Nine Inches

Grade My Teacher

SIXTH PERIOD WAS ENDLESS. VICKI stood by the Smart Board, listening to herself drone on about the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder, but all she could think about was Jessica Grasso, the heavy girl sitting near the back right corner of the room, watching her with a polite, seemingly neutral expression. It was almost as if Jessica grew larger with each passing moment, as if she were being inflated by some invisible pump, expanding like a parade float until she filled the entire room.

She hates me, Vicki thought, and this knowledge was somehow both sickening and exciting at the same time. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at her.

Vicki hadn’t known it herself until last night, when she read what the girl had written about her on grademyteacher.com. She had stumbled upon the post while conducting a routine self-google, exercising a little due diligence so she didn’t get blindsided like her old friend and former colleague Anna Shamsky, a happily married mother of three who’d lost her job over some twenty-year-old topless photos that had appeared without her knowledge on a website called Memoirs-of-a-Stud.com. The site was the brainchild of an ex-boyfriend of hers — a guy she hadn’t thought about since college — who had decided in a fit of midlife bravado that the world needed to know a little bit about every woman he’d ever slept with (“Anna S. was a sweet innocent sophomore with boobs to die for,” he wrote. “When I was done with her, she could give head like nobody’s beeswax”). The surprisingly steamy photos — Anna’s youthful breasts totally lived up to the hype — had spread like a virus through the entire Gifford High School community before the subject herself even remembered they existed, and by then there was nothing to do but submit her resignation.

Vicki didn’t have to worry about nude photos — she’d never posed for any, not even when her ex-husband had asked her nicely — but that was just one risk among many in a dangerous world. She told herself she was simply being prudent — in this day and age, googling yourself was just common sense, like using sunscreen or buckling your seatbelt — but she was sometimes aware of a tiny flutter of anticipation as she typed her name into the dialog box, as if the search engine might reveal a new self to her, someone a little more interesting, or at least a little less forgettable, than the rest of the world suspected. She remembered feeling oddly hopeful last night, just seconds before she found herself staring at this:

Vicki’s first reaction to this was bewilderment — she honestly had no idea what the writer was talking about — followed by a combination of searing embarrassment (she’d had her doubts about those beige pants) and righteous indignation. In her entire career — her entire adult life! — she’d never called anyone a fat pig. She wouldn’t dream of it. As a woman who’d struggled with her own weight, she knew just how hurtful such epithets could be.

What made it even worse was that she realized she was making a mistake even as she clicked on the link, violating her long-standing policy to stay as far away from grademyteacher.com as possible. It was just too depressing, and she wasn’t even one of the truly unpopu­lar teachers, the unfortunates whose names were flagged with a big red thumbs-down icon — people like Fred Kane, the marble-mouthed biology instructor whose average score was 2.4 out of 10, or Martha Rigby (a mind-boggling 1.8), the ancient English teacher who regularly referred to the author of Great Expectations as Thomas Dickinson. Vicki herself was stuck in the middle of the pack (5.5, to be exact), with fewer than a dozen comments to her name, most of which contained a variant on the phrase “Boring but okay.” By contrast, Lily Frankel, the lively and hip young drama teacher, had received a whopping sixty-two reviews for an overall rating of 9.3, highest on the entire faculty, thereby earning herself a coveted smiley face with sunglasses and a crown.

Vicki read the post over and over — the author was identified only as “Greensleeves,” a pseudonym that meant nothing to her — wondering what she could have done to provoke such a hateful and dishonest attack. You’d think that if someone despised you enough to call you an insane bitch, you’d have a pretty good idea of who it was, but Vicki’s mind was blank, unable to produce a suspect. It wasn’t until she gave up and went to bed that the answer came to her, almost as if it had been jarred loose by the impact of her head against the pillow.

SHE’D BEEN circulating through her classroom during a quiz — this was back in February, either right before or right after winter vacation — when she spotted Jessica Grasso munching on a Snickers bar. Some teachers allowed snacks in class, but Vicki wasn’t one of them, and she’d been teaching long enough to know that you had to stick to your guns on stuff like that. Not wanting to embarrass the girl, who’d never given her any trouble, Vicki tapped her on the shoulder and spoke in a barely audible whisper as she held out her hand.

“Please give me that.”

Instead of surrendering the contraband, Jessica took another bite. She was a big girl with a pretty face — except for the ridiculous raccoon eyeliner — and sleek dark hair that swept down across her forehead, partially obscuring one eye. She chewed slowly, taking a languorous pleasure in the activity, staring straight at Vicki the whole time.

“Did you hear me?” Vicki demanded, this time in a normal voice.

Jessica’s expression remained blank, but Vicki detected a challenge in it nonetheless. She began to feel foolish, standing there with her hand out while the girl gazed right through her. It was possible — she wasn’t clear on this point in retrospect — that Vicki lowered her gaze, taking a moment or two to perform a less-than-charitable assessment of Jessica’s figure.

“It’s not like you need it,” she said.

Jessica blinked and shook her head, as if maybe she hadn’t heard right, and Vicki took advantage of her confusion to snatch the candy bar right out of her hand.

“Hey!” Jessica cried out, loudly enough that several heads snapped in their direction.

Now it was Vicki’s turn to do the ignoring. She marched back to her desk and dropped the stub of the Snickers into her empty wastebasket, where it landed with an unexpectedly resonant thud. By now, everyone in the room was looking at her.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” she told them. “Food is not allowed in this room.”

That was it, the whole ridiculous, deeply forgettable incident. Vicki was more than willing to admit that it wasn’t her finest hour as an educator, but she hadn’t called anyone a fat pig and didn’t think she had anything to apologize for. If anyone was at fault it was Jessica, who’d knowingly broken a rule and then treated a teacher with blatant disrespect. So it was frustrating for Vicki — humiliating, even — to see herself portrayed in a public forum as a nasty woman in unflattering pants, nothing more than a joke to the kids she was trying to help.

Like a lot of people her age, Vicki had grown accustomed to taking the punishment life dished out. Most of the time she didn’t even bother to complain. But every once in a while she found it necessary to stand up and defend her dignity — her worth as a human being — and this was apparently one of those occasions, because after the bell rang, instead of sitting quietly at her desk and organizing her papers as the students filed out, she found herself moving toward the door with an unusual sense of purpose, arriving just in time to form a barrier between Jessica Grasso and the hallway. She couldn’t deny that she derived some pleasure from the look of confusion on the girl’s face, the slow-dawning knowledge that she’d been busted.

“Greensleeves,” Vicki told her. “You and I need to talk.”

THEY SHOULD have had it out there and then, when Vicki had a head of steam and the element of surprise working in her favor, but Jessica was rushing off to a big chem test; apparently Mr. Holquist took points off if you were late, even if you had a pass. She offered to come back right after school let out, but Vicki had to nix that due to a faculty meeting. Not keen on hanging around for an extra hour, Jessica suggested postponing their talk till the morning. Vicki was adamant that it couldn’t wait that long, and after a brief, somewhat hectic negotiation, they settled on Starbucks at four-thirty in the afternoon.

As soon as she sat down with her cup of green tea, Vicki began to suspect she’d made a mistake in agreeing to meet in the coffee shop, the atmosphere too mellow and unofficial — Joni Mitchell on the sound system, retired men playing chess, young hipsters tapping on their laptops — for the kind of chilly confrontation she’d been rehearsing in her mind. This conviction only deepened when Jessica arrived a few minutes later, waving to Vicki and miming the act of drinking as she took her place on the coffee line. The girl seemed perfectly happy to be there, as if the two of them were regular coffee buddies, and Vicki found herself momentarily disarmed, unable to muster any of the feelings of anger or shame that had made this rendezvous seem so urgent in the first place.

“Sorry I’m late.” Jessica smiled as she took her seat, her cheeks rosy from the damp April breeze. “My mom made me fold the laundry.”

“That’s okay. I just got here myself.”

“Mmmm.” Jessica sipped from her enormous drink, a clear, domed cup full of what looked like a milk shake with whipped cream on top. “This is awesome.”

“What is it?”

“Venti caramel Frappuccino.” She held out the cup. “Want some?”

Vicki was horrified — there must have been a thousand calories in there — but she just smiled politely and shook her head. What Jessica ate and drank outside of class was none of her business.

“I’m fine with my tea,” Vicki said. “How’d you do on your chemistry test?”

“Terrible.” Jessica gave a cheerful shrug, as if terrible were a synonym for pretty good. “I suck at science even worse than I suck at math, if you can believe that.”

“You don’t suck at math. I just don’t think you apply yourself.”

“That’s exactly what my dad says.”

“You should listen to him.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. They were honey-colored, and there was an appealing cluster of freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose that Vicki had never noticed before. It’s the makeup, Vicki thought. She’s not wearing that awful makeup. She wished she knew the girl well enough to tell her she was better off without it.

Something caught Jessica’s eye and she leaned to the left, a look of such longing on her face that Vicki couldn’t help turning to see what had caused it. At a table near the front window, a slender blond woman in a boldly patterned wraparound dress was flirting with a cop, a big-bellied, broad-shouldered man holding a coffee cup in each hand. He said something that made her laugh, then reluctantly took his leave, shuffling backward out the door so he could keep his eyes on her for as long as possible. When he was gone, the woman smiled to herself and reflexively checked the messages on her cell phone. Vicki felt a sharp stab of envy — something that happened to her several times a day — irrational hatred for the smug woman coupled with an intense desire to be her, or at least to be looked at the way the cop had looked at her.

“So you read it, huh?”

Vicki turned around, her mind a beat behind the question. She felt flustered, as if Jessica had caught her in a private moment.

“Excuse me?”

“That thing I wrote? That’s why you wanted to talk to me, right?”

“Yes.” Vicki straightened up, hoping to regain some of her teacherly authority. “I was hurt by it. You said some really awful things about me.”

Jessica nodded contritely. “I know.”

“You really need to be more considerate of other people’s feelings.”

“I didn’t think you’d read it.”

“Well, I did.” Vicki’s eyes locked on Jessica’s. “I cried myself to sleep last night.”

“Wow.” Jessica didn’t seem to know what to do with this information, and Vicki wondered if she’d made a mistake in revealing it. “I’m really sorry.”

“I’m only human,” Vicki continued, a slight tremor entering her voice. “You think I like reading about my big backside on the Internet? You think that makes me feel good about myself?”

“Well, how do you think I felt?” Jessica shot back. “You called me a fat pig.”

She said this with such conviction that Vicki couldn’t help wondering if it might actually be true, if she really could have said something so mean and then repressed the memory. But it didn’t make sense. If she’d called Jessica a horrible name like that, she would have remembered. She would have gotten down on her knees and begged for forgiveness.

“I never said that.” Vicki’s voice was calm but insistent. “You know I didn’t.”

“But you thought it.” Jessica was blushing fiercely. “I remember the way you were looking at me. Judging me. You don’t need that candy bar.”

“No,” Vicki murmured, but the certainty had drained from her voice. “I wasn’t judging you.”

Jessica took a long pull on her Frappuccino, squinting at Vicki the whole time.

“I didn’t ask to be fat, you know.”

“You’re a lovely girl,” Vicki told her. “You have a very pretty face.”

“My mother tells me that five times a day.”

“It’s true.”

“I used to be really cute.” Jessica laughed, but all Vicki heard was pain. “People used to tell me I looked just like my big sister.”

“How old’s your sister?”

“She’s a senior. Jenny Grasso? Cheerleader? Like the hottest girl in the whole school?”

“Oh.” Vicki knew Jenny Grasso. You couldn’t spend a day in Gifford High School and not be aware of her. It was like living in America and not knowing about Britney Spears. “I didn’t realize that the two of you—”

“Why would you? It’s not like we have the same last name or anything.”

“It’s a big school,” Vicki replied lamely. “You could be cousins.”

Jessica shook her head. She didn’t seem upset, just defeated. “Her clothes are so tiny. You can’t believe she fits in them.”

Vicki had never taught Jessica’s sister, never even spoken to her, but she had an oddly vivid image in her mind of Jenny Grasso walking slowly past her classroom in tight jeans and a pink tank top, clutching a single red rose.

“Do you get along?”

“Sometimes. I mean, she’s pretty nice most of the time. But it kinda sucks living in the same house with her. Boys are always texting her and she’s always going to the mall with her friends and coming home with these really cute outfits. It’s just — her life’s so great and mine…” Jessica’s eyes pleaded with Vicki. “Sometimes I want to kill her.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I don’t see why she gets to have all that and I don’t. It’s like I’m being punished and I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“There’s no justice.”

Jessica nodded grimly, as if she’d figured that out a long time ago. “You want to see something?” She picked up her phone, took a couple of swipes at the screen, then handed it to Vicki. “I mean, look at this.”

Even on the small screen, the photograph was heartbreaking. It had been taken on prom night, the two Grasso sisters — the fat one and the pretty one — standing side by side on the stoop of a pale blue house, the camera far enough away that their bodies were visible from the knees up: Jenny in a slinky, low-cut yellow dress, not smiling but looking deeply pleased with the world, Jessica in a tentlike hoodie, grinning till it hurt, her face at once large and indistinct, one beefy arm draped over her sister’s delicate shoulder.

Poor thing, Vicki thought as she handed back the phone.

“I know,” Jessica said, as if Vicki had spoken the words aloud. “Story of my life.”

“Believe me,” Vicki told her, “I know just how you feel. I mean, I was never petite or anything, just normal-sized. But then I put on fifty pounds when I was pregnant with my son. Fifty pounds, can you believe that? And I couldn’t take it off. I did Weight Watchers, I fasted, I exercised, I tried every diet in the world, but I just got bigger and bigger. It was like my body was saying, Guess what, this is how it’s gonna be from now on. Better get used to it. My husband told me he didn’t care, said he loved me no matter what, but a few years later he left me for a Chinese woman, I don’t think she weighed a hundred pounds. They have three kids now.”

“He sounds like a jerk.”

“I loved him.” Vicki flicked her hand in front of her face as if it wasn’t worth talking about. “That was almost twenty years ago.”

“You ever get married again?”

“Nope.”

“Any boyfriends?”

“Nothing serious. I was a divorced working mother. Not young and not thin. My phone wasn’t ringing off the hook.” Vicki hesitated long enough to realize she was making a mistake, then kept going. “For a lot of that time, I had a crush on another teacher.”

Jessica’s eyes widened. “At Gifford?”

“I was crazy about this guy. He was divorced, too. We ate lunch together every day, went to the movies with a group of other single teachers, even played on a coed softball team. It was a lot of fun.”

“Was it Mr. Oberman?”

“Mr. Oberman?” Vicki couldn’t help laughing. Dan Oberman was a slovenly history teacher, a sadsack who lived with his mother and had been wearing the same three sweater vests for the past ten years. “You think I’d have a crush on Mr. Oberman?”

“He’s not so bad.”

“Anyway, I got really motivated about walking every day and watching what I ate, and I lost about twenty pounds. I could see he was looking at me in a different way, complimenting my outfits, and you know, just paying attention, and I finally decided to go for it. At the faculty Christmas party, I took him aside and told him how I felt. He said he had feelings for me, too. He drove me home that night and we…” A bit late, Vicki’s sense of decorum kicked in.

“You hooked up?” Jessica pretended to be scandalized. “Was it Mr. McAdams?”

“He’s a married man.”

“Come on, just tell me.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we had that one night together and I was so happy. I could see my whole life laid out in front of me.” Vicki laughed at herself, a short, scornful bark. “But he didn’t call the next day, or the day after that…”

“Or the day after that,” Jessica continued. “Been there.”

“Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I called him. He got all serious on me. You know that voice, like a doctor telling you you’re gonna die. You have to understand, Vicki, I like you a lot but what happened the other night was a mistake. I had too much to drink, blah, blah, blah…”

“Let’s be friends,” Jessica added knowingly. “That totally sucks.”

“I’ll tell you what sucks. Three months later he got engaged to a pretty, young gym teacher. And guess who got invited to their wedding? Good old Vicki.”

“Mr. Turley?” Jessica gasped. “You hooked up with Mr. Turley?”

“It was just that once.”

“He’s cute for an old guy,” Jessica said. “Didn’t Ms. Leoni just have a baby?”

“Yeah. Sweet little boy.”

“Ouch.”

Vicki nodded. Ouch was right. She didn’t tell Jessica about how drunk she’d gotten at the wedding, how the bride’s mother found her crying in the bathroom and listened to Vicki’s confession of her love for the groom with surprising compassion, telling Vicki that she understood how hard it must be, that she’d gone through something similar back when she was single. You have to forget him, she said. You have to move on with your life.

Jessica slurped the last of her Frappuccino and studied Vicki with a look of anxious sympathy. “You think you’re ever gonna meet someone else?”

Vicki wasn’t surprised by the question. It was something she’d asked herself frequently in recent years. If she’d been honest, she would’ve said that she’d come to the conclusion that Mr. Turley had been her last shot, and that she’d pretty much resigned herself to spending the remainder of her life alone. But it was clear from the way Jessica was looking at her — hungrily, with the kind of focus Vicki rarely inspired in the classroom — that she was asking an entirely different question.

“Of course,” Vicki told her. “Of course I’ll meet someone. I just have to be patient.”

THAT NIGHT she ate dinner alone, graded some homework assignments she should’ve handed back a week ago, and called her son, who was a junior at Rutgers. As usual, Ben didn’t pick up, so she just left a brief message: Hey, honey, it’s your mom. Give me a call when you get a chance. Love you. Then she watched an episode of CSI: Miami and the first part of the news before finally working up the nerve to turn on her computer.

She wasn’t sure why she was so nervous. She and Jessica had parted on good terms, joking in the Starbucks parking lot about heading across the street to Bruno’s for a large sausage-and-pepperoni pizza with extra cheese. It was early evening, and the light had seemed unusually soft and forgiving as they said goodbye. Left to her own devices, Vicki wasn’t much of a hugger — she saw how people hesitated sometimes, and it took a lot of the pleasure out of it — but Jessica didn’t share her qualms. Before Vicki understood what was happening, the girl was moving toward her with her arms out, their two bodies bumping together, the sensation so familiar it was almost as if she were embracing herself.

“So,” Jessica said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Vicki felt a sudden odd emptiness as the girl let go. She was surprised to realize that she was close to tears “You have a nice night.”

Jessica had promised to delete the offensive post on grademyteacher.com, and Vicki was pretty sure she trusted her to keep her word. Still, she felt a vague sense of foreboding as she scrolled down the alphabetical list of Gifford teachers — there was Becky Leoni (6.7) and good old Sam Turley (7.2) — a queasy suspicion that something unpleasant was about to unfold.

But it was okay. The post was gone, wiped away as if it had never even existed. Vicki felt a moment of pure satisfaction — justice had been done, a crooked thing made straight — as well as a rush of affection for the girl, who really was a lovely person despite the awful things she’d written. Her attack was just a projection, an attempt to displace negative feelings for herself onto someone else. Vicki understood all too well how that sort of thing worked.

Her relief didn’t last for long, though. Without meaning to, she found herself reading the review that had taken the place of Jessica’s at the top of the Vicki Wiggins’s page on grademyteacher.com. It was several months old, written by a student who called himself “Mr. Amazing”:

Vicki had read this post when it first appeared and had barely given it a second thought. It was actually pretty good as far as these things went — Mr. Amazing had given her a higher-than-average overall rating of 6.0 — but right now it just seemed heartbreaking. Was this what she would be remembered for when all was said and done? That she gave some kid detention for a minor offense? That maybe — just maybe — she wasn’t as mind-numbingly dull as Dennis Ferrone?

I have so much to offer. And no one even notices.

For a few seconds, she thought about approaching Jessica after class tomorrow, suggesting that she post a new, more generous review on the site just to set the record straight. But it was a lot to ask. And the thought of making such a request was embarrassing beyond words.

She wasn’t sure why it mattered so much, but it did. It just did. Why wouldn’t it? She was a good person, she worked hard, and it seemed crazy — crazy and wrong — that these things went unacknowledged.

It turned out to be easier than she expected to register on grademyteacher.com. You just typed in an e-mail address and checked a box that said I AM A STUDENT AT GIFFORD HIGH SCHOOL. She chose the username Frappuccinogrrrl and wrote the following in the comments box:

There was more to say — much more — but space was limited and she decided to stop there. She checked her work, pressed SEND, and turned off her computer. There would be time enough in the morning to wake up and drink a cup of coffee, then maybe google herself before heading off to work. It would be nice, she thought, clicking on her own name and, just for once, finding something that felt like the truth.