works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

"Guinevere", Chapter 3: Morgan

It wasn't so much of a "something" as a "someone" that happened, though. And it wasn't that undefinable, either: the someone was a she, and she was fifteen-years-old. It was the Monday of the second week of class when she walked into my class for the first time, wearing an olive green Army surplus jacket two sizes too big, with a dirty hiking backpack slung over her right shoulder and a bottle of Evian in her left hand. Her red hair, tied back in a ponytail, swung back and forth like a pendulum as she scanned the assortment of desks briefly and chose the one that was directly front and center. She eased her slight body onto the plastic chair and shot a dimpled smile at me. She was twenty minutes early; I was sitting at my desk.

"Hi," she said. I counted thirteen freckles scattered around her nose and on her cheeks.

"Hello," I said. I shuffled a few papers around on my desk with no real purpose except to have the appearance of being busy. I wasn't great at engaging in small talk with fifteen-year-olds, not by any stretch of the imagination; it seemed like it had been a very long time since I was of that awkward age where no world save for my own existed. Was it so long? Ten years or so, and yet my memories of high school for me were confined like an ugly dog in an animal shelter, awaiting the euthanasia of forgetting. They occupied no special place in my heart and I would not regret their loss.

Was there any memory that really, truly mattered? A memory that would break me with one hundred percent absolute certainty, if I forgot it? Everything I had learned up to now was a means to an end, and this job, this place, was just another means – to what end?

Listless...drifting...like an old boat moored on the Gulf of Mexico. J. wasn't just "somewhat" right about me, he was perfectly on the money when it came to that aspect of me. Come on down, you're the grand-prize winner – tell him what he's won: a job teaching high school history. Or History, with a capital H, as he liked to put it.

Come to think of it, I had no real grasp of why J. was here. But he knew exactly why I was here, and that inequality unnerved me, almost as much as that girl sitting in front of me, who had been staring at my hair for the past five minutes or so. Her eyes were a very bright green.

"What's your name?" I asked. Anything to break her gaze. We were still the only ones in the classroom.

"Morgan," she answered. She was still looking at my hair. Just ask about it. Say something. Come on. I don't want to be the one to push the conversation along. I've heard all the stories of misconstrued sexual harassment by high school teachers. She bit her lip, then said: "Cool hair."

"Thanks," I said. I pretended to search for something in the drawers of my desk. Five years out of college and I still dyed my hair. There was something therapeutic about having my hair washed, cut, and dyed by a professional. I enjoyed tipping extra and I never went to the same salon twice in a row, even if it meant driving an extra thirty minutes to a different city – as long as I could find a place with a good reputation. Word-of-mouth was everything.

"I like your hair too," I said, hunched over a drawer full of useless papers. Oh, damn. So much for playing it cool. If a parent overheard, there'd likely be mobs with burning torches in front of my apartment complex the very next day. Burn the teacher who said something vaguely complimentary with possible sexual undertones! He's a witch! Tie him to the stake, and –

"Thanks. Um. Sir?"

I looked up. "What?"

"I'm looking forward to your class," she said. The smile must've left some time ago, while I was hiding underneath my desk, but now it made its triumphant return in full force. Morgan. She was very pretty, for a fifteen-year-old. Before I could respond to her, the door opened and students began to file in, arranged in ones and twos and threes and sometimes fours. It was only the second week of the term but already they had fallen into their cliques, groups, and relationships. They formed the physical manifestations of these tenuous lines connecting tenuous adolescent lives by how they sat next to each other. The room buzzed with their conversations about the weekend.

I stood up.

"How did you all like Fitzgerald? I'd like you all to get out your copies of The Great Gatsby, but don't open them just yet – look at the cover for a moment..."

---

It was late afternoon. The sun would set in a few hours, casting its last gasps of light across the tops of factories and two-star hotels and movie theaters and bowling alleys and cheap bars and newly-opened chain restaurants. If nothing else, the suburbanites loved newly-opened chain restaurants. They would flock en masse to the fresh neon signs, tell their friends, bring their families, and after a year or two they would leave behind the chain restaurant that had brought them so many reasonably-priced meals and so much reasonably-priced kitsch. And a new one would inevitably open, the people in charge of deciding where to open a new location having noticed the success of so many other chain restaurant openings, and the families and friends would flock to that new one, and on and on and on. It'd been happening since I was born and it would probably keep on happening after I died – things like that never really changed. Not in ways that mattered, anyway.

I went to a chain restaurant after finishing going over the lesson plans for the rest of the week. I had skipped lunch and I couldn't remember why, so a reasonably-priced meal sounded pretty good, never mind the kitsch.

Londonburger's was the newest of the chain restaurants. Despite the name, their food had nothing to do with London, but the decor was everything an American who had never seen London would imagine it to be: it was as if they had taken a model of Big Ben and one of Buckingham Palace then gutted them both and laid them across the walls like the skins of slain animals drying in the sun. The host, usually a community college student paying his own way through, had to wear the costume of a Buckingham Palace guard, tall hat included. It seemed all the more ridiculous that the face underneath the hat was always so young, and always so forcefully cheerful.

"Hello, welcome to Londonburger, how many will be eating with us today?" As he spoke, the hat began to fall over his forehead. He pushed it up awkwardly.

"Just one," I said.

"Sherry will seat you in just a moment," he said, tapping at a touch-screen computer with white-gloved hands. A waitress materialized, wearing plain black clothes. It seemed unfair that only the guy up front had to wear an almost-offensively stereotypical uniform, but on the bright side, the staff refrained from using Britishisms or a mock accent in their speech. The prevalence of meat and the constant usage of the word "bloody" would probably not go over too well with most patrons, especially the kind of man who would carry little bottles of hand disinfectant in his briefcase and refuse to enter public restrooms, the kind of man who would yell at a waiter for water spots on a spoon, never mind that the waiters and waitresses didn't wash dishes.

"This is a goddamn disgrace! I demand to see your manager, you little college piece of shit. I guess they don't teach how to fucking wash a spoon properly at Fuckhead University, now do they?"

Never mind the atmosphere – Londonburger's had at least this going for it: the peppercorn burger was pretty damn good.

---

I was on my way out when Morgan nearly spear-tackled me to the ground.

"Mr. Nguyen! Oh, wow, what are you doing here?" she asked, smiling.

I pushed her away to arms-length distance. "Just eating. Isn't that what most people come here to do?"

"Well, yeah, sure. But, I mean, Mr. Tomson was just in here earlier –"

"J.?"

"Yeah, but I have to call him Mr. Tomson, you know," she said. "I can't be on a first name basis with teachers. Everyone would be like, 'Sue him! Arrest him! Burn him at the stake!' and...stuff."

I nodded. "I'm sure the pitchfork-wielding villagers wouldn't take very kindly to a teacher being voraciously hugged by a student though." Her smile vanished. "Not that...uh..."

"It's okay. I've got to get back to work, anyway. See you tomorrow, Mr. Nguyen!" she said. Just before she turned around and walked away, the corners of her mouth turned upward slightly.

J. had been here? I hadn't seen him.

Maybe the peppercorn burger was more engrossing than I realized.

Anyway, when J. had said something was about to happen, this is where the story really begins. Though I saw that Morgan was pretty and had a mesmerizing sense of vibrancy, J. found her beautiful. Really, truly, with absolute certainty, he believed that she was the most beautiful girl, person, thing, creation, concept, that he had ever known or could ever know.

But I learned a long time ago that you couldn't really ever know anything, not with absolute certainty. Two plus two did not always equal four. And in this case, the calculations were a lot more complex.