Fat School Confidential (5 page)

    “
The boys’ dorm is full. Otherwise, I’d put you up there.”

   
Girls’ dorm? Was this even appropriate? I felt awkward.

   
Daniel opened a door to a room directly ahead. Windowless, the room was perhaps eight by ten feet. A twin mattress lay on the floor. Along the wall opposite the door was a small dresser.

   
A tiny cell—mere steps from a bunch of fat teen girls.

    “
It isn’t much. But I’ve called it home when I had to stay here.”

    “
Where do you live?” I asked.

    “
My wife and I have a house in Santa Monica. She’s a writer. We met at Yale.”

    “
Cool. My wife and I both went to CalArts,” I replied, knowing full well that a world-famous arty-farty school couldn’t compete with a world-famous Ivy League school.

    “
Cool.”

   
Unlike me, Abrams’s wife had actual credits as a writer, having an on-again, off-again stint on a hospital drama
on a major network.

   
No jealousy here.

   
I hung my garment bag on the door, and placed another bag on the dresser. I took one more look at the mattress on the floor. We stepped out and closed the door.

    “
I’ve got a room down the hall. But I usually go home on the weekends.”

    “
I will too.”

    “
You’ve got to. There’s nothing to do on the weekends.”

   
Daniel handed me a key to the room, and walked with me to the cafeteria.

    “
When you find a place, let’s talk about what you may need for moving expenses.”

    “
Thanks.”

   
Lunch was healthy and palatable for the most part. We had buffalo—or more correctly, bison burgers, a salad, and fresh fruit. The bison was going to take some getting used to. It had kind of a dry, chalky texture. It was nothing like the taste of a juicy beef burger.

   
I soon learned that although the entrées were somewhat limited, both in choice and in quantity, students were allowed unlimited amounts of fruit and veggies in the salad bar. Beverages consisted of coffee, tea, and sugar-free soda. A student eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner here could keep the calorie count low and stay under ten grams of fat a day—total. A traditional beef burger alone had more.

   
I saw myself losing a great deal of weight here.

   
At the table, Daniel quickly introduced me to other staff members, whose names I had forgotten just as quickly. I was reveling in the free room and board, the job, everything. Well, almost everything. The shared office situation was a slight bummer. And the fact that I’d be holed up in the girls’ dorm. How was I going to explain that to the wife?

   
I glanced across my table. Maybe I had my “fat glasses” on, but the students, for the most part, didn’t seem any more obese than the students I taught in Los Angeles. There was one major exception, though: these kids were, for the most part, rich. How else could one afford the five thousand dollar a month tuition? Obesity aside, there were two other differences between the students I had in L.A. and the ones here. First, while my Angelenos were ninety percent Latino, the Academy kids were mostly white. Second, in L.A., the sex ratio seemed about even. Here, there seemed to be three or four girls to every boy.

   
Daniel and I strolled back to the Admin building. We went by classrooms and offices. We stopped at Kristy Reinhart’s office. Daniel knocked on the office door. Frank Mills answered. He shook my hand.

     “
Hello, Mr. Rourke.”

    “
Frank is the new academic director. He’ll be working with you and the rest of the teaching staff.”

    “
Great.” I replied. I was right about Frank replacing Kristy. I just never would have guessed how soon.

    “
I heard a lot of good things about you,” Frank said, revealing a dimpled smile.

    “
But I haven’t started yet.”

   
Daniel and Frank exchanged a knowing glance—as if they were in on some unsaid, inside joke. I tried to make nothing of it. Daniel excused himself, mumbling something about a Splenda shipment. I took a seat in Frank’s office. He wasted no time giving me the 411.

    “
Daniel gave me some background on the teaching staff. Of them, Jack Lang and Michael Strumm are the only veterans. You, another two teachers, and a fitness instructor are new to A.O.S.”

   
I wanted to mention to Frank that he, too, was new to A.O.S., but that would have been stating the obvious.

    “
You mentioned to Daniel you wanted to teach English?” he asked.

    “
Yes.”

   
He glanced at what must have been my resume. “Art degree, huh?” Placing the resume on his desk, he leaned forward.    

    “
You’re teaching English. And an elective.”

    “
That’s great.”

   
It was great—great to be teaching subject matter that was more up my alley.

    “
I have a law degree myself,” Frank beamed.

    “
Really. Where from?”

    “
Yale.”

   
A Yale law school graduate with no teaching background, supervising teachers in a Podunk farm town? Clearly, he didn’t get the job because of his resume. Right?

   
Daniel went to Yale.

   
Oh, what a coinkydink.

Chapter 4

Program

   
I had the weekend to get my act together and prep for the first day of class. But I wasn’t going to prep if it meant hunkering down in my dorm room. If there was anything more depressing than spending the weekend in a windowless cell, it was spending the weekend in a windowless cell doing schoolwork.

   
I ventured out into the light of day. Undulating ripples of heat greeted me. L.A. had heat waves, but it was nothing like this. Back home, I could expect an occasional cool gust of air blowing in from the Pacific. In these God-forsaken flatlands, however, there was no cool breeze to offset the misery. Besides the unbearable heat, I noticed the familiar, pungent smell of manure.

   
I scanned the grounds for human life. Preoccupied with tasks and therefore ignoring me, students and residential staff milled about. Presiding over them, a tall, muscular man in a polo shirt and shorts jogged past. I learned later he was Tom Eccleston, A.O.S.’s Program Director. With a homespun, no-nonsense attitude, Tom was a director in the classic sense. He oversaw residential and logistical staff to keep the students fed, exercised, and housed. He was old school. And that—at least on paper, was a good thing.

   
Glancing at the group, I marveled at how these students, a couple of them well over three hundred pounds, could keep pace with the staff—and in oppressive, fry-an-egg-on-the-asphalt heat. They didn’t seem to break into a sweat, either.

   
Maybe it was the dry heat.

   
The Admin building was unlocked, and I had a key to my office. At least I’d have windows to look out while I got busy with paperwork. After doing a little furniture rearranging and sprucing up, I pored over teacher edition textbooks, literature guides, and previous teachers’ binders. By the look of the number of binders stacked on my desk, two if not three teachers preceded me. One teacher became the interim Academic Director until Kristy Reinhart came along. Then, I figured, said teacher moved away or got a better paying gig. By the looks of the handwriting, the other nameless educators were probably fresh out of college when they took on A.O.S. Badly executed lessons, misspelled notes to themselves—no doubt they went on to bigger and better things.

   
Kristy went on to bigger and better things.

   
The question I asked myself was, why such a huge turnaround? Back at Franklin, teachers came and went. But that was over the course of four and a half years. Here at the Academy, teachers came and went every season, and sometimes in droves. Why was that?

   
I wasn’t planning on leaving after one semester. Maybe there were unseen challenges, and maybe I was unprepared to handle both a more rigorous curriculum and a student population with a lot on their plate—so to speak. But I was determined to be a part of this school for years.

   
Well, at least until I earned my full teaching credential.

   
Most of my classes would be in language arts, and given that the materials at my disposal were heavily slanted towards a literature-based curriculum, that was what I was going to teach. For the first time in my teacher life, I wasn’t going to focus on English composition. For the here and now, I wasn’t going to have my students write essay after essay after essay. Well, maybe a few essays. But I wasn’t about to exhaust my time or my students’ time in overcorrecting and micromanaging their work. Somehow, in some way, I was going to make English fun.

   
Here was the thing: For years I had wanted to teach a “regular” high school class—meaning, a class that wasn’t modified for learning disabled students; a class that wasn’t an elementary class in disguise because the kids were five or six grade levels behind; a class that didn’t consist of taking the bus all day or learning how to count change.

   
Here was my opportunity. The chance of a lifetime. And I was going to run with it.

   
I joined the rest of the living in the cafeteria for lunch. Daniel wasn’t there—or anyone else I recognized. Two athletic-looking female staff members, one about twenty and the other a little older, were ahead of me in line. Buffalo meatloaf was the entrée of the hour. The younger one noticed me. Smiling, she leaned in.

    “
You know, only students are allowed one serving of controlled foods. Staff can come back for seconds.”

   
The other woman nudged her. “Or more!”

   
Were they joking with me because I looked like I’d go for seconds? Come to think of it, I did notice staff sneaking behind the counter to grab another helping or two. I glanced at the meatloaf before me. The small slab of brownish-gray meat didn’t seem filling, let alone appetizing, but I thought I should make do with one serving. Besides, I would have felt awful if I gave myself a pass in front of my paunchy pupils.

   
I sat alone at the far end of a staff-designated table. A few more staff in T-shirts and shorts sat off to the side, enjoying lunch while surveying the room for any adolescent mischief. While most of the students sat talking quietly among themselves, a few of the more daring were gathered around the salad bar. Partaking in all the fresh fruit and veggies they could pile onto their plates, the kids then slathered the fruit with as much fat free yogurt the plates could structurally hold.

   
Then, came the Splenda—packets upon packets of them. An obvious remedy for an enormous sweet tooth, the Splenda usage at this place defied comprehension. Okay, I’d be the first to admit, I was guilty of using too many of those yellow packets myself. But we were talking ten to twelve packets. Tops. And that was to sweeten my coffee. These sugar-deprived youngsters would go through twenty to fifty packets in one sitting. They added it to their tea. They added it to their water. They added it to their already-sweetened yogurt!

   
God help the school if it should ever run out.

   
There was another thing I noticed: Students were popping little brown cubes into their mouths as they ate. I learned that these cubes were called Viactiv, sugar-filled chocolate chews supposedly fortified with a dozen vitamins and minerals. I thought it was odd that the kids were given supplemental vitamins disguised as chocolate. I mean, whom were they kidding?

   
With lunch over, I headed back to the dorm. I noticed a commotion in the grassy area between the girls’ dorm and the Admin building. A group of female students were hugging and talking to a curly-haired woman in her thirties. She wasn’t skinny like the rest of the staff. Zaftig, yes, but she wasn’t a fatso.

   
If Tom Eccleston was the man-behind-the-scenes, day-to-day director of A.O.S., Sheila Skolnick was its star. Fresh from a stint at one of the school’s parent company’s summer fat camps, she apparently had a following. I was to later find out that Sheila was the Clinical Director of the school, and thus, the head of all its counselors. When the crew of ABC’s Extreme Makeover showed up later that fall, she became A.O.S.’s pitch-woman. But while she was surrounded by fans and handlers, I didn’t want to intrude.