One day, our fourth-grade hamster, Nina, had babies. Six of them. They looked like chewed-up tomatoes, which is what I told our teacher when I summoned her to the cage. “I think she barfed fruit or something.”
Kids crowded around the cage, but by the afternoon they had lost interest. I, meanwhile, became obsessed, particularly with the runt, which was black and white and about the size of a fava bean. I named it Pepper. As Pepper grew, it became clear there was an issue: its back legs were fused together by some kind of membrane that looked like pink bubble gum stretched thin. As a result of this deformity it had to drag itself around by its front legs, and it usually got left behind. Kathy, our teacher, was concerned: soon Pepper might get beaten to the food bowl, bullied, or worse. Nathan, she told me, was a hamster expert. He had fifteen of them at home. Perhaps I could take Pepper across the hall and see what he had to say.
I approached cautiously at lunch, carrying Pepper in an open shoe box. I paused at the door, watched him for a moment at his desk hunched over a sandwich, a juice box, and a grown-up novel. “Hello?”
Nathan looked up. “Hello.”
I explained the situation in fits and starts, trying simultaneously to convey the gravity of Pepper’s case and take in the reality of a fifth-grade classroom. He motioned for me to hand him the box. He peered in, picking Pepper up in a confident motion, holding her under the tiny armpits while he examined the lower extremities. He removed a pair of nail scissors from his desk drawer, and I watched him cut Pepper’s legs apart. “It’s a she,” he said. She was mewing, kicking her newly freed feet. “She’ll be fine.”
The next year, when I got to Nathan’s class, I felt like I already knew him. He acted like he knew me, too. And he noticed: that I loved to read and write and act and also that I had no friends. He invited me to stay with him for lunch, so I didn’t have to stand out in the courtyard with everyone I hated, huddling in the corner to stay warm while sportier types sweated and had to remove their overlayers. We would usually end up talking: about books, rodents, the things that scared me. He told me his wife had died right after his daughter was born and that he had gotten a new wife, but he didn’t like her as much. He said it was hard to find someone you wanted to spend that much time with. His energy shifted: some days he was calm and funny. Others he was antsy and tense, stopping every few minutes to shoot Nasonex up his left nostril. “Stupid allergies.”
I’d never had a teacher talk to me this way. Like I was a person, whose ideas and feelings mattered. He wasn’t just nice. He saw me for who I felt I was: achingly brilliant, misunderstood, full of novellas and poems and well-timed jokes. He told me that popular kids never grow up to be interesting and that interesting kids are never popular. For the first time, I looked forward to school. To the moment I’d walk into the classroom and catch his eye and feel certain I was going to be heard that day.
He called me “My Lena,” which became Malena. At a certain point he started rubbing my neck while he talked to the class. He put a heart on the board every time I said “like,” but just a check for the other students. I was terrified of what the other kids would think and thrilled to have been chosen. One day he brought his daughter to class, and she sat on his lap during lunch, drinking a juice box, her feet dangling, skimming the floor. She looked just like him in a wig. I wanted to kill her.
That winter, Jason Baujelais (now seemingly forgiven for the N-word incident) announced he hadn’t done his homework. “Well, that’s a problem,” Nathan said, arms crossed.
“You never make Lena do her homework,” Jason said.
I froze. Nathan approached slowly and asked me to open my backpack. I unzipped it, terrified of what might fall out. There were piles of unfinished worksheets, half-finished papers, all of which he had just stopped asking me for. He said he’d rather read my stories.
“You better have all this done by tomorrow,” he told me.
I had picked up a dollar bill that had fallen out of my bag, and I was feeling it, turning it over in my sweaty hand. He snatched it.
“You can get this after class.”
Once the classroom emptied out, I approached him. “Hi. Can I have my dollar?”
He smiled and stuck it down his shirt.
“Okay, now I don’t want it.” I giggled, hoping it would calm us both down.
He chucked it at me. “Jesus, Lena. You’re all talk, but when it comes to action …”
It would be years before I knew what he meant, but I knew I didn’t like the sound of it, and I told my mother, who looked like she had seen a parade of ghosts. “That fucking pervert,” she said, furiously dialing my father. “Come home from the studio now.”