All the Pretty Failures

Trigger warning: This story contains mentions of substance abuse and physical violence.

The radiator in Room 103 had been bleeding rust since the Bush administration and nobody at Millhaven Community College remembered anymore whether the stains on the linoleum were from water damage or something meaner. Meredith sat at the pressed-wood desk that passed for a teacher's station and watched five adults pretend to write essays about overcoming obstacles while the real obstacle, the one nobody talked about, pressed down on them all.

December in Ohio came at you sideways, through gaps in window caulk and the spaces between hope and mortgage payments. The emergency lighting gave everyone's skin the particular green tint of gas station fluorescents at 3 AM. Meredith had calculated their grades two weeks ago, done the math on a paper towel in her kitchen because she'd run out of real paper and hadn't been paid yet. Darrell Webb: 68. Tanya Morrison: 71. Marcus Shoulders: 64. Paula Chen: 74. Jerome Patterson: 69.

In developmental writing, you needed a 75 to pass. Not 70 like in the real world, because this wasn't the real world, this was the purgatory before college, the place where people paid $400 a credit hour to learn what they should have learned in high school, if high school hadn't been about survival instead of education, if their parents hadn't been working third shift at the plant that closed, if the system hadn't been designed to sort them into slots they'd never climb out of.

She'd written the prompt on the whiteboard with a marker that squeaked like something dying: Describe a time you overcame an obstacle.

Darrell sat in the back corner. His phone face-down on the desk but vibrating every few minutes: his mother again, or about his mother, the endless crisis of a woman who'd been dying by degrees since he was twelve. The boy could write when he showed up. Had a way with words that made you feel the weight of engine grease under your fingernails. But talent was like beauty in places like Millhaven, nice to have, but it wouldn't keep the lights on.

She'd taught his older brother six years ago. Terry. Same jawline, same way of apologizing for existing. She'd given Terry four extra points, bumped his 71 to a 75, told herself she was opening a door. He'd passed her class, failed English 101, dropped out, got a job at the tire plant that everybody knew was closing but nobody talked about. When it finally shut down, he'd bounced between construction and unemployment, pills and sobriety, until the night he wrapped his Cavalier around a telephone pole doing ninety on Route 19, racing to the hospital where their mother was overdosing for the second time that year. The newspaper ran a photo of the car, compressed to half its length. Local Boy Dies in Weather-Related Accident, the headline said, like the weather had been driving.

Marcus hunched over his paper. Twenty-three years old, built like someone who'd learned to lift with his back instead of his legs and would pay for it at forty. He worked nights mopping these same hallways and emptying trash cans. The free tuition for employees sounded like opportunity until you understood that Marcus read like words were actively fighting him, letters switching places when he wasn't looking, whole sentences rearranging themselves between one glance and the next. Dyslexic, obviously, but diagnosis required testing and testing required money and money required the kind of job you couldn't get without the education you couldn't afford without the job.

The lights died completely then, not even the emergency EXIT signs glowing anymore. December darkness filled the room like water finding its level.

"Keep writing," Meredith said to the darkness.

Tanya Morrison didn't pause when the lights went out, just kept typing on the ancient laptop the college loaned to students who'd filled out the right forms in triplicate. Forty-two years old, three kids at home, husband who communicated primarily through his fists when the Bud Light ran out. The bruise under her left eye had faded to that particular yellow-green of old damage, like a sunset in reverse. Two weeks old, maybe three. Last month it had been her wrist, bent at an angle that suggested either a bad fall or a good grip.

She wrote the same essay every time, just changed the tense. Future tense was where she kept her dreams—when I graduate, when I get a better job, when I save enough money, when the kids are older, when I finally leave. The future tense was the only safe place left, because the present was all screams and food stamps, and the past was just a catalog of chances taken from her before she knew they were chances at all.

Paula Chen wrote by the light of her phone screen, each Chinese character transformed into English with the careful precision of someone translating between worlds. Her parents had sold their restaurant in San Bernardino to send her here. Not really here, but here's where she ended and that was enough detail for Meredith. They'd imagined something better than this converted strip mall with asbestos in the ceiling tiles and despair in the drinking fountains.

Jerome Patterson didn't need light to write. He'd been composing the same essay in his head for months, ever since Loretta died and left him with promises he didn't know how to keep. Fifty-five years old, hands like rough drafts of hands, all scars and swollen knuckles from thirty years laying track for Norfolk Southern. His wife had made him promise to go back to school, get his diploma, show their grandson that education mattered. But Loretta had been the one who believed in bootstraps and betterment. Jerome just believed in getting through the day without drinking.

After they left, Meredith sat alone in the dark classroom with five essays and the knowledge that she'd failed them all before they'd even started. The grades were already calculated, had been for weeks. She could enter them now—68, 71, 64, 74, 69—or she could lie. Give them all 75s.But what was the point? Pass them here, they'd fail in English 101. Pass them there, they'd fail in the job market. A degree from Millhaven Community College was worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, and the paper wasn't worth much.

She closed the laptop without entering anything. Let the grades default to incomplete. Let the system would mark them as unfinished, which was at least more honest than pretending they'd failed when really they'd never had a chance to succeed. Let someone else be the executioner.

The walk to Flora's Diner took eighteen minutes when the sidewalks were clear, twenty-five when ice made every step a negotiation with gravity. Meredith's Corolla had been repossessed that morning while she was teaching, towed away so quietly she hadn't even heard it go. That night, Main Street looked like a mouth with half its teeth knocked out with empty storefronts between payday lenders and CBD shops, beauty supply stores next to buildings with SPACE AVAILABLE signs so old they'd become historical landmarks.

Flora's Diner squatted on the corner of Main and Despair; that wasn't the real name of the latter, but Commerce Street had stopped meaning anything when the commerce left town on the same trains that used to bring it. The neon sign flickered between OPEN and OPE_, the N giving up the ghost years ago but nobody bothering to fix it because everyone who needed to know knew.

Inside, the smell was all grease and coffee and the particular perfume of small-towns: cigarette smoke that clung to everything despite the smoking ban, industrial disinfectant, boredom.

"Coffee?" Brother Lee asked from behind the counter. He didn't wait for an answer, just poured, the stream black as the ice on Route 19 where Terry Webb had died.

She'd seen Brother around town for years without really seeing him. The way you don't see telephone poles until you hit one. Everyone called him Brother though she didn't know why and had never asked. In Millhaven, you didn't ask about nicknames or scars or why someone was sleeping in their car in the Kroger parking lot. You just noticed and moved on.

"Rough night?" he asked, setting the mug in front of her. The handle had been broken and re-glued, a white line of ceramic scar tissue showing where it had tried to heal.

"I teach at the community college."

"Ah." Like that explained everything. Which it did.

A woman sat in the far booth with a boy maybe six years old sleeping across the vinyl seats. The kid wore a flannel shirt that swallowed him whole, probably from Goodwill or the donation box at First Methodist.

"I proctored an exam. You know what kills me, Brother?" Meredith said, talking to the coffee more than Brother. "They write these essays about overcoming obstacles. Like obstacles are hurdles you jump instead of walls that get higher every time you back up to take a run at them."

Brother cracked eggs on the griddle, the sizzle like static between radio stations. "Maybe that's the point."

"What?"

"The lie." He flipped the eggs with a motion so practiced it looked like boredom. "Sometimes the lie's all that keeps you going. Like those fake oases in the desert. You know it's not real, but what can you do? Sit down and die?"

"I failed them all," she said. "Every one. Well, almost failed technically."

"Good."

The word landed like a slap. She looked up from her coffee to find him watching her with eyes the color of dishwater, all the color washed out by too many double shifts and compromises.

"Good?" she repeated.

"You ever see what happens to a dog that's been beat too much?" He pulled bacon from the freezer, separated the strips with fingers scarred from years of hot grease and bad timing. "Keeps coming back. Tail wagging. Thinking this time will be different. This time the boot won't come. Hope makes it worse. Makes the beating worse because there's further to fall."

"So I did them a favor."

"Don't know about that. But you did them a truth." The bacon hit the griddle angry, spitting like it had opinions about the conversation. "First week I worked here, Flora told me something. Said life's just hours strung together. Clock in, clock out, don't die in between. That's it. That's the whole secret."

"That's depressing."

"Once you accept what it is, it just... is."

The woman with the sleeping boy got up to leave. She moved like someone who'd learned to be invisible, gathering their things without sound, lifting the boy like he weighed nothing and everything at once. The practiced motion of someone who'd carried more than children.

"Thanks, Brother," she said softly.

"Coffee's always free for you, Marie."

She smiled, the kind of smile that was really just rearranging pain on your face, and slipped out into the December night. The bell above the door played a tune that might have been cheerful in another life.

"What's her story?" Meredith asked.

"Same as everyone's. Had a baby with someone who hit harder than he loved. Stayed too long. Left too late. Now she's got a kid who needs shoes and a restraining order that's just paper unless the sheriff's around to enforce it, which he ain't because the county cut the budget again."

"Jesus."

"He ain't hiring in Millhaven. Ain't been for years."

They sat in the kind of silence that had weight, that pressed down like all the snow that hadn't fallen yet but would. Outside, a pickup truck gunned through the intersection, muffler shot, the sound like someone screaming through a pillow.

"I gave extra points once," Meredith said finally. "To a kid who needed them. Thought I was being kind."

"Were you?"

"He's dead now. Wrapped his car around a pole trying to get to his mother."

Brother nodded like that equation balanced. "Kindness in a cruel system is just another kind of cruelty. Like giving a man on death row a better last meal. He's still gonna die, but now he's got hope right up until the needle goes in. That's meaner than just killing him."

"So what do you do?"

"You cook eggs. You pour coffee. You don't lie about what any of it means."

"That's it? That's your solution?"

"Ain't no solutions. Just ways of getting through. You think too much about solutions, you'll miss your exit and end up somewhere worse."

The trucker in booth three raised his empty mug. Brother grabbed the pot, topped him off, came back with it still in his hand like he'd forgotten he was holding it.

"You know what your problem is?" he said, but not unkindly. More like a doctor delivering a diagnosis that everyone could see coming. "You think education means something. Like it's a ladder out of the hole instead of just a shinier shovel to dig with."

"I have three degrees."

"And you're here." He gestured with the coffee pot at the diner, the town, the whole situation. "Teaching the kids of the kids you taught ten years ago. That ladder working out for you?"

It landed like truth always did, hard and without warning. She wanted to argue, but what was the point? She was here. In Flora's Diner at eleven PM on a Tuesday, her car repossessed, her bank account showing negative numbers, her three degrees worth less than the paper they were printed on because paper at least you could burn for warmth.

"So I should what, stop caring?"

"Stop pretending caring changes anything." He refreshed her coffee even though she'd barely touched it, the gesture automatic as breathing. "You failed them. Good. Now they know where they stand. That's more honest than most people get. Most people, they get strung along. They get told if they work hard, if they try, if they overcome their obstacles, they'll make it. Then they're fifty and scanning groceries at Walmart wondering when their ship's coming in, not realizing it already came and went and they weren't at the right dock."

"It doesn't feel honest. It feels cruel."

"Same thing, sometimes. Truth and cruelty, they're cousins. Show up to all the same parties."

Meredith sighed.

"Look," Brother said, leaning on the counter like he was about to share the secret of the universe and knew nobody would want to hear it. "You want to help them? Tell them the truth. This place? It's not a town. Shitty graveyard with a zip code, that where we’re stuck in. They're already buried. Everything else is just marking time until someone throws the dirt on top."

"That's not—"

"True? Look around." He gestured at the empty diner, the empty street beyond, the empty futures stretching out like Route 19 after midnight. "Your students, they're writing essays about overcoming obstacles? They ARE the obstacle. To themselves. To their kids. To anyone fool enough to believe it gets better. The obstacle ain't something you overcome. It's something you become."

"So why stay?"

"Same reason you do. Same reason everyone does. Where else we gonna go? You think there's some other place waiting for us? Some promised land where degrees mean something and hard work pays off and the American Dream didn't die of an overdose in a gas station bathroom?"

She wanted to argue, but the words wouldn't come.

"I should go," she said.

She left a five on the counter. He pushed it back.

"For the eggs," she said.

"You didn't order eggs."

"For the coffee, then."

"Coffee's fifty cents. You trying to tip me four-fifty for telling you things you already knew but didn't want to hear?"

She walked to the door, stopped with her hand on the handle. Outside, Millhaven waited like a drunk uncle at a family reunion, familiar, embarrassing, impossible to avoid.

"Those grades. I didn't fully enter," she said without turning around. "They'll default to incomplete."

"So?"

"So, they can petition. Try again. Maybe—"

"Maybe they'll fail slower. That's your big mercy? That's what you're offering? A longer runway to the same crash?"

"It's something."

"It's nothing with paperwork attached. But you do what you gotta do to sleep at night."

The bell jangled as she left, the sound following her out into the cold like a question nobody wanted answered. The snow had stopped but the wind hadn't, cutting through her coat like it had a personal grudge.

She already knew she was not going home. Not yet.

By the time she got back to campus, the security lights were the only ones on, casting everything in that particular shade of institutional indifference. The essays still sat on her desk, five attempts at making suffering sound like strength.

She opened her laptop. The gradebook cursor blinked in the empty spaces where numbers should go, waiting for her to decide what kind of executioner she wanted to be, the kind who made it quick or the kind who let them hope.

68. 71. 64. 74. 69.

She thought about Terry Webb, dead at nineteen with four extra points that had bought him nothing but a different route to the same telephone pole. Thought about all the Terry Webb she'd passed over the years, all the small mercies that were really just cruelties with better marketing.

She typed: 68. Delete. 71. Delete. 64. Delete. 74. Delete. 69. Delete.

Started again: Incomplete. Incomplete. Incomplete. Incomplete. Incomplete.

Then deleted those too.

Finally, she typed what Brother would have typed, what anyone who'd lived in Millhaven long enough to see the patterns would have typed:

68. 71. 64. 74. 69.

Failed. Failed. Failed. Failed. Failed.

She hit submit.

You survived, she told herself. Clock in, clock out, don't die in between.

Just like everyone did.

Until you didn't.