The Bottom Club

05 | opia

EVERYONE TOOK NINTH grade hard. You were fifteen and no amount of YA books or Teen Fic movies you consumed could prepare you for the real deal. Yes, there were castes, the popular, not so popular, and unpopular―but life was not so black and white.

Pop culture never prepared you for what to do if the head of the varsity cheerleading squad graduated valedictorian, with a full ride scholarship to one of Stanford’s pre-med programs, or when the nerd got three F’s and did so poorly he had to repeat the grade. And it never told you what to do if you began high school right after the year’s long finalization of your parents’ divorce. So while most people took ninth grade hard, Wyatt started his drowning, which was how his tradition of going to sleep in the school’s infirmary began.

It first happened about two weeks into resumption. Wyatt had been on his way from the cafeteria after spending most of the previous night on a phone call with Viv when he distractedly collided with Will Hamilton, a tenth grader at the time who was notorious for bullying the freshmen. He’d begun to apologize, but Will refused to listen and pushed him into the lockers. Tobi hadn’t been there to fight him off, as he’d spent the entirety of that summer in Nigeria, starting high school late because of some problems with his parent’s visas.

It would’ve been a blood bath if Mrs. Lopez, the head school nurse, didn’t walk in at that same moment and put a stop to things, though even then Wyatt hadn’t escaped without a cut on his brow alongside a serving of emotional trauma.

She led him to the clinic after sending Will to the principal’s office, where while cleaning up his wound with Peroxide Wyatt started to cry.
Mrs. Lopez―Martha―then fifty sixty, had always exuded an aura of warmth, and he fell into it, wrapped himself even as he began to tell her everything. He spoke of his fear of waking up one day to find that even his father had left and that he would die alone. He spoke until she pulled him in a tight hug, not caring if tears or mucous stained her dress.

“Now the way I see it,” she began, “is that I have been alive for a very long time, and you might not believe it but I think things happen for a reason.”

“Bullshit,” Wyatt countered.                                                                
“Do you believe in God?”

Wyatt shrugged, slightly apprehensive. She didn’t look like any of the people he’d seen in Times Square during pride parades carrying signs like Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve, but people could surprise you.

“My grandparents on my mum’s side are Christian, and my mum identifies as Christian too―though nominally. My dad’s a secular humanist though, and I live with him, so yeah.”

“Well, do you believe in anything?”

He turned her words over in his head, not understanding what she was getting at.

“I don’t believe in magic if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She laughed, and wisps of white hair fluttered from the white chignon bun she’d styled her hair into. Wyatt took in the laugh lines around her mouth, and the wrinkles at the sides of her eyes, and understood what it meant when people said that there were some moments you wished you could live in forever.

“I think the first thing you need to do is find yourself,” Martha said, now an epitome of composure, “And after that, you find what you believe in, whether it’s God, or love, or music, or even you. You find that thing you believe in, take it in, and let it guide you.”

He opened his mouth to talk, but she stopped him with a finger.

“Don’t interrupt me,” she said, and Wyatt shut his mouth.