Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,5
were supposed to be making lemon pie. We only had to make the curd filling. Because it was the start of the school year and we were still kitchen losers, not artists, Miss Cuddle had made all the crusts. “If you really love the people you’re feeding, you don’t buy store-bought crust,” Miss Cuddle had said. Candace had nodded the same way she did when a priest said, “And Christ died for your sins.”
I was standing at one of the Formica counters next to a pile of lemons Miss Cuddle had made into a neat pyramid. Dana Miller and I were doing a sloppy job grating lemon peel while Candace waited to add it to the curd mixture she had on the stove. Tina was measuring out sugar.
Dana was this kiss-up sophomore who said she wanted to be a school principal even though no one started out actually wanting to be a principal. She worked as a student aide to Assistant Principal Lawler, who she sometimes called by her first name, Theresa. Dana’s family and mine intersected. My uncle’s brother-in-law was her uncle, and even though this meant nothing—it wasn’t like she showed up at my family functions or vice versa—she always acted like it did. Thus, she’d immediately paired up with me in Kitchen Arts. At least today it was turning out to be useful. She’d dug through a few files and found out that Mr. McMann had graduated from Southern Illinois University, where he’d been a soccer player, and that he would be teaching freshman algebra.
“I heard one of the office managers call him a ‘Title IX hire’—you know, that legal thing where they have to have sports teams for girls—and I bet he’s only coaching girls’ soccer because he couldn’t get a boys’ sport,” Dana was saying, loud enough that people a few stations over could hear her. She was on the tall side, but she always bent forward at the waist when she talked to people, like she wanted to be shorter. Meanwhile, I was short and always had to draw myself up taller when I talked. Maybe the only way to be happy with how you looked was to never look at anyone else.
“If he was a soccer player, maybe he really wanted to start a team,” Tina interrupted her. “We don’t know what’s inside his head.”
“I just want to know what’s inside his pants,” a sophomore at the next cooking station interjected.
“We all saw THAT,” Candace said, holding a rolling pin in front of her pelvis and waving it suggestively.
“And thank God it’s not shaped like a rolling pin.” I corrected her penis shape comparison by picking up a banana from one of the fruit bowls arranged by a previous class.
Dana cleared her throat and I tried not to roll my eyes.
“Anyway, he was a last-minute hire,” she told us. “If you remember, we were supposed to have a girls’ basketball team. But resources didn’t permit it.” She even sounded like a principal. I wondered if she practiced.
“Oh yeah, because of the gym,” Tina said, referring to the spare gymnasium at the back of the school that had been closed off at the end of last school year when a huge chunk of the ceiling had fallen in.
“Why soccer? Who would a team even play?” I asked, more out of concern that Coach McMann would be taken from us before we even got to know him. I didn’t pay much attention to sports—I’d only go to football or basketball games when Candace dragged me—but I still knew none of the other high schools around here had a girls’ soccer team. Even boys’ soccer was limited to the private schools. Guys at our high school acted like it was girly to play soccer, and the joke was that the guys who played it only did because they hadn’t made the football team.
Of course, Dana looked ready to answer my question, but Candace cut her off.
“Who cares?” she said, swiping her finger near her lip, where a dot of powdered sugar clung. “Tell us more personal details.”
Dana continued authoritatively, like she was already in charge of Bobby’s fan club. “His birthday’s November seventh. Scorpio.” You could tell by the way she said it, she was compatible with Scorpios. But so was I, as an Aries. “He drives a 1973 Datsun,” she continued, “the blue-gray one in parking spot twenty-seven. This is his first teaching job.”