Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (9)

Jack Weede


My hands were tied. There was no way that a sixtysomething male administrator could broach the topic of your erect nipples with a thirtysomething female teacher and not expose himself to a humiliating lawsuit, along with a virtual stoning on the internet. I had no intention of jeopardizing my hard-earned reputation—not to mention my retirement benefits—in the final lap of my long career.

I know I can sound paranoid about this stuff, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. The pendulum has swung so far in the past few years, I’m amazed I haven’t been run out of town on a rail, like so many of my contemporaries. Guys like me are the old guard; we’re presumed guilty whether we’ve done anything wrong or not, though many of us have sinned, I’m not denying it. It’s like the French Revolution. They had a just cause, but they got a little overzealous with the guillotine. That’s where we are now with all this Me Too business. The-old-guy’s-head-in-a-basket phase.

It was such a different world when I started teaching back in 1974. People forget how different. Kids smoked in the bathrooms; fragrant Marlboro clouds wafted out whenever someone opened the door. The boys had fistfights on a regular basis; their friends would gather in a circle and cheer them on. The gay kids got taunted mercilessly—not that anyone admitted to being gay, but bullies made assumptions—and it wasn’t uncommon to hear racial slurs in the hallway. Girls got rated on a scale of one to ten; boys would call out their numbers as they passed. Teachers rarely intervened when this stuff happened, because it happened all the time. That was just the way it was, kids being kids, the world being the world. Part of growing up was learning how to handle adversity on your own.

When you’re starting out in a career, you take your cues from the people above you. And back in the seventies, the message I got from the older male teachers was pretty clear: the girls were fair game. At my first job in Hillsdale, half the gym teachers were married to their former students. The head of the Math Department, Bart Martinson, was obsessed with a girl in his trig class, a sophomore with an amazing body. He bragged about making her his “assistant.” Every day she had to stand in front of the class and write equations on the board.

“She’s got a perfect ass,” he said. “I want to enjoy the view.”

My friend Lou Gardner and I weren’t the worst, but we weren’t saints, either. We liked to go out drinking on Friday nights, and we always ended up talking about the girls we taught. Who had the best tits, the nicest legs, the sexiest mouth. Who was still a virgin and who was not, who would give the best blowjob, etc. We were young and horny, only a few years out of college, and the Sexual Revolution was in full swing. Our dads were uptight, not us. In 1977, I actually taught Lolita to my Honors English class, and instructed my students to think twice before passing judgment on Humbert, maybe take a moment to see the world from his point of view.

No one complained.

I try not to think too much about those days now—let the past be past. The truth is, we’re all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don’t change over time, you know what?

They just haven’t lived long enough.





Tracy Flick


Bridget was wary at first, and I couldn’t blame her. It’s not every day a veteran teacher gets summoned to the Assistant Principal’s office.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Just doing a little temperature check. See how things are going.”

“Oh.” She pressed her palm against her forehead and held it there for a few seconds before giving a cheerful shrug. “Ninety-eight point six.”

“Excellent.” I nodded as if that was that. “How’s everything else? You have a good summer?”

Her body relaxed and her eyes got big.

“Oh my God, Tracy. It was so good. I can’t even tell you.”

I hadn’t been in close quarters with Bridget since school had started, and I found her presence more unsettling than I’d expected. It wasn’t that she’d been unattractive in the past. She’d just been a little dull, easy to overlook. But now she was glowing. And it wasn’t just the new hairdo or the smoky eyes or the perky nipples. It felt deeper than that, as if she’d undergone a profound inner transformation as well.

“You seem really different,” I said.

“I’m happy,” she declared, as if it were as simple as that. “I should thank my ex for leaving me. That was the wake-up call I needed.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“Tracy?” Bridget was peering at me with a hopeful expression. “Do you ever go out dancing?”

“Me? No. Not for a long time.”

She leaned forward. Her eyes were bright blue, the same color as her blouse, which was sleeveless and a little tight.

Don’t look at her nipples.

“You should come out with me sometime,” she said. “There’s this club in Lakeview that has a nineties night. Great DJ. Nice crowd. I think you’d like it.”

“Sounds fun. But it’s not really my thing.”

“Okay. No worries. Just thought I’d put it out there.”

We traded awkward smiles, the way you do when the small talk has run its course. I let the silence linger for a moment.