Community College: First Year
By the tenth week of the semester, her hit and miss attendance had become a permanently empty seat near the back. Still, I called her name every morning along with the rest.
On the break, Artrielle came up to my desk, touching her fingers along the worm-thick, purple-white scar on her upper arm. She pointed at my roster, to the name of the girl who’d been missing in action for the last two weeks. “She ain’t coming back,” she said.
I smiled. “Isn’t.” I looked at the name and then back at Artrielle. “Why not?”
Artrielle shrugged and then explained that the girl in question had been beaten up by her fiancé so badly this time that she had to drop all of her classes. “Sweaters and turtle necks ain’t—isn’t going to hide what he’s done to her.”
The girl had always worn long sleeves or hoodies . . . even in the still-hot days of September.
Earlier in the semester, Artrielle explained, the fiancé punched the girl in the stomach and she lost their baby—the pregnancy she beamed about during the first class as they went around the room and introduced themselves.
Artrielle said more, but my mind went to a time when the girl had been in class. We read a short story about a Southern couple that lost a child at a drive-in theater. They watched gigantic, flickering movie stars, and their baby quietly died in the backseat, a sudden infant death.
The girl, the missing student, stood up in the middle of the class discussion, slung her backpack, and disappeared. I made a note in my roster: LE. Left early. I figured she just got tired of hearing us discuss a story that she didn’t read and didn’t know anything about.
“You don’t have to call her name no more . . . that’s all,” Artrielle said. She touched her scar again and asked how much time was left on break.
I looked at the clock, swallowed, and told her, “Seven minutes.”
The student, the girl I would never see again, came to my office around the third week of the semester . . . this, after she’d missed a full week of classes. She wanted to make up two quizzes and two journals. I have policies about quizzes and journals. According to the policies, she hadn’t done what she needed to do to make up the missed week’s work.
“It’s too late,” I said.
She sat hunched in my visitor’s chair, left arm cradled around her stomach, big brown eyes searching mine.
“The policy is in the syllabus,” I said. “You’re way past due.”
She winced, shifted, and clutched her torso – a tear shined along her lower left eyelid.
I crossed, then uncrossed, then crossed my arms again.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll let you make up the quizzes.” My back to her, I started shuffling through a folder. “But you’ll have to take them right now. As to the journals . . . you’ll have to take zeroes.” I swiveled toward her holding out the quizzes. “You understand. You missed a week of classes. A week. I mean, it’s only fair that you should have to take a hit somewhere.”
– Jeff Vande Zande teaches English at Delta College in Midland, MI. His stories have been collected in a full-length collection, Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). Individual stories have appeared in Coe Review, Existere, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. He has two novels: Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press) and Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press). Whistling Shade Press just released his most recent book, Threatened Species and Other Stories. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com.
