WWMJD (What Would Mrs. J Do?)

Trigger warning: Contains references to substance abuse and violence.

Its funny how you don’t ever really appreciate things until you no longer have them, until they are gone. We were 16. What 16 year old appreciates anything really?

I remember there was this one morning, I must have gotten a total of like 3 hours sleep the night before. I show up for first period like I have just crossed the finish line at the NYC marathon, all breathless and sweaty and full of teenage drama. I slide into my seat just as the final bell rings and lay my head down on my desk, letting my long curly hair fall all over the place. I am like that for like a full minute, relishing the coolness of the desk on my cheek, the darkness underneath my folded arms, when I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. I pop my head up, ready to apologize, but Mrs. J is just smiling at me and in her hand is what looks like a chocolate croissant.

“Here,” she says. “You need this more than I do.”

Like I said you never appreciate things in the moment. Looking back now I am pretty sure that lady just flat out gave me her breakfast.

I never ate in the morning, partly because I didn’t wake up hungry but mostly because there was never anything to eat in my house, nothing good anyway. Mom would sometimes just forget to go shopping, or the milk in the fridge would smell off, like the boys locker room after gym class. I had my own money from babysitting and dog walking but I would rather spend it on concert tickets or clothes than on breakfast. 

Somehow Mrs. J could always tell when I was hungry. She could also tell when I was tired and needed to just lay my head down for a minute or when I was sad and needed to be left alone. I was sad a lot in high school though, and it was hard to teach literature to someone who wanted to be left alone all the time. So sometimes Mrs. J would smile gently at me, as if to say Nova just answer this one question and then you can go back to staring blankly at the wall. The weird thing is, I always knew the answers, even when I hadn’t eaten breakfast and had been up half the night texting. I loved to read and write, ever since I was a little girl. Sometimes, when I was really out of it, Mrs. J would hand me a piece of paper (I kept forgetting my notebook at home) and tell me to just write something, anything.

I remember this one time, right in the middle of reading the Odyssey, Mrs, J suddenly slammed the book closed and clapped her hands loudly, as if to wake us up.

“You all look like a rock band the night after a big concert”.

I am pretty sure teachers weren’t supposed to say stuff like that, but in truth at least half of us probably were a bit hungover. It was Monday after all, and this was high school in springtime in suburban New Jersey. There was nothing to do on weekends other than hang out at the mall (boring!), go to the movie theatre (only if you wanted to make out and your parents were home), or bring a six pack and a blanket down to the shore, so most kids just did that. 

Mrs. J then stood up and motioned for us to follow her.

“Come on, class is outside today.”

I don’t think she was allowed to do that either, just take us out of the building like that without asking the principal first and probably like a billion permission slips. But Mrs. J often did stuff she probably wasn’t supposed to, like that time she ordered two large pizza pies from the shop on Main Street, right in the middle of a lesson on adverbs. Or the time she stopped prepping us for the midterm, because everyone wanted to talk about that kid who had gotten beat up on the football field because he liked boys. Coach Mike said he had gotten extra tackles for being disrespectful but everyone knew what it was really about. Rumor had it Coach Mike used to press up on the cheerleaders after the game too, but when the team is winning suddenly no one can see clearly anymore.

But not Mrs. J. She had simply closed the book she had been reading from, sat down on top of her desk (she said she liked it better up there than in the chair) and said “I imagine you guys have some feelings about that.”

That was how she often got us to talk about teen stuff. Maegan said that it wasn’t fair that Noah got those extra tackles because he was the smallest guy on the team and then Joey said it didn’t matter, that you had to work hard to be the best. Natalie called Coach Mike an asshole and I expected Mrs. J to tell her not to use that word in class but instead she just nodded and let us keep talking. Finally April, who always got frustrated easily, blurted out “This is bullshit, Mrs. J. Everyone knows Noah got those tackles for being gay!” Then the room got real quiet, everyone watching Mrs. J to see what she was going to do next. She paused for a second, biting her lower lip in that way she did when she was thinking, and then she looked April right in the eye.

“You are absolutely right, April. Some people are afraid of what they don’t understand. What do you think you should do about that?”

No one else ever talked to us that way, like we actually had some power in the world even though we were only 16. Years later, when I was about to graduate law school and start my own career, I found out that Mrs. J had gotten married to a beautiful blond lady, and a lot more made sense. 

I never meant to get her in trouble though. 

It wasn’t my mom’s fault that the house was dirty and that sometimes the milk in the fridge went sour. She had a lot on her plate, what with three kids and a husband who occasionally came home late, smelling like stale beer and cigarettes. Suburban life was like that, the teens went to the shore and the men went to the bar. Like I said, there really wasn’t anything else to do; that’s why I went to college in the city, and then moved there as soon as I graduated. Small town life will eat you alive if you let it.

But anyway, my mom did her best, and she was infinitely patient when my dad came home a little stumbly; leaving a big glass of water and two Advil by the couch, making sure to tiptoe around him quietly. Usually it worked out fine. 

Like I said, Mrs. J could always tell when something was going on, and the night before that morning she gave me her chocolate croissant, things had not worked out so fine. 

Dad had come home real, real late, even later than normal, and I guess he had lipstick on his collar or something, because for once my mom wasn’t quiet at all. She screamed and shouted and she threw a glass which shattered on the wall behind him into a million tiny pieces. At one point he tried to grab her, maybe to calm her down, I don’t know, because that was when I saw red and the next thing I knew I was standing over him with a big knife from the kitchen. 

Things got kind of fuzzy after that. 

Mrs. J kept me after class that day and when she asked me if I was ok, maybe because I was so tired from all of the drama from the night before, I told her the whole story. I didn’t know about mandated reporting back then. I also didn’t know that my dad’s best drinking buddy at the Irish pub down on Main Street was actually Coach Mike. 

Maybe the two of them concocted some kind of story, or maybe it had to do with having class outside that time, or the pizza, or one of the million other cool things Mrs J did that were most certainly not allowed at Lacey Township High School. All I know is the following Friday we didn’t read or write anything. Instead Mrs. J sat us down and told us she was leaving.

She said that she was going to teach at a middle school in Brooklyn where people might appreciate her unique style a bit more.. She said that she loved us and to never stop fighting for what we believed in, for what we wanted out of life. She didn’t mention me or my dad. She didn’t say she had been fired, and she didn’t end her little speech with ‘What do you think you should do about that?” 

But that is what we heard.

We organized the biggest protest our small town had ever seen, complete with signs and everything. The entire 11th grade sat out on the football field for two whole hours and refused to move unless she got her job back. 

It didn’t work, she left anyway. But on her last day she got a little choked up and told us we were the best teenagers she had ever met.

A lady with glasses and a briefcase showed up at my house a few times and after that my dad seemed a bit more subdued. He started showing up for dinner more and bringing my mom flowers sometimes. They both took me to dinner at the Olive Garden after graduation. He told me he was proud of me and handed me an envelope with $200 inside. 

Neither of them ever mentioned the night with the knife again.

Mrs. J sent me something for graduation too, a card with a kitten hanging from a tree branch and the words “Hang in There.” Inside she wrote “Best of luck in college. Go out there and do great things, you deserve it!”

She must have been keeping tabs on me, because I got the same exact card from her when I graduated from law school 8 years later. 

A lot of my classmates went into corporate law because that was where the money was, but I decided I wanted try to help people instead and was hired as in house council for a small non-profit in the city. 

Eventually I got married, to a sweet, wonderful man I met at a law conference. We went on honeymoon in the Bahamas, spent five days drinking rum on the beach and watching the sunset. I got my hair braided like I was 22 on Spring Break, and he laughed at the sunburned streaks on my scalp. 

When I unloaded my mailbox a week later there was another card, buried underneath the useless catalogs and statements from accounts I had forgotten to make paperless. It was the same cat of course but this time she had written, “Congratulations on your wedding! So happy for the both you.”

She must have bought a whole pack of those cards.

My dad stayed on the straight and narrow ever since that lady came to our house when I was 16. He was dead sober when he walked me down the aisle at my wedding, and he was dead sober when he buried my mom ten years later. (By the time they found the cancer it was pretty much too late to do anything.) The funeral was held in the tiny church right down the road from my childhood home. They were mostly happy in the end too, as happy as anyone can be in this life, especially when you live in small town New Jersey. 

I know someone else might have not let a father like that participate in her wedding day, but you can’t really choose who your family is. Besides, I let go of most of my anger that night in the kitchen. Life is just too short to carry something that heavy.

Mrs. J would have understood.

Its funny about teachers. You don’t really think about the impact they are having on your life at the time, too caught up in all the drama that is high school. But now, as an adult with a successful career, a husband, and a baby on the way, I find myself thinking about Mrs. J often. Sometimes when I am faced with a difficult decision, I even ask myself what would Mrs. J do.

She was the best teacher I ever had.