The Teachers' Lounge

       “I picked up a shift at Red Dog tonight,” Hannah announced. She was standing beside the microwave while it loudly turned her leftovers around inside. The handle was missing. To open it you had to pull at the top of the door, careful not to grab the rusty nail that stuck out in place of the long gone handle. “Rent’s due next week."

          “Melodie needs braces, so I’m tutoring at the library after school,” Miriam added. “If you know anyone who needs a tutor, I’ll need to pick up some extra students for the time being.” 

          When money was tight Vanessa scoured Care.com for quick jobs. She was an expert date-night sitter, even though most people stopped babysitting at sixteen. The extra cash helped pay for holiday gifts and classroom supplies though. She stabbed at a stale crouton with a plastic fork. The lettuce had looked a little wilted when she made the salad this morning, but she packed it anyway. 

         “My room needs more tissues,” Vanessa chimed in. “Do you think 6th graders eat tissues? How do we go through them so fast?” Vanessa had bought a bulk-sized pack only two weeks ago.  

       Miriam rolled her eyes. She had a stack of essays in front of her. A red pen was poised in her left hand. She peered down at the tests over the rims of her brightly colored reading glasses. 

        “I told my kids that the first five people to bring a box of tissues each month get a homework pass,” She drew a line through one of the words in the essay.

       “I stopped buying them,” Hannah pried the microwave open. The smell of her now-warm chicken noodle soup hung in the air. “Christmas is coming up. I can’t buy tissues and gifts and new pencils. You know how many shifts I’d have to pick up at Red Dog?” 

Hannah worked the bar's popular Thursday Trivia Nights whenever possible. She slung beers for intoxicated college kids shouting out incredibly wrong answers to common knowledge questions. 

      “Do you know how terribly twenty one year olds tip?” She plopped down into the only unoccupied chair that surrounded the beat-up card table the three of them ate lunch around everyday. 

      Vanessa had also worked at Red Dog when she first started teaching. Mixing drinks for drunk college kids was more tolerable when you were a recently reformed drunk college kid. At thirty one it was much less tolerable. Now, she spent her weekends playing house and building blanket forts with six year olds whose parents could afford a $20-an-hour sitter. 

      “Oh, I know how badly twenty one year olds tip,” Vanessa chuckled. “You used to be one of those twenty one year olds tipping me poorly."

       Hannah’s cheeks turned a light pinkish color. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her mouth, blowing gently on the liquid. She had gone to Mountain State when Vanessa was bartending. The nights at the bar were hazy, so Hannah couldn’t be certain if she tipped well or at all.

      “Look what I got!” Hannah exclaimed. She abandoned her soup to bend over, digging through the reusable shopping bag at her feet. Leaving the bag there was a bold move. It offered a home to mice or roaches or ants. 

         Hannah reappeared above the table holding up clear pencil cases. Each of them had a student’s name imprinted on it in scripted vinyl. She had probably spent an entire night bent over her Cricuit personalizing them. 

       “The Target dollar section,” She said. “The Superintendent mentioned that clear pencil cases could be safer.” 

          A beat of silence fell over the three of them after the words left her mouth. Miriam paused for a moment. Her pen was hanging over a new essay now. Vanessa imagined her classroom, Room 310, at the end of an isolated hallway. It was like the peninsula she grew up on: one way in, one way out. 

         “Safer,” Miriam laughed. There was no humor in the sound. “Right,” She laid a shaking hand on the table to steady it. “A pencil case can’t fit an AR-15 nor can it protect us from one.” 

         She shook her head and turned in her seat. The metal creaked beneath her weight. She stared out the window that overlooked the courtyard. One of the kindergarten classes was on recess. The sounds of their delighted squeals traveled up through the cracks in the window frame. 

     “God and they can’t even buy the pencil cases for us,” Miriam shook her head. 

     Vanessa and Hannah stared at one another. The steam that had once danced off the top of Hannah’s soup had disappeared. Her spoon was discarded on the side. 

   Vanessa didn’t mention the nightmares. She had woken up in a cold sweat on more than one occasion. Images of using her body to shield her students from bullets filled her mind. 

     “A few of them might fit through the window. They could make it onto that landing beneath my room,” Vanessa said, almost absently. “The bigger kids wouldn’t fit though.” 

      She thought of Mackenzie with her shoulders built from years of the butterfly stroke. On Monday mornings she loved to recall the tales of her weekend swim meets. Sometimes she still smelled faintly of chlorine. Jacob came to mind. He was a quiet kid, but already nearing 6 feet. Did they deserve to die because they wouldn’t make it out the window? 

      “Colin helped me move those two big filing cabinets in my room. Now you can’t see the reading corner,” Hannah mentioned her boyfriend. “The cabinets might be thick enough to deflect some of the bullets. My kids know to hide there. We have a plan to throw metal water bottles to distract the shooter.” 

     Miriam turned back to her grading. She hunched over the stack of papers and got to work with her pen again. She didn’t look up at the other two women as she described the plan for her own classroom. 

     “I have the bathroom in my room. They could hide in the stalls,” She shrugged. “My windows open pretty wide though. They know to run to my mother’s house around the corner. She listens to the news religiously, so she knows if she needs to unlock the back door for them.” 

     Each of them had spent more time than they cared to admit accessing their classrooms from every angle, trying to see it through the eyes of a gunman. Vanessa would sometimes walk past her room to study it from the hallway. She wanted to be prepared for any potential attack. 

     “Did you see the news last night? Indiana. It was another elementary school,” Hannah whispered. “Seven dead. Two of them were teachers.” 

     They had all heard the news. They read the headlines as they popped up on their TikTok For You Pages and then they noticed that by this morning it was already yesterday’s news. 

        “I’m always afraid I won’t get the door locked in time,” Vanessa confessed. Some days she was more focused on a survival plan than she was on the lesson plan. The guilt ate at her. 

       Miriam’s closely clipped nails tapped on the table. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. For just a moment, it was the only sound against the background noise of gleeful recess screams.  Hannah pushed her abandoned soup to the center of the table. 

     “If there’s more than one…” Miriam’s words trailed off. One attacker was a hard enough pill to swallow, but two made survival seem impossible. 

      They had countless drills. Active shooter drills had become as common as fire drills. The anger that bubbled up between the three of them was almost palpable. Why wouldn’t anyone do anything about this? 

      “It’s hard to think about,” Hannah swallowed audibly. She tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear and looked up at her two coworkers. Her friends. Not only was the idea of protecting her students scary, the idea of losing one of them in the line of fire terrified her, too. 

     “It feels more like ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ now,” Vanessa pressed her lips together. She worked to hide the tears that stung at the corners of her eyes. 

      The screams from outside were quieting down, signaling the end of recess. In turn, that meant the end of their lunch period. They were set to go back to their classrooms with their haunted thoughts and survival plans.

     “Well,” Miriam pushed back from the table in her gruff manner. She collected the papers and tucked them into the crook of her arm. “Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be coming up with separate lesson plans for the students I tutor,” She shook her head slowly. “My ex gave our two kids lots of trauma, but he couldn’t give them his perfect teeth?” 

      Hannah and Vanessa laughed. They each got up to discard their lunch. The afternoon would be filled with broken pencils and raised hands. The students would be riding a sugar high after eating lunch. Hannah would force her students to read paragraphs of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ aloud. Vanessa had a fun Algebra lesson planned. Miriam had a movie she was going to play while she finished grading the papers. 

       They would return to their classrooms with the noise and the smell of the cafeteria wafting in with their students. The three of them would dive back into lesson plans and laugh at the outrageous things their students would inevitably come up with. The entire time one eye would be watching the door for imposing figures and their ears would be perked for the, ‘Code Red,’ announcement to come over the loudspeaker.