The eggs on the car was the absolute last straw. The egg yolks and whites shined on the car under the dim streetlights, glazed like some stupid cake.
Enough was enough. Mrs. Kwan sucked in her breath, put one finger on the mess slathered all over her car. Hunched her shoulders up and started to weep. It felt good, really. She hadn't cried, really cried, in months. Maybe years.
She had been too busy staying strong to cry. Strong for her husband as he went through round after round of chemo and radiation. It didn't seem to be working, but she wouldn't let him see the hopelessness on her face.
Dragging herself to work everyday, finding it harder and harder to deal with seventh and eighth graders. They were childish and immature and did not pay attention. They tried her patience. If they could ever be quiet and listen, really listen to what the authors of the stories and poems and plays were saying they might learn something. Something about life and love and themselves. But they would not listen.
They would not listen, and certain ones tried her patience more than others. Spinner Mason. Jimmy Brooks. Ashley Kerwin. She knew she was out of patience, knew some compassion for her profession and her students had run dry. But there was nothing for it. Dreading the alarm clock's mechanical call, dreading herself in the morning, making toast and coffee like an automaton, her husband hunched and curled in his uncomfortable sleep next to her empty spot in the bed, if he wasn't in the hospital.
Dragging herself to work, a travel mug of lukewarm coffee in her hand. It was just another six and a half hours to get through, to survive. She felt like that dumb poster everyone seemed to have when she was a kid, the one with the kitten barely hanging onto a tree branch, a look of tired fear on the kitten's face. The caption beneath it read, 'hang in there, baby,' She was that damn kitten only she was losing grasp of her tree branch, her claws swiping uselessly at air.
The kids, all day long. Talking, laughing, snapping gum, listening to walkman's or ipods behind their books, making out in the hallways. Did they think she was stupid?
She couldn't get through to them, she couldn't break through, and she no longer had the energy to try. They didn't like her like they liked Mr. Simpson but she didn't care. It wasn't about like. It was about knowledge, it was about what she could impart to them. But all she got was disrespect, half-assed assignments, glazed stares, clock watchers. Her husband sick, her sleep cycle seriously messed up, coffee had no power to fuel her any longer. Degrassi had become a prison, her students her wardens. Constantly stretched beyond her limit. The little reed bends and survives, but anything bent too much will break, too. Or never snap back to its original shape.
She didn't know who egged the car and she didn't care. It might as well have been every last one of her students, her teaching job, her husband's tumors, her broken potential. All the energy and spirit she had in college, when coffee could rev her up to full speed, when she had a million sparkling ideas and the world was hers, when she loved her husband and nothing would harm him, all that had drained away.
She covered her face, dissolved in her tears, the sobs coming from the soles of her feet. It was too hard. Her husband was going to die. She hated her job. She couldn't remember what she had been so happy about in college. She hated her blunted emotions, her robotic days, choking on the chalk dust. Smothered by poorly written papers, the slamming of the lockers like the rattling of forged chains.
She couldn't clean the car. She couldn't go back to work. She couldn't save her husband. She was failing right across the board.
"I give up," she whispered, sinking to her knees, covering her head with her arms, the sobs shaking her like earthquakes, like thunder, like war. She'd cry until she was dry, she'd cry until she was empty.
"I give," she said, punching the side of her car, her fist covered in the drying slime of the raw eggs. The tears kept coming, all her saved up tears.