Torsade Literary Space The Resident (part twenty-five)
Chapter Four
An Odd Man Out
(part twenty-five)
Whether her permission to attend was sanctioned, or whether he had exposed himself, giving it…this violation, the next violation, finally the “we’ve decided not to renew your contract” violation…
He saw her in his class that Thursday night. As he lit the projector she edged in, wearing a fisherman sweater and baggy cargoes. Her notebook was neon yellow. She used a Bic Clic…clicked it like a toy, grinned around her.
If anyone talked afterwards, while in the dim John explained cables, ports, disk drives, the importance of a clean fan vent, antistatic protocols, Claudine would say, “Oh, hey, I’m getting my notes. I hope you can let me listen for a moment.”
It worked. The disrespect John had borne for a lifetime dissolved for her.
“Shut up. Claudie’s working.”
“Let the girl work.”
“She’s learning. I never learned before.”
“Shut up. Shut up.”
He had droned his way through lectures, dogged, mad at them, alien to rapport. Now and then hearing “something wrong with that guy…” muttered not low enough.
When the lecture ended and the hands-on began, other students asked her to be their third or fourth. His student machines were floppy boots; on his desk was a seventh, a hard drive, cabled to a dot-matrix. Claudine was quick at games, quicker at programs, soon a go-to for questions the students didn’t care to ask John.
“You ever drink?”
“I am, like, hundreds of years older than you.”
“Come on. Friday night.”
“No. I’m dead on Friday nights.”
She was teaching the class, she was keeping order for him, she was loved. He thought about walking away from his job. Getting hired at Radio Shack.
The last session before break, she waited. “So, for Thanksgiving we’re just off the whole week? Thanksgiving is funny.”
“No Tuesday class, no Thursday class.”
“But Thanksgiving. Explain it to me.”
Why, for a joke? “Explain why you’re dead on Friday nights.”
“But see. Is there a thing people do on Fridays, after Thanksgiving?”
“They shop. For Christmas.”
“For real, though? So you have a turkey, a big bird you have to eat, and you have…”
“Pie.”
He locked the room. They were in a community center, not a college. No computer lab, just equipment he had gathered himself, a room he temporarily held the key to. A contract with Learning Experiences, the company that found him work, paid him $420 a week for four hours of teaching. Other hours were his to invest. He had one bag slung over a shoulder, and Claudine had the other. She was flanking him to the parking lot.
“Pie is great. I love it, it’s such a crazy thing. You mix flour and water and smush it together. Then you roll it into a disk with a special tool.”
“And fill it with pumpkin.”
“Pumpkin? What is pumpkin? What a name, so adorable!” She kept laughing.
“I don’t know. I wish you wouldn’t…”
She stopped laughing.
Say a thing, he told himself. “Are you alone for Thanksgiving?”
“I’m hearing in your culture how you’re not supposed to be.”
38
An Odd Man Out
The Resident (part twenty-six)
(2022, Stephanie Foster)