Comegys Elementary smells just like my grandma’s old classroom—disinfectant and potato chips—and probably like my father’s classroom in Florida, where I’m not very welcome, not with the stink of the world on me where Christianity used to be.
I walk a flight of stairs and then another. I need cash before grad school starts in the fall so I ask two different people how to get to room 203, circle back through another set of double doors. I finally settle into a classroom that looks just like ones I remember: bags of bright, waxy crayons; dingy linoleum; a poster in the shape of a thick pencil explaining what great writers do (Use a beginning, middle, and end! Check spelling!); the teacher’s desk in the corner with a thick notebook amidst the stacks of papers.
Before I ever said the word gay aloud, when the world was shrunk as small as the distance from the cul-de-sac to the church, my mother took my sister and I to the teacher supply store, probably because she was teaching preschool at the church back then, or maybe just for something fun to do during summer break: the pool, the playground, the teacher store. We clambered into the shop, which was dark and dusty and smelled like cigarettes and erasers. Out of the summer sun—so hot and bright the sidewalk shimmered—we found treasures down the aisles: slick pink folders stacked tall, purple pencil toppers by the fistful, a planning book with clean, crinkly pages. My mother bought me that thick planner and all summer I played school with my best friend, drafting lessons in reading, writing, and math in its pages.
The students start to arrive, impossibly tiny, sliding into their seats. My father doesn’t know where I am today, my head bent over a desk helping a little girl in a pink t-shirt with her multiplication tables. Maybe I didn’t really come here for money, or not only for money, anyway, but to find a last tether between us, wrap it loose around my neck, slide my nametag inside its plastic pouch. My badge is outdated, still says Johnson, same as his. Quinn and I changed our names last week and it’s no longer my name, not at all, not even a little. But he wouldn’t know that.
Eryn Sunnolia (she/they) is a queer writer living in Philadelphia, PA. Their writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HuffPost, Well+Good, and others. She is in her first year of the Rutgers Camden MFA program in creative nonfiction. She also likes making quilts. You can find them at erynsunnolia.com.
Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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