The Last Summer

That was the year, of course, that broke all the records. Again.

The last school bus circled for the third time, the last horn blasts louder, the last cheering echoes from its sealed up windows happier, the last withered waves from her colleagues and peers, even a few administrators, fiercer. This tradition of the school busses circling the parking lot a few times on the last day before summer was one of Miss Lindsey’s more appreciated events, so she held off returning to her classroom. Another of her more appreciated experiences as a teacher was a classroom empty of children, none more keenly relished than an emptiness ten weeks long.

Miss Lindsey turned to Mrs. Bonnie and said, “Is it hotter this year than last or do we always say that?”

“We always say that,” said Mrs. Bonnie. She waved with a great loving smile at the little faces crowded in the last school buss’s rear window, some of them, for heaven’s sake, in tears.

Lindsey couldn’t help editorializing. “No tears in my kids’ eyes,” she said, shaking her head in mock sadness, even as she smiled and waved at the retreating 2nd graders.

Mr. Faircloth, 5th grade science, said with typical half-serious sarcasm, “That’s ‘cause we’ve broken ‘em by then. But it is hotter this year,” he added. “Have you seen the news? California? The fires?” The clarification was actually necessary, there was so much news.

“Oh, those fires,” Mrs. Bonnie said. She was the kind of doughy veteran who grew gentler and kinder each year. She put her hand to her grandmotherly chest.

The town was small enough they’d see the kids around through the summer, though, especially as they aged into part-time jobs and independence, went to older movies, the same shopping hours on occasion, that sort of thing.

But summer was here. Finally. Miss Lindsey had started to think of herself in that name, her classroom name, around year four; now it fit like the school shirts she wore. Today’s said ‘Palmetto Primary Cares’, which made it sound like a 24 hour clinic, but she wasn’t picky. The school didn’t have uniforms - budgetary reasons - but she’d collected enough shirts over the years that they’d become a uniform out of expediency. Same shirts every day, so no need to add thinking about clothes to the classroom’s impossible number of demands. Still, not wearing Palmetto Primary t-shirts was another summer reward.

And it was hot and humid enough that even a t-shirt was uncomfortable. Last thing you wanted as a teacher, kids in the room or not, were sweaty pits, so she muttered her goodbyes to the faculty and went back inside.

She was returning next year to the same classroom. Earlier that last month Principal Michaels had cc’d the whole school about maintenance and cleaning crew shortages over the summer and it was unlikely (read: not happening) that the walls would be repainted this year, or much else by way of summer restoration. So Lindsey wasn’t taking down any of the year’s posters and such. She’d tried to get her last period to stack all the desks and chairs in the center of the room but that kind of job was a task 7th graders did poorly, so now chairs were on desks, desks were stacked sideways, and half the furniture wasn’t even in the center but along the wall. Basically, they’d made two forts out of it.

And she was too worn out to care.

She’d signed the contract for next year, but the inevitability of August hardly felt welcome. Summers were weird that way for teachers. You never left the calendar of a kid, the happy anticipation of an end, a weekend to beat all weekends, ten weeks long. But there wasn’t the promise of growth either; you were the same at the start and would be the same at the end.

And every year it seemed to get harder, just like it seemed to get hotter, the last five after Covid (and wasn’t that a lesson plan gone awry) just one additional vaguely impossible demand after another. Usually at the end of a school year she was already half into planning the next, happily polishing the Units that worked and gratefully abandoning those that didn’t for projects yet untried. But all she was feeling after this year was relief it was done and anxiety over finances.

Still, summer was here.

But what a hot one. The first week of June she didn’t need to ask if they said the same thing every year. The news was filled with record highs and records broken.

She’d picked up a few shifts waitressing at The Crab Shack over on the inlet, decent tips and mostly tourists, which avoided that awkward table of “Miss Lindsey? You work here?! Mom, dad, grandma,” (whoever) “this is my teacher! My teacher!” So much surprise and confusion it was as if they thought she went into storage over summer like a winter coat.

Almost.

Some days, like now, it was a kid like Dimitry Clover, class shit of a kid. One of the growing number who didn’t do any work. Like, at all. She’d called him Dimi, then just Dim in class. A lot. Dim, sit down. Dim, stop throwing. No Dim, you just went to the bathroom. No Dim, you just got a new pencil. No Dim, Fern is not staring at you. (He was, but whatever.) Dim get to work. Dim eyes on your own paper. Dim sit down.

Another thing about this summer. Despite the year and all their complaints about the kids, which they made every year, she’d always left liking most of them and even loving a few. It was like a class-wide, year-end version of the Parent Teacher conferences, where one on one and face to face you mostly forgave all their behaviors and flaws and saw only the potential, believed whole-heartedly their sincerest promise to do better.

But this year?

Three or four from each class, maybe. The rest? Ugh. And Dimitry wasn’t even the worst.

He was there with a large party - a twelve top in the corner overlooking the dock and water - three families, parents and a half dozen kids, two around Dim’s age but she didn't recognize them. He didn’t notice her until she put the introductory water down, big red cups you were always refilling and which kids like him too often tipped over, and said without looking up, “I wanna Coke.”

“Sure Dimitry, your parents okay with that?”

He looked up, startled, but didn’t miss a beat, said, “Of course” and turned back to the others.

“I’m his teacher,” she said to the adults. “Or I was, last year. ELA.” She got ready for the standard ‘not his favorite subject’ discussion but the group was distracted. She recognized mom from one of the conferences, asked, “You have family visiting?” with a nod to the rest of the table.

“Yes, kind of,” she said. “They’re from California. L.A.”

“Lost everything,” one of the men said. “Should’ve moved after the first fires.”

“Or the second,” the woman next to him said. “Or the third,” said the man next to Dimitry’s mother, likely the dad, on the heavy side, red cap proudly worn.

There was that grim laughter all around and one of the Californians said, “Well, we’re here now.” They looked, all of the strangers, like Pacific wealth, something in the haircuts, the fit of their clothes, a lack of sweat, but Lindsey couldn’t help feeling they also had the air of refugees, like they carried an imaginary whiff of campfire. Which was, frankly, weird.

They left a decent tip, though, which was nice.

Like so many businesses that summer, especially restaurants and service, they were short staffed, so she picked up more shifts than expected. The owner, a lanky retired captain named Jim, favored sports channels, and she watched all her own stuff on Netflix and Apple, so the world’s news slid around her most weeks. The days flowed towards August, work and the occasional date and usual restaurant drama here and there, so she was only peripherally aware of fires and floods West and North, some big city conflict over the police, again, and various institutions here and there falling apart.

She saw Dim again, the whole crew still somehow managing to get by, though she wondered where they even were living now, if all together and sharing bedrooms. It didn’t take long for them to lose the California shine, that was clear.

And then it was mid-June and an early hurricane - already a ‘D’, Douglas, Hurricane Douglas, tore through the Keys as a Cat 4, then veered straight up the coast like it meant to follow US 1 or I95 all the way to Maine.

Theirs was a panhandle town, so half the workforce went south to reinstall power lines and rebuild bridges and repave highways. Not everyone came back, but it seemed all the kids were now out in the streets, students from last year and a half dozen years previous. At first they played, came down to the dock and fished, sped off in their little skiffs and returned hours later all sunburned and asking for free sodas.

But there was a change in the air already, as if the luxury of childhood, maybe what everyone kept trying to haul back after Covid, went into hiding. Boys started fishing in earnest, out before dawn, returning at dusk. She saw them all over town, working, cashiering at the Publix, mowing lawns with the few remaining Hondurans and Haitians. Her worst student from two years back, Covey Mac-something - she’d forgotten his last name - a kid who threw a chair through a classroom window (not hers) was up on the roof of the apartment complex for three weeks re-roofing the place with his father. Seemed to do him good. In the afternoon when she headed to her shift, he smiled politely, asked her, “How you holding up Miss Lindsey? Ready for summer to end?”

Three former students ended up at The Crab Shack, two in the back starting as dishwashers and busboys but soon enough graduating to line cooks. Little Alexi, Miss Lindsey’s student three or four years past, now a sophomore, grown up, still just as sharp, went from hostess to waitress in a week. Lindsey was put out a bit at first - girl made better tips it seemed - but got over it fast enough because she was a hard, uncomplaining worker.

She ran into Mr. Faircloth at the bank one morning. They chatted idly for a moment, all empty space-filling talk, ‘how’s the summer?’ ‘have you travelled?’, all that, until they both realized the teller was once of theirs from a few grades back, Jeronika, one of those haughty middle school mean girls.

“She a senior now?” Faircloth asked. “God she was a bitch in my Earth Science.”

"She's grown up now," Lindsey observed.

"Right?!" Faircloth said. "Seems like last month we were thinking there's no way this generation's gonna make it. Have you seen all of 'em around town working? I swear I saw Creed, you know, that little bathroom vandal last year," (Lindsey knew him, oh yes) "emptying garbage cans at City Hall. Like, he's working there?"

Lindsey shrugged. "Stuff needs doing."

Jeronika greeted them like she’d been working at the bank for a decade. Faircloth was older, had a couple of his own kids already graduated, and he made a joke or two about “teaching them this kind of responsibility.” Jeronika laughed exactly the way she was supposed to, but she didn’t recognize Miss Lindsey at all and they parted with nothing but the business.

Then that branch, like several hundred others in the state, closed down and Lindsey moved to online banking.

Two more Gulf hurricanes in July, both roaring up through Texas, and a Cat 5 slamming the Carolinas.

She watched the news more carefully as the month drew to a close. Everyone did. Fires and floods, bankruptcies, riots, tornadoes and a cattle virus.

By the time hurricane Paula tore through the town the first week of August it felt inevitable.

Her apartment complex, newly built, was up to all the most recent codes, and they weathered the storm - she’d taken on two roommates by then - at home in a terrified, candle-lit huddle, the wind and noise so bad all three spent the hours in actual tears. But while some of the cars in the lot took damage, the apartments held up.

Mrs. Bonnie, against all advice, house on the inlet, stuck it out, and was lost, according to rumor.

Three days after, Lindsey drove her little Prius, parked safely in the unit’s single downstairs garage for the storm, through the town. The roads were still minefields of branch and debris, and every low area had water, lakes between every house, in the depressions meant just for drainage after Florida rain. The sky seemed unnaturally clear until she realized the trees were stripped of leaves.

Houses were missing roofs, or sat cleaved in two by fallen oaks.

Classes were scheduled to begin in two weeks, but there was already talk of delay. Most of the town was still without power and news was spotty, but it was also her job and she was desperate for something that felt like normalcy. She would get her classroom ready, sweep and mop if necessary, put the desks back in place, maybe rearrange the posters. Maybe the generators would be up and she’d have a little power, but if not she’d open the windows and air the room.

She rounded the corner into Palmetto’s parking lot and for a moment thought she’d made a wrong turn. But it was the school’s roof blocking the way, a million sodden pages of text and paper carpeting the neighborhood.

And after that, with one thing after another after another, they never went back to school again.