"The In-School Suspension Supervisor" by Zac Smith
Originally published in Sleazemag (October 2018)
I drive through the heat. It permeates the car, the open windows do nothing, they might as well be closed. I sit alongside massive pickup trucks full of contractors or rich farm kids, and massive sports utility vehicles full of idiot parents and their idiot kids. I sit alongside bicyclists trapped by the gridlock, leaning off of their bikes, uncomfortable and sweaty. Students hang out of the windows because of the heat, but they find no comfort in the air here, only exhaust fumes from the trucks and the sports utility vehicles and the busted-ass Impalas and the smell of the swollen, rotting riverbanks.
The hallways in the high school are worse, they are humid, muggy, and the smells are worse – rotting river slime stench replaced with the smell of pubic oils and unwashed feet, the diesel exhaust of trucks supplanted by aerosol deodorants and the stench of Taco Bell breakfast. The goth kids’ makeup looks pasty and damp, the preppy girls’ makeup looks pasty and damp, the teachers’ makeup looks pasty and damp. Everyone else looks pasty and damp, but this is uninteresting, because we have always looked pasty, only the unending perspiration is new. The heat reduces us all to ugly monsters, it feeds on our intentions and shits out disappointment. The heat fucks us, but it fucks us clean, it reveals our true ugliness.
The air in the administrative office is stagnant. The attendance sheet is damp. Susan’s hands are damp, and her makeup is pasty and damp. We are warm and damp and lethargic and ugly. Ass-sweat balloons out from my soaked underwear and into the legs of my pants, and face sweat drips from my three-day-old mustache hairs, it literally drips, I see a drop – there it goes! – fall from my shitty mustache and onto the arm of my shitty blue shirt. Susan answers my unasked question, she addresses the dumb half-thought that hangs in the stagnant air. Air conditioning’s broke, she declares, taxed and tired.
Teachers wheel massive, caged fans around the hallways as students strip down to undershirts and tank tops. Shame has died, a victim of the heat. Shoes and wet socks come off and sandals are procured from mildewing gym bags. Ties are loosened, shirts unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, collars pulled out and swished around. Teachers walk around in short dresses with bare legs sticking out, endless piles of pantyhose discarded in the bathroom trash bins due to the heat, monuments to our crushed optimism.
Gym class will be held outdoors, today, as will the environmental science classes, and a few intrepid English classes, to read Walden beneath the sparse trees near the faculty parking lot. The cafeteria will open the doors to the sad courtyard to let desperate students get sunburned under a clear, oppressive sky. But in-school suspension cannot be done outside. Outside is associated with freedom, and freedom is antithetical to in-school suspension. In-school suspension is a trap, it is a snare that grabs you and puts you at the mercy of whoever set the trap. It is a binding, an enclosement. No trees. No wind. No sky. No nature, or comfort, or happiness. No liberty. Only confinement.
I cringe in anticipation of the impossibly hot hellscape that will greet me in the in-school suspension cube, and I open the door, and there is my class of idiot troublemakers, my class of failures and mouthy brats, my class of the practitioners of boredom.
There are thirteen students, and the air conditioning is not broken.
No, it is not broken.
It is alive and well, and it is angry.
It was never broken. It has only been reserved for us, for this room, reserved to punish us. It has been diverted to us, only us, so that we may suffer. It is a vicious, caged, starved animal and we are here to sate its appetite. The administration has decided that the suffering of the entire school is worth the sadistic discomfort that will befall us here. Their suffering is vastly outweighed by this more targeted, specialized suffering reserved just for us. I admire the bravado, the recklessness of it, the insane machinations behind it. It is an incredible accomplishment, a far-flung wretchedness.
I look for the sun, but it is nowhere to be seen. I look for the moon, but there is no moon. I look for anything, but there is nothing to look at. No Windows, I consider writing on the white board. No Nature, maybe. And to cover our bases: No Nurture. We are being fed to the air conditioning. Was this the plan all along? It seems obviously conspiratorial. Thirteen students, the largest number yet. Here we are, time to destroy us.
Suffer, maybe. That’s a good rule, I think.
##
Thirteen students. It seems incredible. Enough students to conduct an actual class, enough students to do group work and discussion, enough students to petition the school board, enough students to start a magazine, enough students to enact an art movement, enough students to plan a coup, enough students to start a war.
Who are they? I wonder at this. I project networks of relationships upon them, scrutinizing the errant, bored glances and assigning to them deep meaning, sordid pasts, histories of shy movie dates and heavy petting. How many of these students will live on in some other student’s memories simply as someone who had to suffer through in-school suspension with them that one time? How much will this scant interaction, this accidental spaciotemporal overlap, color one’s perception of the other? Fifteen years go by and they are both in this town for a funeral, totally unaware that the other was close enough to the dead acquaintance to attend the funeral, and from across the church dining hall during the wake they quietly, subtly, point each other out to their respective spouses. That guy and I had in-school suspension together once, I think, they both say. What a strange thing to recall, they think. What a strange memory to have. Who is that person, really? Why do I remember him? No answers seem forthcoming, it is simply another strange mystery of our conscious life, another quirk of us trying to discern pattern in the chaos. But the strangeness of it is a distraction, a minute change in focus away from death, and loss, and fear, and dread, and all the other terrible emotions that well up in us while we stare at the face of a resting corpse in the front of a church that sits in the middle of some horrible Midwestern town they both tried to escape after high school. This strange memory is a mystery, it is something to contemplate and consider, it produces small, low-stakes choices – Should I say hello? Should I ask someone else what his name is? Should I bare it all, expose him to the unending neurotic tribulations my recognition of him has evoked in me? These questions rattle around while they eat macaroni and cheese and drink room temperature Dr. Pepper and provide comforting pats to their spouses who seem lost and uncomfortable in this weird, newly surfaced pocket of unshared life with its unfamiliar people and places and unknowable relationships. Did my husband ever date anyone here? Did he ever feel love for one of these people? Did he ever get into a fistfight, or a screaming match, or a sexual assault? What terrible shame did he experience in this town, what terrible shame does he experience here now? What of those experiences, that shame, will he ever share with me? Why do I feel so selfish, why am I focusing on this, why am I not being supportive, why am I neurotically ruining this funeral for him? Ruining this funeral, what a crazy thing to say, what a ridiculous sentiment, what unbridled selfishness, they think. There is nothing to ruin, this is already a ruin, this is the celebration of ruin. I hate this, I hate this church, I hate this town, this place, and I hate the hotel we’re staying in, and I hate this potato salad, and I hate how people talk here, and I hate all of the pickup trucks, and I hate funerals, and I hate the people who go to funerals. And I hate my husband. Oh my God. I do, I do, I do, oh God, I hate him.
When will be the first funeral that any of these thirteen teens attends? Trick question, the answer is: now. We are attending a funeral, here and concurrently, we are mourning a loss, we are mourning a death. We are the pallbearers, and our minds are in the caskets. This is a mind funeral, this is a ceremony of academic destruction, and every silent tick of the digital clock is another handful of dirt thrown into the pit.
Zac Smith is the author of 50 Barn Poems (CLASH Books, 2019). His stories and poems have appeared in online in places like Hobart, Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and other cool websites. He lives in Boston, where he likes to walk his dogs. He’s on twitter @zacthelinguist.