Agree-Monster, Mrs. Barnes #9893

Overbrook High was a good school when I went there. There were AP classes, and Honors classes, and a film class, and an Orchestra class, and we had a nationally competitive Speech and Debate team. I involved myself in all five of these things that I thought made Overbrook great.
The place was built to hold half the population it did when I went there. In fact, my mother had gone to the same school some thirty-five years before me with a much smaller student body. Her yearbooks looked like pamphlets compared to mine.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?”
Mrs. Barnes had also graduated from Overbrook High. Only her class had been the first to go all the way through the school when it was brand new, and a mint green wall color was called innovative instead of nauseating.
“Nothing.” I had frozen with my hand in front of the controls to the popcorn machine.
“That’s right. You’re not burning anything tonight, missy. Go be Nacho Nelly.”
Mrs. Barnes was not only a year-one graduate of Overbrook, she taught there, too. She was both a Geometry teacher, and the school’s Debate coach. It just so happened, that during basketball season, she was also the manager at the concessions stand where our Speech team got to keep half the proceeds. Which was why I found myself laboriously prying open a gallon tin of Nacho Cheese and scraping it out into a crock-pot that had probably never been clean.
“Kunal, you can be the Popcorn Prince tonight.”
“Yesssssss.” Popcorn Prince or Princess was the job that required the least amount of cleanup. Unfortunately, you also had to be good at knowing when to add what.
“Hellllooooo?!” Shayna was obviously perturbed. “I always get to be Popcorn Princess. It’s like, my job.”
“Exactly.” Mrs. Barnes turned from where she was leaning up against the counter. “We’re switching it up tonight. Kunal is Popcorn Prince. You get to be… cashier.”
Shayna frowned and moved over toward the cashbox.
“How come cashier doesn’t get a cool name?” She muttered.
Shayna and Kunal were on the Speech team with me. Kunal was a state championship debater, and Shayna and I were sophomores. We did interpretation events and practiced rote memorization while conjuring wildly ridiculous emotions. It was like competitive acting. We were good at it so far, and we liked it. But while we weren’t state champions yet, we found ourselves loving the part of Speech Team that meant we got to stare at older, talented guys like Kunal wearing three piece suits.
“Hey, watch it, Kunal, you’re going to get oil on me!” …or maybe not like Kunal.
Kunal was Bengali, which meant that he could grow a full beard and mustache at his seventeen years of age. He had made this unusual fashion statement his trademark, and it gave him an edge while he made Marxist comments in his AP government class. He looked like a forty-year-old man trapped in a seventeen-year-old boy’s body, and sometimes in the midst of a particularly heated rebuttal he sounded like one too.
Shayna and I were pretty close to being best friends. We had been competing in speech events since we were thirteen, and we had a lot in common. Shayna was trend sensitive and colorful. She liked shopping, sports, accessories, and winning speech trophies.
“Hey, are you going to Homecoming?” Shayna also liked boys.
“I don’t think so,” I twisted the knob on the crock-pot all the way to the right. “I went last year and it really wasn’t fun. The only interesting thing that happened was that Darius Palmer wore a dress.” Darius had slowly become more and more female since he’d first arrived in our seventh grade class. It had taken him three and a half years, but he was now considered a flamer, and was unmistakably gay.
“Yeah, but you could go with Russ. Talk about accessorizing!”
“I don’t know. We might find something better to do that night than freeze our butts off in the bleachers at homecoming.” Something better like lay around in the grass, I thought. Russ and I had been dating for a bit less than a year, but we were linked like an old married couple as far as Speech team was concerned. Russ was the captain of the Brickmore High School team. Brickmore was down the street from Overbrook, but several busy intersections separated it from Metro County, meaning it was securely rooted in the new money suburb of Brickmore itself. Russ’s family owned stock in soft drinks that dated back almost a hundred years. They were worth significantly more than my parents.
“It should be a crime to make us wear all these pretty dresses to go to some dance-type function and then hold it outside so we all cover up with coats.” Shayna dipped a chip into my now luke warm nacho cheese and popped it into her mouth before Mrs. Barnes could look.
Hm. It might be too cold to lie out in the grass.
Russ’s house in Brickmore had a creek running behind it. You could walk along the creek until there was an open space and a clearing containing some kind of large electrical box servicing his subdivision. We liked to go there and lay out in the grass staring at the sky and holding hands. We walked there those days because the last time we had taken Russ’s car, we’d found his father and a police car next to it when we got back. The owners of the house we parked it in front of had called the police to have it removed from their property. On the drive back, I distinctly heard his father refer to me under his breath as “jail bait,” and since then I was attempting to present a Brickmore-acceptable version of myself anytime I saw Russ.
It wouldn’t stop me from lying in the grass with him, though.
“You girls talking about Homecoming?”
We both turned around to see Mrs. Barnes leaning against the frame of the side door to the concessions stand. She always seemed to be leaning against something.
“Yeah.”
It might have had to do with the fact that age had not exactly been kind to her body. Though after all, she was the one of the flagship graduates of the smelly public school we were now standing in.
“You girls know something? I bet you’d never guess now, but when I was in school, I was on the homecoming court.”
“Really?” I could believe it. Mrs. Barnes had a face with soft features. At sixteen, this was the sole factor by which I determined whether someone had once been beautiful.
“Yes. And Mr. Barnes escorted me.”
“Oh! How cute!” Shayna clasped her hands in girly glee.
“Are you girls going?” I was surprised she was interested. Mrs. Barnes was the Dragon Lady. She wasn’t exactly the kind to buddy up with students. She was more likely to yell at you while making a facial expression akin to a screaming teapot than to ask you questions about a meaningless social function.
“She’s not going,” Shayna pointed at me before looking away and straightening two boxes of candy that weren’t centered on the back shelf.
“Yeah, I went last year. It was kinda boring.”
“If you did go,” Mrs. Barnes was interested in my social life? “You’d be going with Russ Walker?”
“Well, yes. We’ll probably do something else that night, though.” I wanted to keep my name linked with his. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t with him at all. Russ was, after all, pretty dreamy. And talented. And perfect.
Mrs. Barnes looked absently over at Kunal filling bag after bag of yellow popcorn.
“I might go with Chase Miller,” Shayna had to be included. “He goes to my church.”
“Don’t get too wrapped up in that boy,” Mrs. Barnes said to me suddenly.
“…Oh, I’m not.” But I was, of course. I wanted to marry that boy. I thought about it all the time. I tacked Walker on the end of my name constantly just to see how it would look and how it would sound.
“She wants to marry him!” Ah, Shayna, ever the enthusiast. “You married Mr. Barnes, didn’t you? She’s going to marry Russ, and the circle will be complete! It’s a reincarnation of love!”
Mrs. Barnes looked away from Kunal and back at us. She actually looked a little bit sad.
“I did marry Mr. Barnes, but not right away.”
“Like after college?” Shayna asked.
“No.” She turned back to Kunal. “Don’t start more yet! Where would you put it? Think before you do something that’ll waste team money!” Kunal put down the container of popcorn kernels and sighed.
“So when did you marry him?” Shayna and I still wanted to know.
“I got married nearly out of high school. But it wasn’t to Mr. Barnes.”
“Oh,” we both said.
“That’s why some of my books, if you’re looking on maybe the top of that bookshelf, say Bethany Anders on the binding.”
“I thought Anders was your maiden name?” I asked.
“It was my married name. The first one.”
“What happened?” Shayna asked, and I elbowed her.
“Oh,” Mrs. Barnes turned and opened the cashbox, “I only did it to get away from home. I was very young. Back then a girl couldn’t move out on her own. I just got married.”
“Wow. You make it sound so easy!” Shayna handed her the roll of quarters she was reaching for on the bottom shelf below the counter. “Like… finding a husband is like grocery shopping.”
“Oh, it’s not hard at all,” she said, breaking the quarters open on the edge of the counter with a loud pop.
“Not hard?” I asked. “Isn’t it, though?” It was hard for my parents to stay married, I thought. They didn’t agree on anything lately. They were hardly around each other. I felt like they were hardly around me. As a unit, anyway.
“Girls, it’s not hard to be married. At all. It’s easy, actually, to agree, to get along, in a marriage.”
“It is?” It just didn’t make sense to me.
“Yes, it’s easy to be married. It’s hard to be happily married.”

And this was the one thing that I remember most of Mrs. Barnes.
She said that, and I thought, great! It’ll be easy for me to marry Russ and be happily ever after. Domestic bliss is only a few years away, I thought, and we’ll be together all the time, as adults in our adult lives!
What I didn’t bank on was the fact that in those few years I was marking off day by day, I would still be immature, wild, and overly imaginative. I wouldn’t understand the world the way I was so sure I did then. My parents would be divorced, and I’d be chasing guy after guy, so desperately trying to agree, to get along, just like Mrs. Barnes said, that in the end I’d forget who I was completely and agree so much and so often that I wouldn’t remember anything about what I wanted.
Maybe that was why Mrs. Barnes went back and found Mr. Barnes, her high school sweetheart. Maybe she didn’t get to become anything, since what she became was an agree-monster. Coming back into yourself is hard. I watched my mother try to do it five years after Mrs. Barnes told us her story at the concessions stand.

Mrs. Barnes doesn’t teach at Overbrook anymore. And I didn’t realize how much I would miss that school until I left. But that’s how all important things are missed. Nostalgia happens suddenly, and keenly, and without warning or premeditation.
The distinct smell of old library books mingled with the scent of a thousand musty cafeteria lunches made me want to cry the next time I visited Mrs. Barnes’ room after high school. It met me at the door like a permeable wall of memories. I felt like I was looking back at myself in some sort of Dickensian High School Christmas Carol.
Yeah, Zac Efron, try starring in that.