Pain Or Pills

"I wondered what was the point of working so hard to stay alive, if that's what I was doing. I remembered my pep talk to Esperanza a few months before, and understood just how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold--with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."

--pg. 232 of The Bean Trees by Kingsolver

I noticed her typing on a laptop in the back of the classroom, seemingly uninterested in her surroundings, including the other students and the English instructor. Her head stayed down. I simply took her as being a classmate that I had never previously noticed.

The following class period, she stands up in front of everyone in Engl 201A and announces that she's a professor in the English department here at the community college, a colleague of the English instructor, and that they perform reviews of each other as part of their employment. She's here to hand out teacher evaluations' forms. She emphasizes how important feedback is, and encourages us to write as much as we want on the back of the form.

The lower abdominal pain is starting to unrivaled me. I have two options, I can suffer through it or I can get high during class and possibly not understand a word being spoken. I decide to do the latter. Unfortunately for me, the pain pills are in my purse, which is in the car, which is half-a-campus away.

She lays the paper on my desk as she passes them out to the rest of the class. About a week before, I had a nightmare about this very situation. In the dream, one of the professors who I was fond of was fired because of bad student feedback. I remember him standing there, disheveled and manic, shouting at someone--or anyone.

So, I just politely excuse myself, and head towards my pill-popping salvation. As I'm making my way to the parking lot, I notice the English instructor talking to probably another instructor on the sidewalk. He was asked to leave during the evaluations.

The pill gets stuck in my throat, so I'm wandering around campus, looking for a drinking fountain. By the time I return to class, the other professor is gone and so is the evaluation form from my desk.

After period and after all the other students have left, the English instructor approaches me, and asks if everything is okay.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I reply.

He remarks that I didn't complete the teacher evaluation.

"I think I'm a little biased." Probably should have just kept that comment to myself.

He says nothing more.