Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny

Author:Katherine Heiny [Heiny, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Mr. Hawthorn offered to take Jane’s class for the rest of the day, but Jane said, “Oh, no, I’ll be fine. It’s less than an hour.”

Why did she say that? She had no idea.

“If you’re sure,” Mr. Hawthorn said. “And Duncan called and said he’d pick you up after school.”

“Okay,” Jane said.

She left the principal’s office and walked back toward her classroom, trailing one hand against the wall. It was a strange, dreamlike walk. But that made sense because surely she must be dreaming? The carpet was hilly and uneven, the walls bulged inward like warped boards, the floor threatened to rush up to meet her several times. She reached her classroom and put her hand on the doorknob. Brushed steel—cold, almost greasy. It felt real. She wasn’t dreaming.

She opened the door and went in. She saw that the children were journaling—that fallback plan of substitute teachers everywhere—and that they had just about reached the outer limits of their compliance. Their cheeks were all chapped, as though they had been out in the wind instead of just listening to it, and the room was filled with the sound of their fingers flipping the edges of their journal notebooks. Ms. Lowry was walking up and down the aisles, her eyes scanning from side to side, as though restlessness were a spider she could track down and stamp out.

“Thank you, Ms. Lowry,” Jane said. Her voice was calm, clear. “Children, you may put away your journals.”

Her students looked startled; she never called them “children.”

Ms. Lowry flashed Jane a grateful smile and slipped out the door, back to the office to fight the good fight against unanswered phone calls and excessive tardiness or whatever it was she did all day. It was beyond Jane’s comprehension, now that the world had changed. Now that she knew what people were capable of.

Twenty-two pairs of eyes looked at her.

“Class, it’s time for the next subject,” Jane said. She never called them “class” either. She seemed to have forgotten how to be herself. Or perhaps she had left her real self back in the principal’s office, and now she was just a shadow person, a wraith.

“It’s time for Science,” Christopher Goodman said. “It says that on the schedule.”

Jane swung her head, which seemed ponderously heavy, and looked at the schedule written on the whiteboard. “So it does,” she said. “But I’ve—I’ve—” What had she done? “I’ve changed my mind. We’ll have Story Time instead.”

“On a Wednesday?” Kayla Norton asked doubtfully.

“Yes,” Jane said. “Kayla, why don’t you pick a book, and we’ll all go to the Library Corner?”

The Library Corner was in the back of the room, with a rocking chair for Jane and the Peter Rabbit rug for the children to sit on. Blond wood bookshelves held all the children’s books Jane had owned as a child and all she’d collected as an adult. Good books, all of them, dog-eared, oversized, begging to be read.

Jane sat in the rocking chair, and Kayla handed her The Spider and the Fly.

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