The Last Teacher Read Online Free PDF Page B

She couldn’t just put it back out on the street when she decided it was time to start travelling down the highway with the rest of the caravan.
    Trixie ? No. Sprinkles ? No. Fluffy ? Definitely not. She looked around at all of the empty beer cans. Tipsy ? Maybe.
    Then the name came to her and she was discouraged she hadn’t come up with it earlier.
    Holding the phone away from her mouth, she whispered, “Where did you come from, Stranger ?  Where do you want to go?”
    In response, Stranger purred and circled, purred and circled.
    A thought occurred to Ray then, and she pulled the phone back to her mouth: “Hey, mom, what did I want to be when I was little?”
    “Is everything okay, honey?”
    “Everything’s fine, mom.  I’m just curious what I wanted to be when I was young.”
    “When you were little?” her mom said, her way of repeating something to make it sound absurd.
    “I was trying to tell my students what I wanted to be when I grew up and I couldn’t remember.”
    “Well, that’s easy, honey. A teacher.”
    “No, mom. Not what I’m doing. What did I want to be when I was little?”
    “A teacher!” her mother said again.  “A teacher!  A teacher!”
    Ray shook her head, unsure why she bothered to ask questions like that when the conversation never went the way she wanted it to go.
    Her mother added, “You came home from your very first day of Kindergarten and told your father and I that you wanted to be a teacher when you grew up. We laughed and thought it was the funniest thing in the world. But then you said the same thing in first grade when you were asked. And second grade, too. You don’t remember that?”
    “No,” Ray said, frowning. “I don’t remember that at all.”
    Rubbing the back of Stranger’s head, she wondered how she could forget something like that.
    “You never said what subject you wanted to teach,” her mom added. “You didn’t even know teachers could focus on a certain subject back then. All you knew was that you wanted to be a teacher.”
    “Are you making this up, mom?”
    “No! I’m being serious. I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
    As if joking about becoming a teacher was something that should be off limits if you had any decency.
    “Thanks, mom.”
    “For what, honey?”
    “For remembering.”

Final Chance
     
     
    The rest of the weekend was spent thinking about the scientist’s report and the diminishing student population. She remembered the things Eric Tates had said before storming out of the room, and she also replayed the conversation with her mother over and over.
    By the time school started on Monday morning, she was on a warpath. She stormed into the teacher’s lounge, ready to tell everyone there exactly what she thought about Al Flanagan and Harry Rousner and all the others who had left before the school year was finished.
    The only person in the lounge, however, was Mr. Turkow, the janitor.
    The man, hunched over his mop, looked up from the wet floor and said, “Another migration this weekend.”
    “Oh.”
    Next, she went to the principal’s office. She was on her way into Principal Wachowski’s office, without knocking, when a voice called out behind her: “She’s not in yet. If she’s coming in at all, that is.”
    Ray turned around. The mousy-looking secretary was standing behind her, next to a metal filing cabinet.  The secretary had a stack of folders in her hands.  Looking down, Ray saw that two trashcans were already full of the folders.
    “Permanent records?” Ray said, rolling her eyes.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.” If her class clown had been there, he would have laughed—or cried.  Ray said, “It doesn’t matter if Wachowski is here yet.  I’ll leave a note.”
    She wrote down everything she had planned on saying to Wachowski’s face. She wrote so quickly that when she was done, she had to go back and make some of her handwriting more legible so the principal would be able to read it all. Her