Lockers Can Fit Almost Anything

The first years are in a strange mood. It is friday as well as the period before lunch, so it’s hardly surprising. The boys seem oddly calm and the girls all look depressed and spaced out, and continue to peer at me more curiously than usual. After having class with me for three months, this is a little unusual. Maybe I wrote on my face again.

The class stands to give the opening greeting. A boy in the fourth row is looking at me pointedly and he leans back to his friend, “Damn, she really DOES look like Becki doesn’t she?”

“I can heearrrrrr you,” I mouth. And he gives me a big, rare, slightly abashed smile. “Heh, she can hear me,” he says to the same friend in Japanese.

“Onegaishimassssss.”

And so the class begins.

The girl in the front row spends a good portion of the class ignoring the handouts that are given to her and instead meticulously and stealthily plucking hair from her arms with a pair of tiny silver tweezers.

The activity of the day involves the students jan-kenning, the winner permitted to ask the loser a series of questions in English. I wander over to the boys’ side of the room and engage in a riveting janken battle.

“HI BECKI!” one boy says as I begin playing rock, paper, scissor with his deskmate. “NO, NO. BECKI. ME. ME.” After I have lost to the first boy and answered his questions, I move over to The Boy Who Has Yet To Retain My Name and manage to lose yet again. There’s something in the subtle art of rock, paper, scissors that I have yet to grasp.

“Right. Let’s see. Name? …BECKI.” He proceeds to fill in ベッキ in on his sheet despite my protestations. “BECKI!” He grins at me.

“No. Not Becki!” Sigh.

The boy leans over to his friend. “Oh all right. Hey, what’s Becki’s actual name?”

His friend considers for a moment and then answers, “Rebecca.”

“Riiiight. Rebecca. Okay. You’re Rebecca.”

In the back of the room one of the rowdier students seems to be getting into an argument with the student seated diagonally in back of him. The boy in back cannot seem to stop himself from howling with laughter. Unable to endure the mockery any longer, the boy in the front leaps back and grabs the kid’s shirt by the collar, pulling him towards him, until they are face to face. The kid seems unmoved and continues to giggle uncontrollably. The teacher moves towards the back and the boy returns to his seat, looking mildly put out by the laughter, assumedly at his expense, but still simultaneously (and strangely) smiling.

As the class finishes, the Japanese teacher and I walk around the room closing windows and shutting lights. The boys are all gathered towards the back of the room around a large, gray, metal locker situated between two shelves which has been pushed up against an unused door. For some reason they are all laughing and laughing HARD at the locker, which to the untrained eye does not seem all that amusing.

I continue closing the windows giving them suspicious looks mingled with confusion.

As I gather up my things to leave, I see one of the students resignedly pull the cabinet out from between the shelves and swivel it around so that the door can swing open. And like magic, out steps the student who appeared to be on nitrous oxide not ten minutes ago. He is not laughing quite so hard anymore.

I suddenly feel like the completely clueless, out-of-touch teacher. How they managed to get that kid into the locker in the course of two minutes I am still not sure. Now-Sober-Nitrous-Oxide-Boy and his Arguing Companion are the last to leave the class. The Arguing Companion seems smug. As they leave I get a brief flash back to an episode of Saved By The Bell with the reoccurring clip of Screech emerging from a shiny red locker at Bayside.