Out

"Do you want to know a secret?" she asks as I walk in the door, on the brink of tardy for my own first block class.

I raise an eyebrow, gesture to the small gathering of ninth graders, try to keep up the pretense of school. But I am intrigued; six years later, a senior, finally, she's still not one for discretion. To have reigned in her impulse is something. So I let her tell me, later, in the bastion of illusory privacy that is the hallway. How many times for how many reasons I've closed a door, leaned against a wall. This time I'm told of a mutual friend in another school who has come out with some news about who he is, or how he will live, and while his announcement was not intended for public consumption it was intended for me. "Only the people I trust the most," he'll e-mail me later. This excitable girl is my courier.

"Can you believe it?!" she exclaims. "I mean, we always teased him, but. . I mean, I don't care." she grasps, amazed. "But he did say it might be a phase." I'd have said, "not that there's anything wrong with that," but she wouldn't have gotten the reference. She wanted a, "No way!" at least, for me to share her not-quite-shock, but she should have known she wouldn't get it.

"That says a lot about your friendship; I'm glad he can trust you like that," is what she got instead. I didn't remind her of the time we all crowded a middle school hallway after his hastily withdrawn admission of the same kind of preference led to an uglier scene. Surely she remembers. I can still see them, such kids, looking up to me to fix it as my mind raced for words that might not make it better but wouldn't make it worse. Silent panic in the school corridor; luckily, I don't think they noticed.

Or maybe they did; they're well aware of my failings and faults, and yet they keep returning with their dilemmas and successes. Some of it is necessity: we've been stuck with each other for a literal third of their lives. But beyond that, there's something. If only I'd taught this young man English he could express it more fully, but I'm thrilled with his gist when he writes me tonight, "thank you, mrs p, i'm glad that from everyone i know you are one of the most understandable people i've met in my life."