Remember Why You Started

CW: Mentions of suicidal ideation

Walking into the school, my hands on the straps of my backpack with a spring in my step, I was excited for my first day. Teaching Language Arts had been my dream since I was fourteen years old.

I propped my classroom door open and stood with my arms folded as I paced around the hallway. The analog clock above the hallway’s entrance read 7:55. Class started at 8:10, and kids weren’t supposed to line up for class until 8:07, but the assistant principal had instructed staff members to stand watch in the hallway in case any students snuck in.

“Nervous, O’connell?” I turned around. Mrs. Testran, one of the science teachers, was leaning against her door. She had the classroom across from mine. She had black dreadlocks hanging down to her shoulders. From what I’ve heard during meetings, the kids last year loved her.

“Nervous? No, not really. I’m excited more than anything,” I lied. Nervous? I was terrified. Everyone made seventh graders these days sound like demon-possessed tazmanian devils. I’ve seen how they conduct themselves in public.

“Then you’re off to a good start. Just remember why you signed up to be an educator. My door is always open for you during planning period.” She did air quotes when she said planning period.

After what felt like fifteen minutes of talking to Nicky followed by more anxious pacing up and down the hallway as she went to make copies, I looked over at the clock. 8:03. Kids were standing outside the hallway, pleading for the security guard to let them in.. “Now, that’s a job I’d lose after the first day,” I thought, “I couldn’t say no to kids like that.” Then I remembered what my friend Jazmine, a preschool teacher, said when I told her I got this gig, “90% of a teacher’s job is to say the word no.” Hopefully, that wasn’t the case in middle school. It couldn’t be, right? These kids are so much more mature than preschoolers. It had to be different.

It wasn’t different. In fact, I could have sworn they pumped the preschoolers full of steroids and other chemicals to make them rabid baby squirrels with acne and longer limbs and sent them here, sending the real seventh graders to the early childhood education building a few blocks away. I stood in front of the white board reading from the seating chart, all twenty-seven pairs of beady eyes preparing to attack me.

A boy in the third row wearing a football jersey, Joaquin, raised his hand, “Teacher, can I go to the bathroom?”

Another boy from the back of the classroom wearing a red hoodie, Carl, interrupted, “Dude, class just started.”

Joaquin turned around and said, “Shut your bitch ass up, wish app Tom Holland looking fag.”

“At least I don’t fuck my own mother like you,” said Carl. The whole class erupted in snickers and murmuring.

“Fool, Ima beat your ass,” said Joaquin as he stood up from his chair and pushed it over, strutting towards Carl as he shook his hands and rolled his neck. “Square up, bitch.”

Carl bolted out of his desk and ran out the door. Joaquin chased after him, saying, “Get back here, little shit!”

“What the fuck do I do?” My stomach dropped as I realized I had twenty-five pairs of beady eyes staring at me as they giggled and talked to each other, probably about how much of a fraud I was.

“Mister, you should do something.” said a girl with pigtails in the front row. I wanted to say, “No shit,” or something else that would hammer a nail into the coffin of this job, which I had surely just lost. Should I call the principal? 911? My mom? What about having the kids sit in a circle and sing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’? A locker outside rattled, followed by a muffled, “I’m sorry, man! Don’t—” Thuds and more rattling. Carl yells, “Stop! Please!” There’s a struggle as the sound of two bodies hit the floor.

A voice booms from down the hallway, “Hey! What are you boys doing?”

I stepped halfway out of the classroom to see the commotion and noticed that every other teacher in the hall had the same idea. Mr. Macintosh, the principal, glared down at Carl and Joaquin with a scowl on his face as he clutched a radio in his hand. Carl, with blood dripping down his nose, pointed at Joaquin, “He started it!”

“Bitch, shut up!” Joaquin started raised a fist before the school resource officer jogged into the hallway and grabbed his arm and turned him away from Carl. Joaquin wiggled out of the officer’s grasp and stood up.

“Get off me, pig!”

“Carl, go to the nurse’s office and then come see me in my office. Joaquin, we’re taking a walk”

Carl needed no more instructions as he immediately started out of the hallway in the direction of the front lobby, holding his hoodie over his nose.

“My uncle’s a lawyer, you assholes! We’re suing all of you! You’re fucked!” said Joaquin.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Mr. Macintosh as he gestured for Joaquin to follow him, giving him a death glare, “Come on.”

Nicky waited until the principal was out of earshot to turn and laugh. Before walking back into her room, she said, “Welcome to Dawson Middle, Mr. O’Connell!” I nodded. She went back into her room, saying, “Okay, back to work! Who can tell me—” She shut her door. I looked around at the other teachers. They had also returned to their classrooms. I took a deep breath and did the same. This is okay. Everytihng will be fine.

It was like a circus, except all of the animals and all of the stagehands were high on crack, no ringleader in sight. But then I realized I was the ringleader. Oh, how I should have picked another job. The only kid still sitting in their seat was a girl in the front row with pigtails—Destiny; a boy stood atop his desk and roared a pop song as a group of students stood around him in a circle and chanted his name. Across the room, two girls, one in a crop top and one wearing a pink tiara, were making duck faces as they recorded themselves on one of their phones. The other students were standing around the room.

Fuck me. Sigh. I should start getting this place back under control.

I walked up to the boy standing on his desk. “Hey, not safe,” I said in a low, quiet voice, “can you please get down from there?” He just stared at me before continuing to sing.

“Shit.”

“I need you to get down,” I said more sternly. My presence made some of his spectators return to their desks. It’s like they say in teacher school: celebrate the small wins!

“Why?” He continued singing, apparently not caring that half of his audience had just abandoned him.

I walked over to the girls, trying to stay out of the shot of their camera. When they noticed me approaching, one of them said, “Mister, come join our video!”

“I don’t want to,” I said. The girl with the crop top kept trying to angle the phone toward me. I kept putting my arm out to block the camera. “Please put your phone down.

The girl with the pink tiara giggled and bashfully told her friend, “Stopppp, he doesn’t want to be in the video! You’re such a jerk,” while laughing. I pinched the bridge of my nose as I regretted my life choices that led me here. Be a teacher, they said. It’ll be an easy job, they said. Plenty of vacation. People respect teachers for what they do. Be a teacher; not every day will be a ray of sunshine, but it’s a good job. You might be underpaid, but the benefits are great, especially the pension. What bullshit?

I ran my hand through my balding head and sighed as I turned away from the social media stars, walking towards my desk. I would call the office, and they would send some administrator who knows what they’re doing to help me wrangle this parade, someone to put out the fire I can’t extinguish. I thought about that meme with the dog in the bowler hat sipping coffee in a fire-engulfed room. I chuckled to myself like a crazy person.

“Are you okay, sir?” I looked up from my desk and saw Destiny looking at me curiously.

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“You should do something about,” she gestures to the whole class, “this.” The boy wonder who failed his audition on American Idol was still standing on his desk, but now he was pretending to shoot at make-believe enemies as he made machine gun noises and held an invisible gun. A red-headed boy to his right lobbed an equally invisible grenade while the boy with a green mohawk to his left lay prone on the floor with a sniper rifle and gave the other two covering fire. The girls across the room now had a following of three other girls and were putting on a makeup party. Over half of the other kids were standing next to their desks and chatting.

“You’re right,” I nodded. It was a little humbling, honestly, to have a student remind me to do my job. Perhaps I could ask her to swap places with me. Would that be okay? It would probably add to my growing list of first-day failures. At this point, though, did one more infraction truly matter? I took a deep breath and said as loud as I could muster, “Guys, could you please return to your seats so we can get started?” Several listened and sat down, opening their notebooks. “That’s a good start,” I thought. Literally only several, though. Three, to be exact. “Just my fucking luck to get assigned to a class that doesn’t listen, and it’s only the first period.”

The classroom door opened, averting my attention. A boy with spikey dark brown hair in a plain white t-shirt and faded blue jeans walked into the room. He wore a silver chain around his neck. The classroom went silent as all of the kids stopped what they were doing and returned to their desks. “Sorry I’m late,” said the new boy, “my mom got sick, so I was helping her until my grandparents came.” He looked at the boy who made a career switch from backup vocalist to infantryman and said, “The fuck are you doing, weirdo? Act your age. Take a seat.” Without saying anything, the entertainer specialist obeyed his commanding officer, hopping down from his desk. His brothers-in-arms scattered. The new boy shook his head and sat at the empty desk next to Destiny.

“George got so hot over the summer,” loudly whispered the girl with the pink tiara to her friend in the crop top. They both giggled. I guess this boy’s name was George. I looked down at the seating chart in my hand. It was.

“So, what are we doing today? That’s when it hit me. I don’t know if it was his blue eyes, sharp jaw line, straight eyebrows, tanned skin, or the nonchalant way in which he carried himself, but it was as if I was looking at my childhood best friend.

***

I went to the movie theater almost once a week over the summer before sixth grade—my dad was a movie buff. At home, I was a just a boy living day to day. I was inside playing video games and watching TV between bouts of playing outside with my friends, the few I had. I was just an ordinary kid. At the movies, though, I could dream. I could visit fantastical worlds with superheroes, spies, and aliens. Fiction empowered me, so I started writing stories. I took inspiration from the movies I’d been watching and started writing similar things: car chases with guns and explosions, grotesque aliens that inhabited the minds of their human victims—the kind of stuff twelve-year-old boys are into. I didn’t dare show them to anybody; they were for my eyes only.

I met River the following September in my sixth-grade Language Arts class. He was one of the most popular boys in school with his chill demeanor and spikey dark brown hair. Me? I was an awkward four-eyed geek with a lisp and a combover. By mid-September, I was editing his essays, and by the beginning of October, we were hanging out for fun. I don’t know what he saw in me, and I don’t think I ever will. After trick-or-treating on the night of Halloween, we came back to my house and watched a marathon of scary movies in the basement.

We were in the middle of the 2017 version of It when River said, “Man, I’d kill myself if my mom was like his,” he said, pointing to the TV. We both chuckled. “Hey, Luke. Can I ask you a question?”

I paused the movie. “Yeah, man.”

“Do you ever think about killing yourself?”

This caught me off guard. Kill myself? As in, suicide? “Uh, no, why? Do you?”

He looked at me with a stoic face, “Yeah, sometimes.”

What do I do? What do I say? My heart skipped a beat as I scrambled for the right words. I faced him and said, “You should talk to one of the counselors at school about that.”

“Nah. They can’t help me.”

“Can you talk to your parents?”

River chuckled weakly, like he was reacting to a bad joke, “That’s the thing. I don’t have a dad, and my mom is too busy taking care of my baby brother, Kyle. I could not come home tomorrow and no one would notice.” It was then that I realized I knew nothing about River’s family or his life at home.

“Shit. I’m bad at cheering people up.” I thought of something encouraging to say, but all I said was, “I’m sure that’s not true.” I thought, “That was good. I’ve heard dad say that plenty of times. It has to work.”

He continued, “I just- I just feel like-“he sighed and looked up at me with a sad smile. His eyes were tired and wet with tears, “forget it. I’m fine.”

“You feel like what?”

“I dunno, man. It’s dumb. I don’t feel like I have a purpose. Everyone at school thinks I’m awesome—”

“You are,” I said.

He ignored me and continued, “But I’m not. I wake up, eat breakfast, take a shower, help my mom with Kyle, leave for school, come home, help mom with Kyle, do my homework, make dinner, play video games, and go to bed. My life is pointless.”

“Maybe you’re a helper, like Mr. Tumnus from Narnia.” I said, thinking that would somehow make River feel better about himself.

He sighed. There was that laugh again. “Thanks, Luke. You’re a good friend,” he said, “let’s get back to the movie.”

After watching the 2019 sequel to It, we decided to call it a night. We headed to my room. I left River while I went to the bathroom to take my sleep meds and brush my teeth. I came back to find him looking through my writing notebook. It included a collection of short stories. My stomach flip-flopped—I thought I could trust him. “Hey, bro, put that down,” I said, begging more than commanding. But he did not put it down, nor did he look up at me. He continued reading.

“Did you write these?” he asked, “These are cool.” He laughed hysterically, saying, “I love the alien in ‘Martian Mayhem,’ he’s so funny.”

“Oh, thank you.” ‘Martian Mayhem’ was a story I wrote between bouts of throwing up and barfing when I had the stomach flu, in which an alien from Mars visits Earth and ends up accidentally causing havoc.

“You’re a really good writer, Luke,” he said, still skimming through the pages of my notebook.

I rubbed my neck and did my own rendition of laughing at a bad joke, “I don’t think I’m that good.”

“Bullshit,” he said, finally looking up at me, “You know what we should do?”

“What?”

“We should start a Youtube channel and make short movies! You could be the writer… bro, just think about it! It would be so fun. All we’d need is your phone, and we could get some kids from school to help!”

“I don’t know,” I said. I liked the idea, but putting my stuff out into the world for anyone to see?

River smiled at me, “You don’t get a choice. We’re doing it. No, but seriously, dude, do you want your stories to go to waste? It’ll be awesome, you’ll see.”

We named our channel ‘Fantastic Films.’ At first, it was just me and River, but by December, we had three other guys and two girls coming over to my house once a week to rehearse and film skits. By the end of sixth grade, our team expanded to fifteen kids.

One day in July, when we were all at my uncle’s farm, shooting ‘Martian Mayhem,’ River pulled me aside. Hugging me, he said, “Thank you for helping me find my purpose.” That was the day I knew I wanted to help kids find their purpose in life; I wanted to become a teacher. While ‘Fantastic Films’ eventually fizzled out, the friendship River and I developed never will. Through it all, we found ourselves. River’s now an actor in an upcoming sci-fi Netflix series.

***

Feeling empowered, I walked along the front row of desks. “Today, students, you will reflect on a time in your life when you and a friend helped each other.”

Three hours later, Nicky asked me how my first day was going. I replied, “It’s going well. I remembered why I started this journey.”