Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. ZZ Packer

and fun. Lynnea looked around the classroom to see if others were as lost as she. A man who had previously introduced himself to Lynnea simply as Robert the Cop stared at Evelyn, then winced as though he’d been asked for a urine sample.

      “Miss Evelyn,” Robert the Cop said, his hands holding a box of imaginary no-nonsense. “I’m a cop. I’m new at this teaching business. You gotta break it down for me. What do you mean by ‘disappear’?”

      “Disappear. You know. To go away, to vanish.”

      Lynnea sighed and looked down, watching a roach scramble across the floor. Then Jake Bonza, the man second-in-charge, a teacher for twenty years, took over. “What Ms. Evelyn Hardy means is this: one a y’all is going to pretend to be the teacher. The rest of y’all are going to abandon your adult selves and act like students. Not the goody-two-shoe students, but the kinda fucked-up students you know y’all were or wanted to be.” He paused, looking at them as if to sear his words into their heads before he continued, “This’ll prepare you for the freaks of nature who’ll throw spit wads at you while you try to take attendance.”

      Bonza browsed the room, flashing an ornery grin. “Yeah.” He nodded. “We’ll see which one a y’alls cracks and bleeds. Which one a y’alls bends over and takes it from behind.”

      DURING THE training sessions, adults playing students took their roles as miscreants to heart: they got out of their seats, wanting to pee and eat and smoke: Robert the Cop stood and lit a Marlboro while some pink farm girl from Vermont went through her lesson on subtraction in tears, her shaky hand gripping the chalk so hard it broke. They’d ask questions like how much wood could a woodchuck chuck; one teacher felt liberated enough to discharge a sulfurous fart. Lynnea sat with her chin resting on her desk, eyes trained on the chalkboard, refusing to believe her students would act this way, refusing to participate in team-spirit badness.

      But after eight weeks of role-play, Lynnea was in front of a real classroom. Freshman English. After she’d written her name on the chalkboard, a tall boy, the color of a paper bag, hitched up his droopy jeans and exclaimed, “Two G’s, yo!” splaying two fingers like a sign of victory, the other hand in an arthritic semblance of a “G.” The replies were immediate and high-pitched. “Yeaah boyeee!” “What up, yo!” Then a trio found each other from the maze of Lynnea’s carefully organized seats and high-fived elaborately before leisurely sitting back down, happily grabbing their crotches.

      Throughout the first day, she kept hearing this phrase; students in the hallway yelling, “2 G’s! 2 G’s!” She finally pulled two girls aside and asked what it meant. The girls looked at each other, tottering coltishly in their clunky Day-Glo shoes, all enlarged eyes and grins, muffling giggles on each other’s shoulders. Finally one girl composed herself enough to explain, “It mean two grand. Two thousand dollars. Like the Class of 2000. Get it?”

      Lynnea nodded her head quickly, feigning remembrance of something she’d momentarily forgotten. She had wondered what the Class of 2000 would call themselves when she and people she called friends gathered in the Taco Bell parking lot to celebrate their own graduation. “What’re they gonna call themselves? The class of Double Nothing?”