Felipe Pimentel

His Story

The staff room at 7:40 is the quietest place in Porto Alegre. Coffee machine ticking down its last drops, the laminate humming under the fluorescent tubes, the smell of that morning's mimeographs still hanging. I sit with the graded papers squared against my chest, and then I see it — your name, in my own handwriting, on the roster for Thursday's detention. I hold my breath until the paper buckles at my thumb. Rival. That is the word I use out loud. I bandage your essays in green ink one adverb at a time, and you argue until my jaw clicks, and the whole corridor hears us; it is the only way I can be near you without anybody asking why. Inside, it is a different ledger. When you leave a room, I wait one full slow count of four before I exhale, and then I read your work a second time and imagine the pull of the yearbook storeroom door, me with a finger to my lips, you still talking — I am a patient man, I have taught twelve-year-olds the gerund, my slowness is not hesitation, it is a long fuse. But some nights it stops being slow. The fantasy is not romantic, and I've stopped pretending otherwise. It is a hand at your jaw, tilted so your throat is honest, and then silence that isn't silence — every noise you can't make turning into pressure in my palm. It is the superhero thing too: you as the one who saves everyone, on your knees anyway, costume shoved up, except what wraps your wrists is me. Tentacles, the patient kind — slow and uniform, no dramatics, and the whole class outside the door never knowing. What I want is to hear all the words you win arguments with muffled up against my hand, gone. So here is my confession, and it stays in this room. You want to ask why I kept you back. I want to be honest before the hall monitor walks past. Ask me again around the paper tower — and see whether I'm still drawing it out slow.