J
"Got another one for ya," Taehyung says as he takes his seat Monday morning.
If I have to hear another Chuck Norris joke, I'm literally going to explode. "Not today, my head hurts," I reply.
"You know what Chuck Norris does to a headache?"
"Taehyung, I'm serious. Shut up!"
Taehyung withdraws and turns to the unfortunate student to his right.
Lisa's not here. The class waits a few minutes, not really knowing what to do. Apparently this is uncharacteristic of her.
Javi stands up and gets his books. "Five minute rule," he says as he walks out the door. He walks right back in though, followed by Lisa.
Lisa shuts the door behind her and goes to her desk and sets a stack of papers down. She's on edge today, and it's obvious to everyone. She hands the first student of each row a smaller stack of the papers to pass back, including me. I look down at my paper and there are about ten sheets stapled together. I start flipping through them and recognize one page is Eddie's poem about the pink balloon. They must all be poems written by students. I don't recognize any of the others.
"Some of you in here have performed at the slam this semester. I appreciate it. I know it takes a lot of courage." She holds up her own copy of the collection of poems.
"These are your poems. Some were written by students in my other classes, some by students in here. I want you to read them. Once you've read them, I want you to score them. Write a number between zero and ten, ten being the best. Be honest. If you don't like it, give it a low score. We're trying to find the best and worst. Write the score in the bottom right of each page. Go ahead." She sits at her desk and watches the class.
I don't like this assignment. It doesn't seem fair. I'm raising my hand. Why am I raising my hand? She looks at me and nods.
"What's the point of this assignment?" I ask.
Her eyes slowly make their way around the classroom. "Jennie, ask that question again after everyone's finished."
She's acting strange.
I start reading the first poem when Lisa grabs two slips of paper off of her desk and walks past me. I glance back just as she lays a slip on Eddie's desk. She picks it up and frowns. She walks back to the front, dropping the other slip on my desk. I pick it up and look it over. It's a detention slip.
I glance back at Eddie and she just shrugs her shoulders. I wad my slip into a ball and throw it across the room to the trashcan by the door. I make it.
Over the next half hour, students begin to finish their scoring. Lisa is taking the stacks as they are finished and she's adding up the totals with her calculator. Once the last of the points have been added up, Lisa writes the totals on a sheet of paper and walks to the front of her desk and sits.
She holds the paper up in the air and shakes it. "Is everyone ready to hear which poems sucked? Which ones got the most points?" She's smiling as she waits on a response.
No one says anything. Except Eddie.
"Some of us who wrote those poems may not want to know how many points we got. I know I don't."
Lisa takes a few steps toward Eddie. "If you don't care how many points it's worth, then why did you write it?"
Eddie is quiet for a moment as she thinks about Lisa's question.
"Aside from wanting to be exempt from your final?" she asks.
Lisa nods.
"I guess because I had something to say."
Lisa looks at me. "Jennie, ask your question again."
My question. I try to remember what my question was. Oh yeah, what's her point?
"What's the point of this assignment?" I ask cautiously.
Lisa holds the paper up in front of her that contains the tallied scores, and she rips it right down the middle. She reaches behind her and picks the stack of poems up that everyone scored and she throws them in the trash. She walks to the chalkboard and begins to write something on the board. When she's finished, she steps aside.
"The points are not the point; the point is poetry." ~Allan Wolf
The class is quiet as we take in the words sprawled across the board. Lisa allows a moment of silence before she continues.
"It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks about your words. When you're on that stage-you share a piece of your soul. You can't assign points to that."
The bell rings. On any other day, students would be filing out the door. No one has moved; we're all just staring at the writing on the board.
"The points are not the point; the point is poetry." ~Allan Wolf
"Tomorrow, be prepared to learn why it's important for you to write poetry," she says.
There was a moment, in the midst of all the distraction in my head, when I forgot she was Lisa. I listened to her like she was my teacher.
Javi is the first to get up, soon followed by the rest of the students. Lisa is facing the desk with her back to me when Eddie walks up, detention slip in hand. I had already forgotten she gave us detention. She gives me a wink as she passes me and stops at her desk.
"Ms. Manoban?" She's being respectful, but dramatically so. "It is my understanding that detention proceeds commencement of the final class period at approximately three-thirty. It is my desire, as I'm sure it is Jennie's desire as well, to be punctual, so that we may serve our fairly deserved sentences with due diligence. Would you be so kind as to share with us the location in which this sentence shall be carried out?"
Lisa never looks at her as she walks toward the door. "Here. Just you two. Three-thirty."
And she's gone. Just like that.
Eddie bursts out laughing. "What did you do to her?"
I stand up and walk to the door with her. "Oh it wasn't just me, Eddie. It was both of us."
She spins around wide eyed. "Oh my god, she knows I know? What's she going to say about it?"
I shrug my shoulders. "I guess we'll find out at three-thirty."
--
"Detention? Duckie gave you detention?" Gavin laughs.
"Man, she really needs to get laid," Taehyung says.
Taehyung's comment causes Eddie to laugh and spew milk out of her mouth. I shoot her a cease and desist look.
"I can't believe she gave you detention," Gavin says. "But you aren't positive that's what it's for, right? For skipping? I mean, she already mentioned that at the slam last week and she didn't seem too mad."
I know what the detention is for. I'm pretty sure I know, anyway. She wants to make sure she can trust Eddie. I'm not positive, though, so I lie.
"She said it's for not turning in the assignment we were supposed to do the day we skipped."
Gavin turns to Eddie. "But you did that one, I remember."
Eddie looks at me as she replies to Gavin. "I guess I lost it," she shrugs.
--
Eddie and I meet outside the door to Lisa's classroom at approximately three-thirty.
"You know, the more I think about it, this really sucks," Eddie says. "Why couldn't she just call me or something if she wanted to talk about what I know? I had plans today."
"Maybe we won't have to stay long," I say.
"I hate detention. It's boring. I'd rather lay in Lisa's floor with you than sit in detention," she says.
"Maybe we can try and make it fun," I say.
She turns to open the door but hesitates, then spins around and faces me. "You know, you're right. Let's make it fun. I'm pretty sure detention is an hour long. Do you realize how many Chuck Norris puns we can make in a whole hour?"
I smile at her. "Not as many as Chuck Norris could."
She opens the door to detention.
"Afternoon, Ms. Manoban," Eddie says as she flurries inside.
"Take a seat," she says as she wipes the point of poetry off the board.
"Ms. Manoban, did you know that seats actually stand up when Chuck Norris walks into a room?" she says.
I laugh as I follow Eddie to our seats. Rather than taking the two front seats, she keeps walking until she's in the very back of the room where she scoots two desks together. We sit as far from the teacher as possible.
Lisa doesn't laugh. She doesn't even smile. She sits in her seat and glares at us while we giggle; like high school girls.
"Listen," she says as she stands back up and walks toward us. She leans against the window and folds her arms across her chest. She stares at the floor like she's trying to think of a delicate way to broach the subject.
"Eddie, I need to know where your head's at. I know you were at my house. I know you know Jennie spent the night. I know she told you about our date. I just need to know what you plan to do about it; if you plan to do anything about it."
"Lisa, I already told you," I say. "She's not saying anything. There's nothing to say."
She doesn't look at me. She continues to look at Eddie, waiting for her response. I guess mine wasn't good enough.
I don't know if it's nerves or the fact that I've had the strangest last three days of my life, but I start laughing. Eddie shoots me a questioning glance, but she can't hold it in. She starts laughing, too.
Lisa throws her hands up in the air, exasperated. "What? What the hell is so funny?" she says. She's getting agitated.
"Nothing," I say. "It's just weird. You gave us detention, Lisa." I inhale as I try to control my laughter. "Couldn't you just like, come over tonight or something? Talk to us about it then? Why'd you give us detention?"
She waits until our laughter subsides before she continues. "This is the first chance I've had to talk to either of you. I didn't sleep all night. I wasn't sure if I even had a job to come back to today." She looks at Eddie. "If anything gets out, if anyone finds out that a student slept in my bed with me, I'd get fired. I'd get kicked out of college."
Eddie straightens in her seat and turns to me and smiles. "You slept in her bed with her? You're holding back vital information. You didn't tell me that," she laughs.
She walks back to the front of the room and throws herself into her chair. She leans onto her desk and sets her face in her hands. This isn't going how she had planned.
"You slept in her bed?" she whispers, low enough so Lisa doesn't hear her.
"Nothing happened," I say. "Like you said, she's such a bore."
Eddie laughs again, causing me to lose my composure.
"Is this funny?" Lisa says from her desk. "Is this a joke to you two?"
I can see in her eyes that we're enjoying detention way more than we're supposed to. Eddie isn't fazed, however.
"Did you know Chuck Norris doesn't have a funny bone? It tried to make him laugh once, so he ripped it out," she says.
Lisa lays her head on her desk in defeat. Eddie and I look at each other and our laughter ceases as we respect that she's attempting to have a serious conversation with us.
Eddie sighs and straightens up in her desk. "Ms. Manoban?" she says. "I won't say anything. Swear. It's not that big of a deal anyway."
She looks up at her. "It is a big deal Eddie. That's what I'm trying to tell both of you. If you don't treat this as a big deal, you'll get careless. Something might slip. I've got too much at stake."
We both sigh. The energy in the room is non-existent now. It's like a black hole just sucked all the fun out of detention. Eddie feels it too, so she attempts to rectify it.
"Did you know Chuck Norris likes his steaks med-" Eddie doesn't finish her sentence as Lisa reaches her limit. She slams her fist against the desk as she stands up. Neither Eddie nor I are laughing at this point. I look at her wide eyed and shake my head, letting her know that Chuck Norris needs to retreat.
"This isn't a joke," she says. "This is a big deal." She reaches over and takes something out of her drawer and swiftly walks to where we're sitting in the back of the room. She smacks a picture down on the crack where the edges of our desks meet and flips it over. It's a picture of Leo.
She points her finger to the picture as she says, "This boy. This boy is a big deal."
She backs up a step and grabs a desk and turns it around to face us as she sits down.
"I don't think we're following you, Lisa," I say as I look at Eddie. She shakes her head in agreement. "What's Leo got to do with what Eddie knows?"
She takes a deep breath as she leans across her desk and picks the picture back up. I can tell by the look in her eyes that her recollection is unpleasant. She lays the picture down on the desk and leans back in the chair, folding her arms across her chest.
"He was with them…when it happened. He watched them die."
I suck in a breath. Eddie and I give her respectful silence as we wait for her to continue. I'm beginning to feel this big.
"They said it was a miracle he survived. The car was totaled. When the first person came on the scene, Leo was still buckled up in what was left of the backseat. He was screaming my mom's name, trying to get her to turn around. For five minutes he had to sit there alone and watch as they died."
Lisa clears her throat. Eddie reaches under the table and grabs my hand and squeezes it. Neither of us says a word.
"I sat in the hospital with him while he recovered for six days. Never left his side-not even for their funeral. When my grandparents came to pick him up and take him home with them, he cried. He didn't want to go. He wanted to stay with me. He begged me to take him back to campus with me. I didn't have a job, I didn't have insurance. I was nineteen. I didn't know the first thing about raising a kid…so I let them take him."
Lisa stands up and walks to the window. She doesn't say anything for a while as she watches the parking lot slowly empty. Her hand goes to her face and it looks like she's wiping at her eyes. If Eddie wasn't in here right now, I would hug her.
She eventually turns to face us again. "Leo hated me. He was so mad at me he wouldn't return my calls for days. It was in the middle of a football game when I started to question the choice I made. I was studying the football in my hands, running my fingers over the pigskin, across the letters of the brand name printed on the side. This elongated spheroid shaped ball that didn't even weigh a whole pound. I was choosing this ridiculous ball of leather in my hands over my own flesh and blood. I was putting myself, my girlfriend, my scholarship-I was putting everything before this little boy that I loved more than anything in the world.
"I dropped the football and walked right off the field. I got to my grandparent's house at two in the morning and grabbed Leo right out of bed. I brought him home that night. They begged me not to do it. Said it would be too hard on me and that I wouldn't be able to give him what he needed. I knew they were wrong. I knew all Leo really needed-was me."
She turns and slowly walks back to the desk in front of us and places her hands on the back of it. She looks at both of us, tears streaming down our faces.
"I've spent the last two years of my life trying to convince myself that I made the right decision for him. So my job? My career? This life I'm trying to build for this little boy? It is a big deal. It's a very big deal to me."
She calmly returns the desk to its place in the aisle and walks back to the front of her room, grabs her things and leaves.
Eddie gets up and walks to Lisa's desk and grabs a box of tissues. She brings the box and slumps back down in her seat. I pull out a tissue as we both wipe at our eyes.
"God, Jennie. How do you do it?" she says.
She blows her nose and grabs another tissue out of the box.
"How do I do what?" I sniff as I continue to wipe the tears from my eyes.
"How do you not fall in love with her?"
The tears begin flowing just as quickly as they were ceasing. I grab yet another tissue. "I don't not fall in love with her. I don't not fall in love with her a lot!"
She laughs and squeezes my hand as we willingly sit out our much deserved detentions.