Corey And You

“It’s God’s fault I can’t spell ‘conscientious,’” Corey says flatly, crossing his arms. “I can spell ‘nitwit,’ though...” ...which comes in handy for teaching evaluations. He glares across the heavy mahogany desk at his guidance counselor. 

The creases around the man’s tired eyes deepen. “Come on Corey, you’re not a nitwit. You’ve been a consistent C student for two years, in every subject except English. And even there, you've always had at least a D.”

“I get straight As in shop,” Corey mumbles.

“So what’re you gonna do, be a carpenter? Not if you don’t make it through school.”

The counselor’s veiled derision makes Corey wince. The plaques, framed certificates, and trophies on the wall catch the light as he sinks deeper into the plush armchair. Corey wonders whether the spindly counselor personally won these awards, or if they came with the office, along with the stately desk and matching bookshelves.

The counselor stares at him, waiting for a response. Corey complies. “It’s hard to keep track when the letters play musical chairs.” 

“And I suppose that’s God’s fault, too?”

“Of course it is. Everything is.” 

How many times have you thought that, yourself? A thousand responses leap to your tongue, and you don’t say any of them. You can only watch from afar.

The counselor sighs like the great bellows of a hot air balloon.

“That’s what this school teaches, isn’t it?” Corey pushes. “God’s Plan?”

“He made us all perfect in our own ways. Dyslexia is part of your unique perfection.”

“Great, so tell Ms. Snow to give me perfect grades for it.” Corey closes his fist around his failed spelling quiz, crackling the paper.

“Look, Corey. You can blame Ms. Snow or God or whoever you want, but you have to pull your grades up or you won’t make it to high school next year. Success is won, not given, and you haven’t earned it yet.”

Corey presses his lips together. Frustration and indignation burn his cheeks, but snark can’t change the facts—he’s been coasting at a low D all quarter. At a public school, the state would twist Ms. Snow’s arm until she fudged Corey’s grade, but not here at Cristo Rey Jesuit Middle School.

Corey’s predicament is news to you. You’ve only just tuned into his life after peeking into thousands of others. And after him, you’ll poke your head into thousands more. His plight doesn't mean anything to you, yet.

As the counselor fires the next barrage of axioms, Corey stares out the window over his shoulder. Nodding occasionally, it almost looks like he’s paying attention. The sky outside is blue—sleeping-in, first-kiss, summer-break blue. Even in this sterile office, Corey imagines the smell of cut grass and the warm sunlight on his hair.

But it’s not summer. It’s the last beautiful day of the year, probably. Then begins the dark slog through the winter and early spring, deep into the cold heart of the school year. Corey nods like a bobblehead. It’s gonna be a long one. The bell rings in the hall outside, one of  thirty-thousand odd times in Corey’s life.

Finally, Corey pays a few cheap promises for his ticket out of the intervention. He slips out before the counselor remembers that it’s time to update his 504 plan. Outside the office, students flow through the hallway like blood cells, clotting together against the lockers lining each side.

You remember the jostle of warm bodies and sharp elbows, don’t you? The pungency of pubescent boy sweat, the squeak of sneakers against linoleum, the banging metal locker doors. Did you ever wish God would pluck you out of this battlefield?

Corey does.

In the hallway, far enough away for plausible deniability, a girl leans against the lockers. Corey fights through the current to reach her. This is Mattie. Her hairline is pimpled, she hasn’t quite learned how to style her curls yet, and she’s heavy-handed with the eyeliner. But when she smiles at Corey, her eyes sparkle. At him. At you.

“I see you got out in one piece,” she says as Corey stumbles out of the throng.

“Kinda.” He tries to lean suavely against the locker and instead trips over a stack of textbooks on the floor. The girl beside the toppled pile, kneeling before her open locker, glares.

“What do they think you’re gonna get out of visiting the counselor all the time? Dyslexia can’t be fixed. And even if it could, it’s not that dipshit counselor who’d figure out how.”

Corey snorts and a booger lands on his shirt, stark against the black cotton. He hopes she doesn’t notice. “He went on about that whole ‘unique perfection’ thing again. How can everyone be both perfect and different?”

“Ask him if getting caught drinking in his car is part of his ‘unique perfection,’” Mattie says. You remember kids who knew things they shouldn’t, usually the offspring of loose-tongued administration or law enforcement. You see every possible branch of her future—coddled party girl, sly blackmailer, incongruously free spirit, a tangle of acronymed disorders, or some combination thereof. Corey’s first love, maybe lost, maybe eternal. Maybe not at all. You’ve seen a thousand outcomes, haven’t you?

Corey laughs at her joke, voice cracking. Then his smile evaporates and he mutters, “he says I’m not gonna make it to high school.” He doesn’t look at Mattie. Doesn’t state the obvious: that staying in middle school means staying without her. Around him, the shrill, preteen voices echo like the yipping of dogs in a pound. 

“Don’t listen to him, he’s a drunk.” Mattie almost succeeds in sounding nonchalant.

“I mean, basically. He said I won’t go to high school next year if I don’t pull up my English grade.”

Mattie’s face brightens again, her braces glimmering like rhinestones in the greenish light. “Oh, is that it? Come on, Corey, you’ll pass.”

“How? It’s not like I’ll wake up one day and my brain’ll just work. Guess I could always sneak in and cook the gradebooks,” he adds, hiding behind a stiff grin. 

The bell rings. Corey hadn’t noticed the hallways empty as he talked to Mattie. For what it’s worth, you didn’t either. 

“Oh shit, I have to go to the third floor.” Mattie swings her backpack over her shoulder and hurries away, a Hello Kitty keychain bouncing with every bound. “Don’t worry, Corey!” she calls. “We’ll figure it out!”

We. Corey’s face turns hot and his heart leaps into his throat. He has shop next period, his favorite class of the day… and the only one where he’s ever maintained perfect grades. He bites his lip. “Wait! I’ll go with you!” And he jogs after Mattie.

You don’t follow. Your gaze lingers on the deserted hallway, where doors slam as teachers start their lessons. The rhythm of this place is as familiar as your own circadian cycle; by now, the smell of chicken nuggets would be filling the air, mingling with the usual scent of pink erasers. Ahead of you and behind, the lockers extend into infinity. Each one belongs to a child conscripted into standardized education. Who used to wait for you by your locker? 

What has life done to them?

You catch up with Corey in shop class, where the teacher greets him with a nod and points to a pile of plastic safety goggles. This is the only class that doesn’t hinge on Corey’s ability to decipher dancing symbols. Even though you hardly know him, you can’t help but be proud as you watch him help, teach, and lead classmates who outdo him in every other subject.

It’s the next morning. You didn’t follow Corey home from school last night. You didn’t see his dad’s door-slamming, teeth-grinding fury when he heard the voicemail from the counselor. It filled the home like a gas leak… and ignited when Corey dared to say, “I’m sorry.” 

But worse was his mother’s reaction, because there wasn’t one; only resignation, as if she knew better than to expect more. “Our job is to feed, clothe, and shelter you, and your job is to do well in school. If you don’t hold your end of the bargain, maybe we shouldn’t either,” she said.

So Corey slept in the backyard, in a tent, alone—not because his mom shoved a tent into his arms and pushed him out the door, but because he couldn’t stand her not talking, not looking at him. As he drifted off, he prayed that when he woke up, his brain would be fixed; and when it wasn’t, he wondered what sin he’d committed to deserve this. You didn't see these things, but you know they happened. You remember when they happened to you. 

But now Corey’s back at school, where Mattie greets him at the front door. Her braces sparkle as she smiles, but you see something that Corey doesn’t: Mattie’s worry. In fact, Corey’s too self-conscious to notice anything outside of himself. He smells, and he knows it. He didn’t shower last night, and the tent was hot. When he grins back, he doesn’t show his unbrushed teeth. Mattie could tease him about it. She doesn’t.

They enter the building together. Corey passes his own classroom to walk Mattie to hers and then doubles back, fighting through the zombie parade of sleepy, staggering preteens. Buses rumble outside as they pull away. Corey tries to think of anything but the day ahead of him, stretching as far as he can see.

How did you get here? Did you walk uphill in the snow both ways? Were you dropped off by a harried parent already on the phone with a client? Or did you ride the bus—the first stop in the morning, and the last in the afternoon, watching every other kid get their freedom before you? 

All morning the knot in Corey’s stomach tightens, until he ducks into the boy’s bathroom between algebra II and study hall to throw up. The bell rings as he swishes his mouth with lukewarm tap water and he squeezes the edges of the sink until he’s sure the porcelain will break. He arrives late to study hall, earning himself the final of three strikes and thus another phone call home. Once there, he does nothing for exactly fifty-five minutes.

Then comes English. His churning stomach threatens to void itself again on the way there, but it’s an empty threat—there’s nothing left to vomit. Mattie waits for him at the door and distracts him with a funny story about music class he only half-hears. She inches into the classroom, trying to guide Corey into the door before he’s tardy again without freaking him out. By the bell, they’re sitting in their assigned seats on opposite sides of the classroom.

She looks at him, and he grins stiffly back. His anxiety is contagious—you feel it in your gut, too, sour and hard like an unripe grapefruit. There’s nothing either of you can do. It’s just another feature of the school day, as regular as lunch. And he’ll have to do it again next year, and the next, every year until he’s old enough to give up, because he and God and everyone else knows he’ll never pass.

The young female teacher stands and leans against the whiteboard. You can tell she’s cool from her bright, chunky necklace and playfully messy hair. “Well, class, I had a chance to look over the gradebooks last night and I have to say that overall, I’m pleased. We’re moving at a fast pace, but I knew you could keep up.”

Corey’s rubbing an eraser on his desk to create dust, which he collects in a little pile.

“The class average on the quizzes is a C. B, if you ignore the outliers.”

Outliers. He sweeps the eraser dust into his hand and begins kneading it like clay, infusing it with his hand oils. 

“Now, we’re just about halfway through this quarter, and you know what that means.” She pauses for effect. “Our first spelling exam is next week.”

The oils and kneading have turned the powder into putty. Corey plies it furiously.

“It’s cumulative, and it’s worth more than all the quizzes combined. If you’ve been doing well, show me that you didn’t just cram and flush the material. If you’ve not done so well, this is your chance to show that you’ve learned from your mistakes.” 

The class murmurs. It’s dull against Corey’s eardrums, as if he’d plunged his head into a bucket. His putty ball is pocked with thumbprints. Ms. Snow mentions study groups and review sessions, staring fixedly at the top of Corey’s head. His face is suddenly warm and feverish. 

This exam will be the failure he’ll point to for the rest of his life as the reason he lost his best friend. Usually he’d catch Mattie’s eye across the room and mime shooting himself in the head, but today he doesn’t. Too much of him wouldn’t be joking.

The bell rings, and class is over.

Mattie tries to catch up with Corey but he powers on without looking up, slipping his eraser-putty into his pocket. “Corey?” 

It’s not his name that stops him in his tracks—it’s the hurt within it. He struggles against the torrent of classmates trying to squeeze through the door. Then a hand closes around the strap of his backpack. Together, Corey and Mattie wash out into the hallway and into an eddy by a floor-length, frosted window. The air is drafty here, prickling Corey’s arms with goosebumps. The window filters the warmth out of the sunlight. By the time it reaches Mattie’s face, it’s cold and dead, and makes her look that way, too. 

“Someone elbowed me in the ribs,” she says. 

“Sorry.” It’s not Corey’s fault and he knows it. “Sorry,” he says anyway.

“Elbowing me is better than pretending not to know me. What was that for?” Her voice is still hurt, but at too low a frequency for an adolescent boy to hear. You only know because you’ve heard it a dozen, a score, a hundred times. It’s the pain of a much older person—you see it on her face. Mattie has a headstart on her peers in more ways than one.

“Sorry,” he says again. That’s what the world wants to hear him say, isn’t it? 

“Don’t be. It’s fine.” 

Laughter erupts down the hall. Someone else is having a good day. Corey’s choking on a question he can’t articulate. If he can’t cough it up, he’ll drown in Fs and parental disappointment and stern eyebrows. If he can’t… he’ll be separated from Mattie forever. 

He stammers.

Mattie’s confused; she hides it behind faux-haughtiness, lifting her chin so she can peer down her nose at him. “In my benevolence I bestow mercy… but you don’t have to get all choked up about it.”

Corey squeezes his voice through his tight throat. “I, So… uh. You’ve been doing pretty good on these quizzes, right?”

“Well enough. I just have a good memory, nothing special.”

“Any chance you could… uh…”

Realization dawns. “OH. Well, I have to stay late for theater tech tonight anyway. If you meet me in the commons, maybe I can give you some pointers before rehearsal.” 

The draft blows straight through Corey. Its icy touch cools his burning cheeks. He can breathe again. “C-cool,” he says.

“That does not mean I’ll let you cheat off me.” Mattie waggles a finger at him. 

“Duh.”

“Then… see you after school.”

“Yeah. Cool.”

When Corey goes to shop class, he puts aside the birdhouse he’s been building. He spends the entire period surveying the raw wood, comparing grain, lining his eye up with the edge to check for warping, rapping each board with his knuckles. Sometimes you can tell why a plank fails his tests, sometimes not. But whatever his arcane criteria, he picks the perfect board. And right before the bell rings he sketches a plan for a little box, notated with handwriting no one but him can read.

It’s the end of the day. You watch the students walk—almost run—to their respective buses, some smiling for the first time that day. Now the hallways are empty. All the little wooden Jesuses on the walls peer down at the speckled linoleum. The voices of the remaining students echo forever off the cinderblock walls. Something wells in you, watching the buses trundle away in single file—is it jealousy? 

But you have no other home to return to. Your home is here, much as you hate it. Much as you’d rather be anywhere else. The Jesuses leer from their eternal crucifixion. None of you will ever leave.

With a sigh of relief, you silence the bell for another day.

You find Corey sitting at a table in the commons with Mattie. Her voice breaks through the pressurized hush of the deserted building, a bit too loud for how close she’s sitting to him. Neither of you mind. She writes on notebook paper. The caps of her markers pop! open and snap! shut as she rotates through colors for each letter—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. There’s no indigo marker in a standard Crayola 8-pack. Snap! 

“This is what we do for my little sister,” Mattie explains. “She knows her colors, but she’s awful at spelling. So we play the Rainbow Game on long car rides.” With a flourish, she presents the word written in large block letters: conscientious. Corey groans. You look away as soon as you recognize the word and try to spell it in your head. Concienshous? Conciencious?

Good luck, kid.

“Spell it,” she commands. Her lively blue eyes turn to slate. Suddenly you realize what Corey already knows—it’s not just natural intelligence that keeps her grades in the stratosphere.

“C-O-N-C-S-”

She baps Corey over the head with the notebook. “No! What comes first in the rainbow, green or blue?”

“Roy G. Biv… green.”

“Correct. So what letter comes first? Green S or blue C?”

“Green S.”

“Dingdingding! Again!”

“C-O-N-S-C-I-E-N-T-I-U-”

Bap! “Wrong! Does purple come first, or blue?” At least he got the T that you forgot.

She’s trying to fit in as much as possible before theater tech, but it’s working. Corey gains speed and makes fewer mistakes. He’s still just reading the letters out loud, but even this takes concentration. You can’t look away; your heart aches for every day that someone could have done this for you, but didn’t.

They work through every word Corey’s ever missed on a prior spelling test. When they reach the latest one, Mattie smooths out the crumpled paper. “You didn’t have to ruin it. It’s not the test’s fault, you know,” she says. Then, seeing his expression, she adds, “it’s not yours either.”

“Then whose is it?” 

“Who d’you think?”

“I always say it’s God’s.”

“Have you talked to God about it?”

Corey hesitates. “I pray about it.”

“And what does God do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” she repeats, her voice flat and distant. “Spell ‘opaque.’”

Corey’s brow furrows as he recalls the colored letters. “O-P-A…” Come on, Corey, green before blue. “...Q-U...E?”

She baps him, then rewards him with a grin. “Correct.”

He smiles back, and it’s beautiful.

Mattie leaves thirty seconds before her report time, yanking a black tee over her head as she runs for the auditorium. Corey surveys the words he missed. Not too many, only twenty-five, but diphthongs and silent letters abound. Twenty-five words and seven days.

Corey now sits alone in the commons, listening to an industrial vacuum in the distant reaches of the building. No bell. Occasionally, voices float out of the auditorium doors, where Mattie is designing too many props for her triple-digit budget.

“No, stop! Help!” a girl wails. Corey doesn’t know the play, but he’ll see it on opening night. Mattie will be there.

“No, stop! Help!” It’s more convincing this time.

You peer into the auditorium. All the actors are sitting in a circle onstage, wearing jeans, holding scripts, and reading their lines out loud. Corey doesn’t know this. He imagines the wailing actress on her knees in a long white dress, beseeching God. Tears shine on her cheeks as she reaches for the glaring spotlight.

“No, stop! Help!”

Corey planned to keep studying, but he can’t focus. Twenty-five words and six days. Still rounds to four a day. He goes home. If he walks fast, it’ll only take forty-five minutes.

But you stay and watch the actors. The stage lights bear down on them like the desert sun. There’s no audience to gasp at every plot twist and laugh at every joke. Each line is met with apathetic silence. With the lights in their eyes, the actors only see blackness beyond the stage. The faraway vacuum hums.

You’ve watched this building for a long time, but never this closely. Every creaking pipe, every lonely footstep, reverberates within you. It’s getting harder to separate your memories from Corey’s life unfolding in the present.

Did he go home yesterday to a furious father and indifferent mother? Or did you, years ago? You taste last night’s spoiled dinner on your teeth and feel the canvas tent floor sticking to your clammy cheek. Stomach acid burns the back of your throat. The porcelain cracks in your hands. 

This is a system designed to grind Corey into dust and reconstitute him into putty. He must excel at the same skills as everyone else. He must hate the qualities that keep him from reaching his homogenous potential.

What did you wish God would do for you back then? Did He ever answer your prayers?

No?

If God won’t, shouldn’t someone?

You lean back from the screen. Your eyes are dry and your legs are numb from sitting, transfixed, before the monitor. All you’ve done for so long is watch, so now, even when the urge to act makes your fingers twitch, you don’t know where to channel it. 

You click through angles of the deserted school. They’re so still that if you didn’t already know it was video, you’d assume they were photos. But then a car passes outside the window of the cafeteria and breaks the illusion. On the walls around the school, there are at least as many cameras as Jesuses, sometimes right next to each other. The kids don’t like to look at them. Both make them feel watched. Judged. Powerless.

As you do now.

Through the camera overseeing the auditorium, you watch the actors leave the stage and shut off the lights. Their laughs echo through the walls and through your memory, until you can’t tell one giggle from another. Then it fades to nothing. They leave the building and the reach of your many electronic eyes.

Corey’s at home, ducking his head between his shoulders as his mother berates him for leaving eraser putty in his pocket and “ruining” his pants. You don’t know this, but it’s what yours would’ve done. You can’t imagine it would be any different for him.

You watch the still images of long hallways and listen to the central air system until your eyelids droop. Your shift is over. You return to a small, school-subsidized apartment just off school grounds, where the on-call repairman and the groundskeeper also live. When you close your eyes for the night, you see long hallways.

What can you do for Corey?

Nothing.

Is that so?

You push the thought away and welcome sleep. In your dreams, no matter where you run, the long hallways stretch on forever. And the bell rings… and the bell rings… and it rings… rings...

...Rings, heralding a new day. As soon as you turn the bell back on, you wish you had just let it sleep. Mattie greets Corey with a bright smile, which he doesn’t even pretend to return. She falters. She doesn’t know that after Corey left last night, he tried to spell the words to himself on the walk home, in the shower, in bed. Counting letters like rainbow sheep. When he checked his spellings, they were all wrong. He explains this in a hollow tone.

“You just need to keep at it you know,” Mattie says. She’s already drawing up a new studying schedule in her head. “You still have five days left until the test, so memorize a few words a day and review the—”

“Your game isn’t working,” Corey interrupts. Her refusal to see the truth finally snaps his piano-wire nerves. “I wasted two days playing a stupid kid’s game instead of actually studying, and now I’m going to fail. Next time you waste my time, warn me up-front.”

The keen twinkle in Mattie’s eye dies. Her mouth opens and closes as she struggles to find the right words to make everything okay, and fails. “Fine. Study on your own. I hope you do well.” And she’s telling the truth.

Mattie covers her mouth with her hand as she enters the building without him. Switching between cameras, you watch her speed down the hallway, colliding blindly with other students. Then she ducks into the girl’s bathroom. You return to Corey, who stands in the same place as if his sneakers are embedded in the concrete. He’s alone now, just like you. 

Again, the urge to help makes your limbs restless, but what would you do? March into the girl’s room yourself and drag a crying Mattie out by the arm? Tell Corey everything will be okay, even though your own life is proof that sometimes it isn’t? You fail to find these words, same as Mattie.

Corey doesn’t go to his first class, or his second. The bell rings and rings, rings and rings, end of class and beginning, end and beginning. He sits against the back wall of the building, tugging manically at his hair. This is a well-known blind spot where kids hang out to smoke weed and make out where the teachers inside can’t see them. But from your office, you can.

Before study hall, Corey wipes his cheeks with his sleeve and stands. He hesitates, as if fighting against impossibly heavy weights around his ankles. Then he breaks free. The timestamp in the corner of the video shows that the tardy bell will ring in six minutes, not enough time for Corey to get to the front entrance, cross the building, and go up to the third floor for study hall. He’d be in less trouble if he turned around and hid in the blind spot for another hour. 

It isn’t fair, but there’s nothing you can do… right?

You rise. The sudden change in blood pressure makes you woozy. Your legs have turned to kneaded eraser after decades of sitting, watching, and doing nothing. There’s one other thing in your office, other than the surveillance equipment, your chair, the light controls, and yourself: the button you use to turn off the bell system at the end of every school day.

You hit it. The seconds count down to the release bell in the corner of the screen.

5 (years until graduation)…

4 (more English credits to go)…

3 (chances at the graduation test)…

2 (friends against the whole system)…

1 (now all alone).

The minute changes, but the building holds its peace. You hold your breath—it feels like the slightest sound will rupture the silence with a pop!

 Students stay clustered by their classroom doors, eager for their sample-sized bite of freedom. Corey walks down the empty hallways of your dreams, his sneakers squeaky against the tile. His face is swollen, and all the confused students waiting in the doorways ogle as he passes. He could duck his head, study the floor, avert his eyes. It’s what you would have done. But he doesn’t.

He finds the door to study hall and opens it, releasing a swarm of seventh-graders with bulky, bumping backpacks. Once they’ve poured into the hallway, other doors open too, until the sounds of moving bodies fill the building. 

Even though he’s technically late, Corey’s the first one seated. He doesn’t spend the first five minutes arguing with the monitor, and so doesn’t spend the last fifty minutes steaming about the injustice of another tardy mark. Instead he slides a composition notebook and a box of old, broken crayons out of his backpack. It isn’t Mattie’s fault he couldn’t do it last night. If she’s willing to bring markers from home, stay late, and believe in him, he has to do at least as much. And to apologize for lashing out, he has to show her he’s willing to.

You hear a commotion in the office next to yours while administrators troubleshoot the bell system. They won’t come in here for a while—after so long working with you, they know you’d never make a rookie mistake like accidentally bumping the button, and they’re right.

The bell doesn’t ring, so students tentatively drip out of their rooms as the clock changes. Their teachers wipe whiteboards clean and stack papers as usual; they’ve become so accustomed to tuning the bell out that they don’t even register its absence.

Corey’s in his English classroom. The whiteboard screams EXAM REVIEW. He sucks in a deep breath as the seats around him fill, all except Mattie’s. Ms. Snow, wearing big, playful earrings and a comfy skirt, announces that they’re playing a game called sparkle, and Corey’s heart sinks into his belly.

Everyone stands in synchrony. 

Do you know the rules to this game? Ms. Snow picks the first word: adversarial. The first student gets off easy—he says the first letter, an A (“red,” Corey says to himself), and breathes easy for this round. 

The next player, a gangly girl who’s been checking her phone, guesses: “M?” Corey doesn’t whisper the color because it’s wrong. She sits down, giggling, and resumes texting under her desk, according to plan. Around the class the word goes until it reaches Corey, who picks A as the seventh letter—red again. This word is easy because it has two red As.

“Sparkle…”

“Sparkle…”

“Zap!” say the last three students. The zap! arcs over Mattie’s empty chair and strikes the unfortunate boy on the other side. He sits, the first loser. And so the game is played.

The next word to reach Corey is “malleable,” and, of course, he gets the pesky fifth letter. He knows A is wrong—A is violet, he needs something blue—so he guesses Y. He’s the first to make an honest mistake, and third to sit down. Corey figured this would happen. He gets his crayons out. Every time Ms. Snow announces a new word, he writes it out in rainbow before the first student’s turn. His page is marred by letters he wrote, immediately recognized as wrong, and scribbled out. Ugly though his list is, the final spellings are right. All of them.

One kid wins, Ms. Snow awards him a perfunctory bonus point, and everyone stands back up for another game. “Dubious.” Corey closes his eyes and tries to scrawl colored letters on the backs of his eyelids. He doesn’t notice the door open until Ms. Snow speaks.

“Oh, there you are Mattie. Glad you could join us. Have a seat, we’re playing sparkle.”

Mattie blushes. She’s not late often, and never the center of attention. Her red-rimmed eyes meet Corey’s. He smiles reassuringly. Apologetically.

“Corey, it’s your turn,” Ms. Snow nudges.

Corey snaps back to class, quickly counting students before him. “Uh… blue O.” He blushes. No one else knows the O in dubious is blue.

Ms. Snow raises an eyebrow but nods, authorizing Corey to pass on the hot potato. Mattie nonchalantly nails her next turn as she’s still taking her books out of her backpack. And so the game is played, until Ms. Snow hears the hallways fill and lets her class go.

Corey and Mattie walk wordlessly to her next class. He wants to make everything better, wants to forget they even spoke this morning, but her smile is tight. How can he take back saying something he never should have thought?

Then Corey goes to shop. He starts work on the box without waiting for the bell as he usually does. Mattie might be proud of his sparkle performance, but he hasn’t apologized yet, and he wants to do it in his own language. He measures twice. Marks. Cuts. Sands. Simple verbs in which every letter serves a purpose. Corey doesn’t notice his classmates file out after fifty-five minutes, and barely registers his teacher offering to supervise while Corey works after the class has ended. The teacher grades papers at his desk in the corner, trusting Corey not to slice his fingers off. 

The overpaid administrators leave before they fix the “broken” bell. On the way out, someone jokes about the mysteriously broken bell being an act of God. They go home to their families and don’t think about this place for sixteen hours. You don’t have this luxury. You’re part of this place, embedded in the system and the structure that houses it. But today, you introduced a grain of sand to the machine. All you need now is a monkey wrench.

When a group of rowdy boys pokes around the technical skills wing, you shut off the lights. They freeze in their tracks. The dark hall and Corey’s screaming table saw hint at more trouble than the boys bargained for. They leave. When the janitor comes around with his industrial vacuum, you radio him to request that he clean this wing last. You want to let Corey’s creativity run forever.

And run it does. Corey is enchanted by swirling technicolor letters in the wood grain. He has grand designs of etching and painting them on the outside of Mattie’s box: “epochal,” “emulate,” “winsome,” “wry,” “zephyr.” All fitting together like rainbow puzzle pieces so you have to search to see the words. Part of him fears that it'll look like something out of preschool, but he won't know until he tries.

Mattie will understand the message regardless; she’s the rare bilingual who speaks both Corey’s language and the one the rest of the world seems to use. If she never forgives him, Corey fears he’ll never meet someone as amazing as her again.

In fact, today Mattie intuited a message Corey didn’t even mean to send. Despite their argument, she stays after school, waiting for him at their table. She lays out her markers in a neat line and starts writing out today’s new words. The marker cap pops! between each letter. 

But Corey doesn’t meet her. He’s in the shop classroom, thinking of her. Hoping he can win her grace with a gift, unaware that she’s already forgiven him. As the minutes pass, her shoulders slump, until her forehead presses into her crossed arms on the table. You can’t see it from the office, but her tears make the ink bleed through the notebook page.

Who but the trees heard the prayers you whispered at the open window? Did you think the cool night would last forever, postponing the school bus indefinitely, if you asked it to? What if you had asked someone who could help, and what if they listened?

When you stand, all the monitors that usually overwhelm your vision look small. Mattie and Corey are on opposite sides of this array, separated by images of lockers and doors and speckled linoleum tile. God, are you sick of looking at it all.

You turn your back on everything. 

A few days ago, you thought you’d have to fight through conditioning and inertia to defy your duties, but now you find that you were wrong. Once your feet start moving toward the door, it’s the easiest thing in the world. 

Your metal office door slams behind you and your heart beats hard. You’d forgotten how the waves of adrenaline feel as they rush from your brain stem to your fingertips. This is a human feeling, one that Gods, wooden Jesuses, and cameras will never know.

The principal’s office door is locked, but you have the key. You open it and walk to the desk without even turning on the light. You’ve watched the camera in here long enough to know the room even in half-light. They’ve entrusted you with everything. 

You find the microphone for the intercom system on the left. It’s a slender black thing with a broad base and a round head like an asp. You knock over a cup of capless and mismatched pens as you reach for it, and then you stop with your finger on the button. When the asp doesn’t strike, you’re almost surprised.

With a gentle click, you press it.

Throughout the building, into the furthest wings and supply closets, the sound of your breath echoes. You can’t see them without the cameras, but Mattie and Corey both stop. Corey doesn’t hear much through his noise-reduction earmuffs. To Mattie, it sounds like the middle school itself is taking its first breath of life. The janitors can’t hear through their earphones. All the Jesuses listen. Who knows? Maybe God is speaking. 

“Uh,” the building says. You lean too close to the mic and it brushes your lip. Now that you’re in a position to help, you’re not sure what to do—you’re only human, after all. But you try anyway. 

“Uhm, girl in the commons. Please report to, uh. The shop classroom. Immediately. Please.” You take your finger off the button, then replace it a second later. “Just follow the table saw noises.” Your face flushes, even though there’s no audience there to see it.

You don’t bother to pick up the pens as you leave. You’ll either be fired tomorrow or you won’t, and a few stray pens won’t make a difference. As you return to your office, you realize that it smells like stale sweat and dust. How long have you hated it here? 

The monitors are arranged according to proximity, so it’s easy to track the movement of a single object through the school. You watch Mattie pack up her books in the bottom right, wiping her tears off on her sleeve. All the crying today has smeared her cheap, water-soluble mascara until she looks like a racoon. She takes a deep breath and straightens her shirt. Mattie doesn’t know what she’s facing in the shop classroom, but she’ll meet it with mettle. 

Camera to camera, hall to hall, you watch her cross the building. Sometimes she walks toward the camera and sometimes away, though she never veers off course. The collage of moments you see from your office is distorted more than you had imagined.

In the top left, Corey has resumed work on the box. He doesn’t know who “the girl in the commons” is, since he told Mattie not to stay after school today. The teacher “supervising” Corey has fallen asleep at his desk, despite the table saw screaming intermittently. Mattie follows it like a cry for help in the woods.

She opens the classroom door. At first she only notices the negligent shop teacher, but as she nears his desk, she sees Corey around a rack of lumber. He hasn’t noticed her. Sweat sticks his hair to his forehead and drips onto the wood, which soaks it up like parched earth. You don’t hear what Mattie says, but your guess is close.

As Corey pauses to inspect the cut, his own name penetrates his earmuffs. It’s insistent and sharp, as if it’s a middle link in a chain of repetitions. He slides the right side onto his neck and turns, saying, “sorry, Mr. Clevenger, I didn’t—” But then he sees Mattie. “Oh my God, did someone punch you?”

Mattie snorts. “No, stupid. It’s makeup.” Her voice is still thick and phlegmy. 

“Oh. Do you have allergies? I heard the pollen count’s bad, whatever that means.”

“No, don’t worry.” Mattie clears her throat. When she averts her gaze, the light catches a tear lingering on her eyelash. Guilt and sadness wash over Corey.

Before he can assemble a coherent response, Mattie forges ahead. “What’s that?” She points to the maple board in Corey’s hand.

“It’s a birdhouse,” he says, putting it on the table behind him. “Are you—”

“Then why does it have your spelling words on it?”

“Practice.” A few moments pass in which Corey tries to surreptitiously block Mattie’s view, while Mattie pretends to inspect a blister on her heel to see around him. Suddenly, she laughs. It’s clear and free, as if Corey hadn’t said that awful thing to her this morning. More shame chokes his answering chuckle.

“It’s a secret, huh? That’s okay. Will you tell me about it some other time?”

“Yeah, when it’s done.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah. I thought you weren’t gonna stay late today.”

Mattie shifts her weight between her feet. “Well, I noticed the words you missed in the review session and wanted to get to them before I forgot… if you happened to be around.”

Seconds tick by. Corey wanted to apologize in his own language, but she’s here now. If he doesn’t say it now, in some language, maybe she’ll never forgive him. Finally, words come. “Hey, I’m, uh, sorry for being a dick this morning.” He turns away, grateful that his face is already flushed from exertion.

She sighs. “It’s fine. I’m sorry for being pushy. I was just trying to help. I know you really don’t want to be held back, but I really don’t want to move on without you, either.”

“The problem wasn’t your game. I was just being stupid. When I write the words out in rainbow, it’s easy to tell what’s missing or wrong. I’m just not good at spelling them out loud.” He wipes his slick hair back off his forehead. “Found that out in English today.”

Mattie sits in a chair next to a bin of discarded sandpaper, agitating a cloud of fine dust. “You’re not stupid, Corey, whether you pass the exam or not. Don’t let these tight-assed teachers decide what you’re worth.”

Corey lets her point slide off his back. “If I pass the exam, I’ll owe you a whole lot.”

“No you won’t.”

“When someone helps you, you owe them.”

Mattie shakes her head more insistently. “Only when you think friendship is transactional…” Corey’s brow furrows and she changes tactics. “How about this, then. If I help you get into high school, you help me when I get there, okay?”

“How am I supposed to help you? I’m not good at anything.”

“Stop. You make every day of my life suck less. Just don’t stop, okay? And I’ll do everything I can to help you with spelling.”

Corey’s eyes stray to the pile of box pieces behind him, all perfect, straight cuts and clean angles. “Okay. I’ll throw in a little present too, unless you don’t want it.” 

The spark behind her eyes lights again. “Of course I want it. I can’t wait to see what kind of birdhouse… oops, I mean present… you’ve got for me. Everything you make is so cool… I think you’ll be a great carpenter someday. Is it a deal?” She hocks a viscous loogie into her hand and holds it out to Corey.

“Deal,” he says, and he spits into his sweaty hand and slaps it into hers before either of them can chicken out of the squelchy handshake. 

You never had a Mattie, so you don’t know what they said. But you can tell from the smiles and gross handshake that something broken was mended. 

There are so many more broken things—in the system, in your life, in the lives of kids who sit next to Corey and Mattie at lunch. Too many for you to fix by playing with the lights and intercom. You’ll be written up tomorrow. You’ll see long, long, long hallways in your dreams, maybe forever. 

But now that you know how easily the gears of this system are jammed, your fingers ache for that monkey wrench... and the first thing you’re going to smash to pieces is that damn bell.