I got a queasy feeling in my stomach when Claire’s name blipped onto my phone screen. The last time I’d seen her was ten years ago, and she’d been screaming at me in line at a Pollo Tropical. “Asshole Jesus,” she’d called me. I brushed Jackson P’s godawful essay to the edge of my desk and opened the text. My free period had just started. It was supposed to be for grading but the AI-generated platitudes pasted into these kids’ essays were giving me a headache. Claire was back in Miami and wanted to know if she could call me. I got up and closed the classroom door. Before I could respond to her one way or the other my phone writhed on an improperly formatted works cited page. If I knew Claire at all, I was gonna have to pick up at some point.

“Claire?”

“Victor?”

The muscles along the back of my neck tightened. I’d known Claire forever. We grew up in the same shitty subdivision and went to the same shitty schools. Plus, we were the same age, both siblingless, and both gringos in overwhelmingly Latin Miami, so there’d always been a tension between us—a brotherly/sisterly competitive thing wherein one of us was constantly getting compared to the other. Claire, basically, was the yardstick by which I’d have to measure my success in life. And by the time we got to high school, it was clear that she was winning the competition. She made perfect grades, got genius-level SAT scores, founded a student finance club, etc., all of which got her a full ride to the University of Pennsylvania. The local paper ran a profile of her since she was the first alum of our high school to ever get into an Ivy. She came back to Miami the summer after she graduated and that’s when we sort of dated. 

“How’s the ole private equity gig?” I said.

But she wasn’t doing that anymore. She’d given up the finance thing. I was shook. As my tenth graders would say. Finance was her whole raison d’etre. It was also the reason why our situationship or whatever you wanna call it cratered: she’d summarily dipped out of Miami for the job she’d landed in New York.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” she said. “I’m teaching.”

“What do you mean you’re teaching?”

I hadn’t beaten her in educational achievement or money or career prestige, but at least, I thought, I’d secured the moral high ground.

“I mean I’m teaching,” she said.

“What are you teaching?”

“I’m a humane educator.”

“A humane educator?” I’d never heard of that. But it fit. It had a boardroom ring to it.  

“I do workshops on ethics. Mostly in colleges, but sometimes I’ll do a high school. That’s actually why I wanted to talk to you. I was hoping I could come in and do a workshop with your class.”

“Oh.” So this wasn’t a call to rekindle or relitigate. It wasn’t even a perfunctory check-in. It was professional, transactional. I was more disappointed to realize that than I should have been.

“But it’d be great to catch up too. Maybe we could get a coffee or something.”

I put my earbuds in and stood up. Across the courtyard the sun was turning the glass exterior of the CompSci building into a massive mirror. I pressed the button to bring the shades down.

“What are these workshops on, exactly?”

“Discrimination,” Claire said. “Racism, sexism, speciesism. Kids these days are inundated with this stuff, but I come at it from a slightly different angle.”

She went on describing her little talks, but I wasn’t paying attention. The awesome extent of her hubris was starting to hit me. First and foremost there was the hubris of her decision to one day willy-nilly declare herself a teacher. Then there was the hubris of her thinking that some hackneyed anti-racist TED Talk was novel and profound. There was the hubris of her presumption to know anything about discrimination in the first place. And there was the hubris of that ridiculous made-up title; she wasn’t a teacher like the rest of us, no no—she was a “Humane Educator.” Well alright then. If she wanted to test her teacher chops on my students, she could be my guest. We’d just finished a unit on Animal Farm, so it’s not like a talk on discrimination would be all that discordant with the curriculum. And anyway, the year was winding down, and I couldn’t imagine Claire’s talk being anything other than a harmless exercise in filling some dead air. My students would probably be grateful to listen to someone else prattle at them for forty-five odd minutes. I cut her off.

“We could make that work.”

“Amazing,” Claire said. “But I feel icky asking you a favor out of the blue like this.”

I told her not to worry about it.

“You sure you don’t want me to go through the whole presentation? These things can be tough, emotionally, sometimes. You have to clear it with your department or anything like that?”

“You been to Miami lately?” I said. “These kids could use some ethics.”

She laughed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. And we planned the thing for Friday.

#

I gotta admit, I was a little disappointed when she showed up to my classroom. I’d been hoping that she’d roll in with a vibe I could easily deride—a culturally-appropriated hairdo, maybe, a protest scarf, or some expensive esoteric knickknack around her neck that only someone who worked in finance would think is authentic and cool. But no: she was the same conventionally good looking, conventionally dressed Claire I remembered from the last time I’d seen her ten years ago.

“Well this is fancy,” she said. We hugged and I took her tote. She was right. It was fancy. The unscuffed desks stretched the width of the classroom, the students’ wheeled chairs were Scandinavian design objects, and the west-facing wall was a floor to ceiling window that looked out on a fairly spectacular live oak tree. Some hedgefund guy who’d relocated operations to Miami had donated a wholeass state-of-the-art STEM wing just to guarantee enrollment for his employees’ creepy little spawns.

“It’s deranged,” I said. I hung her bag from the back of my chair and took a seat on top of my desk. “You wouldn’t believe the tuition.” Though of course: having worked in finance, maybe she would believe the tuition and think it no big deal. “You remember that Edgar Allan Poe story we read in high school, The Masque of the Red Death?”

“I don’t think so,” Claire said.

Which wasn’t surprising. Literature wasn’t really her thing.

“A bunch of rich assholes are partying in a mansion while the rest of the world dies of a plague,” I said. “That’s what it feels like working here sometimes.” I spun around to make sure the classroom door was closed. Vice Principal Mari, who every morning comes out of her office with a Bluetooth speaker to play dance music as the kids hop down from their parents’ Cybertrucks, would have been shocked to find out that I wasn’t totally enamored of my position as tenth grade English teacher.

“I just meant that it’s nice. Our high school didn’t look like this.” She bent over her computer and I clocked her earrings, these big orange triangles hanging from tin hooks, each with a number and a barcode. I didn’t really know what to make of them. Maybe they were some kind of rich girl anti-capitalist merch.

“Do you like it?” Claire said.

“Like what, teaching?” I said. “It’s whatever. Someone’s gotta help these pukes get into Vanderbilt.”

Claire laughed, but I wasn’t really joking. I made enough money to afford the rent, but not enough to afford the rent in the school’s excessively swish neighborhood. Summers off was cool. And besides that? The students were businesslike, the parents were cunty, and the other teachers were boring. I’d never wanted to teach. I got a degree in English from a so-so state school, and I was in such a rush to pay off my student loans when I entered the job market that I took the first job I could get. And whatever satisfaction I might’ve extracted from the whole prosocial, it-takes-a-village aspect of teaching was negated by the aforementioned fact that I wasn’t so much a teacher as I was a to-do these kids had to check off before they were welcomed into the country’s elite institutions of higher learning and then went on to join the professional-managerial class. Also, the amount of JCrew buttondowns I now owned made me want to commit suicide inside of a JCrew.

“What about you?” I said. “You like humane educating?”

“I love it,” she said.

I’d been at this job almost a decade; in that time I’d only met a few people who could say with a straight face that they loved teaching, and I considered them to be sorta psychotic.

“Love’s a strong word,” I said.

“I mean it,” Claire said. “It feels good to be doing something worthwhile.”

“Private equity wasn’t worthwhile?”

She gave me a look. “We all know how you feel about private equity.”

“Well don’t tell me you don’t miss that PE salary,” I said.

Was I being bitchy? Yes. And should I have been happy for her, that she’d renounced her Wall Street gig and discovered a vocation that was, if not altogether revolutionary and radical, at least harmless? Probably. But my feelings were hurt. So there. They were hurt ten years ago when she left Miami for her New York finance job, and they were hurt the other day when it became obvious that she’d only texted me because I was still here, in Miami, doing the same old shit, and she’d needed something from me. She’d made me feel like a townie.

“The PE salary”—she put air quotes around PE—“was deranged, as you’d say. But look at what it got me. Now I’m able to do stuff like this. Stuff that actually matters.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t work for a nonprofit or something like that?”

“No,” Claire said.

“You’re not getting paid to do this?”

“Nope.”

“You’re doing this completely on your own.”

“Uh huh.”

“Why?”

She slid her ringless fingers into her jeans pockets.

“Cause I believe in it.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Doing something you believe in.”

Claire sighed. “I know I’m lucky. I had a lot of success early on in life and that’s allowed me to figure out who I am and what I really want to do. I know that not everyone gets to do that.”

I wanted to tell her to fuck off with her little disclaimer. She reminded me of those stock-trading congresspeople who don dashikis whenever the cops gun down a Black guy. Her words didn’t change anything, she’d only said them to rid herself of some guilt, and they’d made the subtext obvious: she’d evolved, developed, and grown over the past ten years. I hadn’t. Not really. I thought of the infirm and elderly, the grammas and grampas, the laid-off factory workers and Vietnam vets working into their seventies. The Target by my apartment employed an old guy like that. He pointed to the soap section when I asked him where the soap was, and he pointed to the battery section when I asked him where the batteries were.

“Well congrats,” I said.

Vice Principal Mari’s reggaeton was audible from the dropoff bay. I slid off my desk and propped open the classroom door. The reggaeton got louder.

“You ready? They’re gonna be here soon.”

Claire fixed her gaze on her Chuck Taylors and fondled one of her earrings. What was with those things? I wanted to ask her. But she snapped out of her little reverie and pointed at the projector that hung from the ceiling.

“I’ll be able to get video on that, right?”

#

My first period was on time. Not all of the girls had Botox foreheads and filled in lips. But some of them did. And a few of the boys were definitely brain broken by sports betting apps and masculinity influencers. They were unnaturally ripped for fifteen-year-olds. The bell sounded. I closed the door.

The entire class was staring at Claire, who was off to the side where the pride flag had been up until the Nazis in the Florida state gov took it down. I introduced her and scooted behind my desk. She walked into the blue light of the projector carrying her laptop. “Is this all synced up?” she said, scribbling a finger on the trackpad. Her voice was bassless and thin. She might’ve been about to bomb. After all: teaching is not easy. It’s an art. I hated it, and I wished I didn’t have to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an art that requires serious training, patience, and dedication, and as such it’s definitely not something you can just up and decide to do one day when you’re disillusioned with your career choices and want to inject a little meaning and purpose into your life. So yeah: I wanted her to bomb.

She tapped a key on her laptop and two images appeared on the screen: one was a pencil drawing of a slave with a baroque metal muzzle clamped over his mouth; the other was a photo of a slave who’d had his owner’s initials branded onto his forehead.

“Can someone give me a definition of slavery?” she said.

No one said anything. They clammed up when they knew they weren’t getting graded. Claire looked around the room, smiling.

A back row hand went up. It was Francisco, who typically got zeroes or ones on his weekly participation grade. “It’s when you own someone,” he said.

“Right,” Claire said. “And why’s it wrong?”

She was gonna have a tough time getting answers out of them if she went with the Socratic questioning thing the whole time. Plus, someone might say some redpill crap and try to explain how actually slavery is cool.

“Because it’s unfair,” Tomas said. “You have to pay people for their work.”

It was pretty rich that Tomas was the one advocating for fairness. When I gave him a zero on a homework assignment cause he’d plagiarized the entire thing, his dad called and said there was no way Tomas had plagiarized because he’d watched him do the assignment from the first letter to the last period. Which was obviously a lie. But I backed down and gave Tomas a passing grade. Tomas’s family was always high up on those tiered donor lists, and Tomas Sr. seemed pretty unhinged. One morning when I was on front door duty I saw Tomas get down from his dad’s truck. On the back window of the cab was a decal that said: All Lives Splatter Nobody Cares About Your Protest Keep Your Ass Out Of The Road, and under the text was a clipart depiction of a Hummer splattering a stickfigure protestor.

“That’s definitely part of it,” Claire said. “Any other ideas?”

“Because it’s illegal.” That one was from Tatiana in the front row. Like Francisco she got low marks on participation. I was sort of shocked at the level of engagement Claire was getting from this group. I guess she was actually getting through to them.

“Good point,” Claire said. “Slavery is illegal now. But if it wasn’t? Would it still be wrong?”

Voices began to call out yes, yes, it’d still be wrong. She wasn’t bombing. So she could add teaching to the list of things she’s good at. Maybe the Miami Herald could run another piece on her, this one about her latest foray into the field of education.

“I agree,” Claire said. “But why? Why was it wrong back then, and why would it still be wrong today?” There were lots of mouths hanging open but this time she didn’t wait for them. “It’s because people are subjects, not objects. Subjects have experiences. Subjects are conscious. They feel pain and happiness, sorrow, joy, depression, anxiety. We don’t want to be enslaved, so slavery is wrong. Our lives matter to us, so murder is wrong.”

The slide changed. On one side of the screen was a rock—a plain old sedimentary rock. On the other side of the screen was a stock image of a white guy in a buttondown. Under the rock were the bullet points:

·       Object

·       Not conscious

·       Doesn’t feel pain

·       No thoughts, emotions, desires

·       Okay to kick, punch, throw off a bridge

And under the LinkedIn-looking white dude were the bullet points:

·       Subject

·       Conscious

·       Feels pain

·       Has thoughts, emotions, desires

·       Not okay to kick, punch, throw off a bridge

Claire read the words off the screen and the kids laughed. I laughed too. What was happening? My disdain for her was fading. No. Not quite that. I guess I just couldn’t find it within me to hate what she was teaching. That was it. The lecture wasn’t super groundbreaking, fine, but there were definitely worse ways she could’ve been spending her finance money, worse post-retirement passion projects for her to pursue. And actually, maybe it was sort of groundbreaking. These kids got their moral worldview from their crypto-hawking, tax-evading dads, from their NIMBY moms, from tradwife influencers, pro-genocide videogame streamers, and antisemitic looksmaxxers.

“All systems of discrimination and oppression use the same logic,” Claire said. “Racists, for example”—she clicked back to the gnarly images of the slaves—“use skin color as a justification to enslave and abuse. But skin color has nothing to do with what we call moral status. Skin color is morally irrelevant. The only thing that matters when we’re asking ourselves how we should treat someone is: are they conscious? Can they feel pain? Can they suffer?”

She took a sip from her stickered waterbottle. “Any questions so far?”

The class was silent, rapt. Outside, a campus peacock bobbed across the courtyard.

“Good.” She kept going, now using the example of sexism instead of racism. On the basis of a morally irrelevant trait (their sex) women were, and still are, treated as objects, abused, given fewer rights. Women couldn’t vote until 1920; women couldn’t get their own credit cards until the 1970s; today women don’t have autonomy over their own bodies, even when they’re the victims of rape. At the mention of abortion and rape I scanned my students’ faces for signs of distress—because even though the vibe of the school was cosmopolitan, we were still in the Free State of Florida. A lot of these kids were religious, and a lot of their parents were worried that the woke mind virus was gonna trans their progeny. But apparently they were unbothered.

“Women deserve fair treatment,” Claire was saying, “not because they’re women, not even because they’re human, but because they’re subjects.”

We were ten minutes into the talk. She changed the slide. A Golden Retriever popped onto the screen. With another string of Socratic questions she established that dogs are subjects. The kids followed her from one premise to the next, from that premise to the conclusion. I’d never seen anything like it.

“So notice something,” she said. “We don’t treat dogs with respect because they’re dogs. The reason we don’t kick a dog, or chop a dog up and make him into a dog sandwich, is not because there’s something super unique and special about dogs. It’s because if we kick a dog, he’ll feel pain. It’s because if we slice a dog’s tail off, or brand him, he’ll suffer. It’s because dogs don’t want to die, so it’d be wrong to hang a dog upside down and slit his throat.”

Claire took a deep breath. The room was getting warm. Slavery? Dogs? I’d lost the thread. I opened the climate control app on my phone and lowered the temperature. The conjured-up images of dog sandwiches, dogs with brands, dogs with tails sliced off, and dogs hanging upside down with their throats slit all felt very deliberate. Her earrings spun as she paced the front of the classroom.

“In other words,” Claire said, “species is morally irrelevant. When it comes to how we ought to treat someone, species doesn’t matter. Just like race doesn’t matter, and sex doesn’t matter, and gender and religion and sexual orientation don’t matter.”

Another slide change. This one consisted of a wordy quote and a portrait of an old-timey cherubic-faced guy with a Pilgrim-style hat and long silver hair. The caption underneath the portrait identified the dude as English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832. She read the quote:

“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum”— Claire quickly put in that villosity means hairiness and termination of the os sacrum refers to where the spine ends, i.e., tail—“are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.”

So she was staying on the animal beat. But I doubt my students had any idea what the hell Jeremy Bentham was talking about. They weren’t the best close readers. They’d reduced Animal Farm to “all revolutions are bad” and “socialism sucks.” Still though. I was starting to worry about where this was going.

“Now we’re going to watch a short video,” Claire said. “And I’m not gonna lie: it’s gonna be tough. But please don’t look away.”

That queasy feeling, the one I’d gotten when I saw her name pop onto my phone screen, came bubbling back in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly everything that’d happened so far felt like just the exposition and rising action, and now we were coming to the climax. Claire hunched over her laptop and clicked open a video file. The screen went black.

“Victor, would you mind getting the lights?”

I stood up and went to the touchscreen panel on the back wall. All eyes were on Claire. Some of my students even had notebooks out, pencils ready. They were completely and utterly in her thrall. I was too. Claire had always had the ability to bend me to her will, to get me to do what she wanted me to do. I tapped the icons for the lights and shades. The lights dimmed and the shades rolled down.

“The question is not,” Claire said, “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

And she clicked play.

#

The only thing going through my head as the video started was a single sentence: she can’t be serious. There was no Netflix-style intro, no sweeping drone shot or bad documentary music. Instead there was just a closeup of a cow in a stall. Text appeared at the bottom of the screen: Milk Production—Dairy Workers Forcibly Impregnate (Rape) Female Cows With Bull Semen. The camera pulled back, and the cow squirmed as a farmer shoved a gloved arm up its rectum. The scene changed, and the text read: When The Female Cow Gives Birth, Her Baby Is Taken From Her And Killed Immediately Or Sold To Be Slaughtered For Veal. The recording showed a calf being born, flopping onto a floor of matted straw all goopy and steamy. The shot cut, and the calf was being scooped into the maw of an earthmoving machine. Another cut. The earthmoving machine was driving off with the calf. The female cow chased behind, wailing. For a second I felt like I was gonna be sick. For a second I swear I could smell the fetid trampled grass of that farm. I looked away from the screen. Claire was sipping an energy drink. The nausea turned into a deep, violent indignation. I couldn’t believe her audacity. After she’d made a bazillion dollars in an industry that was killing the poor, the middle class, the sick, the elderly, the vulnerable, democracy, and the planet, she was here to scold us about what, not being vegetarian? Drinking milk?

Tatiana started crying. Claire went over to her and gave her a hug. Touching the students was a big no-go. Whatever teacherly instincts I still possessed were screaming at me to shut the whole thing down. I wanted to call the security guards, the cops, the friggin national guard to bust in and escort Claire off campus with her hands behind her back. But if I did that, word would get out that I’d exposed my students to a full-on lunatic. That’d probably get me fired, and if it didn’t, the parents would draft a petition labeling me a groomer. I could see the capslock Facebook posts and apoplectic school board meetings. I could see not just getting fired. I could see going to jail.

So I stayed in my seat. And that wasn’t the only reason why. I thought back to ten years ago, in that Pollo Tropical. How she’d called me a misogynist and said I had a problem with strong women in general and her in particular. I didn’t want to be that dude. I didn’t want to prove her right.

The text read: Beef Production—Cows Are Forced Into Slaughterhouse With Electric Prods. The film showed a mass of cows in the back of a truck. A ramp led down from the truck to a narrow chute lined high with corrugated metal walls. The electric prods were long silver wands with yellow prongs at the end, and the workers shoved them into the flesh of the cows’ legs, between their ribs, under their tails. This wasn’t right. Clearly these workers were sociopaths and sadists. Clearly this wasn’t normal. But then Claire, like she had a direct line to my mind, said: “Everything you’re seeing is a standard industry practice, and perfectly legal.”

She was at the back of the class now. Tomas had stacked his arms on the desk and buried his head in the crook of his elbow. His back swelled up and down, up and down. Claire put a hand on his forearm, kneeled, and whispered something to him. What was I witnessing? Tomas and the rest of my male students had always been stolid and straightfaced, products of Miami’s toxic macho deal. The text on the screen read: Captive Bolt Gun Used On Cows. This black cylinder thing was pressed against a cow’s forehead. The black cylinder thing hissed and pulsed. The cow shivered and went wobbly. By now it was more than Tatiana and Tomas crying. I pushed my chair out. The text read: Cow Shackled On Kill Floor. An aproned worker put a steel ring around the cow’s ankle. Chains clanked. The cow was drawn into the air. I stood up. The cow thrashed and dangled.

“That’s enough,” I said.

I moved out from behind my desk. The cow bellowed, and bellowed, and bellowed, until another aproned worker grabbed hold of its head and sawed open its throat. Before the blood came spouting out I reached up to the projector and switched it off. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I heard snuffling, whimpering.

“It wasn’t over yet,” Claire said.

#

I brought up the blinds and hit the lights. Claire had her arms akimbo at the back of the classroom. I looked at the kids. Their faces were red. There was nothing I could think to say to them. “Claire,” I said. “I need to see you outside.”

She followed me into the hallway. I made sure the door latched behind us. The hallway was dead quiet. I kept my voice low.

“What was that?”

Claire screwed up her face.

“What are you talking about?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t try that.”

“I’m confused. I told you what this was. You okayed it.”

I understood her earrings now. They were those things that get clipped to the ears of cattle.

“Do you seriously think that was okay?” I said. “You just traumatized a roomful of kids.”

“No I didn’t,” she said. “All I did was show them the truth.”

I looked her up and down, from those stupid cow earrings to her ratty sneakers, scanning for some sign that we were inhabiting the same reality. But we weren’t. In her face, her body language, there wasn’t a sliver of guilt. Or doubt. Or regret.

“You sound crazy.”

“I feel crazy.” Her voice pitched up. “The level of cruelty and injustice, I just can’t come to terms with it. When I found out about all this, everything else stopped mattering.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I said. “You can’t just do shit like this.”

Claire stepped closer to me and touched one set of fingertips to the other so her hands made that kind of penitent, prayerful shape.

“I’m sorry, truly, if there was some kind of miscommunication. I didn’t mean to catch you off guard. I actually thought you’d appreciate this.”

So now I was being made out to be the crazy one.

“Don’t gaslight me,” I said. “I’m not being precious. You’re the one who did something fucked up.”

She put a hand on my forearm and ran her fingers over the pilly fabric of my buttondown.

“I get that it’s shocking,” she said. “But you’re smart enough to know that what we do to animals is an atrocity. It goes against everything you say you stand for.”

My grip on the doorhandle tightened. She was petting my arm like I needed to be comforted, calmed down. I took a step back so she’d cut it out.

“And when did you come to that realization?” I said. “At drinks with Larry Fink and Stephen what’s his name?”

I couldn’t remember the name of the other one. The Blackstone one.

“I exposed an injustice,” Claire said. “And you’re madder at me than you are at the injustice itself. Does that make sense to you?”

She gave me these big overly sympathetic eyes. She was trying to coax something out of me. An apology for cutting her presentation short? An admission that she was justified in showing this shit to kids? A declaration that I’d join her in her crusade? But all I had for her was hate.

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

My students were in there, alone, recovering from the torture porn I’d just exposed them to. Any second now VP Mari could come moseying out of her office for one of her pop-ins. 

“This is just cognitive dissonance,” Claire said. “I went through it too.”

My hand, the one that wasn’t gripping the doorhandle, became a little knot by my side.

“Can you just shut the fuck up for a second?”

Claire shook her head and laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“You. You haven’t changed a bit.”

I knew what she was getting at. That summer ten years ago, after she’d spent a week in New York for interviews and job offers, I got a text from her saying we should meet for lunch to talk about our future. The fact that she suggested Pollo Tropical told me all I needed to know. Before we ordered our Tropichop Bowls, as we stood in line squinting into the white light of the menu screens, I told her that I thought it was actually pretty gross of her to go into finance while at the same time…insert blatant social iniquity here. I told her that her whole entrepreneurial girlboss schtick was just a cover for her selfishness and greed, and I told her she was free to run off to New York and marry some guy in an LL Bean vest who shared her Ivy League pedigree. She looked at me a long time and then said I was full of shit. “All the class consciousness and anti-billionaire Bernie-bro rhetoric don’t count for much if you’re a misogynist dickhole.” To that I said: whatever. She could miss me with all that fake woke shit. That’s when she yelled, called me “asshole Jesus,” and walked out. And that was that.

Around the corner a door opened and I heard the smack of sandals fade into the boy’s bathroom.

“I don’t care about your opinion of me right now,” I said. “You’re leaving. Let’s go.”

“Really?”
I opened the door.      

“You’re such a hypocrite,” Claire said.

She pushed past me and went back inside the classroom. She grabbed her laptop, stuffed it into her bag, said thank you and bye to the kids, and walked back out. Tomas asked what was going on. Francisco asked if we were gonna get to finish the movie. I told them I’d be right back. I caught up with Claire and held her bicep as we walked down the hall. For a brief instant the thought crossed my mind that maybe I was overreacting. But no. Not at all. She was crazy. You can’t compare milk to rape. You can’t compare farming to slavery. No. You just can’t. We cut a straight line across the floor of the light-filled rotunda. At the security desk I let go of her arm.

“All I did was show the truth.”

“Bye, Claire.”

Another head shake, another little laugh. She pushed open the heavy glass door and disappeared down the wide stone steps.

Back in the classroom I told everyone to quiet down. I’d made a mistake. That was not the lecture they were supposed to have seen and I was really sorry if it was upsetting. I sat behind my computer, clicked to the Announcements tab, and deleted the notification about the guest speaker. I wanted everyone working on their tablets for the rest of the period. Tomas raised his hand. “I thought we were supposed to hear everyone’s point of view,” he said. I put my hand up like a stopsign. We weren’t going to be discussing it further.

The bell rang. I loaded them up with a bunch of homework for the weekend. My next period was free, and I spent it drafting an exculpatory email with a whole lot of passive voice that I could blast out to parents if I ever needed to.

After my free I had lunch duty. Lunch that day was beef empanadas, cheese pizza, ropa vieja, salad with bits of egg and crumbled cheese. I grabbed a tray and made my way to the staff table. As I sat I saw Tomas. He was sitting alone at a table on the other side of the cafeteria. I set my tray down and watched him stick his fork in and out of his salad. He wasn’t touching the other stuff. I sat down to eat.