Falling In and Out

J.L. Lapinel

 

I got my first period in the crypt. With a wad of paper I was back running from wall to wall with everyone else and avoiding contact with the ball. I can’t remember whether I turned my ankle badly, but I used that moment to sit and catch my breath. That’s when Mr. K rescued my all-too-angular body right back to the main building. I dared not stare too long at his perfect nose, big orange bristles, and striped blue eyes. It didn’t skip my thoughts that I was bleeding or what that meant. The bones under the floorboards under gym class crossed my thoughts as smoothly as what was for lunch and being asked, multiple times a day, whether I caught the license of the truck that ran over my face. As soon as Mr. K deposited me with the nurse I was back to skipping down the stone spiral staircase, fingers reading the leaded windows with pictures of possibilities filling me.

That was the day he drove onto the grounds in his yellow Bug. Someone new at the school excited everyone, but especially me. Mr. G had his own set of bristles in a darker shade of brown, but shared the same set of striped blue eyes. His voice rang bells and popped like corn. The soft roll of it drew me in and I floated to him like I was following a scent. They gave him a room to stay in that happened to be directly across from my homeroom English class and that’s where he lived for two years while I melted under his sermons accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel on his portable record player in a side chapel behind a rod iron gate. During recess I sat on his bed across from homeroom and listened to his thoughts on who I could be someday, maybe in the future, after I grew up. I could only watch his mustache bounce and wonder what his lips looked like underneath. He talked of the future of who I would be, but I heard it like the weather or news because I was sure I would die very soon.

Around this time is when Ted started waiting for me after school. Ted was in my class, but we never really talked. Every day he would hide behind a different tree and jump out when I walked by. His chubby knuckles would pound and pound down on my shoulders and head until he got tired and with one last “I-hate-you-I-hate-you-you’re-so-ugly-I-hate-you” he was on his way. This was our routine for I’m not sure how long. It was so much like home that I never thought to mention it. One day I did and he didn’t come back to school. I missed his attention until that just blended into the everyday too.

During one of our chapel sessions Mr. G played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and told us about depression. The word sounded like pressing and I pictured fingers or hands pressing down and making valleys in people’s souls. I’m not sure if that was what he meant but he said he was there for us if we needed someone to talk to. I wasn’t sure what that meant either but I did like listening to him. I thought about the bones under the floor below us and the bathrooms down there as well. Did the pipes go between the bodies? I wasn’t sure but Mr. G’s eyes were so blue.

 

J.L. Lapinel is a Latinx writer and educator from Manhattan who is presently an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst. Her work appears in Yellow Arrow Journal, The Wellington Street Review, Cambridge Collection, and North American Poetry Review, among others. J.L.’s work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.