Then he said, “So now I’m fucking up school just like everything else is fucked up,” and that broke the rest of my heart. I told him that he wasn’t fucking up, he just needed to acknowledge the problems and come up with practical strategies to overcome them. Eventually, he calmed. When he left, I handed him the card of the head of guidance and pleaded with him to contact her and see if there was anything the school or social services could do to help. I also told him he could always talk to me if he needed to; I was in my room for at least half an hour after school on most days.
Omar was tall for an eighth grader—he’d been held back. He had a faint mustache and a chubby, childish face with full, expressive lips over uneven teeth. During my months observing him, he struck me as a bit clumsy physically, in an endearing kind of way. But he was pretty good at maintaining the jivey persona required by his fellow students, and so he seemed to me, from my distance, to be reasonably popular. On the other hand, middle school is largely an education in the theater arts, immersive training in doing an impersonation of a peer-determined idea of “normal,” so his persona didn’t necessarily reflect his inner state.
My home life was such a mess that I took refuge in my work, spending more and more time after school. I felt cruelly betrayed by Matt’s infidelities and his hurtfulness and his emotional indifference to figuring out how they affected our relationship. I had been cut by all the raw edges, both paper cuts and deep slashes, that go with the rancorous ambivalences of divorce, especially if it has dragged on too long and the wounds are reopened daily. Ironically, one of the most painful aspects of it all was realizing that he didn’t need me. I needed to be needed! Being needed allows you the opportunity to provide succor, to demonstrate love, to be the balance and the ballast. To prove you can be the strong one. It is a good thing to feel.
You can see where this is going. Omar stayed after class again, cried, talked. We hugged. Et cetera. He was so grateful. I felt good about myself: the Samaritan teacher. After a few such meetings, he had stopped crying and our encounters became more reciprocal, less charged conversations. He showed himself to be more intelligent than I had first assumed, and I felt we were developing a special relationship, communicating on a level beneficial to both of us. I began to look forward to seeing him. I was confident that our talks had helped him, and in my divorce-battered condition I welcomed the pride that gave me. I was no doubt blind to other signals. We hugged, but only briefly, when he took his leave.
But then one afternoon, I was leaning, half sitting against my desk, and he rather spontaneously came up to me and hugged me. God help me, this is how starved I was: I relished the feeling of a body pressed to mine, somebody goddamned well needing contact with me. He was a big kid, about as tall as Matt; all the parts and places fit the same. Neither of us made any suggestive movement, but yes, okay, yes, there was probably a bit more frontal contact than is appropriate for such hugs. And I let it go on for too long before I shrugged away.
Was it erotic? For him, maybe. As for me, I don’t know what I thought or felt. I wasn’t sleeping at night and I was taking caffeine pills to get through my workday. In any case, I have never been good at distinguishing the precise dividing lines between companionship, the pleasant pressure of friendly touch, and erotic contact.
I didn’t see Omar after class for a few days, and I had no reason to ask him to stay on—no bad test results or papers so wretched they required personal follow-up.
But one day, he lingered after the others left. He seemed to be relapsing into another tough phase. He didn’t cry, but he spoke darkly and hopelessly. I made sympathetic noises. He came to the desk and we hugged and it went on too long and his hand drifted too low in back and cupped my buttock and I was slow to react, and that’s when I heard muffled snickering from the doorway and looked up to see a little crowd of boys and girls, leaning in to watch. Obviously, Omar had been talking up his adventures with the horny Ms. Turner, bragging about his cougar conquest, and had invited them to the show.
It went through the whole student body overnight, manifested in suppressed smirks in class and, in the hall, a different kind of glance, followed by averted gazes.
The administration heard about it. The principal, vice principle, and faculty council chair interviewed me. I told my version, skipping the part about my inner confusion. They believed that I had been moved only by compassion and that my oversight was due to an excessive expression of it. But it was a serious lapse. They had no recourse but to remove Omar from my class and put me on a kind of probationary status. When the school
