Page 58 of Whiskey Shivers

“Yeah?” she called back, leaning back in her seat, Louie standing aside so she could look out the door of her office at me.

“Can I get on the internet?” I asked.

“Absolutely!” she cried. “Everything okay?”

“I think I’ve upset some of my students,” I said. “I haven’t checked my email and apparently they’ve been emailing and not getting an answer. Some of them are feeling a little abandoned.”

I feltawful, and I definitely felt the need to rectify the problem immediately.

“Go ahead, honey, take your time,” she said and then she said something to Louie who jumped like he hadn’t thought of that.

He came out and asked, “Where’s your laptop? I’ll help get you set up at the dining room table.”

“Oh, it’s in my briefcase in the spare bedroom. Thank you.”

“No problem,” he said.

He came back with my computer and set it up at the table for me and I sat down. This would be the first time I’d switched it on since… well,since.

I held my breath as it went through its booting up process and let it out slowly as I keyed in my login awkwardly with one hand.

Louie keyed in the internet password for me, and Alina warned me it would be a little slow, but it did just fine. I opened my in-school email program, and I wasnotprepared for the absoluteflood.

By the time they all finished loading, I had one hundred and ninety-four emails and most of them were from my students.

I choked up. I don’t know what made me think that I was so easily forgotten, but I’d just been shown that it was they who felt I’d abandonedthem.I felt so guilty about that. Their feelings were certainly as valid as mine, even if they were slightly unfair. If there was anything I’d learned, life wasn’t fair and you were going to make mistakes. It was what you did when those mistakes happened that made the difference.

I sniffed and ordered my email from oldest to newest, scrolled through the pages of read but stored messages, and with some trepidation, opened the first unread message dated the evening of the day I’d been assaulted.

I read, I hit reply, and I started to slowly peck out a response one-handed.

“Here,” Louie said. “You’re gonna have to spell things but move over. Let me type. You’ll be at this all weekend if you try and do it like that.”

He pulled up a chair beside mine from the other side of the table, and I moved over.

“Thank you,” I said.

Alina came out and took over after her paints were all settled to dry and harden, and Louie was grateful. Things did move much faster then, without me having to correctly spell even some of the simplest words. I had a fear that the educational system had failed poor Louie. As a man, the level of struggle he was experiencing with reading and writing shouldn’t have been a thing.

It was a mark of what a good man he was that he put all of that aside and was willing to help me anyway. I did suspect, however, that I maybe could help him, too. Still, by the time I had dutifully answered every email, I was then duty bound to begin the work of reading the few things I’d been sent as attachments and provide feedback.

The student who had written me through Hex was an outcast among her peers. She was, in my estimation, neurodivergent to a point that she could mostly mask and function normally, however she had enough of an aura of otherness to her that her peers could be brutally cruel with their bullying.

She was highly intelligent, and very sensitive. While everyone wanted to proclaim her this unfeeling weirdo, that simply wasn’t the case. If anything, Tomeka Ross felt everything so profoundly it was overwhelming and frightening to her, and it was something she tapped intobeautifullywith her writing. For a tenth grader, she had such an amazing grasp of language and writing, and I was doing everything that I could and then some to foster a belief in herself with her creative writing endeavors.

I felt as though I had failed her in particular, over the last three weeks by not opening my email and checking it. She’d sent me so many messages asking when I would be coming back, each becoming more distraught than the last until they’d simply stopped altogether.

I was grateful to Hex for thinking to bring me the note. Tomeka had mentioned that Mr. Johnson had told her it was okay, and it broke my heart how many times she’d written she was sorry. As though it was somehow her fault I wasn’t responding. As though she was afraid, she’d angered or upset me.

I had a feeling she dealt with a lot of anger and upset at home, and it killed me that I had tapped what was clearly some major fear of abandonment issues by my lack of diligence and care.

It was something I was determined to rectify immediately.

We’d lunched on some delicious po’ boy sandwiches I’d whipped up while something fragrant simmered on the stove for dinner later that night.

I discussed some things with the other adults at the table and worked through some solutions regarding the deep anger and mistrust I’d accidentally fostered in some of my students with my inattention and inability to respond in a timely manner.

One of those students, I referred the emails from him to our school administration, looping the principle, the guidance counselors, the school resource officer, and the school’s social worker into the picture and forwarding all of his emails to me to them.

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