BAD GUY

Photographer - Tobi Brun

BAD GUY 

I WAS REVISITING a dating app conversation, concluding that my dual “lols” in the same message had reeked of desperation, when I noticed the little blue dot signifying unread messages in my group chat of old high school friends.

Apparently, one of our old classmates, Tristan Mack, had been arrested for vandalism after peppering a local playground with anti-semitic graffiti. This probably wasn’t Tristan’s first run-in with the law since he was expelled from our high school for fighting nearly a decade prior, but it was the first time in a while that I thought about him. In my head, I still pictured Tristan at 7 years old, dirty-blonde curls and flushed cheeks, bits of crusty boogers often formed at the edges of his nostrils. Little me had seen those boogers and taken it to mean blowing one's nose wasn’t cool, that the dried bits were something of a fashion statement because he had to be doing it on purpose; I mean, how could he not notice? And because I wanted to emulate every part of the impenetrable armor of coolness he exerted over Mrs. Smith’s class, I learned to avoid tissues the way most kids avoided me.

When I called my mom to tell her about Tristan’s arrest, she said “Good, that little fucker deserves to rot.” I held my phone secure with my neck and shoulder and pulled up his mugshot. I stared. The childlike features I pictured had sharpened and thinned out, reminiscent of a military cadet, I thought, had his curls not been butchered into an uneven DIY haircut, had the red in his cheeks not become intermingled with dark bags, had the expression on his face not looked so dazed. A wave of emotion crashed into my sinuses, which wasn’t unusual; I cried when reading about injustice in the world or, conversely, hearing about a remarkable achievement; when feeling alone or excluded or when seeing other people feeling alone or excluded; when something melancholy or beautiful or inspiring or heartbreaking happened. And even though I couldn’t quite place the emotion behind these tears, even though what he did was clearly fucked up, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with my mom. I put her on speaker and held the phone away from my face, lost in thought.

THE TRANSITION FROM half-day kindergarten at one school to full-day first grade at a different school had been a disaster for my separation anxiety, which stemmed from close adults in my life dropping dead or getting diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Every single day before school I cried about not wanting to go, not wanting to leave my mom and dad. So far I’d been given everything from stuffed animals, to Xanax, to a miniature box in which I was supposed to tuck away my worries like a small child at bedtime. Nothing was helping, nothing was preventing the tears from spilling before school and continuing once my parents dragged me to class every day. My lips became chapped and turned a bluish-blood-red color from the staccato of gulps and hiccups that became my default way of breathing, amplified by a serious case of childhood asthma and a cocktail of allergies. Needless to say, not a lot of kids wanted to befriend the wheezing, sniveling little boy with bags under his eyes that looked like bruises. Until Tristan, that is.

Tristan was, without a doubt, our class clown. Not the type of class clown to drive a teacher to the brink of a breakdown, necessarily, but the type to drive her a little batty until she learned how to feed and nurture him like a particularly erratic houseplant. This meant giving him a lead role in class and getting creative when it came to engaging him. When Tristan couldn’t stop tapping his pencil on the desk like it was a drum solo, Mrs. Smith gave him the five minutes before lunch to do a performance. When he couldn’t stop singing Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, she brought him to the front to conduct daily full-class renditions of the song until we all got it out of our systems. When he fell out of his chair on purpose, she scolded the chair for failing to do its one job and told Tristan he better sit on the carpet for the rest of the day while the chair thought about what it did. It didn’t hurt that Tristan was charming, a jokester who seemed to know when to turn it off, when to stop pushing the teacher’s buttons.

Tristan’s dad was a police officer, much to the reverence of our class, and his aunt taught Cultures of the World at our local middle school. On our second playdate, Tristan told my mom what he considered to be an amusing anecdote, that his aunt, the Cultures of the World teacher, often called her dog a racial slur when the dog made her mad. I don’t remember the slur now, and I sure didn’t know what it meant at the time. I’m not sure if Tristan really knew the magnitude of it, either, but people around him found it funny and so he did, too. That second playdate was when my mom decided that she didn’t want me hanging around that boy anymore. But that was later.

OUR FRIENDSHIP STARTED one day right after my show and tell. It was a big deal for me and naturally, my legs were shaky and my voice was foreign but the tears that tried to pierce my makeshift levee were temporarily kept at bay. I held up my favorite T-shirt, black with a large graphic of a wrestler cheesing hard, ripped but weathered muscles popping out in a way that made him look almost three-dimensional. Scribbled in sloppy handwriting was a silver signature and the words ‘For my pal Paul.” As much as I loved sports, I didn’t know anything about wrestling. The shirt was a birthday gift from my friend Jayden. Jayden’s brother was friends with my brother and his mom was friends with my mom. Jayden’s mom was going through chemotherapy.

“Cool shirt,” Tristan told me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Do you want to be my friend?” he asked.

My eyes widened. “Okay,” I said.

When Tristan was bored in class, he drew detailed doodles that were not quite comics, although many of them had captions. Most drawings involved robots or aliens attacking humans and several brave heroes stepping up to destroy these evil invaders. His handwriting was sloppy but discernible, the speech bubbles unable to fully contain the words that bled into the margins of his composition notebook. Of course, I got a firsthand look because Mrs. Smith got wind of our budding friendship and sat us next to each other, probably delighted that she wouldn’t have to help wipe so many of my tears.

Sometimes Tristan would pass me the notebook so I could laugh at his creations. When I told him I liked to draw and had my very own sketchpad and a how-to book on the fundamentals of caricatures, his eyes lit up and he said “Here, add to it this page.” And so I started drawing the civilians that got slaughtered before Tristan’s heroes came in to save the day, all with Mr. Potatohead eyes and sharp mohawks, usually joined by a wispy mustache over an awestruck mouth.

EVERY DAY, I was allowed to eat lunch in the classroom with the counselor, Ms. Molina, the stuffed animals that didn’t seem to help much, and my Worry Box, which began to help a lot. Looking back, I can recognize that my anxiety was tied to love, and I felt like I was betraying my loved ones if I wasn’t longing for their wellbeing. Now, I had somewhere to redirect my worries. Instead of having to physically carry them around like a backpack, they were accessible when I needed them, no longer permeating the space between folders and sticky notes and colored pencils, but rather stored safely inside the small white box.

Ms. Molina was a tiny woman, silky black hair over a kind face, soft-spoken, and with a series of dashes on her arms that I now recognize to be self-harm scars. She had taken me under her wing beyond the scope of her job description. “Paul,” she said one morning. “I’m so proud of how far you’ve come! Do you want to invite a friend to eat lunch with us?”

I said nothing, unsure if I was ready to leave my carefully cultivated comfort zone, the feelings of safety to which I was clinging like a buoy in a vast sea of marine life seemingly content to operate in chaos.

“I’ve seen you hanging around Tristan,” she prodded gently.

“Yeah, he asked me to be his friend,” I said.

“And do you like being his friend?” she asked.

I chewed my lumpy PB&J, swallowed, and nodded hard. “We draw together and work on our Mad Minute Math together.”

Ms. Molina’s eyes flashed warmly and then she hesitated. “And he’s nice to you?”

“He’s nice. He asked me to be his friend,” I repeated.

She looked uncertain and then seemed to make up her mind. “I’m gonna go grab him, ok? We are going to play a game together. I think it will be good.”

Moments later, Tristan strode in with the energy of someone who was getting special treatment. Ms. Molina showed us how the game worked. She gave us each a whiteboard and laid out two stacks of cards, “Careers” and “Houses,” co-opted from The Game of Life, and said that we were going to play a modified version. On the whiteboard was a list labeled “Life Experiences,” evidently brainstormed by Ms. Molina herself, whose distinctly loopy handwriting was a little hard to decipher.

She clapped her hands softly. “Okay,” she said. “Each of you should take one Career card and one House card.”

“I better get a mansion,” said Tristan as he greedily reached for the piles.

I hesitated and Ms. Molina gave me a patient smile and nodded. I drew.

“Great,” she continued. “So now, you are going to pick some Life Experiences from the board that you think go alongside the House and Career you chose. Then, you can draw a few pictures of your future life! The object is to try to show as much about your life as possible. Don’t only show your career. Don’t only show your house. Try to paint a picture of everything that goes into your amazing future.”

Tristan, reading beyond grade level, started rattling off some of the Life Experiences listed: “Get a dog. See a movie in a theater. Go skydiving. Eat at a restaurant. Get married. Listen to a great song. Spend quality time with someone you love.” At the last one, Tristan gave a little scoff. “Isn’t that kinda gay?”

Ms. Molina looked flustered and then, voice more severe than I had ever heard, said, “Tristan, we don’t use that word in a mean way.” Her mouth stayed half open like she wanted to say something more but instead plowed forward, like the awkwardness of their exchange could be suffocated if it wasn’t given the appropriate time to breathe.

“I’m-so-excited-to-see-what-you-both-come-up-with. Go-ahead-and-start,” she said.

 By the end of lunch, I had drawn a picture of a Bungalow and yard big enough to include my mom and dad and brother, uncle and grandparents and cousins, Jayden’s mom, happy and healthy and driving a flying car packed full of Jayden and his brothers, my uncle and grandparents, Ms. Molina and my neighborhood friends, all of us about twenty years older and smiling. I had drawn the “professional athlete” Career Card and decided on the “get a dog” Life Experience, so future-me was wearing a basketball jersey and cradling a puppy.

Tristan had ignored the cards because he didn’t need them the way I did, because he wasn’t paralyzed by anxiety today that made thinking about tomorrow impossible. He knew exactly what he wanted and what he deserved. A police officer like his dad, a bad guy on the ground, a Lamborghini for a cop car, and a woman, presumably his future wife, with a speech bubble that said, “Go Tristan! Kick his @$!”

 WHEN TRISTAN’S DAD came in for our class career day the next week, kids were tripping over themselves to get a look at his gun.

“No waaaaay,” said Grant Girobaldi. “How many bad guys have you killed?”

“Epic,” said Anna McDonald.

“I want to be a cop and protect people one day, too,” declared Jimmy Spencer.

Tristan’s dad gave a cheeky smile and Ms. Smith did a series of claps to refocus the class.

“Okay. Who has a question for Officer Mack?”

I scanned around the class as nearly every hand shot up. Not mine. Cops scared me. All of that authority, that bravado, made me nervous. I was grateful to them for protecting our community but it made me uneasy to think that an honest or not-so-honest mistake could put someone behind bars. What if someone wasn’t bad, just quiet, and didn’t feel like they could stick up for themself? I finished my scan of the classroom and caught the eye of Tristan, who was sitting next to me. I knew how proud he was of his dad, how much he wanted to follow in his footsteps. So when he eyed the gun his dad was holding and looked away quickly, it surprised me. The ever-present swagger was muted for just a moment and I thought I recognized that familiar feeling of folding into oneself. But before I could ask if he was okay, it was as if the gun let out a crack and jolted him back to his usual self, buzzing now like a slightly feral dog.

“Tell the story of when you shot that guy to save Eddie!” Tristan called out.

 Officer Mack looked at his son. “That’s Uncle Eddie, to you,” he said coldly. Then he turned to the class and his eyes lit up, though when he started speaking, it seemed to be mostly to himself. “So I was on duty in a bad neighborhood downtown. My partner, Officer Eddie, is like a brother to me. I’d do anything for that man. I was doing a coffee run while Officer Eddie was in the car, and while I was out, he noticed a suspicious-looking guy leaving the liquor store. Officer Eddie knew that the guy had stolen something. So he goes to make the cuff and this scumbag punches him in the face. I come out of the Dunkin’ and see it happen. So I draw my weapon and tell the guy to freeze with his hands up. He doesn’t immediately comply and I deem that this guy most likely has a weapon. Lo and behold, I see his hand flash toward his pocket to grab said weapon. There’s no way on God’s green earth that I let this guy hurt my brother and get away with it. So I take the shot. Bullseye. Hits him clean, guy crumples to the pavement. Officer Eddie ends up with a pretty bad shiner from the sucker punch but other than that he’s good. Still my partner to this day. Loyalty, kids. That’s what it’s all about.”

Officer Mack finished the story and looked around like he was accepting his police Oscar for Outstanding Service, the class of 7-year-old children in awe at his presence. I wanted to raise my hand to ask if the guy survived but I was too scared to speak in front of him. Plus, if Officer Mack said that he did the right thing, that violence was sometimes the price of loyalty, then I believed him. He was wearing a badge, after all.

OUR FIRST PLAYDATE was at my house because I still yearned for the comfort and familiarity of my parent’s presence. It was an unseasonably warm October day in the suburbs, the type of languid sunshine that made any activity a monumental task. When Tristan showed up at my door, his dirty-blonde curls were covered by an uneven baseball cap and he had splotches of sunscreen dotting his abnormally clean nose. He was clutching a spray-painted black Nerf gun in one hand.

“Do you want to play on the swings?” I asked after ushering him in and introducing him to my parents.

“No, let’s play Bad Guys!” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a game where one of us is the cop and the other is the bad guy. The bad guy has to run around and try to avoid the cop but if the cop shoots the bad guy before he runs out of bullets, then the cop wins. If not, the bad guy wins,” he explained.

“Ok,” I said, and then added “Cool gun.”

“I call being cop first,” he declared, ignoring my comment.

I zigged and zagged around the yard to escape Tristan, cackling as I climbed up the slide and ran down the other side of the play structure to narrowly avoid the styrofoam bullets whizzing past my ear. In that first game, I managed to make it until Tristan’s last bullet before he pelted me on the side of my neck. It was a good game, I had to admit, and I hoped Tristan would say something about my athletic prowess. Instead, he simply said “Let’s play again,” and so we did, until both of us were glistening with sweat and wheezing hard. He held out his hand for me to slap and said, “Nice.”

My mom came out beaming and brought us toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches and juice boxes. We ate sitting criss-cross applesauce in the Autumn grass crunchy with leaves of varying yellows and oranges and purples.

“Why did you ask to be my friend?” I asked suddenly between bites.

Tristan chewed slowly, his expression hard to read. “So you would feel less sad and alone I guess,” he shrugged. “And because John Cena is my favorite wrestler, too,” he said nodding at my favorite shirt, now wet and clinging to my tiny body like plasters of paper-mâché.

“I hate being at school,” I said and then hesitated. “But it’s starting to feel a little less bad.”

“Yeah, school sucks,” said Tristan. “I’d rather ride around with my dad.”

“Does he let you ride with him?” I asked in awe.

“Not yet. But soon. He says it’ll help me learn to be a man. And to see how the world works. I can’t wait to be a grown-up.”

I nodded uncertainly, once again lacking Tristan’s confidence about the future, and then coughed as my juice went down the wrong pipe. “Definitely…” and then hasty to change the subject I added, “Come on, let’s play again.” And so we did, running around in the sticky heat until Tristan’s mom came back to pick him up an hour later.

MY MEMORY gets a little bit grainy at this point. Finishing the story is like piecing together a nonlinear photo album. The snapshots are mostly there, but I’m not exactly sure how they fit together. I do know that Tristan and I continued to sit together after that first playdate. In fact, our friendship stayed strong enough to warrant another one, and we made plans for a sleepover. However, Tristan had a shorter fuse leading up to this monumental step in any child’s friendship. Maybe it was because I was starting to loosen up and talk to other kids. Maybe it was because I was still too dependent on him. But then again, maybe it was outside of anything related to me, purely related to Tristan and the things he was going through that I knew nothing about. I do know that his appetite for the starring role amped up so much that Mrs. Smith, God bless her soul, couldn’t keep up with the increasingly erratic feeding times.

On one such occasion, we were situated on the multi-colored classroom carpet with our scraped knees crossed tightly and our obedient eyes locked forward. Mrs. Smith was sitting in an elevated chair at the front of the classroom, her oversized heart earrings dangling playfully as she craned her neck down to read. It was our daily storytime, and we couldn’t have been more excited to find out what was happening with the poor orphan sent to live with an aunt now being manipulated by a sinister new head of house. The big twist was coming and we could all feel it. The moment we were waiting for was finally going to happen in this storytime block. But every time the tension would thicken, twenty-five greedy eyes leaning forward, a collective “Ahhh” waiting to be released, Tristan would interrupt. Sometimes, it was something harmless, like yelling “No way! This is crazy.” But when the protagonist was trying to quietly eavesdrop on an important conversation, he joked that “It sure would be a bad time for her to FART right now,” and then he cut the cheese with his armpit.

Mrs. Smith tried to politely redirect his attention or simply ignored him in a valiant effort to keep an aura of mystery alive in the room, but it wasn’t working. Finally, the quiet and bookish girl to the left of Tristan, Aimee Edelstein, had enough.

“STOP, Tristan!” she exclaimed furiously after yet another fart noise erupted from Tristan’s mouth.

“Make me!” Tristan spit back and then he lunged at her and pinched her on the arm until she squealed and Mrs. Smith had to rush down to break them up.

That’s when the ever-composed Mrs. Smith lost it on him for the first time. “TRISTAN,” she spat. “We. Do. Not. Attack. Our. Classmates.”

Minutes later, the principal came and took him away to alert his dad about the incident. It wasn’t that Tristan was immediately branded a “bad kid” after occurrences like these, but the seeds were planted and the moodiness, the precipice from which Tristan was normally able to walk himself down, became steeper and more tenuous.

THE SLEEPOVER PLAYDATE was uneventful until Tristan shared the anecdote about his aunt’s nickname for her dog at dinnertime. I could see my mom’s eyebrows practically jump to her hairline, neck whipping to see if Tristan had just said what she thought he did. 

“That’s a bad word. A bad bad word. A word that’s harmful to an entire group of people. It’s absolutely not okay to say,” she said with a firmness I had seldom heard from her.

Tristan looked a little confused and a little defensive. “It’s what she says as a joke,” he shrugged, as if that settled it.

My mom stared. The room got hot and an uncomfortable silence immediately boiled and bubbled thickly, heavy steam shrouding our dining area and rendering speech impossible. After several long moments, my dad walked out holding an oversized pot of Spaghetti with sausage pieces drowning in the thick red meat sauce. “Bon Appetit,” he said, and then left to clear up the mess in the kitchen.

The distraction must have given my mom a moment to think. Looking back now, I understand that she had considered the friendship over the moment Tristan revealed this anecdote. I’m sure she weighed calling Tristan’s mom to give the woman a piece of her mind, to tell her to come get her kid. However, she must have decided to spare me the immediate embarrassment because she gritted her teeth into a smile and said, “Eat up, boys!” 

Mouth full of spaghetti, Tristan regaled us with a story. He told us that prior to arriving at our house, his brother challenged him to a milk-drinking contest. Apparently, they had both downed four glasses of two percent before they could no longer find room left in their stomachs. “My bones are gonna be so strong,” he declared proudly as he twisted his fork and shoveled another bite of spaghetti into his mouth.

“That’s a lot of milk,” I giggled, thinking we had recovered from the awkwardness.

 My mom half-nodded, still distracted from the earlier exchange. Moments later, Tristan clenched his stomach and then lurched forward. A stream of radioactive orange projectile vomit unleashed onto our kitchen table and the rug beneath it, dyeing everything in its vicinity and leaving us in a splotchy warzone of undigested noodles and sausage. If the earlier exchange had happened in slow-motion, this one felt as if someone had pressed fast forward. From the abruptness in which the sour-smelling mixture had tumbled from Tristan’s mouth, to the swift action my parents took to call his mom, begin the clean-up efforts, and corral him into the car to return him home, it must have been an afterthought that I insisted upon accompanying my friend. Nestled in the back seat of the car with the windows down, Tristan shuddered and let out another stream of vomit. I watched it drip down the car door, chunky and sluggish, and hoped my friend would get better soon, not understanding that this would be the last time we’d be allowed to play together.

OVER THE NEXT couple of weeks, several things happened. My mom called Mrs. Smith to tell her to please keep me separated from Tristan; she sat me down one evening and gave me an introductory crash course on racism in America; and after I told Tristan I couldn’t be his friend anymore, someone wrote “Paul is an ass” on the stall door of the boys’ bathroom. Nobody could prove that Tristan had done it because he’d been smart enough to mask his handwriting, but there wasn’t really any question about who was responsible: the little kid who took a chance in befriending a lonely classmate, the little kid who probably thought his vomiting episode played a larger role in the termination of that friendship than the racism perpetuated by his family. 

In the immediate aftermath, I sat in Ms. Molina’s office, crying at school for the first time in nearly two months. She let me wheeze and huff, tears pooling in a mucousy mess above my shuddering upper lip. After fifteen minutes of this, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a small mirror hung in the office. In blue Sharpie were a series of loopy words that said Look! You are Beautiful No Matter What! I saw my puffy eyes, the shadow of black bags underneath, and appraised my snotty nose. Immediate instincts told me not to wipe so that later on it would dry and I could be like Tristan.

When Ms. Molina saw me looking at myself and getting even more worked up, she gently patted my back and said, “Okay, Paul, I think that’s enough. Take some deep breaths alongside me as I count to ten.” With tremendous effort, I took a few shuddering breaths, repeatedly getting caught on both the inhale and the exhale, like someone tumbling down a hill and running into tree after tree. Several minutes later, when I had finally found a rhythm and my tiny chest was expanding and contracting smoothly, she motioned to the board, still featuring a list of life experiences, and then did a voice like a train conductor. “Now boarding for Canada. At your destination, you will learn to ice skate and eat french fries covered in gravy. Draw a picture of you and your family on the trip!”

I took several more deep breaths, hiccupped, and said “Can you pass me the whiteboard, please?”

As Ms. Molina leaned forward, I noticed three small bandaids underneath her sleeve in a perfect line. “What happened?” I asked, alarmed.

“Oh,” she hesitated. “I hurt myself. I got a couple of cuts,” she said shortly.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

“Yes, I suppose I will be. I guess…” She hesitated for a moment and then this time, decided to plow forward. “Well, like you Paul, sometimes I feel a lot of pain. Pain is a normal part of life. I feel it on my body, like when I get cut, but also in my heart. For me, the pain in my heart hurts a lot more. So this pain, this pain on my body feels… easier. It’ll heal. I know it’ll heal. And… I guess, I just have to remember that the pain in my heart will heal too. But sometimes it’s hard. So we both need to remember that if our hearts start to hurt, they can always get better. ”

“But how? How will they get better?”

“By doing the things you’ve already started learning how to do. Figuring out how to take a breath when you need it. Finding a safe place for your worries. Leaning on the people you love and the people who love you. Finding experiences you enjoy so much, that they make the wandering in your mind go quiet. Being able to ask for help when you need it.”

“Okay,” I said and then stared, lost in thought. “I guess I would like to try french fries covered in gravy. It might be gross, but it might be okay,” I contemplated.

Ms. Molina looked at me and something in her face broke. She let out an otherworldly belly laugh, a sound that reverberated around the room like she had been using a loudspeaker, and so I started laughing too even though I didn’t entirely understand why she was laughing, until we were laughing together, feeding off the full body hysterics of the other, wild and sudden and unburdened.

Over the years, I grieved yet more loved ones and sometimes felt the overwhelming suffocation that emptied my brain and made the future feel unthinkable. I felt like that hopelessly lost little boy when addiction and illness threatened to eviscerate my immediate family, when coaches hoping to motivate me looked into my eyes and told me I wasn’t shit, even the first time I nursed a beer in the basement corner of a dingy high school party. And there were times when I desperately wanted to assimilate into my surroundings, when I wanted my coaches to think I had the kind of bravado they sought out, or when having the loudest voice in the room felt appealing. But there was always a flicker of something within me. At times it was faint, nearly imperceptible. The desire to wet my thumb and pointer finger, to pinch the flame out of its misery became more and more appealing. But I never truly could because deep down I never truly wanted to. I’ve been wired to feel shame for many things, but I don’t think being soft was ultimately one of them. Too many adults in my life refused to let that happen.

My mom was still on the other line, still waiting for my response, and I absentmindedly used my right hand to brush the fingers on my left hand. I didn’t think he deserved to rot, and I mumbled that sentiment into the phone.

“You don’t?” my mom said a little sharply.

“He did a lot for me when he asked me to be his friend.”

“And then he wrote evil things about you. And spewed racist garbage.”

I sighed. “His family clearly taught him that stuff.”

“And he went with it. He just sprayed a bunch of swastikas on a playground, Paul.”

“I know, I know,” I said, and closed my eyes and shook my head. As I palmed my temple, another vague piece of the story began to form in my mind. It was like a fever dream, splotches of color shaping the landscape of a school playground, and I couldn’t even be certain it was a real recollection.

It was a chilly day. The type of chilly day that produced reddened cheeks and dampened eyes. The type of wind that cut through bones. I wasn’t allowed to play with Tristan at this point, but the playground was only so big, and sometimes we crossed paths for a moment until I averted my eyes. He was standing on the precipice of the jungle gym, thinking about whether he would jump down. We locked eyes for a brief moment, but I quickly studied the mulch beneath my feet. I heard a thud, a crunch, and a yelp of pain. My head jolted Tristan’s way. From a distance, I could see the rosiness in his features, the mixture of mucousy and freeze-dried boogers circling his mouth and nose. He tried to stand up, crashed back to the ground, and yelped in agony again. Refusing to be tied to the mulch, refusing to let the pain win, he hobbled to his feet, though the injured leg was not bearing any weight. I was glued in place, staring. He met my eyes once more for a fleeting moment and then turned the other way, hopping on one foot in the opposite direction. Still, I didn’t move. I didn’t call out. I don’t know if he would have let me help, let me try to support his weight until we got to the school nurse, but I didn’t try. Nobody around us did. He hopped through the mulch, up to the blacktop painted with four square and hopscotch lines, and to the timeout chair by the entry door, where he sat still, trying not to wince in pain as other kids continued to scream and laugh and run around in the distance.

Cole Chaloupka is a former classroom teacher and current college counselor with an undergraduate degree in Marketing and Masters in Teaching. One of his favorite parts of teaching was the creative writing units, where he found he really enjoyed doing the writing prompts alongside the kids.