Things Are Going to Get Weird

You are standing at the front of the room, leading a writing warm up to a class of thirty-six fifteen-year-olds who run the gamut of locked-in to fully asleep to grinning at their phone to raising a hand to go the bathroom because “they locked the bathroom by the lunch room” to drawing on their desk to sitting at your desk because they “need to talk as soon as you’re done” to writing down the prompt — the one part you asked them not to write — to filling up the bottom of the first page because “I’m just a writer and I can’t stop myself and also I have another poem to show you.” But you. The teacher. You see all of that and really you just see the fifteen-year-old kid standing in the doorway, eyes dim, heart-broken. And you see him walk over to the girl who broke her foot playing volleyball (“Miss Dion, I cried and cried when the doctor told me it was broken. And then she started crying. And we all cried. It was a mess.”) You see him go up to this girl and she rolls him the mobility scooter she’s been using and you see him casually grab the foam covered handlebars and kneel one leg on the seat, and use his other foot to just… push off — <a href="https://abbimireille.medium.com/things-are-going-to-get-weird-70d8cb5395f">Read More</a>