Chapter 2 

The Lottery

That Tuesday, The 27th

I teach AP Literature at the same high school I graduated from.

I moved away for a few years. Athens for college. Then I came back to South Georgia afterward.

Mema wasn’t exactly why I became a teacher. She’d been retired before I was born and dead for over a decade by the time I started teaching, but I still cited her as an inspiration.

What I really wanted was to be that one, really good teacher that students remembered forever. The one that changed everything for somebody.

Growing up in a small town can be a life sentence.

They trap people.

Everybody knows everybody, which sounds nice until you realize it also means everybody knows who lost their job, whose husband drinks too much, whose kid got arrested. You grow up hearing enough of it and eventually realize most people are terrified of becoming the thing that everybody is talking about; they never end up living their lives.

I think that was part of why I came back. I kept imagining maybe one good teacher could interrupt that cycle for somebody before the town fully swallowed them.

Is what I told anyone that asked, anyways.

The less flattering version is that coming back felt easier than figuring out what came next. Truthfully, coming back was just always the plan. Maybe I hoped that by coming back home, I could impart that dream of escape into some other kid who had enough in them to actually stay away.

My first year teaching, I was cartoonishly optimistic. Then I discovered that teaching English and Literature to teenagers is, in specific ways, brutal. They speak the language already. They all have smartphones. English class sounds like a waste of time to a sixteen-year-old, and the average sixteen-year-old is not particularly shy about letting you know that.

Last month one of my students filmed me for talking about the symbolism of curtains in The Fall of the House of Usher and posted it.

We didn’t do that when I was a teenager. We said the same things, sure, but we said them in private.

This is pointless.

He's obsessed with curtains.

Who cares?

We said them to each other. In the hallway. After class. And then they evaporated. Now they live online. Permanently.

With an overlayed caption.

I winced at the image of the video as it flashed behind my eyes. The comments were not kind to me. Pseudo-intellectual nothing-burger was the caption. His parents and I had what I charitably called a grounding moment with that kid. His mother apologized more than he did and assured me that he wouldn’t be filming his teachers in class again.

But also, it’s deeper than that!

This was not just about being filmed!

I do have a duty here. It isn't about "good English." Language is how we access and understand information. Reading carefully, thinking about what words are doing, that's not an elective skill. I stand by the curtains.

I stand by all of it.

But some days, I go back and forth between feeling it's all pointless and caring so much it physically hurts. Most days, both at once.

In my crusade against ignorance, this last week, I’d assigned for the class to read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. It's short, so I can usually get through it in a single period if I don't let them derail me. As a bonus, it’s so short that nobody can pretend they didn't finish it, and it hits hard enough that even the kids who are determined not to care usually go silent by the end.

I handed out the copies to the class.

"Read to yourselves. We'll talk when you're done."

The room did that thing where it gets loud while becoming quiet. Papers shuffling. A chair scraping. A kid in the back cracked his knuckles one at a time like he was about to perform surgery. Then gradually, slowly, actually something like silence.

I watched them read.

When I assign certain literature, there's a moment where the students, most of them anyways, become so engrossed in the text, they don’t realize that I am watching them. They're somewhere else entirely. I live for that. When you can truly see each of their personalities fully shine through, unfiltered of all that teenage baggage.

Olivia is a peeker. She immediately flipped to the last page and read the last line and her eyes widened; she flipped straight back, finger to the first line, and started moving her lips rapidly as she drug her finger back and forth across the page like a printer.

Michael definitely didn’t read every line. There’s no way he finished that fast. He’s a skimmer. But I think he absorbs the general shape of things and then goes back three to five more times before he turns in the homework. Or he uses Chat. Either way he usually lands somewhere in the B+ range.

And then there were the ones gazing at the wall. Their bar is passing the test, getting the college credit. That’s it, but they just aren’t motivated past the immediate benefit or reward. I have a soft lead a horse to water policy. I give them a nudge, but I can’t make them want it.

It had been about thirty minutes, and by now about half of the class were already on their phones, while the other half got a head start on their packets.

"So," I said, clapping my hands together once.

The class shifted, and one by one they gave me most of their attention.

"What just happened?" I held my palms flat together and brought them to my chin.

A girl in the front said it was messed up.

"Okay. Why?"

"Because they just... killed her. For no reason."

The ones who hadn't finished reading were suddenly paying attention. A couple of them started shifting through the pages to find out what Meredith was talking about.

"Was there no reason?" I pushed back.

Shawn, who hadn’t even opened the packet until then, started fingering the pages curiously, searching for the part where they stone Tessie Hutchinson to death. I always stopped just short of asking them what it was about public execution that suddenly made them interested in the class.

"There was a reason," Michael said from the middle of the room. "They just always did it. The old guy thinks it helps the harvest."

"Right," I said a little surprised.

Michael tilted back in his chair, looking around the class with a grin, his head bobbing up and down, flexing his arms as if he’d just scored a touchdown.

“Four on the floor.” I said grounding the ego as much as the chair.

I continued.

"So, what does that tell us, do you think it truly helps with the harvest?"

A few breathless no’s escaped the mouths of their half-vacant faces. They collectively shook their heads silently sideways.

Out of nowhere, from the left side of the class, a voice said:

"I think she deserved it."

The entire class spun toward the direction it came.

It was Thomas, the student who’d filmed me.

I threw my chin up at him, "Walk me through that.”

"She was fine with it every other year and didn’t care when it was someone else. She was probably out there throwing rocks too."

Thomas sunk back in his chair almost defensively as he spoke.

He continued, "So yeah. She deserved whatever she got. People usually do."

I turned the corners of my mouth up and squinted at him for a second as he finished.

“Okay,” I said. “So, do you think you would participate?”  

He thought for a second. His eyes shot toward his hairline as if he were looking deep into the back of his brain, then looked back at me.

“I guess I would.” He concluded raising his dark eyebrows as high as they’d go.

I gestured to the class.

“Anyone else?”

Nobody spoke right away. Which was fine. Some questions aren’t meant to be answered right way; they’re supposed to follow you home.

“What I want you to think on tonight as you do your homework is this.”

I wrote in big letters on the board.

“Why do they do it?” I said as I finished jotting, I let it linger for a moment.

“We’ll pick it back up tomorrow.”