Cygnus and Christopher

Chapter One

        I remember the desk; the blue and red pen marks, the curse words, the carved names of those who came before. It was not inherently more remarkable than any of the other desks I ever sat in. It just happened to be the one that housed me when the final hour of my highschool life came to pass. An hour that found me with legs extended to the point where I was almost lying down, and with a hood pulled up so the back of my head had some cushion between it and the backrest.

    The classroom was dim. Only the front row of lights were on, giving a stage like vibe to the place. The slight darkness made prominent the small strips of sunlight that snuck through the curtained windows. One of the beams illuminated a unmarked area of the desk. Maybe it was sign. The sun from millions of miles away, falling into a blank space, the one less filled with history. I thought about writing my name there, thought about becoming one of the people behind a collection of letters. I didn’t though, that spot on the desk survived another year unscratched.

    Back in elementary school I had made the opposite choice. Near the end of my sixth grade year I scratched my name with a pencil into the liver of a plastic mannequin used to study anatomy. Something about it being hidden appealed to me at the time, and perhaps still appealed to me when seventeen.  

    From behind my hood I wondered if it was the default mode to be somewhat hidden from one another. How well I had know the twenty some kids in that final high school class of mine? If given a quiz to match names with faces I thought I would have aced it, but beyond that and I felt relatively clueless. The more deatiled portraits of the numerous teenangers glancing around or whispering to one another seemed unreachable to me, and such a portrait of me was likely undisclosed to them. There may have been one commonality among us though, a generally lack of focus on Mrs. Clearwater’s last lecture.

    She gave us the final test a day early so she could spend our last day together speaking on areas of life outside of the calculus curriculum. It was a quavering speech of personal history and their corresponding didactic lessons. Anecdotes from as far back as her early childhood and were as recent as the previous week. I noticed that none came from the few weeks she was absent earlier in the year. An absence she went into as one of the most confident and respected teachers, and came back a whispering, worn, and easily pushed around classroom supervisor. I didn’t learn specifics of what happened, but judging from the transformation, I guessed it was no vacation.

    The bell signaling the end of school, or as some were apt to put it, freedom, rang in the middle of one Mrs. Clearwater’s stories. Students raced for the door, sometimes colliding with each other. The room looked like what I imagined the inside of a volcano does. The pressure built up to uncontainable levels and eruption occurred, students spilling like magma over the tiled hallways. So, in a manner of seconds it was just myself and Mrs. Clearwater in the room.

        I took my time to sling my backpack over one shoulder and rise from my desk. The flow of time brushed heavy along my skin and I wanted a few more good looks at this section of the river before I drifted elsewhere. Mrs. Clearwater stared down at the floor for the entirety of my walk to the door. And when I stood in the gate between the classroom and the hallway something dawned on me. Whereas many of the students left this place with the lightness of new beginnings, Mrs. Clearwater perhaps went into summer with the prospect of lecturing disinterested students and staring at floors only two and a half months away. Before I transferred from the carpeted classroom to the tiled hallway I turned back to the slouch figure left in the now nearly empty volcano. “Goodbye Mrs. Clearwater.” She looked toward me and with red eyes and a slight smile she returned a farewell. “Enjoy the summer Cygnus.”