Because I Wanted to Be Divine
by June Sanchez
By September, I wondered how I could go on teaching. My sense of failure was magnified by the summer weather that still pervaded New Orleans. The school year (and my two-year commitment) had barely started. The heat was suffocating by 9 a.m. and loud storms soaked the ever-moist earth each afternoon. I’d never lived in a place with a wet season before, and I was struck by the volatility of the weather, the atmosphere. The oak-lined street I lived on, characterized by colorful shotgun houses and boutique shopping by day, surrendered itself to swarms of roaches and sporadic gunfire after sundown.
A couple months earlier, in May 2022, I graduated from an East Coast liberal arts school and moved to New Orleans to join Teach for America, a controversial, two-year teacher training program that sends recent college grads to work in high-need schools around the country. Its criticisms are vast and varied: ties to countless charter networks and a subpar, overly theoretical training program for new initiates just scratch the surface. Perhaps most essentially, it’s lambasted for its fundamental assumption that (often white) college graduates with no prior experience can do more to remedy educational inequity than veteran teachers who are native to the communities TFA “serves.”
Within my first month I started blasting Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” as I drove to work. I continued this regrettable ritual for several weeks, often crying through the crooning, punk refrain as I navigated fast, sharp turns. I hated getting cursed out by teens not yet old enough to drive, the constant need to discipline rather than teach content, and how unprepared I felt for my students and the chaos that dominated their home lives.
But I must defer here. I could write about the misery teaching bred in me until it swallowed this story whole. I would never arrive at what I really want to say.
Around that same time in early September, Idris, a small, quiet student, looked up at me as I passed his desk.
With wide, urgent eyes, he said, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Ms. S, is it okay to eat plastic?” I found no hint of sarcasm or challenge in his voice.
I leaned in. I’d learned quickly that conversations of any comedic or serious nature are best handled as privately as possible: don’t embarrass them, and definitely don’t give them a stage to embarrass you.
“No, Idris, probably not. Why would you ask me that?”
He pulled out a half-eaten, bite mark covered spoon from his pocket.
“Why would you do that?” I oscillated between concealing panic and laughter.
“It tasted good,” he paused, “will I be alright?” I couldn’t help but smile at his sincerity.
“You should be fine, but let me know if you feel sick at all.”
He nodded solemnly and returned to work.
Five minutes later, I stood up at the board to go over our discussion questions. Idris’s shoulders slumped over slowly until his forehead touched the desk. I called on another student to answer a question and wrote him a slip for the nurse’s office.
There were other moments like this; I helped a female student cover up her period blood-stained khakis, discreetly giving her one of the pads I kept in my classroom closet. I comforted another after her supposed best friend called her a slut and poured chocolate milk down her shirt. She told me she was thankful, that she would have swung if I didn’t cut in. I assured her that getting back at her classmate wasn’t worth the consequences and felt assured myself. These short times of my students’ reliance on me, however uneasy, were fond memories in my first year of teaching. They almost made me feel like the kind of educator I had intended to be.
In middle school, I was vague friends with a girl named Evelyn. She was tall, about 5’10”, with a broadness to match that she had not quite grown into. We knew a few people in common. Once, I accidentally flicked a pencil shaving into the frizz of her mousy brown hair. I was too embarrassed to tell her, or pluck it out.
Freshman year, we were in biology together and paired up for lab experiments. She dyed her hair red for a school play, The Three Musketeers. Her character, Milady de Winter, didn’t necessarily have red hair, but the director insisted Milady needed a different hair color from the also brunette heroine, Constance. Evelyn kept it that color—a shade of auburn that no one has naturally but looks natural on the right person—as long as I knew her.
That play was the first time I’d seen Evelyn wear a real dress, a gown. Looking up from blue auditorium seats, I watched as a senior boy held a fake knife to her long, elegant neck. She cocked her head back on an otherwise still body and peered into his eyes with an expression between longing and hatred. Under those stage lights I saw the newfound contours of her face, the sheen of her freshly curled hair, and the way her once buck teeth had turned into a charmingly toothy grin. Her voice had developed a low, sultry nature; ideal for audiobooks and the kind of women too perfect to touch. That night I started a new diary, something I hadn’t done in a few years, just to write about how beautiful she looked.
In her wake, I joined theater, the color guard, and other groups that I hadn’t a natural aptitude for. I found all of them joyous, in part because of the time I could spend alone with her. I would infiltrate her life quietly, under bleachers after football halftime shows, backstage shrouded in darkness, and sitting together on long bus rides. We became close friends. At night, I would fall into a stupor borne of the deep suburban boredom that inspires many teenagers to make God of their school crushes. In my room, I pulled apart her every word like strings off a clementine. When I had cleaned the day’s fruit, I laid awake and imagined us in a series of scenarios and fantasies until madness, tears, and finally—sleep.
Through the years, perhaps by osmosis or our tethered existence, I would come to possess everything she wanted. I would spend a night kissing the boy she liked; letting him mix me rum and coke off his parents’ bar cart. I would even become drama club president despite my lack of talent. I was thin, beautiful, well-liked, but I was never her. Her: old before she’d ever kissed someone, with expressive eyebrows and corners of the mouth and dark, inquisitive glances that held the mystery of all feminine things, their origin and meaning hidden even to her. I grew older and older, and never felt as old as she seemed at 14.
In July 2023, days before beginning my second year teaching, I flew out of the Newark Airport back to New Orleans. In the security line, I fingered the broken zipper of my carry on, a victim of my last-minute packing. Crumpled dollar bills, tampons, and wrappers, all covered in a film of powdered makeup, threatened to spill from my bag’s threshold.
“Back to school?” said the old man in front of me. I scanned the stranger who had just broken the wall between us: knife-creased trousers, dress shoes, white hair, and a muscular frame that betrayed his age. Maybe keeping him company could be my new job, I thought.
“I’m a teacher, actually,” I said. ‘Back to school’ was technically correct, and a fair assumption. Though the contours of my face were angular, my features themselves were soft and delicate, so I was often assumed younger. As a result, I frequently found myself in the same conversation with other people, usually men. It might start differently, say, ‘where do you go to school?’ but once I let slip that I’d actually retired to the other side of the classroom, it was as if I could see a boyhood fantasy play out in their dilated pupils—one with glasses perched low on my nose and a button-up puckered against my chest.
The impolite ones put voice to these fantasies, saying, ‘we didn't have teachers like you when I was in school,’ or ‘you would have certainly been my favorite teacher.’ The polite ones refrained, but often showed similar interest. The man continued:
“Oh, I wouldn’t have thought so. Where?”
“New Orleans.”
“Wow, long way from here,” he paused, “and certainly a lot more beautiful.” He gestured generally towards the fluorescent-lit grime of the airport. I giggled and twirled a curl with my finger. He continued,
“What grade, subject?”
“Eighth-grade English.”
“Wow, God’s work.”
I never knew how to respond to “God’s work,” in relation to my profession. After constantly witnessing my coworkers vaping into their classroom closets, or loudly voicing desires to inflict harm on specific students in the teachers’ lounge, I no longer saw us as saintly. Regardless, I appreciated it. In moments like this, I felt like an actual teacher. Maybe because the people who made these comments had an educational experience like mine, one with teachers who had the luxuries of prioritizing content over classroom management, distance from their work, and respect as a given. Or maybe it was because these men, with gazes both lustful and reverent, reminded me of how I pursued education. I responded,
“Something like that.”
“You like it?”
“Sometimes.” And that was the truth. I didn’t really want to go back, had debated not going back countless times that summer, and yet here I was, heading back to start another year. The conversation fizzled out and soon I was walking towards my flight.
Before my friend Evelyn, there was my seventh-grade Science teacher, Ms. Z—tall, dark-haired, and unapproachable. At 27, prominent wrinkles lined her face. I was too young to know that 27 wasn’t old, so I thought little of this. She had dark, thin eyebrows that were good at arching questioningly, one at a time. All of this was enhanced by a mouth and corresponding voice that could perfectly articulate the slightest change of tone. It communicated everything she needed it to with movement that felt both minute and theatrical simultaneously. Her features, in tandem, could draw words out of you, bringing your voice out of your body like a mermaid petrified of a certain sea foam demise. I wrote about her, contemplated my affections towards her, and got high off uncovering the smallest, most seemingly mundane details of her life. She signed my yearbook on the last day of school and I waited with bated breath. I read it the second I left her class.
“‘You have to be the sweetest student I’ve ever had. Best wishes in 8th grade!’ - Ms. Z”
That summer, I read myself to sleep holding my yearbook. I whispered her words over cricket calls, running my fingers over the font, feeling where her red pen pressed into my page. I read it in different ways, trying to find that which would give her words the most meaning, the most intention imaginable. I found it when I separated “I’ve” into “I have” and lent pauses to her words. This made it feel almost confessional. But even after then, I tried new ways of phrasing, just in case something came to me that finally explained her true intention, the intention I wanted her to have in writing it: That I held some deeper importance in her world, as she did in mine.
The summer I moved to New Orleans, when the days were too hot to go outside and I had not yet found friends, I sat in front of the floor length mirror on the cool, green tiles of my bathroom. There, I practiced my lessons and the faces I thought were necessary to be a teacher. I would arch one brow, turn a smile ever so slightly, find different stares I’d seen from my favorite professors and teachers over the years with meanings ranging from “yes, that answer’s on the right track, keep going” to “shut the fuck up.” I practiced until my muscles grew tired, at which point they were unable to convey anything other than fatigue.
A few weeks later, I would come to stand in front of a group of children with lives and histories completely different than mine. The faces of teachers are, contrary to my earlier beliefs, region, race, and sex specific. I quickly found that the students and teachers local to New Orleans had their own faces and gestures that I didn't know. They clicked their tongues in ways foreign to me, moved their faces and necks and eyes more than I did mine and spoke in witty, animated ways that when I tried sounded forced, wrong even. Their words and phrases, spoken effortlessly, sat obtusely in the pink of my mouth.
In my sophomore year of college, I took a sociology class. I excelled at the statistics-heavy material, and after a few hours of lackadaisical studying yielded a perfect score on my first exam, my professor asked me to come to his office.
“You’re very smart, with very good reasoning abilities—what are you looking to do after school?” He made me comfortable enough, so I bounced my legs and played with my hair and revealed to him my desire to teach. He nodded, suggesting programs and people he could put me in touch with.
I became a regular at his office hours. We talked about the course content, but then we just talked. I learned about him, his research, his son, and his wife. Later, I learned of the educators he had looked up to in his younger years, his ex-wife, and the ways he considered himself power-hungry.
When the course concluded, he asked me to come to his office.
“If you’re still counting, you got a 102% on the final,” he began. He straightened my final and a few other papers before moving them out of sight.
He launched into a speech on the statistical beauty of my physical features and mixed ethnicity, grounded in his own research on physical attractiveness. He later sent me an in-depth overview of this via email, with the subject line “beyond the course comments.” He continued on about how I had a nice smile and how he looked forward to seeing me.
“I only wade into the appearance matter at all because of your high social intelligence, forgive me if it’s unwelcome, I promise I won’t mention it in any of the recommendations I write for you.” I had not asked for any letters, but I didn’t object.
Two years later, I applied for Teach for America, the program he had first recommended to me. By then, I had learned that just as some students see their favorite professors as mythical, Socrates-like figures, some professors see students as their pederastic disciples.
My hair in its natural state was an impenetrable sea of curls with hues ranging from platinum to chocolate. Two months into teaching I dyed it red.
I worked under the yellowed lighting of my bathroom, standing in the old claw tub while I balanced my supplies on the equally dingy sink. Both fixtures carried the sheen of a hundred college-aged renters’ dirt and mildew no matter how much I scrubbed and bleached. I rinsed the dye out with icy water and blood-orange runoff pooled in the bathtub. My new color was coppery, luminous, and brought my blue green eyes to prominence in a way my old hair hadn’t. It was artificial in the way Golden Age Hollywood starlets were.
After dyeing my hair, I started paying greater attention to other redheads. I found that women, both real and fictional, have used red hair to signal a combination of beauty and brains since Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” From Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff to Disney’s Ariel, red hair had long indicated a fiery demeanor, good looks, and often underestimated intelligence.
Later that year, I spent a sleepy Sunday watching “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.” As the gang ran around Moonscar island, a fictional location set in the steamy, swampy Louisiana Bayou, I realized that redheads come in two fundamental varieties: the ever-touched and the untouchable. Some of us would always be more Danger-Prone Daphne Blake than Jessica Rabbit, more Ariel than Milady de Winter.
Throughout most of college I had a boyfriend—a Sicilian skateboarding Jesus minus a weed addiction and plus a finance major. He had the kind of dorky demeanor and boyish good looks that turned his every word and gesture into divinely-timed comedy, like water into wine. He also readily excused his Trump-loving family and genuinely wanted to work in insurance. We had a few common interests and a longstanding friendship, but mostly he was a young Hugh Grant reincarnate and I wanted to be one with the sublime, even if it was of the ephemeral variety.
Despite this commitment, I found pleasure in looking at several of my educators, admiring them because of and beyond their talent. I fantasized about the kind of affair that saw us driving through red-leaved hills, our hair blown back by crisp, hay-tinged air. I wanted a fatal attraction that saw wood floors and candles and dark windowpanes of some bed and breakfast hidden away from our college town. I craved an entanglement that bordered on apprenticeship, where I was being instructed on how to live like a true artist. I wanted someone who was far enough away that I could never fully understand them, where there would always be mystery and lofty, transcendent things that they pondered unknown to me. I would have never considered cheating on my boyfriend outside of these scenarios. Yet, I imagined I would hardly feel bad if they came to fruition. Perhaps because my desire for corporal connections with my educators was, above all else, a means to something greater.
In August 2023, when my second year teaching was beginning, I went to a barbecue with other Teach for America members. The host had a backyard with a luscious garden where we ate sausages and grilled fruit as the sun began to set. The backyard, shared with a friendly neighbor in the adjacent shotgun, had strings of warm ivory lights zigzagged between the houses. Produce and exotic flowers grew in mulched areas and eclectic pots scattered haphazardly. The day’s residual heat oozed up from the earth, and the lowering sun cast our skin in various shades of gold. I was drunk on beauty and strawberry daiquiris, which in tandem with the excellent food and company, made the night feel like a Dionysian festivity. Someone brought a tightly packed blunt, and we passed it around the circle until the roach threatened to singe our lips.
Amongst the backyard foliage, a passion fruit plant clung to the wooden fence. Its few flowers—lavender with intricate, string-like petals—glowed under dissipating tangerine-gold sunrays. While observing the flowers, I noticed a single fruit hidden amongst the vines.
Passion fruit plants only bear their fruit if they were fertilized by another passion fruit. Further, the plant’s flowers cannot last more than a day until the plant is fertilized, their alien beauty wilting and shedding with every sunset. This meant that someone nearby grew another passion fruit plant, which a bee or other pollinating animal found before fertilizing this plant. As a result of their connection, a bulbous, green passion fruit grew and strange, beautiful flowers blossomed assuredly. Tears welled in the corners of my eyes as I contemplated this beautiful coincidence.
Meanwhile, the people in a circle around me discussed teaching, specifically, how we all continued to put up with it.
“Well, you definitely need a ‘deep why,’” someone across the circle said.
A “deep why” was what Teach for America termed your reason for teaching, delivered to your employers and peers with misty eyes and a solemn, hushed tone. The unspoken requirement of a “deep why” was that it must relate your own educational experience to TFA’s mission of remedying educational inequity. As a result of these limitations, we all regurgitated the same answer over and over from the vantage point of our race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identities. We centered the most stereotypically painful part of our upbringing and education. If there was no personal struggle worthy of mention, we relayed the hardship we witnessed in classmates or the kids in the next town over, and how we noticed the absence of that pain and struggle in ourselves. We told stories, ones that implied we were good people, that we saw injustice in the world and wanted to remedy it.
People around me laughed, but I was too high and stunned by the passion fruit to join. I imagined if I laughed too, I would have looked across the circle and exchanged knowing looks with my peers. Looks that collectively acknowledged that the “deep whys” we told our employers, and each other, were lies. They weren’t really why we wanted to teach, though for a time we may have convinced ourselves that they were.
In my first year teaching, I taught a student named Gabrielle. She wore baggy clothes in plain colors and had hair cropped close to the base of her neck. When I asked her pronouns, she drew her words long and slow,
“I guess she/her.”
She smiled and waved every time she saw me down a hall and made a habit of asking me about my weekend, my day, my taste in music, books, movies. Her own was colorful and eclectic, an array of comic books and manga, cartoons and anime, theme songs and catchy punk rock beats reminiscent of Green Day or My Chemical Romance. When she wasn’t distracted by her own books, Gabrielle eagerly participated, her hand shot up high in the air. She was the subject of snide remarks by other students, who mocked her drawings, her books, her unkempt, stringy hair. She sat quietly with clenched fists, allowing me to give—as consistently as I could manage—the death glares, talking-tos, and write-ups in her honor. I imagined, like my middle school self, she took an “Am I Gay?” quiz online, unaware that choosing to take an “Am I Gay?” quiz on the internet already answers the question at hand.
One day in late spring I passed out homework packets—a few reading questions on Lord of the Flies I could hope half the class would turn in. The book and corresponding curriculum, chosen by administration, was not a hit with most kids—and why would it be? British prep school boys weren’t exactly relatable characters for a bunch of poor, Black kids in a state that consistently ranked between 47th and 50th in education. But the one topic they always found interesting was the biblical allegories. I, who grew up with no particular religious affiliation, found myself the de facto authority on all things Christianity. They had lots of questions about the Bible, the Garden of Eden, the Fall.
“Is God real?” Once that question came, as it inevitably did every time we discussed this, I would tell them that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, and start shifting the conversation back to the discussion questions.
I’ve never believed there to be a God in such a concrete Santa Claus, naughty or nice, fiery pits of Hell or Paradise kind of way. But I knew I believed in something. I had encountered it over and over and wanted a piece of it for myself. That chase brought me to New Orleans, so I could sit on a pulpit of sorts: the edge of my desk, feet in a chair, like I’d seen so many of my own teachers do. I could try to answer my students’ most burning questions and never satisfy them fully.
When I handed the day’s homework packet to Gabrielle, she asked, rushed in the way that premeditated questions are:
“Is that your real hair color?” gesturing to my crimson curls. I gave her a closed mouth smile and cocked a single eyebrow, as if to say, that’s for me to know and you to ponder.
A couple months earlier, in May 2022, I graduated from an East Coast liberal arts school and moved to New Orleans to join Teach for America, a controversial, two-year teacher training program that sends recent college grads to work in high-need schools around the country. Its criticisms are vast and varied: ties to countless charter networks and a subpar, overly theoretical training program for new initiates just scratch the surface. Perhaps most essentially, it’s lambasted for its fundamental assumption that (often white) college graduates with no prior experience can do more to remedy educational inequity than veteran teachers who are native to the communities TFA “serves.”
Within my first month I started blasting Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” as I drove to work. I continued this regrettable ritual for several weeks, often crying through the crooning, punk refrain as I navigated fast, sharp turns. I hated getting cursed out by teens not yet old enough to drive, the constant need to discipline rather than teach content, and how unprepared I felt for my students and the chaos that dominated their home lives.
But I must defer here. I could write about the misery teaching bred in me until it swallowed this story whole. I would never arrive at what I really want to say.
Around that same time in early September, Idris, a small, quiet student, looked up at me as I passed his desk.
With wide, urgent eyes, he said, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Ms. S, is it okay to eat plastic?” I found no hint of sarcasm or challenge in his voice.
I leaned in. I’d learned quickly that conversations of any comedic or serious nature are best handled as privately as possible: don’t embarrass them, and definitely don’t give them a stage to embarrass you.
“No, Idris, probably not. Why would you ask me that?”
He pulled out a half-eaten, bite mark covered spoon from his pocket.
“Why would you do that?” I oscillated between concealing panic and laughter.
“It tasted good,” he paused, “will I be alright?” I couldn’t help but smile at his sincerity.
“You should be fine, but let me know if you feel sick at all.”
He nodded solemnly and returned to work.
Five minutes later, I stood up at the board to go over our discussion questions. Idris’s shoulders slumped over slowly until his forehead touched the desk. I called on another student to answer a question and wrote him a slip for the nurse’s office.
There were other moments like this; I helped a female student cover up her period blood-stained khakis, discreetly giving her one of the pads I kept in my classroom closet. I comforted another after her supposed best friend called her a slut and poured chocolate milk down her shirt. She told me she was thankful, that she would have swung if I didn’t cut in. I assured her that getting back at her classmate wasn’t worth the consequences and felt assured myself. These short times of my students’ reliance on me, however uneasy, were fond memories in my first year of teaching. They almost made me feel like the kind of educator I had intended to be.
In middle school, I was vague friends with a girl named Evelyn. She was tall, about 5’10”, with a broadness to match that she had not quite grown into. We knew a few people in common. Once, I accidentally flicked a pencil shaving into the frizz of her mousy brown hair. I was too embarrassed to tell her, or pluck it out.
Freshman year, we were in biology together and paired up for lab experiments. She dyed her hair red for a school play, The Three Musketeers. Her character, Milady de Winter, didn’t necessarily have red hair, but the director insisted Milady needed a different hair color from the also brunette heroine, Constance. Evelyn kept it that color—a shade of auburn that no one has naturally but looks natural on the right person—as long as I knew her.
That play was the first time I’d seen Evelyn wear a real dress, a gown. Looking up from blue auditorium seats, I watched as a senior boy held a fake knife to her long, elegant neck. She cocked her head back on an otherwise still body and peered into his eyes with an expression between longing and hatred. Under those stage lights I saw the newfound contours of her face, the sheen of her freshly curled hair, and the way her once buck teeth had turned into a charmingly toothy grin. Her voice had developed a low, sultry nature; ideal for audiobooks and the kind of women too perfect to touch. That night I started a new diary, something I hadn’t done in a few years, just to write about how beautiful she looked.
In her wake, I joined theater, the color guard, and other groups that I hadn’t a natural aptitude for. I found all of them joyous, in part because of the time I could spend alone with her. I would infiltrate her life quietly, under bleachers after football halftime shows, backstage shrouded in darkness, and sitting together on long bus rides. We became close friends. At night, I would fall into a stupor borne of the deep suburban boredom that inspires many teenagers to make God of their school crushes. In my room, I pulled apart her every word like strings off a clementine. When I had cleaned the day’s fruit, I laid awake and imagined us in a series of scenarios and fantasies until madness, tears, and finally—sleep.
Through the years, perhaps by osmosis or our tethered existence, I would come to possess everything she wanted. I would spend a night kissing the boy she liked; letting him mix me rum and coke off his parents’ bar cart. I would even become drama club president despite my lack of talent. I was thin, beautiful, well-liked, but I was never her. Her: old before she’d ever kissed someone, with expressive eyebrows and corners of the mouth and dark, inquisitive glances that held the mystery of all feminine things, their origin and meaning hidden even to her. I grew older and older, and never felt as old as she seemed at 14.
In July 2023, days before beginning my second year teaching, I flew out of the Newark Airport back to New Orleans. In the security line, I fingered the broken zipper of my carry on, a victim of my last-minute packing. Crumpled dollar bills, tampons, and wrappers, all covered in a film of powdered makeup, threatened to spill from my bag’s threshold.
“Back to school?” said the old man in front of me. I scanned the stranger who had just broken the wall between us: knife-creased trousers, dress shoes, white hair, and a muscular frame that betrayed his age. Maybe keeping him company could be my new job, I thought.
“I’m a teacher, actually,” I said. ‘Back to school’ was technically correct, and a fair assumption. Though the contours of my face were angular, my features themselves were soft and delicate, so I was often assumed younger. As a result, I frequently found myself in the same conversation with other people, usually men. It might start differently, say, ‘where do you go to school?’ but once I let slip that I’d actually retired to the other side of the classroom, it was as if I could see a boyhood fantasy play out in their dilated pupils—one with glasses perched low on my nose and a button-up puckered against my chest.
The impolite ones put voice to these fantasies, saying, ‘we didn't have teachers like you when I was in school,’ or ‘you would have certainly been my favorite teacher.’ The polite ones refrained, but often showed similar interest. The man continued:
“Oh, I wouldn’t have thought so. Where?”
“New Orleans.”
“Wow, long way from here,” he paused, “and certainly a lot more beautiful.” He gestured generally towards the fluorescent-lit grime of the airport. I giggled and twirled a curl with my finger. He continued,
“What grade, subject?”
“Eighth-grade English.”
“Wow, God’s work.”
I never knew how to respond to “God’s work,” in relation to my profession. After constantly witnessing my coworkers vaping into their classroom closets, or loudly voicing desires to inflict harm on specific students in the teachers’ lounge, I no longer saw us as saintly. Regardless, I appreciated it. In moments like this, I felt like an actual teacher. Maybe because the people who made these comments had an educational experience like mine, one with teachers who had the luxuries of prioritizing content over classroom management, distance from their work, and respect as a given. Or maybe it was because these men, with gazes both lustful and reverent, reminded me of how I pursued education. I responded,
“Something like that.”
“You like it?”
“Sometimes.” And that was the truth. I didn’t really want to go back, had debated not going back countless times that summer, and yet here I was, heading back to start another year. The conversation fizzled out and soon I was walking towards my flight.
Before my friend Evelyn, there was my seventh-grade Science teacher, Ms. Z—tall, dark-haired, and unapproachable. At 27, prominent wrinkles lined her face. I was too young to know that 27 wasn’t old, so I thought little of this. She had dark, thin eyebrows that were good at arching questioningly, one at a time. All of this was enhanced by a mouth and corresponding voice that could perfectly articulate the slightest change of tone. It communicated everything she needed it to with movement that felt both minute and theatrical simultaneously. Her features, in tandem, could draw words out of you, bringing your voice out of your body like a mermaid petrified of a certain sea foam demise. I wrote about her, contemplated my affections towards her, and got high off uncovering the smallest, most seemingly mundane details of her life. She signed my yearbook on the last day of school and I waited with bated breath. I read it the second I left her class.
“‘You have to be the sweetest student I’ve ever had. Best wishes in 8th grade!’ - Ms. Z”
That summer, I read myself to sleep holding my yearbook. I whispered her words over cricket calls, running my fingers over the font, feeling where her red pen pressed into my page. I read it in different ways, trying to find that which would give her words the most meaning, the most intention imaginable. I found it when I separated “I’ve” into “I have” and lent pauses to her words. This made it feel almost confessional. But even after then, I tried new ways of phrasing, just in case something came to me that finally explained her true intention, the intention I wanted her to have in writing it: That I held some deeper importance in her world, as she did in mine.
The summer I moved to New Orleans, when the days were too hot to go outside and I had not yet found friends, I sat in front of the floor length mirror on the cool, green tiles of my bathroom. There, I practiced my lessons and the faces I thought were necessary to be a teacher. I would arch one brow, turn a smile ever so slightly, find different stares I’d seen from my favorite professors and teachers over the years with meanings ranging from “yes, that answer’s on the right track, keep going” to “shut the fuck up.” I practiced until my muscles grew tired, at which point they were unable to convey anything other than fatigue.
A few weeks later, I would come to stand in front of a group of children with lives and histories completely different than mine. The faces of teachers are, contrary to my earlier beliefs, region, race, and sex specific. I quickly found that the students and teachers local to New Orleans had their own faces and gestures that I didn't know. They clicked their tongues in ways foreign to me, moved their faces and necks and eyes more than I did mine and spoke in witty, animated ways that when I tried sounded forced, wrong even. Their words and phrases, spoken effortlessly, sat obtusely in the pink of my mouth.
In my sophomore year of college, I took a sociology class. I excelled at the statistics-heavy material, and after a few hours of lackadaisical studying yielded a perfect score on my first exam, my professor asked me to come to his office.
“You’re very smart, with very good reasoning abilities—what are you looking to do after school?” He made me comfortable enough, so I bounced my legs and played with my hair and revealed to him my desire to teach. He nodded, suggesting programs and people he could put me in touch with.
I became a regular at his office hours. We talked about the course content, but then we just talked. I learned about him, his research, his son, and his wife. Later, I learned of the educators he had looked up to in his younger years, his ex-wife, and the ways he considered himself power-hungry.
When the course concluded, he asked me to come to his office.
“If you’re still counting, you got a 102% on the final,” he began. He straightened my final and a few other papers before moving them out of sight.
He launched into a speech on the statistical beauty of my physical features and mixed ethnicity, grounded in his own research on physical attractiveness. He later sent me an in-depth overview of this via email, with the subject line “beyond the course comments.” He continued on about how I had a nice smile and how he looked forward to seeing me.
“I only wade into the appearance matter at all because of your high social intelligence, forgive me if it’s unwelcome, I promise I won’t mention it in any of the recommendations I write for you.” I had not asked for any letters, but I didn’t object.
Two years later, I applied for Teach for America, the program he had first recommended to me. By then, I had learned that just as some students see their favorite professors as mythical, Socrates-like figures, some professors see students as their pederastic disciples.
My hair in its natural state was an impenetrable sea of curls with hues ranging from platinum to chocolate. Two months into teaching I dyed it red.
I worked under the yellowed lighting of my bathroom, standing in the old claw tub while I balanced my supplies on the equally dingy sink. Both fixtures carried the sheen of a hundred college-aged renters’ dirt and mildew no matter how much I scrubbed and bleached. I rinsed the dye out with icy water and blood-orange runoff pooled in the bathtub. My new color was coppery, luminous, and brought my blue green eyes to prominence in a way my old hair hadn’t. It was artificial in the way Golden Age Hollywood starlets were.
After dyeing my hair, I started paying greater attention to other redheads. I found that women, both real and fictional, have used red hair to signal a combination of beauty and brains since Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” From Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff to Disney’s Ariel, red hair had long indicated a fiery demeanor, good looks, and often underestimated intelligence.
Later that year, I spent a sleepy Sunday watching “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.” As the gang ran around Moonscar island, a fictional location set in the steamy, swampy Louisiana Bayou, I realized that redheads come in two fundamental varieties: the ever-touched and the untouchable. Some of us would always be more Danger-Prone Daphne Blake than Jessica Rabbit, more Ariel than Milady de Winter.
Throughout most of college I had a boyfriend—a Sicilian skateboarding Jesus minus a weed addiction and plus a finance major. He had the kind of dorky demeanor and boyish good looks that turned his every word and gesture into divinely-timed comedy, like water into wine. He also readily excused his Trump-loving family and genuinely wanted to work in insurance. We had a few common interests and a longstanding friendship, but mostly he was a young Hugh Grant reincarnate and I wanted to be one with the sublime, even if it was of the ephemeral variety.
Despite this commitment, I found pleasure in looking at several of my educators, admiring them because of and beyond their talent. I fantasized about the kind of affair that saw us driving through red-leaved hills, our hair blown back by crisp, hay-tinged air. I wanted a fatal attraction that saw wood floors and candles and dark windowpanes of some bed and breakfast hidden away from our college town. I craved an entanglement that bordered on apprenticeship, where I was being instructed on how to live like a true artist. I wanted someone who was far enough away that I could never fully understand them, where there would always be mystery and lofty, transcendent things that they pondered unknown to me. I would have never considered cheating on my boyfriend outside of these scenarios. Yet, I imagined I would hardly feel bad if they came to fruition. Perhaps because my desire for corporal connections with my educators was, above all else, a means to something greater.
In August 2023, when my second year teaching was beginning, I went to a barbecue with other Teach for America members. The host had a backyard with a luscious garden where we ate sausages and grilled fruit as the sun began to set. The backyard, shared with a friendly neighbor in the adjacent shotgun, had strings of warm ivory lights zigzagged between the houses. Produce and exotic flowers grew in mulched areas and eclectic pots scattered haphazardly. The day’s residual heat oozed up from the earth, and the lowering sun cast our skin in various shades of gold. I was drunk on beauty and strawberry daiquiris, which in tandem with the excellent food and company, made the night feel like a Dionysian festivity. Someone brought a tightly packed blunt, and we passed it around the circle until the roach threatened to singe our lips.
Amongst the backyard foliage, a passion fruit plant clung to the wooden fence. Its few flowers—lavender with intricate, string-like petals—glowed under dissipating tangerine-gold sunrays. While observing the flowers, I noticed a single fruit hidden amongst the vines.
Passion fruit plants only bear their fruit if they were fertilized by another passion fruit. Further, the plant’s flowers cannot last more than a day until the plant is fertilized, their alien beauty wilting and shedding with every sunset. This meant that someone nearby grew another passion fruit plant, which a bee or other pollinating animal found before fertilizing this plant. As a result of their connection, a bulbous, green passion fruit grew and strange, beautiful flowers blossomed assuredly. Tears welled in the corners of my eyes as I contemplated this beautiful coincidence.
Meanwhile, the people in a circle around me discussed teaching, specifically, how we all continued to put up with it.
“Well, you definitely need a ‘deep why,’” someone across the circle said.
A “deep why” was what Teach for America termed your reason for teaching, delivered to your employers and peers with misty eyes and a solemn, hushed tone. The unspoken requirement of a “deep why” was that it must relate your own educational experience to TFA’s mission of remedying educational inequity. As a result of these limitations, we all regurgitated the same answer over and over from the vantage point of our race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identities. We centered the most stereotypically painful part of our upbringing and education. If there was no personal struggle worthy of mention, we relayed the hardship we witnessed in classmates or the kids in the next town over, and how we noticed the absence of that pain and struggle in ourselves. We told stories, ones that implied we were good people, that we saw injustice in the world and wanted to remedy it.
People around me laughed, but I was too high and stunned by the passion fruit to join. I imagined if I laughed too, I would have looked across the circle and exchanged knowing looks with my peers. Looks that collectively acknowledged that the “deep whys” we told our employers, and each other, were lies. They weren’t really why we wanted to teach, though for a time we may have convinced ourselves that they were.
In my first year teaching, I taught a student named Gabrielle. She wore baggy clothes in plain colors and had hair cropped close to the base of her neck. When I asked her pronouns, she drew her words long and slow,
“I guess she/her.”
She smiled and waved every time she saw me down a hall and made a habit of asking me about my weekend, my day, my taste in music, books, movies. Her own was colorful and eclectic, an array of comic books and manga, cartoons and anime, theme songs and catchy punk rock beats reminiscent of Green Day or My Chemical Romance. When she wasn’t distracted by her own books, Gabrielle eagerly participated, her hand shot up high in the air. She was the subject of snide remarks by other students, who mocked her drawings, her books, her unkempt, stringy hair. She sat quietly with clenched fists, allowing me to give—as consistently as I could manage—the death glares, talking-tos, and write-ups in her honor. I imagined, like my middle school self, she took an “Am I Gay?” quiz online, unaware that choosing to take an “Am I Gay?” quiz on the internet already answers the question at hand.
One day in late spring I passed out homework packets—a few reading questions on Lord of the Flies I could hope half the class would turn in. The book and corresponding curriculum, chosen by administration, was not a hit with most kids—and why would it be? British prep school boys weren’t exactly relatable characters for a bunch of poor, Black kids in a state that consistently ranked between 47th and 50th in education. But the one topic they always found interesting was the biblical allegories. I, who grew up with no particular religious affiliation, found myself the de facto authority on all things Christianity. They had lots of questions about the Bible, the Garden of Eden, the Fall.
“Is God real?” Once that question came, as it inevitably did every time we discussed this, I would tell them that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, and start shifting the conversation back to the discussion questions.
I’ve never believed there to be a God in such a concrete Santa Claus, naughty or nice, fiery pits of Hell or Paradise kind of way. But I knew I believed in something. I had encountered it over and over and wanted a piece of it for myself. That chase brought me to New Orleans, so I could sit on a pulpit of sorts: the edge of my desk, feet in a chair, like I’d seen so many of my own teachers do. I could try to answer my students’ most burning questions and never satisfy them fully.
When I handed the day’s homework packet to Gabrielle, she asked, rushed in the way that premeditated questions are:
“Is that your real hair color?” gesturing to my crimson curls. I gave her a closed mouth smile and cocked a single eyebrow, as if to say, that’s for me to know and you to ponder.