“Solve for X” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Upslash image by Bernard Hermant @bernardhermant

At school in Algebra class Becky passes me a note. “I think Mr. Lehman is leaking!”

I pass the note back with a big question mark. 

While Mr. Lehman is discussing how to turn a word problem into an equation on the whiteboard, Becky whispers, “He’s starting to tilt!!!”

It’s a little scary, watching our math teacher deflate. 

“Mr. Lehman,” Xin raises her hand, and he swivels. “Are you ok?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re leaking.”

“I’m fine,” he says, turning back around to show us how to solve for X.

The air in the room starts to get an odd, musty odor: stale potato chips or stuff little kids shove under the back seat of a car. Is that what the insides of math teachers smell like?

Mr. Lehman begins to collapse on one side, and then he deflates into his chair, no longer trying to pretend everything is fine. I run over, looking for the leak. It’s just above his right knee. I have to take off his pants.

“Could you get the nurse?” Mr. Lehman mumbles.

“Does anyone have any gum?” I yell.

Tiff hands me her pack of watermelon Bubblicious. I toss it at Becky, who shoves a wad in her mouth and passes the rest of the pack to Xin. They both start chewing furiously. I keep my hand on the leak, doing my best to keep Mr. Lehman inflated until Becky and Xin are ready. There are at least four or five patches already on his legs. Would this leak be the one that finishes him? 

Becky presses her wad into the leak, then Xin. Before it could blow the most hideous of bubbles, I wrap Mr. Lehman’s leg furiously with Scotch tape. Our math teacher looks more like a bag than a person, with his head lying on the desk, completely boneless. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him, even though I’m not so sure. Mr. Lehman’s flattened face twitches.

The school nurse soon arrives with a foot pump. She reaches under Mr. Lehman’s shirt, fishing out the sort of valve you’d find on a bike tire. She begins pumping, seeing if the air would hold, or if he’s now leaking from other spots. Satisfied that isn’t the case, she peels back our gum and replaces it with a more hygienic thin rubber patch.

The nurse looks up at Becky and me. “This happens more often than you think,” she says, steadily pumping, but then she turns her attention more to our math teacher than to us. “You teach here a while, you get into a routine. Then you make stupid mistakes, you let your guard down, and what always happens? You pray there’s a nurse nearby who knows how to use a foot pump.” 

She moves Mr. Lehman’s head until it’s facing her. “But sometimes there isn’t, Stanley, and then what will you do?”

“Oh Sandy,” Mr. Lehman says, like he’s a little high. “You worry too much about me.”

Later at lunch, Becky, Xin, Tiff and me talk about Mr. Lehman, budget cuts, and wondering how many of the other teachers at school are inflatable. Just think how incredibly tough they’d have to be, to walk into a classroom and deal with the likes of us, day in and day out, when one mistake, one thumbtack casually left in the middle of a chair, and they might pop for real. I mean, we don’t run around with scissors, we wouldn’t, but there are definitely some kids around here who would, and do.

“Yeah,” Tiff says, interrupting my thoughts on the fragility of life. “But I think Mr. Lehman did it on purpose. We all saw that compass on the floor.”

Xin nods. “Did you see the way he smiled at the school nurse?” 

“Forget Algebra,” Becky says. “Pay attention to those two, because that’s true L.U.V. right there.”

“I would never stab myself in the leg for love,” I say.

“That’s because you’ve never been in love,” Xin says.

“L.U.V.,” Becky says, lightly pressing a fork into her thigh while looking at me..

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Joyland, Jellyfish Review, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic Press. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.