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was the dry heat.
        The Admin building was unlocked, and I had a key to my office. At least I’d have windows to look out while I got busy with paperwork. After doing a little furniture rearranging and sprucing up, I pored over teacher edition textbooks, literature guides, and previous teachers’ binders. By the look of the number of binders stacked on my desk, two if not three teachers preceded me. One teacher became the interim Academic Director until Kristy Reinhart came along. Then, I figured, said teacher moved away or got a better paying gig. By the looks of the handwriting, the other nameless educators were probably fresh out of college when they took on A.O.S. Badly executed lessons, misspelled notes to themselves—no doubt they went on to bigger and better things.
        Kristy went on to bigger and better things.
        The question I asked myself was, why such a huge turnaround? Back at Franklin, teachers came and went. But that was over the course of four and a half years. Here at the Academy, teachers came and went every season, and sometimes in droves. Why was that?
        I wasn’t planning on leaving after one semester. Maybe there were unseen challenges, and maybe I was unprepared to handle both a more rigorous curriculum and a student population with a lot on their plate—so to speak. But I was determined to be a part of this school for years.
        Well, at least until I earned my full teaching credential.
        Most of my classes would be in language arts, and given that the materials at my disposal were heavily slanted towards a literature-based curriculum, that was what I was going to teach. For the first time in my teacher life, I wasn’t going to focus on English composition. For the here and now, I wasn’t going to have my students write essay after essay after essay. Well, maybe a few essays. But I wasn’t about to exhaust my time or my students’ time in overcorrecting and micromanaging their work. Somehow, in some way, I was going to make English fun.
        Here was the thing: For years I had wanted to teach a “regular” high school class—meaning, a class that wasn’t modified for learning disabled students; a class that wasn’t an elementary class in disguise because the kids were five or six grade levels behind; a class that didn’t consist of taking the bus all day or learning how to count change.
        Here was my opportunity. The chance of a lifetime. And I was going to run with it.
        I joined the rest of the living in the cafeteria for lunch. Daniel wasn’t there—or anyone else I recognized. Two athletic-looking female staff members, one about twenty and the other a little older, were ahead of me in line. Buffalo meatloaf was the entrée of the hour. The younger one noticed me. Smiling, she leaned in.
        “ You know, only students are allowed one serving of controlled foods. Staff can come back for seconds.”
        The other woman nudged her. “Or more!”
        Were they joking with me because I looked like I’d go for seconds? Come to think of it, I did notice staff sneaking behind the counter to grab another helping or two. I glanced at the meatloaf before me. The small slab of brownish-gray meat didn’t seem filling, let alone appetizing, but I thought I should make do with one serving. Besides, I would have felt awful if I gave myself a pass in front of my paunchy pupils.
        I sat alone at the far end of a staff-designated table. A few more staff in T-shirts and shorts sat off to the side, enjoying lunch while surveying the room for any adolescent mischief. While most of the students sat talking quietly among themselves, a few of the more daring were gathered around the salad bar. Partaking in all the fresh fruit and veggies they could pile onto their plates, the kids then slathered the fruit with as much fat free yogurt the plates could structurally hold.
        Then, came the Splenda—packets upon packets of them. An