A Scene from School

"Are you always here?" he asks. It's 2:00 p.m. and school has been out for all of six minutes.

"I'm here a lot," I respond.

"It seems like you're here all the time," he says, his eyes flicking from the desk to the filing cabinet to the bulletin board, taking it all in with frank curiosity. "Are you the school secretary?"

"I am."

"For all the schools?"

I don't know what this question means, so I phrase my answer carefully, telling him I'm the secretary for three of the four buildings on campus.

"It just seems like you're a different secretary," he says, and I only have an instant to wonder what this means because he elaborates. "Most school secretaries are gone as soon as school is out and the kids are gone."

His range of experience with school secretaries may well be broad, but then he may never have been in the building after school let out himself. It could easily go either way as a teenager, his perception of school secretaries formed from knowledge or imagination.

I'm without a response, so I laugh, one of those appreciative gestures that doesn't mean "you're funny" as much as "you're making me happy."

"That's okay, though," he says, giving me permission to stay late if I want to do so. "You're a hard worker. That's a good thing."

Four months into school and this is the first conversation we've had, he and I, and it might be the last, but in two minutes on a Wednesday afternoon in January he connected himself to the name I type into my forms. I laugh again, and say "Thank you" (which is redundant), and am glad for those two minutes.

I love this job.