The Faculty Lounge

by Jennifer Mathieu

the two young teachers possessed a preternatural calm that came only from growing up aware that at any moment they might be shot dead at school.

Mr. Rayfield and Ms. Sanderson were part of a generation that had absorbed an absurd atrocity as normal.

person could color-code and list and organize, but in the end, life sometimes just happened to you.

Luz was not really seen by so many of the people she came into contact with each day.

Upon her arrival in the United States, Eduardo and Maritza had explained to her that it was shockingly easy to exist in a country that did not, at least on paper, want her there. Because the truth was that, in many ways, it did. It needed people like Luz. It depended on them to clean their buildings and tend to their babies and fix their homes. It did not want to extend to them their full humanity—that was clear. But as long as she didn’t open her mouth, ask for too much, or rock the boat, she could stay. As long as she could agree to exist only in a certain way. Like, half a person.

He was kind and respectful and he cared about Nancy, but in the end, the problem was Nancy’s problem. It was always the girl who was going to have to pay.

Nurse Honeycutt had never been particularly political. She had never marched or protested, and she had eschewed labels like feminist even as a college student in the ’70s. But she followed the news carefully, she read the paper each morning, she made donations to causes that mattered to her, and she had opinions about many things. And on Election Day, when she voted, she knew exactly who she was voting for and why.

He came to know certain books so intimately that on some level it still occasionally surprised him that the characters inside those pages were not real.

That there were more books in the world than he would ever have time to read was equal parts comforting and troubling.