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There’s a jock in her class.
There’s a jock in her class and he sits front and center, not slouched in the corner like the other times she’s called roll on the first day and glanced up to match a name to a bored face above a letterman jacket. This one—Eliot Spencer—does not look bored.
He does look at her breasts, which she doesn’t hide as much as she should in her role here, teaching home economics in the small high school of a small town of small-minded people. That kind of talk might occupy the imagination of some of the parents she meets on teachers’ nights, but it stays shuttered behind smiles and ingrained courtesy, her young women pulling their mothers forward to introduce them and why yes she did sew this dress herself, so kind, and don’t you find that a few good patterns are all you need for a wardrobe, and of course Marcy is doing excellent in her own pattern making, did she show you the sloper she made?
She never meets Eliot’s parents, rarely meets the parents of the few boys in her classes. He, however, does show some imagination, even if he’s putting it to use slipping less than subtle glances at her chest. Out-of-the-box thinking , her old team lead used to say, and maybe he didn’t mean a quarterback taking home ec at the behest of his teenage hormones, but it did show a certain amount of sideways problem solving within context.
She likes context.
Here, in the dusty middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma, her safety depends on the lack of the old, specific context she’d operated in. She obeys the rules. Owns a shotgun, because not owning a gun in this part of the world is almost unheard of, and she prefers talk of her cleavage to any other gossip they might cook up. Even so, her finger itches for the extended pull of a semi-automatic. If they do come for her, if the shotgun isn’t enough, well, then, she always did like knives. And no one bats an eye at a home ec teacher with a well-provisioned knife block. Hers is the safest classroom in the school.
She wants to see what a kid like Eliot Spencer might do with a knife. He’s rough still, what teenager isn’t, but smarter than he or this town know what to do with, and there’s an intensity to him that begs for a purpose.
Knives can serve multiple purposes, as needed, and she tells him that— knives are like people, it's all about the context— while pressing the breasts he so enjoys ogling into his shoulder. It’s the closest she’s allowed herself to come, in acknowledging her past life, the weapons at her disposal, and both the admission and the advance feel good within the context of her purpose. But she’s careful. Always so careful. This is only a test after all.
Two weeks later, he passes it, raising his hand when she asks why salting the water adds sweetness to oatmeal. “Any horse’ll tell you oats are plenty sweet. The salt adds a contrast. It’s all about the context,” he tells her and smirks in that cocky way of his; half pride at proving himself, half hidden insecurity at looking like a nerd or a teacher’s pet, or whatever other label kids cook up to put down other kids. His answer tells her he was paying attention to more than her chest, managed to retain information despite a distraction and apply it in a completely different context.
There’s a lot about this high school that begs for a different context. Town like this still needs the archaic school schedule to get the crops in the ground and back out again. Teens are up at the crack of dawn for not only for football, cheerleading, and marching band, but also farm and house chores; caring for younger siblings as a trial run for their own children. Plenty of them will marry high school sweethearts who they’ll eventually find out aren’t so sweet; too little or too much salt in the pot.
Eliot’s got a girl, Aimee Martin, whose sharp tongue and sharper mind can rein in that cockiness of his, just like she does the horses her pa trains. If anyone were escaping this place, she’d lay her bets on those two—her with the salt and him with the sweet and perhaps that’s why they work and she should drop this idea right now. But Aimee’s happy, tied to her father and those horses, and Eliot’s still champing at the idea of being tied to his father and that hardware store.
He doesn’t tell her this of course, but habits survive the context they were born into, which she supposes is the same thing as dying hard. Gone are her days of eavesdropping on the gossip of mafia wives, of tilting her ear to the broken whispers of broken targets, of close concentration to the static of a hard-earned, badly placed bug. The information she gathers in these halls will not break kings and shatter countries, but it’s beaten into stiff peaks of tension she could slice with a knife. This is high school, after all.
She can feel his taut frustration, remembers her own at that age, and it’s not so different from what chafes at her now, apart from her hard-earned, hard-learned self-awareness. The context of the world she’s left and the one she now inhabits.
And why wish that world or something like it on anyone? It’s bad enough, thinking about the other contexts in which she’s used a hot iron, as she demonstrates how to press shirtsleeves. The wrong ways to put out a grease fire are the right ways to make it spread. Dilute bleach to remove stains from whites, but leave it full strength to degrade biological evidence. She tries to imagine what sort of person she’d be, in the context of her own tiny town, not so unlike this one. Her ma’d always stressed these things, the domestic versions that is, and she’d learned them early. Good thing too; once the cancer settled in, Ma had lost the energy to keep the house spick and span, but not the need for it, everything shining and in its place. Only thing that didn’t quite fit was her. But what if she had stayed? Found a boy to marry, settled in and ignored the pressure building behind her eyes.
What if Eliot stays? Keeps a lid on that simmering frustration and anger, curbed now through his loyalties to his father, to Aimee, and her father, to his teammates and friends. He doesn’t have enough time to realize he doesn’t fit, doesn’t have enough time period, though he always seems to make some to help her clear up after class, and at some point she stops expecting him to use the moments to make a move. He is loyal, possibly to a fault, and if she had a rubric of the traits she was looking for in a recruit, he’d be exceeding expectations. Even faults have their uses.
Eliot is doing so well this semester. He demonstrates a keen attention to detail, creative problem solving, and excellent active listening skills. Always helpful, he is a joy to have in my class and shows great potential at extracting information and killing people when necessary.
Thing is, you don’t want a kid that likes killing for the hell of it, or thinks he might like it, if given the chance. Bullies aren’t nearly as useful as they think they are. You want a kid so loyal to a person, to a team, to an idea, that they’re willing to kill to protect it. Willing to die for it too. It’s a trait that can’t be taught and rarer than she used to think, before her world twisted itself into knots and she had her own loyalties to question, her own difficult choices to make.
Come graduation, he would have choices to make too, and currently they’re all in the context of other people. It’s an unavoidable byproduct of loyalty: the only way to escape the pull of one orbit is to hitch a ride on another. But getting out of a place like this requires a football scholarship or the army. He’s good on the field; superb hand/eye coordination, agility, and a knack for strategy, but he’s too small to catch the eye of the college recruiters that infrequently stop by and even if he had a bit of growing left to do, added a few more layers of muscle to that wiry teenage frame, his loyalty is to the team, not the game. She’s done enough interrogations to know the difference.
Here, football games are a town event, not just an insular high school affair. She’d attend each one even if she didn’t teach, as part of her cover. She understands the idea of setting up a play, reading the field, passing the ball. If her jock fumbles it, well, she’s stuck here along with him, can observe him walking the straight shot of a path she’d somehow avoided and circled back to. But he’s not one to fumble a catch. Military recruiters come far more frequently than the colleges to places like this. The next one is due in a few months and her scheduled check-in with the WitSec marshal is next week. They have a good rapport. She follows the rules. If she asks for a favor, to send a message to an old contact always on the lookout for something special, he’ll do it.
Of course, Eliot won’t know about the note in his file, won’t know why the recruiter lavishes attention on him, won’t know her role in this beyond the words like honor , duty , and service she slips into their conversations as his gaze drops down to what she wants him to see. She knows he’s listening.
It’s all about the context.