JANUARY - FEBRUARY

On the 22nd of January I began my first full-time job. Two days later I arrived at the school. It was a Wednesday, and according to Daniela, on Wednesdays we had two meetings. There was one in the morning called SAP. It seemed like no one knew what it stood for anymore, they had been calling it SAP for so long. It was for discussing every single student and all the things going on with them inside and outside of school. Apparently it got pretty depressing.

The second was an all-staff professional development meeting after lunch. It was run by the principal and the assistant principal. It turned out we didn’t have “vice principals” anymore, they were called assistant principals now. They made us watch a YouTube video called “Warm and Strict.” Already this did not bode well.

It had clearly been filmed close to two decades ago, possibly on someone’s iPod. In it, a young teacher singled out the lone Black student and said to her in soft-spoken monotone, “You breathe heavy. You breathe heavy to show attitude.” Then he called her awesome a couple times and somewhere in there slipped in a “I love you” before telling her to stop breathing like that. When he finished his spiel, he gave her a fistbump and said, with no change in his tone or expression, “Goodbye.”

That was the end of the video. The teacher in front of me burst out laughing. I noted his shaking shoulders with fondness.

We went to City Hall for a career fair. At some point a woman in a bright orange power suit arrived, and by the people flocking around her, it was clear she was someone important. A tall bald man kept following her around everywhere snapping photos with a gigantic Galaxy Z Fold. I had never seen a real person use a Galaxy Z Fold before.

I turned to the girl behind the lunch counter. “Is she a celebrity or something?”

There was a beat. “That’s the mayor.”

“Oh.” It was the mayor, London Breed.

My desk was in an interesting spot of the room. I was the only one who had a clear view of the hallway. It worked as a metaphor for who I was: a fly on the wall, someone who liked to see everything and say nothing.

We had a department meeting at the main office on Post Street. It was my first real company meeting. Most of it was boring. Across the table, T.J. kept conjuring snacks out of thin air like a magician. Before I knew it, he had a square of Tillamook cheese in front of him. He ate it with his hands at first, and then set it down on the table and began cutting pieces of it off with a fork like it was a slice of cake.

The crush began on Leap Day. It was hard to not find it meaningful that, of all days, it was the one that came around only every fourth year, and otherwise didn’t exist.

MARCH

I liked going to the professional development meetings. Everyone else in the world seemed to find them unnecessary and awful, including the people who ran these meetings and decided on the content that went in them. I liked the opportunity to observe, as the newcomer, the other people who worked at this school. And it meant I got to be near him, even if we didn’t so much as glance at each other.

They had me pick the third winner of the staff raffle, dubbed the “staffle.” I plucked a ticket from the pile and read aloud his name, written in red.

I took the bus to Menlo Park and found The Idiot at a store called Kepler’s Books. I hadn’t bought a book in America for over two years. The book ended up costing a dollar more than it said it would because of a “living wage tax,” which annoyed me, and then I realized I shouldn’t be annoyed that the employees of Kepler’s Books were supposedly getting living wages.

To open the novel, Batuman had added an excerpt from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through—awkward indeed but by no means infertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

Every northbound train was incredibly delayed due to an “incident.” That usually meant someone had thrown themselves onto the tracks. An earlier train arrived at the station right at the time my regular train ran, and I got on it. It was packed. Three quarters into the trip, I suddenly realized I didn’t know if this train stopped at 22nd Street or not. I found the answer when I looked out the window and saw the station passing behind us in a blur.

At 11:45, we had the monthly attendance assembly. We weren’t aware it was happening until three minutes before it happened. We took a few copies of our scholarship flyer to present during the assembly, but it became apparent pretty soon that we probably wouldn’t actually do that. There wasn’t much room for us to present it what with the election people coming to tell students to vote and some career service people who basically did what we did, but better. Students kept talking over one girl from the career services and I felt bad. Still, I didn’t do anything to help.

One of the quiz questions was, “In 2022, a study found that women made an average of how much on the dollar earned by men?” The answer was 0.82. A student got the answer right and we all clapped. Then we laughed about clapping for that.

There were two high-five notes in our mailbox from the last staff meeting. Both were addressed to me. It was for my “IT help” during SAP meetings even though all I had done was hide a few columns on Google Sheets. Carlos said he was glad to see me here even if it was just for a short time. I felt silly for not writing a more serious high-five note myself. I had written one to Ty for something incredibly stupid, which was letting me borrow his pen two minutes before I wrote the note. At least my note to Jess had been marginally more sincere.

In the SAP meeting that morning, they kept using the phrase “fell off a cliff.” The first time they said it, I thought a student had literally fallen off a cliff. Judging by how one student had literally jumped out of a moving car the other week, it seemed totally believable to me. It turned out they were using it metaphorically, to describe the student’s performance declining at an accelerated rate.

I started painting my desk. I went over everything with mod podge first, then poured fat spurts of yellow acrylic onto the dried surface and painted a corner. I didn’t like the color—it looked like radioactive mustard. When I went home, I poured in some of the white interior paint we’d bought at Lowes to paint over our moldy walls. The next day, I painted more of the desk with the now-lighter yellow. It looked a little better.

My mother was gone for two weeks, having set off on a road trip down the California coast. On the Sunday after she left, I took a long shower, started a load of laundry, and filtered out a batch of coffee concentrate. I stood in the kitchen in my underwear and scraped ripe avocado onto a floppy croissant. During the two weeks my mother was gone, it was my responsibility to finish the three almost-overripe avocados in the fridge. I used the silly method where I cut a tiny hole in the avocado and dug out the flesh from there. It helped keep the rest of the avocado from browning so quickly, supposedly. This was something my mother had come up with recently. At the age of 62, she was still discovering new ways to eat avocado. The thought comforted me.

I hung the laundry out on the patio. It was a good day to spend hours listening to music. The other day, when I was volunteering at the library, one of the children’s books I pulled from the shelves was about the science of music. It explained how sound worked and the different technological innovations over the course of human history that allowed us to enjoy music. There was a page that talked about how deaf people could make and listen to music, too, like Beethoven—they felt the vibrations that produced sound. Another page said music was so powerful, even people with Alzheimer’s could recognize the music they liked. This idea, that music existed in every imaginable place and time, that it existed plainly in the fabric of the universe like math and physics, also comforted me.

When I tried to be stern with Angel, I lost my resolve. He didn’t come to the workshop because he was sent home early, he said. He always spoke with a slow, sheepish smile, and seeing it again made it impossible to be annoyed at him.

“They sent you home early? Why?”

“Because I came two hours late,” he said.

I should’ve reprimanded him for that, but I felt indignation on his behalf. I told him he had to communicate with me about this stuff, and then I went to unlock the storage closet so he could get his scooter.

My hair kept bothering me. It was too long, or too fluffy, or too boring, or too misshapen. I cut it often, chopping bits off at different lengths to create layers, which tended to make it slightly better. I decided the right side of the top of my head needed less volume, and cut off an entire fistful of hair by the roots. I made sure I cut a part that was under the top layer of hair, so you couldn’t see unless you parted it. When I did part it, a tuft of hair popped up that made me look like I’d been chewed on by a dog.

I didn’t know what that kind of love was. I knew love in every other way—from walking past people on the street, from waiting for the train, from sending photos, from hearing music. I knew the kind of love you felt in bursts for friends and the love you felt for family, which was always inseparable from grief. Never had I been able to figure out what romantic love really was, and when it happened. I knew only infatuation. Surely I wasn’t in love with him, but there was no other way to describe how strongly I felt. For all I knew, this was it.

Every crush I had was the same story, but it always felt like the first time anything like this had ever happened. With him, I was convinced it was the first time I’d been this aggressively delusional. Unlike others, he was within reach. Coincidence drew our paths close together. It meant I could chase him at least a little bit, and if something really happened, the world wouldn’t fall apart.

There had been a car crash. A terrible one—no deaths, but all three involved, two boys and one older man, were injured. The boys’ car was destroyed. Police were everywhere. Two firetrucks had arrived. One of the boys, or both, moaned loudly. They tried to get everyone on a stretcher, but things kept rolling down because the street was a hill.

There was the worrying possibility that one of the boys was a student here. We couldn’t tell. We couldn’t see any of their faces.

APRIL

We read the feedback forms from last Tuesday’s workshop. In the “Things I appreciated” section, Gennesis had written about practicing her interview with me. I felt immensely fond of her.

The “connector” activity of the day was looking at a colorful wheel of emotion words and choosing which one you felt at the moment. Most of the words were negative. One of the main categories denoted on the wheel was “disgust.” It seemed like Principal, who probably chose the activity and put this wheel in there, was only now really looking at it, because he struggled for a long time trying to find a word. Eventually he managed to say he was “surprised” choosing one was so difficult.

It turned out one of the guys in the car accident was a student at our school, a fifteen-year-old boy. I was told his x-ray looked bad.

Marci was in my room after the bell rang. “Don’t you have to go to work?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, and reached for a high five. His hand was exactly as sweaty as I expected it to be. That had been all he wanted—to give me a high five.

I received comments on the piece I had submitted to the fiction contest last month. Someone had said, “A very unusual piece of writing.”

The yearning was becoming unbearable. I listened to a Korean song called “Wind, Blow No More” over and over again like a single-purpose device manufactured specifically to pine over him. There was one line in the song that always felt shattering: “Now everything is all in the past.” I couldn’t say why it resonated with me so much. In a way, it explained everything I knew about wanting someone.

We were throwing a surprise baby shower for Sash, and I had not known at all until Jess told me in the hallway after the bell rang. I wished the people at this school remembered I existed, but then I saw that everyone had contributed payments for the shower, and I was glad they forgot I existed.

“Can I just show up?” I asked, thinking about him being there.

Becca and I spent a long time together—she didn’t get picked up until almost 4:30. Becca had a crush. (I could relate to a painful degree, but I did not say this.) I let her paint my desk a little and arrange my postcards and photos and poems on the window above my desk. I could tell she was continuously updating in real time her initial evaluation of my personality. She said later she first thought I had a “petite” personality. I think that meant I seemed quiet, boring, and maybe a little stuck-up. I couldn’t disagree that this was most people’s first impression of me. I was glad she no longer thought I was “petite.”

I spent all the time I had before the baby shower listening to Becca talk and painting the rest of my desk. I brushed Mod Podge over the yellow, then realized all these dust particles and little hairs on the desk were sealed into the Mod Podge layer now, and it would remain there like a scarab preserved in amber. Ms. S beckoned to me from the hallway and said my name with an accuracy that moved me. I signed Sash’s baby shower card. I didn’t know what exactly to say. I had never really been around pregnant people like this before.

Coincidentally, we had to leave at the same time, and coicidentally, we were taking the same bus—the 22. I could barely believe it. On our walk down the hill we didn’t stop talking for a single second. It was so easy to make him laugh, even if all of these quips were from a rehearsed arsenal. It was a worrisome thought—that he found me funny. He was doomed to find me likable, and we were doomed to become acquainted.

My stomach sank. I hated that he had become real. He had real opinions and spoke in a real language and I now knew the words he used and what his laugh sounded like and the way he asked questions, and I had to live with this terrible knowledge for the rest of my life.

This is you, he said, when it got close to my stop. I looked up at him as he said this. It was there, like it always was—that permanently stricken look, like there was something truly wrong somewhere. Which, I supposed, was not ever untrue.

Korea was obsessed with this idea of a “first love.” I had never understood the term. According to popular culture, a first love seemed to always take place during high school, or otherwise in that same period of your late teens and early twenties—and I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be the first time they’d ever liked someone, or the first time they’d ever fallen in love, assuming that “love” was something more that felt immediately more intense than a crush. Both were unimaginable to me. I had had my first crush in kindergarten or first grade, and then a string of equally inane crushes had followed with each year. It was as if a crush was part of the main food groups, like it was nutritional. I was feeding off of one constantly, and it made me feel energetic, healthy even. If your first crush was your first love, my first love happened when I had been alive for only five years. It made absolutely no sense to me that other people had their first crushes in high school. Surely this was not what they meant by “first love.”

Did it mean first love, then? It had to, right? But then that implied a universal understanding of what love was, and how to differentiate this first love from all the crushes you had before. Did they not feel the same at first—infatuation, excitement, a deep discomfort around the fact that they existed in two configurations, as their real self and as the image you dreamed up alone? Was it only after some time that you knew someone had been your first love? Or was your first love your first realized love—the first one that really got somewhere? Because I could never attach the word “love” to the first person I dated, nor could I, honestly, for any of the people after.

I was so clueless. Everyone seemed to have an opinion of “love” being something stronger and deeper and long-lasting than a crush. This, I could understand. But I had never experienced love after a crush. Once a crush disappeared, it all disappeared. There was obviously something incredibly wrong with me and me alone, I knew, but I just didn’t get it. I didn’t know when I was going to finally get it.

To me, love was delusion. I wasn’t unhappy about this. I liked living in delusion—I believed it was necessary to keep myself alive. And maybe that’s why I believed I was in love with him. It really felt like it, even if I had no idea what love was. It felt different from every crush I’d had before. Had I ever thought so much about a person for so long? When reminded of him I would involuntarily sigh out loud, or my stomach would turn inside out. I had no appetite. My heart was always racing. It seemed like the first time I ever felt literally lovesick—physically sick from love. Had I ever been like this before? I was convinced I hadn’t. But maybe I just couldn’t remember, or maybe I’d chosen to forget.

Every so often I looked outside the entrance of the store. I wondered if there was any chance at all he would be walking by. When you looked at Inner Richmond on the map, you could see that it really wasn’t a large area. The idea that, just by being in any part of Inner Richmond, I was in physical proximity to him made my heart beat rapidly. I could turn a corner and he might be there, I thought. But he never was.

We went to Green Apple Books, where Alyssa decided to buy a book about movies and astrology. I looked at the Leo section. None of it seemed relevant to me. Nor did it seem something that he, also a Leo, would find relatable and necessary. I looked at the shelves labeled “Relationships.” I had been doing that lately—going into libraries and bookstores and looking for books on love. All I could find were books on sex.

After spring break, I had a month and a half left with this school, until everyone graduated and left for the summer and prepared for the next school year. Which I would not be a part of, ever again.

It was unfair—this six-month job was actually a five-month job, and then, with the end of school being at the beginning of June, it was technically a four-month job. Wind, blow no more!

After two months of knowing me, Pablo seemed to have no idea what my name was, or even what it vaguely sounded like. His response to the question asking for his counselor’s name was simply the letter “B.” How could he have possibly found this a satisfactory answer, on a personal level, I wondered. None of the people who worked in this room had a “b” anywhere in our names.

It was funny how songs that were supposed to be relatable to teenagers were relatable again, when you worked at a high school. But then again, I had begun to find every single love song relatable. I could find a line about him in all the songs I listened to.

In the SAP meeting they talked about a student who always reeked of weed. Principal had given him a new jacket to wear, to stop smelling so much like weed, but then that started smelling like weed, too. Carlos said he must be growing the weed inside the jacket. That made me laugh. We didn’t even discuss his attendance or credits, just his stink, so all I wrote in the notes was, Needs to wear jacket that doesn’t smell. This made Carlos laugh.

I thought good things happened when I came to work early, so I did, every day. I stayed late, too, spending the extra hours with Jess in the hallway or smoking cigarettes together at the corner a block away. Sometimes we were beside ourselves with laughter. I wished I’d started doing this earlier. I wished I’d started doing everything earlier.

I was surprised Angel wanted to continue talking to me. I said I wanted to work at the library, and then he judged me for wanting to work at the library, and then he insisted he wasn’t judging and thought I would make a great librarian. Then I made him go look at the books. He came back later while Vae was explaining her essay to me, and he said he’d written his essay on gun violence. I asked if his aviator sunglasses were new. They were.

“Is that what you spend your paychecks on?” I asked. He wasn’t spending all his paycheck money, he said—his parents were trying to teach him to build up credit. I didn’t really understand this answer, because how could he build up credit if he didn’t have a credit card? But that pivoted the conversation to opening bank accounts, and IDs, and getting a driver’s license, which he was a long way from getting. I said I was bad at driving. He was reluctant to accept this statement.

“You haven’t seen me drive,” I said.

“One day, I’ll see you drive,” he said.

He told me I should get a friend to help me practice if I didn’t want to go to driving school, and it was funny and endearing, hearing him give me advice. I mentioned potentially asking T.J., since he was a good driver. For whatever reason, the thought of T.J. being a good driver was more absurd to Angel than the thought of me being one. I said T.J. used to have a driving service, and it bothered Angel that T.J. had chosen to work here instead of continuing his self-employment ventures, so I had to explain that stability and benefits were things most people found helpful.

MAY

“Hi,” he said to me, calling me by my name, which I always liked. “I haven’t said hello to you today.”

“Oh, hi,” I said, overjoyed.

“How are you doing?”

“It’s really hot.”

He asked if the cowbell was loud enough. He sounded so cheerful. I had never heard him like this before.

Next to me, Bela asked if I was okay. I must have looked crazy or something.

I asked if he wanted to hear something funny about Pablo, and he sounded excited to hear it, and then I told him the dumb thing I thought was funny, and I guess it wasn’t actually that funny because he sounded considerably less excited after hearing the story. And then I told him the funny story about Angel playing basketball, which didn’t seem to amuse him that much, either. I realized maybe I should stop talking about his students, or even better, stop talking in general.

We kept walking through the farmers’ market. He mentioned having a bike. Because of course he was the kind of guy who had a bike, I thought furiously to myself. I said I couldn’t be a bike rider because I didn’t want to wear a helmet. He didn’t really wear a helmet, he said.

Jess moved us along to another stand before I could tell him about my friend’s sister’s friend’s fiancee dying at around his age because he hadn’t been wearing a helmet while skateboarding. It was for the better. If he got a brain hemorrhage while riding his bike without head protection, there was a chance I would stop being infatuated with him.

Ocean told me about prom. I thought maybe I should go, even though no one else was really going. I kept asking the other staff if they would be there, and almost all of them made a face like they regretted its existence. When he came down the stairs, I asked if he was going to prom. He made the face.

He was heading for the door, and I thought that would be all, but then he asked, “Are you?” I said I might come for thirty minutes. After all, Jess would be there. “It’s my last chance to go to a high school prom,” I said.

“You’re not going to keep working in education?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” He seemed to appreciate this answer. “At least not in high schools, I think,” I said.

Everything was okay again. He wasn’t avoiding me, and I wasn’t a miserable idiot. On the whiteboard by the entrance, it read: 22 (BUSINESS) DAYS TILL SUMMER, KIDS!!

It was the most beautiful day of the year. The city was the warmest it had been since winter. We came to school dressed for summer, in sundresses and skirts and hats and unbuttoned shirts. The girls wore shorts. The boys begrudgingly took off their jackets. People kept sneezing uncontrollably and saying, “Allergies.”

Jo came by in the morning. It excited me to see her—she normally didn’t come in on Thursdays. She had on a yellow hat with a strawberry embroidered on it. She was passing out a printout she’d made of discounts for teachers, for teacher appreciation week, to all the staff, and I joyfully tagged along.

Outside in the hallway, I stopped when I heard the song they were practicing, “Creep.” It sounded so different from the original song—better—with the synths. It was the prettiest sound in the world. Through the window, I saw Cadence and another student with their heads bowed over their instruments, making music in the dark.

A handful of students came in today, but not to work with us. Mel wanted to know how to tell if one had an eating disorder. I told her how. We both decided it didn’t seem like her problem was an eating disorder. The rubberband she’d been using to tie her shirt back broke, so I gave her one of my elastic hair ties. Prisca, Char, and De’marco came in to use the microwave. Char was complaining about her dry hands, so I gave her some of T.J.’s ex-situationship’s hand cream.

I was still wandering the hallway. Jurmiah walked by. He stopped and looked at me.

“You bored?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.” He kept walking.

A few minutes later, I saw Damonta standing half inside, half outside an opened room next to Mir’s classroom, staring blankly at nothing. I walked over and asked what he was doing. The label on the wall next to the room said, STORAGE.

“Just looking at this closet.”

We went into the open closet together and stared. It had piles of all the scrap fabric the fashion students used for their projects. I’d never seen this closet before.

“This is cool,” I said, and left him to continue looking at the closet.

Assistant Principal walked by and asked if it was too hot to stay in our room. It seemed like she knew how desperately I needed to do something, anything, because she said she could use some help setting up the ice cream in the teachers’ lounge. She had me prepare the raspberries and strawberries and the fresh mint, which Bela taught me to julienne. Assistant Principal thanked me profusely, calling me a “hero, truly,” but the way she said it, it sounded like she was telling me to jump off a cliff.

I joined her outside right as class ended and students came careening through the hallway. We passed out cherry-mango and cherry-pineapple popsicles as the kids left for home, complaining about the heat. Everyone was happy about the popsicles, except Nairobi and Angel, who refused them for whatever reason.

“Damn,” said De’marco to one in particular, sitting at the table where Bug and Jess usually sat, popsicle in his mouth. “I don’t really eat popsicles in front of people like that...but it’s hot.”

As Jess and I were heading out, someone knocked on the front door. It was Yovani and Broc. They bemoaned the heat. We gave them popsicles.

“How many calories?” asked Yovani.

Jess wasn’t in today, so I thought I would leave early. But I ended up talking to Jones for a while, and it felt, in a way, humbling. We talked about our respective experiences being a young staff member at this school, and how working with high schoolers and living here made us feel like non-adults. It made me realize that maybe, as a young person, I was trying too hard. I liked everything too much. I wanted too much and made it obvious. But maybe that was something entirely different—maybe my interest in being so involved and my naivety were separate. Jones said people appreciated that I was willing to help around with everything, and that it hadn’t gone unnoticed.

It was the last all-staff meeting ever, which meant that we set up Sunshine even though it was the middle of the month. They added cards for everyone with a birthday in May, June, and July, and then Jess had them add one for me, because I was right after the cutoff and wouldn’t get one at all if I didn’t get one now.

I turned to him and told him my birthday was actually in August; they were just giving me the card this time because I wouldn’t be here when it actually came around. I thought this was very important for him to be aware of.

“What day is it?”

“The sixth.”

He didn’t mention that his birthday was also in August, which I wasn’t supposed to know. What he said was, “Isn’t that Obama’s birthday?”

“No,” I said, refusing to believe the direction this conversation was taking.

He thought about it. “It’s the fourth or something.”

I looked it up, but by the time I turned back around to confirm it was the fourth, we had started to sing happy birthday to the birthday people in the weird, alternative way this school sang happy birthday.

We all got one of those gigantic sheets of sticky paper and wrote our name on it, and wrote things we were proud of this year, and went around writing what we appreciated about each other on everyone’s papers. Writing what I appreciated about everyone was hard. I couldn’t think of what to say, even though I did appreciate everyone. But there was no way I could write what I really thought, like, I appreciate how you’re in your forties and still wearing skinny jeans.

It was funny it was called a “crush.” The word suggested danger, misery. That crushes were inevitably doomed. That you would break apart under the weight of your own heart, crushing on someone. Everything about this word made sense. Like that in the moments I wasn’t madly in love with him, I hated him. I hated him for not wanting me; I hated him for what he did to me. Yes, this was a crush. This was the crush to end all crushes. And because it was so intense, at times so joyous and at other times so painful, because it had knocked the wind out of me, had made me feel like I had begun my life anew, had brought blooming flowers to my peripheral vision, I had the conviction: this is my first love.

I bought sunflowers and put them on my yellow desk. It was my first time deliberately taking care of any flowers. On the first day they were closed up and shy. After three days of cutting the stems and replacing the water, they opened, petals stretching out as if waiting for embrace.

Mel gasped when she saw them. “Who bought you these?!”

“Me,” I lamented.

Gennesis and I were outside the room showing people my hat, which she now had on her fuchsia curls, and wore much more brilliantly than I could. He appeared in the hallway this exact moment. I stayed with Gennesis a little longer, just so we would inevitably meet. I waved at him and he waved back, looking happy, and a little like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.

We walked up the stairs together, and I told him his class had always been my favorite. At this, Naysa from the theater class, who had been walking with Kevin in front of us, turned around and said, “Wow…I heard that.”

“Marci,” I said. “Do you want to teach me how to play the bass before the end of the year?”

“Yes,” he said, genuinely happy.

We decided on the next Tuesday—after the four-day weekend. We would do it at lunch. He told me to practice my finger strength on my left hand, since those were the fingers I’d be using to pluck the bass strings, and taught me exercises to keep the muscles engaged. I felt like such a kid for being equally as excited as he was about this, but it was also true that Marci had a lot he could teach me, and that it was okay to be excited about this.

Gennesis asked to see my camera, and I paused.

“Are you going to look through the photos?” I asked, turning on the camera and pressing the button to see the photo gallery. “Because then I have to delete some stuff.” I stared at the first photo that appeared in the gallery—the last photo I’d taken. It was the one of him.

“No, I just want to see the camera, damn,” she said. I let her see it.

José had found a snail in the garden. I asked to take a photo of him, and the snail, with Lawrence, even though we all knew José hated being in photos. No one had ever seen him smile. Lawrence said, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take one picture where we’re both smiling, and then one where we’re not.” So I took two pictures. Lawrence had a wide grin in one; in the next, it was replaced with a look of absolute disdain. José, holding his snail, had the same expression in both.

The school didn’t have a yearbook, so I began printing all the photos I had taken of the students and handing them out in the last days before graduation. The ones from the music class had come out best, the post-performance glow on the kids’ faces, their poses with their instruments. Sometimes I wrote a little note on the back and signed off with my name. I wanted them to remember me. Or, in the case of Pablo, maybe learn what my name was for the first time. They were mostly quiet when they looked at themselves in the photos, but held onto them tight like they were precious. Mel squealed and ran out of the room to show her teachers.

He said something as I passed.

“Hm?”

“Cool hat.”

“Oh! Thanks.”

This was it? This was the end? Everything had led up to this? I hadn’t found the answer to so many questions. I hadn’t said everything I wanted to say. I hadn’t gotten close to people it was obvious I would be friends with, had we been given more time. I hadn’t gotten anywhere with him, after all this.

I thought I would go crazy if this was really how it ended—if next week didn’t offer some sort of real closure, some sort of grand conclusion. And yet I could already sense that the endings I faced in my life would always be like this. I would always be searching for something that wasn’t there. I would keep holding on long past the right time, because I was like that. And things would slip away from me, and I would care until I no longer remembered enough to care.

I hugged Angel for the first and last time in the morning. I hadn’t expected to see him at all, actually, but I had somehow made it in time to catch him before his conference, and he accepted my hug. He even hugged back. It was, like Lawrence’s, solid.

Mel and I stuck to each other like magnets throughout the rest of the lockdown. She had so much to say about the boy who had brought her to tears, it was easy to forget we were under a potentially active shooting threat.

I kept telling her that this boy she liked so much was a tiny blip in her to-be-fruitful lovelife, and that he sounded like a real asshole, and that he was really just some guy. Just like how my guy was really just some guy, I thought.

It didn’t take too long to clear the threat. It was most likely a hoax—several other schools had gotten the same call. The cops, however, stayed. At around half past four, Principal announced everyone could leave, and a horde pushed past the main exit. Mel asked if I could walk with her to her bus stop on 16th Street, so together we went out into the sun and kept commiserating on her boy troubles.

“It hurts,” she said as we waited to cross an intersection. “But maybe that’s what I want.”

That hurt. That scared me. “You want it to hurt?”

“Yeah,” she said contemplatively. Somehow I knew precisely what she meant even though I didn’t feel the same way. She stepped off the curb before the light turned, and I found myself impulsively following her, aware of how irresponsible I was being.

Malaysia came in and we asked if she was here for the conferences or the senior trip. “Huh?” she said. “We don’t have school?”

“What?” we said.

“There’s no school today?”

“School is over.”

“I haven’t been here in five days, I don’t know what’s going on.” She released a string of happy expletives and left.

Carlos thought it was ridiculous I’d been hired just to be here for a few months, especially when they’d had the position open all year. I said I was apparently the only person who got past the first interview. No one else had had relevant experience working with youth.

“What were you doing before this?” he asked.

“I graduated from college and then I was unemployed.”

“No, I mean what did you do that gave you experience,” he said, amused.

He thought I was doing a great job. I was surprised to hear Carlos, who usually didn’t have positive words in his vocabulary, be so genuine towards me. He said I brought a new perspective and energy, and other people thought so, too.

“I think T.J.’s been checked out since January 3rd,” he added.

“What happened on January 3rd?”

“I just made up a random date.”

“I got this job on January 3rd.”

JUNE

In the hallway I saw Karla, who was the only student present in the entire building. When I said hi she immediately followed me into my room and started talking. “Man, I’m really gonna miss you guys,” she said. “You guys did so much for me. Daniela and T.J. are the only ones who know all about my drama. They know everything about me.” Possibly worried I felt left out, she then told me all her drama. Stuff about her current girlfriend, some other girl at her job, et cetera.

At one point she started talking about “love,” and I remembered a question I needed answered. Normally I didn’t seek answers from high schoolers but these were desperate times.

“How do you differentiate between love and a crush?” I asked.

“A crush for me just feels like lust,” Karla said.

“Like, you want to fuck her?” I realized it must be wrong of me to talk in this way—to prompt a student to think about fucking anybody.

“Yeah,” she said.

It was so easy for her. Sex was the last thing I wanted to do with someone I liked. What was a crush, then? Was it nothing?

“How would you rate your year here?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

“My semester?” I thought about it. “11/10.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been happy here. And that’s a word I couldn’t have used to describe myself at all in a while.”

Nairobi came over. “I didn’t get to bother you that much,” he said, giving me a hug. “But I’m gonna bother you more.”

“This is the last time you’re seeing me,” I told him.

“For real?”

“I’m not here next year.”

“Aww, no way.” I loved him. I knew he would forget about me by the end of the month.

I was learning about Rachel at dinner. She talked about a person she dated as a teenager, her high school love. I thought I had a high school love in a different way, because I had a crush while at a high school, as an adult, and because the crush was devastatingly immature.

“Would you still call that love? Now?” I asked.

“That’s a good question,” she said. She thought about it. “No.”

That seemed to answer everything.

Then she amended: “It was a different kind of love.”

Rachel drove me to Chinatown, where T.J. was DJing. Daniela came earlier than I did. I’m at Lion’s Den, she texted me. London Breed is here.

WHAT, I said.

GRADUATION

Marci hadn’t wanted me to take his picture, so instead of a note on the back of a photo I wrote it on paper, a short letter. I gave it to him at the ceremony, along with a couple bobby pins from my own hair so he could keep his cap on his huge head.

The sun had set and we were nearly touching. I could feel at my hip where the solidness of his body began, but if I moved a millimeter away, I would lose this tiny thing we had. And if I moved a millimeter the other way, towards him, we would actually be touching. I didn’t want that, either.

I spent my first Bud Light talking to Ocean, who was a delightful drinking partner. He said that I reminded him of a young Yola, which I would later realize was extremely high praise. When asked who he’d wanted to keep for the next year, he had answered with my name. They’d said I was leaving anyways. “So I was like, what the fuck,” he said emphatically.

He said he could tell from day one I was the right person for the job—that I had my shit together, that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t agree with this assessment of my abilities at all, and I was amazed I came off that way. He said that if I could find a way to come back after grad school, I should. When I told him I hadn’t been born in this country, he said, like he had figured something out, “That’s why I resonate with you.”

People were leaving. I said bye to a number of people for the last time. I hugged Carlos when he was about to leave.

“Aren’t you still coming next week?” he said.

“Yeah, but I just wanted to give you a hug. I like seeing you.”

“Okay,” he said.

We ended up in Ocean’s apartment. I sat next to him on the floor with a glass of water. We took turns drinking out of it, like we’d been doing all night at the bar. Ocean walked past us, accidentally kicking over the water with his foot. A huge wet spot blossomed on the carpet floor. I filled up another glass of water. Ocean knocked over that one, too.

Ocean was a great snorer. His snores traveled all the way from his room to where we were in the living room, and I was amazed that he, on the other cot, didn’t wake from it. Or from the clock, which ticked rapid-fire every other minute as if possessed. I put on my glasses and observed the morning light settle into the room.

All of Ocean’s apartment seemed very clean, for a two-bed-two-bath occupied by one man, a man who drank as much as he did at that. This bathroom was supposedly the less clean bathroom, but it seemed perfectly clean to me, save for the dead spider hanging from the towel rack. The tiles on the wall were sea blue, which I found comforting.

I went back to the living room and tried sitting on my cot for a while, waiting it out until sunrise.

He moved around under his blanket. I averted my eyes. I didn’t feel I was allowed the privilege of watching him wake up. And yet I was the first person he saw when he rose. I was his introduction to the day.

“Good morning,” he said.

I let myself look at him shyly. “Good morning.”

“My RA in college, this guy named Max—he was a really great guy—he got hypnotized once,” he said. Later: “I think you would get hypnotized.”

“You think I look like someone who would get hypnotized? Why?” I wasn’t sure if I should feel hurt or not. Did he think I was easily swayed?

“Yeah—well, it’s just you and Max are very similar.”

“How?”

“Just your demeanor…” He seemed to finally understand what I was asking. “Are you sad I said you seem like someone who’d be hypnotized?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

Maybe I was someone who would get hypnotized. I mean, I was hypnotized by him, and he hadn’t lifted a finger. Besides, wasn’t it a good thing that he thought I was similar to Max? He had said Max was a great guy.

I didn’t want to finish my coffee, so I asked if he wanted it.

“Well, we’ve been sharing a lot of drinks,” he said.

I didn’t really understand what he meant. “Why, are you sick?”

“No.”

I realized I had assumed he meant we should stop sharing drinks. He had meant we didn’t need to stop sharing drinks.

The three of us sat there side by side on the sofa. I was overcome by a feeling of peace and a quiet longing. This felt like the times I’d spent with family during Korean summers—the kind where we simply sat watching TV in a comfortable silence during an uneventful afternoon.

“Here,” I said, handing him my postcard. It was the last thing I had to do.

“Oh,” he said softly. He studied it and a small smile broke upon his face. “This is really great art,” he said. His voice was warm. I liked that he saw it as art.

“Thanks.”

“You know a couple months ago, when we were walking to the bus together and you said we should be friends?” He said. I nodded. So I wasn’t the only one who thought about that time? “I really appreciated that, because I feel like the school is so crazy—”

A bus, the 29, pulled up to the curb. I pointed. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

And it was over. Why had I interrupted him—school is so crazy what? I didn’t know who went to hug who first. It seemed like both of us instinctively knew it was the right time.

He sent me the postcard. He didn’t just send a photo—he had scanned it somehow so that it looked digitized and perfect, as if I had drawn directly onto his screen. I knew it wasn’t necessarily difficult or even inconvenient to make it like this, but it still made an impression on me that he had chosen to do it.

Because it looked digitized and perfect, as I studied my own art again for the first time since we had parted, I could see the tiny details of my hand, where the ink had blurred and where I had written some letters thicker than others. Looking at this preserved was like seeing a recording of my own feelings towards him: I could see the gentleness with which I had handwritten these characters, the smudged ink that held an inexplicable tenderness; the undeniable imperfection of myself and yet my perseverance in my love.

SUMMER

Sometimes I was unable to do anything but listen to music: my future self was waiting for me, but I couldn’t move. I could only sit still listening to songs on repeat, counting how many times the same part of a song made my heart tick, dreading the inevitable moment where I’d realize my reaction to the music had finally dulled, that it didn’t make my senses go whoosh, like I was experiencing something supernatural.

It almost seemed that everything before 22 had been inconsequential. I knew this wasn’t the case, but I tried to think about what had happened to me at 21 that had been so important, and I couldn’t remember. It was scary to realize this—that at this time next year, I would feel none of the things I felt now. I would probably forget what I had even felt at all.

Everyone left, but I still had some time to kill. Carlos made a passing comment as he was walking to the kitchen: “You’re not gonna make ours nice?” He was talking about how I’d redone the whiteboard lettering—I’d neglected “our” part, the “College & Career” line. So I started doing that.

We made some more small-ish—medium—talk when he resumed his position at the hallway desk. At a gap in the conversation, he said, “Gonna miss you out here.”

That almost stunned me into paralysis, so I had to respond blandly, without looking at him: “I know. I’m gonna miss you guys too. I already kind of miss it…”

It couldn’t have been a greater understatement.

Wendy and Nikko and Mel were talking by my desk, Wendy on my chair, the three of them rapping to the same beat in different rhythms. None of them still needed to be at school by this point. T.J. watched them and said with a soulless expression, “It’s better than being on the streets.”

I walked to the garden, knowing it would probably be the last time I’d see it. Lawrence wasn’t there—it was too early—but I peeked through the window of the shed, looking for the photos I had taken of him and our students. And it was there. He’d tacked them up on the board, like he’d promised.

I guess Carlos wasn’t ready for us to leave, either, because he came with me back to our room and started talking to Jocelyn and I about the new career organization again. He wanted Jocelyn and Daniela with them, he said, because it made much more sense to have people who could ease the transition—or else he’d have to reintroduce everything and all the staff and it would take a year for them to figure it all out. “I’m gonna have to go like, ‘Hi, I’m Carlos. This is the office. This is the bathroom.’”

“You have to do all that?” I asked.

“No, but we gotta get everyone introduced somehow.”

“I don’t think I really got introduced when I came.”

“You came at an awkward time. When you showed up everyone was thinking, what the hell?” He made that sideways expression I found so funny. “But you grew on everyone. You’re gonna be remembered for a long time.”

Gennesis told me she got depressed if she thought about me leaving.

It was the last of last days at the school. It came, as all things do, full circle to an anticlimactic finality. There were loose threads, little to no closure. I was glad to see so many people I thought I wouldn’t see again. It still felt like something was missing, though. Maybe that something was Jess, who couldn’t make it.

We didn’t do much this day, continued working with some students. This one kid made me sad—he couldn’t remember for the life of him the name of the program he’d worked at not too long ago. You worked there for months and don’t know the name? How was he going to do anything after high school? (It was the Boys & Girls Club; a name didn’t get easier than that.) I didn’t know what to do—with him, and with the fact that this wasn’t uncommon for the students. Even with this other kid, Bryan, who just needed to get a driver’s license, I was fighting off a sense of hopelessness creeping up on me. Just scheduling the appointment was annoying enough, and then actually getting a car to the DMV and passing the test was another thing. What if it didn’t go well? Then he’d have to do it again and that would take more time and effort and meanwhile jobs that needed him to have a license would pass him by and he wouldn’t even be in school to get our support anymore.

I wondered if infatuation had blinded me from my actual job. Was I really helping these students? Could I be doing more? Or was I forgetting what it was like to be a high schooler—how capable they are of achieving things on their own? Were we genuinely “setting them up for success”? I couldn’t tell.

Ms. S asked if she could hug me. God, I was going to miss her.

I came too early. I wandered east of the train tracks, following 22nd Street to the end, where it hit the fence before the ocean. It was quiet. Mostly just joggers and bikers. Meaningless parts of the sidewalk turned into signs. It was stupid how my heart squeezed, but that’s what it did.

Even though this was the exact activity I was about to do with K in thirty minutes, I went into a cafe and drank a cup of coffee. I wrote in my notebook, thinking I was just killing time, but then I couldn’t stop writing. It turned out I had a lot to say.

I learned that K wrote, too. Maybe he wanted to work in journalism in the future. Maybe he didn’t. How universal it was, the feeling of not knowing anything about your life. He had been talking to someone who’d just published a book, he said, about writing about things that happened to you. “After he wrote about it, he said all the memories from that time went like this,” he said, motioning like he was stuffing everything in his hands into an imaginary box.

“Like now they were all contained in what he wrote? And he couldn’t remember it in any other way?”

“Yeah. And that was an act of moving on, you know? It was letting go and moving on.”

Momentarily I was quiet. It was exactly what I was doing.

On the 22nd of June an email from Marci appeared in my inbox. Two emails, in fact. The second was exactly the same as the first save for a few changes in word choice, as if he believed sending an edited email erased the first. Out of respect to him, I pretended I didn’t notice.

its Marci, he had written. As if I wouldn’t remember you! ive been really busy with my new job and life in general, I just wanted to say i really really loved your letter it really meant a lot to me and you were one of my biggest supports through this last semester of high school and i just wanted to thank you so much for all you did for me. as for what ive been getting up to ive been playing a few shows but mostly been working at this cafe near my house lol.

An hour later I ran into Mel. It felt like a blessing. She was selling makeup on the street, at the busy intersection outside the subway station. She was starting her first classes at college soon. I wanted to know, for the rest of our lives, how my students were doing. I wanted to know who they became. But I didn’t know if I was allowed to say that, and after everything, I was going away.

I spent the rest of 22 in the public library, transcribing my heart into the communal computers for sixty minutes at a time. I reconnected with people I hadn’t seen in a while, met new friends, said goodbye to old ones. I kept writing. I created art out of the mess littering the floor of my room. There was still something new every day. There was still love. And we had the summer, like we always did.

There was a Korean song I listened to a lot during this time, called Graduation. It went: I won’t forget you, wherever you are in this crazy world. It was funny, in a way that made total sense, that I had never left school. School assigned timestamps on your life. Each year was a beginning and an ending, no matter the circumstances. There was always that period of separation called a summer break, and then a more permanent separation called graduation. People you had gotten to know so well went elsewhere. Or maybe you did, and left everyone behind. Either way, school had longing built into its walls. I spent all my life in schools, so I spent all my life longing.