— It’s a sin, chirps the chinless one behind her.
That’s an F for you, Chinless, thinks Mrs. Mochinski. F–!
— Where on earth does it say in this play that Romeo was gay? splutters Mrs. Mochinski.
The class dissolves into a buzzing like she has stumbled into a flight of mosquitoes, an infuriating whine needling every nerve in her body.
Mrs. Mochinski whirls from the board and wheezes out another cough. She slams the play down on her desk, the chalk in her other hand jumps, shatters on the floor. Hands on her hips. — That’s it! I have had it. You people! Stand for prayer please, stand for prayer.
The students rumble and screech their chairs to standing.
— In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen, she says, making the sign of the cross, accidentally chalking her left boob. Then she leads them in the Lord’s Prayer, squinting through her partly closed eyes at them, ready to quash any hijinks.
— So sit down and do your Silent Reading. And by Silent Reading, says Mrs. Mochinski, — I mean Silent and Reading. Stop doodling, Faraday, she says, suddenly remembering her name. — Now that’s a nice waste of paper and ink. Fumiko, she says to goth girl, — Try to stay awake for longer than a minute.
Little Jésus fuckface jumps onto his desk and belches.
At 3:45 p.m., Mrs. Mochinski beetles through the icy school parking lot to her car, yanks open the door and dives into the driver’s seat. Back to her own life. The divorce papers in their neat manila envelope lie on the passenger seat. She left the car unlocked this morning on purpose, hoping someone might steal them. The only thing she cared about this morning. Patrick Furey gone for good, then. A boy she hardly knew in her third-period English class. Grade 12, then. Nearly at the end. Gripping the cold steering wheel, she coughs and coughs, lets the coughs erupt unimpeded, the tears gushing and streaming from her eyes.
Walter
Tuesday morning, with the memo with its bullshit instructions sent out to every teacher, the news of Patrick Furey’s suicide flinging itself against the bars of its cage, Walter strides busily through the school hallways, checking the bulletin boards for inappropriate material as a way to avoid his own office.
Finally in his office, he snacks on a power bar and sips tomato juice. He sucks up the juice too fast and droplets splash out his nose onto the keyboard. He stares at the bloody drops, breathes the stale air in his little pod of an office. Walter’s back crawling because that dead boy is sitting in that chair, still and silent, sweater resolutely inside out. Walter keeps his back to the dead boy, slides the binders back into their correct places above his desk, but it makes no difference: the surface of his desk, the computer screen with its hundreds of rows of tiny folder icons, are a multiplying landfill. Patrick Furey’s tiny folder icon smoulders on the screen, a disorderly tic, a rogue wave, a cigarette butt screwed into the middle of a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Walter clicks the dead boy’s folder icon open. Hobbies: Likes skateboarding. Walter prints a copy for the parents.
This Tuesday. This Monday that refuses to end. Every day a stretch of endless Mondays.
— Have you solved your problem then, Walter whispers to the dead boy. — Awesome.
He leans his chin on his fist.
The radiator ticks.
He stuffs The Pride and the Joy deep into the outside pocket of his briefcase. He will abandon the book at a bus stop on the way home. Maybe someone will read it and it will change his life. Or drive him further to the brink. It will end up in a landfill. As a hunk of trash in the sea. A skateboard in a river.
When Walter finally unlocks the front door of their house Tuesday evening — Max still muscling around at work making phone calls, writing agendas for Wednesday morning— the first thing Walter does is gobble down one of the two foil-wrapped Grandpa burgers with added bacon and cheese he bought on the way home, the warm meaty treasures at the bottom of the paper A&W bag, one for him and one for Max. He unpacks the burger, unhinges his jaws and bites into it, one bite so big the burger he draws away from his face is only a quarter its original size, a chubby crescent moon. He chews through the juicy meat patties, wipes ketchup, meat-juice drips, bacon fat from his beard with a paper napkin, slurps the stringy, wet lettuce splattered on his cheek. Lieutenant Fong leaps onto the table and perches next to his plate, her tail whisking, head cocking side-to-side as she assesses the waning burger, the cardboard container of disappearing french fries percolating with grease. Walter takes a long, freezing slurp of his chocolate shake, the ice cream chilling his tongue, the roof of his mouth, his throat; he waits for the fat from the burger to give him a great big hug from the inside, but today the hug doesn’t come.
The cat yawns, her mouth bristling with fangs. He tries to pet her, hopes she might curl into his lap, but she squirts away from his outstretched hand.
When he’s crammed the last of the burger into his mouth, landslid the rest of the french fries down his throat, he scoops up the chocolate shake and screeches his chair away from the table.
He unfolds himself onto the carpet in the basement den; his upper half releases so quickly he falls straight backward and his head bounces. He lies on the carpet, his head bloated, his joints hardening, tears streaming from his eyes, pooling in his ears. A very nice pose for a man of fifty-two, only three years away from retirement. How terrific for a man whose job it is to advise young people about career choices, course schedule timetabling, how to participate in the world as upstanding citizens, and how not to kill themselves. The cat licking her anus right next to his face, her leg sticking into the air like she’s offering it for supper.
His heels grilling on the heat register, he can smell sweaty stink billowing out the collar of his shirt. He reaches for Lieutenant Fong’s left paw. She lets him take it in his hand, she spills onto the floor next to his face, her body hot and solid. He strokes the pads’ cool, soft leather, the furry knuckles. She pretends to sleep, her eyelids slightly parted. She presses her other leathery palm against his chin. Listening to the furnace sighing, belching through the vent at his feet, smelling his own shame, eyes sticky with tears, resting his hand on Lieutenant Fong’s back as she clambers up onto his stomach and curls herself into a warm turd.
His stomach flip-flops. He has to tug open his eyes, gummed together as they are.
He lurches to standing, Lieutenant Fong swinging to the carpet, a claw hooked into his sleeve, and he lumbers to the kitchen to eat the second Grandpa burger, the second set of french fries he’s stowed in the warm oven. Max won’t be home for ages. And burgers don’t taste good cold.
Walter is not the dead boy’s mother. He is not the dead boy’s father. He was just his guidance counsellor. What was the last thing he said to the dead boy? Good luck. Or Perk up.
Max
Today is Tuesday. The day is one elongated blob. A temporal Möbius loop that makes him so dizzy he might vomit.
Saturday night Max the school principal drives his parents to a female impersonator show. He inhales his cigarette to the glorious, bitter end, grinds it into the ashtray on their porch, then ushers them into his car.
— Mother, you’ve slammed the seatbelt in the door. Mother, the door, Mother, no, the door, your seatbelt. Right. Good.
And his car spins off into the snow.
Before he leaves home to pick them up, he pecks Walter goodbye on the top of his thinning curly black hair, Walter haloed by the lamp next to the couch.
— Mmm hmm, says Walter. Walter wearing his bifocals and thumbing pages in his novel, chewing his moustache. Not until Max’s key is turning in the lock does he hear Walter yell, — Bye, Maxie!
Max would rather