Some Time Later

When we catch up to him again, it is one year later.

He teaches English at a high school in a nearby city. The commute is tolerable. He's been known to remark, offhandedly, that this "is the only job [he's] ever had that doesn't feel like a job."

On Tuesday, while he was walking around his classroom, gently reminding some students to keep working and others to keep breathing, he distinctly overheard a boy saying, "Put it in your mouth."

There were several boys looking at one girl who had a smear of blue gum stuck on her desk. One of them--the one next to her--noticed that they'd caught his attention and explained that "Someone put gum under [his] desk and [he] accidentally put [his] finger in it so [he] wiped it off" on her desk.

So it goes.

The next logical step was to ensure that someone test the gum.

"Put it in your mouth." From many voices.

"I'll give you a dollar."

"Me, too!"

"That's, like, five dollars!"

"Do it!"

He was on his way to the supply closet for a roll of paper towels and some cleaner when his aide remarked that this was "like that girl who ate the goldfish in [his] class last--."

"I don't want to talk about that," he said quickly. "I'm still a little bit worried that that will come back to haunt me."

The situation, not the fish, is what he meant.

Students near the aide clamored for a story about a girl and a goldfish (and extra credit, but they didn't know about that), but the aide knew his place and kept quiet.

He grabbed the cleaner and a roll of brown paper towels and walked over to the situation just in time to hear an assortment of "She did it!"s and "Gross!"es from her hangers-on.

"Chew it!" someone shouted, but she had already spit a small shred of gum into the trash can by his desk.

"That wasn't part of the deal!" someone else fired back.

Indeed.