Johnathan

Trigger Warning: Mentions of substance abuse, child abuse, and gun violence.

“Just try again, Johnathan,” I said softly, shifting my weight to the other foot as his brow crinkled. Those black, mousy eyes flit over the page quickly but his tongue remained bolted in his mouth. He writhed in his chair, eliciting a cackle of loose change from within his ratty hoodie. I watched his tiny hands thumb them through his pocket. Several months ago, I would have demanded that he turn any such distractions over. I was still in my disciplinary phase then. Now, all I had to offer was stern but quiet redirection “Move the hair out of your eyes.”

He remained as still and as silent as stone. 

In my head, I ran through the days until summer vacation. Twenty-seven days, two hours, thirty minutes, and about…five seconds exactly. Even still, part of me knew we would only come to this same fruitless exercise in this same ruddy, cramped classroom in the fall. Summer would not make this kid any less illiterate, or uncooperative for that matter. Likely only more so. 

Acknowledging such a truth however requires acknowledgment of context too, I reminded myself. Ever since I had settled on becoming a teacher during one dry, sultry psychology lecture in college, I had promised myself that I would be fair to my students. If I was to loathe an institution as much as I did the American education system, the least I could do was strive to change it.

Johnathan wouldn’t improve in the summer because his mother wouldn’t push him too. His mother wouldn’t push him too because his name was about the only thing she had ever given him, besides the odd bruise here and there. Even the name hadn’t really been a product of divine maternal love she had told me during the one five-minute phone conference the school district had bullied her into. 

As soon as she had picked up the phone, I could tell she was as high as a kite. I could almost feel the fetid breeze of smoke that she stopped every other sentence to exhale as I imagined her sprawled out over the rundown couch of their small, squalid apartment. 

“N-named him af-after that passing salesman, I did,” she had rasped out, “Such a lovely fellow truly. Even left some money on the nightstand before he left…so thoughtful really…” With some rustling in the background followed by an exasperated “Johnathan!”, the line had gone dead. Only three months out of grad school, the feelings of indignation and shock had still been fairly new to me at that point. My next phone call that day had been to CPS, but the speed at which I came to memorize their number quickly revealed how effective they would be.

And so here he was, greasy, quiet, and increasingly antisocial. I had only ever heard him speak every fifth time he was spoken to, usually in the safe confines of a few scarcely intelligible grunts before he would cocoon himself in that reeking hoodie again. At recess, he always sat with his head on his knees by the fence nearest the door to the classroom, content to move as little as possible save for a few sullen glances at the noise of the playground. For all his difficulty in understanding inertia during our physics lessons, he seemed to be the perfect example of it in every way possible.

Three years of teaching second-grade, each one of them with him in my class, had whittled me down to just barely containing the meager frustration our seemingly endless hours still produced in me. It was reassuring, in some queer sense, that I could still feel some passion for this job, regardless of its nature. Nevertheless, this particular afternoon looked to be just like all the rest. 

A glance at the clock told me I had missed my dentist appointment for the second time in a row now.

“You can pack up your things now, Johnathan,” I murmured, moving back to my desk to collect my own belongings before I walked him out to the front gate. 

As expected, the same dingy black truck rolled up about thirty minutes late to the time I had told his mother that his after-school tutoring sessions would end, the two of us walking out just in time to meet it. His family’s tardiness could in fact be worked down to a science.

With not a word or glance back at me, Johnathan threw his bag into the front seat and hobbled inside. I wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway, the blaring music from inside illuminating various expletive rhymes the likes of which I could have never imagined. 

His older cousin, the driver, gave me one stale look before taking a hit from his vape, handing it off to Johnathan who took it silently. Though I couldn’t hear it, I read the verbal bird-flipping his cousin gave me as he pumped his foot on the gas. Johnathan quickly whipped his head around to me and I was almost amused to think that he might actually speak to repeat his cousin’s curse. But when I looked at those red chapped lips, I read very different words. It wasn’t until they had already sped quite a ways away, the volume of that crude song the only trace left of their presence, that I realized Johnathan wasn’t mouthing the words of his cousin; with perfect rhythm, he was mouthing the words of the chorus.

    * * *

For one of the first times, Johnathan actually looked up at me when I put a thesaurus and that little blue notebook in front of him the next day. In following years, I would come to distract myself throughout the day by wondering at any given moment how much that notebook was worth. It had scarcely been seven years by the time such estimates hit millions.

“No essays today,” I smiled to assuage him, sensing his early resignation from even the thought of writing. “Just your thoughts and ideas. Go on, write down whatever you want.”

He cocked a suspicious eye at me before slumping his head down on his desk.

“I mean it, Johnathan,” I said, coaxing the patience from myself as much as I was trying to coax the creativity from him now. “Really, put down whatever words or thoughts come to mind.” No movement from him. “You can say anything, anything at all. Even words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit.’” 

His head snapped up quicker than lighting, his eyes holding a certain electric blaze. Mystified, he spent a few moments staring at me in wonder before taking the pencil to his hand and moving with even quicker hands to scratch out a few rudimentary scribbles. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be very humble attempts at spelling a few curses from the song I had heard yesterday.

“Very good, Johnathan. Maybe some lyrics of your own?”

He titled his head like a confused puppy.

“Maybe you can make up some rhymes not from the song? You know, pair some words that sound sim-”

“Yeah, I’m not stupid,” he spit quickly before scratching down more words. Feeling warmth spreading across my face, I thought at first his tartness had caused me to blush; relief washed over me in a cool wave as I realized I was smiling.

We spent the next few weeks refining his writing skills in this manner. In the beginning, we focused on correcting his spelling and penmanship, though his writing never did seem to shake its peculiar spidery quality. Next, we moved onto forming more coherent sentences, and I eventually came to watch him artfully stack expletive upon expletive in both prose and verse. For as rough and crass as his words looked upon first glance, diatribes his go-to, they left one with such a profound feeling of righteous satisfaction, as if all the madness of the world had been spelled out so clearly. In Johnathan’s writings, there was no illusion of a perfect or sensible world, and a reader could appreciate such raw honesty wrapped in the steady, dependable rhythm of his words.

Perhaps most surprising of all was the gradual dilution of his work with more polished words. The books of my classroom became increasingly dogeared as Johnathan would rip through them, taking one home only to return it (if only a little worse for wear) promptly the next day to check out another. It wasn’t long before I saw traces of Woolf and Wilde in his style.

I tried not to take too much credit for his rapid improvement. It would be too vainly cliche: “innovative teacher unlocks troubled but gifted student’s potential.” Sharing space with someone like Johnathan, who unearthed and moved mountains of anger and despair I had long ago buried, however, couldn’t help but to excite some sense of accomplishment. In the minutes and eventually hours I came to spend pouring over the experiences he painted in pencil lead, I found new parts of myself, parts I feared for a little bit, with all their angst and frustration at the tribulations of the world, and parts that I learned to love as they unlocked new doors of passion that stoked that frozen-over engine within me. 

No longer was Johnathan the sole attendee of my after-school tutoring sessions. By the end of the year, I had three-fourths of the entire second-grade working on reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, and science. 

“They’re reading and writing!” The principal exalted during our final staff meeting. “Adora, whatever you’ve done, it’s working! Test scores are through the roof. We can expand this to other grade levels too. The possibilities are endless…”

And they really were, not just for me but for Johnathan too. As the years carried on, Johnathan came to enjoy the new, unique challenges of third grade and then fourth and then fifth all the way until he graduated from university. 

Blazing under the heavy morning sun at his graduation, childless yet happy among so many beaming parents, I found that his commencement speech still carried the same vociferous zeal as that first page he scribbled in those many years ago. Except he was a man now, lean and brushed up a little; he still wore his clothes wrinkled, though they were made of tweed and fine cotton now, and still wore his hair errant and disheveled, though it was washed thoroughly with sporty French fragrances. Cloaked from the midday sun in the shade of the bookshelves at his first book talk and signing, far removed from those dark, ever-searching eyes, I comforted myself with the thought of the haphazard, solitary child inside him still, peeking out from every crevice of his features, as if to shout “I’m still fucking here!” 

Even as he strode from book conference to talk show, he never came to make friends, only to echo the grit of his existence, even if it meant screaming it in the cruelest, angriest words, and for that, I could never stop admiring him.

Eventually, the time came when I could no longer read his words, vague, fuzzy hazes on a page I knew to be challenging me in every belief I held dear. Fortunately, the rec room of my nursing home housed a large and blaring television set from which I could hear the tremulous conviction of his voice as he read his pages to millions nationwide from the comfort of the capacious reclining chair in which I spent the majority of my blurry and drug-fogged later years. 

Pearls came to be clutched heavily by my fellow residents whenever he or his works came on. Like twittering thrushes, they would prattle on about the shameless degradation of the American vernacular engendered by talk like Johnathan’s. Shameless fools themselves, they nonetheless proved to be as generations beyond his own came to be enamored by the sheer, honest veracity at which he spoke. He set them free in their own minds, binding many followers to freedoms they had thought they would never be absolved of. It only took the black labyrinth of his letters on the eternal page to show they would never need to be. 

Of course, few of us ever escape entirely guiltless. I know I never will. And I often wonder if Johnathan will, daring to crumble my expectations one final time. 

It had been about three months after his last book release that it happened. I was just about bedridden and the only trickles of the outside world came through the rare episodes in which my room’s TV decided to function. 

I hadn’t seen so many people running from a single place since Columbine and yet there they were on the dingy screen, as though mere pixels could communicate the ice-cold terror saturating their veins. 

They said that the gunman had been a big fan of Johnathan’s, some convenience store stock boy from Montana who had been following him from the beginning. As the afternoon rolled over to the evening news, it seemed every hour unearthed some new picture of him and Johnathan together, at book signings, meet-and-greets, TedTalks. The police found copies of Johnathan’s book littered throughout his shabby apartment and even some of the gunman’s own pitiful imitations of his work, handwritten in that same slatternly, heavy-handed style. 

It would not be just to say Johnathan’s life was ruined by the shooting. No, his work continued to be discussed on talk shows and still featured, with accompanying guides, in high school and university curriculums. But I stopped seeing Johnathan’s face in the magazines, stopped hearing his voice on the television. 

In the end, there remained just the idea of a Johnathan, lent credence only by the existence of his work. His relevance became no broader than the yards left uncombed by sharp-toothed critiques who engaging only with each other on the matter of his work, brambling over each in search of the most unmerciful tirade of his iniquitous disturbance of the public peace and corruption of the young American mind.

I was comforted only in that I knew what Johnathan knew: he hadn’t poisoned anyone’s mind. He had only awoken what was already there.