Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Events described herein are products of the Narrator’s—Speaker’s—Whatever’s—imagination. Any resemblance to factual incidents, places, or persons (real or deceased) is purely coincidental. Besides this, any relationships between consecutively narrated events is also purely coincidental. Causality, whether by natural or supernatural means, is neither expressed nor implied.
The centerpiece of Ms. Rilke’s class projects during the second grading period was a group essay, about the interplay between fate and free will in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.
It was a rite of passage, almost akin to a hazing initiation, whose lore over the succeeding generations of Advanced English students at that curious institution, was Nearly All The Days Were Still 23 legendary. It was one of the reasons that, for those assigned by the registrar’s arbitrary computer algorithm to take English with Ms. Rilke, her reputation inevitably preceded her.
Ms. Rilke assigned these group essays to each successive year of advanced juniors. The thesis statement was regarding Aristotle’s theory of tragedy as exemplified by the pity-to-terror catharsis of Oedipus’s self-revelation in the Sophoclean turn of the tale.
She would raise the stakes of such a paper assignment, by purposely putting together people who, in her estimation, were likely to experience histrionic personality conflicts. She gave an intimidating speech at the start of each such group project, each year, where she instructed the students that each group had to demonstrate a shared effort. She would state that by that point in the year, she had memorized each kid’s individual writing style, and would therefore be able to tell if somebody tried to write the entire essay, for the rest of their group mates.
Each essay received not only a grade, but professional evaluations with numerical ratings for each individual student, typed anonymously by their group mates.
All of this, if you are wondering, to scare everybody into passive-aggressive diplomacy when collaborating on a group essay about classical tragedy.
As you can imagine, each year there was at least one group essay for which the theory of tragedy became more self-referential than perhaps its co-authors would have liked.
In all this, Ms. Rilke remained at her desk. Sometimes she looked absorbed in papers or answering emails on her computer, but sometimes she sat back comfortably, and eavesdropped on the groups, surveying the large dull box-like room with her glance.
It was during one of these instances that Ms. Rilke overheard somebody in one of the other groups complaining about a student in another class getting favored openly by the teacher.
Random Student 4: “… it’s so messed up the way he just gets special treatment from Mr. Alewife.”
“Well come on you guys,” interjected Ms. Rilke, as if she had been part of that group discussion all along. Everybody else in the room turned to attend to her digression from the class work. By that point in the year, her tangents had become something of an institution in the classroom.
“You’re juniors in high school by now; you can’t seriously still kid yourselves that any teacher is actually going to treat you all the same. Please,” she eyed the class scornfully. “Each of you is a different person, and a different student, with different experiences, and different capabilities. Why on earth would I even try to treat you as though you were all the same? Every teacher treats every student differently. And yes, every teacher has students that they like better. It’s called ‘capital.’ You guys know Drew LaBoone, right?”
Andrew LaBoone was a varsity football player, now a senior, whose academic nonchalance overshadowed his intellectual faculties.
“I taught Drew for Advanced English last year. He once walked into my class twentyfive minutes late, and gave no explanation, handed no excused tardy slip from Mrs. Cook in attendance. He just grinned sheepishly as he sat down, and opened his literature textbook. And that was fine. Why? because Drew—my Drew, mind you—has capital with me.”
The class giggled appreciatively; Drew was popular among the students, and that extenuated his status as one of Ms. Rilke’s pets. He was one of those senior jocks whose popularity extended to collective laughs from the student body when he addressed them in the auditorium by saying “Good Morning.”
It would always unsettle the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—slightly to hear this kind of herd mentality, so audibly. It was like the eerie sinking feeling that arises when you miss a step while climbing the staircase through the darkness of an empty and drafty house, at the end of a dead-end, right off Route 9, somewhere in Newton, Massachusetts.
The fact is that if Ms. Rilke had mentioned an unpopular boy as having acquired “capital” with her—Dan Vandersteen, a junior boy famous for his histrionic indignation about not getting picked for show choir or The Musical, for example—it is guaranteed that there would have been at least one student in that classroom, probably more like two or three, probably girls but perhaps also boys, who would have raised no objection in the moment, because of the size and power of Ms. Rilke’s in-person ego, but would have gone to the head or the associate head, or had their wealthy parents intervene on their behalf with the said authorities, to convey back to Ms. Rilke the righteous complaint of her openly advocating favoritism in class.
But because the teacher’s pet she identified happened to be Andrew LaBoone, a popular senior, that ostensibly off-the-cuff lecture became one of many digressions over the course of that school year, that led the students in that section, and in other sections, to say things like:
“Ms. Rilke tells it like it is. Everything isn’t sugarcoated.”
“She gets teenagers better than the other teachers.”
“Thought-provoking and entertaining.”
“She’s down to earth.”
“Her class is tite.”
“Her class is amazing.”
Back in the moment, Ms. Rilke went on from her allusion to Drew: “Each year, I assign my advanced juniors to recite poems from memory in front of the class for the spring. People always come in on the day of the recitations, and just give me things like food they know I like, and gifts, and candy. They’re always hoping they can purchase last-minute capital with me so they can get out of having to stand and deliver. They can’t. You can’t.”
A smirk began to twist the corners of her mouth.
“Well Ms. Rilke,” remarked the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—without raising his hand, “you just became my favorite teacher for today, for saying out loud what we all know to be true, but no other teacher will admit.”
“Favorite for today??” Ms. Rilke’s tone became incredulous, but a playful edge also crept into it. “Sounds like prostitution,”—here, a snicker arose from the class, as her smirk in his direction turned slightly diabolical—“You’re going to have to find more creative ways of sucking up, if you want to buy capital from me.”
For some strange reason, as it happened, the boundary between student and teacher came up frequently, whenever Ms. Rilke digressed from literature in class.
It may or may not have been a disclaimer for things she may or may not have done on a somewhat regular basis.
There was the time when a girl brought a mechanical baby doll into English class. It cried loudly if jostled. She was in the Early Childhood Caregiving class offered in the Social Studies wing. The doll was meant to simulate as closely as possible the real-life responsibility of caring for a flesh-and-blood human infant.
Ms. Rilke was in the middle of elucidating the meaning of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” when she was interrupted by the shrill sound of electronic squalling.
Everybody else snickered, and then the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—observed: “You can see why some animals eat their young.”
A louder laugh rose up from the class, prompted by Ms. Rilke’s own guffaw. “Did you guys know,” her eyes suddenly twinkled the way they did when she was about to digress, “that teachers can get written up for disciplinary infractions same as students?”
And in a second, she was off on her tangent: a few years earlier, she and Mr. LeCaptain, who had then been the varsity football coach, had both gotten written up by Mr. Schechter, then the principal, because they got caught taking the mechanical baby dolls from the Early Childhood class when they were left unattended on cafeteria tables by students responsible for them—and hiding them in the microwaves that lined the cafeteria’s perimeter.
The class laughed again. Ms. Rilke’s oratory combined the power of confession with the narrative grace of mock epic. In the moment, to teenage listeners, the anecdote seemed to imply that Ms. Rilke was actually just like them—a cocky and careless teenager, given to the same irreverent impulses as they might be, and the incident of the babies in microwaves was something inappropriate yet charming that she had narrowly gotten away with.
But it might have been that same class, or another one with another seemingly spontaneous digression, where she remarked:
“You know, every now and then I have a student say something to me like, ‘Oh Ms. Rilke, you’re the best friend I have here,’ Whenever a student says something like that, I seriously just want to run screaming from the room. Let me make this perfectly clear to all of you,” and she peered around at the students each in turn to punctuate: “I Am Not Your Friend; I am your teacher. Do you have any idea how weird it would be for somebody of my age and position to be hanging out with seventeen-year-olds?? Oh my god. I have a life.”
And despite that, it might have been only a few days later, by chance, that Alex LaBoone himself came into the room near the end of the period.
He handed Ms. Rilke a written note that he said was from Mrs. Cook in the Main Office.
Then he turned to leave—but before he reached the door, he stopped and turned in Ms. Rilke’s direction again.
Always remember what comes next. Always.
“Ms. Rilke, I got injured in practice. It’s really bad, Ms. Rilke. I might have to go stay at the hospital over night.”
He said it in the tone that popular boys at that curious institution often used to signal power, where you couldn’t quite tell if they were joking or serious.
The predictable wave of titters rose up from the class, observing the back-and-forth between Drew and their English teacher.
“Well Drew,” Ms. Rilke’s tone became unctuous, and her favoring smile in his direction was positively feline, “if you go to the hospital overnight, you’ll tell me which room you’re staying in, won’t you? So I can come…….. . . . . . . . visit you??”
“Of course,” the senior boy smirked back. He disappeared through the door again.
Turning back to the current juniors, Ms. Rilke remarked with the same slight sneer, “That was Andrew LaBoone, and as you can all see, he is indeed—my—Drew.”
The students laughed, on cue.