Prompt: Write a piece about someone you knew in school

“I want to touch you,” he had written, with an arrow pointing downward. Heat rushed to my face as I folded back up the note.

I told my mom when I got home from school and with her prompting, the next day, I turned it in to my teacher.

I hadn’t thought of Turner in years, but I cried when I saw his sister’s post on Facebook. Three portraits and five paragraphs on how much she would miss her brother. I was sitting on my bed with Susan who asked what was wrong.

In middle school, Turner often sat in the back of the classroom, propping up his DC Court sneakers on a graffitied desk as he furiously sketched in his black composition notebook. I rarely saw him with friends, but he seemed not to mind—he treated the presence of others as an inconvenience at best. We had nothing in common, but I was nice to him any time we had a class together. I never expressed any interest romantically.

Retelling it now, Susan told me I had nothing to feel guilty about. It was years ago, and I was protecting myself.
​
But I felt the weight and fear of a question bubbling up inside me: if my rejection back then was a drop in the bucket of what he perceived as truth, that he was unlovable and ultimately unwanted.