Until Dave Comes

Please get me out of here Dave!

She presses ‘send’ and the screen goes black. No more Dave to clasp on to. Just that damn, feverishly hot, phone from 2017 in that ugly, purple case – so damn gross from her fingerprints. Stupid, oily hands; stupid, sweaty head in the reflection.

She tosses the device towards the dashboard, but it bounces off and goes diving through the open window. Doesn’t matter. A broken phone doesn’t matter right now. This broken car, however, does matter a great deal. Probably can’t pay for all that needs fixing as a student working ten hours a week. And can’t go home.

Ticklish drops of sweat run down the space between her shoulder blades. Yeah, she can’t stay here either. It has long been evening, but it just won’t cool yet. Thinking of the aircon in the school and those sacred keys she possesses that go in its doors, she abandons her car, retrieves her phone – only a small crack – and makes her way back to her workplace.

She’s not used to being the last one left in the building. Usually, Dave – colleague turned boyfriend – wants to finish homework before his shift and thus gets to lock up. He wanted to go out with his friends tonight and so he cleaned his classrooms downstairs just as early as Ramona always cleans the daycare. Ramona might be avoiding them on purpose, come to think of it. Doesn’t matter.

The lights in the entrance hall flick on like they’re hesitant to do so. She feels a chill, doesn’t know if it’s due to the temperature change or the silence. Of course, she knows the space childless, but not silent. She works with The Cure or Sunny Day Real Estate on and somehow there are always teachers still present after schooltime, needing to cross every square inch of floor she just mopped.

What now? Dave probably only has eyes for a karaoke screen for the time being. Good student. Good Partygänger, too. There’s an old school phone by the reception desk, but it’s of no use. She doesn’t know a single number by heart. Well, yes, she knows 911, but imagine: “Hi, I’m just an idiot who has memorized complex physics formulas, but not her emergency contacts. Can I order a police car taxi ride so I can be in bed in time?”

She laughs as she imagines it, until she turns her head to a picture on the wall that scares the living shit out of her. It’s just a picture of a former student who went on to do great things – something this small, rural, elementary school is very proud of. But, God, those eyes look soul-piercing bright now that the fluorescent lamps reign over this place.

She supposes she could wait in the teachers’ lunchroom, maybe grab a coffee. It’s just down the left hall. The two-layered building is practically a square of mostly prison-grey bricks with weird angles and a decorative courtyard in the middle. Parts of the walls are glass to look out on it. Now, the bushes and the pebbles grow less and less visible as it darkens outside. She’s left with a mirrored clone of her in whom she takes no comfort. This clone surveils her, is the feeling she gets. It makes for a slow walk to the lunchroom. She doesn’t want to walk slow. Like: relaxed-slow. Yet, she feels compelled to in the presence of her clone: guardian of the school, caring about not bringing disturbance to this quiet sanctuary. Every step has a bothersome, far stretching echo and feels weightier than normal – although it occurs to her that the latter might just be exhaustion from being on her feet for over two hours. Still, the linoleum floor is unforgiving with its shock absorption. She wonders if this is how mammoths felt while walking on ice.

Her coffee becomes drinkable by the time it’s midnight and she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like how wrong it feels to be inside the school under the big blanket of the night. Even though she is no real intruder - has the keys and all - being there now makes her feel similarly uneasy to when she was left alone at Dave’s apartment the second time she was there: he just needed to run a quick errand, but in those twenty minutes he was gone, she did not even dare to pick up the book on the armrest of the couch where she was seated to read the backflap. She did not know the place… intimately, yet. Can’t just be all over someone before it feels right. Before permission is given. This school and her are basically just acquaintances. She comes to clean it and then she leaves. Therefore, neither of them feel comfortable staying the night together, as it were. She thinks of it as a good justification for her strange sense of not-belonging, for selecting a type of coffee the machine has allowed her to have before.

Another hour passes and she finds herself back in the hallway after a pee. She’s bored out of her mind from sitting in that lunchroom. Good for the brain, though: not doomscrolling until she falls asleep for once - but, oh, what she would give for five minutes on Instagram right now! Doesn’t deserve it, though. Stupid girl drained her phone battery through watching brain rot reels in her car first thing after her shift. Could’ve googled a mechanic if she had been more strict with those percentages.  

Her mind wanders off to the main rules of cleaning schools. One: you do not touch anything besides your tools. Two: you do not move anything, even when it’s in the goddamn way. Three: You. Do. Not. Take. An. Interest. In. The. Children. Not that she has, but the teachers already dislike you because you’re a cleaner and they will dislike you a whole lot more if they notice you taking an interest in the children. But they’re not here now, and she feels compelled to find out more about what kids go here: to look at their big, circular cutout pictures attached to colorful lice bags, hanging on a wall mounted rack outside each classroom. She gives herself the ick by wondering if the groups are less white the younger they are. These are different times, after all.

She kills at least half an hour doing a lap around the ground floor, learning about faces that exist, like hers, and that are indeed not always white, like hers. She is right and convinces herself it’s no more than a simple observation. Alright, maybe she has a hard time picturing herself being a teacher mouthing ‘foreign’ names, but she thinks it’s hardly worse than dealing with the Western Gen-Z names. Skye, Jazzlynn, Marleigh, Jaxx…. For fuck’s sake. It’s why she can’t stand modern fantasy books. There are good names, too: there is good, old Caleb, for instance. This kid of six, coincidentally, looks a lot like Dave with his pointy ears – and her with his bushy brows. This is what their love child would look like, and she hates herself for using that term. The thought of what that would entail as well is far too visceral. It doesn’t help that she has seen several framed artworks of the kids with their stick figure mommy and daddy. Naked sticks…. No! Embarrassingly, but for good, her thought is immediately arrested by her clone, popping up in the reflection of the laminated picture of Caleb. New, fourth rule: You do not have thoughts you shouldn’t have in church either. Not that she goes to church, but – doesn’t matter.

She feels awfully tired all of the sudden. Sick from the caffeine; sick from fighting her sleep. She is not a Partygänger – often mistaken for it by her looks, but truly doesn’t have the body for it. There’s some sort of moth above her, aggressively trying to break through a light bulb. A buzz, a tick. A buzz, a tick. A… bloody migraine coming up. It then occurs to her that she could just take a nap. Theoretically speaking, even on the floor. Nice job, Dave. Surely, she will wake up once he arrives. If not, an early arriving teacher is going to have a fun story to tell at dinner tomorrow. Though, she might actually ask for a relocation if that happened. Lucky Ramona.

Best thing to do would be to lie on the box sofas near the entrance. It feels like a long way to get there. She wants to rush, but the pounding sound from her steps – and feeling each step through her entire skeleton – is nauseating. On top of that, it’s like the hallway narrows and elongates the more she rushes. She rushes anyway, stupid girl. Near the end, light headedness gets to her, and she sways and trips. She falls face first into the apple green lice bags of the four year olds. Amir, Mosegi and Milly tackled. Touched. Somehow, her arm stretched out and took a stick figure drawing on the wall with her. The glass: broken. Every cleaner’s rule: broken. Nose: possibly also broken.

She does not know how much time passes as she just sits there: back against the rough brick wall; cramped hand trying to stop her nosebleed; her reflection in the courtyard glass staring back at her amusingly. The moth – that fucking moth – still going at it in the distance.

It is proper dark now, but inside it’s bright like a fridge. The migraine is brewing, too – fogging her mind and making her see little stars - but she fights it, although the headache could come any minute. As soon as her nosebleed stops, she attempts to put the pictures and bags back on the rack. The exact order, she can’t remember. It’s probably not this order. Frustrating, but doesn’t matter. The drawing is what could get her in trouble. Again: the teachers already dislike you because you’re a cleaner. They have a very small bucket: takes one drop to overflow.

She decides to sweep up the glass and place the frame on the teacher’s desk inside the classroom. On a sticky note she writes: Sorry! It was an accident during cleaning! A lie, but no one needs to know if Dave would just show up any minute now. He very rarely stays out past three, as it now is according to the clock in this room. She does decide to sign off the note with her name, to not be mysterious about that. Otherwise, they might blame Dave, since her area is upstairs.

Three thirty something. She has tried to fall asleep on the box sofas, but her nasal bone is throbbing and so is her head. Want to turn the lights off. Can’t turn the lights off. Can’t. Turn. The. Lights. Off. Dave needs to know that she is inside the building. The only relief she gets is from covering her arms over her eyes, but goddamn it hurts her nose more. She lays like that for what feels like forever, but could realistically not be longer than an hour with the absence of ibuprofen in her system. She knows that from an instance she did go clubbing and had, of course, forgotten about the fact she was through her pain meds when she arrived home with a head wanting to split open. Her bathroom was very bright and then very dark and she does not remember making it to her bed.

She tastes a gross taste she experienced in that memory. She also tastes coffee. Yes, focus on the coffee from today. From yesterday?

She smells new leather. And sweat. And… soap. Does Dave mop with soap? Ramona had told her to only use water.

She hears the wind softly breezing by outside every now and then, rustling the leaves of the potted plants by the entrance door. She also hears a consistent humming noise of the lamps and the aircon she had turned back on. Actually, she can’t remember if she did that. Sometimes, there is an insect. Not the moth. Or possibly the moth. Either way: loud buzzing. Then soft buzzing. Then far away buzzing. Then, suddenly, buzzing directly in her motherfucking ear.  

She doesn’t know what she sees. Darkness. Snow – like that on old TV screens that you sometimes see on the inside of your eyelids when you close them. Flashes of memories. Of light. She does not want to see light.

Agony is all that she feels for a while. At some point, it stops and she does not remember it stopping. Then it comes back again, but more… worn out. She doesn’t quite know how to describe it. She doesn’t remember how long it was away and when it came back, and why and how, either. She just feels like she was run over by a car, even though it was a truck. And she feels… warm. There’s a warmth to her skin and to the air she breathes in. She also feels sore, like she has been sitting or laying in the same position for too long. Her right shoulder is irritated, something is chafing it. And she seems to be in motion, but she is not moving.