And then it’s back to school, the teachers are hatching again. They come up from the cracks in the floor, dripping mnemonic goo and we’re supposed to clap, but honestly? It’s disgusting. Questions and answers and we sound like idiots and we get treated like criminals. So. Cool.
This morning my mom ironed my shirt so flat it felt like paper. “Make us proud.” She smiled too wide, like she was talking to the school and not me. She didn’t say a goddamn word about the day one of us stops being a student and becomes a teacher. Like this is all normal. Like yeah, sure, one of us is going to dissolve into a fucking syllabus by June, but hey, don’t be late to homeroom.
Everyone else shuffles inside. This is fine. Normal. My mom says it’s “just a building,” which is hilarious. She never pressed her hand against the wall and felt it throb back. The world’s grossest handshake.
The posters are the same as last year: Attendance Is Achievement. Your Mind Belongs to the Future. Translation: sit down, shut up, and rot.
My sneakers squeak. There’s Mara at her locker. She dyed her hair copper-red over the summer, and under the shitty fluorescent light it’s fire. The only bright thing in the whole building. I want to tell her you look amazing and missed you and thought about you all summer. God. Just nod. She nods back all casual and cool like I’m not falling apart. She didn’t even notice my hair.
We shuffle into class. The desks vibrate, faint but steady. Put your hand flat, you feel it. A second heartbeat. That’s the teacher coming. Everyone stops chatting. I want to write something in the margin of my notebook. I’m still here! But my hand won’t move.
And then the teacher arrives. It extrudes up from the floorboards, pale and wet with wires stapled into its jaw. They say those wires are “assistive devices.” They look like restraints. It smells like blood pennies and moldy bread. “Respect your educators,” they say. Respect this?
The lesson starts. No voice. Just pressure, like being swallowed. Algebra grinds in the teeth. History forces itself down your throat until you gag on wars you never fought. Learning is a gift, but it’s more like a for-your-own-good infection.
When the lesson ends and the pressure eases, the room reeks of sweat and something like a hospital floor. The popular guy in back tries to crack a joke but gags mid-sentence. Black spit sprays everywhere. Another kid pulls his sleeve down too late. Skin spotted with quote-and-date lesions. No one says shit. We’ve all been there. But fuck! Why isn’t anyone screaming?
My notebook is a confession. Half-assed lyrics and sketches of Mara. Thoughts from a track I obsessed over all summer. And then there’s lines I wrote that just come out during the lesson. How do I speak without numbers, sing without science? Pathetic. Whatever.
At lunch, the cafeteria hums like always on the first day, all fake cheer and forced laughter. Then it cracks. Always does. Mara’s tray clatters and she sits across from me. She eats like she’s trying to murder her sandwich. Just full-on chomps. Bread guts spill out. Mayo smears her fingers and she doesn’t give a shit. Just wipes it on her jeans. And of course, I can’t stop staring. Idiot. My eyeballs are traitors. She catches me once, smirks, like she knows exactly how pathetic I am, and then just goes back to gnawing. Like it’s nothing. Like I’m nothing. Which makes me want to slam my tray into the wall and scream, but just sit here and choke down this slab of meat that tastes like embalming fluid. She’s untouchable. Like she’s built for escape. She’s gonna make it. And me? Already halfway digested.
“Think they’ll announce it sooner this year?” she asks around the last bite of her sandwich.
Year-end, they pick someone to go down into the Nursery. Big ceremony. Everybody cry. Like, it’s holy, but it’s basically: goodbye kid, hello new teacher-slug. We call it an “honor.” Sure. Spoiler: it’s just your best friend dissolving into lesson plans for the next year. Totally normal. Totally fine.
“Hope not.” Maybe Mara. Maybe me. Maybe both.
“Guess we’ll see.” She shrugs, and I want to blurt it all out. I’m terrified it’ll be you. Terrified it’ll be me. I like you. I love you. Please don’t pupate into lesson plans and pedagogy. Instead, uhm, did you watch that one movie this summer?
Just tell her before it happens, let her know. But my throat is already filled with someone else’s words. Back to the margins again. Hands shake. All that comes out is that it’s already inside me. It is. Shit, it really is. I think it is. The lesson crawls in, rewrites me line by line. Nobody screams. Nobody fights. We just smile and sit up straight in our ironed shirts and bleed quietly into the future.
But hey, kids are the future, right? Except the future looks like a meat-grinder with desks. The school doesn’t care who we are, what we dream, who we love. God, It just eats us, over and over, smiling with its mandible-mouths. It’s tradition. Attendance is forever. Fucking brutal.
In the margins, I scribble a stupid love line for Mara and twist it into a middle finger, then spit and smear the ink. Maybe you can scrap us, autoclave us, sterilize us into syllabi, but you can’t sterilize our laughter. You can’t erase my margins.