The three unhinged lines my high school teachers said that I still think about, unprompted
I was folding laundry last night, found that beat up 10th grade chemistry notebook I’ve never been able to throw away. The cover’s covered in lopsided sunflower doodles and bad angsty poetry I wrote when I was 16, and one of those lines just popped into my head out of nowhere. No big trigger, just there — same way you randomly remember you forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer for dinner.
I don’t think about these lines every day, obviously. It’s not like I sit around trauma-bonding over mean teachers on TikTok. But they stick, you know? The kind of offhand unhinged things someone says when they have all the power and you have none, that don’t leave even when the person who said them doesn’t remember opening their mouth at all.
The first one was 9th grade biology, Ms. Hale. I was terrible at biology — like stayed after class twice a week for extra help, cried over Punnett squares at my kitchen table terrible — so when I got my midterm back and saw a B+ scrawled in red pen at the top, I actually bounced up to her desk after class to ask what I could fix to get an A next time. I’d dyed the ends of my hair hot pink the weekend before for homecoming, and she’d side-eyed me every single day that week, so I already felt like I was on thin ice. I stood there, paper crinkling in my sweaty hand, and she looked at me over her reading glasses and said, “You’re the kind of girl that peaks in 9th grade anyway, so a B+ is more than you deserve.” That’s it. No follow up, no joke, just went right back to grading other people’s papers. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and walked to the girls’ bathroom and cried in a stall that smelled like lemon cleaner and someone’s discarded bubble gum, and I never asked her for help again. I got a B in the class, which didn’t ruin my life or anything, but I still flinch a little when someone asks me what I think I “deserve” in any context.
The second one was AP Lang junior year, Mr. Grady. Everyone loved Mr. Grady. He wore flannel, he let us listen to our headphones while we wrote, he went to all the football games. People still post tributes to him on the high school alumni Facebook group, talking about how he changed their lives. I was working on my college essay draft, and we were doing small group share-outs. I’d written it about my mom losing her job at the local textile mill, and us having to sell the family cabin we’d gone to every weekend since I was a toddler. It was the first real thing I’d ever written that felt like it was actually mine, and I was so nervous to share it I’d retyped it three times that week. Mr. Grady wandered by, leaned over my shoulder, and read the whole thing over my shoulder while I sat frozen. Then he laughed a little, loud enough for the whole table to hear, and said, “Poor people problems don’t make good college essays. You want admissions officers to care? Write about that mission trip you went on over spring break, the one where you built houses. That’s the stuff they eat up. Stop trying to make them pity you.” My fingers were already sticky from the half-eaten pack of Sour Patch Kids I had next to my notebook, and I just folded the paper in half and stuffed it in my backpack and never showed anyone that draft again. I ended up writing a boring, generic essay about how reading To Kill a Mockingbird taught me empathy, which got me into college, but I still think about that original draft sometimes, sitting in a landfill somewhere with all my other old high school trash.
Third one was my guidance counselor, senior year. I’d just gotten my financial aid package for the state school I got into, and my scholarship covered half the tuition, but I was still $3,000 short for on-campus housing. I was working 20 hours a week at the local grocery store checking people out, and I still couldn’t save that much that fast. I went to Ms. Lopez panicking, asking if she knew of any last-minute scholarships I could apply for. She leaned back in her chair, clicked her pen a few times, and said, “If you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t go. Go to community college and become a dental hygienist. They make good money, they’re always needed, stop wasting everyone’s time trying to go to a four year school you can’t pay for.” I left her office and cried in my beat up old Honda in the parking lot, and then I picked up an extra shift that night and borrowed $1,500 from my aunt and made it work. But I still have nightmares sometimes that I’m back there, panicking about rent, and that line’s playing in my head.
I’m 28 now. I got that four year degree, I pay my own rent, I work in publishing now, I dyed my whole head pink last month just because I felt like it. People always say things like “oh that just made you tougher” or “you should forgive them, they were stressed too” and maybe they were. I’m sure Ms. Hale had a bad marriage or a headache that day, I’m sure Mr. Grady was just trying to be “practical” in whatever messed up way he thought, I’m sure Ms. Lopez saw a hundred kids a day and didn’t think twice about what she said. But that doesn’t erase the way those words felt when I was 16, 17, 18, when the only people who were supposed to be on your side are the ones saying that shit to you.
I ran into Ms. Hale at that same grocery store last year, she was buying Fancy Feast and recognized me, and said “Oh, I remember you! You were such a sweet girl, how are you doing?” and I just smiled and said fine and walked away. I didn’t yell, I didn’t bring it up, it doesn’t matter that much. But it also doesn’t just go away. Some unhinged things people say when they have all the power just stick with you, like gum on the bottom of a bathroom stall. You don’t have to turn it into a big life lesson. It just is what it is. (Word count: 1187)
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