Not prayers nor writing lines nor even palms caned bloody would be enough to discipline Savvas, the worst student of our class, Ms. Antoniou said. So she made him stand in the corner of our classroom balanced on one leg with his back turned to us, and this lasted for years.

This is the only way children like him learn to behave, Ms. Antoniou said regretfully as she sealed the classroom from the rest of the school, and the world. Seated dutifully at our desks, we watched her swallow the key.

Christmas holidays came and when it snowed outside, we made miniature snowmen on the windowsill, then saved the water in empty crayon baskets for drinking. Easter followed and a bird left us its eggs to decorate with pastel watercolors before frying them on hot metal during a sunny day. School closed for summer break, and we stayed then also, sending paper planes out to our parents, saying we hoped they had fun on their vacations to seaside villages or mountain ones, kiss our grandparents for us but, no, we can’t come with because we’re being obedient, we are good examples for bad classmates to mimic, and aren’t our parents proud of us?

They sent back postcards sometimes, if their busy schedules allowed them, until they too forgot about us like the janitor and head teacher and principal already had. And we forgot about ourselves, our former selves, growing taller, surpassing every marking on every height chart of past first graders, then that of the second and third and fourth graders, the fifth, the sixth, and then there were no charts left in this classroom to surpass. But despite our best efforts, our bodies were diligent things, they didn’t stop growing until we wondered if we would be tall enough our heads would pierce through the roof.

Years passed in clusters of hours and days and weeks. We learned arithmetic until we discovered our own math theorems; soon we could recite all our classroom’s books forward and backward, and we invented new directions of recitation until we needed no other nourishment to sustain us; we could chew inked paper and spew out answers to the universe. Early on, the other teachers had climbed rickety ladders to our barred windows to slip us food and water and other contraband, but those offerings had trickled to a stop long ago. We watched the class’s pet rabbit grow old and die, and we sucked the marrow from its skeleton, fighting over the most fragile of bones.

What else did we do?

We danced, we bickered, we married each other and made fake flower crowns out of colorful paper. And someone put a wreath on Savvas’s head too as he wobbled on his one-legged perch. We thought he might fall but he didn’t. There, on the white-chalk-dusted and pencil-shavings-strewn floor, he flamingo-balanced as we slept curled under our desks with our old backpacks as pillows.

And when Ms. Antoniou grew old and died like our pet rabbit had, we wheeled her corpse upon her teacher’s chair so that it faced the opposite corner Savvas did. This was the only gift we knew how to give him. Soon our teacher was bones and we fashioned flutes out of them. We sang, we all danced together while Savvas swayed. But no one dared talk to him, if he could still talk, and some of us thought he might not have a face at all anymore, on account of us not having seen it in so long, his features slipping away from memory. And Savvas’ crimes? His mischief, his disobedience, the reasons behind the prayers and the written lines and even the palms caned bloody, why Savvas stood in the corner on one leg facing the wall? Well.

We forgot those, too. 

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson