CONTENT WARNING: SUICIDE, SELF HARM, REFERENCE TO SEXUAL ABUSE
You watched about six minutes of a documentary once about fur trapping. It started with a bow-legged man crunching purposefully across gravel toward a snared animal. He wore pearl snaps and carried a hunk of rebar in a relaxed way. The animal flipped around and he unceremoniously drove the bar down. It made a wet thunking sound on its abdomen. Boredly, he kept clubbing and its little leg shot upward between the blows, wavering before him, trying to stave him off, or perhaps just obeying the electric chaos of its nervous system. The rod swept it aside and crumpled its windpipe like a water bottle. You turned it off.
*
Its resistance was not beautiful or inspiring. It wasn’t worth it.
*
You are in your tenth year teaching and the bell rings and they start pouring through the halls. You see their faces and they mingle with the faces streaming through your memory. Warm and fragile ghosts from past school years.
You see B who would be locked in the closet until her mother came home, released her, and let the younger ones beat her with cords.
You see J who went from foster home to foster home. Kids sensed it and nipped at her like pups on the runt. You remember how she flinched at her own name. Eyes white. Nerves shot.
You see Q who you never liked. He killed himself during the lockdown. You added a meager post to his memorial website and spent hours reading emotionally drenched eulogies from his family.
*
Always you see L and her sister R.
L looked nothing like R. Both looked like their mom. They always forgave her absences. Her addictions and stretches in jail. They had girls’ nights doing their makeup. They would go out to eat and she would drink too much. L would be embarrassed. When you first met L, her mom had been missing for two months. She was a ghost of a student until she was found.
Two years later during back-to-school week, L tells you in a vomit of details she had an appendectomy in June and the day she was released from the hospital her mom hung herself. She doesn’t say hung. She tilts her head to the side, shuts her eyes, and makes the rope jerking motion. Her eyes water a little.
L is one of your favorites. No one looks like her. No one talks like her. She speaks slowly and meanderingly. She pulls every syllable into a soft oval of feeling.
You really try with her. You think the universe owes her one and you try to pay the debt. You both have anger problems and one day you really have it out. You could have backed off and let her save face, but you let her humiliate herself in front of her classmates. Later, you will feel so complicit in her harm.
The girls pack Nics and weed vapes. They roll blunts and take pills. They get drunk. R takes acid and vomits on herself and then sits on your couch for an entire day without moving while L strokes her hair.
L is the stronger student. R gets kicked out of class for making a little mouth out of her hand and imitating her teacher’s speech patterns while he yells at her. She can bring adults to a precipice of rage and you secretly think it is funny, and she knows you think it’s funny, which makes it harder to straighten things out.
One day last year she just walked up to you and let it all out. No warning. No relationship. She had seen you with L, and that was enough.
You sit here trying to type this and you know you have to soften the details.
The facts would sound exaggerated. So you will water them down:
She was forced to do it in elementary school. And again later. And again. The man was caught and never came back. She hung herself on her doorknob in elementary school. But she lived. She was drunk and high during class in seventh grade. Her father lusted after her middle school friend. To cover his tracks. he labeled the child a bully to R. Now, these children can’t be in the same room at school or they will fight. Their dad told your principal: “See these hands? These hands have hurt a lot of bullies.”
The girls put their mom’s ashes next to their grandma’s. L tells you her storage unit was stuffed with cosmetics and party supplies. The girls stuffed all the beauty products they could into their folded arms. R gets high and puts her
mom’s sunglasses on the urn. They both draw silly faces on it with her lipstick. L sticks a photo of her mom holding her as a baby on the back of her phone. L talks to the urn. Tells it she misses her. Tells it she’s angry at her.
You give R a small journal to write in one day and she does. She wants money for being beautiful. She wants to be left alone. She wants to be a shark— an ancient underwater shark she saw on Netflix. She says it swims so deep no one can find it and its skin is turned inside out and you could see its organs if you were close enough. Their youngest sister A is here now. Her first day of school she has a picture of her dead mother from the funeral on her phone, shows it, and says “When I grow up I want to be like my mom.”
*
G interrupts your teaching twice a day. His arms are criss-crossed in cut marks. You deal with his suicidality so often you don’t think much of it. It might as well be a little checkbox on your hand-drawn to-do list.
You get annoyed when he shows up. You give him a hug and his damp hair clings to your face and you smell his body odor. You say “I love you—go to class.”
One time he showed up and wouldn’t stop. After you stop trying to get him to leave, he tells you last night he used a butcher knife.
Self-harm doesn’t move your needle anymore. But these details give you that scary feeling in your heart. Not because of what he did to himself. This is one of those times you have to do something. Somewhere in the back of your mind is that little voice. It is always telling you you will get too numb to it, ignore it, and that will be when a kid kills themselves after begging you to help them.
He sits in your room for the next four hours because no one comes to get him. Sometimes the suicidal ones’ names come through in a rush.
X, I, S, M, P, E, W, G, N, (one whose name you can’t remember, but you remember her face, her long cheeks and scored skin and eyes that seemed like swollen glass and emanated pressure fracture noises) Y, D, O, E.
You don’t want to think more because you know how many more are buried. You wonder why your mind sometimes wants to recite them like a mantra. Like a grocery list. Like you can’t forget. Like it matters to remember. The paw crumpling under the rebar.
*
J is your favorite this year. His mom still insists on calling him C, but he wants to be called J. She puts him on one meal a day. She makes him run a waddling mile in the mornings. She says last year during his so-called eating disorder—he was at a healthy weight.
He looks at you with that angelic little face and says “Oooooooooh boy. OH BOY. I am not OK.” Funny sounding like it looks in his singsong voice.
He has learned above all, his pain is unacceptable, so when he is really upset, he always says it like one of the three stooges.
He knows the magic words and does not want to say them. No more CPS. His parents told him to deal with things privately.
Today he is about to break. He says he has wanted to die for two weeks straight. “Oh boy—NOT GOOD.” The sillier he sounds the more serious it is.
On your way to the counseling suite, he wheels around on you. He freezes. He wants to know if his parents will be called. He starts to beg. He backs away from you like he was struck. He has the gentlest heart and you think for a moment you did strike him. His eyes are filled with tears and pleading fear. You tell him you love him. You tell him we can stand here as long as you want. You tell him whatever you can dredge up.
He knows how to hyper focus. He sees it coming. He is going to be in big trouble for telling a teacher this. Last year he told a teacher something he never told anyone. A grade school rape. Police got involved. He got in trouble at home. He was told never to speak to that teacher again. He tells you he feels so bad for hurting his parents this way. He tells you he is afraid he won’t be allowed to talk to you ever again.
You are so helpless. You are disgusted with his parents.
You tell him, “Your parents are fucked up. This is fucked up. You are allowed to feel suicidal.”
It is the wrong thing to say. You think you regret it. You don’t know. It felt like an emergency. Like he is wounded on the battlefield and you are stuffing his entrails back into a hole and what exactly is supposed to come out of your mouth?
But this isn’t an emergency like that. And as you write this you know you are embarrassed for using a soldier metaphor. You are just wearing Target pants and running shoes under fluorescent lights shifting from foot to foot on the linoleum. But you do wish he was a soldier. You do wish, if nothing else, there was a pretense of purpose to his pain.
He has to stuff it down. You can hear his parents’ voices tape looping inside his head: Hide it. Stop eating so much. Be the daughter we wanted, not the rape victim trans weirdo you are so stuck on becoming.
It will work out. You get to the counselors and they are away at training. The principal on duty is splitting time between J and F, the girl next door who was asked, “Do you want to see my boner,” from a student who has a parole officer.
The parent phone call gets delayed. J gathers his strength and remembers to swallow the magic words when he talks to the school psychologist ninety minutes later. His little paw in the air. Against the inevitable.
What else can you do? You help them resist. You help them push back. You show them where their strength is and how to use it where it will be most effective. You teach them they can’t be mean and expect anything else in return. It can be beautiful when you look at it the right way. You can see the arc. You lose yourself in these moments, but then you always float back up, gulp the clean air and let these ten years wash and wash over you. You cry in catharsis. You think about the word fulfilling.
*
Something like that. That is the best ending you can muster up for this right now. But it isn’t real. You can’t stop here. This isn’t the real ending.
*
The real ending is your first favorite student C. Her hat was half a cartoon bear head with long dangling ears that reached her waist. She had a weird chili bowl haircut and talked too loud. Kids would get irritated with her sunshine outbursts, but you always found her endearing. When you read The Tempest, you were sure all the kids would hate Shakespeare at least as much as you.
Despite your willful vengeance on the text, she loved Caliban. She wanted him to be her boyfriend, she said. She scrawled “Caliban is bae” all over her paper in highlighter.
Six years later you meet her at a Starbucks. She removes all the spaces between her words like a snake unlatches its jaws to swallow something huge. She gives you her whole life story. She was drugged and used for sex before middle school. Her mom locked her in a room for long stretches of time. She pulls out a blackness you could never conceive. Talking too loud and not stopping for a solid ninety minutes. It is interminable. You get sick inside and you want to shut her mouth. You want to throw up. You just drink your coffee and start sending your attention as far from her words as you can without being obvious. She gets to the present day. She tells you how two frat boys fucked her at the same time and high-fived. She drools from the meds she is on. She asks to come live with you. You sit in your car holding it together as you drive her home. You ask her if she loves her little sister. You tell her from now on, she should try and make her decisions like she was making them for her sister instead of herself. You will never speak to her again. You’ll get drunk and take mushrooms and drive fast in the rain to loud music later. It was Christmas Eve.
You wonder if she will kill herself.
You mostly push this memory away. But you can’t ever forget what you learned. This is how the story ends. The paw in the air. Not beautiful. Not inspiring.
You can’t dwell here too long because it hollows you out and you can’t love. You feel your body vibrate when you stare at a wall in bed. You know this could gain momentum fast. You don’t believe in lying, but you believe in the power of storytelling. So you make yourself tell the story:
You aren’t just finger painting with their pain—you are helping. You aren’t just pretending—you are a good person.
Your compassion isn’t drawn like blood—it’s a gift.
This life is an intricate stained-glass mosaic on a cathedral wall. One of those baroque and magisterial scenes, possibly of some little figure holding up its hand to shield itself from some heavenly blow about to land. It is bleeding and haunting and sacred and on fire with the moving light of the inexplicable sun behind it all.
Carson Ovalle has worked as a teacher in the public school system for ten years. He has taught SPED English, on level English, Honors English, AP English, OnRamps Rhetoric, creative writing, and assorted remedial courses.
Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.
We have earned a Platinum rating from Candid and are incredibly grateful to receive partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Humanities, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and Illinois Arts Council.
If independent publishing is important to you, PLEASE DONATE.
