My Teacher Destroyed My Dead Sister’s Final Drawing — So I Erased Her Twenty-Year Career
Part 1
The back of my sketchbook was strictly off limits.
Everyone in the room knew the rule.
I kept a thick rubber band wrapped around that entire section just in case.
Brenda paced between the rows of desks.
She snatched notebooks from hands without breaking her stride.
Checking the back of mine before passing it forward completely slipped my mind.
The fact that the rubber band had snapped the previous Friday escaped me entirely.
Her footsteps stopped.
I lifted my head from the metal frame of my desk.
The teacher stood at the front of the room with my sketchbook resting in her hands.
Its covers were folded back completely.
She stared directly at the forbidden section.
“What on earth is this?”
Her voice echoed off the cinderblock walls.
My lungs turned to ice.
I pushed my chair back against the linoleum floor.
“Brenda, please don’t.”
“Is this a joke?”
She turned the book around to face the rest of the class.
Stick figures.
Crayon drawings of a lopsided dog.
A house with scribbled smoke pouring out the chimney.
Two people holding hands under a giant yellow sun.
“It’s not the assignment,” I managed to force the words past my teeth.
“I know, I can see that.”
Her fingers pinched the top corner of the first page.
“Please, don’t touch those.”
Rip.
The sound of the thick paper tearing echoed through the silent room.
“You think you can waste my time with this?”
Rip.
Another page separated from the binding.
“Stop, please.”
I gripped the edges of my desk.
“You don’t understand.”
She ignored me perfectly.
Her fingers crushed the two torn pages into a tight ball.
She tossed them toward the metal trash can by the whiteboard.
“You turned in a joke instead of taking this class seriously.”
“They’re not a joke.”
My voice shook.
“I’m begging you, just stop.”
Brenda did not even look at me.
She grabbed a third page and ripped it clean out.
“Those aren’t part of the assignment!”
Rip.
“Maybe next time you’ll take my class seriously.”
The room tilted.
My brain erased the memory of pushing my chair away.
Crossing the floor happened in a blur.
My hands closed around the spine of the sketchbook.
I ripped it out of her grip.
The momentum sent her stumbling backwards.
Her hip crashed into the edge of her wooden desk.
The entire classroom gasped in unison.
“Assault!”
She shrieked the word at the ceiling.
A shaking finger pointed straight at my face.
“He just assaulted me!”
The threat barely registered in my mind.
“You’re getting expelled!”
I dropped to my knees in front of the trash can.
My fingers dug through discarded paper towels and pencil shavings.
I pulled the crumpled pages out from the bottom.
They were completely ruined.
Thick paper held deep creases through the crayon wax.
I pressed them flat against my thighs.
Violent tremors shook my hands.
Then I saw the final page she had torn.
The one she had ripped directly in half.
Two stick figures holding hands.
One large, one small.
‘Me and big broother’ was scrawled in purple crayon at the very bottom.
Megan never could spell ‘brother’.
Teasing her about the extra letter became a daily routine.
She would always laugh and tell me the mistake sounded funnier anyway.
The tear went straight down the middle of the paper.
It split the space exactly between the two figures.
It separated me from her.
My chest caved in.
I sat on the cold floor of the classroom holding the two halves of my little sister’s drawing.
A sound broke out of my throat before I could stop it.
“She’s dead.”
The sob tore through the quiet room.
“My little sister is dead.”
Brenda’s shouting choked off instantly.
The sudden silence in the room was deafening.
“She had leukemia.”
I kept my eyes pinned on the purple crayon letters.
“She was eight years old.”
I swallowed the massive lump forming in my throat.
“She died in January.”
I held the two torn pieces up toward the fluorescent lights.
“Every night we would sit on her hospital bed and draw together.”
I looked at the students watching me.
“She would use the back of my sketchbook, and I would use the front.”
I pressed the two torn edges against each other.
“It was our thing, just me and her.”
Nobody in the room moved a single muscle.
Brenda stood frozen against her desk.
“This was the last thing she ever drew.”
My thumb traced the lopsided yellow sun.
“The night before she went back to the hospital for the very last time.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“She was so weak she could barely hold the crayon, but she finished it.”
I looked up at my teacher.
“She handed it to me and told me to keep it forever.”
My voice cracked on the final word.
“I promised her I would.”
Tears spilled over my eyelashes and burned my cheeks.
“I promised her, and you ripped it in half.”
A chair squeaked against the floorboards.
A girl in the front row stood up slowly.
“He told you to stop.”
Another chair pushed back.
“He begged you.”
Craig stood up by the window.
“You didn’t even ask what they were.”
Another student rose to their feet.
“You just kept ripping.”
One by one, the scraping of chairs filled the silence.
Twenty-two students stood up.
They formed a solid wall between me and the front of the room.
Brenda pressed her back against the whiteboard.
Her eyes darted toward the heavy wooden door.
“Sit down.”
Her voice trembled.
“Everyone sit down right now.”
Nobody moved an inch.
I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve.
I stood up from the floor.
I looked past her shoulder at the massive black portfolio resting on the top shelf.
