( @hitundo ) « starter call — for forrest
BEING AT A school was bizarre. — Sure, he visited Julie, but that was a high school, and he didn’t have many memories of a high school of his own; he’d dropped out at fifteen and a half, only about halfway through his sophomore year, and no one had minded much that someone who had struggled ever since starting school no longer haunted the halls.
But elementary school? With its brightly-colored paper and projects hung down the hallways brought Reggie right back to the eighties, when he’d been just a kid and didn’t know the language, didn’t know what the teachers were asking him, and they finally just.... gave up. He walked the hallway for a little bit, peeking his head into a classroom where he heard a low voice instructing.
Sparing a passing glance at the teacher, Reggie looked to the back of the class — where he would have been sitting — and saw a sullen-looking boy who was doing everything except pay attention. He kneeled next to the desk, looking at himself, caught in a time capsule, and offered a bittersweet, aching smile.
“Hey, Buddy,” he said, starting another one-sided conversation, but he didn’t mind. He’d realized that all of this talking was more for him, anyway. “I bet you’re the troublemaker in here, aren’t you? What’re you working on?” He looked down, seeing that the boy was slowly working his way through an arithmetic sheet despite the teacher talking about something to do with grammar at the front of the class. Reggie could see, and recognized, that pinch of concentration on the boy’s brow, like he was running and already knew he wouldn’t catch up, because whenever he made it to one station, the train would have already left.
“Oh, this is tough stuff, but you’re getting it!”
Reggie sat next to the boy for the rest of the class period, remarking on the math question he was doing, praising him for right answers and moving his eraser a little closer when he got the answer wrong. When the bell rang and the kids all got up in a flurry, probably for recess, Reggie looked up from the space he’d been occupying by sitting cross-legged on the floor, up at the teacher who was wiping away the chalkboard.
“I know you can’t hear me, but I know that kid,” he said from the back of the classroom. “And you probably think he’s dumb or something, but he isn’t, I promise. I know because he’s me, kinda. And I know I wasn’t good at school, but I was good at other things, and he’ll be, too.”
