the former stripper

chapter 12

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In the spring of our freshman year, we watched from the window of our Honors English class as a helicopter landed on the lawn outside and whisked our principal to a nearby hospital, where he barely survived a massive heart attack.

He subsequently retired and left the school seeking a new head administrator. Each class’s National Honor Society advisor was tasked with picking two students from each grade, a boy and girl, to represent the student body in the selection process.

Our NHS advisor, Mr. Williams, was an eccentric and well-meaning English teacher who also directed the school’s plays and musicals. He encouraged Tommy and me in our literary pursuits, Tommy as a poet and myself a writer of stories. Both of us desired his approval in these areas, as he was the only adult in either of our lives who ever took any kind of interest in our pursuits, and kind words from him regarding our works formed a sort of currency traded between Tommy and me that evolved into competition, like most things with Tommy did. We both took an elective taught by Mr. Williams called ‘Intro to Creative Writing’ and each of us was turning in multiples of each assignment, to the point where he had to ask us to stop, and we were convinced he eventually determined the best thing to do was simply give us both the same high grade on everything, if only to dissuade us from perceiving any favoritism toward either of us.

I was certain Mr. Williams would choose Tommy and Emma as representatives of the ninth-grade class, but instead, he chose me in place of Tommy.

“I don’t know why,” I told Emma as we stood at my locker after school on the first day we were to meet with the search committee.

“I think you’re a little more reserved than Tommy,” Emma said. “He kind of takes up the energy in a room and says what’s on his mind all the time. You’re quiet, but when you do talk, you usually have something good to say, Jude-dude.”

I blushed and slung my backpack over my shoulder.

“Who do you think they have in mind?” I asked.

“Well, first off—probably Mrs. Vincenzo,” she said. Mrs. Vincenzo was the assistant principal.

“Speak of the devil,” I said, as Mrs. Vincenzo hurried past us, on her way to the scene of one of the near-daily fights that happened at Veddersburgh High School after the final bell rang. I watched her go.

Emma watched my eyes and rolled her own. “Ugh! Seriously? Okay, even I have to admit though…she is pretty hot.”

“I heard she used to be a stripper,” I said. It was a Veddersburgh High School urban legend.

“Oh, I doubt it. That’s impossible, right? Or is it? To be a stripper and then become an educator? Surely there would be pics of her out there, and it’d all blow up and the parents would have a problem with it and blah blah blah.”

“If there are, I haven’t found them,” I said. Emma punched my shoulder. “But I mean, the Internet wasn’t a thing then, cell phone cameras weren’t a thing, so it’d make sense if there wasn’t.”

“Oh yeah, you’re probably right. I mean, it shouldn’t be a big deal, if she was. Who cares. What matters is that she is qualified for the job.”

“Her daughter goes to Smithson,” I pointed out. “So maybe she’d rather wait for a job there.”

“Maybe,” Emma said. “But I’d think she’d be the best person for the job. At least she knows what it’s like here.”

We entered the teacher’s conference room, which was to be the headquarters for the search for the new principal. The superintendent was there, and they laid out the strategy and parameters for the search.

First, each grade’s student pairs were broken out into groups with two or three teachers each and given a stack of résumés, from which we were to select our top five candidates. Then, in the next session, each group would receive copies of each other group’s top five candidates, and from those thirty candidates, we would collectively choose the top five, at which point those candidates would be called in for interviews. Each group would come up with a few interview questions for each candidate.

We were paired with Mr. Williams and another teacher, and in our stack was Mrs. Vincenzo’s résumé. Nowhere did it indicate a history of stripping.

After school the next day, Tommy inquired about the selection process as we made our way to the conference room for round two.

“So did you pick Mrs. Vincenzo from your pile to be a finalist?” he asked. He had taken my selection as the representative with Emma with grace and gladness, but he was unused to being excluded from things.

“We did,” Emma said. “She’s one of the most qualified.”

“Did you know she used to be a stripper though?”

“That’s a myth!”

“Well, it’s not like she’d put it on her résumé. Who else is there?”

“I’m not sure why they are having us go through this whole thing. It’s obvious it’s going to come down to two candidates,” I said, looking at Emma and implying we had already talked this through, displaying the shared experience we had sans Tommy. His eyes flitted between us, searching for any sign of how far our relationship had advanced without him.

“Yup, for sure. It’s going to come down to Vincenzo and this Nowak guy from Smithson,” Emma said.

“Who’s Nowak?” Tommy asked.

“Mr. Nowak is a teacher at Smithson who wants to be an administrator,” I said. “My dad knows his dad from the Post Office. He seems like a decent guy, good educator, good résumé.”

“What do you think, Tommy?” Emma asked since she knew that’s what he wanted.

“I think a bit of fresh blood is probably good, and I mean if Jude’s dad is kind of friends with this Nowak guy’s family, then why not him?”

“I mean, they’re not friends friends, just my dad knows his dad from work, is all,” I said.

“Let me know how it goes!” Tommy told us as we broke away from him to go to the conference room.

The committee eventually whittled its way to five final candidates: Mrs. Vincenzo, our current assistant principal; Mr. Nowak, an aspiring educator at Smithson High School, a nearby suburban school where my dad worked his postal route; and three others, two from the region and one from the New York City area. The New Yorker declined after being told the salary, and one from our area had found out she was pregnant in the interim and declined, while the other had already accepted another job.

As predicted, we were left with Vincenzo and Nowak, who had their interviews scheduled for the same day.

“What are you going to ask them?” Tommy pestered us as we made our way to the final interviews. Emma and I made another round of eye contact that was surely driving him mad.

“I think our group is going to ask Mrs. Vincenzo how her experience makes her uniquely suited to making the step up to principal,” Emma said.

“And we’ll ask Mr. Nowak how he’d go about integrating himself into a whole new school,” I said.

Mr. Nowak did far better than expected in his interview. He was a warm, gregarious man with a sneakily handsome face, gruff but not sloppy, with a clear love of education and big ideas as to what to do to improve things at our clearly struggling school on our shoestring budget. Progressive ideas that, admittedly, excited Emma and me on many fronts.

Mrs. Vincenzo, on the other hand, was very cold, although that was not a surprise to most in the room. But her coldness came with a confidence and poise; she clearly knew what the problems were and what needed to be done about them, what was possible and what was not. She ended the interview with a smile and a joke at her own expense:

“And, as some of you might have heard, there may be a former profession I left off my résumé, and I just want you to know that it does not make me any more or less qualified for this job, I have to say.”

All the teachers laughed at that, and I had to admit that if she was willing to treat the matter with such incredulity, the urban legend about her being a stripper was probably not true. Although, who knows?

In essence, the room was split on the vibes emitted from both. On the one hand, it was supposed that the student body would warmly welcome Mr. Nowak and his affable nature, but his plans and vision seemed naïve, and his administrative experience was basically nil, even though he had his master’s degree in school administration. On the other, Mrs. Vincenzo came with the baggage of being known by the student body and perhaps despised by some, but had proven herself capable in the past and was more familiar with the harsh realities of the Veddersburgh school district.

Several conversations broke out post-interviews and what was supposed to be a moderated discussion devolved into lawlessness.

Eventually, there was a crack of silence in which Mr. Williams said: “Listen, we’ve got our representatives of the student body here, and we haven’t heard a peep from them about these interviews. Does anyone want to say something?”

The kids from the older grades looked at each other and shook their heads. From the beginning, it was clear that most of them were involved only because they felt like they had to be. It was only another thing to put on their résumé, a homework assignment. Not for Emma and me.

Mr. Williams knew me. He could tell I was itching to say something. “Jude?” he asked. I shifted in my seat and looked down at my notes.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that Mrs. Vincenzo has more of what Mr. Nowak needs than Mr. Nowak has of what Mrs. Vincenzo needs. Mr. Nowak has what it takes to be a principal someday, but I’m not sure we’re in a place for fresh ideas. I think this is probably a tough school to be a new principal at. We’re all still kind of shocked, I think, from Mr. Porro’s heart attack, and we need a steady hand to kind of, I guess, right the ship. And Mrs. Vincenzo is more that.”

Mr. Williams nodded, and the room murmured. “Emma?” Mr. Williams asked before anyone else could pipe up.

“What he said!” she said, and the table laughed.

“I think that maybe Jude has best summarized the sentiments of this committee,” Mr. Williams said. “I think he has put into words what we were struggling to say ourselves.”

A vote was taken, and it was decided to offer the principal position to Mrs. Vincenzo.

Emma and I exhaled as we exited to the parking lot after the meeting, relieved that the future of the school’s administration had been secured and we would no longer have to spend our days in the conference room after school.

“We did it!” Emma said, smiling. She gave me a hug, which I thought was perhaps unwarranted and seemed guided by her own desire to hug rather than by any celebration of the candidate search being completed. It was a tight hug, and I took pleasure in feeling her breasts against my chest, because I was fifteen and a hormonal monster.

We told our friends about the interviews the next day at lunch, even though we were technically sworn to secrecy until there was a formal announcement.

“And it was, like, really deadlocked. I think the room was totally split, but then Mr. Williams called on Jude to say something and he totally convinced everyone that Mrs. Vincenzo was the right move, it was amazing,” Emma said. The table wowed, even Tommy, but I felt his eyes narrow, and he got the same look he had when we set out to collect those golf balls from the creek off the ninth hole.

Not long after that, Tommy invited Emma to his basement, and she showed up expecting the rest of our little crew, but he had neglected to invite us. As expected, though, Emma greeted the time alone with Tommy without disappointment, and they watched Napoleon Dynamite again courtesy of the Blu-Ray Dan had left behind. Around the point in the film when Uncle Rico shows up, they shared a clumsy, teeth-smashing first kiss that sealed their pre-destined bond, making them lovers for the rest of high school and beyond.

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