Kelsey Ward
The Student Body
I hadn’t thought about him in more than a year when I walked into that ground floor classroom on the first day of the fall semester. I was half an hour early for the 8:00 a.m. freshman composition course I was assigned to teach that term. The low, sensible block heels I wore clapped on the linoleum floor, echoing down the hallway; I seemed to be the only person in the building. When I found the classroom, I turned on the lights and stood in the doorway, taking a second to place why this classroom, located in the Social Sciences building, a considerable trek from the English Department, felt so familiar, but it only took a second.
The set-up of the room was the same: all the desks faced forward, their backs to the door, evenly parted down the middle, but now, the university had painted an accent wall one of the school’s colors, a deep garnet, and hung a few black-and-white photographs of students and campus buildings from the mid-twentieth century. All the walls had been white and bare six years before when I was an undergraduate, when this had been our classroom.
I walked between the empty desks to the front of the room, set my briefcase on the wooden podium, and prodded the appropriate buttons to wake up the technology. The computer whirred to life, the light bulb inside the ceiling projector flickered, and the screen hummed as it lowered over the white board. I kept glancing to the right side of the room, to the second row of desks from the wall, the second chair from the front, curious as to what it looked like from this vantage point, curious as to what I must have looked like when he stood behind this podium, when he had been my freshman writing instructor.
My students soon filed in and sat in what would end up being their unofficially assigned seats for the rest of the semester. At eight o’clock sharp, I introduced myself to them, passed out the syllabus, and asked for their introductions. While they shared their name, hometown, major, I scanned the university-provided roster, which included tiny headshots taken at their freshman orientation over the summer. In the photos, their faces are sweaty and flushed from the Florida heat, like school children just come in from recess, and all I could think about was how little they all looked.
*
Whenever I remember the spring semester of my freshman year, it is always raining. It surely didn’t rain for four months straight, but most of my memories of that time are set against a backdrop of navy skies and dark gray clouds. I was often wearing rainboots as I traipsed through puddles in parking lots covered in damp pine needles. I had spent the treacherously-hot-turned-bone-chilling-cold days of fall knocking out course requirements—psychology, oceanography, statistics—but now that it was spring, I signed up for courses in my intended major: creative writing.
I had wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. My mother repeats one story ad infinitum: she was the “Room Mom” for my second-grade class, there to help out on the day we were learning to write stories. We were each given a worksheet that clearly outlined the writing process for us. There were blank lines next to the words “title,” “characters,” “setting,” and “plot,” which we were supposed to fill out before moving onto the bottom of the page to write our stories. The way my mother tells it, she was helping other students—here she usually pauses and makes a point to mention that the boys had a harder time than the girls—and when she looked up and found me across the room, I was already on the back of the worksheet, my head bent low, a ponytail keeping my dark hair out of my face as I scribbled furiously. My teacher appeared beside her and supposedly said with a smile, “You have a writer.”
I have always considered this my genesis. So it is easy to imagine nineteen-year-old me on that cold, wet January day, clomping in my navy rain boots, my turquoise back pack on, umbrella in hand, when I took my seat near the front in that ground floor classroom, to take my first ever college-level writing class, and how I vibrated with excitement.
*
Attending graduate school and teaching undergraduates at the same institution where I received my bachelor’s degree feels a lot like how I imagine it must feel to look back at one’s own childhood after becoming a parent. I remember how invincible I felt and yet, when looking at my own students, at the same age I was, participating in similar activities, I’m frightened by how fragile they are, and even more frightened by how unaware they are of their fragility.
In the six-week training course the department requires of new graduate teaching assistants, I learned that the pedagogy of freshman composition remained largely unchanged since I was a freshman myself. Classes are small, capped at fewer than twenty students, likely smaller than any other course students will enroll in during their time at this enormous public university. In most of their lecture-style classes, their instructors will never learn their names, let alone have a conversation with them. However, the classes we teach aren’t a lecture, but rather, discussion-based, encouraging students to share their thoughts and ideas, creating a dialogue between students and their instructors. It also allows us to speak with them, rather than at them, fostering a conversation about writing, something for which there is no formula that can be solved on a white board. And, what’s more, the college composition directors mandate we cancel a week’s worth of class, twice a semester, to facilitate a series of one-on-one conferences, held in an on-campus coffee shop or a shared TA office, in which we read through essay drafts and give personalized feedback.
It’s fantastic writing pedagogy, all that individual attention, but it’s easy, as an instructor or a student to get comfortable—in some cases, too comfortable. Sharing writing of any kind, but especially autobiographical nonfiction, is an intimate act, and that kind of sharing is something we ask our students to do often. We ask them to write about memories to teach them tense shifts and point-of-view. We ask them to research and write about topics of personal significance to them. We ask them to analyze texts and artifacts that have been meaningful in their lives, and they do, partially because they have to if they want to pass the course, but also because, more often than not, they want to. They want to share what has been important to them and their development, what they like and dislike, what they think and why. They want someone to listen to them, really listen to them, to see them as they see themselves. As an undergraduate, I was no different.
*
He touched me on the first day of class. A high five in response to learning that I was a creative writing major, the only one in our class, during the ice breaker. I’ve thought a lot about that moment over the years. Did something pass between us then? Did I know then what he and I would do? Become? Did we seal our fate with that high five? What I do know is this: a high five is a rare form of physical contact as it requires both persons to be willing, active participants. Both individuals must raise a hand to the other, both must reach out to the other in order for it to take place. Almost all other forms of touching can be done without one party’s consent, by violent force, or simply unreciprocated. A hug, a kiss, a sex act, all can be done to someone. What I’m trying to say is: I was asking for it. Or, at least, that is how I would come to think of it. Of us.
I was invested in my education and eager to learn all I could about writing and how to become a better writer. I came to class prepared, I did all the readings, and I wrote as much as I could. Department policy mandates three major assignments, but only two stand out in my mind. One was a “personal narrative” about my parents’ complex marriage. We met in the office he shared with several other TAs during conference week to discuss my draft. He had liked it. He left a check mark next to the vivid details I used to describe my mother. It reminded him of something he had written about his own mother once, and his parents, too, had had a difficult marriage before their divorce, he told me. I was thrilled to know that my grade school teachers hadn’t been lying to me all this time. I was a writer, and this confirmed it.
And, if I’m honest, I had a crush on him. Sure, I thought he was cute. The way he looked at me when I spoke in class, with his intense blue eyes, made my insides all twisty. And yeah, I thought he was funny, but it was mostly that he knew so much about the thing I wanted to know about, he was good at the thing I wanted to be good at. Sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed, on turquoise sheets, a poster of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly hung on the wall above my headboard, an homage to my favorite novel, I Googled him and read his two published short stories in online literary journals. Later, when I told him I had done this, his eyebrows lifted in unison. He was flattered.
Our true genesis, though, was in my inbox. I emailed him about everything: which classes to take with which instructors, potential MFA programs, literary journals and publications, even though I had barely ever written a story longer than a few pages. He responded to each inquiry with unfailing patience, but I can pinpoint the exact moment everything shifted. About half way through the semester, after a double-digit-long email exchange came to a natural close and there was nothing I could say in response to his last message, he continued our conversation. Maybe a few hours went by, maybe a day, before my laptop pinged. A banner slid across my screen from stage right, his name displayed on it. Attached was an interview Truman Capote had done with The Paris Review in 1957. He wondered if I had ever read it. Of course I had, I told him, and our conversation continued.
*
The English Department recognizes there is potential for student/teacher relationships to develop beyond a professional scope. They recognize and acknowledge the intimate nature of our classrooms. During summer training, mere weeks away from my first teaching experience, I was explicitly cautioned against having romantic relationships with my undergraduate students – albeit somewhat lightheartedly. The Director of College Composition told my cohort the story of one graduate student who held his office hours at a restaurant off-campus at 8 p.m. on Friday nights.
“Feel free to hold your office hours at an on-campus coffee shop or at the library, if you don’t want to hole up in your office,” she said, pacing in the middle of the circle of desks, “but please do not use it as an opportunity to have impromptu dates with your students.”
She chuckled at the image, such a ridiculous idea, why would anyone do such a thing? We all laughed with her. Then, at the all TA meeting before the commencement of the fall semester, the department chair gave his annual spiel, ending his ten-minute lecture with, “And please—don’t fraternize with your students, or any other ‘F word’ for that matter.”
The bulk of what we learned about, in our summer pedagogy class—besides how to teach composition, of course—revolved around the confessions students might make in our classrooms, in their papers, in our offices, with the doors cracked. The intimacy of our classroom and assignments might make them feel like they know us, like they can trust us with the ways the world has wronged them. Disclosures of sexual assault, self-harm, suicidal ideation, addiction, parental strife, poverty, and world-shattering loss. We learned in these sessions which disclosures we’re legally obligated to report to the university and which we should just back away from slowly, hands visible, sending them to the counseling center. As hard as it might be, don’t take on their burdens, we were told. Don’t get too close.
These scenarios and hypotheticals quickly became realities for me. Since that summer training, I’ve sat across from students and read their essays about their parents dying or when they came out to their friends and family. I’ve crouched in front of the desks of weeping students, days after their friends were gunned down at their former high school. I’ve reciprocated a hug to a student who excitedly confided in me that she was pregnant with a baby boy. These are just a handful of examples, representations of the ways in which these students, who I barely knew, seemed to trust me with their lives. I’m not sure what I did to earn that trust. I’m not sure that I deserved it.
I’m not in contact with these students anymore. I’ve run into some around town and have smiled, waved, asked how they’ve been, but nothing beyond that. They sit in my classroom for fifteen weeks—in a summer semester, only six—and share the most vulnerable parts of themselves with me, a complete stranger, and then they’re gone.
*
The final month of that spring semester is a blur now. I would be lying if I said I remembered with exact certainty the order of the following events, but I know that they all happened. I know I was on the second floor of the university library the first time I texted him. I was sitting in an upholstered chair, my back against a window. I was studying for an upcoming final, maybe for the biology course I was taking that term, my laptop perched on my knees, when my email chimed. Attached to his email was a short story he had recently submitted for publication. I don’t remember if I had solicited the story from him, or if he sent it voluntarily, but across the top of the document was his name, address, and phone number. I don’t remember what the story was about because I know I didn’t even read it before I shot off a text message: Guess who.
To this day I don’t know if that was an honest mistake, him sending me that information, or if he was intentionally baiting me, but for the remainder of our relationship, our communication moved almost exclusively to our phones. That was how he invited me over to his apartment for the first time. He was moving at the end of the month. Finished with his MFA in fiction, having already defended his thesis, he was moving back to his hometown before moving again in the fall to begin another master’s program, in literature or philosophy. He was trying to get rid of things that weren’t worth bringing home, like half-empty bottles of liquor. He texted me and asked if I would be interested in anything from his home bar. As a nineteen-year-old with limited access to alcohol and an opportunity to finally, truly be alone with him, I jumped.
I parked my car in the lot of his apartment complex, puddles splashed under my quick steps, and I climbed the concrete stairs to his second-floor apartment. I was in such disbelief when he answered the door. He invited me in while he grabbed what I came for. The living room was just inside the door, with a futon couch in the center, facing a TV. A few small bookshelves dotted the room. The kitchen was a half hallway, enclosed entirely, so I was unable to see him from where I stood. Beyond that was his bedroom. His cat curled itself around my legs and I crouched down to pet him. He returned from the kitchen and handed me the near empty handle of sugar cookie-flavored vodka which I mixed with Sprite later that night, stirring it with my finger, before going out with some friends, disappointed that nothing more transpired.
Less than a week went by before I was back. I don’t remember which of us suggested I come over to watch one of my favorite movies that he hadn’t seen but that’s how I found myself in his apartment again, sitting on the futon. It was during one of the musical numbers that he kissed me for the first time. For the next ten days, until after the semester was over, even after he sold his bed, we mostly didn’t leave his apartment.
*
For years we kept in touch. Exchanging emails, Facebook messages, Instagram DMs, and we Skyped a few times in those months just after we had said goodbye. I asked him all sorts of questions about writing, graduate school, how to study for the GRE. Most of the time when he was the one reaching out, he was drunk or high. I never saw him again.
The last time I heard from him was just after my father died. The day after the funeral, the email app on my phone pinged as I stood at the island in my mother’s kitchen. He had seen my post on Facebook, he offered his condolences, acknowledged my deep love for my father and our relationship, hoped I would feel better soon. It was the end of August and I had just started graduate school over the summer, had just finished the required training, just learned all the protocol, how I was supposed to care for my students. I never replied.
Last January, I turned twenty-six the day before the spring semester began. It was my final semester of graduate school. I finished writing my thesis and defended it. I taught freshman writing courses. My students were eighteen, going on nineteen. The spring of my freshman year, all of this was true of him. Our lives have mirrored one another in this surprising way, but our last semesters of graduate school were decidedly different from one another: I didn’t have late night text correspondence with my students; I didn’t invite them over to my apartment; I didn’t meet them at coffee shops off campus; I didn’t submit their grades early so I could tell them, before they fell asleep in my bed, that they earned their grade honestly.
*
On our last night together, he had a gift waiting for me when I arrived at his apartment. A book he loved, which he inscribed for me, a notebook with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly on the cover—for your words—and a letter that I kept tucked inside the notebook for years.
While I was still in graduate school, I went through a closet in my apartment, cleaning out old papers, dried up pens, student evaluations from previous semesters, when I found the notebook, with the letter still stuck in the back. I flipped through the pages to see what I had written, mostly snatches of drafts, nothing worth saving. I pushed myself off the floor, notebook in hand. I found the book, still on my alphabetized shelf in the living room, and unceremoniously threw them in the trash can, making the bag collapse in on itself from the weight.
Kelsey Ward is a writer, editor, and amateur baker based in the pecan groves of south Georgia. She holds an MFA from Florida State University where her studies concentrated on creative nonfiction and the essay. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, and the Ploughshares blog. Follow her on Twitter @kelseyrward.