Worthy by Sara Weiss

She keeps her eye on the clock while circling the room to peer over their shoulders. They’re working on collages, gluing items onto black construction paper—magazine clippings, pompoms, scraps of tissue paper and string.

Emma helps Caleb straighten out a tissue paper square so it doesn’t hang off the side of the page. She asks Martin and Darius to please stop touching each other with glue sticks. They don’t seem to hear her, so she bends down to their level and asks them in a lower voice. They go back to their own work, but they’re still laughing. On certain days, she’s tired of repeating herself. Now though, knowing the drill is coming, she watches them and she wants to cry—not because of how much she loves them—and she does love them—but because losing them on her watch would ruin her. Maybe teaching was not the profession for her. Emma feels a twisting in her stomach.  

A girl named Bryah, who is small for her age, whose hair is pulled up into a poof on the top of her head, lifts both hands in the air while sniffling loudly. Her nose is runny. On her hands, the glue has dried to look like a peeling layer of skin. Emma rushes over with a tissue to catch the drip falling from her nose. “Got it just in time,” Emma says. Bryah and the kids around her giggle.

Over the intercom, there are three loud beeps, and that means the teachers should initiate the drill. Some of the kids gaze up at her while others keep on doing their work.

Emma is in charge. She needs to keep it together. “Time to walk over to the closet, okay?”

She locks the classroom door. She takes some of the kids’ hands and guides them. Ilida is doing a silly walk, swinging her hips, and that makes the other kids snicker. Emma shushes them and reminds them they need to keep very still and quiet.

The inside of the closet smells musty. There are canvas rolls leaning against the shelves, and Tupperware boxes full of supplies. She bought most of the supplies online over the summer. She had a budget of two hundred dollars, which wouldn’t have been enough for mere markers and crayons for her hundreds of students.

She ushers the students in and whispers to them to sit down crisscross applesauce. “Don’t touch anything, okay?”

She closes the closet door, and hustles around the room on her toes, lowering all of the blinds. She can hear them in there—someone is whispering loudly, and somebody else is laughing. It’s okay, she tells herself. This is just practice. If there truly was something to worry about, she would let them know she was serious.

She’d need to decide. Would she sit with the kids in the closet and lock the door? Hurl tables and chairs at him, kicking and screaming? That she chose a profession working with kids means that she should sacrifice her own life without a thought. That she doesn’t have her own children at home waiting for her means, even more so, that she doesn’t deserve to fight for herself. She’s spent much of her life believing that she wasn’t worth much.

She tiptoes across the shiny floor back to the closet. The walk is a long one, alone. If she had a gun stowed away in her desk drawer, she wouldn’t have the guts to grab it.

She wishes she had someone who wanted to protect her too, like a mother. Her mom wouldn’t want her to stand in waiting with her finger on the trigger, but to curl up and hide away. But then again, her mom never knew her as an adult, only as a child younger than the kids in the closet. Now, Emma feels she must not be a proper adult. In between. In limbo. Liminal.

Her mind is suddenly with Colin, a man she loved who got away. They are gliding over the choppy water, his flat hand on her back, the glow of the sun on their faces. If he was here, he might tell her, be safe. Whatever you do. She’d like to see Colin again, but she let him sail away to South Carolina on his tiny liveaboard, telling him to go even though he would have stayed. Maybe it was a mistake to let him leave without her. She loves the children, but she also likes her life.

She needs him so much in this moment that she finds herself smiling. And then comes the guilt like a pulsing red light. Wanting this for herself, wanting anything is selfish.

Her mind shouldn’t be with Colin, but with the children, who are huddled in silence. She notices they have stopped making noise. They might be terrified or asleep.

She opens the door to the closet. Their eyes squint at the daylight streaming in from the cracks in the blinds. She joins them on the floor, puts one finger to her lips and smiles at them.  Some of them are distracted by the glue on their hands. They press their fingers together or pull at the film. Bryah crawls on Emma’s lap and leans her head against her chest. She puts her thumb into her mouth, hiding it with her head burrowed into Emma’s shirt. Emma is supposed to remind her to take it out, but she’s not going to do that now. She’s not supposed to touch the children at all, having a child on her lap is against the rules, but she can’t bring herself to tell Bryah to get down. This doesn’t count as real time. They’re waiting for the announcement letting them know the drill is over. A solemnness falls over them like a thick fog. Emma can feel her own heart pounding against Bryah’s ear. She can hear them all breathing.

Sara Weiss

Image: – Pixabay.com – pallet of water colour paints.