“Hi, excuse me?”

My back straightened, and I looked over my shoulder.

“Yes?” I responded. I opened the cabinet door, the newly-bought beakers crammed on each shelf.

“Do you know-” His voice came out a strange garble. He cleared his throat. “Do you know where Mr. Johnson is?”

I turned to him, the boy on the other side of the science lab.

He stood in the doorway, his hands gripped around his backpack straps like a lifesaver out at sea. Every limb was close to his skinny frame, taking up as little space as possible.

I looked at the clock - it read long before the first bell.

“Mr. Johnson should be here soon.” That wasn’t a lie, knowing his schedule, but I had no way of confirming.

The boy, familiar but with no name attached in my mind, glanced around the room.

“Is it important?” I asked.

“Um, well…” he began, his feet shuffling up and down like they wanted to run out from under him. “I need help.”

I stepped towards him, instinctively looking behind him as if to see some commotion happening in the otherwise-silent hallway. “Help? Are you okay?”

Not looking at me, he turned away slightly, enough to make me stop moving. My tennis shoe squeaked on the tiled floor, like an untuned violin chord.

Something light grey covered his cheekbone. A shadow? Nothing stood in the way of the fluorescent lights to cast anything on him, no matter how weak.

I blinked, then again.

It was a bruise.

A recent one, too, outlined in a soft pink.

My muscles felt tight.

“Can you tell me your name?” I asked softly.

“Ryan.”

I smiled, although it probably looked watery. “Well, Ryan, you can call me Miss Mendoza.”

The only noise we could both hear was the ticking of the clock, constant droning easy to tune out. I could tell by the way his jaw clenched, his skin seeming to tight around his face, that his heartbeat must be loud in his ears, louder than anything else this school could do.

“Ryan, why don’t you come sit down over here,” I said, gesturing to a few stools near me.

Hesitating, he then headed toward me, hunched over.

I tried to appear calm. “You said you needed help?”

The buses wouldn’t pull into their loop for some time. I knew that the only students around this early would be practicing for the swim & dive team, or rehearsing for the “special” choir, neither of which I believed him to be a part of.

“It’s… Well, it’s-“ He pulled his phone halfway out of his athletic shorts all middle school boys seem to wear. I leaned over, expecting him to show me something, but then he slipped it back in, like it held a dirty secret.

An awkward silence.

“It’s my dad.”

His fingers picked at the phone case, and his worn sneaker tapped against the inside of the stool’s foot rest.

At my three years at this school, this public middle school in a New England town for the top 5%, the only injuries I’ve seen are kids showing up in casts they got after falling off a sail boat or twisting their wrist during tennis. Students never got into fights and only weaponized words and isolation, something they thought teachers didn’t have a radar for.

One girl tripped over an undone shoelace and smacked her nose against the countertop last month, leaking blood the janitor still has to use bleach on the spot. The chemical smell was still obvious even hours later.

I’ve never seen bruises in this building.

Not how I did when growing up, in a place nothing like this.

I sat down in the stool beside him, not used to the wood compared to the spinning seat at my desk.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the same tile he seemed focused on, his eyes glazed but wide, as if he were playing the same memories again and again like a video on a loop, numbing his brain with time.

My breathing matched the ticking on the wall, and after some time, my body felt one with this room - this room that I never made mine, only left up the inspirational and instructional posters and the artificial skeleton that the last teacher left behind.

“Miss Mendoza?”

I looked to him, and he finally met my eyes.

I smiled again, this time feeling warmth I’d sworn to keep away.