Central Academy

Central Academy

Prologue

Last spring, I left my delivery job for one said to be more lucrative. The rumor proved false. Shortly thereafter, the ballroom renovations that waylaid my catering side hustle began. Summer came in hot on spring's heels. My tutoring clientele dissociated into a sun-worshipping diaspora. I was flailing; Indeed.com saved me from drowning.

Central Academy, a private alternative school in affluent Coral Springs, hired me as a teaching assistant in their 10th-grade classroom. The job was fathoms beneath my skill set, a set comprised of a BA, a TESOL, 2 languages, plus 8 years in-country. While the pay was subpar, the conditions were cake. The school was clean and commodious. The 7-hour shifts kept cabin fever at bay. While class sizes were on par with those of public schools, lead teachers did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.

Initially, Principal J. Moller struck me as earnest, and capable. She didn’t clutch her pearls when she found crumbs from my defunct standup career online. Instead, she urged me to expunge it before nosy, net-savvy students hit paydirt. When my background check exhumed a decades-old DUI charge I’d forgotten to dish, Moller assisted me in squaring the matter with the company’s compliance officer.

Between you, me, and the Croatoan tree, a midlife crisis had been besieging me for months. Moller gave me cause to give the bottle pause. I pledged to do right by her. To start, I asked to attend all lead teacher trainings. I even offered to do so pro bono, lest some bean counter begrudge her the labor costs.

Inception

I began training the Monday prior to fall term’s commencement. Within days, Mrs. Ameru and I sensed the rot subsurface to CA’s gilded facade. Class rosters remained incomplete, outdated, or just plain wrong. New books arrived daily; absent an up-to-date registry, Ameru and I nearly tossed dozens of timeworn texts we’d wrongly assumed were slated for supplantation.

One fine midweek morning, my newly-minted nameplate arrived. I should’ve been beaming with pride. Instead, my aura dimmed. Central Academy, which employed 5 F/T teachers, and 4 mostly F/T teaching assistants, had just hired two of each. Why had 40% of their teachers, and 50% of their TAs, quit or been fired since last term?

About Central Academy

Central’s “upper school” was no ordinary high school. While, without question, a cut above public schools’ gym bros, hood rats, trailer trash, and super predators, CA’s wards were hardly “gentlemen of Harvard.” Though the school masquerades as a sanctuary city for “students with Asperger’s and high-functioning autism,” most matriculants were just teenage toddlers enabled by “overvaluing” parents, and apocryphal pop-culture medical diagnoses.

Joshua, a sophomore, had a sixth-grader’s self-control, and an oscillating fan’s attention span. Fatuities flowed from him unfettered. Josh once queried why I’d referred to Kobe Bryant’s surviving spouse his “widow;” How bone-deep ignorant must one millennial be, to reach 16 without acquiring such a widespread word?!

By and large, Central Academy’s best and brightest were typically those who eschewed, rather than embraced, their labels. One junior from a nearby classroom comes to mind: Beloved by students and staff alike, Lara was a social butterfly forever in flight. What’s more, she was breathtakingly beautiful. Picture Cindy Crawford in her prime; now, paint her more approachable. Why she hadn’t dropped out of school, and hopped a Hollywood-bound Greyhound bus, was anyone’s guess.

Ethan, a sophomore, was another pearl in a sea of pearl jam. Handsome, book smart, and sports adept, Ethan’s dignified bearing belied his age. Though famished for context, I never asked “E” what en vogue pseudo disorder kept him from transferring to Big Boy High, casting his lot with the cool kids, and lettering in this sport and that.

Days into my training, Moller announced that she’d fired the school’s sole front office staffer for poor performance. I scoffed; not once had I seen the freshly-fired staffer surfing Snapchat, or nursing a hangover. My ears, attuned to CA’s dysfunctional frequency by then, mined a more likely motivation from Moller’s monologue: 2-3 days ahead of her pink slip, a grey-haired apparat, introduced only as “[1st name] from corporate,” debuted. From then on, Apparat shadowed our receptionist ‘round-the-clock, no doubt tumbling to her subpar training, support, and supervision. Blame needed to be assigned; peasant heads are always the first to roll.

Enter Egghead

As week one gave way to week two, alopecic albino “Egghead” appeared without preamble or stated purpose. While he never telegraphed his title, legacy staff showed him deference.

Ephemeral respites infrequently befell me. Ameru would be lecturing, students would be testing, and so forth. I often spent these breathers bedazzling lectures with YouTube clips, Snapple cap facts, et al. I was doing just that when Moller and Egghead staged an ambush. Busy and pressed for time, I went on with my work. On egress, Headcheese and Egghead summoned me to a private palaver.

Egghead crowned the conference table, his inchoate chin aloft steepled forefingers. Moller rode bitch, like a dimwitted sitcom sidekick. Off his nod, she inquired why they’d “found” me computing rather than co-captaining. I explained that I’d been doping that day’s history lesson with renderings of Roman battle formations. Our powwow should have ended there, punctuated by an apology. However, an empty suit’s divine status can never be compromised; owning an error would be akin to the emperor calling his own nakedness out. To that end, Moller framed curating exhibits for my kids as tuning them out. Given my subordinate status, I ate a murder’s worth of crow.

As our chat was winding down, Moller mentioned my “half-hour break.” For school’s first few days, I’d thought lunch my sole repose. On learning that I’d flouted labor laws, on her watch, for nearly a fortnight, Moller reversed course, writ large. Minutes after dogging me for ditching my kids in principle, she ordered me to ditch them in practice. “When exactly should I take breaks my classroom timeline can’t accommodate?” I riposted, nonplussed. Moller, in turn, suggested that TAs “cover one another.” Her proposal overshot asinine, touching down in space-time paradox country. “Sorry,” I croaked, “but, with no pool subs on staff, wouldn’t plucking a TA from ‘A’ to fill a void in ‘B’ simply create a void in ‘A?’” Moller broke eye contact, mumbled unintelligibly, and razed my faith in her faculties.

Sympathy for Ameru

Ameru’s tenure totaled 2 months, less weekends, Labor Day, and 5 sick days. It’s a wonder she lasted that long. In the runup to commencement, she was handed a list of literary titles, and instructed to select several for required reading. 2 weeks passed; no picks came. Oh, well. She lacked the time to sleuth fine art on behalf of comic book connoisseurs anyhow. A fortnight later, she was served a duplicate form, paired with the same directive.

Moller routinely bent and broke rules to shield Central’s prestige from its systemic chaos. Every time Ameru and I deemed some pupil’s misdeed(s) worthy of his/her permanent record, Moller impeded the protocol. See, digitizing records made them subject to audit: In brief, publishing the bride’s little black book would broadcast what an affront to rectitude her white dress is.

Moller could be comically obtuse. She once tracked me down during my lunch. Finding me ensconced inside a desolate, dimly-lit classroom, she heaped her trademark pedantry upon me. Desperate to reclaim my sanctum, I took to talking with my mouth full. Instead of solving extant problems, Moller would seize upon superfluities, making a show of superintending them. One such instance harshed Ameru’s immutable mellow. Mrs. A’s ensuing outburst sent Moller scurrying back to her hidey hole, tail buried betwixt her legs.

Each day’s first bell beckoned students to the bullpen. Each day’s second bell served as a starter pistol. Once attendance had been taken, I conveyed the writ to reception.

One morning, not 20 minutes in, one of Moller’s loathsome spot audits derailed my/Mrs. A’s progress. Within seconds, Moller concluded that Ameru was not shepherding her flock in an appreciable manner, and subjected her to an impromptu performance review. Choking back bile, Mrs. A pointed performatively toward the TV she’d been staging for a collective viewing when Typhoon Moller made landfall. Chastened, red faced, and in need of fresh scandal, Moller homed in on my absence. By bellowing that I was off tackling the same task I tackled every single day at that same time,” Ameru snuffed Moller’s McCarthyist ambitions.

Frenemies with Benefits

One day, Cheyenne and Samantha were holding hands; the next, they were testing natural law’s limits on how far they could distance themselves from each other. Early on, Moller apprised me of the pair’s turbulent, on-again, off-again lust affair. She told me to watch Chey, as he was known to palpate Sam’s privates when she drew within arm’s length. Within days, I’d dismissed her guidance as bawdy gossip. The pair’s PDAs never surpassed platonic, until they did.

Cheyenne, I liked. His buffoonery, though near constant, never devolved into disrespect, and he never punched down for punchlines. Chey’s cartoonish visage could disarm Yosemite Sam: Picture a peeled spud with benevolent blue eyes, and a sundried straw ponytail; now, imbue that image with Slowpoke Rodriguez’s sense of urgency.

Samantha “Sam” Cadet stood 5’2,” in pumps. Sam’s Lilliputian stature only emphasized her body’s hyperbolic topography. Despite her baroque bosom, Sam never buttoned her fitted polos. To guild the lily, she’d “hem” her provincial schoolgirl skirts by hiking their waistbands false ribs high. In short, Sam knew what she was doing.

Samantha ran hot and cold. Once, apropos of nothing, she foisted her fondness for horror films upon me. 2-3 days hence, I called back to our chat. Sam feigned selective amnesia. Sam was every incipient Karen you’ve seen sassing COPS on YouTube, only to cry ugly when the cuffs come out. $1,000 says she hangs her sugar baby shingle out the day her bio daddy’s subsidies cease.

Our room was a run-of-the-mill rectangle. Our diametrically opposed desks gave Ameru and I a panoramic view of our prefecture. Students sat facing the nearest wall; flanking vertical dividers cut down on coup plotting.

Our sophomores were on their “brain break” (their daily indoor recess) when I saw what I saw. Ameru, planning lessons at her desk, might as well have been worlds away. A stone’s throw starboard, a sprite strafed my periphery. My eyes gave chase, but all that remained was Cheyenne’s girth shrouding Sam’s cubicle. I was doubling back to my crossword when the cheeky sprite encored. Comprehension mule kicked me: “Tinkerbell” had been a tuft of Sam’s hair pronking each time her face bungee jumped from Chey’s glans to Chey’s GUNT. Sam, half-turned in her seat, was polishing his flesh flute like a crackhead earning funds for her next fix.

I raced to the break room. I brewed coffee as a cover story. The employee lounge neighbored reception. Apparat, acting receptionist since the last one’s ouster, was in the weeds, indifferent to surveillance feeds. Bottom line, if Sam and Chey had been recorded, they had to be reported. Peering over Apparat’s shoulder, I found my room’s black-and-white broadcast. I breathed a sigh of relief, from the depths of my soul, for the lot of us. The electric eye’s acuity debased with distance. Sam’s randomly-assigned seat, the farthest from our room’s resident security camera, fell just outside its visual field.

Having no yen to upend two budding lives, I vowed to take what I’d witnessed to my grave. I briefly considered enumerating the trouble Sam and her beau would have been in had Egghead or Headcheese chanced upon their tryst, but, alas, chose not to gift them a sword to hang over my head for the remainder of my residency.

Krystal Harris

Even amid a convocation motley as mine, Krystal Harris stood out. Scars scored her biceps. Their grouping spoke to intentionality. She was either lousy with antidepressants, or a method actor mired in that role. Krystal spoke flatly. She sometimes showed up short of shower fresh. By Week 2’s terminus, she’d missed 4 of school’s first 10 days. Informed of Krystal’s truancy, Moller pulled muscles marginalizing it, citing flu season’s advent. I pointed out that only 2 of her absences had been serial. Moller, sucker punched by this probative reveal, didn’t even feign an inclination to do fuck all about it.

Bloodletting

The term’s second Friday took centerstage. Krystal, minimally present of mind by default, had returned from her latest “sickie” lobotomized. She’d checked out before Mrs. A had finalized attendance, faceplanting into crossed arms. Our ship of fools at capacity, neither Ameru nor I needed Krystal overcrowding it. Man plans, God laughs. We had to wake her 2 hours later, by which time her snores were fragmenting the school’s foundations.

One hour after lunch, Krystal solicited a potty pass. On egress, she surreptitiously swiped Misses A’s scissors. In due time, Ameru tumbled to Krystal’s absence. As the latrine neighbored our classroom, malingerers found no quarter there. Mrs. A beckoned her truant with nonstop door knocking. Krystal cracked the door, teasing the secret she was dying to share. Ameru encouraged catharsis by swearing herself to silence. Krystal flashed the shears she’d purloined, and the flesh she’d defiled. While even the worst of her wounds were superficial, there were several, some seeping. Ameru went back on her word forthwith, marching Krystal to Moller’s office double quick.

Ameru pushed Moller to summon police, paramedics, and any other entity known to talk troubled souls off ledges. Moller, forever leading from the rear, took Mrs. A’s notes, but foisted their implementation upon Krystal’s folks. By requiring Krystal to undergo a psych eval before returning, Moller washed her hands of her troublesome ward.

Full disclosure, neither I nor Mrs. A knew of Krystal’s genitors committing abuse of any kind. Still, in academia, as in clinical settings, hoofbeats herald horses, not zebras. Assuming Krystal’s folks were the wellspring of her woes, remanding her into their care might send her spiraling anew. Four-alarm elopements from work to reclaim “Crazy Krystal” stood to kindle their next combustion. Had it really never crossed Moller’s mind that the calls might have been coming from inside the house the whole time?

Following Moller’s coverup of Krystal’s crackup, Ameru feared she’d shirked her mandatory reporter duties. By that point, I was no longer entertaining a future with Central Academy. Mrs. A, I learned, never had been. Failing the costly behavioral therapist board exam had delayed her career kickoff. Her failure to forward firsthand knowledge of a ward’s self-harm act could come home to roost when she least expected it, in perpetuity. As for me, I lived too low on the totem to be tainted by the brass’ misdeeds, or so I thought.

Krystal never came back, at least not before I left CA for dead, torching the bridge behind me as I did. Moller never solicited my version of events, not even off the record. Krystal’s peers were never apprised of what had happened, much less availed counselors to dissuade kindred spirits from following suit. CA made none of the trauma mitigation efforts that have come to comprise “the new normal” in the quarter century since Columbine.

The Beginning of the End

Monday, 09/04/23, came in hot. I’d thrown my back out on Sunday; a red-hot pine knot had called my lower lumbar home ever since. Ameru’s text scuttled my plans to call in sick. She’d shown for work downright moribund; Moller had remanded her homeward. Ameru, we’d soon learn, had caught COVID.

By that point, the number of students out with, or just returning from, Novel ’19 convalescence had surpassed countability. Of all the reasons Ameru gave for tendering her 2-week notice 2 weeks into the term, COVID was #1, what with her having a husband, a toddler, and a newborn at home.

I stepped up, doing the best job a first mate made captain overnight could. Lacking lead teacher login creds, I couldn’t amend records, or access online content. I made lemonade: When I couldn’t teach new concepts, I refreshed fundamentals. Back when I could still stomach the sight of her, I’d warned Moller that, so long as CA’s caste system stood, I’d remain unfit to wear Ameru’s crown, should the need arise. Remember those lead teacher trainings I volunteered to attend, the ones Moller never bothered getting back to me about?

Midway through my first solo flight, Moller and I chanced to cross paths. She said naught about finding a successor for Ameru, or the daily breaks Ameru’s absence precluded me from taking (the same breaks she’d ordered me to take three weeks aft). Before decamping, she dished that “Corporate” was sending “someone” the next day. Naturally, I assumed that “someone” meant “a professional educator.”

Despite COVID’s compounding growth, CA continued using my inherited classroom for before and aftercare. None of the moppets in either “care” were mine. Meanwhile, every other lead teacher enjoyed private, productive planning periods. Designating her fiefdom a dump site for kids whose parents couldn’t wait to drop them off, plus kids whose parents could wait to pick them up, had been a sore spot for Ameru, and rightfully so. The decision had been made for her, with no input from her.

Minutes piled into hours. Remember that fixer whose arrival Moller teased? With one lead teacher COVID positive, and another in denial about being C+, corporate dispatched a desk jockey. His pronounced Indic features, and his J. Wellington Wimpy work ethic, earned him the inspired handle, “Bureaucrat Bikram.” Bikram never chipped a manicured nail on my behalf. He never even introduced himself, not even before he moseyed about my classroom like a politico courting votes from small-town clodhoppers.

With no novels on hand, “silent reading” became “study hall.” To maximize the time, I enacted mandatory tutoring for my math laggards. Kid-gloved handholding proved just what my ephebic know-it-alls would never have admitted needing.

I spent the whole next day champing at the bit to pick up where I’d left off. Again, man plans, God laughs. Just as my sweathogs were hitting their strides, Moller darkened my door, summoning me to her office. Further inflaming my ire, her lackey claimed Ameru’s vacant recliner, not my newly-vacated tutoring table stoop. I’d already resolved to jump ship after reading Mrs. A’s successor in. However, if my empty pantsuit of a boss had renditioned me for any reason other than to grant a pay raise, I’d hand her my quitclaim at day’s end.

Burn Notice

For school’s first 2-3 days, I’d assumed that proctoring lunch was one of my job duties. Moller set me straight, stating that my students’ lunch was my recess. Ameru, in contrast, was contractually obligated to police her lunch lot. Each day, when the clock’s hands reached their full height, she and a gingered aid from an adjacent classroom led their collated cattle out to graze. I can’t recall the aforementioned TA’s name, only that she too often wore a threadbare Sailor Moon T-shirt to work.

While I wasn’t asked to do so, I habitually stayed behind (in the classroom) to supervise wards warming their meals in the shared microwave. The gesture borrowed against my evanescent reprieve, but it made Mrs. A’s job much easier. Deprived of my succor, Ameru would’ve had to walk her charges to the rally point, dump those who didn’t need their repasts reheated on Moon, double back to our room with those who did, then lead that lot to the lunch spot.

The Bikram-Moller Braintrust

On Tuesday, September 5th, Sailor Moon became Central’s latest COVID casualty. Absent Ameru and her deputy, CA’s captives ate lunch like free men. Moller and Bikram, I’d soon learn, aimed to fault me for the protocol’s breach.

Bikram sat where Egghead had 3 weeks afore. Moller had, again, yielded her throne to a suzerain. Bikram, bloviating into his mobile, didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t even lift a forefinger, that favored flex of pompous pricks the world over. I countered his passive-aggressive play with one of my own, breaching his threshold unbidden.

Had anything eyebrow arching happened over lunch, word would have spread like confetti from a cannon. Each recitation would’ve raised the stakes, setting the stage for a doomsday denouement. So, then, sans fallout, why had the BMBT deposed a priest mid mass? Lacking a glaring answer, I reached for Occam’s Razor: Central Academy had liability insurance. Insurance policies have terms. Given the number of neurodivergent minors under their roof, omnipresent supervision was likely the sovran. Broken rules jack premiums, some flip kill switches. 3 dozen teens had just been Home Aloned for half an hour. The BMBT needed a patsy, fast.

I stared slack jawed, as the same Moller who’d freed me from lunch bondage sat excoriating my lunchroom absence. Meanwhile, Bikram rebuked me for not bird-dogging Sailor Moon, a colleague with whom I neither shared duties nor reported to. It was only when he glossed over why she’d missed work that I got wise to his game. Pressed for specifics, he confessed that she’d reported her C19 diagnosis at first light. Downplaying that singular detail tipped his hand: By couching Sailor’s absence as common knowledge, Bikram hoped to Jedi mind trick me into believing it had been. What excuse would I then have for my inaction?

Once I’d affirmed the rank predictability of Moon’s absence, I dispensed with my Caine from Kung Fu schtick. I worded my reply like a question, but intoned it like an indictment: “Was I informed of her absence?”

By now, I shouldn’t need to tell you that Moller backed Bikram’s play. That said, I’d be flouting reliable narrator norms if I excised, or even downplayed, what she said next. She kind of looked Bikram’s way and sort of wondered aloud, “Did anyone inform Chris?” Wonder of wonders, she’d just conceded my alibi’s integrity, albeit in a manner most noncommittal. Bikram stared down his substantial schnozz at her, acknowledging her contribution with silence. Moller took the hint, succumbing to cataplexy for the duration of our colloquy.

My rebuttal began. First, I cited several more urgent matters they’d been ignoring for weeks, beginning with COVID containment. With 1/4th of their TAs KO’d, CA had yet to mandate temperature checks. At a time when masks should have been mandatory, CA hadn’t even beseeched students to wear them. With 1/5th of their teachers felled by COVID, and another 1/5th falling, CA still wasn’t demanding negative test results from returning recoverees.

I’m a damn good judge of character. My darts don’t always land dead red, but they never touch down outside the bullseye’s verdant circumference either. Bikram struck me, to my core, as a man who’d don drag to board a Titanic lifeboat. That said, what he lacked in character, he made up for in mission commitment. He didn’t let the fact that his case was flawed on its face stop him from trying to make it. Given the peril ‘Rona posed, and the knowledge that my principal was a cowed corporate functionary, I revoked my self-imposed obligation to Ameru’s successor, and pledged to give my two weeks at workday’s end. That was the plan, ‘til Bikram harrumphed: “So, where were you?”

“‘Where was I?!’” I balked, incredulous as I was contemptuous. “I was heating Hot Pockets for my kids. Where were you?” It wasn’t the first time that a fool’s gold false idol had gamed a power imbalance, but it was the first time I’d fought back, consequences be damned.

Clearly, Bikram had come prepared to draw, but not to be drawn on. He fixed me with the same stare that had forced Quintus Fabius Moller’s retreat, and attempted to quell my waxing insolence with his most elegiac baritone, “Who do you think you are?” I met Bikram's challenge with four weeks’ worth of repressed recriminations: “I’m the glue holding your 10th grade together,” I bristled. “I'm a teacher working for TA wages, without the benefit of a TA. THAT’S ‘who I think I am.’”

Tempting as it is to embellish the big finish for effect, my conscience cries foul. There was nowhere left for the conversation to go. A sort of serenity settled in, as we processed the impasse in tandem. Suddenly, Bikram’s frameup, CA’s systemic chaos, Moller’s habit of rising to challenges when stakes reached their lowest, all became wrongs I could, and would, right simply by living well.

“Let’s make this day your last,” Bikram decreed, a hint of resignation in his voice. What was no doubt meant to be his big closer met with the most mic drop-worthy comeback I’ve ever coughed up: “Nah, let’s make this hour my last.”

I returned to my classroom, the Brain Trust trailing from afar, much like Michael Corleone’s Old Country in-laws-to-be when he took walks with his bride-to-be. I gathered my wares like unbundled cordwood, and stomped toward the exit, tipping terse nods to several students who deserved better. To Ethan alone, I offered my hand. I advised him to live up to his potential or, better yet, to live as if his potential lacked limits.

Epilogue

I kept in touch with Ameru for about 4 weeks following my abrupt departure, which was 2 or 3 weeks longer than I’d expected to, honestly. Our union had been forged in a foxhole, on a battlefield we’d both mde haste to leave behind. What’s more, she was married with children, younger by a decade, and resided two counties away. At 40-something and single, the only thing I need less than another platonic female friend is another platonic female friend whose homelife precludes a more meaningful bond. Our last base touch consisted of nothing more than an online article sent from my phone: Maria Velazco, an admin assistant for Central Academy, had just been arrested for embezzling $272,346. On September 28th, a detachment of BSO deputies rewarded her enterprising spirit with silver bracelets and chauffeured car service.

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