Act Accordingly
by James Maskell
I stayed at my desk a little longer than usual that day, returning a few parent emails and posting grades for the end of the second quarter. Excited to get home and relax, to feel the satisfaction of closing out the term and putting work out of mind for the weekend, I shut down my computer, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed out of my classroom into the darkened hall. One row of lights had clicked off automatically at 3PM, an administrative attempt to save money on the energy bill—something I could normally get behind—but most of the faculty just took it as a sign to get the hell out of the building as soon as we could. In truth, I enjoyed the tranquility of the long, quiet walk in semi-darkness as I approached the gym entrance, the quickest way out to the faculty lot. I pushed through the double doors, escaping into the receding sunshine where varsity basketball players were re-parking their cars before their Friday night game, purloining the premium spaces one by one as teachers left for the day.
My car was easy to spot: a fifteen-year-old Honda Accord, sage green—once metallic, but by this time dull and faded with several odd streaks across the hood and a few patches of bubbling rust at the bottom of the doors. I bought it used for $6500, with the odometer reading just over 78,000, so I knew if I took care of it, the car would do me well for some time. A few months later, (just outside the warrantee window) I realized the speedometer only worked intermittently, and that the actual milage was some other number, likely far greater than what I saw on the dash. Soon after, it started to stick when shifting from drive to reverse. The local transmission guy quelled the worst of my fears.
“Transmission’s fine,” he explained. “Shifter cable’s rusted. I can have it ready tomorrow afternoon. It’ll run you just under two hundred.” I told him that was perfect and to go ahead with the repair. “So, when was this thing submerged?” he asked. Submerged? I had no clue what he was talking about. “The undercarriage was in water at some point for sure. Rusted all to hell down there. Good cars, though. Frame’ll probably give out before the motor does. I’d just keep driving it as long as it runs.”
When I started teaching, my wife told me to trade it in. “Get yourself something decent,” she said. “You’re a professional now. You shouldn’t be showing up to work in a car that looks like that. We can handle a second car payment, you know.” She was right, of course, but I wanted to put in a few years first, climb a bit higher on the pay scale before I committed to an avoidable debt. And besides, I simply couldn’t justify the expense of a new car when the one I had got me from point A to point B. I pretended to look around for a car I liked with no real intent to buy one, hoping my wife would just let it go, which she eventually did. And so, a few years later, I was still pulling into the faculty lot each morning with my beat-up, faded green Accord.
I had just tossed my bag on the back seat and was about to get in when I noticed the folded notebook page tucked under the driver’s side wiper, its scraggly fringes flickering in the afternoon breeze. I expected a crude drawing or some sort of angry note, penned by a bravely anonymous student unhappy about my last assignment, but that’s not at all what I saw as I unfurled the paper. “Hey there, Big T,” it began, the bubbly letters scrawled hastily across the page in grape-scented purple marker. “Can’t wait to get my hands on your sexy bod after the game tonight. Know what I’m gonna do when we’re alone?” What followed was a series of detailed, intimate, and arguably selfless actions that the girl with the purple marker had planned to provide for whoever Big T was. I started to panic. I had seen something not meant for my eyes, and as I stood there, holding this provocative note, feeling like I’d committed some inexcusable act, more student cars entered the lot all around me. That’s when I saw it pull in and park just a few spaces to my left: a fifteen-year-old, faded sage green Accord, almost an exact copy of my own. The driver was a kid I’d had in class a couple years earlier. He was polite, rather quiet, a good student, and a pretty good athlete as I recall. Timmy was his name, but he was T to all his friends, and apparently Big T to Purple Marker Girl, who had clearly mistaken my car for his.
I refolded the note as quickly as I could, worried he might see what I was holding and recognize the purple marker on his way into the building. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I knew I had to do something and do it immediately. It was Timmy’s note; it was rightfully his, and I stood there wishing I’d never seen it in the first place. I actually considered walking it over to his car and tucking it under the wiper blade once the coast was clear, but in a high school parking lot the coast is never clear. Someone would see me, get curious, and decide to have a look for themselves. How could I even begin to explain why I’d left such a note on a student’s car? I had to get out of there, get home where it was safe, confide in my wife. She’d know what to do. I stuffed the note into my breast pocket and sped out of the lot and into the afternoon traffic.
I caught every red light the entire way home and checked the mirrors franticly at each intersection, imagining accusatory stares from every direction. Surely the woman behind me couldn’t know about the wretched note burning a hole in my pocket, but what if she did know somehow? What if she had followed me from the parking lot and taken down my plate number? I glared at her through the rearview, trying to decide whether I’d seen her before. She took an abrupt right at the next junction, and I thought: That was close. But it wasn’t close; it wasn’t anything. I had to get out of my head and out of this damned car. When I finally pulled into my driveway, I ran up the stairs and burst through the front door, out of breath and clearly distraught.
“What’s wrong?” my wife said. “Is everything ok?”
I fumbled my way through the story as I pulled the note from my pocket. Starting at my desk and why I’d stayed late, I wove my tale through the darkened hall and out to the fateful moment when I pulled the note from beneath my wiper blade. I handed her the folded page, and she opened it as I rambled on about Timmy and his doppelganger Accord and the woman who I could swear had followed me through two sets of lights. She sighed as she refolded the note and handed it back to me.
“You know why this happened, right?” she asked. She didn’t call me an idiot, but something about the look in her eyes suggested the word was floating around in her head and that it was a suitable word for the moment. “How many times have I told you to buy a new car?”
“I know, but... the note. I wasn’t—”
“The note? You think the problem is the note? That girl put that note on your windshield because you drive a car that a teenager should be driving. You cannot show up to work at a high school driving the same car as a seventeen-year-old. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you had just listened to me.” She was right, just as she’d been right the first time she told me to get rid of that car. “You’re going to the dealership tomorrow,” she said with finality. “I’m coming with you, and we’re not coming home until you have a new car.” She turned and started to walk away.
“Ok, ok.” I didn’t really mean that second “ok,” but it came out anyway, and she stopped in her tracks when she heard it.
“And don’t think you’re going to waste the whole day trying to talk them down a couple hundred dollars,” she said. “You know I hate that, and they always find a way to charge you what they want.”
I do know that, but I haggled anyway, wasting two hours and ultimately paying just under the sticker price as my wife had predicted. But I did drive away in a new Civic that day, a small, sensible four-door sedan with fresh black paint, no rust, and accurate, working gauges on the dashboard. I drove that car proudly onto the faculty lot the following Monday. Years later, my kids learned to drive in it and eventually became its primary operators until they could save enough to buy their own cars. In time it endured a handful of minor accidents, yielding a healthy dose of cosmetic repairs, but it continued to run without any significant mechanical issues.
That whole note debacle was fifteen years ago, though that hardly seems possible. I have no idea what Timmy ended up doing with his life, or whether Purple Marker Girl ever switched to a ballpoint pen, but I thought back to that moment a few days ago. I was stopped at a red light when a current student pulled up next to me in a fifteen-year-old black Civic, rolled down his window, looked over at me and yelled, “Hey, sweet ride.” Before I could respond he bolted down the end of a Red Bull, crushed the can, tossed it into his back seat, then sped off as the light turned green.
When I got home, I told my wife, “I think it might be time to upgrade the Civic.”
“Another note from Purple Marker Girl?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
BIO: James M. Maskell has taught high school English in Massachusetts for over twenty years and writes in the early mornings before heading off to class. His recent work has been featured in Poemeleon, Quarter(ly), Waccamaw, 13tracks, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and elsewhere. You can read his other work at jamesmmaskell.com.