A Little Something Different

September (Inga - creative writing professor)

Inga- creative writing professor

People always expect the first day of school to be crisp and autumnal when the reality is that it’s all too often on the hottest freaking day of the year, and the sun burns with the heat of a thousand George Foreman grills.

I stand in front of my latest bunch of creative writing students and look around, trying not to sweat through my thinnest blouse. When I left the house this morning I asked Pam what she thought of my outfit and she said it was like “slutty Little House on the Prairie.” I didn’t know that was a thing, but I felt proud that I had achieved such a look without even trying.

I hop up on the desk, making sure my Laura Ingalls mini-skirt doesn’t ride perilously high and then lean over to check the time on my phone. I’ll give them at least four more minutes. It’s the first day of school, and even though they’re mostly upperclassmen I doubt many of them have been into this far-reaching sub-basement before. I swear, it’s well below sea level. I would say the depths of hell, but the air conditioning just kicked in.

There are nineteen seats taken and twenty-seven kids on the roster. I can’t help but hope that an odd number of them drop the class. I hate having an odd number of kids in creative writing, it throws everything off when we pair up.

The door opens and my TA comes in.

“Hey, Cole,” I say.

“Hey, Inga. Where are we? Twenty thousand leagues under the sea?” he asks, gesturing around confusedly.

“You’re telling me. I’m gonna have to leave a trail of beer nuts back to my office.”

“Why beer nuts?”

“Because if I’m wasting food like that it’s going to be something I’m not particularly fond of. I would never waste decent nuts.”

The door opens again and student number twenty walks in. He's frazzled looking, out of breath, but when he sees us looking at him, he smiles shyly at Cole and me. He takes a seat on the side near the door, next to the angry looking kid and a girl who looks younger- and more nervous- than the others. He makes blink and you'll miss it eye contact with the girl before they both blush and turn away.

I glance at the time again and clear my throat. This is the part I’m bad at. I’ve been teaching my own courses for ten years, but every semester I feel like I mess up my greeting. I always try to be way too cool. I’m 36, what am I trying to prove?

“Hey, hey, hey!” I say and inwardly groan. I’ve obviously watched too many reruns of Fat Albert in my life. “Let’s get this started,” I add, clapping my hands.

At least I omitted the word “party” from that sentence this semester. One year I said “let’s get this party started!” and then ended up on a tangent about how writing can be a party, it can be fun, but there are no kegs involved and limited opportunities to dance.

The students all look up at me attentively, aside from the angry kid. He scratches his ear and rolls his eyes. Guess he’s not a Fat Albert fan.

“I’m Inga Myerson, and this is Cole … my TA.” I blank on his last name and mouth “sorry” to him. He shrugs and smiles. “And in case you’ve trudged into the depths of Narnia by mistake, this is Creative Writing.”

I fall into my usual creative writing spiel and pass out syllabi while I chat. I put it on auto pilot and try to pick out the two students that I want to see get together this semester. I have a weird knack for this. It all started when I was a TA for my favorite professor back in grad school. She said she liked to think about the students as stories and liked to write one in her head as class unfolded. I took it one step further and made it a romance.

There were a couple of boys I picked in a seminar in the late 90’s that are now happily married with two kids of their own. They’re my most successful pairing, but pretty much every semester I see the couples at least get to the point of in class flirtation.

“I’m going to take attendance, because I like to get everyone’s name right eventually. We’re going to have to get to know each other in this class, so I hope everyone is comfortable with that idea. There’s no way to become writers together without knowing each other at least a little.”

The angry kid’s name is Victor. I’ll remember that.

The nervous looking girl is Azalea, though she quickly amends it to, “just Lea is fine.” She seems less nervous after that.

The last kid who walked in is Gabe. He’s got a quietness about him that I like. He has the kind of posture that makes me want to tell him to stand up straight, but I’m sure he has a mother who likes to tell him just that every time she sees him.

There’s a girl named Hillary who is everything you imagine a Hillary to be. At least everything I imagined a Hillary to be before Hillary Clinton came on the scene and smashed all of my previous Hillary prejudices, like hair tossing and talking like a valley girl. This girl is setting that movement back twenty years.

There are other kids, obviously, but these four stick out more than the rest.

When I finish taking roll, I jump back into my spiel.

“I’ve got a theory,” I say.

“That it’s a demon,” Lea says, so quietly I almost miss it, and I probably would have but she slaps a surprised hand in front of her mouth. I see Gabe turn to her and smile.

“A dancing demon?” he says, quietly.

And then in my finest Rupert Giles impression of all time, I say, “No, something isn’t right there.”

No one else seems to get the joke, but it’s in that moment that I know my couple of the semester is going to be Gabe and Lea.

The quick eye contact they shared was good, but the fact that they both picked up on my inadvertent Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference makes me feel like they must be kindred spirits. Also it makes me happy to realize that kids these days still watch Buffy.

Now I have to figure out a way to orchestrate this relationship.

I hope Cole’s into it. I’ve had TAs in the past who were wet blankets about my little game. I look over at him and he chooses that moment to give me jazz hands and I know we’re going to be on the same wavelength.