Claudia Monpere- Creative Nonfiction

When I Knew Nothing

Some Saturdays Meg woke up with a stranger she’d hooked up with at The Red Raven. I wondered— did he make her a Prairie Oyster for her hangover like I did when I stayed over in the guest room? Raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, tomato juice, hot sauce. The men were always tall and lean, clean shaven. Often wearing cowboy boots. I’d scan the men during our weekly happy hours with our small group of high school teachers. Was this a night Meg would bring one of them home? Or a night she’d beg me to sleep over because she was sad? Or a night she’d drink less and head home alone? 

It was my first year of supposedly teaching developmental reading, but each class Jason wandered around, kicking the wall intermittently; Melanie swished her black and purple cape and chanted Wicca spells; Greg kept his head down on his desk, Andy rolled a joint.  He sat in the back of the room, a magician, vanishing that weed the minute I approached. Many students read at the fourth-grade level. Few had stable homes. My pitiful supply closet offered old Readers Digests, a daily newspaper subscription, a closet stuffed with tattered classics but no complete class set. This was before classrooms had computers. Across the hall, the established Special Ed teacher lavished his students with new books, mixed media activities, graphic organizers, sensory literacy tools.  

At lunch I cried for my students, and I cried for me. Meg swung into my classroom without knocking to introduce herself. “Oh hon,” she said, eyes widening as I cried over my tuna sandwich, “What the hell’s going on?”

Did I pour it all out? Students walking all over me, my bewilderment about how to teach high school students with such low literacy and high emotional needs, my inability to even create a lesson plan. Or was I vague, too embarrassed to show how incompetent I was? Whatever I said, her response stung. 

“You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”

She was right. I got my teaching credential at an “innovative and exciting” experimental program at University of California, Berkeley. We were plunged into middle school and high school classrooms to teach all day, four days a week. What did we do that one day a week when we were being educated? All I remember is weekly sharing circles—and one lesson that involved us walking around blindfolded, our feet tied to blocks of wood.

Meg patted my shoulder. “You need some fun, sweetie. I hereby make you a member of our TGIF club.” 

I counted the hours until those Fridays when six of us teachers clanked glasses and traded student stories. There was always one from Meg that had us laughing.  Always one from the business teacher, Shelly, about discipline, like the time a disruptive student pushed her too far. She held up the blackboard eraser, moving her hand slowly up and down. “Sideways,” she said. Always a story from me about teaching or my fiancé that had me tearing up. He was a brilliant pendulum, romantic and playful one moment, depressed or verbally abusive the next. There was always the Honors English teacher giving me a hug. And once, inviting me to his place where I drank Bailey’s Irish Cream for the first time and tasted the glorious mix of whiskey, cream, vanilla—and his warm tongue. It was worth every hour of that hangover.

Meg’s walk-in closet was lined with Styrofoam heads, each holding a blonde wig. Long, golden blonde hair in ocean waves; ash blonde pixie; honey blonde bob; bouncy strawberry blonde curls. I counted twenty-eight wigs. She said I needed to spiff up my look, so I tried a few on, along with some of her sexy dresses. I hated how I looked, but lied to make her happy. Meg never left the house without a wig; I thought her own short brown hair was fine. 

 Learning that I’d debated in high school and been a college drama major, Meg announced I would be her Assistant Speech and Debate Coach. Soon we were together constantly, not just during TGIF gatherings, but also several days a week coaching students after school and sometimes away on weekends for tournaments. These students adored Meg, who was as comfortable lavishing praise on them as calling out bullshit or telling them to stop being lazy. I could never be that direct, fearful of hurting someone’s feelings or having them dislike me. I loved how Meg used her voice to model for students how to be more animated in their debates and speeches. In my reading classes, I began helping my students put more feeling in their voices when they read aloud. They glowed, a few of them, once they were fluent reading a passage out loud. 

I was fascinated by how Meg moved her body. A kind of authority combined with playfulness that I lacked. She taught students how to gesture effectively during debates, during impromptu and extemporaneous speeches. To indicate emphasis, disagreement, puzzlement. As a high school debater, I’d done that successfully. But it never seeped into the rest of my life. Meg was a natural with her gestures. And she was in constant motion. A twirl out of nowhere. A hop on and off a stool to illustrate a point. Her energy was mesmerizing. I must have said something once comparing myself to her, because one of the best debaters, who was in the school’s production of Peter Pan, tried to teach me to skip and frolic like Pan. 

 Meg loved a good joke. Once our speech students hung 10 or 15 desks from the ceiling light fixtures in her classroom. She couldn't stop laughing. But challenge an idea of hers? Have a different opinion? Her sarcasm shut up any student who dared try this. I longed to speak like her. My earnestness embarrassed me. 

 She was forty-two and I was twenty-one, but I was an anxious beige blob next to her. 

My teaching came to a crisis when the department chair observed me during what I thought was an almost decent class. She was shocked by how disrespectful the students were. Meg to the rescue, meeting with my class, giving them The Green Sheet, strict rules printed on a piece of green paper. It stuck for a few weeks. I sent students to the principal for continued bad behavior after two warnings. But I knew that detention and lectures would do nothing. They needed counselors, speech therapists, stable families. They needed a teacher who wasn’t me.

Meg had never revealed anything personal about herself to me, while I had confided in her about not only my struggles teaching, but also my mother’s and brother’s serious mental health issues, my fear that my fiancée had similar issues. Then one night she mentioned her two daughters who didn’t live with her. Later, she shared her photo album and mentioned she’d lost custody a few years earlier. These revelations made her uncomfortable; she shared nothing more. It made me think of how she’d bring strangers to her bed but never tell me a word about the whys.

One day she didn’t show up to school. We’d had a rare evening out in the middle of the week to console me after a nightmare teaching day, and she went home with a man she’d pronounced cute but shady—until the two of them started dancing. 

 The next morning her classroom was empty although she was always there a good half hour before school began. She didn’t answer my repeated phone calls. I pictured her slain in her bed. I didn’t call the police in case I was wrong. But when the principal asked me where she was and I told him I was very worried, he had me come along while he sped to her house. Bang, bang, banging on her door, the two of us. She finally answered, groggy, hungover, holding a pillow in front of her naked body. 

But that wasn’t when our relationship changed. In fact, she laughed about the pillow incident. We both loved community theatre and had been in a play together; she had a leading role; mine was minor. But we’d done the long drive to rehearsals in a nearby town together, shared funny theater stories during our TGIFs with other teachers, celebrated a terrific opening night. She helped me introduce some elements of theater into my classes: short monologues and scenes. My Wicca student happily chatted about acting. My head-on-his-desk student wrote a play for his little brother. I was incredibly grateful to Meg. 

 Auditions were posted for another production at a community theater.  Meg was determined we’d try out together. Sure, I said, but I was exhausted. Each weekend, I drove two hours to see my fiancé who was buried in textbooks and law school stress. I was taking a graduate course to improve my teaching. Reeling from seeing the police take one of my students away in handcuffs during class. Lanky sixteen-year-old Randy whose clothes never fit, who read at the third-grade level. Reeling from my fiancé’s increasingly angry phone calls berating me for caring more about my teaching and my family than him. I barely slept. Meg offered hugs, sleepovers where we’d drink and talk long into the night. But when I got the courage to tell her I couldn’t audition for this next play with her, she turned iceberg. 

She never thawed. She avoided me, said she was busy when I tried to talk, to ask what was wrong. She treated me like an acquaintance— polite, distant, her laughs and smiles reserved for others. I was devastated. The school year was nearly over, no more coaching. We’d still been friends in early May when our students made it to the state championship and we all traveled together on a bus, supervising the students at the hotel where they roomed with students from other schools and were mischievous in adorable ways. I felt cloaked in joy. 

Then devastated. Why did Meg stop being my friend? She knew how much I admired her, that I was awed by how she combined passion and creative pedagogy with meticulous planning and discipline. Every opinion of hers, every idea: cheer, cheer, cheer! I even admired her one-night stands, the risk, the thrill, so unlike me. Did she feel betrayed that I said no to the play audition, that I chose my well-being over time with her?  Or was it related to her confiding in me about her two girls, perhaps something she regretted? Or was there something I’d said or done that unwittingly upset her? Or did she learn before I did that I was being transferred to another school the following year and she decided I wasn’t worth her friendship?

Decades later, the chronology is a bit of a jumble. But not the pain I felt.

Are you on drugs?” a student asked me the last week of class. “You smile so much.” I wore my smiles like Meg wore her wigs. Like Shelly wore her Marine officer face and navy slacks when she taught business. But when classes were over, she hopped on her Harley and peeled out of that parking lot. At the end of the school year, I went to a party at her place. Her living room ceiling and one wall were plastered with nude photos of her. Large black and whites, they tightroped between art and pornography. I was shocked. Too young to understand the contradictions stitched into all humans. 

The last day of school, my students wrote in my yearbook. The speech and debate kids said things like, “It’s been a privilege to know you.” They quoted Shakespeare: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

My reading students:

 “I have never met a teacher like you until I come to your reading class this year.” 

 “It was nice have you for. A teacher. Love, Cecily.”

“I hope you invited me to your wedding so I can get drunk and I like being in your class.”

“You tried your hardest to teach me but I didn’t keep up my end, thanks, love, Jerry.”

“This has been a very strange class and you happen to be my favorite teacher.” 

“How can you leave us now?”

 I taught a girl with red flame braids whose mother was always drunk. Another girl who never stopped drawing frogs: bullfrogs, poison dart frogs, red-eyed tree frogs. A boy who howled with delight when he finally understood the word “however.” I told him it always introduced a surprise. I taught a boy who found small words inside Christmas. For weeks, he carried the list in his back pocket, presenting it to me at the end of each day: grease-smeared, creased, ragged edges thinned to thread, the word-gifts like rows of restless beetles—is, rat, cram, star. 

Claudia Monpere’s flash fiction and creative nonfiction appear in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Flash Frog, Trampset, Lost Balloon, The Forge, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025.