathroom every ten minutes and she’s stopped asking. I tell her she should at least ask.
“Can I go, please, Mr. Sub, if you don’t mind? Should I get a note?” Eyeroll and sing-song disdain.
The class laughs. If they’d just stop laughing at me so much.
“My name is Mr. Person. Barry Person.”
“Okay, sir, yes sir, I’m about to pee my desk, sir.”
When she’s gone, Shelby, who has been at this school two years too long, thumps his chest. “That’s my baby.”
“No, it’s not. She was pregnant when she transferred in.”
“I could have had her before I enrolled. Maybe she came over to my town.”
“I’ll ask her when she gets back.”
He rocks in his folding chair, twisting metal. “You don’t believe me, Mr. Man, but she’ll back me up, I swear.”
“Don’t swear.”
I’m twenty-four. Shelby’s nineteen and a junior, bigger than me. These other kids are sixteen, seventeen. I don’t smile much at them because if I let my authority slip so much as a laugh, then I’m a cheap taco you can buy with change from under the seat. Have to remind myself: subbing is a stopgap. I’ll be a real teacher soon.
“I swear to God, I swear swear swear,” Shelby says. Then he’s out of the chair and jerking his hips and legs. Dancing, I guess. The tile floor is slick and he moves like he’s on ice, pushing chairs out of the way. The whole class erupts. These classrooms, everything’s louder than normal, echoing.
I tell him to sit down. Tell him again, and he cups a hand to his ear like he can’t hear me. I reach a hand towards the intercom button on the wall behind my desk, and he’s there before I get fully extended. Shelby grabs my wrist tight and he’s apologetic with the eyes: A joke, a joke, can’t you cool it some?
“You let go,” I say.
He holds on. “Promise you won’t send me out.”
“You let go.”
“Come on, Mr. Man.” Fingers a bit looser.
“Mr. Person.”
“Come on.”
I jerk my arm away. I don’t push the intercom button. “Sit.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be scared, but I am. I’m pissed because he wins no matter what I do.
The engine in my Chevy Impala is shot, but I spent too much money on an engagement ring last year, before my girlfriend decided wherever she was headed in life, it wouldn’t be with me. I asked the shop if they’d take them back, but they said no. Said they could melt it into a charm or something.
I’ve got no use for charms.
Best I can do now is either put an ad in the paper (classifieds cost money, too) or sell the rings at a pawn shop for fifty bucks. I decided to teach high school instead of go to grad school because I had wanted to get married. Without a full-time teaching job, I can’t even afford the tiny house I’m renting, a few blocks away from my parents.
Embarrassing.
So I signed on for holiday work at a mall department store in men’s wear, evenings after school gigs. We’re open late most nights.
I work with two full-timers. Eliza is short and white and blond, loud, likes to talk behind your back. I could give a shit what she says about me or to me. I’d still like to hook up with her. Lorelei is tall and black and forty with really short hair. She stakes out the sporting wear register and tells us we can’t ring anyone up on it. All her friends and family bring stuff they get in other parts of the store to her register.
It’s after ten, and I start the prep for shutdown, hating this tedious work more than the other. Fold these shirts when you don’t have any customers, and then fold them again before you close. Use the folding boards and the official instructions.
They shouldn’t call us sales associates. We’re folders.
For seven hours a day, my authority is stomped by high schoolers. For five hours a night, the regular me is stomped by the general public.
Shirt displays on dark wood tables crowd us in. Tommy, Polo, Izod. Golf shirts with woven golfers and clubs and tees and putting greens. I’ll get a headache if I fold those. I tell Eliza I’ll refold khakis. We hardly have room to walk, the floor chock full of tables, three tier displays, and round hanging racks, departments separated by the clear, clean tile of the center walkway, Men’s Suits across from us and Housewares to the left. All bright lit and with Christopher Cross singing out of the ceiling speakers. We have stragglers. They buy things, but not enough to justify us staying this late.
I hear the group of black guys coming around the corner before I see them. They head straight for the Men’s Designer stuff, right towards me, Shelby with them, playing cool as he passes.
The group spreads through the displays. Lorelei picks up the phone at her register and dials a security code that sends a bonging through the speakers. In a minute we’ll have one of our Loss Prevention people over to help keep an eye on them. But if only one’s working tonight, and this is a group of six, well, bad luck.
I had wanted one of those Loss Prevention jobs, and the head lady came by a week ago to check me out. She asked if I had experience in security, watching for thieves. I told her I taught high school. She laughed and nodded.
“I hear you, but it’s not the same.”
Which told me she’d never taught high school.
I move from folding khakis to one of the round racks where thieves sometimes hide clothes behind the densely packed shirts and come back for them later. I prop an elbow on the bar. Shelby runs his fingers over a Tommy ski jacket.
“How you doing?” I say.
He gives me a high nod and a look like I know the guy, can’t place him.
I remember his Name, Age, Place of Birth, and the grade on his last math test. He can’t even recognize my face when I’ve a name tag on?
He’s holding the sleeve of the jacket in his hand, price tag and spare button bag hanging down, and he says, “How much for this?”
“One sixty.” You know that.
“You can’t cut me a break on it? When it’s on sale?”
“Tommy’s don’t go on sale until they’re out of season.”
Shelby nods, grins, cranks his head around to look for his friends—two down in sportswear, two more behind us, another making his way towards the jeans. Shelby spots Eliza, let’s out a low whistle. She smiles.
He’s still holding the jacket but ogling her now. “Why ain’t you all over that one right there?”
“Maybe I am.”
“No, she’s not looking at you like that. You should get you some of her.”
“That’s not your concern.”
I see the security lady – white-haired mean old bitch, great at this job – easing into the suits department. She’s dealt with this group before, trying to catch them in the act. A couple of Shelby’s friends notice her and clap their hands twice.
Shelby’s grin falls away. His friend in the jeans stacks works his way back over.
The others leave the department separately, groups of two, time-staggered.
Shelby’s about to go when I grab his forearm. He looks startled but stays quiet. His friend jets out the door.
“Shelby, I know what you’re doing.”
“What are you talking about?”
My grip gets tighter. “I know what you’re doing in here. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I don’t know who you think I am.. Better lay off.”
“Quit it. You know me. You fucking know me.”
“I’ll forget you grabbed me if you take your hand off. We’ll call it even, Mr. Man.”
The security lady is coming to stop me.
I let go. “See, you recognize me after all.”
He’s almost out the door already. “No clue.”
The security lady tells me I blew it. Blew what? The theives know the security here better than she does. The manager tells me I’m not security and I’ll have to be nicer to customers.
In my notebook on a slow day doing sophomore History, I write:
Need a car, so--
>New engine for the Impala $1600
>Rebuilt $800, but no guarantees it will last
>Truck I was looking at last week $9000
>Monthly Income $not enough
On the Monday before Christmas Break, I’m called in for a sick remedial math teacher. Only four classes, so I can leave by two. The class is narrow with old wooden desks in rows too close together, a file cabinet taking up a lot of the front wall, covering some of the chalkboard. My desk is close to the board and an uncomfortable squeeze. I don’t bother sitting behind it, even though I know it means the kids treat me differently then. A teacher isn’t a teacher without a desk.
The first class is fine. The second class a little noisier, but mostly girls, and they aren’t bothering anyone. On the roll of the third class, there’s only eight people, one of them Shelby.
I stand in the hall before that class, watching the kids shuffle and run and slam lockers in the main hallway. A bottleneck forms around the water fountain. Past that is an old red fire extinguisher mounted by the trophy case. I wonder if it works. Ms. Calvert across the hall comes over and asks how I’m doing, and I roll my eyes. She’s red-haired and plump, a tell-it-like-it-is type who once told me, “Screw the prom. We might as well go ahead and pay for the hotel rooms, take a picture and send them along.”
Today, I tell her, “I get so tired of being talked to that way. They whisper and call me gay, and I think, is it how I walk? Or is it my voice?”
“Don’t take it personally. They call everybody gay. They think it’s funny, and if it gets to you, they think it’s even better. Hell, they’ve got me dyked up with Ellen, the senior English teacher?”
“You get over it?”
“Sometimes I want to tape myself having sex with my husband, just to have proof, but you can’t do that because then they’ve beat you. When they say things, do this. Think, Stupid little bastards and move on. Okay?”
The crowds thin out. She walks back to her class. I stick my hands in my pockets and walk back into mine. I’ll have to wash chalk out of these slacks. The whole room feels dusty because of the chalk. Erasing the board just scatters it. I count six in the room, three of them familiar. The pregnant white girl, a quiet guy who’s got a wild twin brother, and John the basketball star. I call a quick roll, and they tell me Shelby’s around somewhere. These kids all have the same classes most of the day.
I pick up the instructions left by the teacher and I’m ready to read when Shelby glides in, fast and not seeing me, loud in the small room. He’s in a work shirt from a local car wash, khaki pants.
John laughs and says, “Man,” and points to me. Shelby turns around, never stops moving, and says, “Oh, no, uhn-uh. Not you today, I don’t need this.”
“No choice. Take a seat.”
“You going to start on me already and I ain’t done a thing.”
“You’re late. Can I read this now?” I flap the paper and add more noise to the air.
Shelby raises both hands and shakes them, tucks his head down and walks out of class, turns down the main hall towards the front door.
I’ve got Oohs and Aahs and “Dissed you” from my kids, but I do something different from what I’ve done before by going after Shelby.
I catch up because he’s not in a hurry. It’s a dare. “Shelby, stop. Shelby.”
He picks up the pace. The hall is colder than the class, and I feel chill bumps on my arms and neck. I pick up the pace and cut in front of Shelby. He wants to dart around me, tries, but then turns and goes back the other way. My class is in the hall watching. I say “Shelby” louder and want to scream it. I follow right on his heels, careful not to touch. “Shelby.”
He fakes a quick turn and rushes towards the front doors again, towards the principal’s office. Maybe he’ll make it out the doors and run like hell. I’m jogging to catch up, but he’s steady. I pass the trophy case and grab the fire extinguisher. It takes a couple of good yanks, but then I’ve got it and I cut in front of again aiming this can.
“Are you crazy? Are you serious?” he says.
My class is beating on the teacher’s door across the hall now, and I’m sure she’ll call the front office. I need help.
“You will stay in class today. I don’t care what you want or need, because you’re a kid in my class and you will be until class is over.”
“It’s not your class.”
“It is today. Say my name. What’s my name?”
He’s got his hands behind his neck, pacing left and right, angry or scared or enjoying himself, I can’t tell.
“What’s my name?”
“You think I remember your name? I see you an hour, you’re gone the next day. What’s that make you? Nothing. The nothingest white man I’ve ever seen. Don’t mean one thing to me. You’re in my way is all.”
The redhead teacher runs down the hall. “Mr. Persons, hold tight. Calm down. I called the principal, Mr. Persons.”
“There, see, Mr. Persons. I got it,” Shelby says. “I going to leave now.”
“It’s Person, no s. Mr. Person.” I feel a breeze. I hear voices. I’ve got a crowd.
“She said Persons.”
“She’s wrong too. What the hell is it about this place? Person. Person. Person. My name is Person. Barry Person. That’s my name. Barry Person.” I point the can at Shelby’s feet and let out a little blast, loud gas and white foam and he jumps back, coughs. The voices are louder. “Get back to our classroom. Now, you say, Yes, Mr. Person.”
But Shelby is focused over my shoulder, and I hear the voice of the principal above me because he’s six foot ten. “That’s enough, Mr. Person. We’ll handle it from here.”
The assistant principal walks over to Shelby and guides him past me to the office. The principal says, “Give me the extinguisher, and go to my office. I’ll be there soon.”
I hand him the can without turning to look at him. I step around the redhead teacher who doesn’t know my name. Past my students, now scared of me but that’s not what I wanted.
The cafeteria smells really yeasty.
I’m finished at this school. I’ll have to ask to work in the department store full time, and can’t decide if that’s a relief or a punishment.
Next week, I’ve got an interview with a junior high, and another with a Catholic school in Biloxi. I’ll have to borrow my mom’s car for those because I can’t afford that new engine with only one job.
I’m not going to the principal’s office. I head out the front door and wonder how many shirts I’ll have to fold tonight.
Neil Anthony Smith
I make a list of some things I never want to hear again: Know what I’m sayin? Thinks she’s all that. Word. It’s all good. Babydaddy. I don’t know.
Mr. Hock watches over my shoulder.
“What have you got against black people?”
He’s black, about fifty, and still wears a tie to teach here. Junior History. I’m stuck in Special Ed a few days.
“Nothing,” I say. “I just don’t like rap talk.”
We’re the only ones in the flaking yellow teacher’s lounge – someone’s old kitchen furniture and wooden desks with the arms off so now they’re just chairs. I’d got a pizza slice and fries from the Cafeteria and brought it here. Mr. Hock grades papers.
I’m miserable. Not much teaching in substitute teaching, but a year after getting my BA, nine interviews for middle and high schools scattered across the Gulf Coast, no luck.
So now I wake up at six every morning and wait for the phone to ring so I can make forty bucks a day being insulted by teenagers. I always bring some guitar magazines to read. I write notes to myself and song lyrics and doodles and things like “Some things I never want to hear again.”
Mr. Hock tries not to grin at me. It would not have been a happy grin, either. “You can’t separate the rap from them. It’s the culture.”
“But it’s not black people. All the kids talk like that.”
Shrug. “You wouldn’t like them any better if they talked like you.”
I’ve got thirteen kids in the room, which used to be a Home Ec kitchen. File folders in the pantry, a sink that doesn’t work. Particleboard tables and folding chairs instead of desks.
Two of the girls are pregnant. The one showing keeps having to go to the bathroom every ten minutes and she’s stopped asking. I tell her she should at least ask.
“Can I go, please, Mr. Sub, if you don’t mind? Should I get a note?” Eyeroll and sing-song disdain.
The class laughs. If they’d just stop laughing at me so much.
“My name is Mr. Person. Barry Person.”
“Okay, sir, yes sir, I’m about to pee my desk, sir.”
When she’s gone, Shelby, who has been at this school two years too long, thumps his chest. “That’s my baby.”
“No, it’s not. She was pregnant when she transferred in.”
“I could have had her before I enrolled. Maybe she came over to my town.”
“I’ll ask her when she gets back.”
He rocks in his folding chair, twisting metal. “You don’t believe me, Mr. Man, but she’ll back me up, I swear.”
“Don’t swear.”
I’m twenty-four. Shelby’s nineteen and a junior, bigger than me. These other kids are sixteen, seventeen. I don’t smile much at them because if I let my authority slip so much as a laugh, then I’m a cheap taco you can buy with change from under the seat. Have to remind myself: subbing is a stopgap. I’ll be a real teacher soon.
“I swear to God, I swear swear swear,” Shelby says. Then he’s out of the chair and jerking his hips and legs. Dancing, I guess. The tile floor is slick and he moves like he’s on ice, pushing chairs out of the way. The whole class erupts. These classrooms, everything’s louder than normal, echoing.
I tell him to sit down. Tell him again, and he cups a hand to his ear like he can’t hear me. I reach a hand towards the intercom button on the wall behind my desk, and he’s there before I get fully extended. Shelby grabs my wrist tight and he’s apologetic with the eyes: A joke, a joke, can’t you cool it some?
“You let go,” I say.
He holds on. “Promise you won’t send me out.”
“You let go.”
“Come on, Mr. Man.” Fingers a bit looser.
“Mr. Person.”
“Come on.”
I jerk my arm away. I don’t push the intercom button. “Sit.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be scared, but I am. I’m pissed because he wins no matter what I do.
The engine in my Chevy Impala is shot, but I spent too much money on an engagement ring last year, before my girlfriend decided wherever she was headed in life, it wouldn’t be with me. I asked the shop if they’d take them back, but they said no. Said they could melt it into a charm or something.
I’ve got no use for charms.
Best I can do now is either put an ad in the paper (classifieds cost money, too) or sell the rings at a pawn shop for fifty bucks. I decided to teach high school instead of go to grad school because I had wanted to get married. Without a full-time teaching job, I can’t even afford the tiny house I’m renting, a few blocks away from my parents.
Embarrassing.
So I signed on for holiday work at a mall department store in men’s wear, evenings after school gigs. We’re open late most nights.
I work with two full-timers. Eliza is short and white and blond, loud, likes to talk behind your back. I could give a shit what she says about me or to me. I’d still like to hook up with her. Lorelei is tall and black and forty with really short hair. She stakes out the sporting wear register and tells us we can’t ring anyone up on it. All her friends and family bring stuff they get in other parts of the store to her register.
It’s after ten, and I start the prep for shutdown, hating this tedious work more than the other. Fold these shirts when you don’t have any customers, and then fold them again before you close. Use the folding boards and the official instructions.
They shouldn’t call us sales associates. We’re folders.
For seven hours a day, my authority is stomped by high schoolers. For five hours a night, the regular me is stomped by the general public.
Shirt displays on dark wood tables crowd us in. Tommy, Polo, Izod. Golf shirts with woven golfers and clubs and tees and putting greens. I’ll get a headache if I fold those. I tell Eliza I’ll refold khakis. We hardly have room to walk, the floor chock full of tables, three tier displays, and round hanging racks, departments separated by the clear, clean tile of the center walkway, Men’s Suits across from us and Housewares to the left. All bright lit and with Christopher Cross singing out of the ceiling speakers. We have stragglers. They buy things, but not enough to justify us staying this late.
I hear the group of black guys coming around the corner before I see them. They head straight for the Men’s Designer stuff, right towards me, Shelby with them, playing cool as he passes.
The group spreads through the displays. Lorelei picks up the phone at her register and dials a security code that sends a bonging through the speakers. In a minute we’ll have one of our Loss Prevention people over to help keep an eye on them. But if only one’s working tonight, and this is a group of six, well, bad luck.
I had wanted one of those Loss Prevention jobs, and the head lady came by a week ago to check me out. She asked if I had experience in security, watching for thieves. I told her I taught high school. She laughed and nodded.
“I hear you, but it’s not the same.”
Which told me she’d never taught high school.
I move from folding khakis to one of the round racks where thieves sometimes hide clothes behind the densely packed shirts and come back for them later. I prop an elbow on the bar. Shelby runs his fingers over a Tommy ski jacket.
“How you doing?” I say.
He gives me a high nod and a look like I know the guy, can’t place him.
I remember his Name, Age, Place of Birth, and the grade on his last math test. He can’t even recognize my face when I’ve a name tag on?
He’s holding the sleeve of the jacket in his hand, price tag and spare button bag hanging down, and he says, “How much for this?”
“One sixty.” You know that.
“You can’t cut me a break on it? When it’s on sale?”
“Tommy’s don’t go on sale until they’re out of season.”
Shelby nods, grins, cranks his head around to look for his friends—two down in sportswear, two more behind us, another making his way towards the jeans. Shelby spots Eliza, let’s out a low whistle. She smiles.
He’s still holding the jacket but ogling her now. “Why ain’t you all over that one right there?”
“Maybe I am.”
“No, she’s not looking at you like that. You should get you some of her.”
“That’s not your concern.”
I see the security lady – white-haired mean old bitch, great at this job – easing into the suits department. She’s dealt with this group before, trying to catch them in the act. A couple of Shelby’s friends notice her and clap their hands twice.
Shelby’s grin falls away. His friend in the jeans stacks works his way back over.
The others leave the department separately, groups of two, time-staggered.
Shelby’s about to go when I grab his forearm. He looks startled but stays quiet. His friend jets out the door.
“Shelby, I know what you’re doing.”
“What are you talking about?”
My grip gets tighter. “I know what you’re doing in here. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I don’t know who you think I am.. Better lay off.”
“Quit it. You know me. You fucking know me.”
“I’ll forget you grabbed me if you take your hand off. We’ll call it even, Mr. Man.”
The security lady is coming to stop me.
I let go. “See, you recognize me after all.”
He’s almost out the door already. “No clue.”
The security lady tells me I blew it. Blew what? The theives know the security here better than she does. The manager tells me I’m not security and I’ll have to be nicer to customers.
In my notebook on a slow day doing sophomore History, I write:
Need a car, so--
>New engine for the Impala $1600
>Rebuilt $800, but no guarantees it will last
>Truck I was looking at last week $9000
>Monthly Income $not enough
On the Monday before Christmas Break, I’m called in for a sick remedial math teacher. Only four classes, so I can leave by two. The class is narrow with old wooden desks in rows too close together, a file cabinet taking up a lot of the front wall, covering some of the chalkboard. My desk is close to the board and an uncomfortable squeeze. I don’t bother sitting behind it, even though I know it means the kids treat me differently then. A teacher isn’t a teacher without a desk.
The first class is fine. The second class a little noisier, but mostly girls, and they aren’t bothering anyone. On the roll of the third class, there’s only eight people, one of them Shelby.
I stand in the hall before that class, watching the kids shuffle and run and slam lockers in the main hallway. A bottleneck forms around the water fountain. Past that is an old red fire extinguisher mounted by the trophy case. I wonder if it works. Ms. Calvert across the hall comes over and asks how I’m doing, and I roll my eyes. She’s red-haired and plump, a tell-it-like-it-is type who once told me, “Screw the prom. We might as well go ahead and pay for the hotel rooms, take a picture and send them along.”
Today, I tell her, “I get so tired of being talked to that way. They whisper and call me gay, and I think, is it how I walk? Or is it my voice?”
“Don’t take it personally. They call everybody gay. They think it’s funny, and if it gets to you, they think it’s even better. Hell, they’ve got me dyked up with Ellen, the senior English teacher?”
“You get over it?”
“Sometimes I want to tape myself having sex with my husband, just to have proof, but you can’t do that because then they’ve beat you. When they say things, do this. Think, Stupid little bastards and move on. Okay?”
The crowds thin out. She walks back to her class. I stick my hands in my pockets and walk back into mine. I’ll have to wash chalk out of these slacks. The whole room feels dusty because of the chalk. Erasing the board just scatters it. I count six in the room, three of them familiar. The pregnant white girl, a quiet guy who’s got a wild twin brother, and John the basketball star. I call a quick roll, and they tell me Shelby’s around somewhere. These kids all have the same classes most of the day.
I pick up the instructions left by the teacher and I’m ready to read when Shelby glides in, fast and not seeing me, loud in the small room. He’s in a work shirt from a local car wash, khaki pants.
John laughs and says, “Man,” and points to me. Shelby turns around, never stops moving, and says, “Oh, no, uhn-uh. Not you today, I don’t need this.”
“No choice. Take a seat.”
“You going to start on me already and I ain’t done a thing.”
“You’re late. Can I read this now?” I flap the paper and add more noise to the air.
Shelby raises both hands and shakes them, tucks his head down and walks out of class, turns down the main hall towards the front door.
I’ve got Oohs and Aahs and “Dissed you” from my kids, but I do something different from what I’ve done before by going after Shelby.
I catch up because he’s not in a hurry. It’s a dare. “Shelby, stop. Shelby.”
He picks up the pace. The hall is colder than the class, and I feel chill bumps on my arms and neck. I pick up the pace and cut in front of Shelby. He wants to dart around me, tries, but then turns and goes back the other way. My class is in the hall watching. I say “Shelby” louder and want to scream it. I follow right on his heels, careful not to touch. “Shelby.”
He fakes a quick turn and rushes towards the front doors again, towards the principal’s office. Maybe he’ll make it out the doors and run like hell. I’m jogging to catch up, but he’s steady. I pass the trophy case and grab the fire extinguisher. It takes a couple of good yanks, but then I’ve got it and I cut in front of again aiming this can.
“Are you crazy? Are you serious?” he says.
My class is beating on the teacher’s door across the hall now, and I’m sure she’ll call the front office. I need help.
“You will stay in class today. I don’t care what you want or need, because you’re a kid in my class and you will be until class is over.”
“It’s not your class.”
“It is today. Say my name. What’s my name?”
He’s got his hands behind his neck, pacing left and right, angry or scared or enjoying himself, I can’t tell.
“What’s my name?”
“You think I remember your name? I see you an hour, you’re gone the next day. What’s that make you? Nothing. The nothingest white man I’ve ever seen. Don’t mean one thing to me. You’re in my way is all.”
The redhead teacher runs down the hall. “Mr. Persons, hold tight. Calm down. I called the principal, Mr. Persons.”
“There, see, Mr. Persons. I got it,” Shelby says. “I going to leave now.”
“It’s Person, no s. Mr. Person.” I feel a breeze. I hear voices. I’ve got a crowd.
“She said Persons.”
“She’s wrong too. What the hell is it about this place? Person. Person. Person. My name is Person. Barry Person. That’s my name. Barry Person.” I point the can at Shelby’s feet and let out a little blast, loud gas and white foam and he jumps back, coughs. The voices are louder. “Get back to our classroom. Now, you say, Yes, Mr. Person.”
But Shelby is focused over my shoulder, and I hear the voice of the principal above me because he’s six foot ten. “That’s enough, Mr. Person. We’ll handle it from here.”
The assistant principal walks over to Shelby and guides him past me to the office. The principal says, “Give me the extinguisher, and go to my office. I’ll be there soon.”
I hand him the can without turning to look at him. I step around the redhead teacher who doesn’t know my name. Past my students, now scared of me but that’s not what I wanted.
The cafeteria smells really yeasty.
I’m finished at this school. I’ll have to ask to work in the department store full time, and can’t decide if that’s a relief or a punishment.
Next week, I’ve got an interview with a junior high, and another with a Catholic school in Biloxi. I’ll have to borrow my mom’s car for those because I can’t afford that new engine with only one job.
I’m not going to the principal’s office. I head out the front door and wonder how many shirts I’ll have to fold tonight.
