“Let’s read this,” said Kind Girl. She sat beside Teacher at his mahogany table and plunked down the Modern Library edition of Moby Dick. The table was scratched and worn, the book a dusty brick. Kind Girl counted on her fingers, “One, it seems interesting, two, it fits my genre goal, and three, it’s at my reading level. Teacher, let’s read this!”
These were the points Teacher needed to hear, and he knew Kind Girl knew it too. He looked at her. He tried to read her. The girl in the white t-shirt, loose flannel shirt, and blue jeans was drumming her fingers on the book and gazing back at him. She had green eyes. Teacher couldn’t see past those eyes to what she held inside, but those eyes didn’t exactly mirror the world, either — this fluorescent classroom, these pale walls, those scrawny trees outside. Kind Girl’s eyes hid a secret. Teacher needed to find what it was.
“Let’s read this.” Four more weeks of eighth grade, and Kind Girl chose Moby Dick? Teacher had left it on the shelf as a dare. No fourteen-year-old had ever chosen it. Kind Girl had.
Teacher spoke quietly and carefully. “Is Mom still in the hospital?”
“No, she’s back.”
“But you’re still taking care of Little Sister.”
“Yes.”
Maybe the right question was in that book. Maybe the right answer too.
“Can you read after school?”
“I have to walk Little Sister home.”
“What about Stepdad? Can he—”
“He’s not my stepdad.”
“Can he help out?”
“The thing is, he’s on a hitch right now.”
“A hitch?”
“He’s driving trucks to North Dakota. They’re putting up wind turbines. And I don’t need his help.”
Teacher had seen those trucks on the highway. Flatbeds, extra wide, each hauling a single enormous blade lashed to its bed, a smooth curve as great and white as the whale. He had taught Kind Girl the difference between irony and accord. He should ask her which one this might be.
She said something in a questioning voice. He could barely hear. She nudged the book across the hard mahogany table. Closer. The scratches on the table read Sur 13. She might have been saying, “So, what do you think?”
Kind Girl often sat at Teacher’s table to talk about her books. All the students did. Teacher imagined himself their protector, taller, stronger, older, wiser in the ways of the world. His students needed protection, and books were the protection he gave. His back ached from years of leaning close, listening to students read, asking them questions, hearing their answers. Jesus Christ, the things they told him! But not Kind Girl. She talked about her books but never herself. Not the thing she hid away.
Kind Girl asked, “Can you give me a preview?”
Four more weeks. It was his last chance to protect her.
“It’s about a whale, of course. Listen, I haven’t read Melville since college.”
He was adrift. The mahogany table was his raft.
“It’ll come back to you.”
“There isn’t time. School is almost out. The rest of your life—”
“What do you mean, ‘the rest of my life?’ We’ll read and discuss it now.”
Teacher swept his arm to indicate the rest of the students in class. “I have a lot of obligations.” The students were reading their books and waiting their turn to discuss what they had read, waiting for Teacher to ask, “Tell me more about that…”
“I am one of your obligations.” Kind Girl pointed to her chest. Her white t-shirt. The flannel she never buttoned. She wore a tiny golden pendant, a half heart, a jagged edge. Who wore the other half?
Teacher looked at her. “You don’t want this to end, do you! You’re buying time.”
Kind Girl looked back at him. It was not her way to add words when a complete truth had been spoken. Not her way even to nod.
***
But this was not a complete truth. The truth would only come from their time together, time they did not have.
“I remember the beginning,” Teacher said. “‘Call me Ishmael.’ Listen, it is biblical, like he names the world into being.” Teacher tried to remember what happened next. “Ishmael’s looking for work… He meets a pal… They sign onto a boat… The story is about whaling… That’s where people got their oil back then… Their light against darkness…” Teacher scrambled. Naming the world into being? This classroom held the whole world right here. The students came from Mexico, Ukraine, Burma, Iraq, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Cambodia, Somalia, Romania, Kosovo, anywhere they had to flee. English was the shore they landed on. Some of them had left in the middle of the night, and they brought nothing but their stories. Teacher’s job was to ask questions to get those stories. He watched Kind Girl. She had dragged the book to her lap, and she was scanning the first page, tissue thin. You could turn the page with your breath. 565 more pages remained unknown to her, submerged.
She said, “So if you don’t remember, you’re going to have to reread it.” She fixed the cuffs of her flannel shirt. “We’ll read it together. You always say we’re having an intellectual conversation.”
“I do remember how it ends. After he names the world into being, he—”
Kind Girl raised her hand. “No spoilers!” She locked her green eyes on his, and if she saw into him, maybe she saw that he was lost. Maybe she saw what he saw: that she was hiding a secret, that she was not safe in her world, and that they were running out of time. Could she see all that? Were they even having the same conversation?
Teacher turned to the rest of the students in the class. “Ten more minutes. You’re doing very well.” He let them keep reading their books. He pointed to the first page and said to Kind Girl, “There it is: ‘Call me Ishmael.’”
“The world into being?” She sounded hopeful.
“Exactly. Think of Ishmael as a man without a past.”
“Everyone has a past.”
They looked at each other. You didn’t add to a truth.
Teacher said, “There is another character, Ahab, and he very much has a past. You’ll see. One character illuminates the world, the other would burn it with his rage. And yet, you might have difficulty deciding which you should admire.”
“We,” she corrected. “We’re both going to read it.”
“I need to teach you the concept of dualism. Holding two truths.”
She carefully repeated the word, because in Teacher’s class, you repeated the words.
“Dualism.”
“Very good.”
***
“In those days,” Teacher ran his fingers over scratched mahogany, remembering, “they hunted whales for oil. They burned oil lamps for light. The number of whales they killed was staggering. Millions of them. And it was dreadful work on the boats. You’ll see.”
“You were going to tell me about dualism.”
“Well, there will be good and evil in this book. And it will be hard to tell them apart. Maybe both can exist in one heart. What do you think?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Like here.” He pointed to the class. “I mean, we’re all trying to be good people. But that doesn’t mean we succeed. You know this.”
Her green eyes.
“Okay, maybe you don’t know. You’re different because you are kind. I’ve seen it. All your teachers see it. Your friends see it, too.”
Her flat green eyes.
Teacher was getting nowhere. He wrote out some notes. “I want you to watch for symbols. For allusions. Foreshadowing. Irony. Look for themes. You know this, right? There will be digressions. There will be reflections on life. Consider the narrator’s distance that allows for that. And there will be encounters with other ships, if I’m remembering, they call them gabs or gams, to build the tension. Consider the arc, how it builds, where it leaves you. And aside from all that, I hope you simply enjoy the story.”
“Everything you’ve taught us.”
“And more.”
“Dualism.”
Teacher added the word to her notes. He set down his pen on the warm mahogany grain that fought through the scratches. “You know we call you Kind Girl. How will you reconcile that with what happens in this book? It gets pretty dark at times.”
“I can do it.”
Teacher thought about her world. Gunfire in the neighborhood every night. The Friday food pantry, where the line wrapped around the school. Kind Girl always taking her mom to the hospital. For what, exactly? And when her mom couldn’t do her job as a housekeeper, Kind Girl cleaned the houses for her. Was that why she was absent so often? Or was she taking care of Little Sister? Yet, she still found time to read. Teacher said, “I know you can do it.”
The students were tired. They were setting down their books and gazing with thousand-yard stares. Teacher wished they would close their eyes. What would they see? Maybe that’s why they didn’t close their eyes.
“Speakers, tell the person next to you what you read today. Listeners, ask the speaker for a prediction. Ask for evidence to support it. Then switch roles. There is a sentence frame on the board if you need it. And thank the person, always.”
Because that’s what they did in a world stronger than they were. They read books. A student could be saved by the right book. Not in the sense of preparing them for life. To read the books, to think about the books, to talk about them, was not mere training. It was the right way to live, right here, right now, aged fourteen. They read stories. The best books, the students read them to tatters. And if the story struck in a personal way, the student wouldn’t let the book go, a talisman buried in their backpack. Was the student stealing the book? Teacher didn’t ask.
He addressed the class again. “Did I tell you that you’re wonderful? We only have four weeks left to meet your goals. But you will get there. I know you will.” The words were not new, but he made them new by meeting the students’ eyes.
Kind Girl found a partner, Big Uriel, the new boy from Mexico. Actually, he was from El Salvador, then to Guatemala, then Mexico, then the U.S., then back to Mexico, then to the U.S. again. That’s how it worked. They were talking. Kind Girl showed Big Uriel the sentence frame. She helped him understand. She showed him the book. Making a prediction? Citing evidence? She hadn’t even started the book. She had nothing.
Teacher sat with Big Uriel and Kind Girl. They didn’t turn. His voice was soft and low. “In this book, a great wild being is the antagonist, yet it will be stalked mercilessly as prey.”
“And?” Kind Girl tilted her chin. She held a breath.
He said, “This is not easy for me. In four weeks, I will set you free, everyone in the class, set free. But this… it’s too much.” He pointed to the heavy book in her arms.
She said, “Think of it as a symbolic release,” and she smiled, so delighted with herself that she squirmed her shoulders and straightened her spine. She gathered her belongings, which now included this new heavy thing.
Big Uriel followed their words, his face open and lost. He was holding a worn paperback of The Outsiders.
“Wait,” Teacher said. “It’s my only copy. I haven’t read it in twenty years. As you can tell, I’m rusty on the details. And, in this class, we’re all about citing evidence.”
“So we’ll share the book! Back and forth. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.” Her eyes shone. Teacher read joy in them. He could see into her that far.
“Okay, deal.”
Big Uriel rolled his eyes. “You guys are… I don’t know how to say.”
“Ridiculous? Say the word…”
“Ridiculous.”
“Good. You and I can read a 566-page book too.”
“No thank you. Ridiculous.” The Outsiders fit the back pocket of his jeans.
Students were leaving. Happy to find their friends. Happy to be talking again. Books were not the be-all-end-all for a fourteen-year-old. Teacher stood in his classroom doorway and watched them go. He had to perform hall duty to watch for fights. Kind Girl wove down the hallway, cradling the heavy book to her chest as though to protect the thing. She stopped to help a girl pick up a spilled binder. She didn’t have to be kind, but she was. The world certainly was not kind in return. And Teacher was not as kind as he ought to be. If Kind Girl’s eyes ever reflected his unkindness back to him, he could not bear to see it.
***
The conversation had begun with his mom. D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. C. S. Lewis. Sherlock Holmes. Edgar Allan Poe. He and his mom read them together. But she was not good at the conversation. Not the asking part, not the listening either. Gone every evening, sleeping late in the morning, what was her secret? He was afraid to ask. By eighth grade, distance had become important to him too. He felt a growing rage. Something wasn’t coming true. He read books by Jack London. Something was holding him back. He read Herman Hesse. There was a way he was supposed to be. Kurt Vonnegut taught him irony. His mom still brought him books, but she left them lying around the house for him to find. Ursula K. Le Guin. A different way. It was how he found Moby Dick, tucked in a bottom shelf, the same way he, years later, would leave it for Kind Girl, for any student, to find. He read at night, alone. Loneliness was his own making. He discussed Moby Dick with no one. Teenage boys lost sleep over different things.
As for his dad, he needed that distance even more, and by forming other plans for weekends and holidays and spring vacations, he made it so.
It was different for his students. They needed distance too, but with an urgency he could not understand. For them, distance meant survival. When Sha Eh Ler ran through the Burmese jungle, bullets pinging overhead, distance meant life. When Sara crammed into a rowboat with thirty people crossing from Syria to Lesbos on the dark horizon, shivering in her mother’s arms, she measured distance by counting the strokes of an oar. When Kadijah’s father kissed her and sent her across the border, Afghanistan to Pakistan, with a promise that he would follow soon, the distance became irreparable. When Rudy’s uncle showed up from Los Angeles and needed a place but wouldn’t say why, just a few weeks was all, and he slept with his gun on a mat on Rudy’s bedroom floor, and he told Rudy to stay in school, do good in school, don’t do like he done, Rudy didn’t ask what he had done, and the distance had no name.
Teacher had lived a fortunate life, but a wrong and restless life, and he had no answers why. So, he asked questions of his students and hid his own answers away. “Tell me more… What is your evidence for that… Can you relate this to… Let’s read the next page together…” He watched a student’s face form the flicker of a smile. He could wait for it. He had sat at the old mahogany table a million minutes. And if the student had no answer, Teacher saw the shape of things unspoken. He was always one question away from hearing about guns, drugs, mouths to feed, and new adults in the house, coming and going. And the hustle, always the hustle. Mayra selling roses by the roadside. Kind Girl cleaning houses. Jason shoplifting without getting caught, talking his way out of it when he was. Evelyn settling a score because she couldn’t let no one be disrespecting. Teacher got Melanie to remove her thick coat on the warmest day, revealing the scratches, hot and red, that ran up her arms. He kept Child Protective Services on speed dial. He could open any of these stories with the right book, the right page from the right book, the right words to ask. His fingers traced the scratches on the mahogany table, Sur 13, “We’re just one question away…”
Everyone read. They picked books from the shelves in the back of the room. Sunken into stories, they slid low in their steel and plastic chairs. They read their favorites again and again until pages curled and tired spines flopped open. It was not escapism. It was the way to conduct a good life. If you lived in this neighborhood, you kept your time horizon tight as the here-and-now. This story, this page here, these minutes right now, before sundown, this calm space in your mind. The students even told him: you walk the streets with your nose in a book, people left you the fuck alone.
And every June, the students embarked into the violent world. Their stories would never be his stories. Gunfire every night. A brother on the run, an uncle in the clink, a father shot during a drug deal gone bad. A mom in despair, sending the kids to their auntie’s house before ending her life alone in the garage with an idling car. Teacher couldn’t help his students after June. Most of them he never heard from again. He did his one trick. He taught them to read. If they could read it in a story, they could alter their life, if only for the hours they were reading. Their reading journals marked the minutes they were alive.
And come September, when the mahogany table was polished fresh and gleaming, who would be his new students? Elma from Kosovo, who fled to Albania, to Italy, to Spain, to Mexico, to the USA? Cesar from Michoacán who saw his father gunned down over a truckload of avocados? Salam, whose family was talking about going back to Iraq because there was less gunfire there? Lynette, whose mom failed to send the kids to Auntie’s when she did what she had to do? Maleha, the Urdu girl, who spoke better English than he? See, in the refugee camp, they had books, and she even added Hindi and Punjabi and…
Last September, Kind Girl had come to his class for the first time. She came from that dusty town near the state prison, where wives and girlfriends and children waited for the men inside. If she left that town, it wasn’t for no promised land, it was only to get away. Plaid flannel shirt and jeans. Golden pendant, half a heart. A copy of Jane Austen under her arm. Maybe that was all she had? What was she running from? At first, Teacher told himself it didn’t matter because she was eager to learn. Whatever book he suggested, she read it and asked for another. And she was eager to talk about them, more than he needed to ask.
“You’re already getting an A. We really don’t have to confer.”
“But I want to. You said it yourself. We’re having—”
“An intellectual conversation. Okay. So tell me what happened in your book today…”
Kind Girl helped others. She listened to them read and even employed his questions. But whenever it was her turn, she wouldn’t answer any questions beyond the book. Was Mom sick again? Kind Girl’s green eyes had nothing to say. Was Little Sister wearing the other half of that golden heart? When was Stepdad coming home? “He’s not my stepdad.” The sirens at night: was she getting sleep? Who was keeping her fed? Her red flannel: didn’t she and Little Sister have more clothes? Why was she absent so often? How did she not give up on the world? They talked about books, but were books saving her life? The conversations left Teacher adrift. Questions, answers, water swirling around water. He was running out of time. After school, his exhausted eyes read the scratches on his mahogany table, and he realized Kind Girl was the same as any student in one essential aspect: in four weeks, he would never see her again.
***
Teacher was having a conference with Big Uriel at the mahogany table. They were discussing symbolism in The Outsiders.
“So what do you think the switchblade symbolizes for Johnny?”
“Oh, that is not a symbol, Teacher. That’s real, for protection.”
Big Uriel looked around the class. Everyone was reading. He reached into the pocket of his hoodie and produced a shiny tactical blade folded onto its shaft. He tilted it in his palm and unfolded the blade, the shiny blade flashing silvery and blue.
“You can’t have that at school, Big Uriel.”
“This is not for school. This is for what happens when I leave school. People come at me, yeah? People don’t like… something about me… it is hard to say. And I got more too.” He reached into his pocket and came out with a Bowie knife and a utility knife.
“Don’t ever take those out at school.”
“Okay.” He looked at his knives proudly. He put them away.
“Big Uriel, maybe just bring one knife?”
“No, no. If I leave them at home, they get jacked.”
“Just never show them again. Seek a different way, and you will never need weapons. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
“I don’t have a hammer.”
“It’s an idiom, Big Uriel. You need options.”
“I have three options right here! Dude!”
“I’m not your dude. Anyway, what will you read next?”
“It needs to fit in my pocket.”
Teacher pointed at the bookshelf. “Monster. By Walter Mosley. You have two weeks to get it done.”
“The graphic novel?”
“Okay, fine. Will you read it?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“When will you read it? Where?”
“I’ll read it.”
“You’ll tell me about it tomorrow. You know I’m going to ask.”
“All right.”
“One more thing.” Teacher pointed at the table, the scratches that said Sur 13. “You do this? With one of your fancy knives?”
“Sur 13? They’re lowlife trash, Teacher.”
***
Kind Girl sat down. Big Uriel dapped her up as he passed.
She said, “My turn.”
Teacher said, “There isn’t time.
“Yes, there is.”
“I have assessments to make.”
“Start your assessments with me.”
Teacher said, “You heard all that with Big Uriel. You know I have a dozen conversations just like yours. Like ours. Come on now…”
Green eyes.
It had been two weeks. They had completed less than half the book. Teacher was exhausted from trying to read his share. Late at night, he read in bed, fell asleep, dropped the book on his face. Kind Girl looked tired too.
Teacher pointed. “You knew about his knives, didn’t you. What’s that about?”
“I think Big Uriel has something he’s not ready to share with the world.”
Her green eyes looked away. She didn’t want to talk about Big Uriel.
Teacher said, “So when does not-your-stepdad get back from North Dakota?”
Her green eyes were silent. She didn’t know.
“How is Mom?”
“She’s fine.”
“And Little Sister.”
“Fine.”
She would pick her up from the bus stop in about an hour.
“The high school field trip is next week. I’m recommending you for the advanced class, by the way. Maybe you’ll get a chance to read Melville in high school.”
“I’ll come back. We’ll finish the book then.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then we have to finish now.”
Kind Girl set the book on the table. The first half of the book was bursting with post-it notes. Tiny labels said “metaphor… allusion… irony.” The chapters about whale anatomy had no post-it notes in them at all. Had she skipped them or merely found nothing of interest there?
Kind Girl said, “I coded them blue and green.”
“Meaning?”
“Good and evil.”
“But I told you, one person can embody both. Embody. ‘Contain within themselves.’”
“Embody.”
“Good.”
There wasn’t time.
“I did find some dualities, like you said. The artist and the scientist. The outward and within. Two minds, the rational and rageful. I even wrote on both sides of the note.”
“Two sides of the same coin, to use an idiom. Very nice.”
Teacher lifted one of the notes carefully out.
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
He looked at Kind Girl. “I could say this about you. What is your duality?”
Kind Girl made a fretted frown. She wrapped her arms tight.
“You’re cleaning houses again. I can smell it on you. Like lavender. I can smell it on the book.”
Silence meant truth. No, it didn’t.
“Tell me about your flannel shirt. These are the hottest days of the year. A kid who covers up…”
She looked at him, flecks of panic sparking in her eyes.
“…is hiding something. Protecting themself from the world.”
Kind Girl unbuttoned her cuffs. She slid up her sleeves. She twisted her wrists to show her smooth amber skin. “Like Melanie? Do you still think I’m hiding something, Teacher?”
“If I ever see anything, I have to call Child Services. And I will.”
Kind Girl began to cry. “I can take care of myself.” Water glistened her green eyes.
They would not finish the book. Teacher patted her back. What else could he do? He said, “Listen. I promised you that we would do this together. Tonight, it’s my turn with the book. I’ll read twenty pages. Thirty. Look, the weather is beautiful. Take Little Sister to the park to—”
“Teacher, no one goes to the park.”
Kind Girl wiped her eyes with her flannel cuff and shuffled back to her desk. She left the book with Teacher, and he slid Melville’s great book to his side of the mahogany table. He felt the heaviness dragging across the grain, Kind Girl’s notes bursting from inside. Tonight, Teacher would read them, deconstruct her thinking. The book already contained his own marginal notes, written thirty years ago. Had she checked them? What had he given away about himself? His juvenilia. He sometimes had railed against his mom in those private spaces at the edge of Melville’s public ones. Kind Girl could handle it. She was kind to him. Did she know that she, too, was one question away from unlocking his own hard truths? Did any of his students know he was so damn tired that he fell asleep at the mahogany table after school? That, when he got home, he numbed himself on TV, internet, and alcohol?
Kind Girl and Little Sister probably slept in one bed. And when Kind Girl read the book at night, her eyes were the only alert pair in that apartment. Little Sister’s slow breaths would flutter the pages. King Girl probably held Little Sister close, so if the child were removed, Kind Girl would be alerted. How else could it be? Kind Girl saw a threat in that home and determined that the little girl would never know. She would mold Little Sister into the next Kind Girl. As she grew older, cruelty would astonish her.
***
The morning news said the bullets were everywhere. The sides of cars, the apartment walls, the stunted trees. Another gang dispute, a turf war. One hundred shell casings lay in the street, each marked by a tiny yellow plastic cone. Nine-millimeter here, .357 there. No one was hurt, or, if they were, they wouldn’t roll into a hospital until hours had passed, and always in another part of town. The police didn’t tape off the scenes anymore, and the students walking to the bus stop took the shortest path, right through the middle of it. Kind Girl probably held Little Sister’s hand.
The students had less than two weeks to finish their books, but Teacher cut the session short today. No one was reading. They sat erect in their steel and plastic chairs, knees bouncing, fingers tapping, fearful and alert and very tired. Teacher was weakening. The problems were larger than the answers. The problems involved guns. His answers were books.
Teacher collected permission slips for the high school tour. Kind Girl came up, slid the permission slip across the table, her mom’s forged signature along the bottom.
“The shooting. You walked right through there. You covered Little Sister’s eyes. You told her your best stories to distract her. Maybe this one.” He pointed at the book.
She laughed but said nothing. The truth complete.
Teacher said, “Summer will be hot in the metaphorical sense…”
Maybe her green eyes recalled the shooting night before. “I want to read now.”
“I can give you one conference per day, maybe lunch recesses too.”
Kind Girl sat beside him, and they mapped it out, these many pages, these many days. Surely, she saw they would never make it.
“Would you like to talk to the counselor? Get some summer clothes?”
“No, thank you.”
He mapped out more dates but kept them to himself. They didn’t have a chance.
He said, “You guys need to sleep on the floor from now on. It’s safer. Below the bullets.”
“We already do.”
“And you need to think for yourself in the world. It is an older person’s lesson, but you’ll be an older person in the world for most of your life, and…”
Her green eyes were flat as the sea. Adrift. Teacher pictured Kind Girl’s footprints across that crime scene in the street. The two sets of prints among the yellow cones. The directness of her walking. She wasn’t the one who was adrift. He was. He had committed an error. Instead of asking questions, he was giving answers. He imagined how it felt, Kind Girl gripping her sister’s hand and squeezing tight to hide her own tremble. But he wasn’t supposed to supply the image. He was supposed to ask.
Kind Girl took the book for the night. Teacher assigned ten pages, but she would read twenty. And he decided: she needed to keep the book. She needed to keep the book forever. She was too kind to ask for it, but kids stole his books all the time. The best ones. He even budgeted for replacements each summer. Why was she any different?
Kind Girl walked to her desk, hugging the book to her chest, not to protect the thing, he knew it now: the book was protecting her.
***
Big Uriel was found on the bike path. Kicked and beaten. Fingers broken. The low-life trash of Sur 13 had stomped his hands and broke his nose. Pockets empty. No knives, no book. Teacher knew he wouldn’t come back to school for the final week, not for the talent show, the promotion assembly, the party. It was shameful to show your face mashed up like that. Sur 13, they knew it too.
Teacher was sitting at his table, his eyes closed. Kind Girl bumped the table. It creaked like tired bones.
“Let’s read.”
In the last days, they covered two dozen chapters. All the nine ships. The butchering of whales, extraction of the spermaceti. Ahab was getting closer to his special prey. He made a special harpoon, anointed with heathen blood. The violence got closer. Teacher listened to his students’ stories. There wasn’t much reading left in this class, but he heard unimaginable stories. Layla was reading The Outsiders after Big Uriel, and she said, “My parents too, they were wiped out in a car crash.” Issai sat in at the mahogany table and said, “In the park, my uncles, gone.” His hand made the sign of a pistol. Mercedes would not sit with them, but from her seat by the window she made her offering. “My parents are in prison. I been couch surfing as long as anyone will have me. Teacher, you ever been in prison?” Every student, every conversation, the students had more words to tell, with dwindling time to tell them. They knew it was ending.
His classroom, his big shelf of books, lacked the gravity to tilt the world.
Kind Girl took her turns at the mahogany table, giving up recess to read. Teacher ate his lunch and remembered his mom and all those books she left for him. How might this play out for today’s child, reading Moby Dick, then looking back on her life and remembering this time, this conversation? Twenty years from now, would she remember that her friend, Big Uriel, was beaten to a pulp on the same sunny day?
Teacher didn’t want to read anymore. He kept away from the table and stood by the window and let Kind Girl read on her own. He knew how the story ended. But textual familiarity was needed, because conversation required citing evidence, so he would have to lose more sleep to read carefully. Kind Girl’s most recent post-it note: A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. Was that a dig at him?
Ahab revealed his secret stowaways, his killer crew, his assassins.
Kind Girl looked up and said, “They’re devils. He’s made a deal. He’s sold his soul.”
The recess bell rang.
Teacher said, “Kind Girl, we will not make it to the point where the boat is smashed.”
There wasn’t enough time. There wasn’t enough anything.
He said, “You can do this alone.”
King Girl touched her golden necklace. She let it go.
Teacher had done it alone. Ran from his mother’s world, took the stories with him. Did he ever tell his mom that he had taken the stories?
Kind Girl said, “I’ll come back…”
“No.”
“What about meeting in a coffee shop, or the library?”
“I’m very sorry, but that would be inappropriate. One of those teacher words.”
The students trickled in from recess.
“Inappropriate.”
“Good.”
She would be alone.
A long time ago, Teacher had left his own home for the world. He went to college. Glad to get away. He took his mom’s books with him. He found new books. The books created worlds. He felt safe enough. Now, in this desolate neighborhood, to create a safe world was the most important act. Which one of those worlds would be the one where Kind Girl got herself away? Teacher banged his palm on the table. It startled her. Her green eyes looked frightened. “One more thing: Big Uriel. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have protected him.”
It was a true statement. But this one time, the truth was incomplete, so Kind Girl added words. “Maybe I am protecting you!”
It was Teacher’s turn to say nothing.
Kind Girl said, “One more thing. It’s Abigail.”
“What?”
“My name. Call me Abigail. Don’t call me Kind Girl anymore.”
***
On the last day of school, the students were flipping through their yearbooks, if they could afford one, leaning over a friend’s shoulder if they could not. Teacher was boxing his classroom books from the shelves. If the student brought back a book, they got a sucker. If they didn’t bring it back, he knew why. Sylvia and Itzel, who had not purchased yearbooks, came up and offered to take over the task. They sent Teacher back to the mahogany table. “We got this.” They did a better job collecting the books than he.
Kind Girl — Abigail — sat with Teacher for the final time. A pink North Dakota t-shirt beneath her flannel. She set down the book. She had run out of post-it notes. The book smelled of cigarettes.
Teacher said, “So he’s back?”
“For a week. Then he’s got another hitch.”
“Look, do I need to call—”
“It’s okay.” She grabbed his arm. “Guess what! They saw the white whale! They didn’t catch it though. Not yet anyway.”
“What did you think?”
“What is the word? Anticlimactic.”
“Just you wait. They’re not done with each other.”
“Don’t tell me.” She laughed. But her eyes cried. The duality of joy and pain.
“What do you think of the white whale?”
“He’s frightening.”
“Tell me more about that.”
She looked at him with her flat green eyes. But the trick wouldn’t work this time.
“You have something inside you won’t discuss…”
“So do you.”
It was time to give her the book. “Abigail, listen to me. I too grew up in a house where I had to take care of myself. And I too have my own pain. The most perfect thing you can do is finish the book alone. Hold it close to your heart. As you sleep on the floor. And Little Sister? If you read her the story, you can wrap both of yourselves within. That’s fine. But here’s the thing: how long do you think you can protect her? When she becomes a teenager, you’ll be gone. What will you do then? Don’t answer that question for me. Answer it for yourself. All my questions, answer them for yourself.”
“Teacher…”
“The world is an ocean. Prepare to feel yourself sinking. Swim for the surface sooner than later. If I’m talking hopelessly, it’s only because the heart to hope must first be broken.”
He looked at Abigail. Abigail looked back at him. And he knew from her silence she was letting a final truth exist between them uncontested. And for the first time, he saw through her eyes, and it shattered him. She was burned and ashen inside, just like him. At best, she was filling herself with the world, if only to feel something, better than nothing at all.
“You dear, precious child.”
Let her fill with that as well.
He said, “If you keep going, you’ll finally see what happens to the white whale.”
“What about you? Teacher, you’re not going to finish it?”
He said, “I’m hiding from harder choices.”
“Your own duality?”
“Now you understand.”
Abigail hugged Teacher and kept the book. The Mexican girls gave her a sucker anyway. They gave her a second one for Little Sister. The bell rang. The students left. Soon, all the students were gone. Maybe Kind Girl could finish the book in two weeks if she applied herself. Maybe squeeze in a few cleaning jobs, too. Time would tell.
A stray seventh grader without a name peeked in from the hall. “Teacher, what are we going to read next year?”
This was where Teacher had to look for kindness now. Start the questions all over again.
“What do you like to read? Let’s start with that…”
Years ago, the first time he sat at that old mahogany desk, he had thought, “This will make me happy.” He had no idea. Happiness wasn’t the right thing to want from the world.
Teacher spent most of the final afternoon on the phone with Child Protective Services. They said they needed details. They asked what he had seen. He told them he didn’t have to see, he just knew. He intuited. He tried to explain the outlines he saw in absence. The green doldrums of her eyes. They asked had he seen scratches? No. Bruises? No. Had she ever confided in a female teacher? He said, “If she had, you would have already heard.” He wasn’t the only teacher with CPS on speed dial. They said there wasn’t enough to pursue, but they would start a file on the girl. Teacher said there were two girls, sisters, and to put both names on the file.
Teacher hung up the phone and sat alone in his classroom. Alone in his life. There were a hundred other problems to solve. He would never see Abigail or his book again. He could get another copy, but he would never read the book again, because he would only think of her, reading the book, and the conversation they would never complete. But he asked himself, what if they had finished the book? What then? Would there have been nothing left to say? Emptiness? Paucity? The silence she loved when all the truth had been expelled? What would she hold against her heart when the next bullets tore through the apartment walls?
The mahogany table had a drawer. Teacher opened it. He took out the knife his students didn’t know about. A five-inch Bowie knife in a leather sheath. He slid out the blade and cut into the table’s grain. He added Fuck to Sur 13. The other teachers were laughing in the hallway, heading to the end-of-the-year party when he carved, To the last breath I will grapple with thee. The shadows of the scrappy trees outside were stretching long when he carved, I am the alpha and omega. Was that even from Moby Dick? He didn’t remember. It had been in one of his mom’s books, so long ago. The other teachers were texting Teacher from the bar, Where are you? and the custodians were powering down the lights in the hallways, the light in the classrooms, the light in his life, and he illuminated the words by feel, when he carved, I alone escaped to tell thee.
Image by Debby Hudson on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Photo by Kenneth Dixon.
- Kind Girl, Teacher, Sister, Whale - September 2, 2025