My Name Is Harper Torres

In my first public speaking memory, I’m six and holding a teddy bear. His name is Roberto, I explain to the class, and I hold him whenever I feel scared.

I pass him around the room, and each of my classmates examines him briefly, unimpressed. They were more impressed with last week’s show-and-tell, when Elijah brought in a fossilized fish, its scales still glimmering under the fluorescent classroom lights.

What they don’t know is that if you hold down Roberto’s right paw and speak, he’ll record what you say and repeat it back to you. When Roberto circles his way back to me, I squeeze his soft paw between my fingertips and show them. Hi, I say, making each syllable loud and clear the way Mrs. Sheridan taught us to do when we speak. My name is Harper.

Just like that, my friends have a change of heart over Roberto. They go wild over him, and Mrs. Sheridan has to clap her hands for everyone to calm down. As she always does when we’re rowdy, she motions for us to take out our imaginary keys from our pockets and pretend to lock our mouths. Then all together, we twist our hands in front of our lips and throw the keys away.

It works on us, and we’re quiet for the rest of class as we learn to count using marbles. It works so well, in fact, that eight years later, I still can’t find the key.

By the time I’m in seventh grade, classrooms don’t feel like they used to. Once a hub for paper crafts, pizza parties, and hot cocoa before winter break, classrooms are now a place for complicated math equations, chronic self-consciousness, and social interactions that make my stomach turn.

I stare at the nauseatingly colorful YoU cAn dO aNyThInG posters on the wall and feel like throwing up right then and there. I clutch the index card soaking in my sweaty palms and wait for my history teacher Mr. Engroff to call my name.

As far as I'm concerned, the back row is the perfect place to be seated when you’re shy. That is unless you're being called on. When Mr. Engroff calls my name, all heads turn in unison. I can see their eyes following me in my peripheral as I make my way to the front.

“Whenever you’re ready,” says Mr. Engroff—a phrase I’ll grow to hate, because the fact is, when it comes to these sorts of things, I will never be ready. 

I steady the index card in my hand, but it trembles. The ink on it is smeared from the sweat on my hands, and I can’t make out the first line. Middle Ages. The Battle of Hastings something-66. I wonder what has changed in my body over the last several years—whether my nervous system has morphed into a gutter system—an underground network of pipes moving toxins from one point in my body to another.

I swallow my heartbeat, or at least that’s what it feels like. The first word I speak I trip over, and the same happens on every other word after that one. The silences are holes that can swallow me, but my legs are like jelly, and I can’t jump over them. Every time one comes up, my body surrenders, gelatin-like, and I let gravity take me down.

Mr. Engroff makes a face, and that’s when I know it’s too late to save myself from what will now be imprinted on my forever memory as one of the most humiliating benchmarks in my life. I'll think about this when I'm twenty, when I'm twenty-three, and when I'm sixty, and if I ever fall in love, this will probably be the story I confide in them late one night.

I fall into the silence, and stare down, until it becomes completely unbearable for anyone with even a fragment of empathy to watch me go on, choking over the smeared little words I wrote down last night on my index card. Mr. Engroff excuses me back to my seat by patting my back—three firm, flat-palmed blows to the back like the Heimlich maneuver for the socially anxious choking on hard vowels and consonants, as if they were batteries or chicken bones or those cold glass marbles I learned to count with.

I count the number of light fixtures on the ceiling when I get back to my seat because counting is what you’re supposed to do when your thoughts are racing.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” my friend Kelsea tells me in the car loop later that day. “You're Harper Torres."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're cool and great and everything else that's good in the world."

"Then what was that . . . "

"You were just breathing wrong."

"It's not my breath."

"Yeah. Your voice shakes when there’s not enough air in your lungs or something. Something like that.”

I plan to never show my face at school again, but I’m not entirely sure how I’ll do it. That night, I replay each time I stuttered in my head, along with the sad-but-confused look Mr. Something made when he couldn’t bear to watch anymore. I cringe, too mortified to even eat, something I didn’t know was possible. My mom makes her famous creamy garlic chicken, but I turn it down and eat my fingernails for dinner instead.

I hold Roberto close under my covers and squeeze his tiny hand, my ragged nails getting caught in his tufts of fur.

My name is Harper, he says.

It’s strange, I think. How my seven-year-old confidence is preserved inside Roberto. It’s like a feeling trapped in an airtight glass bottle, a time in my life when I had enough air in my lungs to speak confidently, sealed away in a place where there is none. 

***

When you’re a child, the dark scares you, but when you’re an adult, it’s day-to-day life when the sun’s out.

When the sun breaks through my window, my stomach turns, and I think I might throw up. I eat my fingernails for breakfast and watch reruns of Modern Family before my first day of corporate. It’s not fair—that someone, a professional, writes out the words for people on TV and then places them in their mouths, each word polished and proofread and vetted to be nothing short of perfect. I’d rather have someone put the words in my mouth for me—even if they weren’t my own and even if they were ones that led me down a path of distressing consequences meant to advance the plot line. 

I wear my nice top to work because common sense tells me there will be introductions, though no amount of ruffles or carefully hemmed neck lines can hide the nervous system underneath it.

People file in until the room is full—shoulder to shoulder—a woman jingling her keys in my peripheral. I wonder if one of them is the key that Mrs. Sheridan made me throw away.

Hi, I say, my voice cracking on the last syllable, folding over like the creases around my eyes that must make people think, she is too old to be acting like this. I look down for a moment and gather myself. I fill my lungs with air.

Hi, I say again shakily but somewhat, even if just a little bit, steadier than before. My name is Harper Torres.