In third grade, Wayne needed to go to the bathroom really bad, but Mr. Anvil would not let him. So Wayne, the very withdrawn and shy and awkward new kid from Hawaii, peed in his pants, and he grew ever-so-much-more-withdrawn-and-shy-and-awkward. The class did not laugh at Wayne; we were all of us very scared for him. Mr. Anvil was overly strict. He would pound his fist on our foreheads if we forgot our homework, and he would ask if anyone was at home in our heads. I did not think any of us, in that classroom, could be home in our heads. We held our breaths. We cast glances. We wondered who would be next. I felt so bad for Wayne; he had asked to go to the bathroom. He must have been so embarrassed and in so much pain.
I wanted to be in the classroom that had a jar of marbles, with one marble given every day for good behavior and a prize attained when the jar was full, but I never had that teacher.
In fourth grade, Mrs. Morgan made me tutor girls in math who were not doing so well. Mostly, they couldn’t subtract. I took them to the back table where the ant farms were (ant farms that we made as a class) and tried to teach them simple arithmetic, which they could not understand. I myself did not do this so well. I tried to show them how I did it, by slowly counting out dots or fingers on my hand. I ended up helping them pass by doing all the problems myself and then asking them to add or subtract the number one from another number. Christina in particular was impossible. She kept pointing to Niger on the globe and laughing.
In second grade, I wrote a poem about autumn. It was the first poem I wrote. It had, although I did not know it at the time, a refrain. The refrain was “Fall is the season for all.” It was also the season for “going to the mall” and “playing football” and “when the leaves fall.”
In fifth grade, Mrs. Lazarus let one of us go outside during fifth period to get the weather report. It was always a wonderful day for the pupil who went out to get the weather report, as we were in a school with no windows. I would note the position of the sun, the cirrus clouds, the breeze if there was one.
I don’t know why all the girls wanted to kill me, but in middle school, they all suddenly very much wanted to kill me.
I loved a boy really deeply, and I wanted him to know me, that me inside of me. I listened to the Cure and paid attention to the lyrics, because I felt as if the lyrics were me or at least could save me, and I knew that I wanted to use words that way, to save me. I stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s 120 Minutes and to listen to other words by other bands that might also save me.
Children oftentimes disappeared for weeks, and then they came back. Or else, they disappeared for years, and then they came back. Classmates were transient, and the houses emptied and filled and emptied and filled with new friends and new classmates. The boy across the street wore the same orange underwear every day; we knew because we could see the patch of orange showing through the hole in the butt of his jeans; he wore the same pair of jeans every day, and his parents fought often, and his father’s car was sandalwood colored and smoked from the hood, and I felt bad when I squirted juice from my juice bottle at his jeans when we were playing because I had forgotten that he wore the same jeans every day and would need to wear them again the next day. He disappeared after that year and never came back.
Josafina came back; she came back although I never did want her to come back because she was one of the girls who wanted to kill me. She wanted to kill me at school and outside of school. When she came back, she had a tattoo on her chest and had changed her name to Sophie. She wanted to kill me, but she would never kill anyone that I knew of. Her brother, however, did. Her brother killed another student at our school and dumped his body in a ditch one block from my house. The helicopters swarmed all morning.
When I was fifteen, I read a poem by Lucille Clifton called “[at last we killed the roaches],” and I thought about my house and all the houses in my neighborhood and all the roaches that maybe I too could kill so as to have a sense of accomplishment and reside in a beautiful world free of roaches.
Because they never did know where to put me, or because certain teachers did not want to deal with me, sometimes I was in regular and other times I was in advanced. In ninth grade, my English teacher did not let the regular students read the same book that his advanced class was reading, so instead, he made us read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and that was the first time I knew that there were others out there, there must have been others out there, just like me, who were sad and lonely and just wanted some kind of beauty in their lives and maybe for a boy to love them.
I was not in advanced English, however, and so I did not get the flyer from the San Antonio Public Library with the guidelines for their Young Pegasus Poetry Award.
