We’re halfway through the year—in some ways it feels the year is just getting started. Schools have retired for the summer. Kids left their backpacks to gather dust, pockets still holding forgotten pencils, discarded sheets of paper with facts and figures that will mean nothing in a few years. Our brains forget what we no longer need, mercifully erasing trigonometry equations and entire chapters of Franz Kafka’s morbid story with that giant cockroach. I thought everything in school was so important, until the day I stopped caring and could barely lift a finger to open my AP Psych textbook.
When I was a senior in high school, my chemistry teacher hired me to grade homework. Every Tuesday I would go to his classroom after the final bell and he would hand me a giant accordion folder stuffed with other kids’ homework. I graded papers for all six of his classes, including the 4th period class that I was in.
Mr. Oso was a recent Princeton graduate with a soft buzzcut and oval wire rimmed glasses. His go-to jacket looked lifted from the leader of a goth marching band, it was common for him to dress in all black. He spoke with a casual passion for chemistry, one that can only be achieved from a hard earned familiarity. When he pitched me the job, he said the busy work of being a teacher was more than he bargained for. Oso wanted to hire me as an aide so he could focus on other projects. I interpreted this as noble chemistry research, like curing contagious diseases—but I think he wanted to make room for his artistic side. A few months into our arrangement, I googled “David Oso Princeton” and found a Flickr account full of black and white photographs. I flipped through the albums, which repeatedly framed a girlish figure. A blonde with wavy curls. There she was walking on the beach, hiking through the desert, smiling through the lens at Mr. Oso. He was head over heels for a woman who looked like me in 10 years. I closed the Flickr, wondering whether it was weird that I was Mr. Oso’s type. I did my best to forget that I learned too much.
Looking back, it’s strange that Mr. Oso trusted me with this side hustle. I would never look at a high school senior and think, yeah ok let’s share a secret that puts my career at risk. But every week I graded all the papers fairly, even my friend’s work. I figured Mr. Oso would check to make sure I wasn’t handing out favors and I didn’t want to risk losing the job.
Whenever I slipped the accordion folder into my backpack before heading off to theatre rehearsal, I felt like a spy. No one knew the cargo I was carrying. I had a secret mission and I was getting compensated for it. This wasn’t like the olden days when I would lie under my neighbor’s window with a notebook, listening to them watch sitcoms. That was child’s play, forgivable because I was a nine year old, but I could never go back to unpaid espionage. I always felt called to covert operations. I treated my entire life like one giant coverup. At school I’d try to blend in with my classmates. If my performance was successful, I would never betray the secrets of my job at home: doling opioids out to my mother, catching her when she fell, watching her breath at night with a mirror.
Every day at school was another chapter in the greatest heist of all time. Dance across the high security laser beams, cut the bulletproof glass, crack open the safe and steal a cloak of normality. It was a temporary fix—I longed for a permanent solution. An average, translucent existence. As any spy will tell you, living a double life is exhausting.
When one of my friends complained that she was getting a C in Chem, I shook my head and thought about all the steps she missed in her equations. Mr. Oso always wanted us to show our work, he made that clear to all the students. As I graded papers, I was supposed to dock points when the answers appeared on the page without any evidence of a thought process. Mr. Oso wanted us to comprehend, not just complete. I tried to suggest this to my friend without giving away too much of my internal positioning. She continued to skip straight to the answers, which were wrong more and more often. Without an understanding of the process, she had lost her way.
Mr. Oso had this delusion that I was a woman of science. He thought by giving me a job he was encouraging me to take a career in a lab coat. We need more women in science, he’d say, fixing me with his confident brown eyes. Then he’d hand me an envelope with $100 inside and that made me feel alive. But I knew this thrill wasn’t born from science, it was all about the money. I’d nod to Mr. Oso, playing my part in the charade. I’d pocket the cash and do my real homework on the hour-long bus ride from Downtown LA to Brentwood. At home I’d turn on the T.V. and fan out the stack of chemistry papers in a half circle on our sticky beige carpet, using Mr. Oso’s red felt tip pen to grade the work of my peers. These handwritten equations weren’t supposed to make a detour into my home, no one knew I was cradling them across town. My cat would walk across the papers just to hear them crinkle. I piled the graded papers into neat towers, marked them with post-it notes and carefully tucked them back into their accordion folder. It was intimate. When Mr. Oso passed them back to students during class, I’d look away and feign indifference.
I hold no love for chemistry. It’s just math with words. Numbers are tricky for me, I used to have panic attacks during the weekly quiz in sixth grade math. To get through chemistry class, I clung to the personalities of the elements: some volatile, some solid. I imagined the chemical equations as little dramas unfolding based on the reactive characters in the room.
When the school year was over, I thanked Mr. Oso but didn’t promise I would make any scientific discoveries. Now when I google David Oso Flickr, nothing familiar shows up. I can’t find him, but I don’t really want to talk to him. I just want to see if his girlfriend still looks like me.
Once a spy, always a spy.
xx
James
if you liked this, tell your friends, tell your chemistry teacher…