7th Grade Was My Worst Year.

It's hard to be in meetings with her because I become so transfixed with wondering what it must feel like to be in her body. She speaks, and I find myself focusing on the way her jowls shake, the way her mouth naturally slopes down at the corners because of the fat in her cheeks, a forced perpetual frown. She wears short sleeves in the winter and her bare arms always make me feel as though mine need lotion. There's no way the skin can be stretched so taut, like an overstuffed sausage in a casing, and not be itchy. It looks so uncomfortable to be her. They say that in high school she was an athlete (but her sport was softball and there's a lot of latitude with a player's size in softball) and I wonder if she still sees herself as just needing to lose thirty or so pounds. I think that I focus on these things because I hate her, and I hate the words that are coming out of her mouth. Rather than listen and seethe, it somehow feels less rancorous to spend the time that I'm forced to be near her postulating about the combination of calories and inactivity that together make a 36 year old body that grotesque.

I have no friends here, anymore. It's ok with me. I watch shows like First 48 and I think, we are the ones in the position to really have an affect on this and the level of complacency here is criminal. He's 12 years old and estranged from his drug and alcohol addicted mom who's in Cleveland (who asks him to bring cash to their Thursday visits) and fostering with a woman who sequesters the money she gets for them into an account for her trip to Mexico. It's fucked up from the top to the bottom and all the way up and all the way down it's adults who are responsible for it. He's 12 years old and I'm up on the third floor for an entirely different reason and she stops me to pretend to be friends but I know that she just wants to know the gossip. I'm mean to her about it and I know that I'll be the gossip later and that's what I have to be OK with. The end of the line (the ridiculous way in which I evaluate things) is that she will never confront me because she's desperate to stay in my good graces because I'm better at chess than her. These people aren't my friends but I have enough chips in my corner to keep them afraid of my opinion of them. It's so dumb, being grown up. The other tries to enter into the conversation before realizing that I'm being mean and that things have changed since she last talked to me. She says, "he shouldn't be here," and I say, "there are two sides to every story," and the look that I give her contains the thing that I really want to say which is, "you shouldn't be here either." It's a thing that I cannot say but that I need so desperately for her to understand. My hands became your heart and my breath became your breath. An entire coalescing of things happened for you to still be here, so you of all people don't get to say that. Your task is for 45 minutes a day to get him to understand that you care about him. I see him every now and then at his worst and last week I explained to him how to use the number line to understand absolute value when he got kicked out of math and when I had to leave he drew me an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper worth of hearts with a capital J in the middle. There is a great revolution that needs to happen in public education.

She sends a text later, much later, and I don't respond. It will be a whole thing tomorrow and they'll talk about it, she'll come to my office with some innocent comment or request to gauge my mood and it will all be so obvious and stupid. They'll be waiting upstairs for her to report back. God help you when you become the age that you teach.