Well, a job is a job, he told himself, shaving carefully. If it
were an every day thing, he probably would have figured out that
he should shave first, and then dress, against the not unlikely
event of cutting himself and bleeding on whatever he'd picked out
for the day. Composing an identity was hard enough without having
to start over.

Still, working was good. And that blue shirt suited him, somehow,
he thought, carefully knotting his tie into place. He stretched it
down toward his belt buckle, and noted that either he'd grown or
it had shrunk slightly since the last time they'd tried this
particular dance.

He'd been doing the substitute teacher thing long enough to know
that he had only a moment to establish that he was a meaner bastard
than anybody in the class. So he took a couple deep breaths, fixed
his tie, and marched into the classroom. In six seconds he had
discerned that there were twenty-six students where he was expecting
twenty-eight, thus requiring that he take attendance. This always
intruded into the ritual, but it couldn't be helped.

"I am Mr. Stark. You may call me by my first name, which is Mister.
I see there are two of you missing. Who?"

A girl in the front row put up a hand. He ignored her, and instead,
picked out one seated next to the window whose attention was larger
than the room itself. "You.  You will identify yourself the first
time you address me."

"Marsha. Marsha Johnson. It's Melissa and Kathy who are absent.
Kathy with a K."

"Thank you, Miss Johnson."

"Today we're talking about..." but he was interrupted.

"You will identify yourself when you address me for the first time,"
he told the offender.

"Sorry, Mr. Stark. The only problem is we usually talk about the
homework first."

"Perhaps you do, Miss... ?"

"Barnes. Irene Barnes."

"Miss Barnes. However, I seem to have been left in charge of this
hour. We will deal with homeworks when I deem the time to be ripe."

He went on to pose a word problem, involving re-scaling the
measurements for an almond torte, so that it would come out to be
the same stuff, give or take, in a larger pan than was called for.

This involved slightly more pain than he had intended, what with
all the teaspoons and cups and ounces.

"While the English system may be somewhat familiar to most of you,
I will say that the metric system has certain advantages in a case
such as this, if only because the units are related by factors of
ten, and only ten. None of this three teaspoons in a tablespoon,
but four tablespoons... or is it two? or five? in whatever the next
larger unit is. Not to mention that I can come up with units you've
never heard of that somebody, someplace, sometime, used as valid
measures in the English system."

He put a copy of the recipe from a Norwegian cookbook on the
projector. "You probably can't read the words, but you can read the
units. Lets scale it up by a third, shall we?"

Mr. Stark summoned Miss Barnes to provide answers, and to demonstrate
how she had arrived at her conclusions. They all seemed to be correct
but one, in which she had apparently divided instead of multiplying,
and ended up with an egg and a third.

"Which you would do, how?"

"I'm not sure, Mr. Stark. Very small eggs?"

This brought giggles from the other students. And, mercifully, the
bell.

"You'll also notice, Miss Barnes, that your other measurements got
bigger, and the number of eggs got smaller."

"Well, in that case," said Irene, "I'll have to reconsider."

"You do that. See you all tomorrow."

Silence. Blessed silence. He even relaxed, just a little.

He looked up from his desk at the footsteps in the otherwise silent
classroom.

"You've survived?" asked a female voice.

"Apparently."

"Jean Cotton. I teach in the classroom across the hall. You've
managed to control an unruly group of girls rather well."

"Crowd control. My specialty. Clyde Stark is the name, by the way."

"And?"

"Titters. I hate it when the class titters."

"Well, it's a school for girls. You have to expect that," said Jean.

"I guess."

"You've been here before. You seem familiar," said Jean.

"Last week." As the perpetual visitor, he was used to not being
recognized.  "About once a month, give or take, all year," he
remarked. Jean was one of those women who, after being married for
eight years, would look at her husband of a morning and ask, "Remind
me what your name is again?"

"Ah," was what she said this time.

Clyde was left to wonder how many of his students would bother to
remember his name. At least nobody had tried to hit on him for extra
credit. Yet.  If Mrs. Gilmore's illness went on long enough, someone
would. The thought made his skin crawl. The sad thing is that each
girl thought it was an original idea. As, for that matter, would
Ms. Cotton, when it occurred to her, in not many days' time. Not
even remembering that she'd tried it before, just last spring.

He thought he'd go home and try that Norwegian almond torte, scaled
up by a third.