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How does a parent answer a child’s questions about school shootings? For instance: Why does this keep happening? Will it happen to me? If it does, will I be OK? Writer Meg Conley, a mother of three, describes the agony of not having all the answers:
After the second shooting at East High School, we started talking about homeschooling. It’s not the first time we’ve had the conversation. But my kids love lunchtime, talking in the halls, learning new things from new teachers, school plays and after-school clubs. Being separated from those things during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic affected them in ways I still find frightening to contemplate. Forming community with people who are not part of their household is a vital part of their lives. There are just some things that can’t be replicated in the home.
One night in New York City, I sat in between my two oldest daughters as they watched their first Broadway play, Funny Girl. The play opened with Fanny Brice, played by Julie Benko, sitting in front of a mirror, looking at herself before she says, “Hello, gorgeous.” When she said those words, most of the audience knew what was coming, so they cheered. But my girls didn’t, so they politely clapped. I watched them watch the play, with wide eyes. By the end of the show, they loved Brice. They loved Benko. When she started to sing the reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the girls understood what had been and what was coming. They cheered with everyone else. They became part of the community in that room.
We were wandering through the Met museum when my daughter got a text from another friend. It was just a link to a news story. Her middle school principal had gone to the media. There is a child at her school that was recently charged with attempted first-degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm. That child doesn’t need incarceration; the child needs help. But teachers are not trained to give that help. The district rejected the school’s request that the student be moved to online schooling. Instead, the child goes to school every day and receives a daily pat down from untrained school staff before going to class. This student is on the same safety plan as the student who shot two deans before spring break. My daughter showed me the text and asked again, “What are we going to do?”
My two oldest girls went to see a preview of the new musical New York, New York with their dad that night. I stayed behind with their youngest sister. She’s too young for Broadway, but nearly old enough to be killed at school.
Today in the recurring series “America is Broken” — meaning, the news — three reporters at Pro Publica reveal that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas has flown on Crow’s private jet many times, gone on vacations to Indonesia and New Zealand on Crow’s yacht, and spent time at Crow’s compound in the Adirondacks. In doing so, Thomas has violated norms pertaining to judges’ conduct and possibly broken federal law:
Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lavishing the justice with gifts, including a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas disclosed. Recently, Crow gave Thomas a portrait of the justice and his wife, according to Tarabay, who painted it. Crow’s foundation also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.
Crow said that he and his wife have funded a number of projects that celebrate Thomas. “We believe it is important to make sure as many people as possible learn about him, remember him and understand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s superyacht, ProPublica spoke to more than 15 former yacht workers and tour guides and obtained records documenting the ship’s travels.
On the Indonesia trip in the summer of 2019, Thomas flew to the country on Crow’s jet, according to another passenger on the plane. Clarence and Ginni Thomas were traveling with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motorboats and a giant inflatable rubber duck, met the travelers at a fishing town on the island of Flores.
Ben Goldfarb questions the responsibilities of dog owners in an essay focusing on the impact of unleashed dogs on shorebirds. Goldfarb brings this somewhat niche topic to life with a mixture of reporting and personal experience.
We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.
Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the world’s most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrick’s Day tradition.
Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words
“There are two kinds of pets — the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,” Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her family’s various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,” Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttle Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: “Bunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldn’t be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.” Fadiman’s piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. —KS
Justin Heckert | ESPN | March 7, 2023 | 5,462 words
I don’t follow the NBA, and I’m not one for memorabilia of any variety. But leave it to Justin Heckert, one of my favorite feature writers, to make me give a damn about an old, untorn ticket to a Chicago Bulls game that happened around the time I was born. Heckert spends time with Mike Cole, who as a college freshman attended Michael Jordan’s first game with the Bulls and saved the ticket because he’s the kind of guy who does that. (Cole has a plastic bin with “MIKE’S MEMORY BOX” written on the side, filled with ephemera from various sporting events). Nearly 40 years after the Bulls game, a span of time in which Jordan became one of the most celebrated athletes in history, a man with a Glock strapped to his hip came to Cole’s house in an armored car. He was there to retrieve the ticket, which Cole had agreed to sell at auction, where it was expected to bring in as much as $1 million. But the story Heckert tells isn’t about Cole getting rich (though that does happen). Really, it’s about the meaning we invest in objects and how it can change as we do, as the world does. —SD
Claire L. Evans | Grow | March 14, 2023 | 4,203 words
In this fascinating interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares their perspective on the role of AI today — “to broaden our idea of intelligence” — and a vision for a mindful, collaborative future that ultimately decenters humans and makes more space for nonhuman beings and animals. “I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence,” says Bridle. “There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence.” Intelligence is relational; it’s not something that exists within beings of things, but rather between them. As a gardener — someone who loves feeling their hands in the soil, and working with the small organisms within it — I love their conversation on gardening, and how humans can apply that same deep awareness to technology. I appreciate, too, their thoughts on resilience and the transmission of knowledge in a time of radical change on Earth. (If you enjoy this Q&A, combine it with two previous Top 5 favorites: “The Great Forgetting,” a read on resilience and the environment, and “What Counts As Seeing,” another interview focused on the nonhuman and natural world.) —CLR
Jason Kehe | Wired | March 23, 2023 | 4,044 words
For someone who’s published countless books, and sold an enormous multiple of that countlessness, Brandon Sanderson is anything but a household name. Unless you live in a fantasy house, that is. Still, the most prolific living genre fiction writer has never been the subject of a magazine profile, which makes Jason Kehe’s treatment all the more enjoyable. A year ago, I picked Kehe’s piece about simulation theory for this roundup, and the two stories share a damn-the-torpedoes willingness to fuse exegetical acuity with a chatty, even flippant POV. What works for a philosophical essay works for a portrait; Kehe’s quest isn’t to capture Sanderson as much as it is to capture why people love Sanderson so much, and what animates his sprawling fictional worlds. That means casting away the false pieties and stannery that infect so many “celebrity” profiles and instead relishing in the man’s banalities. Yet, the barbs are tipped with love, and everyone — the voracious fans, Sanderson’s cliché-spouting characters, and Sanderson himself — shines as their truest selves. —PR
Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words
Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrick’s Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holiday’s annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, “insults and elbows and fits [are] thrown” until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie — over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, “it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.” —CW
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | March 20, 2023 | 4,772 words
This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentino’s exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight. —CW
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The United States supported a coup in Honduras in 2009. Fast forward a dozen years, and the Latin American country finally escaped the repressive thumb of far-right administrations when a leftist president — and the country’s first female head of state — was elected. She promised reform, including as it pertains to the mining sector, which has devastated portions of the country’s environment and used horrific violence to suppress its opponents. As Jared Olson details, however, hope soon faded:
They blocked the road with boulders and palm fronds. They unraveled a long canvas sign, bringing the vehicles to a stop — a traffic jam that would end up stretching for miles. Drivers stepped out into the oppressive August humidity, annoyed but not unaccustomed to this practice, one of the only ways poor Hondurans can get the outside world’s attention. Several dozen people, their faces wrapped in T-shirts or bandannas, some wielding rusty machetes, had closed off the only highway on the northern coast. It was the first protest against the Pinares mine — and the government’s failure to rein in its operations — since Castro came to power eight months before.
Things weren’t going well. That Castro’s campaign promises might not only go unfulfilled but betrayed was made clear that afternoon last August when, as a light rain fell, a truck of military police forced its way through the jeering crowd of protesters and past their blockade — to deliver drums of gasoline to the mine.
Since their creation in 2013, the military police have racked up a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killings as a part of its brutal Mano Dura, or iron fist, strategy against gangs. Though it earned them a modicum of popularity among those living in gang-controlled slums, they also became notorious for their indiscriminate violence against protesters, as well as the security they provided for extractive projects. They’ve faced accusations of working as gunmen in the drug trade and selling their services as assassins-for-hire. The unit was pushed by Juan Orlando Hernández, now facing trial in the United States for drug trafficking, while he was president of the Honduran congress, in his attempt to give the military power over the police — his “Praetorian Guard,” in the words of one critic.
Castro had been a critic of the unit before her election. But after a series of high-profile massacres last summer, she decided that — promises to demilitarize notwithstanding — the unit would be kept on the streets. And here they were, providing gasoline and armed security to a mining project mired in controversy and blood.
In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:
The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:
a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.
In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.
Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:
They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child.
Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post.
Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.
Gabriella Paiella pays homage to the ultimate “Dad movie,” Master and Commander, a staggering 20 years after its release. Made in a different era of Hollywood, this fun essay also reflects on how the movie experience has changed over the decades.
Any nostalgia stirred up by Master and Commander is also nostalgia for a different era of Hollywood. This sort of richly detailed, big-budget historical epic rarely gets a chance in today’s movie landscape. And even if the action isn’t the point, the battles absolutely kick ass, using practical effects that would probably be weightless CGI these days.
The Delphi murders is a case that every true crime commentator has jumped on; analyzing the eerie footage of the suspect captured by Liberty German on her phone before her tragic murder. Huge public interest has done little to find definitive answers for the murdered girls; instead operating as a catalyst for this vast amount of content. Aja Romano details this disturbing case, thus adding to the glut of information, but Romano at least uses this poster case of the true crime genre to question the ethics of this growing industry.
Nine days after the murders, police released an audio recording of Bridge Guy, now officially named a suspect, saying, “Down the hill.”
This was arguably the moment when Delphi stopped being solely a hometown tragedy and entered the annals of true crime fame — when the eerie disembodied audio, complete with the pixellated image of the killer, swept across media outlets nationwide, galvanizing interest in the tragic story of two young friends who died brutally, side by side.
Professor Paco Calvo believes that plant behavior is the key to understanding how human minds work. Plant lover Amanda Gefter clearly sees the logic in his work and delights in explaining it to us in this fascinating piece.
Artificial neural networks have led to breakthroughs in machine learning and big data, but they still seemed, to Calvo, a far cry from living intelligence. Programmers train the neural networks, telling them when they’re right and when they’re wrong, whereas living systems figure things out for themselves, and with small amounts of data to boot. A computer has to see, say, a million pictures of cats before it can recognize one, and even then all it takes to trip up the algorithm is a shadow. Meanwhile, you show a 2-year-old human one cat, cast all the shadows you want, and the toddler will recognize that kitty.
There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:
That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.
The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
Sophie Elmhirst takes an insightful look into the unique therapy options for the super-rich. Like many people, loneliness and a lack of connection lie at the root of their problems, but, as Elmhirst alludes to in this essay, if even rehab treats them differently from other people can they really hope to find what they need?
But beyond the desire for privacy, extreme wealth has an oddly separating effect. “If you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,” Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.
What inspires people to contribute to a site for nothing? Stephen Luries goes on a mission to find the people determined to give credit where credit is due — and the automation getting ready to topple them.
Adams, now 88, has since written almost 7,000 plot summaries for films listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In total, he’s contributed more than 890,000 pieces of information about film and TV, a chunk of which came straight from the files he hauled from Eastland. “If data was weighable,” he told me, “the IMDb owes a small ton of thank you kindly, sirs to Preston Smith and Victor Cornelius. I was only the messenger.”
It’s been twenty-five years since the film Titanic dominated the cultural horizon, yet apparently, we are still asking the same questions — about both the disaster and the film. What angle did the ship sink at? Could both Rose and Jack have fit on that door? Megan Garber takes an understandably jaded look at why we still want to know.
Time may heal all wounds, but Hollywood helps things along. For many Americans, Titanic now refers less to those 1,535 people than to just two: Jack and Rose. James Cameron’s semi-fictional film about the disaster—for a long while, the highest-grossing movie of all time—has taken on a memetic familiarity.
Our stories this week cover why socializing becomes more of an effort as we get older (and why it shouldn’t), the volunteers in Ukraine who are genuinely motivated by the cause, the life of a gambler, soul-saving runs with a dog named Hank, and the Buy Nothing movement. We hope that you enjoy spending time with all of these topics.
Dan Kois | Slate | February 15, 2023 | 2,753 words
Raising a young daughter and feeling socially disconnected as an adult, I constantly think about where I want to live, but also how I’d like to live. I wrote recently about seeking “community,” but I’m unsure what that even means. So this piece, which explores why Americans spend less time these days hanging out with people, really speaks to me. Perhaps what I long for isn’t some kind of mythical tight-knit tribe to be part of, but something far simpler: more opportunities for casual hangouts. But is this simple? Dan Kois reaches out to Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, and asks if he can fly to Vermont to spend time with her, a total stranger, for a day. The piece that emerges from the visit is delightful and relatable. I can’t help but recall my college years and my 20s: wandering over to friends’ dorm rooms to see what they were up to, piling onto couches in someone’s living room to sit and chat and laugh for hours, frequenting the dive bars and weekly club nights where I knew I’d run into familiar faces. To borrow Liming’s words, these were “effortlessly social” times — and they seem so long ago. Social media, over-scheduled lives, and the pandemic have all made hanging out harder. While I also attribute my isolation to age, Kois notes how young people, including his teenage daughters, still find it hard to put themselves out there or carve out time for casual socializing. While I may not be brave enough after reading this to knock on my upstairs neighbors’ door and sit on their couch to shoot the shit, I’m inspired by Kois’ openness and curiosity. —CLR
Matt Gallagher | Esquire | February 23, 2023 | 6,935 words
Matt Gallagher is no stranger to warfare. His Army deployment in Iraq became the basis of the memoir Kaboom, and (after publishing two novels) he visited western Ukraine with other combat veterans to train civilians. His return to Ukraine for this Esquire feature, however, is to chronicle the “volunteer ecosystem” that has taken root: the men and women who have converged upon the country from both sides of its borders to defend it against prolonged Russian aggression. These aren’t cosplayers or U.S. extremists trying to get militia cred — “all those bitches got weeded out quick,” says one volunteer, an Air Force vet who’s training Ukrainian recruits — but they’re not all mercenaries, either. Over the course of nearly 7,000 words, Gallagher meets a wide swath of people who have moved by the nobility of the cause, from a Ukrainian woman who coordinates medical training to a one-time Clinton administration staffer who travels through Ukraine writing checks and chipping in. This is wartime reporting I never thought I’d read, a reminder that in an age of geopolitical deceit and oil greed, there still exist people willing to take up arms in service of a democratic ideal. Add in the rich vignettes threaded throughout, and you’ve got a piece you’ll not likely forget anytime soon. —PR
Marina Benjamin | Granta | February 9, 2023 | 4,596 words
There’s the thrill of the doing, but before that comes the anticipation, which for some is richer, offering everything the imagination can conjure, without the limits placed by the actual experience. When Marina Benjamin talks about ditching Ph.D. studies to hit the road as a professional gambler, you want to jump in the passenger seat of the hired convertible and burn rubber, right along with her. But what happens when gambling isn’t about winning so much as a way to quantify all that you’ve lost? Benjamin writes: “I now think it more likely that I was toying with loss itself — as one might toy with fire! — trying to figure out at a time of profound change in my life, my entry into the adult world, just how much, and what kind of loss I could comfortably tolerate.” —KS
Caleb Daniloff | Runner’s World | February 22, 2023 | 3,324 words
This essay is about addiction — and a dog called Hank. Hank couldn’t help his 25-year-old owner, Shea, overcome her struggles with heroin and fentanyl, but he could help her father, Caleb Daniloff, who looks after him when Shea cannot. In this beautiful essay, Daniloff describes how running the Fells outside Boston, with Hank, helps ease his torment over Shea and draws him into the present, even if only briefly. He is searingly honest, not shying away from what he views as his failings, making it clear why occasionally pulling himself out of the punishment of his own mind is so important. Weaving between his time on the Fells and a narrative of Shea’s addiction and eventual recovery, Daniloff shows the complexities of his life against the straightforward pleasure of watching Hank bounding after a squirrel. A reminder that simple things can be oh-so-important. —CW
Vauhini Vara | WIRED | February 23, 2023 | 7,267 words
It’s a worthy concept: hyper-local Facebook community groups connecting those in need of gently used items with their owners, a practice that offers environmental benefits in reducing waste with reuse, as well as a chance to thumb your nose at capitalism. But what happened to the Buy Nothing movement founded by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, which by 2022 had expanded to 6 million members in 60 countries? Vauhini Vara discovers that to be able to propagate your values, sometimes you need to accept the compromises of free community access at scale or risk the wrath of the community you created. “The truth was that turning Buy Nothing into a business had come with far more expenses than revenues,” Vara writes. “If Facebook profited from Buy Nothing members’ activities, it also covered many of their costs. With the launch of the app, the resources that came for free with Facebook — software development, computing power, visibility — were suddenly Clark and Rockefeller’s responsibility.” —KS
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Jessica L. Pavia | Longreads | February 21, 2023 | 20 minutes (5,721 words)
I spent most of my time in his room. Every day the same routine: 15 minutes before the bell rang, 45 at the end of the day. My excuse at first was that I didn’t have many friends. Good friends. But that wasn’t true. Entirely.
When I found myself in his class, the side effects of several friendless, depressive years still clung to my skin. The pull of his bright room, the shining praise he left on my papers, called to the deep aches within me. So I made up excuses for seeing T., my English teacher.
It was my junior year and I was trying to figure out what I wanted, and how to get it. In the mornings, T. and I talked about our previous days, the books we were reading, or the upcoming lesson. I’d meander around his room, glance at photos hanging on his wall, and ask about inside jokes from previous classes written on torn paper pierced onto cork boards. I found out he sang and played guitar in a band with another English teacher, and I made an internal promise to stumble into the bar they played in once I turned 21. We’d glance at each other from across the room, me cradling an emptying beer to prove my age, and we would know: Time had caught up, we could be together.
I wore knee-high socks and short plaid skirts, having stumbled around Tumblr the night before, beginning to idolize Lana Del Rey, Lolita, and nymphs; beginning to follow every blog tagged #teachercrushcommunity or #tcc, accounts with names like youaremyfavoritesubject, teachercrush-tcc, teachersthough.
I read students from around the world recounting their school day, or writing fantasy stories about themselves and their teacher crush. I saw GIFs of teachers smiling down at students chewing on pencils. One user commented: “THIS IS HOW BEN AND I HAVE EYE CONTACT MOST OF THE TIME WHEN HE’S IN FRONT OF CLASS SITTING DOWN.”
Sometimes, I considered writing about T.
*Some names have been changed.
My closest friend at the time was Kayla*. We had met years ago, at the snack shop while our brothers played baseball in the background, but I never remembered that. I knew her from eighth grade when we shared English, creative writing, and art classes together. The latter where we talked about Once Upon A Time and doodled hearts around our names alongside the characters’. Creative writing where we wrote into each other’s stories, each other’s universes.
By junior year, she had a deep crush on M., another English teacher up the stairs from T. She talked about him ceaselessly — at lunch, during rehearsal, all night over the phone.
At first, I thought she was deluding herself. The whole thing a disgusting fantasy. I could barely stand, in fact, sitting through lunch period with her going on about M.’s eyes or the way he stood next to her in the hallway.
But she was persistent, and eventually, I bought into it.
I bought into it because I liked having a secret, and loved having a crush. I reveled in the weight of it all, in how risky this business was. I enjoyed the game of seducing T. — the only way I knew how as a junior: Be kind, be interested, be smart. But the biggest reason was T.’s affirmations, which I sucked up like a sponge, how he made me feel smart and seen. He had a soft face and body; he talked about things I liked.
So now, when lunch came, we rushed through the crowd to nestle together at our table and share updates. Kayla was always more open than me, not even looking around the cafeteria to see who could be listening, never checking to make sure M. wasn’t lunch monitor that day, never bothering to use the code names we created.
By junior year, she had a deep crush on M., another English teacher up the stairs from T. She talked about him ceaselessly — at lunch, during rehearsal, all night over the phone.
We obsessed over stolen glances. The moments when T., sitting at his desk — brown hair and stubbly chin, his broad shoulders hunched over his laptop — would suddenly look up and catch my eye from across the room. How I would smile slightly, foot bouncing up and down beneath my desk.
Kayla and I swore up and down that M. and T. could read our minds, knew how infatuated we were, knew we were different, were artists.
We were being so obvious. Speaking with our eyes, our bodies. If they hadn’t said anything, hadn’t turned us down by now, it meant they definitely liked us back. They knew we were different — some invisible pulsation moving from their hearts to ours, begging us to recognize their deafening love, their painful lust, their desire to know us deeper than we knew ourselves. We relished that silence. But I’m not sure how harmless it was.
Our reading partnership began with me giving T. creative pieces I was working on — essays or poems I scribbled into notebooks and called art — while our class was preoccupied with The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, and The Stranger. At that point, I was in a separate creative writing class, but I reserved certain bits just for him.
And he did the same, for me.
Staying after, besides a few students coming in and out to ask questions about their next class, it was just us. I always started in my seat on the opposite side of the room, but without fail I would begin wandering around, making it seem aimless and random. Tilting my head to the side, acting as if something got my attention. Only to land at the table and chair just inches from his desk.
T. would return a piece of mine, something about a boy who didn’t exist, or a boy who was secretly him. He usually took a few days to read and leave notes, sometimes just a night. The days we got to talk about my work were my favorite. Instead of me taking up his time and space, T. invited me to his room after the final bell. There, I’d pull my chair up beside his large dark desk as he pulled in tight around the corner, his body leaning over the pages in front of him, a red pen in hand. I basked in the time, the effort, the generosity he spent on each line, each scene, each metaphor. He was so purposeful in what he said and how he said it. I knew he really meant it — had taken the time because my writing was worthy of it. I was worthy.
“I have something for you to look at,” he told me once. “But it’s really rough.”
My heart started racing with ideas of what it could be. Half-formed thoughts of a short story where we end up together. Maybe a poem or two about some mysterious woman with short brown hair and dark eyes.
Instead, he talked about his novel, following two brothers from a mining town beginning to cave in on itself. Set years after the gold rush, the brothers find some artifact in an old building, and then the story bounced between two timelines: that of the boys in their town sinking to the core of the earth, and the artifact, a throwback to the town’s most glorious days.
He swiveled on his desk chair and pulled out the thick manuscript, bound together with the largest paperclip I had ever seen. When he handed it to me, I expected the pages to fall heavily into my palm. Instead, I felt our fingers brush past each other as the weight transferred from his large hands into mine, my skin tingling at the contact that proved it was possible to get more. I wanted more. I was hungry for more.
My friendship with Kayla was often subconsciously performative. We based our personalities on images of Lana Del Rey; the short white dresses, the dirty knees, the angled liner, the ruffled white socks. When Kayla came over to my house we put on red lipstick and sucked red lollipops. We opened one of the windows in my bedroom and sat on the roof outside. She grabbed my Polaroid camera as I placed the Born to Die album on my 2014 record player. We sang about loving older men who were addicted to drugs but held us gently. Who would die for us. We growled out lyrics begging these men to kiss us hard in the pouring rain, toying with them, saying they like their girls insane. Kayla and I turned to Tumblr to find others like us, sent each other images of gauzy dresses revealing high-rise white panties, found poems about fucking in apple orchards, and reveled in them.
Out on my roof, our bright lips developed first on the Polaroids, then our tongues, red from the candy. We put our hair in pigtails. Kayla picked out quotes from Lolita, a book we hadn’t even read yet, and recited them like gospel: “You have to be an artist and a madman … in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs … the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”
Kayla told me we were artists, that we had fantastic power; that we were deadly demons among our peers. That we knew more about romance and those delicious tremors of grown-up life. And she said that T. and M. were artists, too.
When the clock hit 2:15 p.m., I found my way back into his room. Every once in a while, T. took advantage of my presence, keeping me busy organizing books or helping with lesson plans. Once, when restacking, I stumbled upon a dirty white cover with colorful lines slashing up the left corner, The Catcher in the Rye. Pages were beginning to fall out and become oxidized, but I recognized the title from somewhere deep down in my body.
Kayla and I turned to Tumblr to find others like us, sent each other images of gauzy dresses revealing high-rise white panties, found poems about fucking in apple orchards, and reveled in them.
I was bringing the book over to my desk when another student walked in. T. had left to return books to a teacher upstairs. I looked at this student as she told me about a poetry quiz; T. had said some students might be coming in and told me where the quizzes were. I nodded my head, told her to sit, shuffled through the white pages until we found the right one. I gave it to her and sat down in the front of the room.
Then other students started coming in to grab summer reads. I told them to sign out the books on a sheet. When the student was done with her quiz, I put it on a new pile on T.’s desk. I kept signing out books and handing out quizzes, waiting for him to return. At the same time, a new confidence in myself — in my leadership — peeked out from the shadows.
When everyone left, I took back Catcher and plopped on top of his tall spinning chair, feeling proud of myself. Finally, he returned, apologizing profusely for taking so long. I explained all that happened and he looked at me, in his gray Friday crew neck shirt — a favorite because it was thin and I got to see lines and mounds and turns underneath — and said: “Well aren’t you like my little secretary.”
I stopped spinning on the chair. I got warm and fuzzy inside and felt something sort of tighten beneath my skirt. Just the day before he had called me to his desk and told me I knew how to write, to stop freaking out about it.
“You’re like a little woodland creature that feels isolated, scared sometimes, and overthinks too much. But you shouldn’t, because you’re good at writing. You should be confident,” he told me.
Later that night, I wrote everything down. And suddenly, because I couldn’t help myself, I ran away with it, writing: “He makes me so happy, but there’s so much danger attached to being with him. And I really don’t want to ruin his life. More than anything, I just really enjoy having someone to talk to, who enjoys my company. And I just really, really want to hug him and feel his caring and understanding hands around my back, feeling my entire body go warm in his grasp.”
The next day, back in his room, I asked T. if he ever read Catcher in the Rye. He shrugged, said it was overrated. Even still, he walked over to the bookshelves and grabbed the same off-white paperback. “Maybe you’ll get something from it that I didn’t,” he said. But as I read it, I too didn’t like it. I kept thinking I was missing something, not reading it right. Holden was dull and apathetic — the language boring, lacking lyricism and poetry, every word landing with a thump. No tidy ending wrapped up with a bow.
I felt so much all the time, was preoccupied with everything meaning something, but Holden just walked. And seemed to never stop. He carried his past with him, on and on, wherever he went. It was the last thing I wanted to see. At some point between giving me Catcher and before I slogged through it, T. asked to talk after class. When the bell rang, I headed to his desk. “I read your essay,” he said. He meant a short story I wrote about a young girl with an eating disorder who’d been hospitalized, sick from obsessing over the way she could escape her body and mind. My anxiety and depression were known to only ever come out in my writing, infiltrating my themes and settings, notebooks of scrawled poetry about wanting to die. Even when I hesitated to reveal how dark things had gotten to myself, I couldn’t hide it on paper. Without meaning to, I manifested these neuroses into something more tangible, physical.
I thanked him.
“It was very well done but I have to ask, is everything okay?”
I wanted to say yes and no. No, things aren’t okay. I cry in the shower every night, my parents don’t care. Yes, because I have you, and having you means I have a reason to write, to feel good about myself, to feel good about my writing, to keep coming to school. I wanted to say I did everything to please him.
But instead, I told him it was inspired by a television show. I couldn’t shatter the fantasy I’d built around us by admitting no, actually, something was broken in me. “Everything’s fine,” I told him.
I still have a few of the emails T. and I exchanged. Most, if not all, I sent using my personal email, hoping it would offer a veil of anonymity. I had seen it work in Molly Maxwell, a Canadian film I steadily became obsessed with. I don’t think I ever realized he used his school one.
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
Going through the emails again, I’m both appalled and embarrassed by myself. My tone drips with desire for his approval. I sent him three messages in a row explaining how I pretended to die after my journalism teacher said I shouldn’t have used personal pronouns in my final’s essay. Then in a separate email, he said that from what he had heard, I had the 100 percent in the bag — which I took to mean he was thinking about me on his own, asking for my grades without instigation. In the next email, I am ecstatic, writing in all caps and thanking him profusely.
One still makes my heart flutter, my pulse quicken. It’s from March 14, 2015, at 12:53 p.m. It reads: “I should be done with your story by the last bell if you want to talk about it — you should be very proud.”
Though he never took advantage of my lead, he played his part, too. He never told me to stop. Never told me I was being inappropriate in my advances, in my clear obsession. I finally see he loved the attention, too.
Last day of classes, junior year, I couldn’t bring myself to leave his room. While other students barely held their excitement together, skin itching for summer break, all I thought about was how I wouldn’t be able to use our lesson, or an upcoming vocab quiz, as an excuse for retreating into his classroom. I studied his broad shoulders and towering height, his pressed blue-checked button-downs and light beige khaki pants, his brown belt, and breaking sneakers — soon to no longer be in my daily vision — and felt a deep emptiness inside. I wondered if he felt the same. If that day held as much dread for him as it did for me.
I asked T. to sign my yearbook. Deep down I expected a proclamation of love, having convinced myself the only reason why he hadn’t reciprocated my gestures was that I was his student. I wondered, now that I would be a senior, would he be free to say what he wanted? I hoped what he wanted was me.
As I waited for him to scribble something romantic, I plopped myself on the spinning stool behind his podium and looked out to where I normally sat: second row, two desks in from the left-side windows. I thought of all the times I bit the end of my pen, toyed with him, tried to get him to blush and maybe even get hard. Begged him to notice me, see me, love me. I thought of slowly crossing my legs in my short skirts, raising my hand after every question, thinking I was proving my maturity despite my age.
He finished my yearbook and walked over to me. Rotating back and forth, back and forth, left and right on the stool, I imagined him pulling me in for a kiss, me touching the small of his back, him removing me from the stool and pushing me up against the wall. Instead, he grabbed a whiteboard eraser and began removing any last remnant of the year. But he was so close to me as I turned left and right, left and right; each nudge moved me closer and closer to where he stood behind me. I could nearly feel his hair in the wind I created, pushing the stool as far as it could go, knowing I could brush his arm if I got over far enough. And he didn’t move away; he didn’t do anything. His back faced me, but he was so close I could smell him. Later that night, alone in my room, I opened my yearbook. On the entirely blank page I had left for his words, I found a small note, barely taking up the left-hand corner.
“You were a great student this semester,” he wrote. “Make sure to come visit!”
I read over the minuscule text again and again, searching for what wasn’t there. That’s it? I asked myself. Even if he didn’t love me back, surely I deserved more recognition than that. Didn’t I?
Senior year, Kayla and I were in the same advanced English class. We spent most of our time talking about the way M. looked at her differently yesterday. About how his request for her to water his plants was obviously a declaration of his trust in her, a trust beyond teacher and student. (“He wouldn’t ask just anyone!”) We ignored the immature giggles at lunch coming from Anthony and Claire, saying that M. was gay and Kayla was wasting her time. Sometimes when he monitored lunch, Kayla and I were convinced he stood near our table on purpose.
I imagined him pulling me in for a kiss, me touching the small of his back, him removing me from the stool and pushing me up against the wall.
A favorite topic was the day Kayla sat on top of a desk in M.’s class after school, leaning over toward him behind the podium. She kicked her feet lazily while I watched from behind the door, ready to inform her of every stolen glance she missed once their meeting ended. When she walked out, we clasped hands and ran down the hall, singing praises of how well she seduced him, had captured his attention.
In class, we were assigned to write about a book turned into a movie. We scoured the internet for age-gap films, which wasn’t hard, and stumbled onto The Babysitter (1995), An Education (2009), Palo Alto (2013), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), and Pretty Baby (1978). We idolized the relationship between Ezra, a high school English teacher, and Aria Montgomery, his student, in Pretty Little Liars, asking the universe what we had to do for that to happen to us.
Unsurprisingly, we decided to write our essay on Lolita for the assignment. The first step: getting our hands on the book, which felt dangerous, maybe even wrong. Dressed in our most darling outfits we made our way to the bookstore. With the sweet taste of doing something salacious, we snuck around the shelves, nearly begging one of the male clerks to ask us what we were looking for. After half an hour of searching, we were about to give up before finding that iconic cover of baby-soft pink lips nestled next to other “Summer Beach Reads.” We found this incredibly funny, made jokes about it for weeks to come: “Ah, yes, my favorite beach read, young girl has an affair with an older man, who is also her stepfather. Sounds like my ideal summer read.”
We watched the film together, more than once. I began to find myself no longer romanticizing the story and felt nervous to tell Kayla. She was still holding onto the love story and it felt dangerous to admit I wasn’t. Here was the one person who understood me. Was I really going to isolate the both of us? We were artists, after all. Like Humbert said: Together against the world.
But something in the film didn’t hit right. That final scene, maybe. Or when Dolores finds out her mother has died and her sobs ricochet through the motel walls; retainer in, oversized pajamas, hair falling out of cloth-rolled curls. Her face twisted and unrecognizable she doesn’t look like a kid anymore, but she certainly doesn’t look like a woman. Perhaps the turning point was in Humbert’s narration, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Or later on, when he says she died in childbirth — a child she would never have had if he hadn’t stolen her, never molested her. Because he never gave her a choice. Those scenes were switches.
My final essay focused on how Humbert created a Dolores he wanted us, as readers and jury, to believe in. A Lo that desired his love and advances. We never actually know what she wants in the book because we can’t see her. Humbert is able to hide her behind the words on the page, behind her silence. But the movie gives us clarity through her physicality — the sadness in her face, the bags under her eyes, all the moments she pushes him away only to come back. A young girl without a mother, in need of even a false safety.
Whenever Kayla asked me about the paper, I made it sound less condemning. But inside, I knew I didn’t want this story for myself anymore. I watched the movie and felt a dip in my stomach. I saw Dolores for who she truly was: a 14-year-old girl. A scared girl. A kidnapped girl. I didn’t want to be lied to, stolen, raped, abused. I wanted independence and autonomy.
And yet I still snuck into T.’s classroom, still spun into his doorway with a big Barbie smile plastered on my face. How could both things be true?
Maybe the answer’s in Molly Maxwell. In the film, we follow Molly, a young girl at a school for gifted children, and a new teacher in town, Ben, whose rock band only recently disbanded. Molly and Ben stumble their way into an independent photography study and later a relationship. They “run” into each other on buses — Molly having seen Ben get on from down the street, rushing to meet up with the closing doors — and catch each other at a bar downtown.
One of the first photos Molly takes is of her feet, adorned in green socks, floating below her room’s chandelier. I began taking my heavy, clunky film camera to school. And with each new roll of film, the first picture was always my feet sticking up in the air, dangling below the crystals.
I ripped out a page from a magazine and scribbled my favorite lines from the film on it:
“You’re something else, Molly Maxwell.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“No. You’re like a hand grenade.”
I daydreamed about running into T. around town and going on a secret jaunt to an island as Ben and Molly do. I wondered what we’d talk about, spinning around in some dizzying abandoned top ride. I wondered if he would take my film camera, like Ben does with Molly’s, and gently pull my sweatshirt hood down, his big hands hesitating to tuck the hair flying around my face behind my ears. I wondered if he’d get angry if I said, “Do not bother, waste of film.” I wondered how we’d look at each other after the photo was taken, sitting in the silence of rushing waves and whispering wind.
In one scene, Molly takes her clothes off slowly in front of Ben. I told myself it was because she wanted to and because she was a woman, not a kid, and they could both see it. Molly stares at Ben who says, “You know you’re a real godsend.” She takes her hair out of its ponytail, stands up, unbuttons her shirt. She pulls her skirt and gray tights down, her shirt off. She’s standing in green underwear and a silver bra. Ben walks over to her, closing the space between them, hands linger over her arms, her skin, like one touch might hurt her.
Kayla and I went through phases of watching this movie: as high school students, freshmen, then juniors in college, and first years in graduate programs. Watching the movie in high school, the relationship between Molly and Ben felt so distinctive from Dolores and Humbert’s. Molly spends the entire film convincing Ben of her maturity. And she does it so well, that I believed her, too. So when their relationship starts, it does feel more consensual than Lolita. That’s the trick.
In one scene, Molly takes her clothes off slowly in front of Ben. I told myself it was because she wanted to and because she was a woman, not a kid, and they could both see it.
In the book Stolen by Lucy Christopher, a young woman is kidnapped by a man who’s been watching her. He attempts to convince her of his love, and eventually, with the onset of Stockholm syndrome, he does. But the book wants its readers to feel the same way. It’s moving and upsetting and successful because you, ostensibly, develop the syndrome, too.
Narratives like Molly Maxwell, like Stolen, are meant to make us question the ease with which we start to accept inappropriate relationships. But when you’re young and looking for approval, you don’t have the tools to analyze these subtleties at play. All to say, it took me until my early 20s to see the movie in a new light. And when I did, Molly sounded young, felt young, was young. I finally saw it.
I brought T. my college essay more to read than to edit, but I guess I didn’t explain that well enough. He asked me to come by after school so we could go through what he thought of it, and given any excuse to sit beside his desk once more, I agreed. But when I got there, other students were in his room, too. For some reason, I thought it would be just us; a special meeting closed to the outside world.
He gestured for me to pull up a chair. I scooched in as close as I could, tried to touch my leg to his, so close I could tell the fabric blend of his pants. T. started going through his notes and I saw my paper was riddled with red pen marks. My cheeks flamed, pulse quickened: He hates it, he hates it, he hates it, he hates me.
Half listening, my ears filled with blood as he went through each grammar change he thought I should make, each wrong sentence. At one point he called over to the other students in the room, peers of mine, and asked what they thought of a line. That was the ultimate betrayal.
I didn’t listen to them. I just stared into his eyes, my whole face hardening. How could you do this? My writing is just for you. Why are you asking them? What role do they play in this?
I seethed so much that I thought he would feel my body radiating heat. At the end, I snatched the paper out of his hands, tears forming in my eyes, and stalked out of the room.
When I got home I stormed up to my room, chucking my backpack onto the floor. I grabbed my black notebook out of my bag and wrote: “Today, I grew up. Today, I realized I don’t need, nor want, T. by my side. He was rude to me in a way that showed me he doesn’t care in the way I thought. And I’m honestly very happy I had this revelation.”
“I needed it.”
“I deserve bigger and better things.”
We run through the halls, blue dresses with gray cardigans, Kayla’s big purple backpack dwarfing her height despite the three-inch wedges she always wore in spring. Our small girl laughs ting off the metal lockers as we race against the clock. Just a few more steps and then his door. Just a few more steps and one last goodbye, maybe finally a hug, a kiss, or an admission of love. But as we turn left, manifesting M.’s door swinging wide open at the sight of her, it’s shut and locked.
Kayla backs away and lightly slams her head into the locker behind her. My laughter starts to roll and cannot stop. I snap a photo as we both laugh at ourselves, sinking down to our knees, stomachs hurting, abs forming.
“Well I guess that’s it,” she says.
We join hands once more, but there’s something more final to it this time. The door to the outside world, to our cars and the road, is right down the hall. We head over.
Part of me has let T. go. Another part, the ugly part, knows I would be jealous if it came out that T. took advantage of a student that wasn’t me. That I’d interpret as him saying I was never good enough. There is so much silence in all of this. In the stories of girls abused and groomed by their teachers; in the stories of girls aching for attention, and teachers relishing in it. I workshopped this essay once and the professor — an older white female writer — thanked me for telling it from this perspective. “People don’t believe me when I say some of these young women are asking for it,” she told me. “That they sexualize male teachers.” Her comment broke me. Made me feel completely misunderstood. That’s not what I’m trying to say, I wanted to yell.
I scooched in as close as I could, tried to touch my leg to his, so close I could tell the fabric blend of his pants.
Kayla and I used to watch the movie Beautiful Girls for Natalie Portman’s character and her neighbor Willie, an older man visiting his hometown. In one scene, Willie leaves his buddies ice fishing in a red shed and walks over to where he’s seen Natalie Portman’s character, Marty, skating with other children. He wears a trench coat and hoodie. She has on overalls and a white fair isle sweater. A green hat on her head, mittens to cover her small hands.
She asks what he’s doing there. He tells her. He asks about her crush from school: “So where’s Scooter? Uh, what’s his name. Billy? Tiger? Pookie?” She’s not into him anymore.
“So you got someone new?”
She does a small jump on the ice. For the first time, she’s quiet. Then she smiles, licks her lips a bit: “Yep, you.”
Willie laughs, a smile crosses his face and his breath turns to smoke in the cold air. He’s happy with this reveal. “What?”
“You. You’re my new boyfriend Willie. You up to it? Oh, I feel faint!”
She falls into his arms, and in the background, one of Willie’s old friends, now skating with his own kids, falters. He’s heard about her one drunken night when Willie said he thinks he loves her.
Marty asks if Willie will wait for her. She says, “We can walk through this world together.”
Young girls are desperate for validation. We crave recognition so badly from older male figures that sometimes we mistake innocent need for emotional desire. That impulse is misguided, sure, but we are children. We are young and pubescent and desperate for someone, anyone, to see us and say everything will be alright. That we are alright. And it’s easy to misconstrue love when you have access to bits of culture that romanticize those relationships, imbuing sensuality within the hush of forbidden love.
Only recently have we begun the uncomfortable conversations. Memoirs like Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita and Cheryl Nichols’ four-part Hulu docuseries, Keep This Between Us, expose what they describe as an “epidemic” of inappropriate relationships between students and teachers, and the silence from administration, peers, and adults that enables the behavior.
There is no situation in which the student is to blame, ever. Even if they “ask for it,” even if they seduce and flirt and beg. Certain teachers, often narcissistic, relish the spotlight we give them. Some may never act but remain complicit in their silence. For something so pervasive amongst young women — so much so that entire communities online used to exist in support of it, and probably still do — we should all be much louder.
I once took T.’s quietude for admission. If he only spoke, if he only acted like an adult and broke the mirage, where would my energy have then gone? All the time I spent molding myself into his perfect student. Focused on pleasing him and only him. I’d like to think it’d go somewhere progressive. I’d like to think I would have poured it into myself.
Jessica L. Pavia is a Pushcart Prize-nominated creative nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, and the Columbia Journal, among others. She is a columnist for Write or Die Magazine based in Rochester, NY.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens
Overcoming battles with mental health to become an incredible cliff diver, Gary Hunt also appears to be a lovely person, as Xan Rice demonstrates in this endearing portrait of an unusual athlete — one unruffled by sponsors, other competitors, or great heights.
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