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(A/N: Hey, FP denizens, hope finals aren't killing you too badly! Anyways, this was my final for my Fiction class, so I thought I'd toss it up here. I hope you enjoy it!)
“Paradise”
In her first year of teaching at Douglas Anderson High School of the Arts, Charlie Wilson discovered an unorthodox trend among her female students.
“As Marissa wrapped her leg around the pole, she hugged the metal between her thighs, letting forth a groan of ecstasy.” Sarah, one of the juniors, read each word with relish, her sweaty hands gripping the paper tightly. “Her customers cried with joy as one of her bra straps slipped from her shoulder, and she let her undergarment fall with a coy smile, knowing that her clientele loved it.” As her fists clenched and unclenched, Charlie tried to remind herself that she had to listen and offer suggestions, but with every word, Charlie’s brain desperately tried to drown the drivel out.
A musician friend of hers had once told her that he could never teach the violin to anyone else, because it would have killed him to hear Vivaldi butchered every day of his life. She remembered that story every time she listened to her students butcher her beloved English language. Unfortunately, more often than not, unknown writers needed a day job. Her husband’s little gallery only brought in so much money, after all.
“Peter slipped a dollar bill into her thong, and the tips of his fingers shuddered, as if her skin itself was red hot,” Sarah continued. Charlie didn’t hear the next sentence – she was too busy trying to picture a shuddering fingertip.
Then again, Charlie reminded herself, Douglas Anderson was as good as she could get. It was one of three magnet schools in the Jacksonville area; students had to maintain a 2.8 GPA, at the very least, to be allowed to stay. But though its academic record was strong, Douglas Anderson prided itself on being one of the more renowned arts high schools in the South, and accepted students to the arts area of their choice based on an audition process. But because of its good reputation, parents would often force their children into Creative Writing, a notoriously easy program to get into, so Charlie often had to deal with children with no interest in writing whatsoever. Children who, occasionally, had a deep love for purple prose.
“Her glance was fraught with confusion,” Sarah said, with a passionate hand gesture. “Could it be love, after all? Or was Peter simply there as a customer, to eat her naked body with his hungry eyes? A tear slid from her sapphire orb.”
Not that Charlie disliked her job. She often compared the sight of halls between classes to the Island of Misfit Toys: she’d see girls in leotards, people carrying bulky instrument cases, and the students wore just about every style of clothing that existed. It was a haven for teenagers who, at any other high school, would have been beaten the minute they stepped out of their car. One of her own students, Sam, dressed more femininely than she ever had in school, and she’d never seen him picked on for it. Then again, it was common knowledge that he taught at a jujutsu dojo.
“But when she woke up…” Sarah paused. “Peter was gone.” As the other students offered lukewarm applause, Charlie tried not to look visibly relieved. It wouldn’t have been quite so painful if it hadn’t been the fourth stripper story they’d had in the past few weeks. Taisha, who’d authored one of those stories herself, thrust her hand into the air, and bracing herself, Charlie called on her.
“That’s completely wrong,” Taisha declared. “She wouldn’t have been able to sleep with one of her clients. She’d get fired.”
Sarah cringed. “B-But,” she stammered, “Marissa loved Peter, so she wouldn’t care—”
“It’s wrong,” Taisha said again.
“And the way you wrote the dancing scene was really off, too,” Leila said, nodding in assent to Taisha. “She would have looked ridiculous like that.”
“He wouldn’t have been able to rub up on her like that while she was onstage,” Jenny interjected. “He probably would have gotten kicked out.”
“And she wouldn’t have been able to take her bra off, either,” Taisha said. “The place needs a license to do that, otherwise they could get shut down. You didn’t say anything about a license.”
“Does anyone have anything to say about the writing?” Charlie interrupted before the girls got any further. Where had they gotten so much information on the inner workings of strip clubs?
But as another one of her students raised his hand, Taisha interrupted again. “I wasn’t finished yet.”
“Not everyone’s gonna know about strip clubs, Tai,” Sam said, his eyes narrowing at her.
Taisha’s glare back could’ve melted steel. “I thought her story was insulting, frankly, and I was really offended.”
Offended? Charlie thought, frowning. That was an interesting choice of words. “Taisha, we’re not discussing Sarah’s choice of subject matter,” she said, but Taisha ignored her. An unfortunate side-effect of being less than ten years older than the girl.
“She’s belittling my profession,” Taisha declared, slamming her palms on the table.
Charlie paused. Surely she heard that wrong. “… what?” was all she could say.
“Taisha.” Kara, the fourth member of Taisha’s group of friends, suddenly spoke up, her voice sharp. “Don’t.”
But Charlie’s inquiry seemed to make Taisha proud: she pulled herself up straight, pushing her chest forward with a confidence she’d never possessed before. “We work in a strip club,” she announced, her gesture taking Kara, Leila, Jenny, and herself.
And judging by the eye roll they received from the class, Charlie was the only one who hadn’t known this.
Martin Ashton, a Theatre teacher, took a long drag from his cigarette and glanced up at her without turning his head. “Go on.”
“Yeah! It’s true!” Charlie neglected her own cigarette in favor of wild hand gestures. “Four of them. They’re working at some club on Beach Boulevard called Paradise.”
“Mmm,” he hummed, offering a small, wry smile. “How Biblical.”
“It’s ridiculous. All of my students knew, but I didn’t notice at all.” Charlie rolled a chunk of hair around one of her index fingers. “Even though they’ve been falling apart the last few weeks… falling asleep in class, skipping their assignments. They used to be the ones I could count on, too! It’s kind of tragic.”
“I’d say it’s more of a comedy than a tragedy,” he remarked, leaning against the principal’s SUV. “Bored, middle-class princesses in the sex industry. I can’t think of anything more comedic than that.”
Charlie shot a glare at him, but the comment wasn’t unexpected from the man who nearly got fired when he told his students, “Forcing a paraplegic to run a race is damn funny.” Martin wasn’t popular among most of the faculty, and he was despised by his female students, who insisted that Martin was a twisted misogynist, who only paid attention to the opinions of the male students he was sexually attracted to. The school’s dean, Jared Breen, talked to Martin about it often (the dean was notoriously obsessed with staying in the good favor of his students), but these interventions only made Martin dislike his female students more. But even more than women, Creative Writing students annoyed him the most.
Charlie had been seated with him at a writing panel during a Jacksonville library event, since he taught a playwriting class and she was a local writer. They’d debated rather viciously during the event itself, but when a teaching position opened up at Douglas Anderson, he was the one who brought her name up.
“Do I talk to them, or what?” Charlie shrugged. “They’re eighteen, it’s not as if it’s illegal, but… it feels strange to ignore it, you know?”
“I thought you liked that kind of thing,” Martin said. “Healing with love or some such.”
“Except all I want to do is shake them!” She mimed throttling someone. “It’s not like they’re hard up for money or anything—”
“Attention. Dramatics. Something to do. Well-off children have precious little to talk about,” he said. “If there’s no tragedy to be found, one will simply create it.”
“It’s going to be tragic when their parents find out.” Charlie rubbed her temples. “What if they find out that it’s been coming up in class? I’m only an adjunct, Martin, I can’t afford—”
“That’s a touching story,” he drawled. “Have you considered adapting it for Lifetime?”
She rolled her eyes skyward. It would have been quite witty and catty, but she recognized the tone his insults took when he formulated them ages ago and had been waiting to use them. “You wouldn’t care at all? If your students were doing something idiotic?”
“I’m not a masochist, Charlene.” And with that, he closed the subject, reaching into his bag and pulling out a stapled packet. “The short story you gave me.”
Charlie took it back gingerly, her stomach twisting at the sight of all the ink scrawled across it. “And?”
“I’m still not sure why I should care about this person.” He tossed the cigarette butt to the ground, pressing it into the pavement with the toe of his shoe. “I don’t know what he wants.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want anything.”
“Please.” Martin lived by the system he taught his students, the Major Dramatic Curve: that a story was only about a person trying to obtain something, and the story wasn’t finished until the protagonist succeeded or failed to obtain it. She glanced into his bag while it was open, catching sight of a pile of plays: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Dumbwaiter, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Theatre of the absurd was the one exception to his rule.
“So if I was the protagonist of an absurdist play,” she posed, desperate for some kind of advice, “what would I tell these girls?”
“… nothing.” Martin shrugged, with the air that this was his last word on the matter. “You’d wait.”
Charlie didn’t flinch when her husband’s voice emanated from behind her. She simply continued typing, grinding her teeth in mild irritation. In their year of marriage so far, Andrew had shown precious few flaws for Charlie to take issue with, but he had this annoying habit of hovering behind her while she worked. She quickly scanned the previous paragraphs, seeing none of Microsoft Word’s telltale red squiggles. “There isn’t a typo.”
“Right there.” Andrew leaned over her shoulder, his finger moving to the paragraph describing her protagonist’s water mill – it was historical fiction.
“What, ‘elaborate system of winches?’” She looked up at him, one finger curling around the end of her hair. “You know, winches? They’re—”
“Charlie.” He underlined the word with his fingernail. “You wrote ‘wenches.’”
She stared at the offending word, wishing she could somehow will the rush of blood out of her cheeks. “Oh,” she said simply, trying not to glare or turn even redder as Andrew began to chuckle. But he noticed her less-than-amused expression quickly.
“Not funny,” he clarified simply. He never faulted her for taking things too personally. Another thing she liked about him.
“I finally get the chance to do some writing,” she grumbled, minimizing the Document with a vindictive click. “And I’m barely even here right now.”
“Maybe you were just in the zone,” he suggested, gripping the back of her chair and halfway leaning against it.
“No, I just wasn’t paying attention.” She returned to the computer, pulling up her e-mail server on the screen. “Thinking about this thing with my students.”
Andrew responded to that with a low hum. “Well, you’ll get back into it soon,” he assured her, crossing the living room to tilt a crooked picture back into place.
She turned to him suddenly, her short, straight hair whipping around her chin. “Andrew, are my stories boring?”
“What?” To his credit, he seemed genuinely taken aback. “Where’s this coming from, all of a sudden?”
She hesitated before answering. It wasn’t suddenly coming from anywhere. “When I show my stories to people, they’re always just ‘good.’ They’re never ‘amazing,’ or ‘excellent.’ Even if I have technical talent, that’s nothing if I can’t make the reader feel anything.”
It was something she’d always been terrified of: that whether it was her stories, or her own personality, being mediocre was the worst possible sin she could commit. Even in school, the utter lack of excitement and drama in her life seemed to make her boring in the eyes of her peers, though they found her “nice” enough to unload their own problems onto. Even her first marriage and subsequent divorce were nothing to talk about. She and Simon had dated through high school, and married not long after graduation. They’d shared three stable years of marriage that came to an amicable end when he received a promotion that would send him to Holland. And that was all it took for her to realize she didn’t like him quite enough to follow him anywhere. The divorce hadn’t affected their friendship much, though.
She constantly feared that Andrew was too interesting for her. He ran a small art gallery in town, and was the artsy, thoughtful type that always seemed to be surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Though he enjoyed reading her work, and always offered honest, insightful comments, his approval meant surprisingly little to her. It almost felt as if she didn’t have to work for it.
Martin had complimented Charlie, once. It had been some stupid, insipid little detail, but she still remembered the exact words he used. And yet she still wished she had it in writing, or an e-mail, or some proof of existence.
Andrew pursed his lips, considering. He was never one to mince words, but she could tell that he didn’t want to say anything careless. “If you’re having trouble with that,” he said slowly, “maybe it’s better to practice with something you know?” He smiled. “And then get back to the winches later.”
“That’s the problem.” She propped an elbow on the desk, letting her cheek rest against her fist. “I won’t have time to research anything until Christmas break.”
“Then write about school,” he suggested with a shrug.
“… isn’t that cheating?” she asked. How was that creative, just stealing a story from everyday life? That was no better than a diary entry.
But Andrew only laughed in response.
The first person to raise his hand was Nathan. Much like his own stories, his critiques were laden with nonsensical quirks for the sake of being quirky. Almost cringing, she called on him.
“Listening to your story was like watching a star dying,” Nathan said instantly.
Ashley began to sink in her chair, and Charlie held back the sudden impulse to bash her own head against her desk, as if it would relieve the headache that was starting to form. She didn’t want to embarrass Ashley further, but she didn’t have much of a choice, either. “Can you be more specific, Nathan?”
“It was laden with clichés,” Nathan said, puffing out his chest. “I’m unsure of where to begin.”
Charlie twirled her hair around her finger to keep from tugging at it in frustration. Her students seemed to think that simply calling the entire story “cliché” constituted a meaningful critique. She wasn’t sure how Nathan thought Ashley was supposed to fix that, unless he expected her to—
“Just throw everything out,” Lisa grunted. But she always had a comment to that effect, so thankfully, most of the students had learned not to take it personally.
“Does anyone have any positive comments for Ashley?” Charlie cut in forcefully. She longed to tear into Lisa someday. During Charlie’s first week of teaching, Lisa delighted in lying to the rest of the students that she’d spotted Charlie at the Cheesecake Factory, “popping Prozac and crying.” But the Creative Writing department head had vowed to turn Lisa around, so Charlie was expected to be kind and nurturing to her.
“I like this line.” Sarah took Ashley’s copy of the story, underlining a sentence with her pen. “Maybe you should start here and write it over again?”
With an eye-roll that he didn’t even bother to hide, Sam raised his hand, and Charlie bit back a sigh of relief. Sam, at least, understood that Ashley took critiques better when they were mixed with encouragement.
As Sam began to talk, the whispering from the stripper table, which had been going on since the beginning of class, grew louder. Though Charlie glanced over towards them, she didn’t stop them just yet.
I am an absurdist protagonist, she told herself, ignoring the conversation. I’m going to wait.
But it became harder to ignore as the talking grew louder still. “… and I’ve finally decided on my new name,” Taisha was saying. Between her thumb and three fingers, she held a thick roll of bills tied off with a dirty rubber band, which she seemed to be playing with. “I don’t know why I let them talk me into ‘Ebony,’ it’s so overdone. I’m ‘Gia’ now.”
“That sounds too much like Chia,” Leila muttered in response.
“It’s a character that Angelina Jolie played,” Taisha said snottily, suddenly turning to Sam with a malicious glare. When the other girls followed suit, Charlie finally noticed that Sam wasn’t sitting at their table, like he usually did.
“Oh my God, guys,” Jenny piped up, playing with the ends of her new bottle-blonde hair. “This guy came in last night, and gave me $200 just to cuddle with him!”
“That is so sweet!” Leila cooed, clasping her hands by her chest. And that was about all Charlie could take of that.
“That’s enough on Ashley’s piece for now… good work, Ashley,” she said brightly, collecting Ashley’s story from her. “Taisha, would you please read your piece out loud, now?”
Taisha looked at Charlie as if the teacher had asked her to kill a box of puppies. “I didn’t write one,” she said, her tone mortally offended.
“… I told you last week that you’d be presenting today,” Charlie said. “You had ample time to prepare.”
“I didn’t have the time.” Taisha shrugged. “I have work to do.” She emphasized the word ‘work’ so heavily, it might as well have been screamed.
“Then you should have talked to me,” Charlie said, making a ‘0’ next to Taisha’s name in her grade book. “I’m sorry, but since you didn’t come prepared, I’ll have to mark you as absent for the day.”
“I have a job, okay?” Taisha howled. When Charlie didn’t respond, she let out an exaggerated sob, shoving her chair aside and running out of the room, throwing the door violently against the wall. Calling ‘honey!’ and ‘sweetie!’ after her, Leila and Jenny followed suit.
The fourth member of the table, Kara, stood up slowly, moving towards the door after her friends. But before she opened it, she turned back towards the class, looking exhausted. “Sorry, Miss Wilson,” she sighed, before exiting, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Mercifully, the bell rung.
The class immediately began to talk amongst themselves about the previous event, moving towards the door in a mass. Forgetting her resolution to act as an absurdist protagonist, Charlie jumped to her feet, calling after the mass. “Sam!”
The boy stopped short, turning back towards her with a guileless, if nervous, smile. “Miss Wilson?”
“Come talk to me for a minute.” Charlie was not moved by Sam’s innocent grin; Sam always looked innocent. His curly brown hair, glasses, and tiny frame made him look like an utterly easy target. But over the course of the year, she’d come to know him better than that.
“What’s wrong, Miss Wilson?” Sam said, leaning against her desk. “I can’t talk that long. I have to be at the dojo by 5:00.”
“It’s 3:15.” Charlie’s eyes narrowing.
“Well, you know, traffic.” Sam started to laugh, but stopped as his teacher shot him a glare. “I don’t really want to talk about the stripper thing.”
“If it disrupts my class, it’s my business,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not saying that it’s not your business,” he backpedaled, raising his hands in a defensive stance. “Just that… it sort of makes me want to kill myself?”
Charlie tapped her fingers against the desk. “What’s this about?”
“It’s not really that complicated, is the thing,” Sam said with a shrug, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Kara wasn’t making that much at Waffle House, and she didn’t have enough to cover the deposits for graduation… the others were just going to go to the audition with her, but they somehow ended up working there, too.”
At this, she frowned, biting her lip. Kara had been paying her own bills since she was fifteen; she was legally emancipated, though Charlie didn’t know the circumstances behind it. Even so, Kara had been keeping up with her assignments, much more so than any of her three friends.
“So now, of course, I’m public enemy number one because I think they’re idiots,” Sam continued, pushing his glasses up again. “Then again, they’ve been bitching at me ever since I got accepted to NYU.”
Charlie nodded. She remembered the day she’d insisted on announcing to the class that Sam would be going to New York University, expecting them to be excited for their classmate, even proud of him. The boy received nothing but forced congratulations, stony silences, even betrayed glares from his friends. Later on in the class period, she’d even heard Nathan saying, “Expensive schooling is quite overrated.”
Sam had been moderately popular with his classmates at the start of the year, but now, he mostly seemed to be on his own. It was as if the moment the boy succeeded, his classmates’ brought out the knives.
“I should probably be trying to help before they end up locked in someone’s basement somewhere,” he said, looking guilty. “But I’m too annoyed with them to really want to.”
“I don’t think you could,” Charlie murmured, thinking of their last poetry reading, when Leila had stepped up to tearfully thank her parents for supporting her through a heroin addiction. Taisha, who often passionately claimed that her adoptive parents weren’t her “real” parents, though whenever there was a school function, there was her adoptive father in the audience, a proud smile on his face. Jenny, whose sexuality seemed to change with the weather, and who’d faked a degenerative disease at the beginning of the year. It must have been unbearable, that Kara was more tragic than them.
“They’re writers,” Charlie said. “Equal parts narcissism and insecurity.”
“Sometimes within five minutes of each other,” Sam added, massaging his temples.
Charlie bit the end of her pen cap thoughtfully. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
As the play came to a close, everyone focused on Martin, who stared at the final tableau contemplatively. It was often said that the longer Martin’s “okay” was, the more he hated the play.
“… okay,” Martin said, stretching the ‘a’ sound out for about ten seconds. When the word finally ended, he added another, shorter “okay,” and Charlie and the class flinched. Not many plays had the honor of the double okay. The poor playwright looked as if she might break down on the spot. “Give me your script,” Martin demanded, and the student shoved it into his hands, making her escape when the teacher nonchalantly dismissed them all.
As the students filed out, Charlie made her way to the front of the room, her hands folded behind her back to keep them away from her hair. When Martin simply nodded at her in greeting, she bounced up on the balls of her feet. “Did you read it yet?”
“I did.” Martin withdrew the stapled packet from his messenger bag, but he held it facing himself, though Charlie leaned forward a little, looking to see how much it had been marked up. “So what does your protagonist want?”
Charlie inhaled deeply. She’d been expecting that question. “To be more unique than anyone around her.”
Martin smirked, handing the story to her. “Okay,” he said shortly. “Keep going.”
