Tampa by Alissa Nutting Page B

yellow was an intermediate warning, and red would sound a bell that meant a punishment of total silence would be invoked—once the light turned red, a staff member sounded three whistles, and anyone caught talking afterward was given detention . But I stared into the green light—
The Great Gatsby
was assigned to the ninth graders but not the eighth—and thought about being inside my convertible with Jack, the top down, both of us completely undressed, me flooring the gas and letting the wind hit our bodies as a type of foreplay.
    Janet liked to ruin these daydreams—I could’ve wrung her neck the day that Jack brought a pack of Twizzlers in his lunch. I had a clear view of him, framed between the hunched shoulder blades of two small girls, likely sixth graders, who were sitting at the table in front of Jack’s. One at a time, he bit down onto the red rope of the candy, pulling a little, revealing just a bit of aggressive tooth, and then he would slowly chew, his lips flushing with wetness. I was so fixated I didn’t even hear her until she was right next to me, her respirator-like breathing falling upon my ear.
    “Rosen is on a goddamn witch hunt,” she declared. I came out of my trance, suddenly vulnerable to all the room’s wretched smells and sounds. It was chili day, and massive yellow trash bins around the room were brimming with garlicky waste. Janet began a series of wet coughs, reaching into the pocket of her wide elastic pants to bring out a stained handkerchief. “He dropped by in the middle of my class this morning. Totally unannounced. I’d given them a group assignment and the little punks were all over the room. A few were climbing on the desks like baboons.”
    “Hello, Janet.” I looked back up and felt a bolt of panic in mystomach; suddenly I couldn’t see Jack. I desperately began a right- to-left scan of the room; I had to swallow repeatedly to avoid the urge to yell out his name.
    “I’d like to see Rosen try and teach them about the former USSR. It’s not exactly flies to honey. He sits in his big air-conditioned office half the day, never has to manage a classroom. He couldn’t walk a mile in my shoes.”
    I nodded, solemnly looking at her feet. If I gifted her a pair that weren’t Velcro, would she wear them? Likely not. She frequently removed her shoes in the teacher’s lounge—“Letting the dogs breathe,” as she called it—and when she put them back on there was no need to bend down and tie anything. She simply latched the Velcro back up by running the opposing foot’s callused heel along the straps.
    When she stood in front of the industrial fan, Janet’s sacklike clothing pressed against outlying regions of her body normally hidden by baggy fabric. “Just play his game for a little bit, Janet. Let him see what he wants to see, get him to stop breathing down your neck.” The charcoal frizz of her perm hovered above her scalp like a rising cloud of smog. With one eye open farther than the other, she looked like a stoic survivor: pillaged by the elements but still here against all odds.
    “Says he wants me to ‘foster an environment of mutual respect.’ What a bag of horseshit. These feral little dogs wouldn’t know respect if it bit them on the privates.”
    “Would respect really bite them on the privates?” I asked.
    “Just look at them out there. It’s like
National Geographic
. The future is hopeless.” Janet’s caustic remarks were drawing the attention of a husky student eating alone at a nearby table. A chili dog rested limply in the side of his mouth, his mastication paused so he could stare straight ahead at Janet.
    “Perhaps this conversation is best reserved for after hours,” I whispered. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a familiar blip of gray shirt and turned—Jack and his buddies had moved outside to the courtyard and were now sitting along the edge of a brick planter. The guys in the center were talking to two girls in short-shorts ,