Read Online This Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks - Free Book Online Page B

too closely, there was always Morningcroft. The student body, Steckelberg had told her, was a stimulating combination of disadvantaged youth and wealthy hippie offspring. Eril had just earned an Associate’s Degree in Behavioral Science at Washtenaw Community College. She’d switched from a Hospitality major in her last semester; a surprising number of the requirements had been the same.

    When Eril saw her friends all they wanted to talk about was the job, how funny it was, Eril as a schoolteacher, Eril who’d never cared for school, who couldn’t do math, who had no affection for English beyond the mechanics of it, who, at twenty-one, hadn’t even scraped through a real college, who had filled out applications to be a desk clerk at the Marriott, an assistant manager at a sandwich shop, a receptionist at a furniture distributor, and a schoolteacher, and gotten hired by the school. “It’s just for the semester,” she told them. “Teaching’s not for me.”
    â€œWe could have told you that,” they said, and she’d wish desperately that someone had.
    On her better days, she could decide it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had or hadn’t. As little as Morningcroft could get away with paying her, without certification, without a clue, it was more than she’d earn elsewhere. Enough to keep her in her apartment, pay the higher car insurance premiums since her parents had removed themselves as co-drivers. Enough to call her parents and give them the number of a cell phone she’d paid for herself.
    On other days Eril would drive the long route home, back into Ann Arbor, past the house she’d grown up in and that her parents had sold, and think about how she could teach forever and never afford to live in that neighborhood again. She felt as if the job, her whole post-parent life, was an elaborate game with particular rules about money, about independence, about fortitude; it was only sometimes that she remembered there was no judge, no winner to be declared, no prize to be awarded.
    One of the rat’s tumors kept growing, swelling out from his armpit to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It dragged along the ground as he walked, until there was a bald patch at the bottom of the swell. The children refused to touch him anymore. Eril followed her predecessor’s instructions to the letter, but the rat got sicker, the snake got sluggish, the shells got stinkier. Whatever kind of green thumb the other woman had had with animals, Eril thought, she had the opposite. The water in the fish tank grew cloudier. There were special snails, Donald explained,
who were supposed to eat the algae but couldn’t keep up since Eril didn’t seem to take good enough care of the water. The snails hid all day, Donald said, sleeping, but if it was dark and quiet, like at night, they would come out and start eating the algae. This, he told Eril and the rest of the class, was called nocturnal.
    â€œI know that,” she said, and wrote it on the board with a line under it.
    Donald asked, “Do you know what the opposite is called? What we are? Sleeping at night?”
    â€œWhy don’t you tell us?”
    â€œMaybe I don’t want to.”
    Eril didn’t know the word he meant, and Donald knew it. She turned to the blackboard. Second Conditional, she wrote. If Donald behaved himself, he would not have to touch the rat. The class whispered. Eril walked to the table, the thin floor echoing beneath her. She lifted Binx out of the cage, supporting the tumor with her right palm so the weight of it wouldn’t drag on the rat’s skin. She carried Binx to Donald’s desk and set him down, cupping her hands into a loose enclosure. “Touch the rat,” Eril ordered.
    â€œ Diurnal. The word was diurnal. ”
    â€œIt’s a little late for that. Touch.”
    Grimly Donald stroked the smooth white fur on the rat’s head. The rat’s