Rising on the endless escalator up the rank esophagus of the Port Authority like a belch, Carmen thought suddenly of Teacher Lisa, her flat white ass leaning against her desk as she asked, “Carmelo, could you hang on a second?” and yanked him from his thankless scuffle out the classroom door of the composition class he’d forgotten to take as a freshman.
“What’s going on?” she’d asked. He remembered staring at her as though he might be able to peer through this ridiculous question to the perverse motives that lay behind it, the same way every night he scoured the Internet for the truth behind the news, what government officials had worked for what companies they got tax breaks for and which architects of the Iraq war had stock options on destruction but Teacher Lisa just stared at him and when he didn’t respond she said “Your paper?” and Carmen vaguely remembered sitting stilly in his too-small chair-desk unit while everyone else had trudged to the front of the classroom to turn in their paper-wasting stapled stack of trash.
“Let’s sit down,” Lisa said, her tone kinder, and for a transcendent moment Carmen had a flash of how he looked to this woman, fat and dark in dirty sneakers with his backpack on and his eyes cast to the floor, not a Queen, not even a princess, just another sad wannabe who in his failings had earned this white woman’s fleeting attention. He sat down.
“You’re not coming to class, you don’t turn in papers,” she tried again. “You’re smart, but that isn’t going to help you if you skip assignments. Carmelo?”
“Are you testing me?” Lisa asked. Carmen looked up from his chair to see a shiver between her eyebrows and he wondered how old she was, what bargain she’d made with the devil to end up in Tulsa instead of Boston or New York or wherever it was she wanted to be. “It is conceivable that you will fail.”
“I’m not testing you,” Carmen said. Through the window behind her he could see the North Quad lawn. He wished he could dive through the plate glass and take off running. “Can I turn it in next week?”
“What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Carmen stared at her, incredulous. Had anyone ever asked him this before, ever, ever, ever since he came home from first grade with a black eye and a bloody nose and his mother ran to him screaming, Carmelo what’s going on?
No, he was imagining things: Pilar only screamed in Spanish. “What?” he asked again.
“Carmelo, when one of my brightest students is skipping class and not turning assignments, I notice. I want you to notice. You could have turned in crap and swung a C but instead you get a zero. So I have to ask you, are you okay?”
Was he okay? He’d worked six part-time jobs in two years; the roommate he found on Craigslist called him a fat fucking faggot every day; he was a bastard orphan; if he failed this class he’d lose the scholarship he wasn’t sure he deserved; and as a gay Mexican the xenophobic Tulsa townies had two good reasons to want to lynch him, dios mio, a regular tar and feather burlesque.
“I don’t believe you,” said Lisa.
Lisa stared at him intently. “Are you safe?”
“In your home. Are you physically safe?”
“Verbal abuse isn’t really harmful,” he said.
He recoiled at the sound of her sympathy.
“I want you to speak to your dean—“
“Or Student Psychological Services—“
“It is not acceptable for you live in an abusive environment.”
And there it was, slipped out like a frog from a child’s hands, hopping across the floor, leaving a train of slime on the linoleum behind it.
“Let’s go.” Lisa stood up. “Come on.” So he followed her, with her trim waist and her stacked-heel boots, her corporate purse filled with secret teacher things, her agreeable bob, down the hall, across the quad, into the glassy Student Center and up an escalator not so different from the one Carmen was still on, lost in reverie, in mechanical limbo between the past he knew and a future he didn’t. And though he hated Teacher Lisa at the time, he was amazed, too, that this was a legitimate part of her job, cariño, watching out for him—and he was jealous, too, because at the end of her do-gooder afternoon she’d still be a skinny white bitch with a twenty-five-inch waist and he’d still be Carmelo Guero, a fat loser at the edge of flunking out. Lisa pulled the door open and motioned for him to walk in ahead of her. She was too fucking nice. Every Queen wanted to be the Ice Queen except the white ones who were born that way.
If you enjoyed part 6, check out part 7. Or start at the beginning, right here.
Email me when Tessa Brown publishes or recommends stories