Miss Jenkins

He looked annoyed to be there. His arms were crossed, and he was acting all indignant, rolling his eyes at every word out of Miss Jenkins' mouth as though he were storing the words away later for a response he thought proved his point.

“And the short stories we've been reading together in class,” Miss Jenkins was saying, “I've had each student write out three paragraphs about what happens in the story, what themes they think they present, and how the story overall makes them feel.” She showed other examples from other students. A slight embarrassment came over her when she realized most of the papers were unintelligible scribbles.

When she picked out Clay King's paper, it read at the top his name and the date, and on the first line were only two words out of the possible hundred that were supposed to be written:

Lazy Slut.

“Why're y'all reading stories anyways?” Clay King's father said.

“Well, for the past few weeks we've been reading a number of short stories and after the students write their assignments, we'll spend the remaining minutes of class having an open discussion if any of the students have any questions that pertain to the stories.”

Clay King's father leaned forward, the smell of gasoline wafted from his shirt.

“I'm asking why y'all are just reading stories. What do you have our boy learning about in here?”

His wife, who had been sitting there quiet as a churchmouse, reached over and told him to let Miss Jenkins finish.

“Getting back to my point,” Miss Jenkins said. “Clay here has written something down here that is extremely inappropriate and I just wanted to make you aware of it. And on top of that, while I have you here, we can also discuss Clay's performance in class. When it comes to the assignments, he's usually behind in all of them. I've worked closely with him, but he still has trouble with basic reading comprehension. So I wanted to give you some extra work you can take home and help him outside of school and possibly work with him—”

“You never answered my question.”

“And what was the question again, Mr. King?”

“I asked you why you're just giving our boy stories to read? How the hell is that supposed to teach him anything?”

“Well, as I've said before. Not only is it a way to help better understand their future assignments, it can provide the students with an understanding on other aspects of their life. We try to relate ourselves with the characters in the stories and their actions. As a matter of fact I think it has been very transfor—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, you really are just a dumb little girl who don't listen.”

“Clay,” his wife said, almost as if she was out of breath. “Come on. Don't be saying stuff like that to her. She's just trying to help.”

“All I want to know is why she ain't teaching our kid something that will be useful. I mean some real books.”

“The stories I've assigned,” Miss Jenkins said, “they provide the students with just as much useful information that can help them.”

Clay King's father rose from his chair. He picked up the sheet of paper Miss Jenkins had spent almost a day on; curing to the specific needs of a single student, one who was born from the man now towering over her.

He stared at it for another moment before he balled it up and tossed it back onto her desk.

“I don't think my kid's got any learning problems,” Clay King's father said. “If he can find out a woman is a lazy slut without looking too hard, I'd say he's doing pretty good for himself.”

“Clay,” his wife said. “Come on and quit saying stuff like that.”

—

Robert picked her up outside her mother's house at around six o'clock in his Tacoma. They drove into town and saw a crowd of people pouring out of the doors of the Red Lobster. Seeing that there was no way he was finding a parking spot, he pulled into the strip mall next door.

“You mind waiting here while I go see how long we have to wait?” he asked Miss Jenkins.

“That's fine,” she said.

She watched him cut across the grass barrier and wiggle between the bushes and soon he was out of her sight.

She reached into her purse and pulled out a sheet of paper folded so many times it was beginning to tear. It was the complaint she had filed on the student's father a few days ago. She had detailed it so thoroughly as if it was a police report against him; each stroke of her pen released enough reason to ruin the man's life. But the reason she had not turned it into the front office was lost on her. As she was folding it back up, she again saw the words Lazy Slut and she let out a tiny laugh.

Robert was still gone so she snooped around his truck. She went through the glovebox and seeing nothing interesting there except the truck manual an unopened pack of surgical masks.

She popped open the middle console and sitting there under the phone chargers and unopened tissue packages was a holstered handgun. When she looked up, Robert was returning to the truck with a defeated look across his face. She shut the console lid.

“They said it would be about a forty minute to an hour wait,” he said when he got back into the truck. He looked over at Miss Jenkins. “I'm sorry about this. Should've expected it to be crowded on a Friday night. I should've called ahead or something.”

“You'd make reservations at a Red Lobster for me? You didn't say anything about going all out tonight.”

“Hey, when you want the best, you get the best,” Robert said. “You want to try somewhere else?”

“To tell you the truth, I don't really feel like eating. I'd rather just go home if that's okay with you. If you want, you can stay over tonight and we can just snack around the house. That sounds like a better plan, doesn't it?”

“You sure? I mean, we got a McDonald's right there and we got a Wendy's right over there. And look, there's not a soul in either the parking lot or the dining area. Besides the employees, we'll have the place all to ourselves.”

Miss Jenkins went quiet. She looked out past the grass barrier to see more cars arriving the parking lot and struggling to find a place to park. People were still joining the throng of others waiting outside the Red Lobster.

“Why do you have a gun?” she asked.

“What do you mean why do I have a gun? I just do.”

“You didn't tell me you had one when we started dating.”

“Is that something that's going to bother you?”

“Not exactly. I just want to know why you have one?”

“I flip houses in some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. People are always stealing stuff from the properties. It's just a little insurance. I've never had to use it before if that's what you're asking.”

Miss Jenkins didn't say anything. She just stared down at the console that held the handgun.

“The last time I shot a gun,” she said, “I was thirteen years old on a church trip and they set up one of those skeet-shooting things. I tried it a couple of times but I missed every one of those little disc things that flew across the sky. Later that night, we all sat around a bonefire singing songs and talking, and the whole time I'm thinking to myself: maybe I should better at using a gun for the sake of my future self.”

“We can go to the range sometime, if you want,” Robert said. “You'll get use to it real quick. But if my having the gun on me bothers you, I can leave it at home whenever we go out. Like I said, I just take it with me when I go to check on the houses.”

“A few days I got called a pretty nasty name,” she said.

“Jeez, you're just all over the place tonight, aren't you? You sure you're feeling all right?”

“Do you want to know what I was called?”

Robert waited.

“I was called this name not just by a grown man but also by his son, who happens to be a student of mine.”

Robert still waited.

“They called me a Lazy Slut, Robert.”

“Jeez. To your face?”

“The boy proclaimed it in writing, but the father said it straight to my face. All the while his wife was sitting right there to witness the whole thing.”

“Jeez,” Robert said. “People will just say any damn thing to your face nowadays, won't they?”

“You don't think I'm either of those things, do you?”

“No, I wouldn't say that,” Robert said. “You're not lazy.” He tried to squeeze a laugh out of her but Miss Jenkins had already switched her attention back to the Red Lobster, where she believed a riot was about to break out.

—

When Robert pulled into a gas station a mile from her mother's house, Miss Jenkins watched him go inside and towards the back of the store. His head skimmed the top of the aisles until he reached the freezers.

She opened the middle console again, pushed aside the chargers and packets of tissue paper, and picked up the handgun.

Miss Jenkins pulled the gun from the holster, exploring the coal-black metal and the curiously heavy weight of it, imagining Robert meticulously choosing it from the range of other options. She looked over into the gas station once more.

Robert was paying at the register, barbecue chips, packets of donuts, and beer, food and drink they would hardly touch throughout the night, their stomachs aching and groaning as they wandered close to one another in hopes the other would never let the other one down.

Robert struck up a conversation with the clerk. Then he pointed in her direction as if he saw her remove the gun from its holster and step out of the truck, unseen.

—

Miss Jenkins had an apartment closer to the school, but she found herself most often hunkered down at her mother's. Her father had died seven years before, yet it seemed longer and more distant to both Miss Jenkins and her mother. There were parts of the house that still reminded them of him; places that seemed to hold his steps in time, artifacts that took up residence there shortly after he was gone, things like a wornout jacket or a pair of well-worn boots he never bothered to replace.

Besides the memory of her father, another thing that made her come to the house where she grew up were the mirrors along the wall in her old bedroom. Three sections of mirrors that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Her father had installed them years ago for the sole purpose of believing they expanded the room. And it was cheaper than actually building onto the house, he had said at the time. Miss Jenkins liked to lay at night facing the mirrors, seeing the length of her body before she turned off the light and went to sleep. In the mornings when the sun began to shine through the window, she would realize her back was always facing away from the mirrors.

Miss Jenkins found her mother had left to go to a movie with some of her friends from church. She had left some leftover chicken casserole in the oven, and with a note saying she and Robert could share it.

She warmed it up and scooped out a portion for herself and set the rest back in the oven when Robert figured out she had walked the mile down the road to her mother's house, with his gun at her side. She set the handgun on the nightstand in the bedroom. She had only briefly caught herself carrying it when she walked into the room, and in those short strides each section of the mirror was folding out an imperfect roll of images. Miss Jenkins sat at the edge of the bed and set the plate of food next to her. She slipped out of her shoes, removed her socks, and wiggled her toes for the audience in the mirror.

Her phone chimed and she read the message from Robert:

“Did you go inside the store?”

She set her phone face down on the bed. It chimed again.

“??? Did you run off?”

Still, she didn't respond.

She picked up the handgun from the nightstand, and held her pointer finger above the trigger, something she had learned from a man who had set up the skeet-shooting and talked incessantly about gun safety by calling it “trigger discipline”. She set the gun on the bed next to her phone, which had chimed three times since.

Miss Jenkins pulled her shirt over her head and then removed her skirt. She was left only with the image of a woman glancing back in the mirror in her underwear. She picked the gun up off the bed once more, and with each section of the mirror, she performed a different pose with the gun, believing if she stood there long enough her image would be ingrained in the glass.

The phone continued to chime. She picked it up and read the messages from Robert which were the variety of “where are yous” “are you mad at mes?” and the last one “Did you take my fucking gun???”

She smiled and sent him a picture of her holding the gun as she pointed it at the mirror.

As she held the gun in one hand and in the other her phone, and having never really learned true trigger discipline, the gun went off and a round went dead-center through the mirror. She walked over to it, and ran her fingers carefully over the bullet hole. Shattered glass trickled to the floor, and when she pulled her hand away from the mirror, tiny pinpricks of blood oozed from her fingertips.

Her phone chimed again:

“Did you walk to your mom's?” Another one: “I'll be there in a few minutes. Don't do anything stupid.”

She raised the phone up again and took a picture of the damage she had caused, minding her undamaged finger.

“Sorry I took your gun,” she wrote. “Turns out I'm not just a Lazy Slut, but I'm also a Dumb Lazy Slut.”

She set the handgun and the phone on the nightstand and laid on her side, facing the mirror, and the bullet hole continued to ripple along the entirety of the glass. As soon as she heard Robert pull into the driveway in his Tacoma, she closed her eyes and the lights went out.