Out of Place

I’ve found my place in being out of place. Of course, being out of place didn’t feel like my place at first. At first, being out of place made me feel just displaced.

My freckles made me out place in the sea of white, unblemished skin around me. Despite the wrinkles, even my teacher’s skin was uniform and spotless. Even my teacher, the only one in the room who loved reading as much as I did, was separate from me in this way.  Her unmarred hands displayed a book and its title dropped from her mouth: Freckle Juice by Judy Blume. I felt my own language betray me as the student next to me pointed and declared, “It’s about you!”.

I dissolved into my desk and chair until I was sure the only evidence of me was my spots. I was sure I was gone until the next time the word “freckle” exploded out of my teacher’s mouth and another student contorted around to gawk and taunt. I was sure that the next student to turn would be astonished to discover my desk empty, but adorned with a peculiar polka dot pattern.

Neutral walls. Hard desks with attached chairs. Water-stained ceiling tiles. My new classroom resembled my old one a few hours away. The students around me, indistinguishable from those sitting uncomfortably in same desks 200 miles away, leered at me in a familiar fashion. I had been transplanted from one small town to another.

My language’s sting of betrayal dulled, and I had since locked myself in an embrace with Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes. So locked in embrace I was, in fact, that I almost missed the stare-down from the gangly girl sitting caddy corner from me. Accustomed to gawking and leering, this particular form of examination was foreign. Was that curiosity I saw in her eyes? I felt panic rise from the bottoms of feet to my knees and hips. Once it reached my armpits, it pooled there for a moment before bubbling over and down my arms. The panic poured over my fingers, which grabbed onto the seam at the bottom of my skirt. And then, for no reason whatsoever, my arms lifted the bottom of my skirt above my desk and back down again. The second my skirt was returned to my lap, I saw the caddy-corner girl giggle with glee, but I still hoped nobody else saw me.

Being out of place made me want to be invisible. That is, until I wanted to leave my mark. My out-of-place-ness positioned me in the place of stubbornness.

The cold hardness of the tile on my bottom and the backs of my legs. The warmth of the sun from the window against my back. These are the things that occupied the space of my mind moments before Mr. K coaxed the secret out of me, the secret that distanced me even further from the other students and my high school teachers in the small town of Ottawa, KS.

In his Sociology class earlier that day, my class read about a culture in which tradition dictated teens take on the responsibility of motherhood. My myopic peers railed against the idea, filling the hollow basement classroom with a cacophony of judgement. I, in turn, railed back, challenging them to assess how their culture impacted their assumptions about motherhood. Or rather, in their eyes, I got pissed off for no reason.

Yes, Mr. K, I was upset today in class. Yes, Mr. K, there is a reason. Yes, Mr. K, I am pregnant. The unleashed secret didn’t send shockwaves that blasted others away, but rather tiny emissions that nudged them to toward other things.

The office was spare, white, uninviting. In reality, the office may have been painted in warm tones and furnished with a homey couch, but in this memory, it was spare.  Just as spare and white and uninviting as Main Street and the roller rink and the Walmart on the other side of town. Her face has been lost in the years, but her words--they are still present: Well, I mean, don’t you want to transfer to the alternative school, Angie? I knew what she meant: You don’t belong here anymore. I also knew that my school, my place of learning had nothing to do with the fetus I now carried. And I’d be damned if I was gonna let them put me where they thought I belonged.

An essential component of being out of place is refusing to go to the place others think you belong. It’s about finding the comfort in others’ discomfort; it’s about claiming your place among all the places you don’t belong.

Her fever was high, not so high that I needed to rush her to the doctor--but high enough that I set a timer to ensure a continuous stream of Motrin in her blood. She was miserable, but she was also sleeping. And the time had come: my Philosophy final was one hour away, and the trip from Ottawa to Emporia State University took me 50 minutes. My blue book was packed in my bag; various philosophers were tucked in my head. I wasn’t sure I could take my final holding a sick baby--hell I wasn’t sure my professor would even allow me to take my final holding a sick baby. But I did because he did.

She slept curled up between one arm and leg in the wooden theater seat until the last question of the final. As other students in backwards baseball caps walked past this alien sight on their trek to the exit, I could see the puzzle on their faces but I was too focused to piece it together. I could feel her restless movements synced to the final letters of the final words of the final sentence. Just in time.

Dr. Somer’s opening ceremony, calling off our names in his booming voice, began that first day. Our desks were lined up, much like they were in high school, and most of us were ill equipped for the literature he would hurl at us. Student by student, he announced our last names, preceded only by Mr. or Miss. When his eyes reached the Hs, I was first:  Miss Hedges. Despite the first-day jitters of my second year at ESU, I corrected him: Mrs. Hedges.  He repeated it, placing forceful emphasis on my title: MRS. Hedges.

The litany of names, punctuated by MRS. Hedges, provided predictable rhythm to the semester. This rhythm was accompanied by Dr. Somer’s violent gesticulation, my discovery of beat poetry, and our silence in the wake of our professor’s tears. We slipped into this rhythm so naturally, so easily that I almost felt I was in my place. But the daily articulation of my title reminded us all that I wasn’t quite.

Sometimes, you can find your place in being out of place because you are also out of space. Then, having your own space is divorced from finding your place, even if that’s being out of place.

The expansive building of brick and glass overpowered the surrounding fields. When Olathe Northwest High School opened it doors for the first time, 800 students passed through its doors. A decade later, the building still sat amongst fields, but its population exploded. Unused rooms filled, used rooms repurposed, and additions constructed. My students had transitioned from calling me Ms. Hedges to Ms. Powers, and I had transitioned from being the matriarch in a family of four to being a single mother of two girls. But in this moment, I boxed my classroom supplies, pondering the incredible amount of packing and moving my family had experienced in the last year. From hauling all of our soot-covered belongings out to the dumpster parked in the driveway to transporting boxes of donated clothes collected at the school to packing up our meager assets in the rental house to relocate back into our reconstructed house, my family lived in transit. My oldest daughter began driving to explore her place outside of our family, while my youngest hunkered in corners to read. I found refuge in my classroom, but even that was temporary. Sorting my clips and files and books into piles of keep and discard and give away, I willed myself to keep my ratio of keep to everything else low. But my will deteriorated each time I picked up a book to reminisce about its lessons while my fingers caressed the sharp edges.

            I dodged backpacks and feet and elbows as I rounded a corner, lifting the handle of my cart up ever so slightly to avoid finding my back wheel stuck in the crack between the tile and carpet. A woman on a mission, I returned little more than polite smiles to my coworkers’ acknowledgement of Hi Angie! and students’ greetings of Hey Powers!. I skimmed across the surface of the school, cart in tow, for the next three minutes until I reached my destination. The room--not my room but a room in which taught--had the same white walls and hard desks as so many of the classrooms I’ve occupied. The same white walls and hard desks that my youngest daughter now occupied in her freshmen year at Olathe Northwest High. I wedged my cart into the doorway, parked it in place, and surveyed the room: for the next 50 minutes, this room was the place 26 students and I would find ourselves out of space and out of place together