Back to School

I got a letter! It’s from my new teacher. She writes to tell me that she hopes I had a good summer and she’s looking forward to meeting me and this is the list of supplies I’ll need for the school year. I am ready right now! Let’s go to the store! I need notebooks and markers and an extra box of Kleenex.

The night before school starts, I’m a wreck. I can’t sleep and I keep thinking about my First-Day-of-School Outfit and if we’re going to miss the bus. I lie awake most of the night, watching the clock and counting down the minutes until the alarm goes off.

I can barely eat. Cereal tastes like wood shavings this morning. I get dressed way too quickly and now have nothing to do until the bus comes. My new backpack smells like plastic and possibility. I tug the zippers nervously, killing time, waiting.

Morning cartoons have changed a bit in the past three months. They have a new line up. Hercules then Saved by the Bell then VR Troopers. I see them but I’m not watching. My mind is elsewhere. My mind is wondering where my desk will be and if there will be any new kids and what we’ll play at recess.

The afternoons still feel like summer, but the mornings have grown chilly and damp with dew. We trek outside to the porch, Mom with her camera in hand. We stand by bushes and trees and sit on the porch swing as she snaps photo after photo. We aren’t trying to be models. We are trying to wait for the bus.

Finally, someone spots it coming around the bend. My stomach does flip flops and I think I might lose those Cheerios I ate a half an hour ago. I’m excited! I’m nervous. I’m itchy in my brand new Back-to-School outfit. I’m getting on the bus.

Mr. Fitzgerald teaches health class. He was my mom’s health teacher too when she was in Junior High. When you raise your hand in class and ask to go get a drink, he always says, “As long as you make it non-alcoholic!” with a wink and a smile. In his class, we study the effects of smoking on the respiratory system by running up and down the hallways and then trying to breathe through straws. We make carb charts and present about whether apples really help you avoid the doctor.

Mr. Fitzgerald has a very special talent. On afternoons when we have taken all of our notes, graded our homework, and finished our tests, he lets us play a game. He has a key that he keeps at this desk. He hands one of us the key and leaves the room. We then scramble and pass it from hand to hand and decide who will hide it for when he comes back in the room.

People stick it in their shoes or under their seats or up jacket sleeves. Mr. Fitz, after several minutes, comes back into the room. We all sit still and try not to look at the real key holder. Some of us act as a red herring, attempting to trick our telepathic teacher.

He takes slow, measured steps up and down each aisle. He pauses here and there, a finger to his lips, considering this student and then that one. He makes idle remarks that offset the deep concentration it takes for him to play this game.

We always think we will fool him. We are always wrong. We never play a single key game that he doesn’t win. It remains a mystery, how he does it. How he knows every single time. Is he psychic? Telepathic? Does have a way of seeing into the room from outside in the hallway? A mystery.

– except –

I know.

I sit here, over 10 years later, and I know. I know the secret to the key game. Even now, I’m not sure I should reveal it. Who knows? Maybe everyone found out before we left BCJHS. But then again, maybe there are still a few believers out there. And I was entrusted with this secret. I think I slipped up a few days after I learned it. I vaguely recall telling a girl who was only at school one class period a day, thinking she wouldn’t have a chance to tell anyone. I have no way of knowing if she ever did.

A decade later, I still feel inclined to keep the secret; it’s not mine to share.

That’s what you get for being the nerdy girl with her giant Harry Potter or Christy novel tucked under her desk during lecture, reading with the book balanced on your knees. For stopping in the middle of the basketball game to tell the referee that you traveled and he should take the ball to give to the other team. For having to sit next to the weirdest kid in 6^th grade because you were “mature enough” and your classmates weren’t, so you suffer through a year of him studying the hair growing on your arms and calling you the Jolly Green Giant.

And one day, after the bell rings, Mr. Fitz asks you about the book you’re reading. He walks with you down the hall a little ways and then stops. He looks straight into your eyes, something teachers hardly ever do unless you’re in trouble, and he says, “Sarah, I have something I would like you to help me with, but it will only work if you keep it a secret.”

I am devouring another Romance Novel.

I found a box of them in an old storage shed when Nana and Papaw bought land on Borders. We were exploring these strangers’ things that they just left here, and I came across this entire box full of books. Most of the front covers are missing. Bookworms made little tunnels through the pages. The back covers tell me they were 75 cents brand new back in the early ‘80s.

I am in love.

I read about Marnie, a model turned recluse after some tragedy or other, who is wooed out of her misery by a handsome, stubborn contractor who won’t stand to see her so gloomy. And Rachel, whose grandfather owned a game reserve in Australia that she surprisingly inherits and so must deal with the argumentative albeit insanely attractive foreman.

I read them over and again. I cry when hearts are broken or when another happy ending is resolved. I stay up until 2:00 am on school nights because I can’t bear to sleep until I know that these wayward lovers finally reconcile and live happily ever after.

On the bus, in study hall, at lunch time, riding in the back of the car. I tune out the entire world and let my imagination run away with these beautiful people in preposterous circumstances who are destined to be in love. Pirates, vagabonds, kings… and the women who love them.

My English teacher tells my family that she was initially concerned that I read novels through her class each day, but that my grades are good and I keep up with the assignments so she lets it slide. My teammates on the basketball team show no interest in interrupting my silent descent into these salacious stories, and for the most part I’m happy to not have to awkwardly interact with them. When I have friends over, we read aloud and giggle at the scandalous affairs, inappropriate dinner time behavior, and blushing virgins who become vixens on their wedding nights.

In time, I get picky about my romance writers and am no longer able to simply enjoy them like I used to. Some of the writing is just too awful. I look back on that time, though, with fondness. I fell in love so many times and lived so many stories and enjoyed it all so much.

Real life love, I soon learn, is not really like the kind in books. Better to enjoy those fictional characters and their guaranteed happiness than to risk too much of yourself when it comes to matters such as this.

We sit in a circle in the morning and play a hand-clap game, counting the number of days we’ve been in school so far. We finger paint, which feels like something we should be in trouble for. Smearing colorful goo all over the table top surface? I would be in so much trouble at home. But it’s okay here. Actually, it’s wonderful here.

In the afternoon, we get to drink chocolate milk from little cartons. They bring it in to the classroom in brown, square crates stacked on a cart. Some days we have to do fluoride. Tiny cups of pink liquid stand in rows on a lunch tray. A line of tape runs the length of the room, and we stand on it in a row, waiting our turn. She checks our name off the list when we take a cup. I don’t like fluoride day. It smells funny and tastes funny and makes me feel all woozy, like my head is full of yarn and air instead of brain.

We have a substitute teacher at recess. It rained in the morning, and there are puddles scattered around the playground. One by the swings. One by the sandbox. The sand there is sticky and rough from the earlier showers. One under the monkeybars. We take turns climbing across the cool, slick metal bars, trying not to fall in the puddle. But we aren’t really trying that hard. Someone lands in the puddle.

Uh oh! Look around. Quick. Did she see? Did the teacher see? We’re going to be in trouble.

But she’s laughing. How fun! A grownup who likes fun, kid things? This is a miracle.

Suddenly, everyone is jumping in puddles. Splashing. Stomping. Dirty, brown puddle water spraying up the backs of our jeans and onto our coats. Little flecks of mud and rock stick to pink round cheeks and in the girls’ long ponytails. This is the best recess ever.

Suddenly, everyone freezes. Now, we’re in trouble. Here comes a real teacher. She teaches first grade. She’s tall, and has red hair and glasses, and her voice is sharp and straight like a razor. We’re all ordered to sit against The Wall. That’s where you have to go when you’re bad at recess. Go sit by yourself along The Wall and watch everyone else have fun. With my back to The Wall, the scratchy bricks pick at my coat and catch pieces of my hair, pulling it when I turn my head.

We are all in trouble, but it doesn't seem fair. The grownup in charge was letting us play there. She was okay with it, and she was the one in charge, so why does this other lady get to come out here and tell us we all did something bad? How can you be in trouble for something that you’ve been told you are allowed to do? Rules are supposed to be simple and constant, and I do not like it when they change. It is the essence of unfairness. My five-year-old self is offended and outraged.

Now, any time it’s rainy before recess, even if it stops in time for us to go play, we have to have Inside Recess. Board games. Books. The costume area and play place where we can play house or doctor or ride on the pony seesaw.

And each morning, we sit in a circle and clap our hands and slap our knees and add one more day to the count. These are the days we are in school.