Emily O’Neill

New Girl

Our uniform skirts were gray plaid kilts, the same plaid that Christina Aguilera wore in the video for her controversial “Dirrty” single that came out the year before I started high school. We had regular checks in homeroom to make sure our skirts reached the tips of our fingers when our arms were relaxed at our sides. If your skirt was too short, you could end up in detention for violating the dress code. Most girls just rolled their skirts up post-homeroom to avoid punishment. We all wore shorts under our skirts anyway. It was an aesthetic choice, not about being sexy, but about wearing the clothes we’d been assigned the way everyone around us was wearing them. I walked home from the bus stop near town hall every afternoon and invariably got honked at, whether my skirt passed homeroom inspections or not. I was very clearly fourteen years old, un-made up, carrying too many textbooks, absolutely a child.

There are tropes that seem to exist solely to exonerate men for transgressive behavior before they’ve ever confessed to it. The sexy schoolgirl stereotype is one that makes me deeply uncomfortable, because I wore those uniforms for almost half my life, starting when I was five and ending just after I turned sixteen. My adolescence directly corresponded to the graduation of the New Mickey Mouse Club alums to teenage pop stardom, and though as far as I can tell, none of them ever attended private school, they did adopt the aesthetic and made it even more mainstream shorthand for sexual awakening.

The men honking were rarely other teenagers. Often they were in their twenties or thirties, sometimes even older. The town I grew up in is so small it has only one official traffic light and no real downtown. Every time someone honked, I was afraid to turn to see who it was, afraid to recognize a neighbor or flip off someone I’d see a few days later in church. 

When I changed high schools, it was hardly because of how uncomfortable I was in my uniform. I did it because I wanted to make art, and my school’s administration would rather I did anything else. In hindsight, this feels exactly half-altruistic. A career in the arts is hard to define and even harder to get paid for, so it’s not exactly surprising that they would tell a student attending on scholarship to aspire to a surer thing, at least financially. But at the time, I felt betrayed. The fall of my junior year I sat in a meeting about preparing for college applications and discussed my options with my guidance counselor. Dr. Fallon seemed pleased with my file. My mother seemed uneasy as I was questioned. What do you want to be? I had changed my mind so many times it felt hard to say. An artist. A writer, maybe. Dr. Fallon frowned. I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but whatever she said made it sound like she thought art was a distraction for idiots, that it limited the expression of potential. She asked if I’d considered medical school or the law, wanting me on a life track towards something truly meaningful.

My mom didn’t interrupt her. My mom, who has worked in childcare for her entire adult life, listened to this woman describe how some work is worthy of our intellectual energy, but most work is not, and that it’s important to start early on the track that will help us get the most out of our lives. As we walked out of the meeting, I started crying. I’d thought maybe I could rearrange my schedule to take another art or English class, to do more of what I wanted, but it was clear that wasn’t happening. My little sister had just started at the regional public school and loved it. I begged to go there, to get to choose anything about my life. I was shocked when my parents said yes. The week of my college meeting was the last week I ever spent in Catholic school.

It was exciting to transfer to a school I could show up to in band T-shirts and jeans all of a sudden, when for my whole life I’d woken up and worn the same thing to school as everyone else. It was even more exciting to realize I had enough serious credits on my transcript to free up room for writing classes and art classes in the same schedule. I didn’t have to choose between the things I wanted. I got to do exactly what I hadn’t been allowed to at my old school. 

At my new school, I became an art room kid. I made friends with the other art room kids. They all knew each other, and I knew nothing, so I signed up for the classes they insisted were cool. I joined the debate team with my little sister. I cut off all my hair and reimagined my life, far away from Dr. Fallon and her insistence that I become a productive member of society. I took all honors classes and did fine, but not great, without trying very hard, infuriating everyone around me who wanted Ivy League lives and Fortune 500 jobs like their rich parents. My parents were not rich. My family lucked into a good school district because we lived in the house my mom grew up in. When she was a student at the same high school in the late seventies, it was before the rise of the McMansion. But things had changed drastically. Her former gym teacher had been around long enough to become the principal of the school.

I volunteered at an art nonprofit where one of my uncles threw pottery sometimes, trading work hours for portfolio development classes. I’d been in ballet classes for the majority of my life. I wrote every day as an emotional safety valve, but also because I had dreams of being a writer. I started dating Adam, whom I met in the photography club. He was a year older and taking film class with one of the favorite teachers in any department. I’ll call this teacher Mark.

I didn’t have any classes with him my first year, so I admired Mark in the halls because of what other students told me about his courses, his life, the way art mattered to him. There weren’t teachers like that at my old school. Everyone there had always been a teacher, would always be a teacher. So few of them seemed to have lives outside the stale, uniform building. Mark taught the section of AP English everyone wanted to be in. He’d introduced an elective in film studies a few years before I transferred and it was wildly popular. He coached the improv team and directed the school musicals. He was funny. He talked about the TV shows everyone loved watching. He went to movies and concerts regularly. He seemed less like a teacher than just an ordinary person who happened to work for a high school.

He had lived in Hollywood at some point in the recent past, writing for TV or movies, or at least attempting to. He told a story about his fiancée leaving him in the middle of the night without warning and when he finally saw her again three months later, she confessed to cheating on him with Jeremy Piven.

Adam cheated on me with an ex of his just before we were supposed to go to his senior prom. He insisted it didn’t count because he was drunk when it happened, an excuse I found insufficient. I remembered the story of Mark’s breakup and took the betrayal as cause enough to end things. I shaved my head, picked up smoking again, and broke up with him. But I had paid for our prom tickets, so we still went together. Mark was a chaperone that night. I remember making eye contact with him at one point while I was dancing. He smiled, and I smiled back. Later, Adam tried to kiss me while we were swimming in a friend’s pool. I rolled my eyes and swam away.

At the end of the year, I got my schedule for the following fall. I’d be taking Printmaking & Photography, AP Studio Art, AP Rhetoric and Composition, Psychology, Sociology, Mark’s film class, and AP English, also with Mark. I’d rushed through all my science and math requirements to make my senior year one where I’d get to make or at least study art almost exclusively, and Mark’s classes were the ones I was most excited about. He had real life experience as an artist in the world. He’d moved home when the Hollywood thing didn’t work out the way he wanted, but he’d written screenplays. He lived in an apartment in his hometown, but he’d still seen places I’d never been to. He taught at the high school he’d graduated from, which seemed so benevolent to me then. He had a twin brother with a wife and children, a mirror image example of the ways he wasn’t accomplishing what other people thought he would by his thirties, but he seemed happy. I wanted to know everything about him.

There are stories you receive when you’re new somewhere, whispers that find you all at once, crystallizing your understanding of your strange surroundings and deciding who you’ll align yourself with. The only thing high school students do with any level of consistency is gossip. Mark was rumored to have had an affair with a student the year before I arrived. The girl was a senior then, a star in the musical that year, an aspiring actress and darling of the arts department. Mark was a teacher in his thirties with a receding hairline who happened to be more fun and passionate than most people in charge of classrooms in the district. He loved what he taught, and he made students love it too. But his success as an educator was tarnished by this persistent rumor. Apparently he’d been investigated. They’d questioned the entire improv team about any signs of impropriety. I don’t know who made allegations, but I do know they were never specifically proven true. 

Every woman I know has a story of a creepy teacher or an inappropriate relationship between an adult and a teenage girl to share. Often the story is about a teacher being fired, how the story comes out after they vanish abruptly mid-year. Sometimes the story is more personal. About a friend who got too close to an authority figure. Or even more personal, a story where the teller mistakes themselves for someone empowered by specific attention. When I got to college, we would share these stories as a kind of party game, one-upping each other as we drank, laughing our way through the facts we could verify and the things we never knew the truth about, wanting it to be funny, when really it disturbed us. I had a history teacher at my first high school who sweated through his shirts by second period every day, wore a greasy comb-over, and kept a video cassette of a movie entitled 60 Second Seductions propped up on his desk next to some reference books. He was gross, but it was Catholic school, so everyone just laughed about him being gross. It was our fault: our uniform skirts, our bodies, our problem. But he’s not the story I told.

I told my college friends about Mark. Mark, who teased me for coming into first period smelling like cigarettes. Mark, who edited my college essay about getting drunk on Mother’s Day while reading The Great Gatsby and didn’t comment on content, only mechanics. Mark, who would meet me in the library to talk about what I was reading outside of class assignments. Mark, who wrote me passes to get out of class so we could talk more about books on his free periods. Mark took my ideas about the world seriously. Mark didn’t make me talk about my family or my feelings unless I wanted to. Mark respected me because I did good work in his classes, because I cared so much about my background role in that year’s musical, because—he insisted—I was a brilliant artist who was going to do amazing things after I graduated. He even went so far as to tell me that the things I was making in high school were amazing already.

He encouraged me more than any adult in my life at the time, and he also wrote me love letters. Or, at least, they read that way. Two actual letters, each mailed to my home address, each a dare for anyone to call the communications inappropriate. One was in response to me asking him to sign my yearbook at the end of senior year, something I asked all my favorite teachers to do. He refused, saying in front of a few other students and even another teacher in his classroom at the time, I don’t want other people to be able to read the things I have to say to you. I remember running out of the room when he said it, mortified. I felt hurt, like maybe he was making fun of me. His tone was almost scolding, as if I was being punished for something. But then, a few weeks after graduation, the first letter arrived. It was one page, typed and single-spaced, the only handwritten portion where he signed his name.

I went looking for the letter recently so I could show it to a friend, more than ten years after it was sent, but couldn’t find it. I keep shoeboxes full of papers—report cards and concert tickets and pictures of people I haven’t seen since leaving New Jersey. I found a Polaroid of the musical cast from senior year, drinking in someone’s basement after rehearsal, everyone faded a little yellow, the one guy who stayed in show business long enough to end up on a single season of SNL flashing two enthusiastic thumbs up in the background.

I found the copy of my college essay Mark wrote notes on. I found the speech I wrote about being a transfer student, hoping to be selected to read at graduation, that no one beyond the committee ever heard. Mark pulled me out of class to tell me how he fought with the committee on my behalf, but they’d overruled him, not wanting my essay to upstage the valedictory speech. We both cried as he told me the story. I had never seen a teacher cry before, especially not about something I’d written. I believed him, unequivocally. I believed that he believed in me.

In the box where I expected to find the letters, there were photos of me in San Francisco at sixteen after flying on a plane for the first time, traveling alone to see Adam, the boy from photography club, solely because his family lived in California and I had never been on a plane before. In the pictures, I look even younger than sixteen. I remember feeling so mature at the time. I snuck into bars and drank without being carded during the rise of the scannable ID. How could I have been a child at all?

The first time I told anyone about the letters, I was proud. Proud to be interesting to someone so much older. Proud that he called me the truest artist he had ever known. Proud of the few rides home from late practices for the musical where we’d linger talking in front of my house and he’d remind me to say one of the other students had driven me since we could get in trouble for spending time alone together. I was proud of protecting him because it meant he trusted me. 

I’ve run into this problem many times in life—caring more about winning someone over than what they’re asking of me.

I can start by saying nothing happened. It’s true. Nothing did. Nothing physical. But feelings aren’t nothing. I felt at the time that I was wise enough to be sure of myself if bodies entered into it. I had had sex before. Sex felt unimportant. I was bored with how much weight people around me assigned it, acting like it mattered inherently. Yes, it was important to be safe. Condoms. Conversations. It was around the time the demos for the third Brand New record leaked and I was learning the words, singing along with Jesse as he confessed I used to know the name of every person I’d kissed / now I made this bed & I can’t fall asleep in it like I knew what that felt like. I didn’t. But I knew what Jesse’s arm around me felt like when I met him after a concert at the Downtown on Long Island. How I wanted the ten years between us to never come up in conversation. How they didn’t. How I’d wanted to seem old for my age, old enough to be interesting to someone older. How nothing really happened beyond an invite to the studio that night that I declined, but if I had pushed, maybe it would have been something more.

I had an idea that I don’t think is uncommon among a certain set of teenage girls, that being old for my age was a trophy I could win by behaving a certain way. Adults have a habit of belittling teenage girls, minimizing their behavior and desires by calling what they do and care about trivial. Their love lives are full of crushes. Their stories get called gossip. The language assigned to them exists to make them smaller than whole people. I wanted to be serious. I wanted to feel like I mattered. I wanted someone to pay enough attention to me that they'd feel surprised. I wanted to be worth risking something for.

I made Mark a mix CD at some point when I was a senior. It didn’t feel flirtatious because other students had done it too. Maybe he had even asked us in class for music recommendations. Maybe it was an extra credit assignment. I’m sure if I dug through my shoeboxes for long enough, I’d find some record of the complete track list, but I do vividly remember one song in particular. It’s from an EP released in 2006 by an artist called Jaymay. The song is called “Snow White” and the chorus is a repeated I love you but I’m going to keep quiet about it / I love you but I’m keeping my mouth shut about it.

There’s a nine-and-a-half-minute song by the band Something Corporate called “Konstantine” that’s about a relationship that probably shouldn’t be happening. It includes the lyric dammit you’re so young but I don’t think I care. The song is a letter to a girl who got into my head with all the pretty things she did, and that bit comes back a beat later, but when it repeats he sings, this is to a girl who got into my head with all the fucked up things I did, and then the singer suggests, maybe you could keep me up in bed.

A lot of the music I loved back then could be classified as desperate. Yearning. Lots of sad boys hurt by women who refused to see them clearly. Lots of sad girls waiting to be seen at all. I was convinced that love could not occur unless it grew out of something that had first been wrong, then been corrected. I looked for these potentialities constantly. I wanted to be ready to grow from a ballad into brilliance. I wanted to be the object of desire. I wanted to inspire someone to disregard their better judgment because they felt magnetically drawn to me, because it mattered more to have me in their life than to do what they knew was right, or at least better than their urges.

A dear friend of mine at the time, also a teenager, had a boyfriend who was twenty-six. We went on a double date once where she set me up with her boyfriend’s friend, Al. The two men played hockey together. They were roommates. Al taught high school English near one of the malls I went to with my mother. When my friend and her boyfriend disappeared to his bedroom, Al and I sat up late watching March of the Penguins and talking about books. Al didn’t know how young my friend was, so he didn’t know how young I was until I told him. I told him because it seemed like he wanted to kiss me.

You’re the same age as some of my students, he said, suddenly embarrassed. I felt a little bit like a failure for not convincing him I was different somehow. Exceptional. Worth the risk. But he had to be up early the next morning for school, and so did I. I drove home worried I’d exposed not only myself, but my friend, as some kind of fraud.

It felt like a failure to leave a date without a kiss. Even if the kiss would have been illegal or immoral or uninspiring. I grew up on the internet. Nothing felt illegal or immoral or uninspiring if I came at it from the right direction. I talked to older boys and men in chat rooms all the time. I flirted with my older sister’s college friends on instant messenger. Several of the men she knew from school jokingly called me Little Fox, so I made it my secret screen name, used only to talk to people I thought I might want to want me back. I don’t know what I would’ve done had anyone suggested a time and place to meet. If the conversations turned from suggestive to explicit. It feels telling that during this period I attempted reading Lolita at least a dozen times. I’ve picked it up many times since as well. So many people I respect call Nabokov a genius that he must be, but I confess, I’ve never gotten past the second page of the book. The narrator, Humbert, is written as a monster, but even knowing that, I can’t stand to spend time listening to his account of “love” for a child, especially a child left in his care.

The closest I’ve gotten to the story is movies. I watched the 1997 version, directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. Despite the romantically swollen Ennio Morricone score, there’s nothing lovely about anyone’s behavior. And yet, the film still feels too sympathetic to Irons’s Humbert, a man driven to obsess over teenage sexuality because he lost his first love when he was only a child. The movie seems to take the excuse at face value, allowing Humbert his obsession so it can indulge itself in Swain over-applying red lipstick again and again, her mouth slack unless she’s tonguing a jawbreaker across her teeth or kissing Irons so clumsily it seems ridiculous than anyone might mistake this story as one of passionate entanglement. She presses her gum to dry under the dashboard of his car, flicks bottle caps into the ashtray. She is never not moving, forever nervous until her final scenes, when she stands, pregnant with another man’s child, insistent that the only man she ever loved was the predator she left him for, a man who was impotent, a man Humbert later kills. You cheated me of my redemption, and now you have to die, he says, brandishing a revolver, as if anyone could be the hero in a scene where both men are guilty of using a young girl as a prop for undoing their deficiencies.

Unlike Lyne’s version, the Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita, adapted for the screen by Nabokov, doesn’t lean on oversaturated camp to numb the audience into enjoying a pedophile’s moral waffling. Without goofy, cartoonish exaggeration, the story feels wooden. The film is black and white. The pace is almost painfully slow. Kubrick starts his effort where Lyne’s landed, with Humbert murdering Quilty, then flashes back in time to the rest of the story. A fog. A drive. Why begin the story here, with violence between men, when what the audience expects is so clearly violence against a girl? I was grateful for the lack of narration but, knowing how it ends, there was nothing so compelling about it that could make me endure what I knew was coming. I got about an hour into the nearly three-hour film before abandoning it for being pretentious nonsense. Quilty’s murder is barely a murder, with Humbert shooting him through a painting of a young woman, the final bullet passing through her lifeless cheek before the scene cuts.

There’s another book called Tampa, by Alissa Nutting, written in the voice of a woman who teaches middle school and actively pursues a sexual relationship with one of her adolescent students. The relationship is not framed as an accident. She takes the job because she wants to seduce a child. She chooses the child she seduces carefully. The book is a gender-swapped Lolita in many ways, but instead of blaming the child for being “irresistible,” the book makes it clear that any adult who finds a child seductive has something deeply wrong with them.

Recently, I was sitting alone at a bar, reading Tampa, when a man approached me to ask what I was reading. It was clearly a pick-up line, meant to start a longer conversation, but when I told him what the book was about, he recoiled and left me to my reading. I hear a lot of men say Lolita is creepy, but I’ve also heard one say that he reads it to get hard when his girlfriend of the moment wants to have sex a second time in one night. I know men who hate that Lana Del Ray built much of her debut album, Born to Die, around its imagery, men who also intentionally pursue women much younger than them, relationships where they’re more likely to be able to manipulate the power dynamic in their own favor.

There’s another song, the title track on the same EP as “Snow White,” that includes the lyric I miss not being misused. 

It’s not a mystery to me why I listened to lonely music more than any other kind, why I still feel drawn to songs about longing. I was so lonely as a teenager it feels like a joke. Dating in high school is a farce at best, but I don’t mean lonely like that. I was so lonely I grew toward any attention offered. I was desperate to feel important to anyone, to prove to myself that I didn't have to change who I was to be worthy of someone else’s concern. It sounds crazy, but I swear that every time Mark looked at me, he sighed. He assigned me the role of Ophelia when we put Hamlet on trial in our final semester of classes together, and I made myself a flower crown and played catatonic on the stand and got an A.

Mark acted like he cared what happened to me, almost to the point of spectacle. I once raised my hand in his class after practicing archery all week in gym and he sent me to the nurse to get an ice pack for the grapefruit-sized bruise in the ditch of my arm. I made a drawing of the bruise after that, then built an entire art installation around it for the end-of-the-year student show, exploding the body into fragments that took up an entire room. I crocheted dummies of all my vital organs and arranged them spilling out of a vintage orange suitcase in the corner of a small room. I painted close-ups of bones and nerves and blood and hung them from the ceiling with fishing line so it looked like they were hovering in mid-air. I set up notebooks of mine, which had been damaged in a minor flood, on music stands so you could see how the felt-tip pen I was partial to at the time ran into accidental designs, where before there had been research paper outlines and parabolic equations. I made a deconstructed clay spine and placed each smooth taupe vertebra along a counter in front of a mirror, next to a burnt mannequin head swathed in tulle, examining its reflection. It was very melodramatic, but I was so proud of it then.

The hallway into the room was meant to mimic the mind. One side was an array of pictures I had taken with my collection of toy cameras, many of them blurred by light or mistakes in development, all of the distortions a purposeful inclusion. The facing wall was covered in tiny sheets of lined paper taped in rows so that they fluttered when anyone walked past them. Each paper had a quote written on it from something I’d read or overheard that year. Mark was all over that wall. I took more notes in his class than any other.

The night of the show, I spent a lot of my time avoiding seeing people's reactions. But when I saw Mark was looking at what I made, I waited outside the space to receive his. When he emerged, he seemed shaken. I didn’t know you were including me, he said. And it was all he said. 

In the essay I wrote in hopes of speaking at graduation, I offered the following:

My first day at Northern Valley was a lot like my first day at Holy Angels. But the days and months that followed changed me. I think you can all remember times where things have just clicked for you, whether it be a person you suddenly knew you’d be friends with for the rest of your life, or a thing that you fall in love with in a quiet way that doesn’t announce itself until you realize that all you talk about is a book you just read or a game you played like it was your last. 

The theme of the essay was acceptance. Feeling like I belonged. In the note Mark wrote me as a thank you for the scrapbook project I’d spearheaded as a gift for him from the seniors who worked on the musical, he wrote an echo:

It is great to be acknowledged. It is amazing to be appreciated. But it is beyond words to be known. [. . .] The version of me your album and book and letter and poem and drawings . . . represent is someone I hope to someday be. How do I ever thank you for showing me that person and for believing I could be that person?

When I read that card, I’m not ashamed to say I cried. I cried because of how important it was to me to feel like something meaningful had been exchanged between us. The ellipsis there is his own, a sign I treasured, that showed I meant so much to him that he had trouble articulating exactly what it was he needed to tell me.

I can’t know if Mark spent the two years I knew him hoping our relationship would move beyond the exchange of private notes or nods or jokes or all the odd tokens passed back and forth between us. I’ll never be sure what happened between him and the girl who graduated before I got there. If he admired her as an artist the same way he said he admired me. If their relationship was ever physical. If his focused attention was a pattern of grooming meant to make me feel understood in service of extracting something he wanted from me, or if he simply wanted to foster my development as a person and was going about it all wrong. I can’t know, but I lean towards assuming the worst of each mixed signal.

It is easy to say the way we related to each other was wrong, but so much in my life at the time was wrong that the wrongness doesn’t bother me nearly as much as what happened after I graduated. After graduation, I moved away. I made new friends and new art. I cut off all my hair again and started fresh. I pierced my nose. I got my first tattoo, and then another. Like so many students, I came back to the school to visit my old teachers and tell them about college, and when I walked into Mark’s classroom a year removed from my time as a student there, he was cold to me. Worse than cold, he was rude. He acted like he barely knew me. He seemed bothered by the tattoo on my forearm even though I explained it was one of my own drawings. He seemed especially uncomfortable with how different I looked and acted from how I had been in his classroom. I felt betrayed. More than that, I felt like he expected me not to have changed at all, despite all the chaos I explicitly described to him in my own set of unofficial love letters. We had emailed for most of my first year away at school, and I told him things I didn’t tell anyone—how unhappy I was, how out of touch I found everyone around me, how overwhelming it was to try to live my life knowing that my dad was likely to die before I graduated from any number of health crises.

He always wrote back, encouraging me. It’s amazing that you want more. That you demand more. Of your school. Of your peers. Better to be disappointed. Better to test the universe. You can't not feel what you feel. You can’t not know what you know. You can’t convince yourself otherwise. Within the encouragement, he flattered me. You are painfully attuned to the world. I did most of the talking about my own life, and his responses shared very little of what he was up to, focusing only on giving me advice, telling me I would always feel like an outsider because of how closely I paid attention to everything around me. Despite how guarded he was in our conversations, and how sometimes he’d take weeks to respond, we made plans to meet up to discuss our writing once I was home from college for the summer. But the email chain dead ends there. Maybe I was being naive, but I expected that when I saw him again, he’d be who he was when he wrote to me. Excited. To see me in person, be friends as adults. But whatever had bonded us before seemed to be gone.

Maybe I wasn’t the person he was imagining, states away and struggling. Maybe my own struggling reminded him too much of himself at my age, alone in the world and desperate for validation. Or maybe he was never the person he was performing at all.

When my brother Owen was finally in high school, I would borrow my mother’s car on any visits home so I could be the one to pick him up from school, just to remind myself of what was still trapped in amber in that building. I’d visit a few rooms in the English department to say hi and give updates on my jobs, my writing. There were other teachers who were important to me too, people who cared about my life after high school strictly as mentors. I brought them my publication news and excitement about new projects. I shared the books I loved. My rhetoric and composition teacher told me he was teaching some of my poems in one of his classes, and I felt so honored. My junior year English teacher stopped me in the hallway to gush. “We’re all so proud of you,” she said, squeezing my arm.

I’m unsure what I was expecting from Mark, but he evaded me. The school brought me back in an official capacity a few years after I graduated college to give a paid presentation on contemporary poetry during National Poetry Month, just after my first book was published. Every class period, teachers brought their English classes to a conference room in the library that had been set up like a theater, and I would talk about why I wrote poems. I read poems by contemporary writers I loved out loud, then answered any questions the students had for me. I made Mad Libs out of a Robert Frost poem to hand out to the students. I told them stories about how I fell in love with poems beyond the ones assigned as class reading and where to start looking for art that would excite them. I was hoping to be like Mark, so engaged with the things I was teaching that it became infectious. And I couldn’t help but notice that Mark didn’t bring any of his classes down for the presentation. 

Even though I knew he still worked there, I never got to talk to Mark that day. There wasn’t time to hunt him down between seminars. I couldn’t prove he was actively avoiding me, but I didn’t see him until the very end of the day. Most of the students had already gone home and the school was eerily quiet. I was walking down an upstairs hall, past the corner where I used to sit on the floor every day and eat lunch with my friends. Mark was walking towards me from the English wing, a few manila folders in hand. We made eye contact, and his face changed. Though it seemed highly unlikely he’d been headed there, he ducked into the faculty bathroom at the middle of the hall without greeting me. I sat down at the hall monitor’s desk directly across from the bathroom door and waited for him to reemerge, but he didn’t.

I was years removed from the girl who made him feel known, the girl he knew admired him more than she admired anyone. I had become strange to him and to myself. I was a writer with a Mohawk and a day job and an apartment in another state. A girl with a boyfriend whom I would’ve walked out on if anybody dared me to. I was teaching at the school I’d graduated from, if only for the day, but on that day, we were finally equals, and he couldn’t face it. I was new, waiting to be told newness didn’t change his promises to be present. He had said so many times that it would be a privilege to follow along with my life as it happened. That he wanted to watch me succeed. I had it all in writing, but I realized then how impossible it was to believe he meant any of it.

I wanted and needed for it to be true—for him to have cared so much that it pushed me into being the person I’d always wanted to become.  I wanted his encouragement of me as an artist to be purely that—encouragement—but the more I think about it, the more I feel stupid to have accepted his attention as if it were devoid of selfish motivations. Maybe he’d wanted something else from me. Maybe when he didn’t get it, he moved on to someone else. Someone the same age I was when I would drive past his apartment with a friend, giggling as we slowed the car down, wondering what he would do if I ran across the small, tidy lawn and rang the doorbell. If he opened the door and saw me standing there, somewhere I absolutely shouldn’t have gone looking for him.

I thought about what might happen if I went into the bathroom after him. I had so many questions. I still do. I sat waiting as long as I could, angry and hurt and suddenly so much older than I wanted to be, but he wasn’t coming. I realized he might be standing just beyond the door, and that I should leave, in case he was waiting to move on with his day until he was sure I was gone.

Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. She is the author of two poetry collections: Pelican (YesYes, 2015), winner of the Pamet River Prize and the Devil's Kitchen Reading Series, and a falling knife has no handle (YesYes, 2018). Her recent work appears in Bennington Review, Catapult, Little Fiction, Redivider, Salt Hill, and Sixth Finch. You can find her online @tabernacleteeth.