To this day, I replay in my head the conversation I had with Valeria, after Brenda had stormed out with Kyle in tow. I hear her telling me how she had the greatest respect for me as a teacher, and how worried she was about me, and how, when I was struggling with burnout, she supported me taking the time off that I needed. And I hear myself still trying to salvage what I could, though already knowing it was too late. I hear her telling me that she’s cancelling my afternoon classes, and referring my case to the school board with the recommendation that my contract be terminated, and I hear myself pleading please don’t do this to me, and her saying I’m afraid you did this to yourself, and me shouting back that she had no idea, no fucking idea what we were living through, and then that was it, once I swore at her, that was really it. I think about how she waited for me as I collected my things.

One of the great abiding joys of my life had been working with young people; introducing them to the power of language, literature, ideas, and helping free them from all of the patriarchal, white-dominant, homophobic, and generally anti-imagination, anti-pleasure, anti-risk-taking frameworks that they’d been corralled into like cattle. More than a joy, it was also my purpose. For that to be stripped from me was one of the great humiliations of my life. Looking back, the collapse of my identity as an educator was a major turning point. Maybe the turning point. The moment I was no longer a respectable person, not even to myself.

I didn’t blame Brenda for razing me to the ground. I probably would have done the same. But I vowed that afternoon that I would not let her destroy Kyle, even if out of love. As a teacher, every so often I would come across a student like Kyle who seemed, like a desert oasis, to exist against all odds, who was curious and well-read, or had the desire to be, but came from a home with no books, where curiosity was discouraged, and where intellectuals were viewed at best with skepticism, but mostly with scorn. I was such a student, born into such a home, and I always recognized others when they came along. In most cases, that curiosity dried up by the time the student reached grade twelve. I watched it happen time and again, a little bit every day, until, by graduation, the student was a dry and hardened salt pan. I never blamed the mothers like mine, or Brenda, who were just doing their best with what they had, long ago calcified themselves. But I refused to let it happen to Kyle.