Page 9 of Statistically Speaking
I pause outside the door to my room, noticing that it is already open, and gently push my way through. I have walked over to my desk and started to pull wads of papers out of my bag before I notice that I am not alone.
I give a small internal jump, which I hope she doesn’t notice, and smile as the girl sitting quietly at the back of the room gives me a finger wave. She stands up, and I see that she is tall and lean and has light auburn hair done in Dutch plaits down the sides of her face. She’s wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, denim shorts over torn fishnet tights, and a pair of battered cherry-red Doc Marten boots. A single black stud is in one ear, a hoop in the other.
“Hi!” I say as she walks toward me, exuding a kind of cool-girl confidence I could only ever aspire to at her age—or, in fact, even now.
“You must be Katie,” I add as she reaches my desk.
She smiles at me, and it is a tremendous smile—big and warm and amused, whether at herself or me or the world in general, I don’t really know. All I do know is that it’s impossible not to smile back.
“I am! So I’m guessing you must be Miss Jones?”
I nod and carry on preparing, lining up my pens and stacking my papers while we talk. I prefer to stack paper in piles often, for some reason unbeknownst to me. It just rests easier with my mindset, weirdo that I am. I also like to have my pens in groups of three.
It’s not a compulsion—I’ve known students with OCD, and it can be a destructive and life-bending condition. For me, it’s not something that I need to do, but something I just prefer to do. I don’t have rituals I have to complete before I leave the house, and I don’t feel threatened if one of my pens goes missing.
I can function perfectly well without knowing how many steps it will take me to walk across the class to open a window, or how many roundabouts I will need to navigate on a trip to the supermarket, or how many identical white mugs there are in the cupboards of the staff room. I just function better if I do know those things. I still find numbers comforting, and still enjoy the strangeness of trying to estimate how many coffees I’ve consumed in my life (currently at around thirty-one thousand, amazingly), or how many bottles of wine I’ve drunk (that number is best kept between me and my conscience). I find it relaxing to remember dates, to figure out ages, to add up the ships in the Spanish Armada with the ships in Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar, to list Christmas Number Ones and how many copies they sold. I am an absolute titan at a pub quiz.
So, as an offshoot of that, my papers are stacked in tens, and my pens are lined up as triplets, and my new student is staring at my desk with genuine curiosity.
“What happens if you leave a pen at home by mistake?” she asks.
“Absolutely nothing. My head doesn’t explode or anything, I promise.”
“Good,” she replies, laughing, “because I left my pencil case in my mum’s car, and I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject of borrowing one.”
I hand her a black ballpoint, wincing very slightly inside as I leave twins behind, and say, “There you go, Katie. Keep it—call it a ‘welcome to my class’ gift. I believe you’ve moved up from Middlesex recently?”
“Yep,” she says, her green eyes skittering off to the side, as though she is uncomfortable discussing it. I, of course, could choose at this very moment to say something like “I used to live in London,” and use that to bond with her, two southerners living in the north. But I don’t, because I’m uncomfortable discussing that as well.
“My dad died,” she says abruptly, “and my mum was a lawyer down there and after that she had to work loads of hours, and we never saw each other. It was a bit rubbish, so we sold the house and moved up here so we could live like millionaires and she could work less.”
I smile, knowing she is joking, knowing that this is hard for her and joking is helping her get through it.
“Well, maybe not millionaires,” I say gently, “but it’s definitely cheaper to live here than down south. Why Liverpool?”
“Mum went to uni here and she always liked it. Plus she—we—needed a fresh start, you know? Our old house was too full of him. Full of him when he was ill, anyway, and neither of us wanted to remember him like that. We wanted to remember him how he was when he was the kind of bloke who cycled twenty miles to the pub at the weekend and went wild swimming and built me a tree house for my fourteenth birthday so I could have some privacy. So, we used to live in a big new house that felt haunted, and nowwe live in a small old house that feels brand new—if that makes any sense?”
“Perfect sense,” I respond. “Where are you living?”
“Waterloo,” she says, “in a terrace, with a bright purple front door and lavender in pots and a green gate. It’s really nice. We only arrived a few weeks ago, so it’s been a bit hectic. I got here early today because I wanted to just chill a bit before everyone else arrived.” Weirdly, I think I know exactly the house she’s talking about—it’s maybe a fifteen-minute walk away from my flat, and quite distinct because of its paint job. I don’t mention that, though, as nobody likes to think their teachers have a life, or even exist, outside the classroom. Kids are always surprised if they see me in the shop or a café, like part of them thinks I just hook myself up to some batteries and recharge in a cupboard when they’re not around.
“Well, it’s a pretty nice bunch in here,” I tell her. “I’m sure you’ll make friends really quickly; there’s no need to be nervous.”
She nods, and the plaits bob, and she doesn’t actually look at all nervous, I realize. She is bright and bubbly and also cool as a proverbial cucumber. At least now she’s not talking about her dad.
“Yeah, I’m sure I will. I’m looking forward to meeting people my own age. My mum’s great and we get on really well, but sheismy mum, you know? I’m eighteen soon, and it’d be nice if I could have actual young people to go for a drink with... Is there a history club, anything after school or at lunch or whatever? I know it sounds lame, but I do love history.”
“I don’t know what kind of teachers you’ve had before, Katie, but on the whole I don’t tend to think people who love history are lame. Because, you know, I’m a history teacher?And yes, there is a club—I’ll put the details up on the noticeboard later. We’d love to have you come along. We can talk through your coursework as well. Sometimes, though, I warn you—we dress up. Just for extra-lame fun.”
“Excellent! I’ll root out my suffragette costume!” she replies, holding up her palm for a high five. Unorthodox, but fine—I briefly slap her palm with mine, and she laughs out loud, like it was the funniest thing ever. I don’t know if she’s laughing at me or with me, but it makes me join in either way.
She retreats back to her desk at the end of the room and starts to write in her notepad with the pen I gave her.
Katie Bell, I think, is going to be one of those students—the ones who give us teachers the bright spark that makes us smile inside. She will be a bringer of life, and light, and moments of joy.
The bell rings and I stand up, half an eye on Katie, the other half on the door as I wait for the rest of the class to arrive.
I sneak another pen out of my bag and add it to the twins to make triplets.
