The girl in the fifth grade I dated whom I didn’t treat very well

There was a girl in the fifth grade I dated whom I didn’t treat very well. “Dated.” I mean, by the time we (used here in the universal sense) were old enough to actually “date,” meaning, like, go somewhere, we were already embarrassed by the word and used other words to describe whatever it was we were doing. They were always more serious words than the ones we might have used had accuracy been our goal, which meant there was always a weird kind of anxiety, a rush to get the physical or emotional reality of the relationship up to the level of the word we had been using to describe it, and so there is a lot of rushing going on in middle and high school relationships, and I’m sure this is all universal, so I won’t belabor the point. The point is, what we were doing in fifth grade didn’t really resemble dating at all, though we called it that, although again, you already knew this, so I’ll just go back to describing the girl I dated back then whom I didn’t treat very well.

She had blondish hair, that was crimpy, if not quite curly. She was a little taller than me, but still short. I want to say green eyes, but that could just be my imagination. I remember thinking she was very pretty at the time, but I stumbled across a picture the other day of someone I’m pretty sure is her and she looks way more awkward than I remember her, though it’s really just awkward in that fifth grade sort of way, where you’ve still got your baby fat and your nose grows faster than the rest of your head (this happened to me, at least) and your face looks a little different every morning, it seems. And her name was Beth, which is a nice name, all the moreso because you never meet anyone named Beth anymore who isn’t a couple decades older than you are.

Beth was new to the school and one of the first things she did was announce her intentions to win me over. There hadn’t been much dating of any kind among the kids in my class, and it was Beth, coming from Michigan (I think) who really kickstarted prepubescence for us.

She did win me over, in a way, although it wasn’t easy. Circumstances conspired against her. For one thing, she joined our school just about the time we started splitting the grade in half by gender for our sex ed videos. I mean, not sex ed, but health, puberty, talking about the penis, hair in unexpected places, that kind of thing. Which, I don’t understand the timing, because the whole “yuck girls/boys” thing ends on its own around third or fourth grade, and besides a few outliers (which you’re always going to have), we stopped seeing each other as members of discrete gender groups and finally started getting along, and I think the time around fourth grade was probably the period of greatest, easiest, most egalitarian inter-gender relations I’ve ever experienced. And then out of nowhere come these videos and filmstrips and the childish revulsion of like kindergarten on is grounded in real physical revulsion of self and others and you can’t look a girl (or boy, depending) in the eyes anymore without thinking all kinds of unpleasant thoughts you spend the whole rest of your life trying to banish, and the whole boys/girls-effortlessly-getting-along dynamic, which lasted for all of like nine months, is totally out the window, and it’s replaced by all the aggression and competition and distrust and revulsion you and I know as Adult Inter-Gender Relations. Most of us become more comfortable with this new “adult” dynamic over time, but others never recover.

I mean, you could also argue that, without this redifferentiation, we’d all end up sexless and unhappy and wouldn’t reproduce. Which, maybe. But having been prey to the same supersexual hormonal changes as everyone else circa middle/high school, I seriously doubt all the egalitarian sexual politics and pleasant, unsexually-charged interpersonal relations in the world could have held all that off. What it could have done, maybe, is made the whole thing a lot less unpleasant for everyone.

Anyway, the other problem she faced (besides the super-weird new inter-gender relational atmosphere) was that she chose me. I had some strange ideas, maybe, about dating at the time, having had no real model of a functional relationship. My father was such a nonissue that my sister and I never even bothered asking about him. One day he just wasn’t there, is all. I remembered him a little, my sister not at all. To this day, I still don’t know what happened to him, or where he is or might be (or might be buried). What we did have was our mom and a parade of men we were explicitly instructed to either call or not call Dad (depending on—what? my mother’s whims, perhaps) who all had bushy brown beards. They came in all sizes and varieties, from all backgrounds and occupations, but they all had the beard in common. We were never sure if Mom went cruising around, looking for guys who already had beards to pick up, or if she picked up guys and told them not to call her back until they had grown their beard out or what. Even the ones we were instructed to call Dad never got very close to us, and so we’d get them mixed up all the time, asking one to take us to that park again, only to have him ask what the hell we were talking about, he had never taken us to the park before. One beard was the same as the next, to us.

No one seemed to be too happy with the whole beard situation—least of all my mother (least of all the beards, actually, all of whom frowned a lot, but out of the three of us it bothered my mom the most somehow). What I took away from all this is that all I was really interested in was securing a wife, to avoid all the beards, and my thinking was, this is the kind of thing that happens in eighth grade at the earliest, so until then, at least, you could count me out of the whole dating pool.

I did cave, though, eventually. It just seemed so much easier after a while. What happened was she asked me if I would date her (not directly, of course, but through intermediaries and notes—intermediaries, mostly, especially this one girl named Tory) and I gave no comment and so she’d ask again the next day, and I’d still have no answer for her and so on. It just seemed absurd—the question—and the affirmative and the negative were equally as absurd, as responses go. This went on—for how long? It felt like months, although for all her tenacity and endurance, even she wasn’t capable of keeping it up for that long, I feel like. Must have been weeks, at least, before I finally said no and Tory told Beth that I had said yes and the next day I found out we were dating. I might have set the record straight, but I guess I just figured, what the hell. Here we are, and all.

Dating wasn’t half as bad as I was worried it would be. We didn’t sit at the same table in class, so mostly she’d just glance at me significantly (to the extent that a fifth grader is capable of such a thing). Sometimes I’d give her an empty nod—to express that I saw her and nothing more—or sometimes I’d pretend I was looking past her head, as if out the window, even though the window was behind me and all that was behind her was wall.

Of course, this invites the question—what was I looking at that I always had to nod to her or look away when she kept looking at me? Her, I guess. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel—compelled is the word, maybe. Interested. In the way one might be interested in a new painting that has suddenly appeared in one’s living room. It is now a part of your environment, if nothing else, and even if the painting itself is nothing that great, the real interesting thing is how that painting got there, which is enough to occupy you for a while.

Is there something a little strange about this? All the thought I’ve put into fifth grade romance? Maybe. A little too much detail, I’ll agree. We mostly like to gloss over the detail when remembering such things, so that no one gets the wrong idea. I can understand the impulse, but my concerns about you getting the wrong idea are overpowered by other things. No point in going through this tiresome exercise if I’m not at least going to be honest about it.

It wasn’t just significant looks, though. We hung around with each other in gym, library, art—anything that took us out of the classroom and didn’t have assigned seats. In recess, she would throw a fit if we weren’t on the same team during basketball, and then she would throw additional fits if I didn’t pass to her enough. This might have been annoying but 1) I was just happy I still got to play basketball at recess, and 2) I didn’t get the ball that much since I am and always have been completely hopeless at basketball. And we sat next to each other during lunch, where she was always whispering things in my ear. I think more than anything else, she got a kick out of the dirty looks everyone else gave the two of us when they saw the whispering. Most of the time I couldn’t understand her, and I wasn’t always convinced she was actually whispering words—she may have just gone through the motions of whispering so as to annoy our friends. I usually nodded. Are you getting an idea of the kind of person I was to her? And the thing is I don’t really think she minded. I basically just needed to stand there and she was perfectly content to do the rest.

Every once in a while, I’d go over to her house and we’d watch TV or play on her computer or something. The beards would usually drive me over there, assuming there was one in the house that week. My mother thought it was some kind of father-son bonding, I think, even though I was never bonding with the same beard for more than four or five weeks in a row. Some of them would try to start some awkward conversations, ask me about this Beth person, but most of them knew enough by then to keep their mouths shut.

(Another thing my sister and I always wondered is if the other beards knew about each other. Not if they knew there were other men, but if they knew there were other men and they all had beards. Also, I should say that I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my mother. All these beards would start out sleeping in the guest room and only like 30-50% of them would get called up to the big leagues, so to speak. She just wanted us to have two parents in the house, was a lot of it. And she wanted one of those two parents to have a beard, for whatever reason.)

So the thing to take away from this is: I was completely indifferent to Beth. And though she usually didn’t seem to mind, there were times when she’d try very hard, and my indifference would crush her. She would try to flatter me with some gesture or expose her insecurities (which I think were half hers and half her pretending to have the insecurities TV taught her she was supposed to have, to be honest) to me and my only response would be to give her my patented Blank Stare and she’d just about collapse. She must have wondered if I was even alive in there. I could have given her cruel honesty or easy dishonesty but I should have given her something beyond deadness. She deserved better. Not that there was anything special about her, even, but everyone deserves better, I think, by default, simply by virtue of being made of the some stuff as the rest of us.

Was I scared or confused? Or cruel? Probably, all of those. My own psychology is of little interest to me.

It all unraveled one afternoon in April during lunch. Lunch was presided over by our vice principal, a stern woman named Vincent who was about the age of our mothers. When she wanted silence (which was at least two or three times per lunch period—sometimes because she had announcements, sometimes because people weren’t sitting down quickly enough, and other times because she complained of terrible headaches, and she would scream at us for aggravating them, all the while clutching the side of her head in both her hands and practically crying—I don’t think was really cut out for the position of elementary school vice principal, to be honest), she would cut the lights and we all had to shut up right then and there. She’d talk to us for a little while—thirty seconds or so, usually. She never had anything to say, but was just trying to fill time to keep the cafeteria silent for as long as she could possibly justify it, you could tell. And if you talked or fooled around or dropped a book or did anything else other than sitting silently looking straight ahead with our hands on the table, she would point at you and then point at the empty tables lined up underneath the windows on the far side of the cafeteria (there was a whole row of six or seven of these empty tables, which I think she kept around specifically for disciplinary reasons) and you had to sit there for the remainder of lunch and then were told to report to her office the next day for recess where you’d get your ass chewed out, presumably, for making a ruckus during Designated Cafeteria Silent Time. Some of the other teachers would help her (the young ones, mostly, who were more insecure because they didn’t have tenure yet) find troublemakers while others (the good ones) would pretend to be occupied elsewhere or would even warn kids to be quiet if they thought Ms. Vincent was about to catch them. (And then there was Mrs. Driscoll, who was old and cranky—but in a good way, like the kind of old and cranky person who’s always willing to put his or her crankiness up for your side against evil or just otherwise obnoxious and overbearing people—and had been at the school way too long and through way too many Vice Principial administrations to give a shit about any of this nonsense and would roll her eyes and audibly sigh during Ms. Vincent’s tirades, which threw Ms. Vincent off pretty severely, as you might imagine. A lot of the time, she thought it was kids sighing, and would turn around all ready to chew some kid’s head off and had to stop herself. And the reason she had to stop herself was that the first time this happened, she flipped out in typical Vincent fashion and hissed “all right? Who was that? Who sighed just then?” And Mrs. Driscoll sighed again and said, “it was me, Sandy, I’m waiting for you to get this over with already so we can take the kids back to class,” and we all cracked up and Ms. Vincent looked like she was just about ready to collapse onto the tile floor sobbing or blow a gasket and murder somebody (although whoever it was would not be Mrs. Driscoll, that was for sure), so a couple of the teachers told us all to get up and head back to class, even though it was recess time, which did not go over well with a lot of these kids, you might imagine, and there was about as full-scale a riot as fifth graders can throw in the lunchroom—mostly just a couple overturned chairs and cupcakes flying around—until recess period ended anyway and we all filed quietly back to class.) I was friends with this kid named Jeff who got picked out just about every day. He was trying, honestly, but he just could not sit quietly. He could not avoid it. He didn’t even get upset about getting caught anymore. He just rolled his eyes and said, like, “aw, man!” and took it. The idea behind the tables was to sequester the kids who made noise for the remainder of lunch, I think, because she always tried to space them out, but usually she had sent so many over there by the end of lunch that their tables were more crowded than ours (and things could get pretty rowdy over there, as you might imagine, sending all the kids who tend to make the most noise to one side of the cafeteria).

But the point is, I had never been sent over there, and I was pretty afraid of it. I stayed away from discipline as much as possible, and even when I would have been totally within my rights to stand up to authority (like when my teacher the year before took my Science Center of Connecticut whale pencil because I was admiring it a bit too much when I was supposed to be answering math questions or something, and in a fit of rage, snapped it in half and threw the pieces behind the radiator), I just kept my mouth shut and sat there, feeling deeply ashamed of myself. It was no way to live, it’s true, afraid to stand up for anything, least of all yourself. I’m not sure what I was so scared of. I guess I thought I was a wretched, deceitful, unpleasant little person, and so the best thing I could hope for was to skate through life unnoticed, the primary goal being to avoid what was coming to me, because I deserved many awful things, if one looked at the situation objectively. I’m not saying that was true, that I really was objectively awful, but that is the unconscious principle that guided me for many years and probably still guides me today, to some extent.

And so when Beth was whispering to me that day in April in a clear lights-out Mandatory Cafeteria Silence Time situation, and Ms. Vincent did that thing she did where her head turned first and then the rest of her body slowly followed, and she pointed, only this time she was pointing at me (the reality, of course, is that she was pointing at both of us, but what was really important is that she was pointing at me me me!), I took it a lot harder than I maybe should have taken it, examining the situation from a rational, objective point-of-view.

This was right near the end of lunch, and we had all eaten, and she sat us at corners of different tables so I could see the back of Beth’s head (she kept it down) but she couldn’t see me. There weren’t a lot of people over at the Disciplinary Tables for whatever reason that day. We waited until the rest of the grade filed out of the cafeteria back to class without us, and then we waited while she disciplined the other six or seven kids she’d picked out that day.

We were at the last two tables, so it was just the two of us, by the end. Ms. Vincent went to talk to Beth first. She sat down right next to her and spoke real soft, so all I could her was muttering and all I could see was Beth nodding and shaking her head. I don’t think she spoke, Beth. I think she was just as scared as I was, if such a thing was possible.

Standard operating procedure was, after Ms. Vincent talked to you, you got right up and walked right back to class, alone. But Ms. Vincent got up and sat down across from me and Beth didn’t move. She was still bent over, looking down at the table. I didn’t know if she was too devastated to move or if she had been instructed to stay there or what.

But anyway, Ms. Vincent sat across from me and stared me right in the eyes. She cracked her knuckles and swirled the saliva around in her mouth like she wanted to spit but was mindful of messing up the cafeteria.

“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked. It was a brilliant first question. Get a “yes” and that’s halfway to a confession; get a “no” and now you’ve got lying on top of the original offense and the kid’s in even bigger trouble. It’s a shame she was wasting obvious interrogative talent like this on fifth graders.

I don’t want to act like I knew I had found a loophole and that’s why I didn’t say anything. The truth was I usually didn’t say anything to people who were outside my circle of like five or six closest friends, just as a general principle. So that’s what I did, I didn’t say anything. It threw Ms. Vincent off a bit, you could tell. She started to sweat and she looked pretty angry.

“I don’t need you smarting off to me,” she said, quickly looking to regain the upper hand. “What I saw is you whispering to this girl. Is that what happened?”

Another brilliant tactic. Technically, I had done nothing wrong. I had only listened to Beth whispering to me. There was nothing wrong with that, was there? She was trying to lull me into admitting that, yes, I had whispered, and now she had us both for whispering and I wouldn’t be able to spring myself on a technicality. And if I said no, she could either accuse me of lying (which would probably stick, since I didn’t have much of an appeals process at my disposal, that afternoon in the elementary school cafeteria) or continue to press me and get me to confess to whispering, at which point she’d have me for both whispering and lying the first time when I said I hadn’t been the one who was whispering. But I didn’t budge.

Ms. Vincent threw the chair next to her onto its back in frustration and cursed. “All right, you listen to me,” she said. “I’ve got a girl sitting over there telling me that she’s your girlfriend,” (Ms. Vincent choking back the revulsion), “and she tells me that you were whispering to her and she was whispering to you,” (all these years later, I still don’t know if this was true and Beth had ratted me out for something I hadn’t done or if Ms. Vincent was bluffing or if she had just lost it in general at this point), “so I’m going to ask you one more time and this time I’m going to get some straight answers. What were you two whispering about me?” Ms. Vincent was a very insecure individual, I can see this very clearly now in retrospect.

But anyway, at this point she had me for obstruction of justice, so it didn’t even matter that I still wouldn’t say anything to her. She told us to report to her office during recess the next day.

Beth and I walked off to class together. Beth was shaking a little, and kept brushing her little arm up against mine, like she wanted me to comfort her or something. But I was too pissed off to even think. There happened to be a little desk in the hallway with a tape recorder sitting on it—probably some kind of oral test, or a special ed thing, maybe—and so little fifth grade Chris picked up the desk and threw it against the opposite wall. Beth (like two steps away from getting absolutely leveled by this desk) gasped. The tape recorder had been plugged in, so it seemed to jump off the surface of the desk and then plummet to the ground. It spit out the cassette, which skidded across the floor, trailing tape behind it. I stood there for a second and then stalked back in the direction of class.

Beth caught up to me and grabbed my shoulder. She was crying now. I was making a real ass of myself. She said over and over again that she was sorry. She was sorry! As absurd as it was that I was making her give me an apology, it was doubly absurd that I refused to accept it. She kept trailing after me, crying and apologizing, until I ducked into a boy’s bathroom (which, desperate as she was to make things right, she refused to go into, naturally) and I didn’t come out until I heard her pad off back to class, and even then I took a couple seconds to compose myself lest I flip out again and punch through a window or something equally absurd.

When I got home, I told my mom and the beard what I had done (my mom because I felt like she would find out anyway and then I would be finished; the beard because he happened to be in the room at the time, trying to fix the cable box that was permanently on the fritz and that every beard before him had been just as unable to fix). She tried her best to look and sound disappointed in me, but hoped that I had learned a valuable lesson about doing whatever it was I had done.

My mom dressed me in a sweater the next morning. She still picked out my clothes at that time, because I still couldn’t be trusted. Not that I would wear something outrageous if given the chance, but I was just psychologically incapable of choosing my own clothes. The times she suggested to me I try it for myself (weekends, when we weren’t on any kind of schedule), I would just open up my closet and stare in at all the shirts and be completely overwhelmed by them, with no idea which one I should choose, until she came up to check on me an hour or so later and found me still wearing my pajamas, standing in place in front of the closet, shivering. But anyway, she dressed me in a kind of fancy sweater (that looked kind of like a wearable Persian rug) and khakis, which I usually didn’t wear. I guess it was her silent little way of encouraging to make a good impression.

Beth was in a sweater too, when I got to school. A white sweater with a black stripe across the middle with little white sheep on it. And a pink skirt. So we looked pretty silly, the two of us. (I had also gotten a haircut—though this had been booked like months ago, my mother always booking the next haircut as soon as the last one was over.) She looked at me all morning, I could tell, even though I refused to look back for anything. Why couldn’t I have looked? I refused to believe we were both in this together, is what it was.

I remember we were in the middle of our long division unit that day. I was pretty hopeless in long division normally, even without this death sentence hanging over my head for later that afternoon. I got called to the board to divide 434 by 7 and only got out of it by suddenly wincing as I was lifting the chalk and screaming, “I think I tore my rotator cuff!” (“rotator cuff” being a phrase I had learned that very morning on SportsCenter, where it was used re: Major League relief pitcher Mark Eichhorn) and hobbling back to my seat. The student teacher who was instructing us didn’t really know how to handle it and our regular teacher was on another planet at this point (listening to a book on tape—some new age-y type thing, I think, because she seemed to be doing a lot of chanting—silently, of course, but whatever she was mouthing had the rhythm of chanting), so I got off the hook.

At lunch, my plan was to sit as far away from Beth as possible. Send a real definite message that way. But I was held up in line buying a milk (this kid Andrew, who OD’d on heroin a couple years later (and when I say “a couple,” I mean he was 12) got in a minor fistfight with the cashier) and so the only chair left was right next to her. So I did the only thing I could do—I crawled under the table and ate lunch under there, sitting “Indian style” (not sure what they call this in elementary schools today, but it strikes me that it cannot possibly be “Indian style”) on the cold floor. I could barely eat, I was so sick to my stomach. I would have gotten in more trouble, no doubt, had Ms. Vincent seen me eating on the floor—and I knew this. Such was my dedication to abandoning this girl, who was falling apart herself, and needed me, or could have used some company at least, if “needed” sounds a little dramatic for fifth graders in trouble with the vice principal for the first time in their lives. It was like a moral thing to me, shirking my duties as a fellow human being. I felt I had a moral obligation to myself, to isolate myself, to burn all my bridges to humanity, I guess.

And so she—in spite of all the evidence before her that I was a coward and a fifth-grade asshole—crawled under the table and sat down right next to me.

And so I left the cafeteria.

For the rest of lunch, I just wandered the hall, as if I were given free reign over the prison in my last minutes before execution. I looked through classroom windows at the faces of all the innocent kids in the younger grades. I passed by the band room and listened to the music (the fourth grade chorus was singing the Mickey Mouse theme very slowly and completely indifferent to key). I smelled flowers for the last time. And then I went into the office and just waited in the lobby.

Beth joined me in due time—not until after lunch. She sat down next to me on the small office couch. She didn’t seem nervous anymore. Very comfortable, very at peace. I was shaking like a leaf.

“I like your shoes,” she said quietly. Which was weird, because I was all decked out in this weird get-up my mom had laid out, and I’d even gotten my hair cut, and my shoes were the only thing about me that day that was the same as what I wore every other day. I was just wearing my good old dirty sneakers, and that’s what she picked out. I said, “thanks.”

Beth moved away three years later, I think, or maybe four. That was the last thing I ever said to her. Can you believe we never spoke again? Four years. Jeez.

Ms. Vincent poked her head out of her office. Where were all those other kids from yesterday? We didn’t think to ask; it never even occurred to us that they weren’t there. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to consider other people when you’re not even sure of your own body, in a catastrophe situation like this one.

Anyway, Beth got called in first. And she came out again in, like, less than two minutes. I was too busy looking at my feet to ask her how it went. I could see that she stopped in front of me, but when Ms. Vincent poked her head out of the office again, Beth hightailed it out of the office pretty fast and down the hallway towards the playground. And then Ms. Vincent called me in.

Her office was small and cramped, with a desk that was just about the length of the room, so she had to squeeze between it and the wall to reach her chair on the other side. There were a couple big gray filing cabinets that seemed to be untouched, like a part of the architecture—the top drawer of one of them was permanently opened and she had some potted plants in there (this didn’t keep me from wondering if this would go on my Permanent Record, and if I would someday have to explain this incident to colleges). She had some kids’ drawings tacked up to a corkboard on the wall, which made me wonder what kind of sycophantic shithead kid would give artwork to the universally loathed Ms. Vincent (I wondered if she broke into the art room after hours and stole stuff off the teacher’s desk). Her window had a wonderful nearly-panoramic view of the parking lot.

“Christopher,” she said, “is that right?” I nodded. “You don’t get into a lot of trouble, do you?” There was—I would have sworn—genuine kindness in her voice. I let down my guard and shook my head. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

And it poured out of me. A flood of words. I couldn’t tell you what I said if I wanted to—I forgot the words I had spoken the second they left my mouth. My best guess is it was the disjointed, incoherent ramblings of a ten-year-old madman. If the sentences didn’t make a bit of sense, the words and the tone would have been enough to give you the general idea.

Ms. Vincent nodded and never broke her understanding smile. Was she even listening? She must have done this a hundred thousand times.

When I was finally out of words, she leaned forward and sort of smoothed out her big desk calendar with her hands. “What I think happened,” she said, “is that you’re a good kid who doesn’t break the rules, and you just got mixed up with someone who’s a little less conscientious than you. Does that sound right?” I nodded. “And my advice to you is just be careful about what company you keep, and if you don’t want to get in trouble anymore, maybe you shouldn’t hang around with the kind of people who are going to get you in trouble. OK? Does that sound OK and good to you?”

I couldn’t nod hard enough.

And there it is, folks—my all-time ethical rock bottom. The absolute pits. How could I have abandoned a friend for an uncaring authority I didn’t respect and who didn’t respect me? Beth is almost incidental at this point—she could have been one of a million people at that moment. Fear is a powerful thing in me, is what I learned that day. It has made me do some unspeakable things to friends, for the benefit of people who deserved nothing better than my utter contempt, and it will make me do them again. And if Beth wasn’t a friend exactly—I still don’t know exactly what to call her—we were comrades, both being threatened by this bigger thing, and I caved in to the bigger thing, which thought of us not as people but as examples. Whispering was a victimless crime. Here, I had done in myself, irreparably sabotaging my own ethical health and sense of self-worth, with this nifty little self-defeating betrayal. And I had done in Beth, who hadn’t even deserved it.

The ordeal over, Ms. Vincent walked me out to recess. She said she was proud of me, I think. This didn’t make me feel good. Even then, I knew I had done something very wrong, even if I still didn’t know what it was, and thought it was still wrapped up in the whole whispering thing, somehow.

We stepped onto the playground and I almost was afraid to leave Ms. Vincent’s side and rejoin the other kids. Maybe I knew I didn’t belong with them, if I was going to continue behaving the way I had done in Ms. Vincent’s office for the rest of my life. I belonged with her type now. But I looked up at her and she smiled and nodded and said “run off and play,” or something, and so I started walking towards the basketball court.

And then I was absolutely creamed by a baseball that hit me right in the cheekbone on the left side of my face. It spun me and I landed face-first on the pavement and rolled onto my back, in utter shock. To this day, I believe there was a palpable delay between when the ball hit me and when it made the sound it made—leather smacking against skin and fat and bone, kind of like the sound of a near-suicidal belly flop off a diving board into a too-shallow pool.

I squinted into the sun, still unsure of what had happened, exactly. I briefly wondered if I had been shot. I feel my cheek and it already feels tough and bruised like a crabapple. Ms. Vincent runs over and leans over me and starts waving her hand in front of my face. “Are you OK?” she asks, but I swear, I swear I see her smile. And the funny thing is, through bloody gums and a couple knocked-out teeth and a tongue I nearly bit straight through, I smile right back—not her at, but just at—what? Tell me, what?