Portraits of Hall Monitors

Lyrics

I. Mrs. Maryland is posted at door four every day. I like her. We know each other's names. She has stubborn sprayed hair. Her head moves but her hair stays put. She smiles in intervals. Depression comes and goes for her. Her eyes sink into their sockets, tiny gemstones coaxed by quicksand. Sometimes, when nobody is looking, she lets me in without my ID. She tells me, Honey, I get it. It conflicts with the fashion. Green and gold don't go with nothin'. I been there. She just became a grandma. Her daughter let her pick the baby's middle name. She told me three times. Trenton, because New Jersey was home, home, home before this. Believe it or not, when she was a little girl, she didn't think she was going to grow up to be a hall monitor. The way she says this sounds like an apology to her younger self. I wanted to be a pilot, but here I am. Sometimes, ya know, things just never work out, even if ya did good in class. II. Janet wears a peace sign necklace and lets us call her by her first name. Once, she caught my best friends older sister (a wild goose chase of a teenager) smoking a joint in the parking lot. She could have screwed her over, but she didn't. Instead, she flashed a peace sign of her own, went on her merry little Janet way, humming Baby Love by The Supremes. Ooh, baby love. She says she's been here since the dinosaurs. I could never have babies, so you kids are my moons, my beautiful flower children. III. Her name is Nancy, but everyone at this school, including most of the teachers, call her The Tank, even to her face. Last year, she told me she was leaving soon. I want to believe it was because she was older, because retirement was waiting. We all know that is not true. She left because we were too mean. We spat at her when she asked us to put on our ID's. We pretended that we didn't hear her. We ran away from her in the lunchroom. I thought they called her The Tank because she blocked troublemakers like us in the hallway, but yesterday, I discovered it was because of her size. When she got real thin, everybody joked she was finally taking our advice. When most of her hair fell out, lingering in wisps around her head like cirrus clouds, when suddenly she wasn't in her usual chair outside the main entrance anymore, we had nothing to say.