Tomorrow I return to work. I’m stepping into faculty meetings, planning and feedback. There’s reading and annotating, and helping students with assignments. I’ll be adjusting and trying to find the way to slip from relevance and dragging students toward challenging themselves. Teaching takes a lot of mental power, which means writing takes a back seat during the week. I’ll be back to weekend warrior and school-break writing. While my hope is to do it all, I also know there’s optimistic hope and then there’s reality.
A part of me is sad to say goodbye to the sustained time of summer when writing gets to be a priority. Another part of me is ecstatic to be working with students again, helping the future discover and hone their voices.
To celebrate, I’m going to drop an unpublished excerpt I wrote about Tanner (from The Stories Stars Tell) and Griffin (from In the Echo of this Ghost Town) when they met at fourteen. The teacher in this scene is not one to emulate… but something had to bring together our favorite bad boys.
Safe Spaces
by CL Walters
Tanner’s head was buried in his arms on the desk in the classroom where he was forced to meet for homeroom by unseen entities who seemed to think they knew what he needed without even knowing him. He didn’t feel much like being there. Couldn’t even fake it today. His parents had finally told him they were getting a divorce though instead of an unpleasant surprise, it felt like a sad sack of relief overflowing with guilt. He didn’t much feel like being anywhere and definitely not at school.
Mr. Benton, his homeroom teacher who ushered in Tanner’s first two weeks of high school, was standing at the front of the room, clipboard in hand. Tanner didn’t have to look because he could picture the teacher it hadn’t taken much time to despise. He was in the center at the front of the room, his name scrawled in thin blue-inked letters across the white board with the subject he taught—history—over his right shoulder. History said it all to Tanner who figured it was the most useless subject he had to take. Yeah. Yeah. He’d heard all the effin’ rationalizations about it: we need to learn from our past so we don’t repeat the mistakes. Whatever. It was bullshit because 1) the past couldn’t fucking be fixed, and 2) no one learned it anyway since we kept repeating the stupid atrocities over and over like hamsters in a wheel. So why bother?
Mr. Benton was wearing the same brown pants, slick with some weird sheen like he wore every day. His huge belly obscured the buckle, and the same style cotton-poly blend polo with short sleeves was tucked in and stretched across his wide body. Tanner didn’t like him. It wasn’t that Tanner thought Mr. Benton was bad because he was fat—he had loved his third grade teacher Mrs. Kinder, and she’d been a large woman who wore muʻumuʻu’s everyday—he didn’t like Mr. Benton, because Mr. Benton was a dick. He was mean and nasty to everybody. Condescending, rude and super unpleasant. He looked at you with beady dark eyes filled with animosity. The teacher hadn’t even tried to be nice to them. Not even on the first day of school. No smiles. No stories. No questions to try and get to know any of them. Mr. Benton had just judged them on their appearance. Tanner was smart enough to consider that perhaps Mr. Benton was being an ass to protect himself from something. Ask Tanner if he cared. He didn’t because Mr. Benton was an adult. Like his parents were supposed to be adults.
They all acted like self-centered children.
Mr. Benton’s voice stretched across the room.
Instead of paying attention to the pointless announcements about some Fall Festival Dance he had no intention of going to, or the announcement about school pictures his parents wouldn’t care about, Tanner kept his head buried in his arms. He tried to use Mr. Benton’s monotonous voice to find a place to quiet all the feelings moving through him. Except, when he closed his eyes, all he could see was his parents the night before, sitting on opposite sides of the living room offering their announcement as if they were suddenly partners. That, however, never lasted long.
“This just isn’t working,” his dad had said, the tone of his voice nearly as monotone as Mr. Benton’s, as if he’d been tempering emotion to keep things calm.
His mom, though, didn’t seem to have that ability. “Who’s fault is that, Geoff?”
Tanner had been sitting in the middle of the room, his head swinging back and forth between their volleys to keep track of the battle. He’d had this morbid thought that he should color commentate what was happening, that perhaps his parents had perfected disintegrating marriage as if it were a sport and were in the Super Bowl of divorce announcements.
“Don’t do that, Marna.”
“Don’t do what? Tell Tanner the truth. You’ve been having an affair?”
This didn’t surprise Tanner given the depth and breadth of their arguments over the last four years, though being reminded that his dad had chosen a different person, a different family, didn’t hurt any less.
“And who’s fault is that?”
“You have the nerve to blame this on me?”
His dad had turned away from them, and Tanner could see by the fall of his head, he was pinching the bridge of his nose.
Knowing this wasn’t going to go anywhere but to a place called Worse, Tanner had sighed, more weighted by the way in which this was the same rather than how it might be different. He wasn’t necessary to these proceedings—never had been. So he’d stood and walked out. They continued to fight unaware he’d even left the room. He’d found his way into Rory’s room, out the window, and sat outside on the roof. He stayed long after dark so he could look up at the stars.
Now, head resting on his arms at a desk during pointless homeroom, he swallowed the thorns in his throat and kept his eyes open instead of closing them. Light from the windows on the other side of the room oozed from under his arms. He breathed, the white noise his exhale and inhale feeling rather meaningless like everything else.
Then he noticed the silence.
No monotone voice of Mr. Benton.
No student voice.
Nothing.
Tanner glanced up. Everyone was staring at him.
“Mr. James, correct?” Mr. Benton’s multiple chins jiggled with the question. He looked at his clipboard because he hadn’t learned their names yet, so Tanner’s nod went unseen. “We don’t sleep in this class.” The teacher’s mouth turned down at the corners, and his eyes narrowed.
“I wasn’t.” Tanner didn’t have it in him to fight, but he also didn’t have it in him to listen either. He was just over everything. Everyone. He returned to his folded up version of himself, head resting on his arms.
“I said to sit up.”
“Actually, you didn’t,” Tanner said into the desk. “You said we don’t sleep in here.”
Mr. Benton cleared his throat, obviously annoyed. “Then sit up.”
Tanner didn’t move.
“I know what kind of kid you are,” Mr. Benton said, his voice so heavy with resentment, the words seemed to splat on the floor when they fell from his mouth.
Tanner sat up—angry now. This guy didn’t know anything about him or his life. He hadn’t even tried. He opened his mouth when someone else interrupted him.
“Why don’t you just leave him alone?”
“Excuse me, Mr–”
Mr. Benton ran a finger down the names on his clipboard looking for who’d said it. The rest of the students sitting in their perfect rows glanced at one another, some covered their mouths with their hands while others dropped their chins to their chests, hiding smiles.
“–Benton.” The voice was laced with so much sarcasm it fogged up the room. Between this kid’s mockery and Mr. Benton’s acrimonious landmines, it was quickly becoming a warzone.
Tanner knew all about those.
Mr. Benton’s mouth flapped open and shut like a fish. “What’s your name?”
“Wait? You don’t know? Mr. Benton.”
Tanner turned to look at who was speaking. It was Griffin Nichols. They’d never been in the same class before, and had only started school together in middle school, so he didn’t know him, just of him and there was a lot to know. Rumor was that his dad was in prison for murder. Or something. Griffin slouched at his desk, leaning heavily against that stupid bar that held the desk to the seat. His right arm stretched out across the desktop in front of him and his legs took up way more square footage than he needed. For a fourteen-year-old, he looked pretty badass, though. Like the son of a murderer.
Tanner remembered one of his soccer teammates way back in seventh grade had told him a story of Griffin getting in a fight with some other kid for looking at him wrong, so he knocked out the kid’s front teeth. It had been a bloody story. Seventh grade shenanigans were always true and set in stone since none of them ever went to find out if shit that was said was authentic. But with murdering father on Griffin Nichols’s trading card, Tanner hadn’t felt an impending need to ask him.
Nichols smirked at Mr. Benton as if he was getting ready to digest the teacher and spit him out.
“Yes,” the teacher looked at Griffin like he was no bigger than an ant he was ready to stomp on. “I’m Mr. Benton.” This was said like Nichols was on the lowest end of the intelligence spectrum. “What is your name?” Tanner wondered when Mr. Benton acquired the British accent. He’d enunciated those last words so clearly.
“I know. Mr. Benton.”
Mr. Benton’s face turned a terrible shade of red with purple splotches sliding around his necks. He smacked a girl’s desk in the front row. The girl—Holly Pilcher—jumped in her seat and then sunk down and away from the teacher’s rage. “What’s his name!” Mr. Benton yelled at Holly.
“I don’t–” she whispered.
Griffin laughed. “Mr. Benton. Mr. Benton. Mr. Benton.” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Shouldn’t you know who your students are?”
“Get out of my classroom.”
Griffin stood and raised his arms toward the ceiling. “Thank you, Jesus!” He yelled. “You have saved me from hell.”
The class snickered.
Griffin grabbed his stuff and left the classroom with the flourish.
Tanner couldn’t help but smile.
“Mr. James!”
Tanner rotated his head back to the teacher who now had both hands on Holly’s desk and was leaning forward, his red face coated in a sheen to match his pants, and spittle collecting on his lips. “Leave.”
“What did I do?”
“Get out!”
“Fuck,” Tanner snapped, grabbed his bag and slammed out of the door.
Griffin waited, leaning against the brick wall opposite the classroom door, arms crossed over his chest with what looked like bored indifference. “You’re welcome,” he said to Tanner.
Tanner shook his head and turned down the hall toward the office.
“That’s all the thanks I get?”
Tanner could hear Griffin’s steps behind him until they were walking down the hall side-by-side.
“I got kicked out for you.”
“For me? I got kicked out of class and have to go see the VP, and you think you need thanks?”
Griffin chuckled. “Definitely. First, it got you out of that awful place and second, that douchebag was going to kick you out anyway. Now, you don’t have to go alone.”
Tanner glanced at Griffin who was watching the floor as they walked through the hall. His blondish-brown hair was long and obscured most of his face. Then he looked up and swiped it out of his eyes. He smiled which seemed to soften the hard edges of his features and held out his hand. “I’m Griff.”
“I know who you are, Nichols.”
He nodded. “I know who you are too, James. Your brother died back in elementary school.”
Tanner’s heart stopped up at the same time his feet stopped moving him through the hallway. The hallway collapsed around him, burying him underneath the weight of brick, posters that read Fall Festival Dance, and lockers. When he blinked, however, everything was the same and Griffin was looking at him.
“Dude–”
“I don’t talk about that.”
Griffin searched his face, frowning. “I hear you. I don’t talk about my dad either, but just so you know, he didn’t murder anyone.”
Tanner nodded and started walking again. “Cancer. Rory died of cancer.”
The hall was silent around them, though a stray sound from the classrooms beyond their sphere infiltrated the space like pin pricks.
“Drugs and weapons.” Griff cleared his throat.
They walked through the hallway, silence and a sliver of truth between them.
“Thanks,” Tanner finally said. He glanced at Griff who looked at him without actually turning his head.
Griff gave him a crooked grin and a nod.
They walked the rest of the way to the office in silence, but for some reason, that silence felt a lot like climbing out onto the roof outside Rory’s room and finding peace among the stars. For the first time in a long time, Tanner didn’t hate that he was at school.