The Precipice

At school we had two English teachers, and they were very different. This was a private, single-sex high school in Los Angeles in the early Nineties. Wheeler was the head of the department, having displaced Boyd, who was on probation for unknown reasons—although there were rumors having to do with alcohol and absences. (The rumors about Wheeler—he’d written on Katy G.’s term paper that he couldn’t concentrate on her thesis because of the way she crossed her legs in class; he’d been seen in a bar off Sunset with Liz S.—either hadn’t reached the administration or didn’t have the same seriousness.) Wheeler’s promotion at Boyd’s expense didn’t appear to have gotten in the way of their relationship; in fact, they seemed to us to be the best of friends, as well as allies against what they considered a repressed, repressive administration. Their jokes were irreverent and off-color, and they made them in front of students. We called them by their last names, without the honorific, and they referred to us the same way.