[headcases diary entries - example e] (1st draft)

[headcases: a short story collection] hi i keep thinking about this story i wrote, my own story, i think its my fav in my stupid fucking short story collection which is more of a novella collection :|

EXAMPLE E

Gossip (n.)

Old English godsibb "sponsor, godparent," from God + sibb "relative" (see sibling). The sense was extended in Middle English to "a familiar acquaintance, a friend, neighbor" (c. 1300), especially to women friends invited to attend a birth, later to "anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk" (1560s).

The sense was further extended by 1811 to "trifling talk, groundless rumor." Similar formations are found in Old Norse guðsifja, Old Saxon guþziff.

- The Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com)

Mid-August is a cruel time, made crueler by the events of ten years ago, so ingrained in my muscle memory that I still wake up at five every day this week, ready to teach. This is a journal meant to chronicle those nine months in 2008 that ruined my life in the early hours when I cannot fall back asleep. I still struggle with denial. I believe that there’s something I could have done to prevent it. I had received an offer to switch to eighth grade English early in the summer, but I turned it down. I was worried I wasn’t good enough for the older kids. I was still self-conscious about my teaching abilities, even at forty. It turned out I was far too good for the satanic sixth graders of 2008. I could have taught grad students. I could have gone through with transferring to another Catholic school—one without a rumor about being built on top of an Indian burial ground. But I did none of this. I chose to do my best, like every teacher I have ever met has. This is something I want to get through my head so maybe next August, I can sleep through the early hours of the morning. I did my best with the tasks I was given in the past, and there is nothing I could have done better.

Mid-August on the south side of Des Moines, Iowa. One day, the children of the state are an amphitheater that sings and laughs ceaselessly from the state fairgrounds. The fair is a farce: a Disneyland on legs that will pack up and gather dust within the week. The change from the fairgrounds to the school grounds made some kids change from Jekyll to Hyde. Mitchell and I used to walk around the fair on Sunday when we both still taught at the school, me as an English teacher and him as the chaplain’s deacon. We would people watch at the midway, seeing all the kids at their peak before they returned to their glum, sleep-deprived shells on Monday. We liked witnessing the stark difference in the kids from one day to the next. It made us laugh.

Things were different in 2008, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. I usually blame it on a new generation of parents emerging, their kids teetering on the brink of teenagehood for the first time. They refused to sit still, moved, wrote, and spoke with a twinkle in their eye, because they knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway. It was deliberate defiance. ‘Treat me like you’d treat your mother,’ the kindergarten teachers would tell their kids. ‘You see me as much as you see her.’ These kids did the opposite. Defiance in every breath, every blink of an eye. No other teacher experienced behavior to this degree. Don’t you see? They broke me down deliberately, day after day, until I had no choice. I believe everybody has a right to protect themselves in this country when they feel they are in danger. I can say it now: there is nothing I could have done better as a victim of this cruelty. Yes—I was made a victim from day one, from the time those kids came in from the blacktop and wrestled for their seats. The gleam in Syed‘s eyes was there on that first day and it spread throughout the class, throughout the school year. It said one word and one word only: enemy.

Catholic school kids were always more manageable. I had worked in a public school for three years before working at Saint Isidore. The classes had been double the size. There were never enough desks. The sight of kids writing with their elbows on the floor drove me crazy. Catholic school kids had uniforms and ten years of experience with the fear of God. They went to Church twice a week, if not to pray, then to practice being silent. You were expected to tell them to tuck in their shirts and unroll their skirts. The kids expected you to, too, no matter how unruly they were. You could raise your voice and they would shut up without snickering, because their fears of you were layered. You could send them to the principal’s office or to the priest, who could really get them to cry.

Syed was fighting for a desk in the back row with a loud, fat girl with asthma, Reisha. She was crammed on the inside of the chair while Syed struggled to get his skinny ass on half the seat. Reisha rocked the desk, trying to butt Syed onto the floor. They thought it was recess. I knocked my yard stick on the desk and the two kids folded their hands and looked up at me. Reisha’s mouth slammed shut, but Syed just looked up with me with a toothy smile. He had perfect pearly teeth at twelve that made me think of my own years of braces, however many decades ago. He didn’t stand up from Reisha’s seat or correct his behavior or say he was sorry. He actually, believe it or not, held out his hand like he was giving me the sign of peace, and expected me to shake it.

“My name is Syed Lacewell,” he said. I glared at him—at the way he expected me to accept his sudden act of politeness. Who taught him to shift his tone like that?

“Syed Lacewell. I have a seat for you right at the front of the room, since it seems like you’re desperate for one.”

A few boys snickered. Syed’s smile vanished. He got up with his backpack and a quick glance back to Reisha and sat down at the desk in front of my podium.

I started each year the same way. The class went silent as I scrawled my name in cursive across the entire blackboard. I scraped the chalk harder as I went. Every year, a few of the kids would complain that they had forgotten their cursive and couldn't read what I wrote. A lot of the kids at St. Isidore who received financial aid didn’t know cursive at all, even at twelve. I would wordlessly place a homework sheet of cursive practice on their desk, due the next day.

“Now that we all know Syed Lacewell,” I said, “My name is Mrs. Helen Webster. I’d like to tell you a little bit about my background, so we can get to know each other easier.” I scrawled my name in a big arc. I wrote three words underneath, also in cursive: nurse, nun, and teacher.

“Can somebody read to me this first word?” I said to the class. A girl in a plaid skirt and braids raised her hand.

“Say your name when you answer, too, please,” I said. The girl looked familiar.

“Regina Aiello. The word says nurse, I think, because you’re the school nurse.” I realized where I recognized her—she came from a family of seven, and had four older brothers who looked the same as her.

“Good job, Regina. You might recognize me as the school nurse if you’ve ever visited me in my office downstairs. My background is in sports medicine and anatomy and physiology. That’s what I decided to major in my senior year of high school. But I’ve lived a lot of different lives. Who can read this second word?”

Syed’s hand shot up like a cannon. “It’s nun,” he said. “I can read it because the same letters are in the first word, -n- and -u-, nurse—”

“Good,” I said, “But settle down.” The kid was bouncing his legs and shaking the floor. I slid one of the cursive sheets onto his desk.

“Yes,” I said. “Believe it or not, I was a nun before I was ever a nurse! After college, I decided to move to Michigan to join a religious order called the Dominican Sisters of Mary,” I said.

“Did you have to pray all day?” said Reisha.

“Raise your hand, please, Reisha,” I said. “No, we didn’t have to pray all day. Prayer is a privilege that brings us closer to God. I spent about four hours a day in prayer: one in the morning, one before breakfast, one before dinner and one before bed. But the Dominican Sisters are mainly teachers,” I said. “I actually spent that time teaching boys and girls like you. And I actually only spent four years with the Sisters before I decided to move back home to Iowa, where I grew up. I moved to Ames, and I decided what I really wanted to do was teach English. How many of you were born in Iowa?”

About eighty percent of the class raised their hands.

“Good. So you see, living different lives—I’ve been a nurse, a nun, and I’m currently teaching English. But the theme of all these careers is the same. Right? What do all of these things have in common that weaves them together? I’ve always wanted to work in a school, and I’ve always wanted to work with kids. And these things,” I said, writing the word ‘passion’ on the board, “are my guiding passion. In other words, teaching, healing, and helping you guys become good people is my vocation. It’s what God has given me as my talent. So, this year is about recognizing what your guiding passions are. I want you to think: what has God given me as my talent? Am I a good artist? Do I want to sing in the student choir? Do I want to take care of children? As we read these stories, I want you to think: what is the theme of my life that God has chosen for me?”

I wrote the sentence, ‘What is my vocation/what is the theme of my life that God has chosen for me’ across the top of the blackboard. Underneath, I wrote: Due: 11/15.

“Your first personal essay is due on this date, three months from now. Today is August the fifteenth,” I said. “ I want you to be thinking ahead. You can start planning for this assignment now. If you just write one word a day, you’ll be finished in time for the due date. But I also really want you to think about this. I want you to sit in your bedroom and reflect on what your passions are. If you need my help with outlining or editing your essay, I’m more than happy to help you after school. Any questions?”

Syed raised his hand. “Do you want us to write this in cursive?”

“Great question. How many of you know how to read and write cursive?”

Only a few kids raised their hands—the identical twins, Jameson and Johnny, Reisha, and Regina. It was the meekest population of good cursive writers in a class that I had ever encountered. Had the kids from my old public school Freaky Friday-ed with the Catholic kids?

“Everyone who does not know how to write cursive—I expect you to know it by November, and your essays must be handwritten in cursive,” I said. “The four of you can choose cursive or print.”

Regina twirled her braids. Reisha raised her hand.

“Can we choose any passion we have in mind? Or do you just want us to choose from the ones you named?”

“I don’t see why you should stick to the examples I had in mind. I want you to use your imagination. What were you thinking of writing about, Reisha?”

“Well,” she said, suddenly shy. “I’m not totally sure yet. But I just love that show, Lost? I’m obsessed with it. Jeremy Davies is just so hot. Me and Ruthie have matching posters of him. I’ve got all of his movies on DVD. So I’m just having trouble thinking of what else to write about.”

“I would encourage you,” I said, “as well as all of you ladies, to think about things other than boys and TV. I know you’re all smarter than that.”

“Are you married, Mrs. Webster?” said a blonde girl in the third row.

“Your name?”

“Fanny Mulligan.”

“I am married, as a matter of fact. Does anybody know who I’m married to?”

Regina’s hand shot up. “This is an easy one,” she whispered to Jameson.

“Regina?”

“Is it Mr. Webster?”

“Who’s Mr. Webster?” said Syed.

“Mr. Webster,” I said, writing my husband’s name on the board, “is the deacon here at St. Isidore. He’s the man who helps out the priest during mass.”

“Oh,” said Syed. “That’s why I’ve never met him.”

“Do you not go to Church, Syed?”

“I get a pass,” he said. “I’m Jewish.”

Fanny started blabbing without raising her hand. “I have a question. So how did you get married if you didn’t think about boys?”

“Well,” I said, flabbergasted, “I suppose I did think about boys, but I got married once I was an adult. The brain is fully developed at age twenty-five. This is a special time for you kids, and a special place here at St. Isidore. You should take advantage of this learning environment,” I said.

Fanny whispered something to the shy girl beside her with a pixie cut that hid her eyes—Ruthie. Fanny mouthed the word virgin—a true ass at twelve years old. She snickered like I didn’t have the power.

“One more thing. Don’t jump start this assignment because you want to get it done. If you don’t know what your passion is yet, you might want to focus on your studies. You may hit the hard truth that you weren’t focusing on any of the things that help you grow before,” I said. “I’m looking at you, Fanny.”

Fanny narrowed her eyebrows and tilted her head to the side, deliberately avoiding my gaze for the last fifteen minutes of class. I had to smirk at how well I had read her. I just had everyone introduce themselves, went over the reading for next week and ignored her attitude. The high road. Some day, she would appreciate my tough love.

Some people, like the Pharisees in Jesus’ time, are so truth-avoidant that they will do anything to justify their sinful lives. I find that most of the people who hate change, who can’t be proven wrong, are children. The rest of the truth-avoidant people are adult children—people who never had the devil whacked out of them—people who were raised wrong. It is my vocation to raise generation after generation right until the Pharisees phase themselves out, weeded out to the far outskirts of the breeding pool until everyone is wired to make successful baptized babies and the Pharisees are forgotten or remembered as weak by the time they are gone.

⋯

Mitchell said a half-mass for a few of the teachers every day at four p.m. He still does, actually. Just scripture and homily—mostly the how-tos of impressing the Commandments on children. I usually had time for it if I had wrapped up my lesson plans. That first week, I just wanted it to be winter—for the sky to be pitch black when we drove home. The day spat heat incessantly, and I never had time for mass. I had to write a week of lesson plans after classes on cursive, complete sentences, and note-taking. The children were animals. ‘No pen,’ I said. ‘A sharpened number two pencil with a working eraser.’ The kids made constant mistakes, and I couldn’t stand their scribbles. Jameson’s notes were complete chicken scratch, like he was scared of putting pressure on his wrist. Fanny used pen, crayon; sometimes permanent marker. Fanny went to the principal. Syed had a pencil that worked too well, doodling over every inch of the margin: clowns and dogs and guns and comic panels. His drawings disgusted me and I had to show them to Mitchell.

“Do you think I should call his parents?” I said on the drive home, the sun still boiling like it was noon. “I mean, some of these drawings…they’re scaring me.” I explained to him that I was more worried for the kids’ safety than anything. It was my job to report any warning signs I encountered before a boy developed into a bully. Or worse—a Columbine shooter.

“And that’s commendable of you,” he said. “But there’s a line between boys being boys and criminal behavior. What do these drawings look like?”

“I can show you. I brought some of his homework home. Lots and lots of guns. Macho-looking superheroes with guns and crossbows. Attention to detail. Lots of ‘BOOM!’ and ‘DEAD!’. He likes to draw the members of KISS.”

“What’s this kid’s name?”

“Syed Lacewell.”

“Syed? I know Syed.”

“Has he…been sent to Father Andrew’s office before for anything?”

“No. He’s just a very curious kid. He likes to come in for the last fifteen minutes of staff mass so he can ask me questions after. You haven’t noticed him before?”

I thought about how I hadn’t been to staff mass in the past week. “I guess I haven’t,” I said. “I didn’t know the students were allowed to attend.”

“Of course the kids can attend,” Mitchell laughed. “They just don’t want to be in Church any more than their already forced to. It makes me appreciate kids like Syed. Just naturally curious about learning. Non-judgemental. I thought all the boys turned judgemental the summer before middle school. Not this kid,” he said. “Unless he’s just messing with me.”

“I thought he was Jewish,” I said.

“He is,” he said. “But like I said: naturally curious. I wouldn’t worry about the drawings. Sounds like he’s just being a kid.”

“I wonder if he’s interested in converting,” I said. A swell poured forth in my heart, and I suddenly felt a tinge of hope for the school year. The last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said. If it was possible—which it was—then I could keep the hope for Syed and his friends alive in my heart.

I raised this hope up. I raised it like those kids’ futures were my own. Which is why it crushed me so bad when they all came crashing down on top of me.

Before we moved out of Des Moines, two towns away from the nearest school district, we lived in a cul-de-sac of identical two-floored brown houses with the largest yard in the neighborhood, next to a liquor, tobacco, and food mart with a man-made pond to the back. We had a red-wine painted, Italian-themed kitchen, a baby blue bathroom with a blue light that illuminated the toilet water, and a nursery that served as a storage room. Mitchell had gone to art school before he had recognized his love for the Church service, and he had painted the whole house in the month after we bought it. The storage room was dandelion yellow, with a row of ducklings parading around the perimeter of the floor. There was a dusty crib and a cat-shaped area rug; old textbooks from college. Boxes and boxes of pre-thrift store crap. The windows were south-facing, which made me sad every time I thought about how perfect the light would be if the curtains weren’t always drawn.

In the early days of our relationship, we would talk up trying for a baby. I had never been to the gynecologist; I thought there was something I had not atoned for, something wrong with me. Then the second doctor, a woman, came into the room and I told her I understood. Still, it took a long time before I could accept it: before I stopped praying to Sarah and Ann for it to happen miraculously. Mitchell started talking up adoption when I would cry.

“We can start saving up,” he said. “We don’t need a baby that looks like us. A child is a child.” One day, I came home to a large mason jar on the table with the words ‘Adoption Fund’ written on the lid. There were forty dollars in it already. Our conversations switched from ‘would he have your eyes or my eyes?’ to conversations about concrete babies that already existed on the internet. It was nice to not have to wait to see what they looked like: that way, you could choose an adopted name that matched their face. ‘If he has blue eyes, we’ll take him home. And that one has the cutest curls. How is he from Ghana with eyes like that? Filter out all the kids over one, though.’

Mitchell would talk about wanting a boy, since now we had the privilege of choosing the perfect child that fit our type of household. He talked about how the boy would share his interests all the same. He would talk with our dialect because he would talk to us and his new grandparents. He would be with safe people who would encourage him to play baseball and football. He would run track in high school like my husband did. He would take him fishing; get him a dog and teach him how to build a doghouse. My husband would teach the boy to laugh like him, and I chuckled when I thought about how sweet my man was, wanting a mini-me.

“These kids are all under a year old. They won’t even remember a time before you were their mother. That whole year will just disappear from their memory, and he’ll be your child all the same.”

“But there is a psychological component to nursing from your mother during the first year of your life. He will have never had skin-to-skin contact with me as a newborn,” I said. “It doesn’t make a huge difference…but it does make one.”

A couple years went by. We had to break open the jar to replace the car’s transmission one winter. The income slowed: some change for a coffee here; twenty dollars in birthday money there. Eventually, we accepted that the jar would be half-empty on some days and half-full on others. But it would never be enough. At least not for a very, very long time. We were both teachers at a private middle school, after all: more devoted to the Church than anything.

I just couldn’t accept that the Church could not give me a child. Jesus gives all of us crosses to carry across our lives. I just never expected mine to be so heavy. I prayed to God a lot, telling him to please get back to me one day, to tell me that I would be promised a child in heaven. The child would be born from my body and unborn, someone else’s and mine, and I would give birth to her over and over in the ether as a reward. If God was real and if God was good and he saw me carrying my cross—and this was proven—then He would make sure I got my just reward.

But we never stopped looking online at the adoption sites before bed. It didn’t matter that the babies we were looking at were going to get scooped up years before we could save up enough to afford them. We just liked to ogle. Mitchell passed by a lot of the baby girls without reading the descriptions. I understood why—why wouldn’t a man want a son? He wanted to have a friend he could teach everything to; to mold in God’s image regardless of that unbaptized first year. In spite of it, actually. I didn’t blame him for rolling over and falling asleep once I took the laptop to start looking at the baby girls.

I think that more real Catholics should consider adoption. To be fruitful and multiply has a lot of different meanings. I have learned to think about my infertility more optimistically. It’s rather egotistical and worldly to want a child that looks like you. For many women, getting pregnant is as simple as forgetting a condom one night. Easy is the right word. And God did not choose me to be easy. I like to think that I can rise above the original sin of Adam and Eve, like Mary and the saints. That some of us are not condemned to have sex to have children, and that is holy.

It is more difficult to adopt a child—for behavioral reasons, but mostly for financial ones—but in some ways, it is more holy to give a child a Christian life they would have never experienced otherwise. Under your guidance, which is under the guidance of God, they are safe. It’s basic math. Sometimes I think of the tens of thousands of kids on the adoption sites before Mitchell and I narrowed them down by age and intelligence, eye color and background. The thirteen year old boys with cleft lips; the girl missing a foot. And the fact is, until they are chosen by God to come live in my household, they probably won’t be protected, in this life or the next. I just have to pray that they will find their way.

I would dream, always, about my dream girl of the week. The last girl I saw before I put the laptop away for the night. She was always Chinese and always wore her school uniform. She even slept in it. I wanted a daughter who was smart even more than she was polite. Who would sit and read quietly after dinner when I slipped her a book. I loved slanted eyes and round faces: little girls who always looked like they were too sleepy to get into any trouble. Like cats who slept in the sun twenty hours a day. Perfectly cut black hair like a baby doll. She would love it if I took her to the salon, if any of my dreams took place outside of the house. A girl who was also my daughter, who would enlighten me in ways I could never enlighten myself, because as an innocent child all she did was read and go to school. When I woke up from these dreams, I felt they were prophecies of what God was bound to give me. I started waking up earlier with a spring in my step. And even now, when a little Chinese girl appears to me in my dreams, I feel that she is my daughter. Now that I am too old to adopt a child, I know she is the daughter that will be gifted to me after I die.

⋯

Mid-September. I had taken my class to the book fair on Friday as a surprise treat. Most of them didn’t have any money. I gave a lecture on how this was a lesson to always be prepared in the real world. When the kids became high schoolers, I told them, it was important to prepare for adulthood by always having their wallets on them. Driving permits, cash, that sort of thing.

That Monday I woke up early with the urge to bake some cookies. I was reminded of my mother, who would wake me up on the weekends by having something in the oven. I felt worthless in comparison, with only half of her genes. What was the rest of my body composed of—straight nervousness? I got to work with the electric mixer, even running to the store next door for some M&Ms. The kids would appreciate a little color, I thought. It was on theme, since they were reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

I walked into the classroom on-time with two tins of cookies. Regina came in first and complimented me on the smell of my room.

“Do you have a candle lit, miss? I love scented candles. My mom owns the Bath and Body Works in the mall.”

She was sucking up to me. I was caught off guard by her; I remember not smiling back because I noticed she was wearing blush.

“I made cookies for the class, actually. Take one. But take a napkin first.”

She thanked me and hurried to her seat. The rest of the students filed in and took a cookie and a napkin with an energetic thanks. Syed Lacewell was the last to enter, a minute after the bell. I knew the kid didn’t have a real reason to be late.

“Where’s your hall pass?” I asked him. He gave me his yellow slip and I slid a cookie onto his desk in return. Three napkins.

“I could have sworn I saw you running around the field with Johnny and Canaan ten minutes ago.” Canaan was Syed’s seventh-grader friend who was built like a high schooler. “Johnny was here on time. Why weren’t you?”

“It’s written on the slip.”

“Are you too scared to tell the class?”

“No,” he said, rolling his eyes at me. “It’s ‘cause I slipped on the pavement and scraped my knee. I was waiting for you in the nurse’s office, but then I realized you weren’t coming, so I got a Band-Aid myself and went upstairs.” He crossed his arms.

I laughed at him.

“Syed,” I said, “I can’t be in two places at once. You know I’m always up in my classroom at this time. Any other time of the day, sure, you know to go to the nurse’s office to get a Band-Aid from me. But I could have just given you one of the bandages I keep in my desk. The rest of your friends were looking for you. Why didn’t Johnny go with you to the nurse’s office, too?”

Syed looked back at Johnny. Johnny was blushing. He shrugged his shoulders like a cartoon.

“I guess Johnny just knows better than you,” I said. “He probably thought you were right behind him so the two of you could actually get the wound cleaned up here. You know. Where you could actually find me.” I don’t know why I was so mad. It just felt indicative of every way the kids of the 2008 sixth grade chose to fail. In the back of his mind, I knew Syed simply just wanted to be late to class. Hang out in an empty office for a while, all innocent, secretly dinking around. Thinking of guns. The best method of getting a kid to correct these supposedly-innocent instances of dirty behavior in the future was to give it to them straight up. These eleven year old kids were kids, but they weren’t children. I would tell them to use their brains, because I knew that they knew better. And that’s what I told Syed.

Then I went to my desk drawer and took out a bag of wet wipes, a bandage, and Neosporin. I placed these items on my podium.

“Lift up your pant leg,” I said. Syed just looked at me.

“You heard me.”

He rolled up his shorts to the knee. There was a little dirt on his skin still. A pale bandage was perfectly placed over the wound. I counted to three in my head and ripped it off. Syed’s leg flinched. The class was silent. Most of them were good friends with Syed, girls and boys. A few of the girls who didn’t like him could have snickered, but didn’t. I had command of the whole room. They listened to me snicker. I wiped off the dirt, sprayed the cut, and placed a new bandage that was triple the size.

“And you told me you got a Band-Aid yourself,” I said. “Next time, come to me. Thank you, Syed. Believe it or not, you were a good example for your class. I think this might be the perfect time to mention that our hygiene unit is coming up next week. We’re going to be discussing some sensitive topics that pertain to your growth during the next few years of your life. During our class times next week, I’ll be meeting with the girls in our regular classroom for lessons, and Mr. Livingston will be taking the boys down to the gym. You’ll need to leave class today with a permission slip. Talk with your parents about the curriculum; read it over. I need to know which of you are exempt before the lessons start, so these slips are due by Friday.”

Now the girls were whispering. All of the kids knew that hygiene was a code-word for sex ed. We wouldn’t be discussing cleaning skinned knees, but we would be discussing blood.

Syed wasn’t listening. I had lost him. He was somewhere contemplating everything he had done wrong. Trying to focus on his breathing. His eyes were misted. God, had I been there. I felt for him. Usually I regretted saying one thing to someone per week, when afterward, I saw their eyes mist over. But that was what prayer was for. But truly—and I wanted him to know this, with the deepest love—the hardest contemplation would bring the best growth. I knew from this day on, he would clean his knees meticulously. He would be clean, and he would be better because of it. I wanted these kids to be better for knowing me.

I could not stop thinking about it: how I just wanted these kids to be better for knowing me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Syed’s cookie. He didn’t take a bite of it throughout the whole class. After the bell rang he took it, sniffed it, wrapped it in the napkins and threw it in the trash on the way out. But it was not the trash—there was a lump in the recycling bin, spreading food crumbs over the paper like spider babies. The deep ungratefulness. The complete refusal. And I had a terrible thought.

Would some kids never get better? Were some of them made to only get worse?

⋯

Syed was the first to hand in his permission slip. He came in the next morning and placed it on my desk without looking in my eyes. He was the only kid who got it signed by both of his parents. His father had made a second line at the bottom to write his signature. The mother had written Dr. clearly before her own scribbled name. The sense of hope came back. I knew he wanted to do better.

“Syed,” I said. “Look at me.”

He looked at me in the eyes like he was looking at the sun.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I just want you to work to the best of your ability.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Webster. I know.”

I smiled. “It’s good to know that. And don’t forget it.”

He nodded and went to his desk. He didn’t seem any less sheepish after our talk that morning. I was worried about his confidence, because I felt like it was affecting my focus as a teacher. It was hard to find my words when I knew I didn’t have everyone’s ears. I was trying to discuss the end to The Giver, where the main character leaves the only colorless dystopia he has ever known, only to see a house at Christmastime, filled with warmth and family and color. He hears music for the first time and the book ends.

“The Christmas tree that Jonas sees at the end of the novel…” I said. To me, it was about how freedom of spirituality was a necessary element of sanity. But I wanted the kids to discover the theme of the ending themselves. I didn’t know where my sentence was going.

“I usually like to read this book at the end of November, so you guys can present your projects closer to Christmas,” I said. “But I want you to think extra hard about the significance of this scene anyway. Even though we’ve established that the ending isn’t concrete, like the end of a poem is, there’s still a reason why the author chose to end with such a… specific metaphor.”

Syed was bouncing his leg so hard that his desk was jostling my podium. He was entranced by a doodle of a snake he was drawing. I remembered that he was Jewish and probably wouldn’t relate to the image the metaphor posited at all. Maybe he thought there was no reason to pay attention; that he had garnered all he could from the book. I blushed a little.

“I want you to take this time to finish your projects if you haven’t already. Pull them out, get your glue sticks and paper cutters out, and get to work. There’s extra construction paper on my desk if you need any, but please, be careful with your color choices. No black and orange.”

I told the kids to be quiet even if I was out of the room, which was a threat that they never took seriously. I wanted the kids to have some quiet working time because I knew they needed it—some of the kids hadn’t even finished the book—but I really just wanted to talk to Syed. I felt like something was off with him on that day and I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t entirely my fault.

“Syed,” I said, “Can I ask you something in the hallway for a second?”

He looked at me confused, like he was worried he had forgotten whatever he did wrong.

“I just want to talk,” I said.

He rolled his poster back up and stepped outside.

“I’m sorry about our interaction yesterday,” I said. “I really regret how insensitive I was. But I want you to know that when I do things like that, I’m only looking out for you. It’s just my way of giving you the push in the right direction, whether it’s your health or your grades or your behavior. When you look back, you’ll thank me.”

“I know that,” he said. “You already told me that. All of us. That students like to come back and thank you for turning them from boys and girls into men and women.” He used air quotes, but not in a sarcastic way like all the kids did. That was my exact quote from the first day of class.

“I believe you,” he said.
“Thank you, Syed,” I said. My heart flooded with relief. “Thank you for saying that. Can I tell you something?”

He nodded.

“Some parents have tried to get me in trouble before. Have you heard of the phrase ‘helicopter parent’?”

He nodded and grinned.

“Those are the worst kinds of parents. I always get one or two a year who just decide to hold a grudge against me. Usually moms with only one kid. But those are the kinds of people who I’m trying to raise you kids not to be. I want you to be smart, steadfast, and strong. I don’t think you need to be protected from the truth. I want you to hear exactly what I’m thinking, because I see you guys as equals. If I’m not honest with you, I’m making you weak. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That makes sense. I like when my parents are honest with me. Otherwise, I just feel like a little kid.” He clearly wanted to go back inside the classroom. His arms were bumpy and he was eyeing his sweatshirt behind the window.

“Exactly,” I said. “You’re not a kid. Before we go back in, there’s something else I wanted to ask you, now that we know that you can be as honest with me as I am with you. Right?”

“Right.”

“Is everything okay at home, Syed?”

He blushed, clearly taken aback. He glanced around the hallway. My instinct was he must have been lying right off the bat.

“Yes!” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Are you sure? Because you can be honest with me.”

He just shook his head. “There’s nothing I can think of.”

“Was there a reason why you didn’t eat my cookie? I worked very, very hard on those for you, you know. And it hurt my feelings when you threw it away.”

He blushed hard. “I can’t have any gluten. I was just worried it had gluten.”

I sighed. “I just had a feeling, Syed. And usually when I have a feeling about one of you kids, there’s at least a partial truth to it. So I just want you to think. And I want you to remember that I’m here for you, always.”

Syed looked down at the floor. He was feeling the goosebumps on his arms.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I opened the classroom door and just as we walked in, the bell rang. The kids bustled, tying new rubber bands around their folded posters. The kids had actually spent their time getting creative. Reisha had shared a pack of foam stickers and some glitter glue with the class that she was sorting into her pencil bag. Two boys were sword fighting with their finished cylinders. I broke them up and made them sit down and put their stuff in their bags silently before they left. One of the boys was Johnny, and Syed waited for him at the door as the boy stuffed all his homework into his backpack, folderless. The boys were going to be late to science class.

“What did she want to talk to you about?” Johnny whispered as they left the room. I could hear them from my desk.

“I don’t even know,” Syed said.

“Was it about Regina?”

“No,” Syed said. His voice whined. “She just wanted to ask me about my mom and dad.”

“Your mom and dad? Why?”

“Hell if I know,” Syed said. Now he sounded like a teenager. “She wasn’t making sense. You wanna know what my mom says?”

“Not really.”

“She says sometimes, nuns have to leave their nun house because they go crazy and get possessed by the devil.”

“Bullshit,” said Johnny. Syed laughed.

“Think about it,” he said. “Have you ever heard of a nun who just stops being a nun one day?”

Were all children such loud whisperers? Moving and babbling with no tolerance or temperance like babies? At what point would the miracle of young adulthood slam into them like a wall?

The door to the science classroom slammed.

⋯

Syed needed to be watched in a way his mother couldn’t handle. The best way to find evidence of the nature of something is to collect an abundance of data. I took up recess duty Monday through Friday and watched the way he acted like a nature documentarian. It wasn’t enough to collect offhand evidence. I needed to see how he was most of the time to know that something wasn’t right with him in a way that only those who dug deeper could see. Did he run or did he walk most of the time? What kind of jokes did he laugh at? Did he sneak off without a game of hide and seek in play; did he stay in one area like in the four square court, or zip back and forth out of sight?

Syed was a skinny, gangly kid with a lot of energy, like a weasel or a smiling kickline. He was a natural leader. He looked like a short fifth grader or a tall fourth grader. He usually had a buzzcut that still formed tiny tight curls. He had a head that was too small for his toothy smile, and big bold scleras that contrasted with his honey tea eyes. I’ve already mentioned those teeth. But he liked to juggle his potential energy in sprints and zooms, like a cross between a frog and a German Shepherd. He was quiet when he was causing trouble and always quiet when he was indoors. When he was starting a game, which was usually soccer, he would yell new directions that he made up off the top of his head. He never displayed that kind of casual inventiveness in class. I wondered if it only pertained to his games. He was the team captain, and all the kids listened and followed the new rules. Sometimes they had to play soccer with hockey sticks, or a football, or both. Sometimes they could only score goals backward or while doing the macarena. The games were always co-ed, unless the girls were busy talking. He had as many girl friends as boy friends—friends who were boys—and I still wasn’t sure what his relationships were with those girls. It gave me a shiver. Still, Johnny, Jameson, Canaan, and Syed would always spread around the field, asking everybody if they wanted to join the game. ‘We just need three more players to start a game!’ They’d yell. Always excitable. Always screaming.

I had recess duty with Rebecca Bauer, the sixth and seventh grade science teacher, on Mondays and Wednesdays. It was common for the teachers to exchange notes on kids in the lounge or on the playground. Hell, even in the faculty bathroom. Who was being a little shit as of late? Whose parents were divorcing? I liked to stay proper and quiet, but Rebecca was quite the opposite. ‘How do we stay sane if we can’t talk about them?’ she would say. I knew if I needed more information about Syed, I could talk to her.

I waited until the soccer kids circled the playground, Syed at the front of the pack, so I could make it seem like I wasn’t already curious about him. He had caught my eye in the moment. Syed yelled the rules of the game to the whole playground. The team had to kick the ball up the hill from the lower field, around the playground, to the upper field and back before scoring a goal. It was a part of a soccer tournament that had been going on for a week, with the rules getting progressively harder. Syed screamed like a toddler and kicked the ball through the air to Reisha, spraying up wood chips and landing awkwardly on his side. The other team intercepted the ball. Syed’s team was made up entirely of girls.

“Syed!” Rebecca called. “Let’s keep it down.”

He got up and kept running, his knees coated in dirt.

“What are your thoughts on Syed?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He never sits still.”

I felt validated. I was talking a little too loud. “I know, right? He never, ever stops moving. It’s the leg bouncing that gets me. And he doodles up and down the margins of every assignment. Where am I supposed to write his grade?”

“I thought I got him to stop the doodling first week by threatening to give him a zero if there was even a single smiley face,” she said. “I thought that I did something. Turns out, he was just writing words in cursive up and down his legs during class. I had to make him scrub off the ink in the bathroom.”

“Cursive,” I said. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Now I just let him doodle on his notebook paper in class. As long as it’s not on his assignments, right? He says it helps him pay attention.”

“I don’t know,” I said, remembering Syed waiting for me in the nurse’s office. “It sounds like another excuse to me. If he really knew he needed to stop, he could.”

Rebecca thought for a second. “I thought about pushing it further,” she said. “Letting his parents know the doodling—it borders on obsessive, sometimes, you know? But then I decided not to. Like you said. If he wanted to stop, he would. I think the ball is in his court now. If he wants to be on my page, sit up straight, get good grades and have a good future—that’s his problem, right? His future. Or he can be a graffiti artist with a criminal record.” She took a sip of her coffee. “At a certain point you just have to say…it’s not my problem. It’s his.”

She had quoted me wrong, but I just let her. “If it’s not disrupting the class and your teaching, it’s fine, right? But it gets to the point where it does disrupt me.”

“Now that’s a problem,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“The energy. The leg bouncing shakes my podium like a mini earthquake. He sits right at the front. I thought that would get him to focus—I knew he would be a problem from day one—but he’s lost in his own universe. He’s like a black hole. He doesn’t answer questions—he just goes off on tangents. Random facts he knows that barely connect with the material. He brings recess back inside for all the other kids. I just have to thank god we have class in the morning instead of the afternoon. Otherwise…he’d be a trainwreck.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thank the Lord God.”

“Do you know his parents at all?” I said. “Have you talked with them?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s strange. I never see them at pickup.”

“Me neither.” I made a mental note to watch Syed get picked up that day. “When did you get to talk with them?”
“They came into my classroom when they were touring the school in May. Nice people. I can’t tell you where they come from. Egyptian? Pakistani? Filipino? Usually I’m spot on with guessing. I think the mom is full and the dad is half. Whatever they are. Now that I think of it, the Dad might be fully Jewish because I remember him mentioning he was a Rabbi. He even wore that little cap on the tour.”

“A Rabbi?” I said. “I didn’t know Rabbis could get married.” I wondered if they had immigrated here. Where they had come from. Why I had never heard Syed’s voice at soccer games or his fists dominating Whack-A-Mole at the fair. It was like the family had sprang up out of nowhere, composed of a fully formed doctor, a religious leader, and theireir mentally disturbed spawn.

“And I didn’t know they chose to send their kids to Catholic schools,” she said. “He did mention the temple he works at is the one right up the street. It’s the closest school to his commute. But it must be a bit of a culture shock for him. You know, that could be contributing to his behavior.”

“I thought of that,” I said. “It is still September. If it’s all a matter of settling into a new environment, let’s hope it happens.”

“It usually does,” she said. “We make it happen.”

“And the mom? I’m so curious. All I know about her is that she's a doctor.”

“She’s an OB/GYN at the West Des Moines Medical Center. She’s been there for fifteen years now.” Rebecca blushed. “She’s my gyno, actually. Couldn’t have had my twins without her.”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. “Were they nice people?”

“Yeah. Very nice. A little odd. Very smiley. Didn’t blink all that much,” she said. “It’s weird the things you remember.”

I tried to imagine what Syed’s genes would look like uncombined. I wanted to move parent-teacher conferences up by two months.

“So why change schools now? Send him over to Des Moines middle.”

“I don’t know. I’ve stopped trying to mind-read parents. A lot of them went crazy a long time ago,” she laughed. “Imagine having to see these kids on the weekends. Or in the middle of the night.” She fake shivered. “I guess some parents just send their kids to Isidore for middle school to save money. Like Canaan’s parents. He’s also new.”

“I’m guessing Canaan actually has things to offer in class.”

“When he’s separated from the other boys, yes,” she said with a sigh. “If Syed and Canaan were in the same class…would it be trouble.”

“I don’t even want to imagine it,” I said. “I’ve got more than enough on my plate.”

A full plate and only one way to eat it; to crush my nausea. Like I said, I needed more data. It must be strange for him: a Rabbi father at home and a Catholic school. A doctor mom. Was she at home to take care of him? Why did his parents—probably his dad—never pick him up in front of the school like the other parents? What kind of home did they live in, exactly?

Fortunately, as educators, we are given all of these details to take care of your children to the best of our abilities. Phone numbers, email addresses; actual addresses. I thought it would be better to make a house call on my lunch break instead of after school. Otherwise, Mitchell might ask me what the hell I was doing. And then I would have to explain to him how I was collecting direct data on how to best help a challenging student of mine. Which is a good explanation—reasoning I would still act on to this day—but it doesn’t mean I wanted to complicate things by telling him.

The Lacewells lived in a forest-green trailer behind the Ephraim Reform Congregation. The temple was a two-minute drive from the school. I circled in and out the empty parking lot as my hour of lunch break dwindled. It was maddening watching the numbers skip back and forth, looking for 46 Hope Street with 44 to my left and 48 to my right. It took far too long for my eyes to see the mailbox behind the dumpster, the painted wood blending with a cluster of hickory trees. It made sense that they lived in a simple home. It was the way the painted exterior blended into the exterior like camouflage that made me think of war. I looked around for any signs of a voyeur. There was a closed fire exit at the back of the building. I imagined the Rabbi was busy inside. No sign of anything moving except for three red squirrels chittering against the dumpster. Red blending with red on green blending with green. There weren’t any windows on the south side of the temple—only appropriated stained glass panels on the sides and a commanding rose window above the entrance. A rusted gold plaque to the right of the entrance credited the window to Jewish architect Mendel Acker, who titled the window God’s Eye. The window always confused me, not only because I didn’t see why something so simple as a big, round piece of glass had to be titled like it was a piece of art, but why the architect had been inspired to give it a title that felt so earnestly sacreligious.

I only had fifteen minutes. I parked my car and ran behind the dumpster. I ducked behind the family’s AC unit, peeking out for any signs of someone moving behind the windows. I could see into two of the windows. My heart was racing. I kept waiting for someone to appear at the window—an older sibling I didn’t know about, or the mom on her day off—but no one came. I waited ninety seconds and no one came. Just one of the squirrels upside-down on a tree branch. The squirrels and I, more attentive to this home than his parents. There were no curtains and there was a window fan inserted into the window to my right. Everyone’s fans would be running until November. I walked in a crouch until I was against the side of the house. I said a prayer. The window slid up and the fan fell out with no pressure, arguably one handed, with me putting no weight on my wrist that was never the same after I broke it in high school.

I hoisted myself up and tumbled into the house, hitting the back of my neck on the wall somehow. I had the instinct to cry out for Mitchell to come comfort me before I remembered where I was. A poster fell off the ceiling and onto my head like a sheet. A scantily clad video game woman in a karate pose. I threw it off of me. The bedroom door was open. I quickly shut it and put the fan back in its place. Everything was undisturbed again. I let out a shaky breath and looked around.

I had fallen into Syed’s room. The space reeked of teenage boy. A stick of deodorant with the cap still on. The TV was still on from this morning or the night before, turned to static. The bed was made and the navy comforter matched the walls. His mother’s doing, no doubt. The dresser was open and messy. Sweatpants and t-shirts were put away nicely, but a lot of his outfits were off the hangers or barfed out onto the floor. There was a single suit and stained tie for events. Lots of costumes: superhero bodysuits, lightsabers, and even a Redcoat and a Roman soldier. He had too many costumes for the number of Halloweens he’d experienced in his life so far. I dug through the pile of half-worn costumes to the back of the dresser. There was a neat stack of books back there. My heart leaped. There was a fifth-grade Spanish textbook that he had never returned; an English dictionary. Both were labeled as belonging to the library of a public elementary school in Waterloo. The family had moved here in the past year, but not from anywhere other than Black Hawk county. I dug deeper and grabbed for the remaining books, one of which was one of ten copies of The Giver that I had lended to the students who failed to get theirs before we started reading. I cracked it open. I hadn’t forced the kids to hand in their copies in-between assignments, but they were supposed to annotate their books, using sticky notes if they were borrowing their copy. I had simply trusted them to do so. But now that I had access to one of the kids’ books, I knew it wouldn’t hurt to double check his work without him knowing. It would only give me more data as a teacher. It would give me a concrete idea of how much effort Syed was putting in on his end—if his failure came from a lack of caring rather than a need for academic assistance, like I suspected.

I cracked open the book and his bookmark fell out onto the floor, lodged loosely around page ten. “Shit,” I whispered, inserting it into a random page before realizing it must have meant that Syed had barely touched the book. I flipped through the pages. Only the first line of the book was underlined in pencil.

I placed the book on his bed instead of back in the closet and opened the door. I did a quick sweep of the house—bathroom, kitchen, master bedroom. Even a master bathroom. It was a deceiving trailer that looked rather nice from the inside. It was, regretfully, nicer than my house. The walls were painted with a uniform cream. There was a faux-granite countertop that extended into a bar area, complete with red-cushioned stools. A twelve-year-old living in the house, but no mess if you didn’t peek behind his door. There was a sprinkle of cinnamon and spices in the air. Hardly any signs of a child. A polished glass coffee table holding a sprig of cherry blossoms and Boston College Magazine. A Christian school yet again…had she gone there? Did she admire the way we taught? I knew Doctor Lacewell hired a housekeeper—I just wondered how many times a week they had her stop by. There was no way she had the time for all of this upkeep herself. A trailer home housekeeper, I thought, almost stopping to laugh at my own joke.

I wished I had brought a disposable camera, but I didn’t want anyone to have to develop the photos. Just in case I knew the man behind the counter and he decided to ask, ‘why do you have photos of a random family?’ So I had to memorize all the careful details instead, and make quick inferences based off of them.

A small television in Syed’s room and a mounted flat screen in the master bedroom. No television in the living room—just a large painting of a California beach, gold frame, Norman-Rockwell-esque. Did they not watch movies together—not spend time together? More pink flowers. Family photos on otherwise empty entertainment furniture—Syed as a baby, held by his mother while a pack of children swarm to see the new child. Excited cousins—a large extended family. She’s young and glowing. Syed precariously perched on top of a basketball hoop. Syed with the cap on his head. Sunglasses Syed, smiling with those teeth from a hotel pool. Or was it the ocean? Somewhere overseas? I was surprised to see Syed snuggling up to Mickey Mouse on more than one occasion. I saw a family that spent all their money on experiences rather than on their own home. I guessed they were young parents. ‘Fun’ parents. It wasn’t my place to judge how they spent their money—money that wasn’t mine—but it was a way of life that I was confused by as I walked through the home that was no more than 1,300 square feet. Where had they taken him, and what types of things had he been forced to witness out of his cardboard home? Had any of them corrupted him?

I got my answer in the master bathroom—the final room in the house. I had gotten less and less shy as I made my way through the house, pulling open every drawer in my sight. I thought the parents’ bathroom was where I would find the most damning evidence of how this child of mine was being nurtured, and I was right. Medications: his and hers Zoloft and Prozac. So their judgement was not entirely to be trusted. They probably did these things to fuel their own lack of happiness. Nothing but children’s melatonin for Syed. Nothing but fresh vegetables and homemade dumplings in the fridge. Apples and carrots and peanut butter for lunch boxes. At least they weren’t slipping anything down his throat that was making him this way. Could he have been getting into his parents’ medication? I heard horror stories on the internet of kids as young as seven trading pills for toys on the playground. I flipped through all the bottles: Tylenol, Advil, Benadryl, and calamine lotion. I got scared when I saw the children’s cough syrup. Then, I saw the lube.

I slammed the cabinet and started rifling through the drawers. That was when I scolded myself for not bringing my camera. Nothing, nothing, and then I pulled a little too hard on the knob and the drawer fell out, along with fifteen to twenty used pregnancy tests. I knew they were used because of the smell. Barely dried yet saved. They had probably been marinating in the drawer for a couple days. A little gross. I thought for a second about not touching them, just leaving them there, and then I scooped them up one by one and examined them before placing them carefully back in the box, determining their sex like I was the doctor. Most of them were inconclusive, but a good amount of them were positive. None were negative. Doctor Lacewell was pregnant.

I put the bathroom back in place and used the toilet. I thought about the lube and Syed and shuddered. The words witness and corrupt rotated in my head. The Lacewells getting their kid’s sex-ed permission slip in first—why the haste? Why the sharp…deviation? Regina’s mother and the twins’ parents had respectfully declined. I checked my watch: my break had ended thirty seconds ago. I chose to leave out the front door instead of the window so I wouldn’t hurt myself again. Home security systems weren’t really a thing at that time, but it wasn’t like I checked as I rushed out of the house, disturbed by what the house had shown to me, the unfamiliar ornaments and the wet secrets reminding me of cults on the news and breath down my neck.

I knew that something was wrong with the way Syed was being raised. Misbehavior didn’t just come out overnight. It came from parents with odd jobs, from sex, from girls and screens and strange congregational trailer parks. It came into the classroom. It came to the kids with good families like Regina and the twins; it came to girls with good grades like Reisha. It came to tell them that there was another way to live when there wasn’t.

⋯

Syed’s father picked him up at the back of the parking lot in a Toyota minivan that was the same color as their house. I couldn’t be sure it was his father, but I could see the clear silhouette of a large bald man in the front seat as Syed hopped in. The man let him sit in the passenger seat. I watched them from my upstairs classroom window. I wondered if the car had been next to the trailer home the whole time, blending in so well with the trees that I never even realized. I knew I couldn’t go back to their house anymore, but I desperately wanted to sit in on a family meal or a fly on the wall on the drive home. Was it normal to invite a family to talk about their child over coffee—in their own home? I had never heard of a teacher going over to a student’s house before to talk about their performance, but I couldn’t see why it couldn’t be done. I didn’t want to intervene—I just wanted the bigger picture to see how I could help.

This was what I remember thinking about while the kids gave their presentations on The Giver. I had instructed the kids so carefully on how to make a visually pleasing poster. Always mount your paper on a background, I would say endlessly. And remember to straighten your lines before you cut and glue. The kids took my advice too far and made these gaudy font nightmares using every color of the rainbow. Somehow, everything I said always ended up backfiring. The kids were smirking at Reisha’s project, who had glued an extra border behind every background. Her words were illegible behind all the rainbow glitter. They were playing a game with me. Reisha was the one who had handed out all the extra glue-on doodads from her art kit. She said her favorite part of the book was when the main character saw color for the first time, and that was why she added so much loud nonsense to her poster—because she loved colors. A new hypothesis emerged: had I been teaching a group of obese preschoolers instead?

“That’s great, Reisha, but next time, I’d like to see a lot more text on your poster board. It didn’t seem like you put a lot of thought into your words at all.”

Reisha looked me in the eyes like she was about to cry. I got that feeling of regret that I knew always came once a day after I said something and the tears welled up in someone’s eyes. I was always grateful that after it was over it would be time to pray and I wouldn’t have to feel that regret until I messed up the next day.

“I actually worked really hard on this, Mrs. Webster,” she said. “And I don’t appreciate what you said.”

She was trembling. The girls turned to face Reisha—to see if she was really about to cry—and the boys faced me to see how I would retort.

“I’m sorry I made you feel that way, Reisha. I remember being your age. I remember being sensitive when someone critiqued something I spent a lot of time on. But I want you to learn that a little bit of constructive criticism goes a long way. I want you to do better next time. Would it help if we talked outside of the classroom?”

“No, Ma’am,” Reisha said.

“Good. Because I actually want to specify this to all of you. When I ask you to make a poster for a final project, I’m not asking you to make a poster for art class. This is English. We write. We analyze. We take this time to develop our brains to learn how to critique the things we read in the real world. You don’t learn anything by sprinkling glitter around. In fact, it just distracts from how little work you may have put in.”

Reisha’s lip started trembling.

“May have put in,” I retorted. “These posters are like quizzes. You are to present the information you have learned and nothing else. And yes—I do want them to be well-designed. I want you to format your paragraphs evenly, with no white space and well-spaced borders. Leave it at that. Otherwise, it just looks—garish. Can anybody tell me what garish means?”

Syed raised his hand.

“Yes? Syed?”

The boy stood up and walked to the front of the classroom. He grabbed the chalk and wrote the word garish in cursive across the whole blackboard without connecting the letters. I don’t know why I let him finish.

“Garish,” he said.

“I asked you what it meant, Syed. Not to write it. It was a simple instruction.”

He smiled. “That’s the thing. I actually don’t know what it means. You’ve never taught us something so simple. You expect us to know these stupid vocab words that you don’t even teach us. Do you hear yourself when you speak?”

Reisha scrambled for her seat. I stumbled over my words. What the hell did he mean by that?

“Out,” I said to Syed. I spit. “Just get out.”

He put the chalk down and went to the principal’s office. The next day, everyone in the class had shown their presentations except for Syed. I had given most of the kids better grades than they deserved, simply for not calling my teaching style stupid. How I reacted on this day was my fault. I had stayed up particularly late the night before on adoption forums, reading Chinese adoption success stories. Maybe it was the tiredness. Maybe it was the fact that I knew my dreams were impossible to achieve until I got to heaven, no matter how hard I tried, and Syed refused to let me push him toward his own dreams in a sheer pursuit of rebellion. I was getting nowhere with these kids, which made me feel like I was regressing. I needed them to improve by leaps and bounds by the end of the year—otherwise, it would reflect on my abilities as a teacher. At least Syed gave me the idea to start giving daily vocabulary lists to the class. If anything, their insults could become more loquacious.

I let Syed present at the top of class. I could tell he hadn’t prepared as I watched the kids trickle in. He had unmanaged sweat under his shirt, and he was bouncing all of his energy from one leg to the other.

“How do you think you did?” Jameson asked him. The twins had come over to sit on his desk before I started class.

“No clue,” said Syed. “I only saw you and Reisha go yesterday. I like to go last, but I like to see what everybody else has to say before I talk.”

Johnny nodded. “If you want, I can show you my poster before class. I’m pretty sure I got an okay grade on it.”

“I thought you handed yours in.”

“Shit,” Johnny swore.

“You’ll be totally fine,” Jameson said. “As long as you read the book. It’s not like it’s a quiz grade.”

Syed, bug-eyed, just put a silent finger to his lips.

Jameson was right—The Giver project didn’t count for much of their grade. But grades didn’t matter to me as much as the kids thought they did, or as much as I thought they mattered to me when I got heated. What mattered to me was that the kids were faithful. Even Reisha, who could barely spell, was frantic about getting tutoring from me for every essay. She fucked up, she got reprimanded for her childlike silliness—but she smiled and nodded with her arms behind her back when it happened, like an adult. She tried. When she failed, she treated the acknowledgement of her failure with respect. The sixth grade class of 2008 had too little faith: in me, in themselves, and in God’s will. Kids like Syed only had faith in getting away with their lies. I was more thankful than ever that I had been in Syed’s bedroom that same week. Syed could say whatever he wanted in the next five minutes. He could embarrass himself in front of the class as much as he wanted. He could save his reputation at the last second and come up with something eloquent. No matter what, his fate was predetermined. I had proof that Syed had not read the book he was presenting on. I had taken the book he was holding and had thrown it on his bed as a reminder of his wrongdoing when he came back home, and he still had not read it. His mind was made up. I had not predetermined his failing grade as much as he had.

I wrote the letter F in the column as Syed went up to the podium with his white poster. He unfurled it and stuck it onto the blackboard with magnets. The entire project was handwritten and illustrated in black sharpie. No printer paper. Spiky black marks bordered skinny paragraphs of text, with three words to a line, all in cursive. It was incoherent and colorless, like something you walk by quickly at the MoMA. Syed refused to connect the cursive letters to each other, making the words impossible to read. At the center of the poster, skewing all the paragraphs to the corners, was a realistic drawing of a face looking up at a Christmas tree.

“Well, I guess I don’t have a lot to say about the themes and stuff that everybody hasn’t already said,” he said, clapping his hands together. “And the favorite scenes you guys talked about last class…those were my favorite scenes, too. Escaping from the town on a sled and stuff.”

I don’t know who he thought he was fooling. I was fuming. Everybody knew he had missed most of the presentations yesterday, especially me. He was just talking to make himself sound good—and it was working. Regina had her hands on her makeupped cheeks and was leaning off her seat.

“I guess I wanted to talk about something that I hadn’t heard anyone mention before. I was really fascinated by the utopia in the book. I read online that because the people in the book are unable to learn from their mistakes, like killing babies that aren’t good enough, they aren’t really living in a utopia. Which I think is true. But I’ve still been thinking about what it would be like to live there. In the real world, differences are allowed, but everyone still treats you worse when you’re different. Like for example, my dad and I get laughed at by people whenever we wear our yarmulkes to the grocery store on Shabbat. This man one time yelled that people with our skin color wear turbans instead. So my dad still wears his, but I don’t wear mine outside anymore. We’re supposed to respect each other’s differences, but people are unable to. It starts as soon as they see you. I think if I lived in a utopia, nobody would have any memories that we were ever different. I wouldn’t have to do things in secret or hide those parts of myself, because nobody else would remember why they hated me so much. My grand-papa likes to use the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss,’ and I’ve been thinking about that a lot, so I wrote that as the main theme of the book that I noticed.” He pointed to three fat cursive words.

“The people in the book can’t learn anything about their pasts, but what if they were more bad in the past? They couldn’t get over the ways people like me were different. Like the book says, there was way more death and baby-killing in the before-times. So they washed all those memories away and started fresh. In a way, it’s better to think of a world in which people are subdued. That’s what I think the lack of color represents. People disrespected the gift of people being different, so God took it away from them. Kind of like the Tower of Babel, but the opposite.”

The classroom was silent and attentive. Syed cleared his throat. The vowels in the word orator made my brain ache, but it kept repeating the mouth-sound. Orator. Worse—rabbi.

“So, I guess, my question for the class is: did you think about the book the same way I did? Did you picture yourself living in it? And did you picture your life as better or worse if your job and place in the world and stuff were guaranteed to you?”

He looked at his poster—that black Sharpie smudged nonsense. The corners of the poster board looked like they’d been run over.

“I think I’d be able to give up color for a more comfortable world,” he said. He looked up at me. “That was my presentation. I’m done.”

My mouth was hanging open. Hands sweating. The class erupted into applause and Johnny patted Syed hard on the back. He deserved a bad grade, but not in the way I had expected. I vehemently disagreed with everything he had said and hated the visual abomination he had created even more. He had gone against all of my instructions. But he had given it a try, and had used one-hundred-percent of his heart. He was scarily intelligent. Like the boys I remembered my freshman year at Cornell. I thought about changing it to a D, but I would not scribble in my grade book. His words made me nauseous for the rest of class. I felt like he had outperformed me with an utterly twisted analysis of the book. It made it worse because the nonsense he spouted had sounded so intelligent. In five years’ time, would the kids remember Syed’s lessons on the book, or would they remember mine?

⋯

I was in a state of prayer on the blacktop, asking God to help me once the weekend ended because I had to spend Monday teaching about fornication instead of English, when Rebecca Bauer tapped me on the shoulder.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No worries at all.”

“I just wanted to ask you a quick question about the health unit.” She laughed. “The kids have been talking it up like they talk about field trips. I just wanted to warn you that you might have a lot on your hands.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve only been thinking about it constantly.”

She shrugged off my comment. “You’ve got this in the bag. It’s not like it’s your first time, right?” She winked.

I forced a laugh. “You’re right. They’ve had me teaching this thing since I came to Isidore. It’s the same presentation every year. It’s just the kids that are different.”

“They’re a fucking handful,” she said. “But you’re not alone on this one. I talked to Principal Lucas, and he said it would be okay if I came in and helped field questions during my planning period if you need any help.”

It was a kind offer, but I was a little stunned. I almost flat out told her that I didn’t need anything from her. I couldn’t imagine the sixth and seventh grade science teacher being as important as the school nurse on the subject of health. It felt like she was calling my abilities into question.

“Thank you, Becky. That’s really kind, but I’ve got it. I’m particular about the way my presentation is set up.” I gave her a thumbs up.

She awkwardly half-bowed, half-curtsied in her yellow dress. “Let me know if you need anything at all, Helen,” she said.

I was alone again, my eyes closed at the edge of the blacktop. I could hear Becky calling at runners far behind me. The kickball sprung and thumped, another hollow Earth. I was unfocused; no longer praying. That was okay. Some days’ focus only accounted for a one-and-done. Because now I was thinking about what Rebecca had said. Fucking. Handful. You need help. I opened one eye so maybe they would not see me looking.

Syed was always at the front of the soccer pack. Springing toward the ball relentlessly like a puppy. I watched Reisha nail the ball into the sky. It bounced off the monkey bars, teetered like a pinball, and fell with weight on the wood chips. The girls screamed and the boys pumped their legs. Syed shot out onto the playground where the third and fourth graders were playing house. Sometimes they would ask Regina, Ruth, and Fanny to play certain characters for them, like Mom and Cat and Dog. That day the older girls had made a veil out of a blue jersey and were holding a mock wedding. Syed carried the ball up the stairs on his ankles and knees like it was all moon gravity to him.

I whistled. “Syed,” I yelled. “No soccer on top of the playground. You’re gonna hit someone in the face.”

Syed shrugged like he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Reisha shrugged back from the field and reached for the ball as Syed threw it to her. Fanny and Ruthie continued humming their wedding song. He was making eye contact with some hair peeking out of the tube slide. Reisha dropped the ball and started kicking the ball downhill toward the goal. The boys scrambled, but Syed was no longer with them. Now it was Canaan at the front of the pack. Reisha scored a wide goal which felt too easy, but she still chest-bumped Canaan, their pubescent bodies touching for a fraction of a second mid-air. I blushed. The goal was easy because Syed had not yelled out the rules of the day yet. Where was he? I had seen him enter the slide but did not see him come out on the other end. I scanned the area to see where he might have gone. He wasn’t with the soccer kids. Reisha was yelling the rules now, and Rebecca had given her three warnings to lower her voice. Two warnings too many. The kids had to ask to use the bathroom—if he had gone without permission he knew he would be in a world of trouble. No. He was probably seeing how long he could hang from the edge of the slide until another kid came along. Feeling his arms extend. Staying antisocial and confined within the only area of the playground that was unobservable.

I started to walk over to the end of the slide to see if I could see any feet poking out. The interior was dark and I leaned over. Whoever was still in there was hanging out at the top. That was when I heard a voice call me over from the blacktop.

It was Principal Lucas. He was escorting a woman with a visitor badge across the playground. She was wearing a form-fitting black suit, red heels, and a nude lip. She looked like a successful American businesswoman, if it weren’t for the double chin and wrinkles bringing down her face. That child-raising weight. It was the same woman who was holding baby Syed in the photo, but older. His mother.

“Mrs. Helen Webster. I’d like to introduce you to Mrs. Senna Lacewell. She requested that the three of us have a little meeting to discuss her son’s performance in your class.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said warmly.

I shook her hand. “I’m so glad to finally meet you,” I said. “I feel this has been a long time coming. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your son.”

“His father and I would appreciate it.”

As we walked down the main staircase toward the entrance, I looked back one more time at the kids. Becky was watching them, but it wasn’t enough. She had put Reisha on time out for five minutes for yelling, but those five minutes flashed by fast in my aging frame of reference. Reisha was off the bench. She was getting onto Canaan’s shoulders. A childlike piggyback ride. He carried her up the playground stairs before backbending with the girl still on him—a contortionist ant in the distance with grown spine strength. He dropped her backward into the mouth of the black slide. His belly button shone from his lifted shirt like an eye.

The three of us took a seat in the air conditioned office, but I was still sweating like I was outside. The principal’s office always made me feel like I was in trouble again. I took a tissue and dabbed my forehead. The doctor did the same with the corners of her mouth.

“So,” she started, “here’s the story. I sent Frederick Lucas an email last night because it came to my attention that Syed received an F on his project.”

I couldn’t help but begin with a quick laugh. “I wish I had been CC’d on this email.”

“I wanted to discuss the matter with a mediator first. It can be good to have a mediator in a debate, no?”

“I still wish you hadn’t sprung this on me in the middle of my day,” I said. “Who told you about the bad grade? Your son, or your husband?”

She looked at me with disgust. “My husband told me. Are you trying to imply something?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I just wanted to know if Syed is as concerned about his grades as you and your husband are.”

She let out a sharp breath. “I am sorry to say that that is none of your concern.”

“It is my concern as his educator. Whether or not he feels compelled to take responsibility for the grades he earns is my concern.”

“Forgive me,” she said, “If I say that my son worked very hard on his project. He worked on it all week. Shorted the fuck—excuse my language—out of his sleep. Both of ours. I have to be up at four-thirty most days. I can’t stand to be up at all hours of the night checking grammar. In cursive, no less. But he pleaded with me to. There’s so much pressure on him to—to get it all right.” She paused to laugh.

“Mrs. Webster. Even as a baby, he could not color inside the lines. Sometimes quirks look like flaws, but they are two very different things, and you don’t want to kill the former like you kill the latter. He says you wanted the lines straight. Use a ruler, I told him. But he likes to—” she twisted her bangled wrist around, searching for the word— “freestyle it. He says you don’t want ugly colors. Use black and white, I told him. But make sure to have a visual aid. He said cursive, and I told him again to try his best. Excuse me if I say that his is better than the best. He’s an artist. That picture he drew is better than the book cover. Tell me to my face that any of those other kids can draw like he can draw,” she said. I didn’t answer.

“Look at me,” she said. I looked at her. “My son put in the effort. In my opinion, the result was above average. The grade assigned to average performance is a C. I say we call this a draw. You think he failed; I think he succeeded. I think it is fair to meet in the middle and give him another shot.”

I folded my hands. “I’m willing to change his grade, yes. But I have also made an effort to teach the students that this is English class; not art class. I understand that Syed loves doodling—believe me, I’ve seen him doodle through every class—but want them to focus on analysis over coloring in the lines. The kids really should be past this by now. I think a C will leave him just enough room to grow.”

“I understand what you mean,” she said. Principal Lucas was just sitting there until the doctor stood up to leave. Then, he wiped his clammy hands on his pants and went to shake hers first. The doctor shook mine and smiled differently than before.

“I’m glad we could come to an agreement,” I said. “Please, email me whenever you need anything.”

“I have a feeling things will be good from now on,” she said. “I will see you again at our parent-teacher conference in November.”

She turned to leave before pausing at the door.

“Let me say one more thing,” she said. “I know my son infinitely better than you ever will. In some ways, I can read his future. He is not going to be a doctor. He is not going to be a CEO, or a priest, or even a teacher. He could not teach the foundations of art because he is entirely his own person. Like I said—there is no changing these things. You’ll hurt yourself trying. I can see him being a car salesman maybe, but mainly a performance artist. He’s a theatrical boy. A jock, too. You could label him somewhere in the middle, but that wouldn’t be fair to his energy. There’s not another boy like him. There is not a single other person like him, or you, or me,” she said. “And once you’re at peace with him…as—he—is…you’ll be at peace with yourself.”

She walked out the door. I cleared my throat and turned back to Principal Lucas. I felt I needed to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, he said it for me.

“Between you and me, I think she’s dead wrong,” he said. “You did a good job compromising with the parent back there. But—I mean—we’re literally here to change their kids.” He took a sip from a mug of cold coffee. “What did Marcus Aurelius say? The destiny of everything is to change, to perish, so that new things can be born. Sometimes these working moms come back home after their kids have been parented by us all day and just smell that something is different. It’s their instincts. Like birds abandoning their chicks after they’re touched by human hands. What is this woman, a Buddhist? Did she look like a Buddhist to you? What would happen if this Lacewell kid was forever a preteen? Is that what this woman wants?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying, sir,” I said, letting my heart rate slow. “About these kids needing to change their behavior. It would be inhumane to let them run wild without these rules. Middle school goes fast, and then there’s college prep, then college. It starts now. And I apologize.”

“Apologize for what, Helen?”

“For the way she used your first name back there. I found her unprofessional.”

Principal Lucas laughed. “It’s those little details, isn’t it? I didn’t even notice. I tell you, Helen Webster, you’re one of the good ones. Thanks for looking out for me.”

“No. Thank you,” I said. I felt like I had said something I shouldn’t have. I blushed and left with haste.

⋯

The St. Isidore volunteer school board had tried to do away with the health unit numerous times. Regina’s mother, Mary Lee Aiello, was the head of the board, and we seemed to vote on the topic every other year. Many parents, myself included, found teaching the topic of how to get pregnant to be like teaching malleable minds how to build a bomb or hotwire a car. Within the act of teaching how to have sex safely was the act of teaching these kids how to have sex. On paper it was perversely counterintuitive to their safety that the unit existed in the first place. But somehow, we were always outvoted. We knew that children were different from adults. The rules would change entirely when they hit eighteen, but that was worlds away. At this stage, anything could make or break these kids’ minds. Twelve-year-olds were as curious and absorbent as two-year-olds. Toddlers with debate skills getting their first periods. We could place bunkers around these taboo topics entirely if the people in charge cared about the safety of children. Put government money toward killing all the out pedophiles and pornographers. Maybe then more of our children would stay on the straight path instead of veering off. Only 38 percent of the baptized kids in the diocese had been confirmed in the past decade. I knew that statistic from Mitchell. That meant 62 percent of kids were veering away from the Lord once they reached high school. I thought about what Syed had said. Would it be easier if all these kids were the same—if none of them got to know about it?

Syed wasn’t in class after the grade change. He had apparently gotten sick over the weekend and was not in class to go down to the gym with the other boys on Monday. Regina was out of the classroom as well, but that was because the girls who had handed their permission slips back unsigned got to go down to the library or the chapel. That left me with Reisha, Fanny, Ruthie, and Abigail. There were only seven girls in my sixth grade class out of fourteen total. Only a little over half of the girls’ parents had given them the option to attend. It was good odds. I couldn’t remember how many of the boys had gone down to the gym and how many had gone to the library, but I felt good teaching as few kids as possible on this extra unit. Of course I felt odd supplying some kids with extra information more than others, but ultimately, it was their parents’ decision whether or not they went, no matter how I had voted. I just tried to do my best to feed them with good information without getting angry at how I felt trapped.

The basics: In the beginning, God created man and woman. Easy to digest. They already know the first chapter of Genesis by heart. Penis and vagina. Little diagrams on black and white printer paper that I slide under the projector. Sperm and egg, underlined and bolded with definitions. This caused pregnancy every time without fail. I imagined myself as a little girl sitting at one of those desks, hearing every time without fail. I stumbled over the mucus in my throat. But saying it did more good than harm. Remember: God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. If you do it before God is ready for you, well, he’s told a lot of men on Earth about his opinions on that, and here they are. You must do it once God gives you the go-ahead, emphasis on once, and even then you will experience the worst pain of your life. The contraction pains will pang on a daily basis for the rest of your life because you have children, and watching children wail and stumble and leave is pain. It is called Eve’s curse.

How to insert a tampon. Four to seven days every month. Pads were an option, too. I had little gift bags of Tylenol, tea, and tampons that I handed out. ‘The three T’s,’ I said, and the girls finally grinned at me. How many of the girls had gotten their periods already? Only Reisha raised her hand. Ruthie looked around the room before quietly raising her hand, too. The girls had the most questions about menstruation. Mostly they left the topic of sex alone. With the class split between girls who had theirs and girls who didn’t, the lecture turned into a group conversation.

Does it hurt? Abigail asked. I mean, I know it hurts, but does it hurt bad? My cousin Rosabel, she couldn’t get out of bed the whole weekend when she visited. She was crying and throwing up. We could only visit her in the hotel.

“That’s what Tylenol is for,” I said, shaking a bottle. “You can take two every four hours and it takes the pain away. If that doesn’t work, you can take a hot bath.”

I like hot baths, Abigail said. But being sick for a week every month doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.

I know. I said the same thing to my mom when it happened. I was scared I would fall behind, said Ruthie. In soccer, I mean. I used to not have to worry about it, but now every time I put my jersey on I’m scared it’s going to happen. That I’ll bleed through my shorts. Whose idea was it to have the girls wear white? Fanny checks to make sure I haven’t bled every day of the month. I don’t know. I’m just anxious. Sometimes I wear pads even when I’m not bleeding. It’s hard to accept that we’re growing up. I mean, it’s exciting. But hard. I’m just scared someone will notice.

“It helps to track your flow using a calendar,” I said. “Like I said, your cycle should only return every 28 days. As long as you always have some supplies in your bag, I wouldn’t worry. You will learn to be grateful that it’s happening once you settle into the routine. It means that your body is functioning. It means that you are not pregnant. It means you are turning into a woman. You are experiencing your place in God’s design.”

It seems like everything about being a girl is unfair, Fanny said. Being pregnant hurts and not being pregnant hurts. Shouldn’t the feelings of both be rewarding? At least it ends once you hit fifty or so.

Really? Said Ruthie. I thought it just continued until you died.

So then we talked about menopause.

Reisha raised her hand. My mom is going through menopause right now and it’s got to be worse than periods because she wakes up heaving and sweating every day, I mean sweating so bad the sheets are soaked and she has to run a load of laundry as soon as she wakes up, so the bills are up, she says, and she wishes she could go back and have her period regularly along with me because sometimes when girls live together, their cycles sync. Have you heard about that? I think it would be nice if we could have ours at the same time so we could stay home from work and school. If we’re sick, of course. But mostly it sucks to hear that it doesn’t get better before it gets worse.

“Well, menopause doesn’t last forever, either. It may be every day now, but eventually, it will get easier.”

Easier, or more used to it? Fanny.

“Easier. Those symptoms won’t last for more than a few years. Eventually, once she hits fifty or so, her periods will stop entirely and it will be over.” I stopped and considered her question. “And ‘used to’ and ‘easier’ are usually the same thing in practice.”

Do some people not get used to hard things? What if once my period slows and I switch over to menopause, it ends up driving me crazy? Fanny mimed the act of putting a gun to her head and blowing her brains out.

“Do not do that again, Fanny,” I said, “Or I’ll have to send you to the principal’s office. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll be getting out of class.”

Fanny slumped in her seat. The thing is, I don’t even like babies. It’s like some sort of cruel joke. It is a joke, she said, laughing. Our lives are a joke.

I don’t know, said Abigail. It reminds me of Jesus carrying his cross. She looked up at me for approval, blushing. Sometimes doing the hard thing is more rewarding in the end. I mean, imagine if boys had periods. They would cry and cry. I think we’re stronger for it and that’s rewarding.

What about your cousin? Did she feel rewarded when she had to stay in her hotel room? Throwing up?

Abigail went quiet. I get to talk about my cousin, she said. Not you.

“Girls.”

I mean, Jesus chose to carry that cross. He could have quit. I didn’t get the choice to get my period. I’m stuck with it. It’s different.

“I think what Abigail is trying to say is that life is unfair. Many things are. But having a positive attitude is everything. It’s your choice to say, hey, this is what God has chosen for me. That means something.”

Jesus couldn’t have quit. He was born knowing he had a mission and that he was the son of God. He didn’t choose anything.

Fanny side-eyed her. What about free will?

You know that doesn’t really apply here.

Fanny looked straight at me and crossed her arms. I’m glad God gave me free will, even if he didn’t give his own son any other option. When I turn eighteen I’m going to save my money so I can have the procedure to get my eggs taken out.

I was a little stunned. I almost laughed at her lack of knowledge: ‘THE procedure,’ she said. The only one.

“That’s your choice,” I said, “But I bet money that you’ll change your mind when the time comes. A lot of girls decide that they want kids once they meet the man they want to settle down with. At a certain age, you’ll realize that all you want is a family.”

The kids looked at each other and smiled, like they were picturing each other as married with kids. Ruth nudged Fanny in the ribs.

“No, but think about it,” I said. “Thirty years ago, your parents were sitting where you are now, probably thinking the same thing. What would have happened if they never had kids?”

I saw Fanny whisper something snide in Ruth’s ear.

“I bet you think you’re so different from your mothers. You’ll never be like them, right? You’re still young and adventurous. You want to explore your emerging independence. In my honest opinion, this unit is taught a little too early to you. A lot of you aren’t mature enough for it yet. But these hormones are unavoidable. They will come in the next few years, and they will come on strong. I promise you, they will override the person that you are now. And that is not a bad thing. It means that you will grow up and see that your place in the world is helping the younger generation rise above you. You will grow to meet the responsibilities of life in the middle. And these tenants of life are not a choice. They will happen, whether you like them or not. The purpose of this unit is to get you to remember that there are right and wrong choices that you can make in regards to sex that can send you down a slippery slope. So if you come back to my classroom in thirty, forty years and you still are childless, I will believe that you made a choice in your life. Maybe that kind of life will be right for you; maybe it won’t. But as of now, that choice is not available to you. It will happen to an entirely different person—your older self.”

There was a knock on the door. I don’t know who I expected to be at the door, but it certainly wasn’t Regina’s mother, Mrs. Aiello. She was holding a handkerchief up to her mouth as if she was permanently dabbing a crumb of food off her lip.

“Mrs. Webster. I’m so sorry to disturb your class. I just came to collect Regina’s homework.”

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. The kids don’t have any homework due tomorrow because of our health unit.”

“Is that today? I’m so out of it. The kids kept me up last night. At least Jeanie picked a convenient day to get sick.”

I took a step toward her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t realized Regina was out sick today. I guess I’m pretty out of it, too. I knew she wasn’t in health class so I assumed she made it down to the library.”

“I sent you an email this morning,” she said. “Doesn’t matter now. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to come in and collect Regina’s homework for the rest of the week? I can’t see her coming in until next Monday. At least I know a lot of kids are out sick already.”

I thought about how empty the classroom was. I honestly didn’t know which of them were in the building and which were out.

“A week? What is she sick with?”

Mrs. Aiello shook her head. “Mono. We think she got it from playing her big brother’s flute, because he’s sick, too. I’m surprised you haven’t heard.”

I blushed.“Bill and Regina? Mono?” It felt like a crime even muttering the phrase. Nobody had come down to my office with symptoms yet. It seemed like their parents had caught it over the weekend—after the events of last Friday. The kids called it the kissing disease. And then I realized I hadn’t seen Canaan around. Or Regina. Or Syed. Or, besides Reisha, any of the kids who, at some point in time, had slipped out of my eyesight.

She pursed her lips and nodded her head.

“Oh. One more thing. I talked to another kid’s father in the parking lot. Syed? He said he was coming up to collect his kid’s homework, too,” she said. “Just a warning.”

⋯

I hadn’t had sex since Mitchell and I had officially stopped trying for a baby. A few months after my gynecologist appointment was when I gave in. I would spend hours in prayer beforehand. I used to think that I could earn miracles just by praying—get worldly things, not just salvation—and when the baby wouldn’t come I would ask God why: wasn’t I worthy? But I was. Just not in the way I thought. God gives us the crosses that our bodies are able to bear. Mine was not meant to conceive children. Mine was not meant for the act of sex. My whole life has been God informing me of this central theme. I eventually told him it wasn’t working, which was a fact he already knew. He was just waiting for me to come to terms with my loss. Mitchell is a very logical man. Everything he does is to achieve a purpose. That’s what I’ve always loved about him. After that we just stopped. At first I felt uncomfortable with such a life change, as people do when they quit fast food or alcohol in favor of something kinder on the body. The nature of my prayers changed. I asked God to target the wicked dreams I had at night, waking up to find my hands firm between my legs. In bed I would imagine the baby Jesus sleeping on my chest, putting pressure on my ribcage, and only then did the dreams slow and finally cease.

God took my virginity from me in Ithaca, New York. I never really thought about sex in the context of my own self-growth, but rather as a hurdle in a series of life landmarks. There was a list of questions girl friends asked you during high school sleepovers about these landmarks: who had you kissed, who had you slept with, what parties had you gone to and where. These items had point values assigned to them, and whoever had the most points was the most experienced, the most exciting to converse with, the most wise. I desired wisdom, but I didn’t desire sex on my own. I knew it would come for me at some point. The hurdle would approach me in the distance, and by pure instinct, my nervous system would send a command to my muscles and I would vault over it. I was confident in my control over my body and my goals. There was a point where I thought that the landscape of the future was free of mountains, cliffs and crags, like the endless now of Iowa that I grew up knowing. The naivety of childhood. In this same naive nature, on the other side of the coin, was my love of the sin of masturbation.

Maybe it was an addiction. A lot of things qualify as addictions these days, including sex, so I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, right? Why did I have such an affinity for this sin against my body when I didn’t desire the act of sex? I think it came down to me being a selfish child. Worldly. Physical over mental. Detachment over connection. I wanted exhibitionists and voyeurs over women and men. I thought I could navigate the dark world of adulthood with silent nudity. I didn’t make many friends freshman year. None that lasted. I didn’t know that teaching others was my life’s work. I liked my anatomy classes, at least. I always wanted to be alone with my own mind. At the same time, I wanted to show the world my body, but not have them touch. Maybe a part of me already knew that sex wasn’t for me, but I was still trapped in this physical need. I wanted to be the only one doing this to myself, but I wanted everyone to see me doing it. Falling into a cycle, a serpent eating its tail. So I always left the window open. Pulled my bed to the edge of the sill. Window wide open, before they made suicide prevention windows. Legs spread around the morning sun.

Foul, the way it was pure, pure joy. You can just tell some joys are sins in disguise. Like the way your body processes natural and artificial sugars. A good meal versus a greasy one. A greasy joy is obvious. It’s a byproduct of guilt, and isn’t the real joy that comes from God but rather a mimicking chemical sensation. Your soul processes its falsehood more than your mind does. In this way it is hard for the former organ to overpower the latter. This feels good, your brain says. It feels like I’m learning something about myself. But then there’s the way your soul seems. Unbeknownst to you.

I would get back from my classes and masturbate against the window. Draw the shades, go to my desk and do my homework. Open them back up again after my shower. Sleep with them open until the morning. I drew them after I dressed and went to classes. I lived with my heart racing, so sure at every moment that someone was watching me. Someone very well could have been whenever I decided to unclothe myself. It sent my mind into overdrive: gave me a sense of power that didn’t fit who I was supposed to be. In many ways, I needed God to strike me down. How many years would I have spent like that, prostrating myself to the world’s eyes, if he had not chosen me for the Sisters? Less than six months. God only gives us the crosses that our bodies are able to bear. At a certain point, he saw this urge was overtaking my soul. He took my old cross and gave me my vocation.

My dorm was on the thirteenth floor. The building was E-shaped, with each room’s view facing a twin dorm. The dorm facing my own window was empty my first semester. This left my obsession with someone seeing me as pure fantasy. This didn’t make it any better. It didn’t matter if anyone actually saw me. God was there in the corner, silently injecting me with poison every time I acted on my urges, calling my ancestors over from the waiting room to watch behind a one-way mirror.

I had an itchy, impatient Christmas season. When I moved back to campus in January, I was more than ready to be back in my own space, back to the teenage routine and the studies I had grown so accustomed to. I remember my father silently moving around the space, sniffing the air, unpacking my bundles of jeans and bras and shoving them into the wrong drawers. I let him pretend to be helpful after the long car ride. I was standing in the corner trying not to stare at the boy who had moved in across from me halfway through the year. He was dark-skinned with glasses. He wore a black puffer coat inside, but it didn’t seem like he was going back out anytime soon. He was sitting at his desk, patiently clicking a mouse. His room was already decorated and settled into, with posters overlapping on the walls and a mountain of pillows on a green bean bag. He even had a standing lamp.

On move-in day I sat and studied his room while the other girls living in my suite went out to drink and walk the streets. He didn’t go out that night, either; just kept clicking away on his computer. His screen was the only part of the room I couldn’t see, yet it was the part he was most enthralled in. He had an old camcorder that he retrieved from a bag, which he seemed to be reviewing the contents of, checking the footage on one screen and comparing it to the other. Obviously a film student. Still wearing that puffer coat. It must have been hot in there—the heat in the dorms was notoriously cranked to ninety degrees in the winter, with no way to change it. It was very hot in my own room. I was curious, but I used my curiosity for male attention. I started removing my clothes.

You must understand—or maybe I have successfully justified myself to you by now—that I was a different person then. When I say I was a selfish child, I mean I was a child. I was a smart kid. I went to Cornell a year early at seventeen. It was only when my conditions changed that I became a sinner. I used to blame it on the situation; the East Coast. Now I know that sin was all mine—lust, they call it. It had rotted me and it had to be exchanged through a rather hurtful process for something cleaner. You must understand when I say these things that I am just as scared for my past self as you are. Just as angry. But truthfully, I’m more happy that it happened than anything. I would never have changed. I would never have grown close to God. I would not be myself.

I turned on the overhead light every time. Blinds open, then window. Record player off. I would feel the cold air, the goosebumps, the yellow sun. And I would moan like a bold-faced witch. Just past my own comfort level.

What I was thinking: with my heart. No head, no soul. Someone should see me. Someone is going to see me. Someone is going to see me and I am not going to hide. Someone will like what they see. Their eyes will get wide like they see something in the sky, like Santa Claus or a UFO. Or neither—an angel. He might call a friend over. Or several. And what would happen—they would stare until I finished, watching the angel opera, and then they would go to sleep and the experience would seamlessly blend into their dreams.

I was thinking all these things as usual, fantasizing, eyes shut, but when I opened my eyes the boy was there, or the man, practically in the room with me, for I never realized how close his window was to mine when he had his hand pressed against it. He was balancing himself against his window with one hand and holding his camcorder with the other, so I couldn’t see his eyes, only the lens boring through me. A brutal grin on his face. And suddenly the fantasy was reality, and it had not gone the way I envisioned it. There were consequences. This man was laughing at my skin. Recording my darkest parts to edit into a movie. I felt sick and yelled like I was stupid, like I hadn’t noticed what I was doing. I quickly shut the blinds.

That was how I lost my virginity. On video. Penetrated by video. You might say that’s not sex. I imagine a lot of people would, but it was to me. It was an act of bodily violation that cleaved me in two—the person I was before, and the person I was after. It was like being painfully blinded by the light of heaven. I realized the idea of sex was a farce. The idea was appealing to my body, my lust, but the result did not satisfy my mind. Reality required the eyes and the memory of a man when so many men are worse off in their lust than I could ever be. Fiending to lose their souls. Most men are not like Mitchell. Most men come from such dark corners of the Earth that I don’t know if they have the same definitions of marriage, of respect, of yes and no.

I never saw the man who lived across from my dorm room window again. He wasn’t in any of my classes. When I walked down the street, I was always scared I would see him, but I never did. We either had completely different schedules or he never left his room. He had a video of me. Would he do anything with it? Did he do anything with it? I would never know. I didn’t know who his friends were, who he might have shown, or if he even had friends. When I looked at students who vaguely looked like him, I wondered if they were his friends. I wondered if when they smiled back at me, if they were thinking of me as a person, or if they were thinking of taking advantage of me in the future, remembering the time I let everyone down, let everyone know I was free meat. I knew what those men were thinking. If they existed, they would never understand where I was coming from. As soon as that lens snapped shut, I didn’t know what I had been thinking, either. The fantasy was blank. When I looked in their eyes, all I could see was that video of my body at an angle that I would never see.

⋯

Was I getting sick? I hadn’t touched any of those kids. Only to correct a wrist or straighten their postures in their desks. It was a placebo, how I went to sleep feverish that night and only that night, more sick than I had been in years, only to wake up fine in the morning. Refreshed, even. Sometimes only a late night drive and God’s clean air could refresh me after a bad dream.

I slept badly because I fell asleep thinking of how last year, our health unit had happened the second week of school. Syed would have been down in the gym with the boys if we had just held it in the same week. I didn’t know what Mr. Livingston taught the boys, but he had a loud voice as gym teachers do, and I could imagine himself scaring them straight in a way that Syed probably needed—definitely needed—now knowing he was prone to going off and kissing girls in tunnel slides. Not a far cry from getting STIs. I worried that it was too late; that I had lost him to his impulsivity through poor lesson planning. But of course I couldn’t have known until it was too late. I had two kids out for a whole week. There was a good chance it would break their abilities to keep up with the other kids. Regina I had faith in. But Syed—you know I have to say it, even though it hurts to admit. I could only envision that kid giving up.

My dream. Mitchell was snoring deep into my ears and the pressure heightened into a fever. A constant thumping around the rim of my skull. I need to lay down, honey, I was telling my daughter. I realized I was suddenly older than real life. My dream voice was tar-coated like my mother’s. My dreams always took place in misremembered versions of home. I was laying on a majestic, wood-carved chaise lounge that was built into the hardware of the home. A dozen decorative pillows covered the furniture. Stained. Also Mom’s. A set of open windows cooled my back. It was August.

And then I realized how overgrown my daughter’s bangs were. She was silent at the edge of the daybed, making sure I was finished speaking so she could ask if there was anything else she could get me. Polite in the way an echo is, only replying. Her one quality. She just stood there rather simple and conical.

You need a haircut, I said to her. Come here. This won’t hurt.

She came over and leaned forward. I started pulling out the clumps in front of her face. They popped at the seams right where I wanted them to, leaving her with a neat row of hair at her eyebrows.

It doesn’t hurt me, she said. I hadn’t asked her opinion.

There you go, baby. Fresh bangs. You look much better. It’s Friday. Baby Friday. Either my head was thumping or the walls were. My daughter turned and floated on her heels toward the door.

Where are you going?

My daughter turned around. I suddenly knew that we were the exact same age.

It’s Friday, baby. I come to bang fresh and get hurt.

In my fever dream, my daughter spoke in cursive, somehow. Like there was implied text at the bottom of the screen. I woke up with my head screaming Syed. I wouldn’t have gone back if I wasn’t convinced there was a ninety-nine percent chance of him failing my class. I was the one percent chance that could save him. Everything was wrong, but I could correct it. A whole week without me just wouldn’t do. The class was picking up and moving on. I got in the car and drove into the night. I could memorize a drive after completing it once, barely even glancing at the road. It was night this time, and the shadows cloaked all my movements. I felt confident going through the window after having done it once. I parked the car, ran up to the side like a soldier, and peeked inside. I couldn’t see anything. The bedroom door was shut. I had a dim flashlight that I retrieved from my car. I took a deep breath and clicked it on. I gasped as light flooded the room. It looked like I turned the overhead light on from the inside. Whoever was inside would have surely woken up. But as I illuminated the room, I saw the bed was empty. The sheets were tossed aside. Perhaps he had gone down the hall. I waited for five minutes, but he didn’t return. It was then that I decided to enter, carefully pushing the window open, extracting the fan to the best of my ability—carefully—the fan catching the edge of my nail as I bent forward to place it on the floor. The fan fell with a clatter.

I was leaning on my stomach halfway through the window. I heard a voice from the other room. A father’s voice calling his son’s name. I retreated on instinct and put my back to the trailer wall, the window still open. Perhaps it had just fallen out. The sound of a lightswitch flicked in the autumn night.

“Syed?” The same voice. A gruff grunt. Shuffling. The fan being put back into place. A head on the other side of the house. Though I could still hear this way. The father moved back into the hallway and knocked on another door.

“Buddy? Are you in there?”

Another knock. The sound of a door opening. Then another. A shift in tone. We are not rehearsing. This is the real thing.

“He’s not here.”

“What do you mean he’s not here?”

“He’s not in his bed. That sound was the fan falling out of his window. I checked the bathroom and he’s not there, either.”

“Did you check the rest of the house?”
“Where, babe? The kitchen? The front yard? He’s not here.”

“Syed?” yelled the mom. Shuffling.

“No. You stay here,” he said. The jingling of car keys. But I was already sprinting away. My car was relatively quiet back then. The electric model. I turned off my headlights and peeled out. Five minutes down the road back to my house was when I realized the implications of Syed missing. The most off-putting child in my class, sick with kissing disease, had run away in the middle of the night at twelve years old. The parents had sounded panicked. They had no right to be. Syed was not the kind of kid who got himself kidnapped. He wasn’t pure or easy to manipulate. He was, in fact, a pretty good manipulator of the truth himself. I thought about all the things he had said when he got a turn in front of the class. He lied to get what he wanted. I imagined him telling his parents he was going to bed early and not to disturb him. Was he even sick, or had he lied about that, too? Playing the sweet kid card. With his debate skills, he was practically an adult. I thought about how his mother had babied his intelligence; his future. He was continuing to follow a rougher and rockier path. The last time I had seen him had been the last time I had not seen him, hidden within the confines of the tunnel slide. And suddenly, I knew where Syed had run off to. He wasn’t sleeping over at Canaan’s. He wasn’t with the twins. He was at Mary Lee Aiello’s house.

I made a U-turn and drove seven minutes to the Aiello household. I had been there for Mary Lee’s summer potlucks. She liked to invite all of the teachers and board members. The house was a two-story ranch painted a complimentary green hue. I parked the car on the next street over and walked. In my head, I pretended like I was a dumb woman looking for a lost cat. It was only when I walked past the Aiello house on the sidewalk that I could see one window was illuminated. It was a room I had never been in on the inside. It was to the left side of the home, facing the street. The buzzing blue of television commercials. The lights were off. I struggled to see anything inside other than the presence of a screen. I moved closer to the window. I knew I would find the two of them inside. The light caught up to my eyes and I could see the space. I was a giant bending into a dollhouse. A big flat-panel TV was playing late-night cartoons. Regina’s bedroom walls favored classic paintings with big gold frames over posters. Where were the sleeping children? My eyes adjusted like a cat’s back to the dark. The bed was in the corner to my left, almost directly under me. A bundle under a checkered comforter. The girl was asleep against the wall, her eyelids caked with glitter to her temples. She was leaning on his shoulder. I stopped breathing; looked to see if her chest was rising and falling. I looked up. Syed was staring back at me.

He hadn’t moved a bit, so I couldn’t have seen that he was awake until my eyes focused on his presence in the dark. It was like he had been watching the window the whole time. All eyes like an owl. Watching me approach like a criminal, another creature, checking over my shoulder and crouching to strike. Watching me watch him.

I didn’t know what to do. A wave of fear rammed into me. I remember thinking that if Syed told anyone about seeing his English teacher watching him at night, they wouldn’t believe him. Maybe Syed had lied enough to the people close to him that they wouldn’t choose to believe him anymore. I started to back away from the window one step at a time, as if he couldn’t see me moving if I moved slow enough. His eyes slowly turned to blue-gray static. He didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t blink or smile. Just stared back at me. Once I couldn’t see the top of his head anymore, I turned and ran in the general direction of my car.

I almost made it off the front yard and onto the sidewalk when I heard the front door slam. A hoarse whisper called me back.

“Missus Webster? Is that you?”

It was dark and suddenly cold. I stood at the end of the drive. Syed stood shadowed on the porch in pajama pants and a T-shirt. A loose tissue peeked out of his pocket. I took a few steps closer and he put his bare feet in the grass. I decided he hadn’t lied about being sick. A droplet of sweat ran down his nose next to those big glazed eyes. I could tell he was feverish without touching him by the way he wobbled. He reached out to touch me and I moved back.

“I’m sorry,” he said, blinking. “I thought I was dreaming.”

“That’s okay, Syed,” I said. My heart was racing. I looked around at the neighboring houses to see if anyone was peeking behind their curtains. “I just don’t want to get sick. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty crummy,” he said. “Regina plays the flute in music class, and I play the bassoon, two woodwind instruments, but there’s only one bassoon and Regina likes music more than me, so I let her play mine sometimes. I guess that’s how I got her sick. She called me and asked if I could come over. So we could be sick together, I guess.” He blushed. “Are you here with my mom?”

“Well,” I said, “Your parents are out looking for you. In fact, there’s a whole search party out for you. I understand what you’re saying, Syed. You don’t guess. You know. You know you left the house to visit your sick friend. That was a conscious choice. But you also left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. A lot of people will be mad at you for making them so worried. People all over Des Moines are worried sick about you. And once they hear about how you snuck out of the house, they’re going to be very, very mad at you. I’m not mad, Syed. Look at me. I’m not mad at you.”

His gaze was foggy and focused on the grass. Looking at his feet seemed to be keeping him upright.

“Look at me,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have stayed home. Can you call my parents and tell them I’m okay and I’m sorry?”

I bit my lip. “Well, I’d hate to break the news to him now. I saw your father five minutes ago at your house, where the search party meets back up. He was raving mad. Screaming like crazy about his son. Can I be honest with you, Syed?”

He nodded.

“I was very scared of him.”

He nodded again. “My dad has two types of mad. Scared mad and screaming mad. He doesn’t get screaming mad very often.”

“Well, that gives both of us a hint of how angry he is, doesn’t it?”

He nodded as his knees rocked from side to side. “Is this a dream?” he said. “Can I go get Regina?”
“Regina’s not in trouble,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we go back to my house to finish the dream you’re having. You can sleep somewhere safe, and in the morning, we’ll call your parents once they’re not angry.”

“My head hurts,” he said. “I need to have a glass of water and go back to sleep.”

“Well, you locked the door to Regina’s house behind you,” I said. “That’s some tough luck.”

He just looked up at me again with his broken gaze and flat lips. Keeping that bright smile all to himself. I squatted down and smiled at him. I really, really needed him to come with me.

“You know what always makes me feel better when I have a fever?” I said. “A late night drive.”

⋯

I was awake for the day after that. Syed was not. He slept soundly in the dandelion yellow room, though I parted the curtains for the first time in years. I made up the crib for him, warming the blankets and pillow case in the dryer. His legs were so long that he slept curled into a ball with his toes poking out of the bars. I had popped two adult melatonin into his mouth, helping him swallow. Mitchell did not know he was there. If I hadn’t brought him home, I wouldn’t have known he was there, either. At six, Mitchell came down for coffee and breakfast. I told him I called out sick before even saying good morning.

“I definitely caught a cold from the kids.”

“Just don’t give it to me,” he said, lightly caressing my knuckles with one hand, grabbing a donut with the other.

“I love you. Make sure to eat something.” He headed out the door. After the car left the neighborhood I went upstairs, unlocked the door to the nursery, pulled the rocking chair to the edge of the crib and watched him sleep again. It was easier to see every detail in the daylight. I felt my heart race in figure-eights. It was the first time I could remember in my life where I didn’t have total faith in what I was doing. I wasn’t thinking ahead. I had done the thing that felt right the night before—same as Syed—and now there was the chance that I could get in trouble. All I knew was that I felt safer looking at Syed and knowing he was accounted for. I could check his behavior as many times as I wanted. If he was brushing his teeth; if he sucked his thumb while he slept; if he swore at home or played too many games. It was a lot easier for me to succeed at teaching Syed if he was going to my home, not the other way around. What did I have to learn as the teacher from his student’s habitat? A student with C-grades, at that. I could already see Syed’s body start to heal and adapt to its new environment as he lay unconscious.

There was an old baby monitor with the batteries still intact that I managed to connect to the TV speaker. I put on another pot of coffee and sat down at my desk in the living room. I felt high—on lack of sleep, on what-ifs. It was Tuesday, September 23rd. I wondered who would be subbing in for me. I wondered what Regina had thought when she woke up and Syed was gone. If she was only confused when she got to school and he wasn’t there, either. I wondered where the Lacewells had gone. To the police, if I had to guess. Word must have travelled to the school. People would be putting a puzzle together with the cardboard side up. The kid had obviously left home in the middle of the night. No sign of a break-in. Where would he had gone? On a walk back home. There wasn’t another option. If a kid leaves a sleepover in the middle of the night, where’s he trying to go? Wherever Mom is. So he started walking home and never made it there. Somebody picked him up on his route between midnight and seven a.m. and didn’t bring him back.

People would be thinking all of this soon. Maybe they would even check up on me, I remember thinking. Not to see if I knew where Syed was, but to see if I was okay, too. Things were getting more and more dangerous in the city. But then I thought that my absence could be suspicious to someone. Someone could have told the police about me. I never knew. You know what they say: if you think of anything strange, anything at all…? My absence could be that something for someone. Something they just remember being strange that day. But of course, it was all a coincidence. Mitchell had reminded me about breakfast before he left, I remembered. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be literally ill. The more I broke it down, the more my alibi seemed flimsy. So I chose to douse my eggs in a few of the expired condiments at the back of the fridge. The trick didn’t seem to work. I felt fine after, even better, and the eggs weren’t too pungent. I didn’t have anything moldy or raw that would do the trick. I just wanted Mitchell to come home to the smell of puke and me groaning. He would back me up with such earnesty. I imagined us in front of a flock of news crews. It’s criminal to put my wife on the suspect list, he’d say if it ever happened. She was a very sick woman at the time. Look at her. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

I was adding some tabasco to my fifth cup of coffee when a rustling sound came from the TV. It was Syed stirring, kicking off his blankets. I grabbed my stuff and ran upstairs to the rocking chair.

⋯

I left school after my freshman year to join the sisters. It took a lot of bravery to leave. I had to realize that Cornell was just a name: a clique of money-grubbing whores who idolized the Ivy League. Once I recognized the idolatry around me, it was easy to leave. Only God had been there for me after I lost my virginity, and I found myself needing to be consumed by Him. My soul needed a complete overhaul that could not be satisfied by prayer between classes. I needed to remove myself from that situation. It reminded me of one thing. My impostor system was debilitating. I couldn’t study. I was looking between my legs with a hand mirror again, like I did after I got my period as a girl, trying to memorize its proportions, trying to capture the exact angle again. Was that what everyone else was thinking during my classes? I thought so. I would study the Bible. My rented textbooks became a nightstand. I switched my major in March to theology. It was too late to change classes, so I stopped going to mine. I stopped leaving the dorm. I told my counselor that I was taking a year or so to decide what I wanted to study; that I would come back to Cornell eventually. It did not feel like a lie at the time. But it was not the whole truth. If I had told her everything, I would have said that I needed the Holy Spirit to save my life. That something terribly bad had happened to me so young, a childhood cancer I was unvaccinated against, being pure of heart, but naive and without armor, susceptible to the material world, the lionizing world, a lamb, a lamb entangled in black wool who needed the shepherd to shave her clean, who needed to find her role, to atone. Leaving that world for the Sisters saved my life. It can be life-saving to remove yourself from the corners of the world that are rife with temptation. Because some corners of the world are more sin-filled than others. If only there was a map that showed which peoples sinned by quantity and quality, by country and county and city. If scientists studied the human genome to see which people were direct descendants of Sodomites. I thought about this a lot in my four years of prayer. There are two types of people. There are people who get themselves hurt by sinning, and there are people who sin by hurting others. The former person is usually curious about the treasure promised by the temptation of sin. They want to see the modern life chronicled in loud music and American advertisements, and that means head rushes and body highs. They’re susceptible to temptation because they have big hearts. They are lambs, and they will follow the Shepherd they grew up with, unless they are leashed and led away by one of the many wolves waiting at the gate. The wolves are this latter group. People who take advantage of the meek for temporary joy. It is easy to tell a wolf from a lamb once you remove yourself from the world and ask God to explain this binary to you. God created many things as black and white as he created man and woman; sea and sky. Wolves have big mouths and teeth that express their tendency to smile when they’ve done something wrong to cause you pain. They avoid the pack and migrate to the corners of society as predators looking for the right moment to exert their bodily power. They are masculine in their assertiveness and anger when things don’t go the way they expect. They are scary, and you have the right to be scared of them.

My job as an educator was to ascertain whether or not the child I was dealing with was a lamb or a wolf. Sometimes lambs were led so far away that they looked like wolves. They grew dark unruly fur and long teeth away from the Shepherd, surviving off of raw meat for fun. But these runaway sheep could always be recaptured, reeducated, and sheared. A wolf could not. This was why I liked teaching children. If they had been led astray, it usually wasn’t far. They would grow fearful of the world over the fence during our year together, because I knew the Shepherd well. The problem came when a kid like Syed had spent so much time outside of the fence that I couldn’t gauge if he had spent any time with the lambs at all. If he even came from a lineage of lambs. He had been a sweet kid sometimes, but all the times he had been disruptive and contradictory stood out to me. His smile was either innocent or hungry. His intentions lied in the results of his actions. When had I not felt fearful of him; felt like he had the ability to throw me off balance entirely? He reminded me of all the men I knew who were schmoozers, liars, cheaters, and saggers. I was scared that he did not know God well enough to be saved. I thought of him going to the staff masses for the fun of it, then going home and drawing machine guns. I was partially scared because I didn’t know which box to put him in. But that was why he was upstairs. I would discern which of the two boxes he fit eventually.

⋯

I entered the nursery and locked the door. I slipped the key into my sock. The nursery was the only room in the house that was like the door to the entrance, able to be locked from the inside and outside.

Syed had gotten out of the crib and was standing there. He had stopped moving when he heard me come up the stairs. Practically stopped breathing when I entered.

“Where am I?” he asked. “Why did you put me in a crib?” He sounded hurt.

“This is my house,” I said. “I brought you here last night. You were acting out and I took it upon myself to sort out the situation.”

“Why was I in the crib?” he coughed.

“I didn’t have another room for you to stay in.”

“Why didn’t you just take me home?” He was looking around the room frantically. Maybe for a tissue; maybe for an escape route. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Do my parents know I’m here?”

“They do. You’re here because you’re on academic probation.”

“I…I don’t understand. I was just at Regina’s house.”

“Your parents decided it would be for the best if you stayed here on an academic retreat so we could discuss your performance in class. The two of you are my students. For you to leave your home in the middle of the night without informing your parents…it must mean I am failing to teach you how to be a productive, truthful member of society. Your parents said to me that I spend more time with you in a week than they do. Why shouldn’t I be the one to teach you this lesson? And I agreed with them.”

He was quiet.

“Syed,” I said. “This is serious. This behavior is unacceptable.”

“I…I’m confused. I was sick. I was sick and feverish. I needed fresh air, like you said last night. I didn’t think my parents or anyone would be that mad at me.”

I shook my head and smiled. “And you don’t even know you did anything wrong,” I said. “Unbelievable.”

I had brought some paper and pencils upstairs with me. I pulled up the rocking chair and the coffee table and asked Syed to sit down.

“Do you know what day it is?” I asked him.

“...No.”

“September 23rd, 2008. Write your name and the date in the top corner of the paper.”

He did so and turned the paper around to show me.

“Do you remember the essay prompt that’s been written on the blackboard since the beginning of the year?”

He thought for a second, or refused to think, then shook his head.

“Have you thought about what you were going to write about at all?”

He shook his head. “I’m better at working under pressure.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s a lie you’ve told yourself.”

He looked at the ground.

“My students who like to look at the blackboard probably know the prompt. My respectful students.”

“What is it?” he said. “Just tell me.”

I slipped him another piece of paper with the prompt written across the top. What is my vocation? Picture your life as a story written by your creator. What is the theme of that story that God has written?

“Now you can read it over as many times as you want,” I said. For everyone else, this essay is due before break. But for you, this is due now. You can take as much time as you need; that’s why you’re here. So you can really think this over. Your parents and I are scared that this path you are going down needs to be corrected.”

“So you imprison me,” he said. “You pull me out of school.”

“You’re not imprisoned. This is a routine suspension. You’ve been disruptive to others inside and outside of the classroom. Like I said, once this behavior is corrected, you will go home.”

“If I wasn’t imprisoned, I’d be free to leave now.”

“You’re not free to leave school at any time, either. And school isn’t prison. Would you like to go to prison? Do you think that would be better?”

“I have the choice to go there,” he said. He looked up like he was contemplating the thought deeper than it was.

I pointed to the two sheets of paper in front of him. “If you want to write about how you want to go to prison,” I said, “Be my guest. Fill the entire page. Tell me that you want to impress no one. I will just give you another sheet of paper and make you write it again.”

“Then how will I leave?”

“You’ll write it again.”

“You won’t like the next essay I write,” he said. “I have no idea how long it will take until I write something you don’t hate. I’ll just keep rewriting and rewriting until I fucking die here. Because I will never be able to think the way you think. I don’t like anything that you like. I don’t like books. I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in God. I like girls. I like when my mom says I’m supposed to just be focused on being a kid. That makes me feel good about myself. Because it’s true.”

“If your mom is focused on you feeling good, not you doing what’s right, then she’s a bad mother,” I said. “She doesn’t care whether you’re a good or bad person.”

He grit his teeth. “If my mom wants me to feel good,” he said, “then why did she agree to send me here?”

“Because you’re a lucky kid. Somebody in your life realized you needed to sit down and figure out your life. You should believe in God. This is what his grace feels like. Reaching out to you in your time of need. I bet you feel like shit right now. You should. You should be realizing right about now that that feeling is guilt. Guilt over not taking me seriously. Not taking your own future seriously. You feel like shit because you treated me like shit, over and over again. Write about that first if you need to. But write. You have until November 15th, just like everybody else.”

“I thought you said my essay was due now.”

“You said it yourself,” I said. “You have no idea how long this will take.”

⋯

Syed Lacewell

September 23rd, 2008

If my life were nothing but a story written by someone else, it would be like waking up with another brain. I would be like those ants on the science channel that get possessed by other bugs. Or it would be like being an ant in general, who spends its life building the same thing as every ant in the colony. They all have the same goal. That’s not my reality. I don’t think I have goals. You will say come on, you have goals. You like to paint and draw and stuff. But I don’t have any need to get better at that. I don’t want to get better at the things I love. I love my mom and dad more than I love drawing, and I can’t get better at that. I’ll always love them to the max because they’re my mom and dad. It doesn’t matter if we’re at Disney World or bickering or not talking at all. Same with drawing. I like experiencing it because I don’t expect to get better. Sometimes I draw a really, really bad hand and sometimes I surprise myself, but I still hold the pencil the same. I don’t want to get better at the things I love doing. I love the things I do because there isn’t a way for me to get better at them. My mom says that art is subjective. That means she secretly doesn’t like the art I’m showing her because the characters are too weird. But it also means that even when things are too weird, they’re still liked by someone, somewhere. If my life were a story and I could write it, it would be the most boring story ever. There would be no up and down plot with points and definitions and stuff. Each chapter would start the same and end the same on purpose.

Syed woke up in the morning. His bedroom was a little too warm, and that made getting out of the covers easy. His mother made the best breakfasts. The only fear in Syed's mind was that he could not see the baby. How was it growing? Did it like their mother’s food as much as he did? The baby grew from a pea to a cherry to an orange and more. He was working on a book, the largest comic book ever made, one panel per day at a time. But he only worked on it until his baby sister went to sleep. At night, he fell asleep in his parent’s bed facing the crib, knowing his father would carry him into the right room and tuck him in. His father would always be larger than him.

I took the one-page essay from Syed and read it over once, twice, three times. I opened my mouth, then shut it again. It was beautifully written. I had read far worse essays in graduate school. But had he answered the prompt? There wasn’t a single line that didn’t ignore what I had asked him. He shit on the question. I didn’t know if he would ever cooperate with me in this situation. He rebelled whenever he was sat down in a place and given a set of instructions. Look me in the eyes. Write what I tell you. Just do what I say and I’ll let you go free. But he wouldn’t. He was acting on a different set of principles. A rope of morals endlessly entangled.

“I’m sorry, Syed,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’m going to have to ask you to try again.”

“Why?” he yelled. He tried to stand up from the rocking chair, and I jammed the coffee table against his legs. He sat back down.

“Don’t raise your voice at me.”

“Why? I saw the look on your face. You liked it.”

“I didn’t like it. You didn’t answer the question I gave you.” I reached out to grab the pencil from him so I could underline the key words in the prompt. But he had the pencil clenched in his fist, his hand bigger than mine. He held the sharp end over my head as he grit his teeth.

“Give me the pencil, Syed.”

He just showed me his teeth. His eyebrows slanted horribly. I realized he could hurt me and I backed away in fear. I changed my eyes to oppose him and cowered.

“You talk about the look on my face? Look at yourself. You’re going too far, Syed. Threatening a teacher.”

He looked at the sharpened pencil in his hand and yelled in disgust. He threw the pencil across the room and it rolled under the door. He kicked the coffee table away from the both of us and the glass smashed into a hundred pieces beneath the windows. I screamed and covered my mouth. I lost my train of thought.

“Property damage,” I yelled frantically. “Wait until your father hears about property damage…your teacher’s home!”

But Syed didn’t flinch. He was behind the rocking chair, using the bars as a half shield. His face was still angry. He was inching away from me with his fists up.

“Wait until my father hears that I was here at all,” he said with his chest. “There’s no way in hell he would let me miss school to go with you.”

“You’re not in school because you’re not ready to go back to school. Your parents don’t know what your behavior is like when you’re in the classroom. I need you to decide what kind of person you’re going to be before you come back.”

“I’ve told you who I am. That’s why I know you’re not going to let me leave.”

“No, actually. You haven’t told me who you are. That was my question. You said that you don’t want to do anything with your life.”

He opened his mouth and shut it. “There’s no point in arguing with you. I said what I said. You can read it again if you don't understand.” He took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. “But you will understand. Give me an F on my grade. Fucking expell me. But I’m not writing it again.” His fists clenched.

I laughed at him. “You want to leave? How are you going to leave? I want to know exactly what you’re thinking of doing. Because there goes your nice facade. Underneath that smile, you’re so quick to swear at your teacher. You want to punch me, don’t you? Knock my teeth out? You can’t stop making fists. You could go home, then, right? So please, tell me exactly what you want to do in order to leave. Because I can see that writing your thoughts out in an educated way isn’t working for you.”

“I hate you,” he said. “I’ve hated you since I first met you. I’ve told my parents that I hate you, and that’s why I know they would never let me stay here.”

“I knew it,” I said. “I knew you hated me. That’s why you’ve made my life a living hell.”

“I don’t hate you for no reason,” he said.

“Then why did you hate me from the first moment you met me? Please. Just enlighten me. You want to kill me, don’t you? Stab me with a pencil. Cut me with glass. Do it, then. Hurt me.”

“If you let me call my parents, I’ll tell you. I’ll talk to you about everything. I’ll even rewrite the essay.”

“...Now you’re lying to me. Just say that you want to hurt me.”

He picked up a box labeled ‘Wedding’ and threw it so the contents spilled and smashed in front of my feet. A dozen plates and wine glasses skittered around the floor. I felt a pang in my ankle and looked down to see a thin trickle of blood running down my toes.

I screamed, thought about lunging at him, but couldn’t find a safe route across the room. Syed creeped to the side of the room with the windows, eyes like a squirrel. We were diagonal from each other. I was crouching, unsure of what to do. I made a split decision to open the door and grab the broom from the bathroom next door. I was out of the room for five, ten seconds. I came back with the broom and started pushing the glass around to form a safe trail to Syed. He hadn’t moved, but as I started trailing closer and closer, the shards clattering to either side of my feet, Syed started moving through the glass entirely barefoot on the other end of the room. He moved the bigger shards aside with tiny soccer kicks, but mostly stepped directly over the sharp glitter, wincing as he crept. When he made it over to the closest window on the left he stopped and stared at me. I was moving the broom in an arc around the crib in the middle of the room, getting closer. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I reached him. Simply grab him. Put him in another room while I got everything cleaned up.

But he didn’t give me any time. Standing barefoot in glass, less than ten feet away from me, he unlocked the window and dived from the second story to the ground. I dropped the broom and gasped. I just ran to the window to see if he was dead or alive, coating my own feet in shards. I had no thought in my mind that he could be alive. It looked like he went out the window head first. But as I made it to the window and looked down, Syed was there on his back, staring back at me. He stood up with a shudder, stumbling and falling when he tried to put weight on his right leg. I ran down the stairs and out the front door to the side of the house he fell from. It was thirty seconds from the nursery to the yard, but when I reached the spot, he was no longer there. Just gone. It couldn’t have been easy to get away. But now that he was outside of the house, I couldn’t chase after him and grab him, no matter how injured he was. No matter how wrong he was. Someone would see and would get the wrong idea. I went back inside and sat down at the kitchen table.

Syed would be limping back home now. Perhaps someone who was looking for him would find him first. What would he tell them? Would they believe whatever he said? I had to have faith that whatever he said, however he said it (in that imaginative voice of his) would sound too outlandish for anyone to believe. It was his word against mine. Nobody else had been there to verify what happened. All I had to do was make myself sound more believable than he did. It was strange. This was not a realization I had at the moment. I just knew how easily I could make myself the guilty party without trying. All I had to do was politely pick up the phone.

I pulled up the student directory on my computer and rang the Lacewell residence. The phone rang but no one picked up. I called again and again, but there was no one. They had to be out of the house. Anyone would be if their kid had gone missing. There wasn’t a mobile phone number on the website. I hung up the phone and thought about who to call next. What would I have gained from calling Mitchell? He would have taken the rest of the day off to come home and freak out. Not good for either of us. My stomach started gurgling. I went to the toilet and vomited my breakfast. Left the toilet full and unflushed. That cleared my head; made me feel like I had done something half right. I realized who I needed to call. I went to the phone again.

“Principal Lucas,” I said. “Something has happened with a student of mine, Syed Lacewell, the one who’s been out sick, I guess you should know he wasn’t at school today—”

“Slow down, slow down. Who is this? I can barely understand you.”

“This is Helen Webster,” I said, mouth filled with airy sobs. “Something has happened. I don’t know what to do. It’s Syed Lacewell. He broke into my house. He cut me.”

“Hold on, hold on.” The sound of a man standing up with haste; a door opening. “Lacewell, you said? The Lacewell boy. Christ almighty. He’s been missing since last night. I’ve had his parents sitting in my waiting room for the past hour.”

“Well, he just climbed out of the window of my house,” I said. “He’s completely out of control.”

“He cut you, Helen?”

“...Yes. He was in my house. He scared me. He broke a glass and cut me with it.”

“Are you still bleeding?”

“Yes. It’s a superficial cut.”

“Have you called the police?”

“...No,” I said.

“Christ, Helen,” he said. “Tell all of this to the police.”

“...I guess I wanted to call someone I know first. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Call 911. I’m going to call Mitchell and send him home for the rest of the day. Paid, of course. You’re going to need him at home with you.”

“Stay on the line with me,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“I’m not the police, Helen. I have a lot of buddies at DMPD I could phone and send over to you.”

“I’m scared. I might throw up again if I hang up the phone.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stay on the phone until I know Mitchell is on his way. But I need to talk to the Lacewells. I made them wait through my early lunch. Where is the kid now, Helen?”

“Syed? I don’t know. He ran off. I think he ran back to his house.”

“Back to his house? Did he tell you that?”

“...Yes.”

“Seems the kid could be lying, though. I’ve had my fair share of experience with psycho kids. The worst of the worst. If he’s been violent toward you, he has no problem lying. Wouldn’t want to get in trouble, you know. He’s probably on the run.”

I nodded, forgetting I was on the phone. “I know.”

A knock on the door. “Ah. Here’s Ms. Luther’s bringing in your husband now.” The sound of a hand muffling the phone. A smattering of yeses. Then the door slammed and Principal Lucas was back on the phone.

“Well, your husband is coming right home. How far away is your commute?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” I said. “Depending on the time of day.”

“That’s good. You won’t be alone for long. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to phone a couple of my buddies at the station and ask if they can do a wellness check on the Lacewell house. How does that sound?”

“I can give you the address,” I said, reciting from memory in a daze. “46 Hope Street. That’s from the student directory.”

“Thanks. That’s quite helpful, sweetheart. You know how slow this god awful school internet is,” he laughed. “Worse than dial-up.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” I mumbled.

“Who?”

“Syed,” I said.

“Oh, Christ. I don’t even want to think about it, you know. He’s expelled, of course. He assaulted a faculty member. Doesn’t matter if it happened in school or outside. That’s on his record. In fact—” He paused, muffling the phone again. Calling for Ms. Luther, one of the secretaries.

“Pull up Syed Lacewell’s record,” he said. “Thank you, doll.”

My heart was racing. The puke sensation had gone to my bowels. “I just want him to be found so he can be taken care of. Medicated, I believe. He’s out of control, but I don’t want to call the police. I don’t want to sue. I don’t want him to get into…prison amounts of trouble.”

“Well, he could end up in juvie. But that’s if you press charges.”

“I don’t want to call 911.”

“Helen,” he said. “I think it would be the best thing to do. I’m going to call because you’ve located a missing child. But I understand. You don’t have to bring the hammer down on him if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t. I’ve decided. I think he’s chosen his own fate.”

He laughed. “What happened to you, Helen? You’re a Buddhist too, all of a sudden?”

I hung up the phone and slumped against the floor. Embedded shards flew off of my kicking feet. I put my feet in the sink and washed off the blood and the imprints. Sat on the toilet and got sick over my puke. Then I went upstairs to the nursery with my slippers and a dish glove in hand. I took the biggest piece of glass I could find, disinfected the edge, and ran the knifelike edge from my shoulder to my chest. It was a quick flick of the glass, but the skin flapped open, dribbling and pulsing, the blood clinging to my shirt. More blood than intended, but how could you coax out the exact quantity of blood needed for such a situation? I thought about resuming the clean up, but I realized it was better for me if the room looked violent. Then I remembered Syed’s essay. I collected the papers and stuffed them in my only disorganized desk drawer.

⋯

They didn’t talk to me about it much. I’m sure everyone talked about me behind my back, but not to my face. They didn’t accuse me of anything. Mostly they laughed at me. They ogled at my scar whenever it was too hot to wear a turtleneck. I know they laughed at me because they laughed at Regina. A lot of rumours were thrown around the rest of the year. The kids knew Syed had snuck out at night to see Regina. They said he went crazy because of her since he only got into trouble after they hung out. Something about her rejecting him causing him to lose his mind. It was clear that Regina missed hanging out with Syed. He was a vital piece of her posse, and after he was expelled she didn’t know what to do with herself. She cut her hair and missed a day of school every other week. Then it was every week, and then the year was over.

The last time I saw Syed was at his last meeting in the principal’s office. It was Syed, his parents, Principal Lucas, and I, all stuffed into that small office. Syed was wearing an orange cast. He stayed silent the entire time, only glancing up from his lap to look at his parents when they spoke.

Principal Lucas laid out the charges. Syed Lacewell was banned from attending Saint Isidore. It was up to me to press charges. I told the family that I was not going to; the police were not going to prosecute, either. There wasn’t enough evidence at the crime scene. Then it was the Lacewells turn to speak. It was my first and last time meeting Syed’s dad, the rabbi. He felt things needed to change for his son, he said. His son said he was acting in self defense, but that was beside the point. Leaving his parents to believe he had been kidnapped was inexcusable. Syed was starting therapy. He was going to meet with a psychiatrist. In the fall, he was going to start at Black Forest Boarding School in Wichita. They had a great set of doctors and behavioral programs there. He wasn’t excited about missing out on soccer. His mother stayed quiet, her hand on top of her husband’s. Even though none of them would look me in the eyes, would only look at Lucas, I felt like I could start to breathe. The family stood up to leave. When Doctor Lacewell turned around to say something, Syed kept walking, disappearing to wait in the hallway.

“I don’t know what you did,” she said, pointing a finger at me. “But my son does not act the way you’ve been portraying him. When I find out. When I find out…”

“That’s enough, Mrs. Lacewell,” Principal Lucas said.

“It is Doctor Lacewell,” she said. She looked back at me. She tilted her head, trying to discern something. I felt like I had something on my face. “And I never, ever forget a patient of mine.”

I just relied on the curriculum for the rest of the year. Used my old lesson plans. Never went off script. One day at a time. When I had the talk with Principal Lucas about that year being my last, he wasn’t surprised. Just glad I had toughed out the rest of the year. Mitchell got a healthy Christmas bonus from the diocese. I started working a managerial position at Open Books. Our story had been in the newspapers, but we refused to have anyone interview us. I wanted the incident to be like a bad dream. The Lacewells moved to Wichita to be closer to their son as soon as they could. That was over a decade ago.

It’s nice: with social media nowadays, you can keep up with all the people from your past you wonder about. The Lacewells come to mind whenever the dying summer brings the wind along. I think about Syed saying that ignorance is bliss. I didn’t know what had come of him for years. I just let it be; tried to live my own life. If Mitchell hadn’t gotten me on Facebook, I never would have known. I was bored this past week and tried searching random people’s names I remembered. That was how I stumbled upon Mary Lee Aiello’s page. The header was a photo of the whole family: three rows of people with similar pudgy faces and black hair. There was Regina on the right-hand side—at least fifteen years older, but still distinctly her—smiling with a baby girl wrapped around her leg and another on her hip. Everyone in the photo looked like a family member. I couldn’t identify a husband. I had the urge to check up on her. I had no context for whom she was raising her children with. It could have even been him. It was the only context I had.

That was why I checked up on Syed Lacewell: to make sure that Regina had grown up okay. Regina didn’t have a Facebook page of her own, but after some digging, I found Senna Lacewell. Wichita, Kansas. Still practicing medicine. No mention of her kids. Some photos of her and a baby. I even recognized one of the photos on her page, an old snapshot from a vacation on the wall of her trailer.

I finally entered the name Syed Lacewell into the search bar. The first result came up instantly. Letterstoinmates.com. I stopped breathing. I clicked and it led me to a photo of him with the words Reno County Correctional Facility behind it. It was him. Those same eyes bore me with their uncomfortable glaring white space. I read the words breaking and entering and larceny before slamming my computer.

So, you see? Sometimes you’re just right about a person. When you get a funny feeling about someone, that’s called instinct. One of our last original survival mechanisms in this era of smog and rioting. It is easy, for me at least, to see the glaring mistakes I made while dealing with such a difficult child. It is human to want to change all the little ways you were wrong. But it is also human to make mistakes in the first place. If you make it up the hill with the cross or if you leave it halfway up, the cross still has to go on being the cross. The cross is doomed to be a stump of ugly nails and wood. It’s your job to see what you do with it. I’ve tried to focus on my own life in this way, to tell myself that there’s only so much that could have been done. I tried my best. Seeing Syed’s face on the computer screen, though alarming, has helped me. There was a place his life was going and he ended up there. This is all I know, though I still have trouble convincing myself, late at night or early in the morning, when Mitchell is snoring and all I have to do is write. A wolf is a wolf. Believe it. Call it one.

I haven’t slept for twenty-four hours. Last night, I went out to the mailbox. I had something to mail that wasn’t taxes. The essay was still in my desk. Sometimes you have a drawer that you just never organize.

I didn’t add a grade. Didn’t write a note or my name. Just wrote a fake return address on the envelope, slipped it into the slot, and smiled.