When Alexandrine met Simon, he didn’t have a bed. Or a family.
She worried about him, without speaking of this for many weeks, passing him in the hallway between classes; always picking him out of the crowd, then averting her eyes when he walked too close. She wondered where he slept, or what he ate, or where he took his books to do his homework. If he even still did homework. Maybe he didn’t. Like me, Alexandrine thought to herself. Maybe he draws too much. Maybe he was getting bad grades too.
She began to note that he only had 3 shirts, seeing a pattern in his dressing emerge. An orange t-shirt. A green long-john. And a white sleeveless shirt, with the words “nitimur in vetitum” printed in black ink upon his chest. Always overlaid a jean jacket too big for him. But strange, she also noted that they were never really dirty, or even smelled.
So where did he go after school?
She only knew about his problem because she overheard a teacher on a phone one afternoon, long after the last bell rang. Standing at her locker, sliding heavy textbooks from her heavy backpack and shelving them, she heard her name, softly spoken, amidst the general rush of and clamor of students leaving the building. At first she ignored it, but a moment later, as she slid her arms into her worn hoodie, bending to pick up her now empty bag, she heard her name again.
“Yes, Alexandrine,” the voice said. “In my class. I feel like... he has a connection to her. Maybe I can ask when I see her tomorrow.”
Alexandrine straightened, her head swiveling, honing in on the sound. She moved like a sleep-walker through the emptying hallway, leaving her back-pack unzipped on the floor, and her locker open. Her hands touched the edges of the chipped doorway, and her dark-haired head followed, eyes peering into the empty classroom, where the speaker sat with her back to the door, curly cord to her phone stretching over her computer monitor, and waving like a collapsing bridge as she spoke.
“No, no that won’t be necessary,” she went on. “I’d like to do this without the school therapist and especially the police, for the time being. If he can just tell us, we’ll be able to take it from there. I just hope he’s staying out of trouble in the meantime. I just can’t imagine where he goes, or what he does, without a family. A kid that age can’t be just going out to pick flowers, you know?”
The teacher spun back to her desk, pulling bobby pins out of her braid as she spoke, and suddenly stopped, seeing Alexandrine’s rumpled cascade of black hair in her doorway, and the girl, frozen and afraid.
“I’ll call you back,” said the teacher to the phone, and hung up. “Alex?” she called out softly, getting to her feet.
The girl’s eyes widened, and she scrambled backwards, spinning on her heel to rush back to her abandoned backpack. She did not turn around to face the following teacher, instead letting her hair fall over her reddening face as she bent to collect her things. Her locker had been slammed shut, but her books were taken and strewn across the hallway. The deserted hallway, she suddenly noticed too late.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you heard, but its nothing bad -- ” the teacher began.
Alex abruptly whirled back to glare at her teacher over her shoulder. “I missed my bus,” she said, before dropped her gaze and hiding behind her hair again.
A small awkward silence ensued as the teacher took a breath to collect her thoughts.
“Alex,” she started again. “I’m sorry if what I said worried you. We can talk about it right now if you want, and then we can call your dad for him to come get you, or find another way to get you home. And here,” she said, kneeling to get the last of the scattered collection - a math book now with ripped pages, thrown under a row of lockers. She handed it to Alex, and stayed there on her knees, right at eye level with the girl who sat slumped against the wall, refusing to look at her. After a moment, Alex took the book, and threw it roughly into her bag, zipping it up with such force that the woman thought the girl might tear it.
“So what do you want to do?” the teacher murmured with as much kindness in her voice as she could muster.
“Am I in trouble?” Alex whispered, and her throat made a cracking sound as she started to cry. “Are you going to call my dad?”
The teacher was torn between wanting to shake the girl to her senses, and wanting to hug her, and knew that if she wanted to keep her job, that she could do neither. She instead settled for a soft sigh, and took the girl’s hand. “Alex,” she said quietly. “Look at me.”
Alexandrine was instead frozen again, the only sound that she was listening was the continued tremble in her shoulders.
“Alex,” the teacher said once more, much more slowly this time. “Look. At me.”
The girl did so, parting her dark hair for one fierce and reddened eye to peer through. Her shoulders shook but her gaze never wavered, and the teacher, thoughts now drifting to somedays I am not paid enough for this, took another breath before she began.
“You are not in trouble,” she said with conviction, her grip on the girl’s fingers momentarily tightening to make her point. “I was talking about someone else that I’m worried about, and I wanted to ask you about him.” She paused again to wait for a reaction from the girl, but none came. She continued on. “You want to come in and sit down? We can call someone to come get you so you can go home.”
The sliver of pale face disappeared behind the hair again as she dropped her head to look down at her hands. “Why were you going to talk to the police?” she asked.
“I’m not going to talk to the police,” the teacher said, with a small sigh of suppressed exasperation.
“Who’s the man you keep talking about? Who is he?” Alex asked, still without looking up.
“Not a man. A boy,” the teacher corrected. “In our class.”
A few seconds of silence ensued in which Alex climbed to her feet, dusting off her shorts and hoodie, shouldering the heavy backpack that cause her shoulders to bow under the books’ weight.
“What boy?” she inquired at last.
The teacher stood too, and in response, motioned for the student to enter her classroom. Alexandrine did so, and they closed the door behind them.
“Simon,” the teacher said. “Simon Harwell. This is not for you to go about telling people, alright?” She carefully eyed the quiet teen, who still watched from behind her curtain of dark hair with a guarded expression. Alexandrine gave a tiny nod and listened as the teacher explained she received word from her committee about a troubled student who was skipping classes and whose grades were drastically falling. When they went to inquire with his parents about the situation, they discovered his parents were gone and that someone else lived in his home.
And Alexandrine kept thinking about her own falling grades and wondered if her name was on the committee's lips as well.
“So naturally we’re worried about him,” the teacher went on. “And I sometimes see him sitting next to you in class, watching you draw.”
“I don’t draw,” Alex said defensively.
The teacher pursed her lips. “You most certainly do.” She picked up a slip off her desk, covered in inky doodles of moons and stars to prove her point. “This is your most recent masterpiece I believe.”
Alex hung her head further.
“But that’s not the point Alex. I’m not here to reprimand you. We’ve already had that discussion. I just wanted to ask you if you knew anything about Simon, or his situation.”
The girl shook her head. “I didn’t even know he sat next to me,” she said quietly.
“Alright,” the teacher said with a sigh. “Do you have a cell phone?”
She shook her head again. “Its dead.”
“Well. Don’t worry about the situation. We’ll get it figured out,” the teacher murmured, picking up the phone to hand it to her student.
“But should I?” Alex asked, suddenly looking up with another piercing gaze. “Are you going to call the Police now?”
The teacher, still standing with the phone in her outstretched hand, tried again to not let her annoyance show. “If I have to, it will be to help Simon. Not hurt him. Ok?”
Alex slowly took the phone out her teacher’s hand and called her dad. She kept her face bent down as she later said her thanks to the teacher, and when she slipped quietly out of the classroom to put her books and homework away in her locker, this time without any interruption. 