Be My Friday Night (14 page)

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I
n a way
, it felt like a montage from a 1960's French movie. The dates, and now the nights, were steamed up and tousled in Otto’s bed, with even more moments in the back of Otto’s truck. Sam had decided to bask in the glow of this love haze rather than feel shameful. Her body and heart had made her choice for her. Now all her head could do was follow along as best it could cope.

At the football games they held hands freely. No one mocked or jeered them as Sam had once feared. Rather, like the encouragement directed at the improving Guanacos, the whole town seemed to be cheering for the high school principal and his secretary, the oldest Henry girl.

When Sam had been a student at Grover High, the oppressive reality of being in a small town had made her feel crazy. Now, when she could leave at a moment’s notice, it wasn’t all that bad.

As she grew more comfortable as a Grover citizen, other aspects of Sam's life began to take interesting turns. A funny situation had begun to develop at work. Some of the junior and senior girls, along with one or two boys, had gotten into the habit of hovering, and then slowly inching up to Sam’s desk. Once there, they would loiter, pretending to be nonchalant in the way only teenagers could master. They’d tend to catch her when she was in the middle of something. Sam would be concentrating on typing up minutes from a meeting or drafting an e-mail and the student would begin to talk about a teenage crisis. Usually it was a love crisis. Sometimes it was about friends. Occasionally it involved worries about the future.

Sam had always been a good listener. It was something she prided herself on. The surprise had been at the end of the student’s spiel of romance, friendship, or future plans there was a desire for advice about what to do. They never wanted a philosophical concept or generalization. No, they always wanted concrete details about what to do. They watched Sam with wide, hungry eyes, ready to devour every detailed step for solving the problem.

Each predicament always gave Sam pause. Telling someone exactly what to do was a terrifying prospect. Sure, her opinion wasn’t really important in the grand narrative of a teenager’s existence. Sam wasn’t going to ruin anyone’s life, or at least she hoped she wouldn’t. The problem was when someone was seventeen, it seemed much more possible to ruin their life based on one not so good opinion.

To stall, Sam would make a cup of coffee for herself, and said student would go over the details again while Sam sipped and listened attentively. By the time the student’s cup of coffee was gone, Sam had the best answer she could come up with. If it was a trickier question, as the questions sometimes were, Sam would refer them to Layla for a second opinion.

Every once and a while Otto would come out of his office to the scene of Sam drinking coffee with a student while giving advice.

Of course, the student would immediately stop talking as soon as Otto showed up, sulking on the scene.

"We're busy," Sam said in a stern voice. Her eyes motioned Otto back to his office.

"I need that college outreach report by the end of today," said Otto.

Sam nodded.

"I know," she said.

Otto continued to linger.

Sam gave him another look. There were things she wanted to say, but they would all come out of her mouth in a patronizing manner.

Otto finally took the hint. He attempted to nonchalantly return to his office. Sam turned back to the student who was once again chatty.

There was someone waiting for her about once a day, and Sam had grown to tentatively like her new responsibility. When she had been a TA, students only wanted to know about theories and concepts of different periods in art history. The students mostly came across as too worldly, or too busy with books to want Sam’s opinion on personal matters. She never took offense to this. She understood. She’d been the same way as an undergraduate student.

Chatting with high school students one-on-one about life choices had brought her a new amount of self-confidence. Sam also liked how manageable the situations tended to be. She was fully capable of making a cup of coffee and listening, and it was all the students wanted, someone to listen.

No matter how many cups of coffee she’d made it didn’t prepare her for the words on the other end of the phone line the first Thursday morning in November.

“I need you to go sit in with Della’s class. She just went home. A bad case of the flu hit her right after she came in this morning,” said Rose, the senior AP English teacher, on the other line.

Sam was silent. No words were able to form in her head. Her mouth felt dry.

“Sam?” Rose said.

“Who do you want me to call?” said Sam. There had to be a solution to this problem not involving her stepping into an actual classroom and dealing with a hoard of teenagers. Sam could now handle one teenager at a time. Sitting in on a class was a completely different thing.

“It would take at least twenty minutes for a sub to get here. Everyone who has prep period this early isn't in yet. They’re not getting here until 9:00 a.m.,” said Rose.

Sam grumbled to herself about bad planning. She hated herself for being struck with fear when Rose was simply asking for some help.

“Which classroom?” Sam said. Her voice came out as a scratchy whisper.

“17,” said Rosie. She hung up the phone with a click.

Sam put the phone down. She raised her body from the chair slowly. It fought back every inch of the way up. Sam wanted to run out the front door of the school and as far away from here as possible. Her feet defied her. She headed to Room 17.

The lights were still shut off from the afternoon before, and the room was cool. Sam tread along the carpet, past the empty desks, to the front of the room where Della had her desk. Class was going to start in about two minutes. Students had slowly started to pad into the room. Sam sat in Della’s chair. She didn’t make eye contact with any early students. She stared at the DVDs on the desk.

She picked up the movies from the desk and looked at the options, all documentaries. A couple looked pretty interesting. Sam decided she’d let the class vote on it. She nodded her head and placed the films back on the desk.

That would involve talking to them more than you need to.

A silent panic began to rise from her stomach into her throat. She looked down at the films and considered just picking one now to avoid chaos.

The bell rang. Sam took a deep breath and walked to the front of the class. She looked up. About a fourth of the desks were empty. This flu thing was really going around. Some of the faces in the class looked up at her, others seemed to be doodling notes, or busy with their phones.

Their lack of interest was fine with Sam, as long as they didn’t make too much noise.

She took a deep breath. She noticed the girl sitting in the front row. Her black plastic rimmed glasses popped against her bronze skin. She had perky curled hair. Sam hadn’t even known it was possible to have perky hair, but this girl pulled it off with flying colors.

The girl was also watching Sam with what Sam could only read as intense fascination. The girl didn’t blink, she didn’t move, she only watched. Strangely enough the girl’s mesmerizing gaze brought a sense of calm to Sam. It was the boost she needed in the moment.

She cleared her throat.

“Mrs. Ryan went home with the flu. I’m here with you all for class today,” Sam said. She was about to hold up the documentary she’d picked, she wasn’t even going to attempt to take roll when she noticed her tiny stalker had raised her hand.

“Yes.” Sam pointed at her, instantly regretting it. This girl was probably the class know-it-all and had been sizing Sam up, not admiring her well straightened locks, or panache for fashion.

“Did you really work for a museum in L.A.?” she asked. Sam blinked at her. Her summer job at the museum seemed so long ago.

“Yes, I worked for the contemporary art museum there for a summer,” Sam said, looking at the girl with interest. The girl’s gaze never moved, and Sam could have sworn she saw her eyes get wider.

Sam looked up toward the rest of the class, nervous. Sure, it was cool to work in the art scene in L.A., but no one cared, no one knew what the L.A. art scene was in Grover.

She saw forty sets of eyes staring at her. Sam realized these students seemed older, calmer than the kids who’d mutinied on her first day of subbing. They seemed more focused, and bigger. She noticed many of the boys barely fit in their desks, much different from the hyper pipsqueaks she’d encountered on her first day.

They're seniors
.

She glanced down at the class's roster sheet. This was an AP Humanities class. These kids were serious seniors.

Sam looked out at their faces. She recognized their hungry stares. She understood them. She’d been like them once, when all she wanted to do was get the heck out of Grover. These were the kids who thought working in an art museum in the city was cool.

The girl in the front raised her hand again. Sam pointed at her. Sam figured she could do roll later. Based on the roster sheet there were twenty students, and due to the flu, it looked like there were fifteen students in the classroom. She'd ask Layla to help her with the specifics after class.

“What was the coolest thing you did while you worked there?” she asked.

Sam thought she noticed the kids slide to the edge of their seats. She could tell them about being up close and personal to artworks by the greats, so close you could see the brushstrokes, the dabs of paint, or the fact that working in Los Angeles meant getting to sometimes work with celebrities.

She figured this group could handle both.

“Well, there’s something fulfilling about being around amazing art. You don’t feel so alone with your emotions when you see a piece of art and you identify with it. It’s almost as if the piece recognizes how you’re feeling simply through colors and lines, and that’s an awesome sense of connection. Also, it’s always fun if you get to meet some celebrities while working in LA.”

Sam name dropped a few stars, something she had never done except with Holly, Layla, and her mother while talking about gallery tours she had given and attending galas with fashionably famous guests of honor.

The students were spellbound.

Sam looked down, trying to hide the relieved grin forming on her face. She noticed a textbook with notes open on the desk of the girl with the glasses in the front row.

“Was this your lesson for today?” Sam asked.

The girl nodded.

“We were actually supposed to have a lesson on art history today,” she said.

Sam raised her eyebrows.

“You’re only having one lesson? Isn’t there a class you can take?” she said. There hadn’t been a class when she’d been a high school student either. She had hoped this fact had changed since she'd been gone from Grover.

A few students shook their heads, as Sam looked over to the cabinet where the slides and projector were housed. She wondered how long it’d been stuck there.

“Can someone tell me what you usually do for art history lessons?” Sam asked. A boy with shaggy bangs raised his hand. She called on him.

“We usually go around and read out of the book,” he said in his most helpful grunt.

Sam nodded as she headed for the cabinet. Once upon a time, she remembered coming across slides of paintings and architecture in such a closet. Maybe she'd get lucky today. So far, she had to admit things were going pretty decent.

“Could somebody else tell me what type of art this lesson was going to be about?” she said.

She turned her back to them as she opened the cabinet and pulled out the projector.

A girl’s voice from somewhere in the middle of the classroom explained they were learning about the modern art being made at the same time authors were writing existentialist works in the nineteen teens and twenties after World War I.

Sam pulled a box of slides from the cabinet and quickly began dropping them into the projector round. Each slide clinked in the satisfying old fashioned way of something non-digital. The slides were clunky yet functional.

“Perfect. That was a great time for art,” said Sam. She attached the round to the projector, and wheeled the projector to the back of the room. She asked a student sitting by the projector if she could borrow his book just to get a general idea of what she was supposed to be telling them.

“Feel free to take notes if you think that’ll be helpful to you,” Sam added as she quickly flipped through the chapter.

She asked the girl in the front, who Sam learned was named Jenna, to pull down the projector screen, as Sam walked back to the light switch to darken the classroom. She flipped on the projector. It began to buzz. The fan began to flap and warm up. Sam took this as her cue to start talking about the works and lives of the people who became known as the canon of modern art.

Luckily, there was lots of scandal, misguided emotions, and sex amongst the creators of these artworks. The images, or lack thereof, in the art was exactly what the class craved. The students were enthralled. Some asked questions, some only stared at the slides in wonder, and others scribbled furious notes. Sam continued speaking, guiding the class from year to year, and artist to artist.

Midway through the class it dawned on her that the teenagers were like movie stars on a gallery tour. You had to give them the information along with the juicy gossip to really bring the art to life.

Sam went to switch slides. In a heartbeat, her ease was ambushed by a small, niggling feeling of panic. What was she doing? What if she lost the students’ interest at any second and they went crazy on her? What if—

Stop it.

She shook her head no. She’d deal with the chaos if it happened, and so far it hadn’t. There was an assertive feeling welling in her chest. It shoved the panic down the stairs. This was important information. If the kids didn’t want to be honored with it, that was their problem, and she would deal with it.