The Last Teacher (3 page)

“Did you hear the news?” Al Flanagan asked her. When Ray looked at him with a blank expression, he said, “Liechtenstein disbanded!” When her eyes remained blank, he yelled, “Liechtenstein! It was one thing when Maldives and San Marino disbanded, but Liechtenstein? Are you kidding me!”

Harry Rousner yawned and said, “Maldives is actually bigger than Liechtenstein, both in terms of size and population.  If you’re going to get upset, Liechtenstein isn’t that big of a deal.”

“Suddenly, the Biology teacher knows everything!” Flanagan shouted. “Well, did you know this now makes six countries that have officially disbanded, now that the end of mankind is in sight?”

“And?” Rousner said.

Flanagan eyed the Math teacher up as if not caring about Liechtenstein dissolving into nothing was reason enough to fight him.

“And soon it will be seven,” he growled.  “Then eight. Then nine.”

Rousner yawned and went back to reading his paper.

“How long until the Unites States disbands?” Flanagan shouted. “Huh, Mr. Smart Know-it-all?”

Barbara Wachowski opened the door to the teacher’s lounge, saw the state her Math teacher was in, and told Harry to leave Flannigan alone.

Rather than defend himself, Harry only shook his head and sighed.

The principal walked from sofa to sofa, acting as though she were simply assessing how many teachers she had left.  But she always kept an eye on Ray.  After sitting down next to her English teacher, Wachowski leaned to the side and said, “Did you tell your students they could be anything they wanted?”

“Of course.”

“Ray,” the principal said, frowning so hard that her eyes almost disappeared.  “We’re going extinct.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t give me that. You know what I mean. You can’t tell kids they can be anything they want to be when the entire human race is fading away.”

“Oh.”

“Stop it with that,” Wachowski said.  “You’re making it more difficult than it has to be.”

“Do you want me to tell them they can’t be anything they want?”

“No, of course not.”

Ray said, “So, I shouldn’t tell them they can be anything they want, and I also shouldn’t tell them they can’t be anything they want?”

Harry Rousner looked up from his paper, opened his mouth, then bit his lip to keep from saying something that would get him in trouble.  Al Flannigan was pacing back and forth across the room, trying to figure out all the ways that Liechtenstein disbanding might have an impact on his life.

When the principal didn’t answer, Ray said, “I should just let them figure everything out for themselves?  Instead of trying to help them?  Instead of
teaching
them?”

“Exactly!” the principal said, beaming now that there was no confusion.

“Look at it this way, Ray,” Harry Rousner said. “They have to figure everything else out for themselves. Why should this be any different?”

Al Flanagan yelled, “Ask those kids in Liechtenstein if they can be anything they want!”

The next day, three more of her students were absent, and she knew she would never see them again. Zack Childers, Farah Fran, and Kevin Mathiason were, in all likelihood, on their way south with their families. She imagined them sitting in the backseat of the respective cars they were passengers in, each of them reading one of the books she had assigned to the class.

But instead of only having five students remaining in her class, their were seven. Two new faces looked at her as if they had just as little an idea of why they were there as she did.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Ms. Phillips.”

“But feel free to call her Ray,” Eric said. “Like a man.”

“Thanks, Eric.” Then, to the two new faces, “What are your names?”

“Shawn Kaprosky,” one said.

“Debbie Vandenphal,” the other said.

“And where are you normally at this time of day?” she asked.

“We’re Juniors,” Shawn said weakly, almost mumbling.

He didn’t have to add that he and Debbie were the only two Juniors left at the high school. Already, there were no freshman or sophomores. Shawn and Debbie were the last juniors. And now, Ray only had five students who were seniors.

“Our normal teacher didn’t show up today,” Debbie said, trying not to sniffle.  “Principal Wachowski told us to come here instead.”

So, in addition to the three students who must have left in a small caravan, the only other English teacher remaining in their school had also departed.  While she liked to imagine her kids reading during their trip south, she doubted the teacher was thinking about the school work she had assigned or about her students.  If she were thinking about either of those things, Ray thought, she wouldn’t have been able to leave them in the first place.

“Very well,” she said. “We’re happy to have you.”

She stood there for a moment trying to think of what to teach. Also, she tried to figure out which student, one still there or one who had already left, had complained to their parents about being told they could be anything they wanted.  Was it her little troublemaker, sitting so smugly in the back corner?  It seemed unlikely to her.

She knew she needed to say something before Eric took over.  But the two new students wouldn’t have read any of the material that her own kids were supposed to have completed. It also wouldn’t be fair to her original students—the ones who still showed up each day—if she strayed from that day’s planned lesson.

Impatient with the silence, Eric looked at Shawn and Debbie and called out, “Just because you’re juniors doesn’t mean you can’t be anything you want. You can be anything you want to be in this world. Right, Ms. Phillips?”

Ray kept her groan to herself.

“Thanks, Eric.”

The other English teacher wasn’t the only faculty member to quit. In the teacher’s lounge the next morning, Principal Wachowski told the other assembled teachers that five others had also left. The old Music teacher, whatever her name had been, was gone. So was the Art teacher. So was Al Flanagan.

“Who’s going to scare the beejesus out of the kids now?” Harry Rousner said. Then, looking at Ray, he pointed and added, “You’re it.”

“Al was a nice guy,” Ray said. “He was just scared about what the future holds.”

The principal sighed and said, “Okay, enough of that kind of talk.”

“What kind of talk?”

“The kind that had your students’ parents calling me to complain about someone insisting they can still be anything they want, even as governments are disbanding, the Nobel committee is gone, and there’s no more NHL.”

“No more hockey?” Harry said.

The principal nodded.  “They announced it this morning. The league is folding.”

Harry shook his head and grumbled curses to himself.

“I’m not going to apologize for trying to inspire my students,” Ray said.

Principal Wachowski moved to the door, ready for the conversation to be over.  “Inspire them all you want.  Just don’t lie to them.”

Ray opened her mouth to say something else, then thought better of it and kept silent. It wasn’t the possibility of getting reprimanded or even fired that worried her. The junior class was almost nonexistent and had already relocated to her classroom. It was now obvious to her that her job wouldn’t exist in another year. In a couple months, she would be out of work, regardless of whether she spoke her peace or not.

No, she kept silent because she was wondering where this would all end. How many more students would disappear before they gave up pretenses of Fourth Period versus Fifth Period? How many more teachers would vanish before the principal would throw a couple kids in Ray’s classroom and tell her to teach them whatever she wanted, no matter if it had anything to do with English or Math or whatever else she could think of?

“Which brings me to my next point,” the principal said, as if reading Ray’s mind.  Wachowski’s head was the only part of her still remaining in the doorway. “We might have to start combining classes. Like I said, we’ve had a few teachers skip town. We’ll probably have more do the same. I know a few of you had new students yesterday. Just keep up the good work and we’ll get through this.”

She disappeared for a second.  Then her face reappeared, leaning into the doorway once more, and she added, “And for the eighth time, do not say anything that makes one of your students’ parents call me with a complaint.  We have enough problems as it is.”

She brought the television cart into her classroom so she could watch the news along with her students. It was all they were going to be thinking and talking about later in the day anyway, so she might as well view the broadcast along with them.

At first, the television showed only static.

“I think it might be broken,” she mumbled, clicking buttons on the remote control.

But then Eric came over, switched two of the cables behind the TV, and the picture came in clear and crisp.

“Thank you, Eric.”

He bowed and went back to his seat.

On the screen, a collection of men and women in white lab coats sat on either side of a wooden podium.  Behind them, on a tarp hung up from one side of the room to the other, were the names of various corporations and universities around the world.

Even as the Survival Bill was beginning to ramp up, a collective effort to mass produce food processors, power generators, and incinerators for each family in the country, the government had also funded a massive study between twenty different universities and thirty different scientific groups, all sharing their experiments, all trying to find a cure for what was causing the world’s newborns to be blocked from participating in the world around them. It was the largest study of its kind, lasting nearly a decade. Once a year, the group had released its findings—its total lack of progress in identifying a way for newborns to be able to speak and move.

This was the ninth and final year of the organized study. The final report. The one in which everyone hoped and prayed that scientists would announce they had found a way to reverse the new affliction so that mankind didn’t die its slow and gradual death.

Upon receiving a signal from someone off camera, a man with a white beard, sitting in the first seat to the right of the podium, stood from his chair and moved to the bundle of microphones.

The man coughed twice, then sipped his water.  He opened his mouth, scratched his neck, then took another drink from his glass.

“Get on with it!” Eric yelled from his desk.

Looking down at his notes, the lead scientist said, “I’m terribly sorry to announce that it is this group’s finding, after nine years of work, with hundreds of scientists collaborating from all over the world… of course, we won’t stop trying to find a cure. We’ll never give up… But I’m very sad to announce”—

All of the air sank out of Ray’s lungs.  Her head started spinning and she felt like she were going to pass out. Gripping the sides of the desk she was sitting at, she forced herself to look at the other faces in the classroom. Shawn, her new junior, was staring at the screen while tears made their way, painfully slowly, down his cheeks. Debbie, the other junior, was lurching back and forth as she cried. All four of the senior girls were crying, taking turns between hugging each other and hugging their own knees to their chests. The only one who wasn’t in tears was Eric Tates, her class clown.

She looked at him, silently pleading with him to make a joke, to say something that could turn the sadness into choking laughter.

Instead, he shrugged and said, “I want to be the scientist who finds a cure for all of this.” Then, instead of a smile appearing from his mouth, a dribble of snot ran down his nose and onto his lips. He added, “Still think I can be anything I want?”

Following the broadcast, she had let her students leave class as soon as they wanted. If she were their age, she would have skipped the rest of the day and played video games or gone over to a friend’s house or done whatever kids still did to pass the time. Surely, the ways kids goofed off hadn’t changed just because they knew that in fifty or sixty more years, they would be senior citizens without anyone else younger in the world except the remaining Blocks.

She planned an impromptu quiz for them the next day. It wouldn’t be a real quiz, with results that mattered. And the questions wouldn’t require them to have read any of the material she assigned to the class. She planned questions like, “If
The Awakening
were written today, how do you think it would have ended?” and “If Meursault shot a man on the beach today, what do you think the headline in the newspapers would be?”

The quiz forced them to do work, to stay structured and keep up a semblance of normality as the society around them began to erode. But it also let them acknowledge that the Great De-evolution, as scientists were calling it, was a real thing. To her, the quiz seemed like the best of both worlds.

When class started that day, however, there were only three students remaining. Debbie Vandenphal, one of the juniors. Kelly Abraham, the girl who looked out the window each time she wanted to cry. And Eric Tates, her class clown.

“There was another migration last night,” Eric said, as if she needed an explanation for why even more seats were empty.

She figured there would be fewer students. Word in the teacher’s lounge that morning was that Harry Rousner, the Biology teacher, was in one of the cars that was heading south. But only three students remaining? She was sure each of them saw the cringe of pain that made the corners of her mouth curl inward.

“Okay,” she said, nodding her head. “No big deal.” She handed out three copies of the quiz.

“What’s this?” Eric said.

Ray smiled and said, “A pop quiz.”

Before she could say anything else, before she could explain what she intended, Eric groaned, crumbled the paper into a ball, and tossed it across the room. If Zack Childers were still one of her students and not travelling south on a major highway, the quiz would have bounced off the side of his head.

“This is lame,” Eric said. “This is like, what, the tenth quiz we’ve had this year.”

“Eric”—

“No one cares about your stupid quizzes. Give me an F. I don’t care.”

“Eric”—

“Do you think it’ll impact what college I get into?”

Kelly’s eyes darted toward the window and her lip started quivering. Everyone had known, prior to the school year starting, that all of the colleges and universities around the country had already stopped accepting new admissions. Her students’ formal education would end with their high school diploma.

Eric was shaking his head and blinking over and over.

“Are you going to put this on my permanent record?” he said. “Well, let me know if you do. At least something I do will be around forever, right?”

Debbie Vandenphal put her hands to her face and began to tremble.

“Eric, it wasn’t that type of quiz,” Ray said quietly, her words barely audible.

She wanted to explain her intention, to inspire them while acknowledging what was going on around them, to help them get through being a teenager with as little damage as possible. But instead, she said nothing.

“Screw this,” Eric muttered, standing from his desk, hauling his backpack over his shoulder, then walking out of her classroom.

Kelly Abraham was still looking out the window.  Tears were streaming down her cheeks, collecting at her chin, then dripping onto her desk. Debbie Vandenphal’s face was still buried behind her palms.

Ray picked one of the many empty seats, halfway between either girl, and sat down. From where she sat, the teacher’s desk seemed impossibly far away.  Traces of things that had been written on the chalkboard over the years, only to be erased, offered glimpses of a different world.  Sitting there, she tried to think what she would want a teacher to tell her if she were a teenager facing all of the problems they knew were coming their way.

Then, with a sigh, she said, “Class is dismissed.  Have a good day,” and she watched the two girls collect their things and leave, just as Eric had done.