Chapter 3--Part 2

To make the day absolutely perfect, when I got there it was like a hundred and ten degrees in the building. We’d had hot weather for a while, and you expected the other schools to be roasting—they just have ceiling fans—but the high school has air conditioning. They’re just too cheap to keep it on at night. Sure, we don’t want our little darlings to sweat on their little notebooks, but it’s okay if the custodial staff has one big, massive, collective stroke while they’re cleaning up after the little assholes! What did they care about us? If we all quit or dropped dead of heat frustration, there’d be plenty of other unskilled suckers to take our places.

I hated doing this subbing, going from one building to the next, never knowing what hours I’d be working, but Sandee said it was the only way to get on full-time. And, God help me, that’s what I was trying to do. The job might suck, but at least I’d have health insurance for me and Tris. What the hell else was I gonna do with a 10th grade education—teach? Perform brain surgery? Maybe support us on my wonderful poetry? Ha. Sure, I’d gotten a GED at Adult Ed, but lots of places looked at that as worse than nothing.

The woman I was working with that night was named Raylene. I’d worked with her once before. She was old, like maybe 56, 57, but she looked even older. Her hair was mousy brown, streaked with white, and she wore it pulled back tight in a bun. Nothing makes a woman look older than being a bun-head. Some of those women from one of those religions where they have to wear dresses all the time and keep their hair long used to come in the Ben Franklin Dime Store to get canning supplies when I used to work there. Those dresses reminded me of my mother and always made me want to run out the back door. As soon as the girls in that religion—Bun-Head Freakazoids for the Lord, or whatever it was—turned seventeen, they started pulling their hair into a bun. They went from seventeen right to forty, with no stops in between.

Raylene was also annoying as hell. She knew I’d worked there before, but she still had to give me fifteen minutes of instructions like I was some kind of retard who didn’t know how to do anything. I mean, cleaning isn’t exactly rocket science.

Raylene acted as if we were cleaning Buckingham Palace or something—or maybe her own personal house. She’s such a grind, she takes it personally if all the rooms aren’t cleaned to her standards. I can’t believe she’d work that hard and get that excited about it for $7.50 an hour—and that’s what she was getting after working there half her life. Was I sure I wanted to do this? Ha, like I had much of a choice.

Raylene went on and on about how to wash the boards—“Don’t leave any streaks. They don’t like streaks. Wash side to side, not up and down. And don’t forget to wash out the chalk tray and clean the erasers!”—move all the desks, vacuum, wash the desk tops, check underneath for gum. Did she think I was a moron?

Finally, she let me get started. I’d been ready to strangle her if she hadn’t shut up. While I was nodding and pretending to concentrate on what she was saying, I was picturing sucking that bun head of hers into my heavy-duty vacuum cleaner. But, hell, I’d probably get charged for it if I broke the thing.

I had a whole hallway of rooms to do before I could take a lunch break at 6:30 p.m. I got my cart with all the cleaning supplies and went to work. This cart was really something. It had a special place for everything we needed, so we hardly ever had to go back to the supply closet. It had one part that held the skirt bottles filled with vinegar and water—they don’t let us use any chemicals anymore, it’s some OSHA thing, I guess. There was one part for rags, sponges, the gum scraper, and the squeegee; a bucket; a hole for the mop; and a place for the vacuum cleaner. The whole front section held one of those big black plastic bags for garbage.
Man, all that sucker needed was a little refrigerator for a couple of beers and it would be complete.

I polished the water fountains, after digging a disgusting wad of chew out of the drain. I wonder how the little bastard who left it there would like it if a big wad of chew was crammed in his drain hole. Then I turned to the full-length mirror on the wall near the corner, carefully wiping off about a million fingerprints that I knew would be back the next day. Why do they have to touch the damn mirror, for crying out loud?! Are they trying to feel themselves up or something?