If you could take just a single moment from life to eternity, which one would you choose? For me, there was an instant before something irretrievable was lost and everything changed — when my innocence was taken in second grade.
I lived two blocks away from school and had started walking on my own the year before. Back then I was in a mixed first and second grade class, and, when I was supposed to be working on printing with the other first graders, I would instead sneak glances up at the wall above the second-grade blackboard on the other side of the room and try to memorize the alphabet in cursive. The script drew me not just because it was so pretty, but also because it was how adults wrote, and I wanted to be an adult so I could be free. (Incidentally, I recognized that adulthood also meant obligations, and so I yearned for responsibility, as well.)
Every morning I would race the Ellison sisters — they lived one block closer to school and came out to walk the rest of the way with me — to see who could do the most sprinklers. The object was to step on the heads that had come up to water the lawns overnight, but had gotten stuck after the water cycle, and didn’t go down.
I was tested, and I qualified for gifted and talented education at the school across town. If only I’d gone as soon as I could have, rather than the following year, as a third grader.
Then it never would have happened, and I might have turned out to be someone else.
Mr. Bagsby was new the year that I started second grade. No one knew anything about him except that he had just shown up in those tan corduroy slacks he always wore, one size too short, and those light tan suede shoes tied tight. He covered the classroom walls with posters of Corvettes and Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he said things like, “Up your nose with a rubber hose.”
At first I sat in the back of the classroom close to Candi, whom I now realize was probably getting it, too.
Candi was a sickly child with pale skin and bony limbs. Her light brown hair clung to her forehead in oily strips, and, depending on how prominent her overbite seemed on any particular day, her face could at times be mostly teeth. Candi threw up a lot, often in the middle of class — barfing out a sort of oatmeal-colored fluid. Sometimes she would make it to the sink at the counter behind us; other times, not.
Soon Mr. Bagsby was told about my test scores, or he discovered my capacities on his own, and he entrusted me with the adult chores I so longed for: I was appointed classroom monitor and fly monitor at the same time.
Being classroom monitor entailed telling on anyone who broke the rules when Mr. Bagsby wasn’t looking. I loathed tattling, though, and so I rarely did, instead utilizing my position to manipulate enemies into assets.
Eventually Mr. Bagsby moved me to the first row, right up there in front of him, with our desks almost touching. And there it was that I lay in wait for weeks until the opportunity came… and I slammed the fly swatter down on a big one right in the center of his gradebook.
His pale face, behind the strawberry beard he kept trimmed to perfection, turned red, and the purple veins in his temples pulsed.
The classroom and fly monitor positions yielded in time to curtain duty.
I had to drag those heavy, light-blocking plastic tarps across the entire side wall of windows, facing out on the back playground — the one I didn’t want to go to unless I was headed all the way to the edge of the soccer field, where I could hide under the bushes at the fence near the alley.
And after curtain duty it was the duties I attended to at his desk, sitting on his lap, his knees knocking against the metal drawers as he swiveled around in his chair.
And after desk duties it was the duties that I remember only in flickers, like frames from a silent film for which most of the spools have been lost.
Flickers and flashes.
The frame where I am perched on his thigh and his pants are unzipped.
The one where I am on my knees in front of him.
The strangely upside down ones of his chair and the desk legs, and the walls with the Corvettes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The close-ups of his hands, sprinkled with pinkish wisps of hair — and his dry freckled skin and impeccable fingernails.
And always, over and over again, those curtains, those heavy plastic curtains that were the same color as Mr. Bagsby’s light tan slacks, mixed with Candi’s vomit.
The memories swirl around the globe of my consciousness, often going years and years before they end up directly overhead again. In those vortexes of time and place, I must stop, cry the tears that I hope will wash away the scum of the past so I can see it clearly again — and sometimes, when the clouds start to disperse, I do begin to see a little more — but eventually the present wave slips back into the next one, which crashes into me.
It is at one of those point breaks that I rush home from my morning run in Los Angeles decades later, and pick up my phone the instant I walk in.
“Mom,” I say, and immediately I ask about the navy blue Speedo, a boy’s swimsuit that I used to wear to school. “Did I start doing that in second grade?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, I think I wore that Speedo because I thought if I tied it tight enough that Mr. Bagsby couldn’t get to me.”
“Yes, I know,” my mom says. “You’ve told me that before.”
But there is something else, another detail that I have managed to claw back.
“Mom, I remember tying it in a double knot.”
The memory is, for now, as clear as it will get. I must accept how, for the time being at least, and possibly forever, the past will remain underwater.
If I were able to go back to any particular instant from before, a broken part of me may want to choose the moment I am pretty sure it all began — in his red Corvette on the busy street parallel to the one with the sprinklers, the same street where, in a few years, after I transferred to the school across town, I would go for piano lessons from Mrs. Stack, and also where I’d ride in the car on the way home with my fifth grade best friend’s mother, who once said, “I just love when the trees cover the whole street, like angels protecting us.”
It is on that busy street with all those angel trees where, with my mind’s eye, I can see, in the light dappling in through the Afghan quilt of leaves overhead, Mr. Bagsby’s pale, lightly haired hand: it reaches over from the gearshift, through the air, and comes to rest on my little thigh.
I feel so important in that moment — fly monitor, classroom monitor — and now someone so special as to get a ride in the red Corvette.
But just as I sense his palm alight on my skin, the memory shrinks toward a tide pool of black, like one of those fades in a silent film that is the past. The screen swallows itself up into a circle at the center, and then everything vanishes.
If I could have any moment from life back, to relive it and treasure it forever and ever, the one I would rather choose happened prior to that ride, as I stood on the sidewalk in front of school — right after Mr. Bagsby asked me if I wanted a lift home, and right before I said, “Yes.”
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This piece is excerpted and adapted from my book To Whom I Could Have Been: A True Love Story ~~ with subsequent installments to follow. Thank you so much for supporting my work!