After I set it on the faux-wood desk, I check my phone is on silent. Only a month or so in, Justin and I are already settling into familiar patterns. For instance, Justin likes to text me in the middle of the day. For no reason really, just to tell me he’s thinking about me, and as much as I find it kind of mid-century adorable, I also don’t need my students hearing those little pings and getting distracted. It’s hard enough keeping their attention without my social life on full display.
When I look up I notice a young woman sitting in the front row, smiling at me.
I don’t know her in particular—my classes are large and full of students in both my department and from other majors—and her nondescript features make her blend into other young women sitting beside her. All are pretty, brunette or blond with matching ponytails, wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with Youngstown State’s name and insignia.
I make eye contact until she looks away. Maybe it’s a display of dominance by me; maybe it’s just me seeking out some odd version of camaraderie because today’s topic always leaves me feeling like I have no skin by the end of it. Anticipating how I’m going to spend the next seventy-five minutes, that part of my brain—the part that I’ve sectioned off through sheer force of will, and with more than a little help from Dr. Koftura—buzzes inside my head. I’ve gotten used to it over the years, like the murmur of static playing at a low volume in the background of my life. Just sometimes—not too often—the volume gets turned up.
I check my phone to see if Justin got back to me. I called him on my way to class, but he is in a meeting with his advisor and can’t really talk.
Yes, we’re one of those couples that still talk to each other on the phone. Justin actually asked me out on a date in person, after sitting in on a lecture I gave about language development. And the other night I found a handwritten note waiting on my pillow when I woke up. Dare to dream, but I think I’ve found an old-school romantic.
Ever still, my blank home screen stares back at me, except for the clock on my phone as it ticks down to the deadline to begin the lecture. I look up at the girl who smiled at me before, but she’s now engrossed in her laptop screen.
I take a breath to focus, but as I’m exhaling, a green bubble pops up on my screen. My podium vibrates and my heart does a little involuntary flip, which makes me smile and cringe simultaneously.
I have a new text.
Are you okay?
I pause, caught off guard. It’s a weird thing to ask just because I called him to say hello.
Maybe those patterns aren’t as familiar as I thought.
I answer quickly, underneath the tray of my podium’s computer keyboard.
Yes. Just nervous about lecture today. Talk later. xoxo
I stick on my lapel mic, take a sip of water, and I’m on.
“Good afternoon, class. Today we’re examining child abuse and neglect—otherwise known in the broader sense as child maltreatment. Now you know at this point in the semester, that I was raised in foster care, and we’ll be examining the foster care system as well, given that children subjected to abuse and neglect are typically placed within that system to ensure their safety.”
I take a step away from the podium, and click to the next slide on the presentation.
At this point I offer my students a resigned and practiced smile. I know I’m making it look easy to talk about my past. “Of course, safety is not always found in foster homes.”
I move to another slide and my students see a flow chart of the child welfare system, which looks like a multi-headed hydra vomiting agencies, acronyms, and abbreviations.
“By the end of today, I promise you’ll understand how children come to harm.” I expect to see grimaces on a few faces, and I do. “And I also promise. . .”
My phone vibrates again on the podium, and for a moment it breaks my concentration. Several students in the front rows of the auditorium seem distracted by it as well.
I should have turned it off, not just set it to vibrate.
“And I also promise that you will leave class today with the knowledge to prevent children from coming to harm.”
I say this in a flourish to make up for my minor lapse. Students expect a certain level of theatrics to keep their attention. Sometimes I jump up and down and shake my hair side to side. Often I laugh at my own jokes when no one laughs with me—an occupational hazard. I’ll even imitate the coos and babbles of babies so that students can understand how language begins. But today I only offer a swish of my arm from fourth to third position in ballet—Patty and Dave signed me up for classes. They were an older couple who gave me a room all to myself and wanted to keep me, until they didn’t. Over the almost-year that I lived with them, Patty and Dave signed me up for whatever classes I showed interest in. Ballet and tap. Mandarin. Self-defense.
Sometimes those classes are useful in my life.
A few nights ago, while I cleared the table after dinner and Justin did the washing up—he’d made us spaghetti carbonara, my favorite—I caught him looking at me. He’d said that even when doing boring chores, like gathering up the dirty dishes, I carried myself like a dancer. It’s not the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.
Except that it kind of was.
Today I’ll tell my students about Patty and Dave. And the other places I was sent to.
As I’m talking, I hear the door creak open at the back and, careful to not give away my line of sight, I glance up to see who’s arriving late to class, ready to tap at my watch and give them a well-practiced stink-eye. But it’s not one of my students. Instead, I see Justin’s dark shock of hair easing into the classroom, along with the rest of him. He’s wearing his long, navy-blue peacoat, cheeks bright pink from the cold, and eyes focused only on me.
In an instant the static shifts; her voice inside my head.
“Speak of the devil and he will appear.”
It shocks me, and I drop the remote mouse I’ve been using to advance through the slides with my students. For the next several seconds, I stoop over and try to clasp the stupid device in my fist again, but my hands don’t seem to be working.
It’s one of the few things I can recall about my childhood: her voice, and what she used to tell me when I’d ask for her help, her love. For money to get milk at the R & S market on the corner, for a kiss at bedtime, for her to sign the form that would let me get free lunches at school. My memories of life before care lie in strange and disconnected pockets inside my brain. Compartmentalizing. I learned about the phenomenon in graduate school. Although Dr. Koftura calls it something different. And sometimes, and only with Annie, it’s my “Hot Pocket memory.” “Better out than in,” she’ll bellow between slurps of root beer or the chaw of a Snickers bar.
If you can’t make fun of brain damage with your best friend, then maybe you should rethink your life.
Dr. Koftura and I determined during one of our sessions that the scene that ran on repeat the longest was probably an amalgam of memories, stacked together and compressed like steel inside my head. In it, my mother calls out my name again and again, until I take the risk of going into her bedroom. She’s lying splayed out across the dull brown comforter, the shades drawn and the smell of liquor and other things sweating out through her skin. Her face is blurry except for her mouth, which I can see with perfect clarity in my mind as her upper lip curls in on itself and she says it, that phrase that so often greeted me: “Speak of the devil. . .” Later, hurtling around from home to home because I was “a poor fit” or “unreliable” or even “dangerous”—because attractive pre-teen girls always are to some degree—I became convinced that my mother knew something about me no one else would admit. Even now, with all I’ve accomplished, it’s hard to know if it’s true or not—whether my mother thought of me as the devil.