by Jade Rivera Bowden

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The cheese had blackened around the edges. She dug her fingernail in, scraping the charred bits onto the floor of her car, slamming the brakes at the last second to keep from rear-ending the car in front of her. 

Her students had been particularly annoying that day. The closest she could get them to an analysis of Animal Farm was a conversation about Jessica’s hamster’s most recent escape attempt.   

With the burnt quiche in one hand, she laid on her horn with the other, a gentle reminder to the car in front of her that it was, in fact, clear for them to turn left. 

No one seems to know how to drive, Sheila thought, even as the slush falling from the sky seemed to be falling harder and faster every minute.

She got into her third almost-accident as she was pulling into the parking lot of her apartment complex, braking so suddenly that she lurched forward to let a black cat cross her path safely. As she slowly rolled past it, she rolled down her window and hissed.

She barged into her apartment, threw her keys into the dish with a loud clang, disposed of the failed quiche and wiped the crumbs off her navy slacks.

It was already pitch-black outside, even though it was only 6pm. She’d had to stay late to watch the stupid play rehearsal. She’d told the fresh-faced theatre director that it was coming along nicely only because it was so bad that she didn’t even know how to give a meaningful critique. Or perhaps she just didn’t want to. 

She dropped onto the couch, pulling a blanket over herself to block the world out. She did this on the increasingly frequent days that her students consumed her like a cackle of hyenas on a zebra carcass, leaving her nothing of herself but a blank space. 

It was masochistic, she thought, to imagine that her love of books could translate to middle schoolers. This crazy fantasy she’d had as a college student, ‘inspiring the youth’ or some such bullshit, had become her wasting away each night in a crummy little apartment, extremely single, and going into a job each day that was nothing more than glorified babysitting. 

Daniel would’ve known what to do, of course. Daniel always knew what to do. He’d been trained to be that way by those blue-blooded parents of his. She thought about that woman who was sleeping in his bed with him, on the right side assuredly, where she herself had slept for so many nights. 

The thought upset her, so instead of continuing to think, she turned on the TV. The blaring blue light soaked her and she stared blankly at the people on the screen, letting her own pitiful existence slowly drop away.

“Jane,” she said the next day over cold soggy sandwiches in the teachers’ lounge, “I don’t really know how to say this, but…” she paused for dramatic effect. “The play is going to be a disaster.”

They both hunched over, laughing into their fists. 

Jane taught History at Middleboro Middle School. Her classroom was right next to Sheila’s, so they’d become friends. Best friends. Jane had the chubby cheeks of an innocent with the wit of a snake. Her pale blonde hair was always cut short, making a halo around her head. Jane liked to say it was the perfect disguise for her checkered past. 

Jane had been appointed as Set Designer for the play since the art teacher was out on maternity leave. Sheila had been called in as one of the teachers for the ‘Test Group,’ teachers who would come in during the final week of rehearsals to give notes before the big day. 

It was an atrocity really that the middle school had even been allowed to do a production of ‘Hair.’ The snappy new theatre director, Angelica, was in her first year of teaching straight out of college and had thought it would be a fun show for the students. But of course, she’d had to change every drug and sex reference to something PG, mangling the show beyond recognition. It was like watching your mind unraveling, personalities splitting and then splitting again, ending in a confusing cultural mush.

That evening, Sheila sat in the fourth row in the dark auditorium, using both hands to tear into a buffalo wing. A smear of sauce snuck up her cheek. She wiped it off with her hand then wiped her hand on the velvet cushion below her.  

It had been another exceptionally long day. She’d written Animal Farm on the board and ‘oppression’ next to it, steadying herself for the attempt to spark a conversation that would inevitably disappoint her.

As she turned back around to face her students, a sharp putrid smell hit her, reaching inside of her and flipping her stomach over. 

She covered her nose, so shocked by this onslaught that she was unable to speak for a moment. That’s when a girl in the middle of the class started crying. She’d vomited into her own lap, attempting to conceal it from her classmates, but an orangey gravy had started trickling down her legs. The smell alone had made two other students vomit. 

By the time everyone had gotten cleaned up and settled back in and the girl had been taken to the nurse to sort out whatever hadn’t agreed with her, there were only 10 minutes left in class.

Sheila hadn’t been hungry for lunch. She’d caught traces of bile on the air for the rest of the day, so she was starving by the time school was over. She feasted on the wings, eating with the speed and consistency of a machine while delighting in this awkward version of ‘The Bed.’

Sheila had looked up the actual play as a means of comparison. She knew that this song was supposed to be about sex. Angelica had made it about going to sleep. A particularly delicious sleep.

The boy singing must have gotten ahold of the original lyrics, too He sang loudly, “You can tease in bed, you can please in bed—” 

Angelica interrupted him. “No, no Henry. It’s You can EASE in bed, then you pick up the TEA CUP and—”

“Sheila?” 

It was whispered right next to her as she’d been mid-bite, hunched over, tearing meat away from bone with her teeth.

She turned, body tensed like a cat, only to see Daniel right next to her.

The fact that he was the principal had been fun at the time. Incredibly sexy. But now it made her skin crawl, her ex-lover being her boss.

“Oh, hi” she scraped out.

“May I?” he gestured to the seat next to her.

“Sure”

She stuffed the wings under her seat, but the overpowering spicy and barbeque-y smell enveloped them. Daniel didn’t react.

“I was so sorry to hear about Molly throwing up today,” he whispered, looking straight ahead. 

How to respond to that? “Well, sure.”

“How are you doing?” he asked. The fact that they were whispering in the dark brought back an intimacy that made her tingle. She diligently tried to clean her mouth with her tongue, running it over her teeth, around her cheeks, desperate for her breath not to smell. 

“I’ve been better” she whispered straight into his ear, her chin just barely grazing the fabric of his blazer. She felt a chill like she’d just dived into a freezing lake face-first.

He kept his gaze on the stage. “Understandable,” he said, flatly, nodding. 

They sat like that together, not uncomfortably, for a few moments. 

The ten boisterous children in pajamas on stage pretended to yawn, singing about how the bed was “an invention so good.”

Daniel scoffed lightly, turning to her again. “You know, this play was originally a form of protest against the war on drugs.”

“Yeah, all that they’re protesting now is our sanity.”

Just then a sharp, loud and wildly out of key note startled the whole room. Even the child singing clapped their hand over their mouth, blushing.

They bit back laughter, pressing themselves into the backs of their seats in the cavernous dark room.

He stayed there for the rest of the rehearsal, right next to her in a sea of empty seats. She could hardly remember what it had felt like to be hungry.  

The next day in the teacher’s lounge over bland veggie fusilli, she told Jane everything.  

“And he just sat there?” Jane asked, “The whole time?”

Sheila nodded smugly, inhaling the smell of chicken wings that was still beneath her fingernails. 

On her way home that night, she’d watched the trees reaching their bare limbs straight up, tangling them in the night sky. When she plopped onto her couch, she hadn’t turned on her TV. Instead she’d picked up an old favorite, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The next day was her final pre-viewing of the play. She’d gotten meticulously dressed that morning– her long red and black patterned dress with the buttons down the front. Buttons that could be unbuttoned, she thought.

Her classes flew by uneventfully, a welcome surprise. They’d even gotten into a mildly interesting debate about Oscar Meyer wiener when discussing Animal Farm. 

When the last bell finally rang and the kids were all out of her classroom, she’d used her reflection in the window to re-pin her hair. She spritzed her neck with perfume one side then the other. Then she lifted up the bottom of her dress and gave herself a little spritz down there. She chugged a Slimfast then headed to the auditorium. 

She sat in the same seat she’d been in the other night, trying to look interested. She pushed her chest out to create a luscious silhouette, just in case anyone was watching her. 

Angelica had struggled with this number. ‘Walking on the Moon’ was supposed to be about a drug trip, but she’d decided to make the song about a flow state while playing an instrument. Lines like “Oh my God my bow is so soft. I love my cello” didn’t really land. 

She felt a hand on her shoulder and shuddered. She smelled his musky cologne even before she turned to look, rapturous. 

“Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing to the seat next to her. 

“No not at—” she turned to see Daniel, perfect Daniel, the tweed of his blazer complementing his salt and pepper stubble. But then something emerged from behind him. Someone. Her. 

She wasn’t even a teacher. She was the secretary in the main office, a lowly and uninteresting position. Sure, Daniel had a bit of a reputation. All the female teachers knew that. But Sheila hadn’t expected anything to come out of his trips to the fax machine, his requests for the secretary to help him fix it. Their romance budding over the warm paper.

“Hi, Sheila”. The way she said it, the tone in her voice. Sheila’s lips curled inward, a smile as thin as a pencil line. 

They sat there, right next to her, for the duration of the play. The secretary would lean over and whisper little things in his ear, how cute a child was, how she liked that hippy costume. Sheila was shocked that their relationship had lasted. No, not shocked. Angry. Not angry that he wasn’t with her, angry that he, her Daniel, had chosen someone so blonde, so thin, so endlessly appropriate. 

Sheila watched them without turning her head, craning her eyes as far to the left as they could go. She saw how he tilted his head toward her when she spoke, a catcher’s mitt for her every little musing.

He would smile, nod, but never provide a thought of his own. 

The ‘Let the Sunshine’ song had largely been kept the same, unbearably joy-filled.  Sheila left as soon as the lights came up, fighting her way down the long row, toggling seat bottoms up and down in her wake. She could still hear their voices behind her, the secretary’s laugh like the tinkling of Christmas bells. A sound that was obviously meant to please him.

“Jane.” Sheila barked into her phone when she was in the foyer. “Meet me at the roundabout.”

A little while later, they were pulling up to his house. His front porch lights were on, welcomingly, but there were no other lights on in the house. Perfect, she thought. She’d hoped to get there before they got home.

It had been more expensive than she thought it would be, buying all those eggs. More expensive than she could afford on her teacher’s salary, really. But she’d filled up her trunk anyway.

The first one had missed by a long shot, landing somewhere in the rhododendrons, but the aggression of it had felt marvelous. Her arm whooshing through the air, her muscles ignited. She and Jane turned to each other, grabbing one another’s hands, laughing, jumping up and down.

That’s when it really got fun. The shock of bright yellow dripping down the white siding was like seeing a rainbow for the first time, delightfully out of place.

They decorated as much of the house as they could with yellow streaks. Jane even cracked some eggs on the front porch so Daniel and the secretary would have to step through them on their way inside. 

On her last carton, Sheila hurled one right at the bedroom window, the one she’d been on the other side of so many mornings. To her surprise, the window broke. A loud alarm pierced the air. 

They shrieked, but they didn’t really care. They were in the place beyond fear. Sheila looked down at the carton in her hands that only had two eggs missing, otherwise full. She thought of what she’d do with them if she brought them home. Maybe she’d make an egg salad. The thought felt grotesque, eating eggs that Daniel had tainted. 

“Let’s finish this carton Janey” she shrieked so Jane could hear her.

With the blare of the alarm coating the night, they yelled their final curses and hurled the last of the eggs right at the front door. 

As she and Jane turned to leave, they were lit up by the headlights of a car turning into the driveway. 

They froze. Jane turned to her, but Sheila tilted her head back and laughed, letting the beam of the headlight coat her open throat. She squared off to their car, licking her lips and giving them a big juicy smile. As if it was them who didn’t belong there. As if she’d just given them a gift and was expecting a thank you.  

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Jade Rivera Bowden is a current MFA student at USC and a graduate of Barnard
College of Columbia University. One of her short stories was published in Silent
Auctions magazine and she has recently finished a novel I Have a Great Opportunity for
You which she is currently querying. She lives in a little brick house outside of the SC
capital with her big fluffy dog and little tuxedo cat.