For my first teaching assignment of the year, I am dropped into classes of high school juniors and seniors and their first assignment of the year is to learn about writing their personal essays. I think to myself how lucky I am that this is the task today, and how lucky they are too, if only they knew it. We begin by talking about the essays they've read over the past few days. Those writers deal with the usual: cancer, alcoholism, the horrid ordinaries that make up all of our lives. I ask my classes: how many of you know someone who's had cancer? All morning 70% of the hands go up. Did you like this essay, I ask no one in particular. One boy answers: no. I ask him why not. It was retarded, he replies. That's not a word they get to use in my classroom, and I tell him so: try again. It's gay, he sneers, knowing I'm going to tell him that's the wrong word, too, although he seems surprised to hear me say it. It's dumb, he finally says, trailing off. The teacher keeps a thesaurus on her desk, and for a moment I consider picking it up and slamming him in the side of the head with it, just to see if we might be able to put some new words into him that way. I think to myself: this would be the most surprising thing that would happen to them all day. I wonder how many other teachers have ever felt that impulse. We move on, and talk about what they might use for a subject when they get down to their writing. No one has a clue what they could find to talk about. I try to remember if there was ever a time when I didn't have something to say. I want to ask my students, how many of you cower under your sheets at night because your alcoholic parent is in a drunken rage downstairs. How many of you have already been drunk yourselves and worry about the things you did, who's had their heart broken by that early abortion, how many of you have tacked up a Confederate flag on your bedroom walls. How many of you know what that means? What I saw to them instead: what's interesting about your lives, what story do you have to tell that no one else can tell? They don't know; they don't like it. No one can imagine what there could possibly be to say, never mind how they could possibly write about it. It's all dumb.
And then at the end of third period Ryan materialized beside me just after the dismissal bell rang. He is almost exactly a third my age, several inches taller but several pounds lighter, and I noticed the way his clothes hang off his skinny frame. I didn't notice right away that those clothes were fatigues, in his drab camouflage he nearly disappears into the bland background of the classroom. I think I might know, he begins, what it is I want to write about. His voice pitches up here in the beginnings of enthusiasm. Last summer, he tells me, I went through basic training. He falls silent for long enough that I begin to wonder if that's what he stepped forward to tell me. But he continues in a much lower voice: I'm going to graduate in the spring, and right after that, I'm shipping out for Iraq.
And then he began to shake.
I thought at first he was going to cry, and then I thought that maybe I was going to cry, and all I wanted to tell him was, get your parents, get a lawyer, it's not too late to get out of this. What I manage to say is, oh, and by that time he's recovered a little bit, has regained some of the swagger that I imagine is part of what they taught him over the previous summer. But by the time I get there, he continues, it'll all be fine: I'll be an engineer, and I'll be building roads, so all I'll have to worry about is reconstruction. I couldn't help myself, what I said next, because one thing I've learned about writing over the years is that you have to tell the truth, and sometimes when you're speaking you're really writing out loud, and so I said to him: well, that's all you have to worry about as long as you don't, you know, run into any IED's while you're building those roads...
There he puffed up, confident again and having regained his bearings. They taught us all about that, he tells me, and this is why that happens: those guys who are getting blown up have been there a long time, and they get careless. That isn't going to happen to me.
I don't know what I do think is going to happen to him, but I do know, as I watch him walk off to his next class, that he's been lied to plenty already, and I am suddenly pretty sure that eventually, all that being lied to is what's going to form the central chapter of his life, that he's on the verge of becoming someone who's about to find out he has plenty to say. If only he already knew it. If only he survives long enough to figure out how to say it. If only, all these days of thinking about him later, I could think of a way to tell it to him.
On the way home that afternoon I was daydreaming in the car about the textbook I'd like to write for these kids. The first chapter would be about how everyone has an inner life--I suspect no one has ever said the phrase inner life to a single one of the students I saw that day--and how it's okay to use it. More than okay: it's what you need to survive. Then I'd have a chapter about how the pen is mightier than the sword. It's an idea that goes back to Euripides, that may well go back to the invention of writing. I haven't seen Ryan again since that day, but a few weeks later I was talking with the school librarian. He and I were discussing problem children, as the class I had that day was full of them. The librarian tells me: there's one boy who was a huge problem all last year, then he spent last summer in basic training. I know him, I say suddenly, although of course I don't really know him, I only spoke to him once, briefly and unimportantly. I can't get over the change in the kid, the librarian continues, and his tone is glowing: he's a whole different person now. It grew him up. I couldn't get over how scared he sounded, I reply, and the librarian and I look at each other across the counter, each of us wondering what on Earth the other could possibly be thinking, how dead wrong in their perceptions the other person really is. If only they knew it.
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