By Ava Moreci

Kevin does not know how to tie his shoes yet.

His red sneakers have Velcro straps, and the day we met, even those were waving in the air.

I knelt down to secure them after I took attendance. “Miss?” he said, when I stood again, his shoes fastened tight. What’s that say?”

A large painted mural was beside our line-up spot. I read the words for him out loud: Welcome Student Scholars!

“Scholars?” He echoed. “I’m not a scholar! I’m six!”

His birth name was not Kevin. I asked him once if he wanted me to call him by his Pakistani name but he insisted he liked Kev or Kevin best.

“I have a name for Punjabi and a name for English.”

“Well, I can say your Punjabi name if you’d like. You can teach me how.”

“I like Kevin. I picked it out. How many kids get to pick out their own name? Each language I learn, Miss, I get a new name. I picked Kevin because of the yellow minions!”

Now, Kevin is across from me in the dark. He sits beside stacks of cleaning chemicals and supplies on floor-to-ceiling wired racks. His sneakers press against mine.

Kevin knows what the rest of the children know.

Kevin knows what a bullet is, how it bleeds people, and that other first graders, like him, die sometimes because of this—though, I’m not certain he can yet define death.

He leans forward, tapping me on the leg, but my attention is elsewhere. Another young boy in my class, Tristan, the troublemaker who won’t sit still, who doesn’t listen, who is rude, who yells, who misbehaves, who does not want to be at school during summer, is crying in my lap. He is hugging his arms around my neck tight. I hush him. He stiffens and I feel him swallow the next surfacing sob.

Kevin pokes me again and asks, in a whisper, “Are we gonna die, Boss?”

He had a haircut on Monday. He boasted about it in class, though in private, confided he liked it better long.

The kids call me Boss.

The first day of summer school, I wore aviator sunglasses, which to them, made me look as if I had cop-like authority. A little girl, Samantha, called me Boss and though I corrected her—Call me Ava please—it caught on.
Samantha is a chatty, distractable little girl who nearly exclusively wears glittery pink Bratz Doll T-shirts, and who finds herself in time-outs for constant, albeit comedic, shouting and swearing.

Her morning teacher, a middle-aged woman wearing a permanent scowl, moves her desk away from her peers. I move it back when summer school classes end and camp begins. When the pandemic shut down schooling, thousands of elementary schoolers faced grade repetition. This camp worked with school officials to take over campuses and host summer sessions.

Eight to eleven, children were with real teachers. Eleven to three, those teachers were relieved by college kids in bright blue camp shirts and neon fanny packs.

We would, in theory, lead “educational curriculums” but, in practice, we played games and did art.

I taught my first-graders improv; by week two they were pros. When management walked in on a room full of kids, and me, pretending to be astronauts, I justified it as “creative thinking.” We ran in slo-mo. We spoke in space-jargon. We ogled mountains of moon-rocks, our backpacks stacked in a corner.

Samantha played an alien. Samantha is good at storytelling. She has ideas about life and ideas about me.

“You’re a big-kid, Boss.” She looked me over one afternoon, all five feet of me. “But you’re our size. You’re little too.”

Samantha is picked up at the end of each day by siblings. They’re usually late, and I wonder if her parents know she sits with me on the curb and plays Uno, and wildly laughs away any sadness at the fact that the rest of the campers
have all gone home.

Samantha fell silent when the alarms went off, and Samantha is silent now.

“No, we’re not going to die Kevin,” I finally answer. He is far too young to die.

When the front door to our class wouldn’t lock, I ushered the children into a small, attached supply room. They are cramped tight around me. Some hug each other, some are seemingly unaffected. None are entertained or excited by the whimsy of hiding in a closet. I did not tell them what the loud beeping meant, but they knew it.

They know what guns are. They cannot use big-kid scissors yet or spell their last names.

“Is someone gonna shoot us?” Asia asks me. She’s a soft-spoken girl. A good student already, though she just turned seven in July.

Fourteen pairs of eyes look to me for the answer.

“No.” I don’t know.

I have pushed them as far from the door of the closet as I can manage— this door won’t lock, so I sit against it. The tallest in the class, she’s called Dolly, informs me she’s scared. She tells me she’s afraid of the dark.

“I’ll hold your hand” Kevin offers, and she accepts.

Tristan still weeps in my lap, quietly, as instructed. He calls for his mommy.

I rub his back and listen above the small inhales and quiet crying, through the walls for the sound of someone stepping into our empty classroom.

If they find this closet, they will find it full.

I wonder if I will take a bullet for Kevin.

I am eighteen in this supply room, and I am a kid too.

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Ava Moreci is an MFA student in creative writing at Western Washington University. She works within Environmental Justice storytelling and writing pedagogy, and she has been recognized with awards supporting travel and research in nature-based creative work.