New Student, New Mom

About a week ago, I got an email in my inbox alerting me to the fact that I was going to have a new student in oine of my 10th grade classes. “Tara,” I learned, didn’t attend 9th grade. She hasn’t been in school since 8th grade, and we had no academic information about her.

My private reaction was less than enthusiastic. She’d make my third new student in a week. The first was a drop-out whose parents re-enrolled him. (He still hasn’t shown up.) The second was a transfer from out of state with dismal grades, and he didn’t exactly come in ready to impress. And now I had a girl who hadn’t been in school for a year, who was a total academic unknown. I figured she had probably been home-schooled, and wondered what that would mean for her – some around here are extraordinarily conservative and sheltered, while others are very nonconformist and progressive.

Tara walked in to class the next day flanked by two of my sweetest, funniest guys – really good kids, if not the best students in the world. It was clear they’d taken her under their wings, and I was relieved. Not only did that bode well for her, but it indicated to me that she probably had a decent attitude. These boys wouldn’t have taken to her if she didn’t. She was petite, with reddish hair and the general uniform of the adolescent Emo-Punk Lite – hoodie with a dark all-over print, screenprinted t-shirt, jeans, colorful sneakers. I greeted her, she introduced herself to me with a slight lisp and a smile, and I got her situated for her first day of class. (One of the boys tells her that I’m the nicest teacher in the school. I hope I don’t blush.) I’d guess that Tara’s on the younger end of my students – probably fifteen.

At the end of class she came up to me to clarify something, and I asked where she’s from (not acknowledging that I know she wasn’t in school before). She told me that she’s from Washington, and that she had been living with her mom, but her mom decided that she “couldn’t handle her” anymore. Not, I’m afraid, an uncommon story. So Tara’s mom sent her and the baby here, to live with Tara’s dad.

The word baby highlighted itself in the speech bubble over her head.

As she continued on about her living situation, I realized that for the first time, I had a mommy in one of my classes. I asked her about the baby, and learned that he’d been born six weeks early and was now two months old – meaning that she should have just given birth the week before, had things progressed to term. Looking at her again, I realized that she was carrying baby weight around her waist.

No wonder she wasn’t in school last year, or at least for the second semester. Here, and many other places, there are schools that help kids out when they get into that sort of situation. Maybe where she was, there was no such option. Maybe she just took the opportunity to drop out and try to reconcile this new development in her life…

Today, all of Tara’s demographic information had been put into the system, so I was able to get a tiny bit more information from her. She’s not fifteen; she’s seventeen – almost eighteen. I don’t know how she ended up not being school between eighth grade and eighteen, but a picture paints itself. A struggling student – and for all her very good intentions, she has been struggling – can’t pass, so she drops out and… what? Works at McDonalds? Finds a boyfriend, at any rate, or someone who will get her into trouble and then drop out of her life.

I’ve never taught a mom before. She looks like a child, acts like a child. And yet she’s lived through this mystery, is living a life so radically different than the other children around her…

Epic Fail

I’m teaching about setting, and how – as students analyzing setting – we have to be specific and look for details. As an example, I’m talking about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I figure it’s a well-read enough book on its own, and that students who haven’t read it will have likely seen the movie.

I ask them what the setting of the story is and, predictably, get “Narnia.” When I press about the chronological setting of the story, I get mumbled responses about “WWII,” “WWI,” “the 1900s,” and “the 19th century.” I’ve expected this, and when I move to the next slide on PowerPoint the answers pop up, prewritten: Narnia, a long time ago.

Next I ask them if that’s enough detail. We pin down “a long time ago” – which is, after all, an awfully big place – using what some of the history buffs in the room know about the World Wars. Then I point out that if there is someone who has never heard of this book, and all we tell them is that it takes place in Narnia, he won’t know if Narnia is a distant planet, a magical kingdom, or a small town in eastern Idaho. (And wouldn’t the books be interesting if they did take place in eastern Idaho? There’s a creative writing exercise for you!) We begin spelling out some of the details of Narnia – the terrian, the climate, the political atmosphere.

Suddenly, a light bulb flickers dimly above one student’s head. Before he was just bored; now, he’s confused.

“Wait a second,” he says, after another student finishes explaining how the evil witch wants to seize all power in Narnia. “Aren’t we… isn’t this Epic Movie?”

Ladies and germs, my work here is done.

Lunch Club

The two boys sat there and wasted time in class last week, time that was sufficient to finish the assignment. They already have failing grades due to missing work – three weeks into the school year. I told them that they’d better get it done as homework, that they’d better be ready to turn it in, or that they’d be spending lunch with me on Friday.

When they walked in to class today, I asked them. Sure enough, no homework – just abashed grins and dumb excuses.

“I guess I’ll be seeing you at lunch, huh, Mrs. Bees.”

“Yep.” I handed them lunch passes, already filled out. “You’ve got five minutes to get your lunch and bring it up here.”

There are ten minutes left in lunch when they come in, laughing and jostling each other. I ask what took them so long, and they acknowledge that they forgot to come up. (I’d call bull, but at least one is severely ADHD and probably has the capacity to be holding a reminder note and STILL forget about lunch detention five minutes after being assigned it.) They look genuinely sorry, and hand me a drink they brought me. I ask if they spit in it first, and they think that’s awful – and awfully funny. I trust them.

“You’ve got ten minutes, guys. You need to get to work.”

Nine minutes later, despite my every-minute warnings, they’ve accomplished the following:

• one book open
• a name on a sheet of paper
• eight minutes of stupid jokes

I’m cool as I tell them that I’m going to be talking to their parents. Boy 1 tells me – not seriously, thank goodness – that I’m putting him in a body bag. I advise him that it wasn’t my decision to waste an entire week, including the final chance during lunch, to do a four-problem assignment.

“I expect better of you guys,” I say as they stand to leave.

“Okay, Mrs. Bees.”

“No, seriously. I do. You know why?”

Eye-roll, grin, then in mocking voice, “Because you believe in us.”

“Actually,” I reply, “I wasn’t going to be quite that cheesy. I’m not going to say that I believe in you, because one thing I believe in is our infinite ability to screw up our own lives.”

“Oh my gosh,” they laugh.

“I’ve always got some teacher saying, ‘I believe in you,’” Boy 2 says, rolling his eyes. “I hate that.”

“I hate it when they say that,” agrees Boy 1. 

“I hate it that you know it’s cheesy,” adds Boy 2, to me, laughing. 

I go on. “What I was going to say, is that I know you can do better than this. You have to.”

“Dude,” says one of the boys as they head for the door. “I hate that you know that.”

Me? I hate that you don’t even try… and that you’re building the kind of habit that is going to absolutely hogtie you in college or the workplace or your day-to-day life. But I love that you laugh and bring me a drink to apologize for forgetting to come in. You’re good kids, but you’ve got a ways to go before you’ll be good men.

The Following Events Are Only Dramatized a Little Bit

As you may recall, I volunteered as a contestant in a Singing Bee.

The closer I got to to the day of the pep assembly, the more freaked out I became. I mean, let’s be clear: I am not a singer. I like to delude myself into thinking that I am a good singer; I sound pretty good to myself when I sing along to the radio. But when I ask Mr. Bees if I’m a good singer, he’s very careful about how he answers, and hon, this Bee didn’t join the hive yesterday.

But it’s not like inability would necessarily stop me. After all, I finished off last year by disco dancing in front of the school, and goodness knows I am DEFINITELY not a dancer. (I know this because my MIL and SIL will take any possible opportunity to remind me of this. They should know, I suppose; they are dancers, and they had the misfortune of watching Mr. Bees and me sway back and forth at our wedding. And anyone who knows child psychology and the power of self-fulfilling prophecies knows that the more they say I’m not a good dancer, the worse at dancing I become.)

Big differences there, though. It was the end of the year, and my audience consisted of twelve-year-olds. And there were five of us on the stage dancing at the same time. This is the second week of school, I’m all by myself, and I’m being stared down by 1,400 cynical young adults. And I’m holding (insert nauseated feeling here) a microphone.

So I was getting freaked out, and trying to come up with escape plans.

I figured I’d just be sure to be hoarse, maybe completely lose my voice. Then I’d have an excuse. Unfortunately, I got hoarse enough to drop my voice an octave and cut my range into about a third, but not hoarse enough to beg off.

Long story shorter, at 10 AM on Friday I was handed a microphone and shoved unceremoniously into the middle of a wide-open gym floor. As the music started, a six-foot-tall bipedal wildcat-of-indeterminate-species entered the gym and started advancing, menacingly. Or maybe it was just dancing. Regardless, I now have a whole new appreciation for the experience of the early Christians dumped into the Colosseum to face the lions.

Here’s where things get funny.

The ASB kids who had organized this had been so amused by the little hints they’d shared. Apparently the first few rounds were going to be “super easy,” because they were all “super familiar oldies” – Michael Jackson, etc. Then the finale was going to be “awesome,” because it was a song that would be “really funny for teachers to sing,” and it was “hard rap,” and the sort of song they’d play at a school dance.

I tried to guess it, I really did. Using my powers of deductive reasoning, and realizing early on that my sweet, conservative kids’ definition of “hard rap” might differ from, y’know, everyone else’s, I decided it was probably going to be a Black Eyed Peas song. I trusted that the early rounds would be easy, since they’d be wanting a good lead-up to the finale, and just hoped that the MJ song was “Billie Jean” and not “Thriller,” because really, does “Thriller” even have any words outside of Vincent Price?

The contest started. There were three of us out there, one of whom was a last-minute substitution with deer-in-headlights syndrome. I was the third contestant, which meant that I had two songs to prep for the fact that there were two unforeseen challenges facing me:

1. The speakers were all screwed up, so we could barely hear the song we were supposed to be singing.
2. Apparently “really familiar oldies” were songs that were familiar to, say, people born in the 1940s or 50s.

My first song came up, and in the stress of the moment I failed to remember what it was for this blog entry, but let’s just say that not a lot of singing occurred. I “knew” the song, in that I had heard it before, but I couldn’t have told you any of the lyrics under the best of circumstances.

Ultimately, the first half of the contest was a total bust. None of us could sing anything. Either we couldn’t hear the music, it was a song we’d never heard of, or they cut it in such an awkward place that it just fell apart. The highlight was when one of the other contestants got “Billie Jean” – she didn’t have the lyrics ready, but she danced, and that was pretty funny.

Then, up come the ASB kids, grinning ear to ear. Everything has sucked, but this is going to be funny, they think. The other two contestants – who, I suppose I should mention, are somewhat older than I am – and I look at the microphone with trepidation. This is the finale, the song that no teacher will ever know, the song that they carefully picked out to point out how unhip teachers are.

“Okay, for the finale, you’re all going to sing together,” the MC says, and hands me the microphone.

She pulls out an index card. “Your artist is…”

(dramatic pause)

“…Flo Rida.”

And I have to start laughing. This teacher may not know the words to a Billy Ocean song, but Flo Rida? Flo Rida, I can do.

The opening notes of the song echoed across the gym. (For these, they got the audio right.) The crowd erupts into giggles. So do I.

“I’ve got this,” I mouth to the other contestants.

“You know this?”

“I know this.”

It’s the Flo Rida/T-Pain song, “Apple Bottom Jeans.” Of course I’ve got this. During my internship, one of my students jokingly tried to pass off the lyrics as a poem he’d written and got  the shock of his young life when I sang the whole song right back at him. Yeah, I know this song.

As the crowd giggles, I grab the microphone cord and swing it out of my way. Someone cheers. If I had a baseball cap on, I would have spun it around backward. Even though my mike isn’t on yet, I start singing along, and the kids go nuts. The contestant who danced to “Billie Jean” knows part of the dance, once she hears the song, and “hits the floor” enthusiastically. I do the low-low-low-etc. part of the dance and just barely escape falling on my old-fart backside. The kids are loving it.

Here’s a video – not of me, and not the original music video, but one that probably captures the skill level of my dancing:

Then the music cuts out, and it’s my turn, and I start singing. Only the shock of the dead silence in the room confuses me, and I repeat the last verse instead of going onto the next. They applaud anyway. I acknowledge my screw up and tell them that I meant to have Reeboks with straps instead of boots with fur, and they seem to like that, too.

“She turned around and gave that big booty a slap.” Yeah, I can see why the ASB kids thought it would be hilarious for a teacher to sing that… or to slap their own big booties…

I laughed so hard.

For the rest of the day, kids were complimenting me on my singing (for which I thanked them for flattering me by calling it “singing” – I was so hoarse it sounded more like frog noises) and expressing their delight that I would know “that song.”

But seriously? Hello, I’m not even thirty. I listen to the radio – in fact, I listen to the same radio stations they do. And none of the contestants were old enough to remember most of the other songs! Just because we’re teachers doesn’t mean we’re 80.

Anyway, I guess I made my splash. The other teachers all know I’m a first-class idiot. Some think I’m brave, others probably think I’m annoying. The way I see it, I’m mostly just a sucker… who happens to know how to go low low low low low low low low.

Being Missed

On the first day of school, one of my Latino students called me “Miss” to get my attention. It caught my attention because it was such a sweet-sounding thing. I’ve never been called “Miss” before. It makes me think of little children, calling their preschool teachers Miss Susie and Miss Anna. I wasn’t offended; sure, I’m an old married woman, but I’m not easily worked up over titles. Plus, it was the first day of school. They didn’t have to know my name right off the top of their heads.

Then it happened again. Someone – again, one of my Latino boys – got my attention in the hallway by calling me Miss.

I mention the fact that both boys were Latino because I suspected this was either a linguistic or cultural thing. When I realized I’d be teaching in this district, with its significantly higher Latino population, I wanted to be prepared to be a good teacher here. The Latino students at LMS were tough nuts to crack, and I wanted to learn how to interact more effectively. And, I’ll admit, I was concerned about what problems I might encounter. My new district has a (mistaken, I believe) reputation for disciplinary problems, mostly centering around the Hispanic population.

So I read up on the area, on issues facing Latino youth, on things teachers do wrong because they misunderstand the culture. And I learned that, culturally (and generally) they have a very different relationship with teachers than their non-Latino peers. Often, they avoid classroom participation, eye contact, etc., out of a sense of respect rather than apathy. Typically, they are taught to treat teachers with greater respect than we see in a lot of kids.

Plus, I grew up feeding my brain on stories about British school children, to whom calling any female teacher “Miss” appeared second nature. (This is confirmed by a colleague of mine from the UK.)

My point, if I have one, is that I took these two “Miss”s as a simple sign of respect, rooted in a cultural difference that I hadn’t encountered before.

And then it started to snowball. It seems like every time I turn around, another student – usually male – is calling me Miss. It’s ALL of them.

I spoke to some of the other teachers. They nodded as soon as I said it – apparently it’s not just me.

One of them, also married, forbids it in her classroom. She figures that she’s a Mrs., not a Miss, and that they’re largely being lazy. I’ve already encountered students who don’t know their teachers’ names – including their teachers from last year. (Maybe I should amend that to say that they don’t know their FEMALE teachers’ names…)

The other teacher, who is, in fact, a Miss, doesn’t mind. She told me that it stems from the ELL students, for whom it’s a respect thing. The other kids pick it up, but they also pick up the respectful undertone. So long as it’s not disrespectful, it doesn’t bother her.

I feel… not at all disrespected. It bugs me to think that they’re thinking of all female teachers as nameless – but then again, I don’t think of myself as Mrs. Bees. I think of myself as [Firstname]. And “Miss”… well, it just sounds so dang sweet. I can’t bring myself to tell them to knock it off.

Now, the kid who randomly belted out a monkey scream in the middle of independent work time… THAT I’ll tell them to knock off. Even though it was HELLA funny.

"This sucks. Why do we have to learn about history in English class?"

I’m teaching one section of American Lit (junior English) which, in my district, takes place after two solid years of U.S. History. Taking my cue from a veteran teacher at this school and in this subject, today I gave my kids a diagnostic test to see what they remembered or knew about their nation’s past.

I gave them a list of ten time frames, ten events, and ten historical people (authors and history-makers) and asked them to match them all together. If you’d like to try your hand at it, here they are:

1618-1776	Civil Rights Movement	Rev. John Edwards
1776-1800	Civil War	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1812-1880	Cold War	Ernest Hemingway
1861-1865	Colonization	Thomas Jefferson
1918-1921	Fight for Independence	Martin Luther King Jr.
1921-1929	Great Depression	Ronald Reagan
1929-1942	Prohibition	Franklin D. Roosevelt
1941-1945	Westward Expansion	John Steinbeck
1962-1970	World War I	Harriet Beecher Stowe
1945-1989	World War II	Mark Twain

(My history-minor husband and I agree that some of these aren’t as clear-cut or accurate as they might ought to be, but the spirit of the thing – particularly as it pertains to a literature survey class – is okay.)

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t do well. I was a little surprised at HOW poorly they did, though. I had three boys who seemed to know most of the answers, and I eventually stopped letting them answer while we were correcting. The rest of the class was clueless, to the degree that the class average on the assignment (were I to give a grade on it) was a 2%.

There’s no typo there. TWO percent. And given that I had several high Bs, you can estimate just how many zeroes I had.

And oh, the complaining! How indignant they all were, that I dared blur the lines between history class and English class! My arguments that they weren’t learning history but rather recalling what they’d already learned, all on deaf ears. And don’t even fool yourself that they listened to my explanation as to how literature gains meaning from its historical context.

I’m sharing, not because I blame our history teachers (I don’t… entirely) but because it gave me, in addition to gray hairs, a few good chuckles. For your viewing pleasure, I present A HISTORICAL TIMELINE ACCORDING TO ELEVENTH GRADERS.

From 1618 to 1776, during Mark Twain’s colonization of North America, Martin Luther King Jr. led us in our fight for independence. This span of over 150 years was also marked by World War I, which had no real leader. The passage time brought no peace; in 1776, Thomas Jefferson launched the Civil War at approximately the same time that Mark Twain dragged us into the Cold War. Both wars were ongoing until 1800.

The Cold War restarted in 1918 under the leadership of “that Harriet dude” (actual classroom comment), Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was particularly hard to take, since Ronald Reagan had enacted Prohibition in 1918 and maintained it until 1921. This may have contributed to the Great Depression, which Thomas Jefferson chronicled from 1921 until its conclusion in 1929.

Jefferson – who was a busy guy at mid-century – then led our nation into World War II from 1929 until 1942. Not content with his contributions in this area during the 1600s, Martin Luther King returned for part deux of his Fight for Independence. This led to Ronald Reagan’s Civil Rights Movement from 1941 through 1945.

At the end of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1945, John Steinbeck led us into World War II. Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan, perhaps in protest, re-enacted Prohibition for the duration of the war. This apparently caused a second Great Depression, again closely associated with Ronald Reagan, which lasted from 1945 until 1989.

World War II was waged from 1945 until 1989. Somewhere in the middle of the war (according to the one students whose answers led to this paragraph) we apparently became bored with that skirmish, and decided to start World War III. WWIII lasted from 1962 until 1970, at which point it appears we decided to go back to finish WWII.

Dude, kids. Apparently you NEED to learn about history in English class….

The best part of all of this is one of the students, who I’ll call Yvette. She didn’t do great on the diagnostic – got about half of them right – but knew about the events and was able to make smart connections between the events and the people who may have been associated with them. The mistakes she made make a certain kind of sense – it follows, in a way, that the Civil Rights Movement would come immediately after the Civil War, doesn’t it? She had by far the highest score of any girl, and was the most confident and forthcoming during our class discussion.

Yvette is a foreign exchange student. From Kazakhstan. She’s been in the U.S. for two weeks.

This may be a very long year….

Gee, Thanks

We have a new nurse at our school – not new to nursing, but new to our building. I really hit it off with the last gal, but this one… well, we just haven’t really clicked. Most of this is due to the fact that she keeps very much to herself (no fun health updates, etc.) and I haven’t spent much time in the nurse’s office.

My only real complaint with Nurse is that she doesn’t send sick kids home. Probably there’s some reason behind that, but all I know is that before, a puking kid didn’t get returned to my classroom.

A case in point:

Today, one of my kids – and granted, a chronic sicky – went to the restroom and vomited. ”Ralph” returned, looking visibly ill; I sent him to the nurse. Fifteen minutes he returned to get his things. From “visibly ill” he’d progressed to “actually green” punctuated with loud groans of pain. I asked him if his parents were coming to get him.

“No,” Ralph said. “She says I have to at least get through fifth period, and then if the medicine isn’t helping she’ll let me call home.”

Well, great. I’m sure Ralph’s fifth period teacher wants him in there breathing puke-germs all over her and her other students. It’s not bad enough that he leaned all over my desk and breathed on me, but now we want to take out as many teachers as possible?

Some of these kids – Ralph included – are fledgling hypochondriacs, no doubt. But he was not faking this discomfort, and I doubt very much he was faking the puke. And I’m sorry, but the last thing in the world I want is anyone throwing up in my classroom. That’s bad enough on its own, but when you’re in a room full of kids – all of whom are potentially sympathetic vomiters – you’re just asking for Awful.

Send ‘em home, Nurse!

Inspired by Fiction?

One of my seventh grade boys (who gets to be called Colt here, because I keep mentally describing him as “coltish”) has landed himself in deep poo.

He’s a nice boy with some problems. Unmedicated ADHD. Too smart for his own good, which leads to boredom in the classroom. Wants to be tough. Has (unfortunately for his wannabe toughness) auburn curls.

During first period, VP-7 came into my room and took Colt away. I didn’t think too much of it; Colt is one of those boys who gets pulled out of class. Later, it turns out that Colt never went back to any of his classes that day. Curious, his other teachers and I went to VP-7’s office for information.

Two days later, we finally got most of the story out of the administration (who were constrained by the ongoing investigation and privacy).

Colt brought a knife to school – bad enough, considering we have a zero-tolerance policy. That’s expulsion right there under most circumstances. Worse, he pulled it on a younger kid and pretended (or “pretended” – how would we know?) to threaten him. The kid reported Colt, and the rest was pretty clear-cut.

What bothers me is that I kind of think I know what Colt was thinking (inasmuch as a thirteen-year-old boy is ever thinking anything). See, we’re reading The Outsiders. He’s not in my reading class, but he would come in to my writing class and, given five minutes of spare time, grab one of my classroom copies and start reading it voraciously. If you don’t remember how the book goes, the relevant information is that it is full of tough, quasi-heroic young boys who carry switchblades.

Smart, bored boy gets hooked on a book filled with characters he’d love to resemble. He can’t teleport himself back to the 1960s, but he can walk with a swagger and a knife in his pocket.

Assuming it’s even the case, what’s the lesson? Don’t teach this book? I have to admit, I had my doubts about its appropriateness, but for the first time all year I think the kids are actually loving a book. What teacher in their right mind would take that away?

Meanwhile, Colt is suspended, almost certainly expelled, and quite possibly up on juvenile criminal charges. It’s a heart-breaker. We’d been trying really hard to help this kid… but I guess sometimes there’s no holding them back from the brink.

Bad Idea of the Day

Today’s bad idea comes courtesy of an eighth grade girl who thought it would be great to open up a campus tavern at her lunch table. She acquired half a bottle of booze from her parents’ liquor cabinet and snuck it to school, then somehow managed to sneak it into the lunchroom despite the fact that we have a backpack-free campus. (Having snuck my fair share of sodas into basketball games, I’m guessing coat sleeve.) She then proceeded to open the bottle under the table and pour generous shots for all of her friends.

A student at an adjoining table realized what was going on and, rather than ask for her fair share of straight Everclear (or whatever lovely beverage the Daily Special was) informed one of the lunch duty teachers.

All of the kids who accepted contraband libations have been suspended. The bartender is in a lot of trouble; not only did she steal from her parents and bring alcohol to school, but she distributed it to a LOT of minors. At the very least, with our zero-tolerance policies, she’s looking at expulsion. She’ll be lucky not to come up with juvie charges.

My question: how in the world do a bunch of eighth grade girls drink any sort of alcohol straight and not just become immediately conspicuous? Most adults will pull a face, and many will holler or gag. I can only imagine what amount of sheer will power must have been exercised for those girls to keep their cool.

Nice Underpants, Dahlink

It is way funnier to be catty about crazy substitute teachers than it is to be catty about people you actually know and kind of like.

So, this morning I walked into the faculty lounge, and Natasha was digging around in the crisper drawers of the refrigerator.

She appeared to be six feet tall, about 80 pounds, and about twenty years old. She was wearing all black, except for her blue substitute badge; however, there was only one important part of her wardrobe at this particular moment. Imagine what you look like if you were bending over to dig through the bottom drawer of a refrigerator. Picture it… picture it… yes, that’s correct. Now picture that same posture, only the butt waving in the air is exposing about 6-8 inches of black satin thong to the entire faculty lounge – and, through the open door, the middle school hallways.

(It didn’t occur to me until later that it was a little odd for a substitute to be digging around in the refrigerator. What in the world was she after?)

A few minutes later, I walked back from the copy machine to find Natasha still digging through cupboards. “Can I help you find something?” I asked.

“Yeah, do you have any coffee cups?” she asked, and I swear I wasn’t imagining the faint Russian accent in her voice.

“No,” I replied, not untruthfully or unsympathetically. “We’re out of disposable cups. I’m sorry.” Plus, we all pay every month for coffee, which it clearly says on the machine. I mean, ordinarily I wouldn’t begrudge a sub a cup of coffee, but that looked like a really expensive strap of fabric up your backside, so I’m guessing you could have brought your own….

“Oh,” Natasha said, and opened a cupboard above the coffee machine. “I’ll just use this one, then.” And she pulled out someone’s coffee mug, filled it up, and left the lounge while I stood there wondering how best to pick up my jaw off the floor.

Wow. Wow.

I am TOTALLY requesting her next time I need a sub.