Animal Dreams

"What, you mean I have to work for a living here? Somebody told me teaching high school was easy money." I looked through the stack of forms. "What about DOA? I may need one of those."

Anita looked at me oddly for half a second, then laughed. "We'll just call the coroner when they bring you in."

I smiled. Doc Homer was the coroner of Grace, and had been for the entirety of my life and then some. Obviously Anita didn't know who I was; she looked like a recent graduate herself. Anyone in high school now would have been a toddler when I left Grace. This filled me with hope. Walking those wainscoted halls, still painted the exact same shade of toothpaste green, made me shrink into my skin, and I had to keep reminding myself: None of them knows you as Doc Homer's misfit child. No one here has seen you in orthopedic shoes.

"The kids'll just love you," Anita said, surprising me. "They're not used to anybody so..." she paused, tapping a complete set of maroon fingernails on her metal desk and presumably fishing for a tactful adjective..."so contemporary."

I was wearing a dark green blazer, tight jeans, and purple cowboy boots. I ran a hand through my hair and wondered if I should have paid a call to the Hollywood Shop, after all. "Do you think I'm not enough of an authority figure? Will they revolt?" The teachers' meeting, two days prior, had been devoted primarily to theories of discipline.

Anita laughed. "No way. They know who turns in the grades."

I found the room where I would be teaching General Biology I and II, and made it through the homeroom period by taking attendance and appearing preoccupied. I'd finally paid my preparatory visit to the school a few days earlier, so I knew what to expect in the way of equipment: desks and chairs; some stonetopped lab benches with sinks and arched chrome faucets; an emergency shower; a long glass case containing butterflies and many other insects in ill repair; and a closet full of dissecting pans and arcane audiovisual aids. The quaint provisions led me to expect I'd be working in something like a museum, or a British movie. When the kids filled the room for first period, though, they gave it a different slant. So far in Grace I hadn't seen a lot of full-blown teenagers. I wasn't expecting skateboard haircuts.

The girls seemed to feel a little sorry for me as I stood up there brushing chalk dust off my blazer and explaining what I intended for us to do in the coming year. But the boys sat with their enormous high-top sneakers splayed out into the aisles, their arms crossed, and their bangs in their eyes, looking at me like exactly what I was-one of the last annoying things standing between them and certified adulthood.

"You can call me Codi," I said, though I'd been warned against this. "Ms. Noline sounds too weird. I went to this high school and had biology in this room, and I don't really feel that old. I guess to you that sounds like a joke. To you I'm the wicked old witch of Life Science."

This got a very slight rise out of the boys, not exactly a laugh. The girls looked embarrassed. A tall boy wearing a Motley Crue T-shirt and what looked like a five-o'clock shadow on his scalp pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and thumped it against his knuckles.

"I was told we'd need an authority figure in the classroom, so I dug one up." I went to the closet and wheeled out a human skeleton. "This is Mrs. Josephine Nash."

I'd found her downstairs in a storage room filled with damaged field-hockey equipment and gym uniforms from the fifties. The skeleton was in pretty good shape; I'd only had to reattach one elbow with piano wire and duct tape (provided by the janitor). The name-along with an address in Franklin, Illinois-was written in fine, antique-looking letters on the flange of her pelvis. When I discovered her in the storage room I felt moved to dust her off and hang her up on the heavy cast-iron stand and wheel her up to my lab. I guess I was somewhat desperate for companionship.

"Miss," one of the boys said. "Miss Codi."

I tried not to smile. "Yes."

"That's Mr. Bad Bones." He enunciated the name in a way that made everybody laugh. "The seniors use him for the Halloween Dance."

"Well, not anymore," I said. Mrs. Nash was my compatriot from the Midwest; a possible relative, even. I could see her as somebody's mother, out pruning roses. This isn't a toy," I said, my voice shaking slightly. "It's the articulated skeleton of a human being who was at one time, fairly recently, walking around alive. Her name was Josephine Nash and she lived in Illinois. And it's time she got some respect in her retirement."

I glared at them; teenagers are so attached to their immortality. "You never know where you're going to end up in this world, do you?" I asked.