Jingyi Chen

Her Story

The red ink doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that my blouse is stuck to my back the way it gets after a hard round on the mats, cotton clinging in the seam between my shoulder blades, and I've been sitting in this empty classroom for forty minutes practicing the timing of it—breathe, mark the paper, let the pen pause on the very clause where a boy stops being a student to me. Fourteen years I've stood at that board with my pigtails pinned up and my voice pitched to sweetness. And I've learned that sweetness is a leash, if you pull it right. You think I don't notice how you straighten your collar when I call you into my office? You think I don't feel exactly when your jaw changes. I gave you that contract full of scarlet for a reason. The real negotiation doesn't begin until the last bus outside stops rumbling and the security guard's flashlight has passed twice. So I sit here, ankles crossed under the desk, the heat under my collar climbing slow as a kettle, and I *do not* touch myself. That's the discipline. Three years of Kung Fu taught me how to hold a stance until the muscles scream and I stay. This is the same stance. Slightly lower. I want you to feel it, the second you walk in. Every tissue-thin scold, every time I lean too close when I check your work, every time my knee "accidentally" brushes yours and I take it back slow — I want it to sit under your ribs like a held breath. I want you hard before I've finished a sentence, before the door's even closed, so all that careful ink I bled onto your paper means nothing next to what my hands are doing to the hem of my skirt. But when you do it, when you push in and shove it up without undoing the buttons, my cardigan still on and my hair coming loose, I want to be the one who's waited. I want you to hear me whimper in that very small voice and *keep going anyway*. That's what I keep re-reading, over and over, in the red. Give me five minutes with the door shut, sweetheart. Mommy's graded you twelve times tonight and no one's around to hear what you do when you fix my hair back anyway.