It was just another day on lunch duty in the high school cafeteria. I was one of three teachers in charge of keeping an eye on the students, because they are certainly the ones we have to worry about when it came to causing trouble.
The only thing different about today was that I had brought my camera to show another lunch duty teacher some epic nature pictures I had taken. Just let me scroll past these Cold War government secrets I have stashed at the beginning of this SIM card…
“Don’t worry,” I told the other teacher. “The Cold War was so long ago. These secrets are expired.”
She nodded. “Naturally.”
We oo-ed and ah-ed at my stunning capture of the natural beauty of the walking path near my house until a commotion started up in the hallway.
“I’ll check it out,” I said.
Insert time lapse during which I masterfully diffused a disciplinary issue in the hallway and all returned to normalcy.
When I walked back into the cafeteria my eyes shot to the table where I had left my camera. It was gone. I ran to the other lunch duty teacher and begged for an explanation.
“I turned around to help another table so I didn’t see. I’m sorry.”
My flower pictures!
By some unexplained intuition, I knew it must have been the other teacher on duty. I found him suspiciously reentering the cafeteria from the back entrance, wearing a suspicious expression but no camera strap.
“Give me back my flower pictures,” I demanded, suddenly at his side.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Was that Russian accent new?
“I know you took my camera.”
“You’re the incompetent American who left your government’s secrets exposed.”
My mind skipped to the moment when I had taken those pictures. They were of artifacts that were surely too old to mean anything. Gum wrappers with tiny, illegible scribbles. Coins inscribed with ancient scratches that I had assumed must be expired passwords to nonexistent vaults. What use could they be to a band of modern Russians?
Never mind that I couldn’t put my finger on where I had taken those pictures, or even from what source I had obtained the artifacts. (Curse this memory of mine.) Still, this man had to be joking. He was a history teacher playing a cruel joke on the new teacher on the block.
But if it was a joke, it was meticulously planned out and coordinated between almost half of the staff. Within the hour the high school had turned into a face-off between the patriots and the enemies, all without the students noticing. And I was in the middle of it. If only I could get the enemy spies to understand that “my government’s secrets”–at least as far as they had been captured on my camera–would be of little use to them in 2016. But they would not listen.
Suddenly on my own, I found momentary hideaways in any empty classroom I stumbled upon. But it seemed that there was an enemy down every hallway, and they were moving quickly. I had to stay on the move if I was going to outrun them.
Once, I swore I saw my camera swing past on the arm of a gray haired teacher. They all had gray hair. Why? Was that the mark of the enemy?
There were moments of capture. Moments of freedom. And no moments in which I recovered my most desired pictures. Even I wanted the “secret spy” pictures back, since there was clearly something to them. But there was no hope. It seemed every teacher’s hair was gray by now. The school was overrun. This was the end of public education. This was the end of America.
To add to the chaos, someone pulled the fire alarm. Or was that a tornado alert drill? What kind of emergency response plan did this signal? Maybe if I woke up I would find out…
The moral of this educational Cold War reenactment is this: do not count your pregnancy symptoms before they hatch. A slew of intense dreams can commence when you are least expecting it.
