On her thirtieth birthday, the professor brings two dozen glazed donuts to her classroom. She balances the warm boxes on her hip as she opens the door.
She’s told her friends that as a teacher she feels like a duck with twenty baby ducklings walking behind her. She has never felt that way more than she does on this day, watching them eat freshly baked food that she paid for with the money she receives for teaching them.
I’m feeding them, she thinks. My babies.
The professor does not eat a donut herself, cannot bear the thought of them watching her eat while she teaches. She will save one for later to eat alone in her office.
Two of her twenty students do not eat the donuts either. One is a goth girl with impeccable black hair and black eyeliner. The professor imagines that the goth girl likes her because the professor correctly pronounces her Vietnamese last name. The professor likes to imagine people congratulating her for things like that. The goth girl informs the professor that she is gluten intolerant; the professor winces at her oversight. Next time, she tells the goth girl, she will bring a gluten-free option.
The other student who does not eat a donut is a wrestler who says he’s cutting weight. He has big, bewildered eyes that make the professor ask him, often, if he has a question during class. He never does. At the beginning of the semester, the wrestler told the professor that he was the first in his family to graduate from high school and would be the first to graduate from college. The professor’s eyes had filled with tears when he told her this.
Should we sing happy birthday? asks the girl who sits in the back corner.
The professor says no, but the students do it anyway. The professor is mortified—she never knows where to look when people sing happy birthday to her—but she loves to watch them sing with their donut-filled freshman mouths. Then they get back to work, to their department-mandated discussion of logos, ethos, and pathos.
The professor first notices something is wrong when one of the boys’ voices cracks during an answer to a question about rhetorical devices. She pretends not to notice, doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she glances around the room and thinks: Have they always looked this young?
It’s almost as though she’s teaching fourteen-year-olds, she thinks. They look so small, their faces so round and spotted with fresh pimples. Maybe it’s just because she’s getting older, she thinks. Maybe freshmen look like this to a thirty-year-old.
The professor gives the class an assignment: Write for five minutes about a birthday you’ll never forget—good or bad. She puts on what she thinks is good writing music. Moby. Halfway through the first song she second-guesses her choice, but it’s too late to change it. She doesn’t want to jar the writing students. The professor checks her email instead: mostly birthday wishes from places like her dentist’s office and the website where she buys her contact lenses.
When the professor looks back up at her class, a room full of nine-year-olds returns her gaze. Their feet dangle from their desks, shoes shrunk down along with them. The class’s resident frat boy wears little khakis and a little polo shirt.
The professor thinks to herself: They’re playing a prank. A birthday prank.
She looks to the goth girl and the wrestler. They look the same as before, still eighteen.
Are you seeing this? She asks them. They nod.
The girl in the back corner raises her hand, offering to share what she’s written.
Are you okay? the professor asks.
What do you mean? the girl in the back corner answers.
Something is happening, the professor says, her voice shaking. Something has happened to you.
The girl in the back corner doesn’t seem to hear this. She begins to read out loud, a free-write about the time her birthday was interrupted by Hurricane Katrina. Her writing sounds the same as usual, but she reads it in a little girl’s voice. For a moment the professor sees, or imagines, that the paper is written in crayon.
Stop reading, the professor says. I have to call someone.
She asks the goth girl and the wrestler: Who do we call?
The wrestler offers: The fire department? Those guys can fix anything.
But the professor cannot call anyone. Her phone has no service, not even Wi-Fi. The wrestler and the goth girl look into their palms, press and jab and swipe and then, defeated, hold up their phones to show that they, too, are useless.
The nine-year-olds have begun to chatter amongst themselves. It’s happy chatter, like they’d make on any other day, but higher pitched.
The professor picks up the classroom phone to call IT.
IT, says IT.
My phone is not working and my Wi-Fi is not working and we have an emergency in my classroom, says the professor. Please help.
The outage is a campus-wide issue, says IT. We’re working on it.
Well, can you call someone for me? the professor asks, her voice raising an octave. Like 9-1-1? It’s urgent.
Ma’am, we don’t do that, says IT. We take calls, we don’t make calls.
Please, the professor begs. Something is happening to my students.
For that, you’ll need to call the Student Health Center, says IT.
The line goes dead.
The professor walks fast across the room to the door. She will run, she thinks, and get help. The classroom door is locked from the outside.
The professor turns to face her students again. Before her are two eighteen-year-olds and eighteen seven-year-olds.
We’re losing a year every minute, she thinks. And with the years have gone the willingness to stay in seats. A group of the children begin to play tag, circling their desks, squatting behind the professor’s podium, dodging one another’s hands.
The goth girl says: This is just like that movie, Old (The Beach That Makes You Old).
The wrestler says: This is just like that one episode of Futurama.
The professor says: Nice job tying your ideas to existing creative works.
The goth girl and the wrestler try talking to the children, looking into the fine-lashed eyes of their former friends. They ask if the children are okay, if they’re in pain, if they can make it stop. The children seem to find this funny.
How about if we all try sitting down together and taking a deep breath? The professor asks from the podium. She presses her palms flat onto the podium’s slanted top to steady herself. No one seems to hear her.
The girl from the back corner tugs on the professor’s shirt, asks: Can I have another donut?
The professor says: Absolutely not.
The children become toddlers, their tiny shoes squeaking on the floor as they continue their games of tag and duck, duck, goose. They seem to grow tired, though, yawning and rubbing their eyes. The professor watches as they return to their desks.
A minute later, there’s a baby in every seat. The professor paces the room, scoops the babies up, passes them to the goth girl and the wrestler until they are responsible for six babies each. The babies sleep. They seem grateful for rest after a long semester.
The frat boy’s baby blanket is stitched with Greek letters and he is the grumpiest of the babies, the only one who cries as though he’s been abandoned. The professor rocks him back and forth, holds him closest to her skin.
What do we do? What happens to them now? She asks her remaining students, panicked. They shrug, eyes empty, rocking their swarms of babies.
The professor mutters to herself: My babies, my babies.
A moment later, the three are left with palms full of goo.
The wrestler asks: Is this?
Sperm, confirms the goth girl. From whence they came.
The wrestler twitches, disgusted, moves to wipe his hand on his shorts, thinks better of it, stops and stares into his sticky palm. His kindness is wasted, though. Even the goo dissolves into the air.
The professor watches her palm empty. She is left with her two remaining students and a room full of leftover belongings. Backpacks and jackets slung over chair backs, laptops open on desks. The professor paces the rows, running her hands over still-warm sweater sleeves, slipping her fingertips over crumb-speckled keyboards. The wrestler and the goth girl watch her as she walks.
The professor returns to the front of the room, and she stares for a long moment at the box of donuts. Abruptly, so abruptly that the teenagers jump, she sweeps her arm across the table, knocking the box into the open mouth of the trash can.
The professor strides to her podium. She runs her fingers over her keyboard and the PowerPoint springs back to life.
Aristotle, the professor says, defines rhetoric as the capacity to discern the available persuasive potential in any given case.
And in that way, the day’s lesson continues.