The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  I excuse myself from the classroom, promising to return quickly, though honestly, I want to get away from all the bodies. As I approach the guidance office, I decide to pop in and talk to the school’s one counsellor. Her door is open, and she’s wearing sweatpants today.

  “Hey Liz,” I say. “Congrats on the Senior Girls’ win last week.”

  “It was all them.” She swivels her chair to face me. “They’re a hardworking bunch of kids. Really put in the effort to improve.” Volleyball trophies decorate her office shelves. “Can I help you with something?” she asks.

  “Well, I have a quick question…I guess I just wanted a second opinion. Say one of your girls was showing signs of an eating disorder. Would you confront her about it, or…?”

  “That can get serious,” Liz says. “We had a player at an away game once who vomited so violently it ruptured her esophagus. We had to take her to the ER in Moncton.”

  “Yikes…I guess you’re right. I should maybe look into this further…” I’m thinking of the kids back in my classroom, all moving together towards a shared goal.

  “Which student is it? What’s her name?”

  I hesitate. It strikes me that to give her name is to single her out—to separate her from the others. Exposing her in a way she hasn’t asked for.

  * * *

  Over the weekend, I go with my parents to GoodLife because my dad has signed us all up for discount memberships he found on Kijiji. We walk purposefully into the lobby, where we are suddenly unsure of what to do with ourselves, never having been inside a fitness centre before. Until now, my exercising has consisted only of leisurely outdoor badminton games and brisk, anxious walks on the Halifax Waterfront. My mom signs up for a spin class, and later, disappointed, tells us that spinning is only another word for indoor cycling. My dad experiments with weight machines before a gym attendant hurries over and tells him to stop.

  I escape to an elliptical machine, such an odd contraption—it doesn’t translate to real life the way a treadmill or exercise bike does. I’m worrying I might fall off and become tangled in the equipment’s swivelling parts, when I see Jessica immediately ahead of me, climbing onto a treadmill in sporty spandex. There’s an episode of Full House where eldest daughter D.J. is invited to a pool party and, with the goal of looking better in a bathing suit, she starts over-exercising. She doesn’t eat for three days. When offered cake, D.J. cringe-smiles, opts for a homemade water popsicle instead, and says, “Who needs cake when you can lick ice on a stick?” Laugh track. Later in the episode, she gets off a StairMaster and dizzily lurches to her knees, before her sister yells for help. Bob Saget, one of the show’s many father figures, has a concerned talk with her. “Deej,” he says, “I want you to promise me that you’re going to eat healthy and exercise the right way.” D.J. never skips a meal again. If only I could deliver concerned talks with Bob Saget’s soft-spoken ease. If only sitcom writers would tell me what to say. I could cure every eating disorder in the school district.

  I wonder if Liz has called Jessica to the office or telephoned her parents. Does she know it was me who reported her? On the treadmill next to her is Nose Ring, who has traded in her signature hoodie for a boxy T-shirt of the sort you’d be given at your dad’s company picnic. I hadn’t realized they were friends outside of class. The gym has a wall-to-wall mirror, and I imagine the girls spotting my reflection and glaring at me, raising their hands to give me two simultaneous middle fingers. I leave the elliptical under the pretence of buying a bottle of water. I imagine going to school on Monday and finding an empty, boycotted classroom, and scrawled on the white board: Mind your own goddamned business. I imagine a workshop mutiny, where every student disagrees with every single thing I say—all nineteen of them sitting at their desks, frowning and crossing their arms and keeping their heads statue-still, the twins texting each other to say that I am the worst teacher they’ve ever had.

  * * *

  The school lobby forms a T-shape with its intersecting hallways. At the top part of the T, inside a display case about nine feet long, is the plaster woman, wired together and suspended with string. It’s a body cast without a body, displaying its hollow eggshell insides. They’ve installed it in a sidestroke swimming position, with one arm stretching forward and the other trailing back, bent realistically at the joints. Her outside is painted in streaky maroon and powder blue—the class couldn’t agree on a colour. She shimmers garishly under two coats of varnish. Instead of clothing, she wears glitter that spells out lines from the students’ poems in confrontational block letters and alluring italics. I have to lean in close to the glass to read them, and they are all about acceptance and hope and loving your body—lines from poems so sentimental that the students themselves, when forced to read their work aloud to the class, blush and stammer, and admit to having written them the morning they were due.

  I go left, with the intention of heading to my classroom. It’s early, so the hallway is empty except for one caretaker and one chair outside the guidance office, where Jessica is sitting, back straight, face so flushed it looks like she’s been running.

  I would really like to walk back in the direction I came, but I force myself to move forwards. Jessica turns towards the sound of my footsteps.

  “Hey, Jessica. How are you this morning?” I ask gently.

  Jessica blinks and stares wordlessly at me, processing. “How am I?” she says in a quiet voice, and then turns to face her lap. “I can’t believe you did that…What were you thinking?”

  I wait for a second before answering, wondering if there’s any possibility she’s referring to something else. But there isn’t. They would have told her about the poem. How could she not put it together that it was me?

  “I’m so sorry, Jessica. I just didn’t have any other option.” And this is true, isn’t it? It’s what I’ve been repeating in my head. I choose my words carefully, searching for something compassionate and real. “I’m worried about you.”

  “I don’t have an eating disorder,” she says, spitting out the word don’t.

  “It’s okay,” I begin, crouching down to meet her at face level and lowering my voice. I’m trying to project empathy, to show her that I’m not just a teacher but someone she can be honest with. It was, after all, my classroom where she felt comfortable enough to share a poem about being broken, ending in the line “I don’t know what to do.”

  But she interrupts. “No. You’re completely wrong,” she says. Her eyebrows squeeze together incredulously, and she flings up her hands. “Nur is the one who has anorexia.”

  I stand abruptly and feel the slow rush of my blood awakening. A light-headedness. A clarity. In the hallway around the corner, behind protective glass, is Nose Ring—Nur’s—hand, narrow and bony and now replicated in plaster. When confronted with this class project, she wasn’t eager to coat her body in wet bandages. On my suggestion, she had pushed up the sleeve of her hoodie to unveil a hand so small it could only hold a single letter—the d in the word steroid. Not even a word that’s meaningful to her situation. The rest of the letters spread down someone else’s arm.

  I feel nauseated. “I’m sorry,” I say. I look down helplessly at Jessica. She is wiping her eyes. “I’ll fix it. I’ll tell them it was my mistake.”

  “It really doesn’t matter at this point,” Jessica says.

  “Of course it does,” I insist.

  “You could have just stayed out of it. Now she hates me because the school told my mom and then she called Nur’s parents. Now Nur is literally living at the hospital.” Jessica is crying openly now, her words all jumbling together. “Something is wrong with her liver. But my parents think I have a problem. You know, you could have said something to me instead of going and telling the school. Why would you do that? We were figuring it out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, though I might as well have said nothing. “She’ll be okay,” I tell Jessi
ca, hoping this is true, though it already feels like a lie. Because I know the way these things go.

  * * *

  At my parents’ house, my father sits in front of his laptop, eating unsalted almonds from his cupped palm. “Monounsaturated,” he tells me proudly. He pushes his weight back against his chair and crunches an almond. “Look here, Nina.” He motions for me to lean forward to see the screen. It’s playing a video of somebody’s echocardiogram. Because it resembles a fetal ultrasound—black and white, blotchy and blurry, throbbing and glitching—I find myself searching for a human shape.

  At what point of starvation does your heart start to weaken? Does it matter how small your arteries are when you are only a teenager? Or maybe it’s more about chemicals—mineral deficiencies, electrolyte imbalances, things English teachers don’t know about.

  “That’s neat, Dad,” I say, but he can tell I’m not paying much attention. I told him what happened with the girls. He’s already given me a lengthy, sitcom-quality concerned talk.

  “Nina, we have no control over others’ decisions,” he says now, repeating what he said before.

  “You could not have fixed her health issues…

  “The girl would have gone to the hospital regardless…

  “We have to let others choose their own path…”

  There’s an image in my mind of two girls, one dark-haired and one blonde, heads pressed together as they apply plaster, as they pack a bowl, as they sketch pentagrams onto their arms, as they share sheet music.

  I’ll later hear from Liz that Nur left the hospital using a walker, and that a month later she checked back in again. She’ll lose muscle and bone mass. Jessica will organize a fundraiser to help Nur’s family cover her hospital expenses. Nur’s organs will fail one at a time: liver, kidneys, heart. Jessica will enroll in the nursing program at Dalhousie. By then I’ll have left teaching for good, without telling anyone the reason: I don’t want this kind of responsibility. It feels like a job for somebody both more and less human than I am.

  The plaster woman will hang in the school hallway for years.

  Everything You Need to Know

  DOES EVERY TEACHER BEGIN a new semester longing for the students from the semester before? In January, I meet my new Grade 10 English class. They look identical to last semester’s students, gangly and implausibly young. In my head, a dimpled Matthew McConaughey from Dazed and Confused drawls his yucky line about high school girls: I get older. They stay the same age.

  The class is almost entirely female, some in sweatpants, some in full faces of makeup, some in both. It seems unfathomable that I will ever learn all their names, even though I have done so for every class I’ve taught for more than seven years. That’s maybe 1,400 names learned and mostly forgotten. With every year, the learning gets harder and the forgetting gets easier. The students are watching me intently. Because I don’t know their names yet, they’re like a single entity, a cluster of amoebas that were short on resources, so they blobbed together into one multinucleate organism. The organism doesn’t speak. It just stares.

  Is it something about the room? There’s this radiator that makes a noise at unpredictable intervals. The first time, I tell them it reminds me of a ghost rattling its chains, and we all chuckle at its horror-movie quality, but after that we never chuckle again. We have forgotten how. I distribute scrap paper for them to jot down answers to icebreaker questions (What’s your favourite TV show? If you could be any fictional character, who would you be and why?). The radiator howls over me as I’m instructing them to write down their pronouns, and for the rest of the semester I will worry about whether I’m misgendering them. When I tell a joke, a girl wearing purple-red lipstick smiles, but I sense a lurking snideness. Usually a classroom is a good place to tell a joke: the audience is captive, and the bar for humour is incredibly low.

  The radiator moans to life again. Each time I must decide whether to compete with the sound or wait awkwardly for it to finish. I pose an open-ended question about what everyone is reading, and nobody responds, though they seem to be listening. I answer the question myself. The radiator drowns me out, knocking and clanging, so persistent in its interruptions that I’m concerned about how much I’m repeating myself. What if I don’t get through the lesson plan? This does not turn out to be a problem, because the students don’t participate. In five minutes, we zip through material that was meant to take up twenty.

  During the stretch break, nobody stretches. Nobody speaks. They scroll hypnotically down their phone screens until I tell them the break is over. Perhaps they are googling tips on how to make friends. I itch to check my own phone but resist, because I want to create an environment conducive to learning. Besides, my only notifications are for Old Navy marketing emails. I flip through my notes, underlining randomly, trying to appear busy and purposeful. On the attendance sheet, I draw an amoeba in black pen. I add a speech bubble next to it but leave the bubble empty.

  Then the students are back to staring at me, waiting. I know what they’re thinking: Teach us something. Teach us something we don’t already know.

  * * *

  To be fair, it’s only that one class. My other classes chatter away and ask lots of questions: “Miss, do we need to bring our textbooks with us?” “Miss, how many words does the timed essay have to be?” “Miss, can I leave early to catch my bus?” Teaching Grade 10 English, though, is like the grinding of a rusted machine.

  When I get home, I light up a joint before I even take my jacket off. Then I sit on my bed, hunched like a goblin over my laptop, peering at seven browser tabs and listening to audio clips to learn the correct pronunciation of Goethe and Beaux Arts. I search for energetic ways to frame the material, and for tactics that will force the Grade 10s to participate. I review the course schedule with dread: How will we ever get through the debate assignment?

  I try small groups: “Okay, all of you wearing hats, over in that corner. Anyone who has been to the COWS ice cream factory in P.E.I., you can take that spot by the window.” They drag themselves to their respective corners as though they’re walking through the shallow end of a swimming pool. I assign them roles—a trick I learned from Toastmasters: Facilitator, Spokesperson, Note Taker, Info Gatherer. Occasionally I see an animated face, but it quickly settles back into impassivity. And when I have each group’s Spokesperson talk, their ideas are delivered in monotone, using the minimum number of words.

  “Very succinct response,” I say, wishing for somebody to say more, to tell a joke or an anecdote. To fill up the space.

  The rest of my time is taken up with professional development seminars, faculty meetings, supervision of extracurricular activities. I squeeze in Toastmasters meetings when I can, but even those are meant to improve my teaching. When people ask about my hobbies—which is a question that should be retired after middle school—I have to invent them. Geocaching, I say, though I don’t know what that is. Crocheting, I say, though I find crocheting more difficult than math.

  Eventually, when I’m exhausted from teaching prep, I give up and pull out the pink-and-gold cookie tin that contains my weed. After smoking, I lie on my side under two comforters and the electric throw, too tired to even google anything.

  And then time collapses, and it’s morning again and on to the next class.

  * * *

  In early February, I’m reading aloud to the Grade 10 English class from George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.” I didn’t have time to review it thoroughly in advance, and as I read, I realize how often he uses the phrase yellow faces to refer to the Burmese. Yellow faces…yellow faces. I’m not even absorbing the words in between. What are the students thinking as I read this? I avoid eye contact with Vicky and Ivy, the only Asian students in the class. I consider pausing midway to give more context about the vocabulary used during that time period, but their silence pushes me to continue. I can’t stop. Can I get away with this because I’m Indi
an? A student in another class corrected me when I referred to myself this way. We had gotten off-topic and I was recommending the dosa place in Scotia Square Mall. “Miss, South Asian is the accepted term,” he said, as I eyed his red hair, his freckles.

  That night, I light a joint and examine the map of the world on my living room wall. The map is a stylized watercolour, more decorative than informative. South Asia seems to include Pakistan, India, Bangladesh…Sri Lanka hasn’t made it onto this map. I suppose what we refer to as Asia is actually East Asia? Is Russia basically Northern Asia? Continents suddenly seem so arbitrary.

  A memory arises of a student from another class, who approached me to ask why the syllabus wasn’t more inclusive. “When I registered for your course,” she said, “I saw your name and I thought…”

  And then, I’m flashing back to my Grade 10s. Their soft-jawed faces, features doughy and unsolidified beneath their unending gaze. Yellow faces. I try to focus on concrete, present objects: the wood grain of my coffee table, a green mug listing names of cities—London, Paris, New York, Halifax—resting on a coaster made out of Scrabble tiles. But my thoughts are paperclips and Grade 10 English is a super-magnet; I think of the stupid things I said and the smarter things I didn’t say. At least twice today I lost my train of thought mid-sentence. Anxiety is thick in my chest now as I replay myself saying, “Orwell attended Eton College—you know, the private school where people like Prince William and Prince…” but I couldn’t remember the other one’s name. It was right there, hiding somewhere in the folds of my brain. The only reason I’d brought this up was to relate the essay to something they might care about. “Prince…” I hoped for the bell to ring. In a more talkative class, a student would have supplied the answer, but in Grade 10 English everybody just stared at me, expressionless, waiting. Again, I said, “Prince…” and the pause just kept going. Even the radiator was quiet now. I thought the clock behind me must have stopped clicking forward and that the bell would never ring and that we would stay there and ossify, books forever open on Orwell’s essay.