Report Card

I've been working on a lot of short fiction this summer and decided, since this one was so short, to post it.

“Eyes on me,” Ms. Felicia said. “All eyes on me,” she repeated. Before her sat twenty eight fourth graders barely restrained by their tablet-shaped desks. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring.

Dylan knew what that meant. He worked a sticky patch under his desk – boogers, maybe, or a petrified piece of gum – and watched Ms. Felicia from the front corner of the room. Ms. Felicia was beautiful, he thought, more beautiful than his mother or his aunts. She was taller than any woman Dylan had ever met. She wore her hair cropped close to the scalp, like a boy, and big dangly earrings in the shape of Africa and loose dresses in crinkly, earth-colored fabric. She was Dylan’s favorite teacher, because on Friday afternoons she read to them from chapter books and had let Dylan be the plant monitor for two months in a row.

“Ladies. And. Gentlemen.” She spoke now in her no-nonsense voice and walked toward the light switch. “Five, four, three, two,” she counted down on her fingers. Dylan sunk his fingernails into the mass and scraped it away from the bottom of the desk. He rolled it into a little cylinder before flicking it at the carpet. “One.” The class had fallen silent, and she had turned off the light.

Satisfied, Ms. Felicia flipped the light switch and passed out manila envelopes. She explained how their report cards were inside and that they must show them to their parents when they went home that night. She unenveloped the typed sheet and pointed to their grades, and then to the dotted line that their parents must sign so that they could bring them back the next day, the last day of school.

Dylan looked at his sheet. He surveyed the grades with detachment, and then looked at the bottom of the sheet. “Dylan is recommended to repeat the fourth grade next year.” He stared at the letters anxiously and reread them. He wanted to raise his hand but couldn’t.

Ms. Felicia spoke. “Some of you will be repeating this grade next year, and if your parents want to talk to the guidance counselor, her number is listed at the bottom of the report card.” She paused. “Questions?” Dylan stuffed the sheet of paper back into its envelope. In his haste, he cut his thumb on the stiff shiny glued corner of it and drew it back into his mouth. Ms. Felicia looked suddenly at him.

“Dylan, are you ok?” In a quiet voice, he asked to go to the nurse for a Bandaid, then stared down at his sneakers. Ms. Felicia knelt down beside him. “Are you ok?”

Dylan looked into her eyes, such a warm, dark brown that they were nearly black, and then quickly back at the floor. He felt the prick of tears at the corners of his eyes, and shook his head. Ms. Felicia wordlessly took his little hand in her long, brown one and examined the welling blood at the lip of the cut.

Dylan closed his eyes and allowed the tears to slip down his cheeks. He kept them tightly closed against the chance that someone had seen him. Ms. Felicia patted his shoulder gently, clinically. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked.

The Emergency Alpaca

So one day you find you are a grown up.
All your best friends live somewhere else.
You carry a sense of doom in one pocket
And an indelible longing in the other.
You live in a major international city;
You are waiting on a subway platform
And suspect each oncoming train terminates
In your own middle age.
You drink too much, you wonder
If the kid who had her picture taken in sixth grade
Would have turned tail and fled from the frame
If she knew what sort of mess it became.
And being a grown up, you know in a way that aches:
There is no way it would become anything else.

“There is an emergency alpaca,”
You said to me. I can not only imagine you typing
In a South American cyber café; I have seen you there before –
Your little fingers rabbiting across the keyboard and
Smiles breaking across your face like weather.
I marvel what a wonderful idea this is,
Because the emergency alpaca is meant to bear you up
When the going is rough, when your head goes
All spinny with altitude, and I spend a few days
Thinking about this, and how hard it would be
To fit an alpaca on the subway.
In theory, I mean, you are my emergency alpaca;
No one surer of foot, truer of word or sounder of heart.
But when the distances get too wide, when these pockets are too heavy
I pretend I have just a little one
Living at the back of the linen closet
And I ride across all that divides us
To see your face again.