Mr. Raeford was a shit teacher, totally worthless. He thought about this specific worthlessness as well as his more general worthlessness as he pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through for an egg biscuit and hot coffee. Seven forty-five, certainly not enough time for fast food. The morning DJ’s were ranting about Madonna making out with someone younger than her. The red pickup in front of Mr. Raeford’s creaky Buick belched out gray smoke from underneath a pair of flesh-colored truck nuts. The sunrise-colored sky crept through holes wherever the turning leaves of overhanging maple trees missed a spot. He thought about Moby Dick as he gazed at the trees. He wondered if he would have been more motivated to read it if Carissa had been lying next to him as he read under the lamplight. Or maybe she could read it for him and help him make a lesson plan. A part of what made Mr. Raeford particularly worthless as an English teacher was that he didn’t like to read.

Mr. Raeford handed his card to the cashier through the window. It was forty-five degrees but cold in the way only morning air could be. He had a throbbing headache across the dome of his skull. The cashier took the card and swiped without glancing her tired eyes over at him. The morning DJ’s were now debating whether or not Madonna was still hot, and the louder DJ was claiming that he wouldn’t reject Madonna if she came on to him “because she’s Madonna!” but also that he wouldn’t specifically set out to bang Madonna. Because he was distracted by reeling in his egg biscuit and coffee from the second window, Mr. Raeford missed what the quieter DJ said, only catching: “I’ll be in trouble when my wife hears this!” as he pulled out an empty McDonald’s cup to make room for the new one. He drove forward to give the car behind him some space, shoved his hand down the paper bag, and grabbed his egg biscuit. He ate it fast on the way over, swallowing larger chunks of egg than he was comfortable with. He pulled into the teacher’s lot just two minutes before the bell.

Lines of rushed students were funneling into the double doors. Mr. Raeford wiped the crumbs off of his shirt and forced himself out into the crowd.

“Take your hat off,” he told Austin Roy, a skinny red-headed kid who made decent grades. Mr. Raeford was trying to portray some semblance of authority as he bumped his way through tardy students.

“You’re late Mr. Raeford!” Austin Roy yelled back in response, before joyfully running through the double doors.

 

Mr. Raeford didn’t turn the lights on when he got into the classroom. His sleep-deprived eyes could barely handle the natural morning light coming through the windows. The students who were occupying themselves with their cell phones and the students who were lying down asleep on their cold desks were equally helping him out, as he had no lesson plan. The prospect of making one had kept him up until 3 in the morning, but he had ultimately gone to sleep banking on a last-second miracle. As it turned out, his sudden hunger for an egg biscuit from McDonald’s had robbed him of any preparation time at all, and had not been the slightest bit miraculous. So as the intercom boomed with the morning announcements, he logged onto his computer, pulled up Amazon Prime, and spent thirteen dollars on a National Geographic documentary about whales. He opened up the Google Doc form for lesson plans and wrote out that he was showing a documentary that would greaten the students’ understanding of whales prior to reading Moby Dick, giving them further context for appreciating its artistic merit.

“Alright guys,” Mr. Raeford said when he had the documentary pulled up. A few heads lazily lifted off of their desks. “Now I know I told you’d we’d be reading some Moby Dick today. But I actually thought… on second thought, that you would get more from the book if you had a greater appreciation for whales.”

“Are we going to watch that whale movie?” asked Kayla, from her dark corner in the back of the classroom. She didn’t look up when she spoke, her eyeglasses reflecting the changing colors of a Tik Tok video.

“There’s a whale movie?” Darius asked, through a yawn.

Mr. Raeford mined his memory for any major blockbuster whale movie in the past few years and found nothing. He was left to assume that, like himself, Kayla was still half asleep.

“It’s a documentary about whales. And I want you to go ahead and pull out some notebook paper because at the end I’m going to quiz you on the documentary.”

“Can we get the questions ahead of time?” Kayla asked.

“No.”

Mr. Raeford circled around the classroom, awakening his students one by one by nudging them with the Penguin Classics Edition of Moby Dick. Then he hooked up his laptop to the projector and turned the projector on. A blue rectangle across the projection screen warned that the filter needed to be changed. Eventually the rectangle went away and Mr. Raeford pressed play on the film’s title screen.

“This looks dumb,” Maria Sellers groaned.

He sat down at his desk and pressed his hands tightly around his pulsating headache. Then he pulled out a pen and paper. He’d watch the documentary along with the kids and come up with questions for it as they were viewing. He’d take them out of chronological order to make it seem more like they were made ahead of time.

The documentary started with scraggly-looking men sitting out on a boat under sweltering heat. The ocean was bright blue around them, glazed with yellow sunlight. The narrator described them as a cast of drifters—some with science backgrounds and others just experienced divers. They were out charting the swimming routes of various whale species in the Pacific Ocean. They had all signed up for nearly a year out on the ocean, and while the camera panned across their faces Mr. Raeford noticed the slosh of water against their boat. When he was on that boat with Carissa and her family, rocking back and forth, he had been the only one staring down past the railing. The rest of them were drinking champagne in bright glasses, laughing about old stories only they could know. He was watching the dark sea beneath them, unable to look away. And of course she had asked him what he was doing that day, why he was just sitting there staring at the ocean—she had asked him twice. Once the day they got back from vacation and once on the day she left for good.

Mr. Raeford felt a sort of pop in the wiring of his brain as he realized that he wasn’t paying attention to the movie. He shook his head like a dog ridding its fur of water. Then he turned his attention to the blank sheet of paper. His head still pulsating. The guys in the documentary were yelling in excitement—they were chasing a whale. Their boat was speeding in zig-zags as they tried to get a good look at the specimen, only catching glimpses of its great black tail. The sunlight bouncing off its tail resembled a photo flash. A couple of the guys were gearing up and getting ready to dive. Mr. Raeford rubbed his temples as he searched for a good question. The words just weren’t coming.

The day of the interview, Mr. Raeford showed up fidgety and smelling too much like his recent shower. He told the administrators that he was looking to share his passion for literature with kids and that his focus was on meeting the kids where they were, not forcing them into the texts they wouldn’t like. His sweaty fingers wrestled with one another inside his clasped hands. He was so nervous that he thought maybe he really did want to teach. He smiled with what felt like just half his mouth. They gave him the job, reluctantly no doubt. The other candidate, he later would find out, had been fired from his previous school for challenging a problem student to a wrestling match.

“Who wants to spend a year with whales?” Kayla asked out loud, while scrolling through her cell phone. “These guys have no lives.”

Kayla’s grumbling returned Mr. Raeford’s attention to the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He wrote, rather mindlessly: What ocean are the men traveling in?

When Mr. Raeford looked back at the screen, the documentary was showing a diver and a humpback whale underwater. The humpback was “looking” right at the diver, but “looking” seemed impossible because the whale didn’t look like an animal so much as a giant, moving monument to an unseen world—its skin could have been stone and it might as well have been faceless. The diver was a tiny black silhouette pupiled against the glowing azure of the ocean, and the whale was so close that it encompassed him like a shadowy halo. The whale could have crushed the diver had it wanted to, but monuments didn’t need to crush anyone to prove their worth, so it simply floated on by with slow, swaying movements that didn’t look possible.

The camera followed the whale along for a while, and Mr. Raeford was struck with the feeling that the humpback knew something he didn’t, maybe even everything. His first date with Carissa had been at the fair. They had grabbed some fried Oreos, taken an awkward ride around the Tilt-A-Whirl where they were surrounded by children, and then finally shared a Ferris Wheel ride where everything felt right. The sky was completely dark and the air was moist, slightly windy as they rose. It didn’t seem important to talk. The onion-cheese-and-grease fumes got more faint as they got higher up, and they were soon above the tops of the tents of every kiosk, level with the highest rides, and then able to see over the top of those, above the town, soaring over the fairgrounds of neon oranges and gold and green. He felt a chilling rise in his stomach as he heard the distant pattering of hundreds of people walking on the ground below him, their profiles outlined against the warm lights, their muffled conversations a part of the constant rhythm of the night. A few passengers in front of them pulled out their cellphones and took Snapchats of themselves, and he could see, in the corner of their screens, how calm Carissa looked. He reached over and placed his hand on her leg. They headed over the top curve of the wheel and he peered out over the fairgrounds at the town itself, where toy-sized houses glowed with gold light and toy-sized trucks were parked in driveways, reflecting the distant neons of the fair, and he wondered at each square window what it would be like to be another person, to be anyone else, to even be the passengers in front of him, or to be Carissa.

On the TV screen the camera ascended with the whale, which abruptly leaped out of the water—the ocean parting underneath it, practically exploding under the sheer force of this great animal. It turned—almost in slow motion—so that its wrinkly pale stomach faced the camera just before it descended back into the water, crashing into what looked like a white puff of smoke while Mr. Raeford attempted to hide his tired-but-wet eyes from his students. He turned his attention to the copy of Moby Dick on his desk. It made so much more sense to him now why the book was so long. The whale! He even felt a connection to Melville himself—a man fully captivated by a creature that could never be fully understood…what was it about the whale that urged people to try to understand? He flipped to a page about a fourth of the way through the novel, suddenly inspired to read a paragraph out loud to his students, any paragraph that seemed important—anything at all about whales.

The first line he saw when he stopped turning pages was this: “Alas, Flask, was a butterless man!”

In the living room of Carissa’s two-bedroom apartment, he told her that he wanted her to be happy, no matter what. The windows were black with night. Her hair was wet and she wore an over-sized Dunkin Donuts t-shirt. He smelled her shampoo—lemon, honey, and mint. It reminded him of the feeling of her hair against his neck.  Carissa’s face was half draped in shadows. There was a pounding from the room down the hall—her roommate, the one who hated him now, must have been putting up a picture frame.

“You always said you didn’t want to teach,” Carissa said, with her arms crossed. “The one thing you didn’t want to do.”

The whale documentary turned out to be longer than the class. When the bell rang, Mr. Raeford assured his class that they would finish it tomorrow and answer the questions as well. His students rose from their seats with what looked like a sort of indifferent dizziness, obviously relieved that class was over but also not looking forward to the next one.

Mr. Raeford held his pounding head in his hands again. The egg and cheese biscuit wasn’t sitting well in his stomach. His throat was dry. He needed water. He wondered what Carissa would say if she saw him now.