Chalk

I made a complete fool out of myself… because of chalk.

This tragedy, however, began long before I knew that was even possible.

Hi, I'm Marisa, and I grew up with occasionally debilitating ADHD. I was quite likely the bane of my elementary school teacher’s existence because I was the queen of derailing a lesson about cursive writing into a debate on whether or not the dot above a lowercase “i” was necessary. To this day, I maintain that it is not. Despite my tendencies toward such forward thinking, I fell behind in certain subjects - namely science and mathematics - simply because my little brain could not pay attention long enough to take notes. "I-I-I" had a mild stutter because my brain moved faster than my mouth, and, more than anything, I hated when people noticed it. I would stutter as I excitedly told my stories “an-an-and” asked my never-ending questions. The stutter, combined with the ADHD, left me feeling stupid sometimes. I hated feeling stupid. I hated looking stupid. I hated all of it.

My parents put me in theater classes to help with the stutter. Soon enough, I was able to speak eloquently at the speed of light that I preferred, and I fell in love with storytelling. ADHD, however, remained a problem for much longer. It was not until my sophomore year of high school when a math teacher watched me stare at a pencil eraser for 30 minutes that I was encouraged to look into what the problem might be (thank you, Mr. Mayes). I saw a psychiatrist, took a complicated test, got diagnosed, acquired a new prescription, and passed math that year with the highest marks I had ever made in that subject.

Having all of the above under control, I felt unstoppable. I became a nearly insufferable know-it-all. I dove into crossword puzzles so I knew the answer to the most random prompts. I soaked in every detail of VH1 shows featuring the highlights of each decade so I was never caught being ignorant of any subject. I studied myself into the ground to make higher and higher grades. Now that I knew my best was an A, any other grade was unacceptable to me unless I truly hated that class (I’m looking at you, Honors Chemistry).

My good grades and study habits helped me immensely throughout college. My sophomore year, I began tutoring English 101 with a student-based program (basically, I was a TA without the grading responsibility), and to my knowledge my reputation as a tutor was fairly solid. I helped people go from Cs and Ds to As and Bs. Every day, I had the honor of talking about comma splices until the cows came home. I had a football player who always brought me trail mix to our tutoring sessions - a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

The highlight of my tutoring days, however, was a certain professor. Let’s call him Dr. Brown. I had a head over heels, write “Love You” on my eyelids like that chick in Indiana Jones crush on this man. To be clear, he was married. There was no move to be made. My intentions… there was no intention. It was what it was. This was the purest of puppy loves: half respect and half admiration.

I was just barely twenty-one years old at the time of our tale and therefore completely enamored with this authority figure. This caused me to stumble over my normally confidently spoken words, spill my coffee in the cafeteria, and, overall, just bumble around like an idiot. Summa Cum Laude be damned; I was a complete moron around this man.

And, like I said, I hated looking stupid.

It’s just that he had it going on. He had the hair going on. He had the eyes going on. He had the being well-over six feet tall going on. He was built like a lean door frame. He rolled the sleeves of his casually fitted button-down shirts up to his elbows. He had the intensely dry comedic delivery of Demetri Martin. He rested against podiums and desks as if he were in a film noir, leaning against a brick wall with a cigarette in his hand and fedora tipping over his eyes. More than anything, he was an incredible professor of literature.

His excellent teaching inspired me on a spiritual level. I could not just be smart. I had to be the smartest. I had been in several of his classes before, and he also fatefully became my advisor. Thus, I had to be my best. I had to be on my game. It was paramount that I make the impression of all impressions. In the year of this story, he had referenced another student’s work far more than mine. Sure, he wrote glowing comments and critiques in the margins of my essays, but I needed public validation that I was, indeed, the best. The smartest. The wittiest. My perspective had to be the freshest.

Outside of class, I know I managed to look utterly ditsy in front of him on many, many occasions. In class, however, I was usually able to muster up some level of stoicism when sharing my thoughts and opinions, but I chalk that up to my being a hot-headed feminist with a penchant for defending the proletariat.

Speaking of chalk, let us move right along to setting the scene.

Part 1: The Search

As a tutor, I had to sit in one of Dr. Brown’s entry level classes each week. I was required to write the schedule for my tutoring sessions on the antiquated chalkboard in the often neglected and frowsty humanities building.

The students knew or, at minimum, recognized me. A few minutes before class started, I was speaking casually to a few of them while I searched for the pack of chalk usually kept close to the blackboard. I searched high, and I searched low: the chalk was nowhere to be found. Eventually I gave up entirely… at least in that room.

“Hang on, guys," I said, rolling my eyes as if the previous tutor had been an idiot. I felt high on being inconvenienced and ultimately, somehow, right. "I have to run to another room to borrow some chalk.”

And run I did. After hearing a dull chorus of “okay” and “good luck,” I spun with a gumption I was unaware I possessed. I bounded out the room only to run full force and full body against a figure in the doorway. Dr. Brown.

I have explained my awkwardness around him, but I must be fully transparent with you here. Dr. Brown was as awkward as I. Remarkably well-spoken and stable when giving a lecture or presentation, he was on my level when it came to general human interaction. Do not let how I perceived him fool you; he was no better at navigating awkward moments than I, particularly this one.

Now, back to the traffic jam. Having slammed our full bodies against each other, and my face into his pectoral region, we were caught in the doorway. Somehow, we ended up with our backs against each side of the door frame. I tilted my chin up to look at him, and he strained his neck to look down at me. An incredibly sophisticated conversation followed.

“Hi,” he said with a questioning lilt in his voice.

“Hi!” We stared at each other for at least seven more seconds.

“What’s up?” His eyes darted from left to right a few times.

“Oh… I was just going to… you see… we are out…” I blinked up at him, blankly.

“...of?”

“Chalk!”

He nodded. “Chalk.”

“Yes, chalk we are out of,” I said, you know, as Yoda would. “I-I-I was running to get some.” Did I just stutter?

“You were.”

“Yes.” I definitely stuttered.

We stared at each other.

“So, I’m going to go get-”

“Yeah-”

“-sorry-”

“Sure thing!” He shot me finger guns.

We dislodged ourselves from the door and each other. My face had never achieved that level of crimson blush before. There was no doubting my Scottish roots at this point; I was beet red with embarrassment, hairline to collarbone.

I had stuttered. I body slammed my favorite professor, and I stuttered.

My cartoonishly red face and I hurried into the adjacent classroom, where other students I had tutored the previous year were.

“Hey Marisa!”

“What are you doing in here?”

“Dude, are you okay?” A former student asked with far too hearty a laugh for my current state.

“Shut up!” I demanded in his general direction.

My back received some chuckles from the class as I snatched a few sticks of chalk from their podium. I rushed into the hall, took a deep breath, and strolled back into my own classroom with the smallest semblance of dignity. I calmly wrote my schedule on the board and gracefully made my way to my seat.

I took a deep breath, shaking it off. That wasn’t that bad, I tried convincing myself. And it’s over.

Boy, how I wish that had been true.

Part 2: The Discovery

Class proceeded as per usual. I sat in the front corner farthest from the door and immediately in front of the podium, taking notes and doodling in the margins. We were covering something along the lines of We Were Soldiers Once… And Young or The Yellow Wallpaper. Considering my already knowing these works far more intimately than most people care to know about any piece of literature, I was fairly zoned out and trying to avoid eye contact with the class and its professor. Dr. Brown continued his lecture without any indication that he had just experienced one of the most awkward instances one has ever endured in a doorway, an instance which was, quite unfortunately, not fully over.

He strolled over to the podium to lean against it as he taught. He acknowledged poignant questions for his students, and a few of them provided rather thoughtful answers. He steered them into the direction of the answers for which he was looking. While doing so, he looked down at the podium. He squinted down at something, looked up at me, raised an eyebrow, and moved away from the podium. He shot back one last confused - and wary - glance at me and continued teaching.

I waited until his back was facing me to investigate the podium, as his confusion in turn confused me. I craned my neck up and a little to the right. Lo and behold, chalk. And not the chalk I had acquired from the neighboring room. It was the original chalk I thought we never had.

I felt the faint sensation of ringing in my ears as the crushing realization set in. Not only had I already made a fool out of myself, but I made a fool out of myself for absolutely nothing. If I had moved one notebook… if I had taken a half second longer to search… if patience had somehow been one of my virtues… I never would have rammed head-first into my professor, and I would have never stuttered in front of him. Based on the look he gave me, I also would have never given him the impression that I was going through some sort of manic episode.

I remember groaning around every five minutes for the rest of the day. I gained at least three sets of crow's feet around my eyes simply from the cringing. I could not shake that feeling of the look he gave me when he discovered the chalk. Chalk, chalk, chalk. I heard it in my head all day. I heard my stuttering in the doorway all day. I heard the ringing in my ears all day. I heard my jaw clenching and my teeth grinding all day.

But now it’s over, I told myself. It’s finally over.

It was not, in fact, over.

Part 3: The Coup de Grâce

I cope with tragedy by telling everyone and their mother about it.

I peddled this story within an inch of my life. I think I needed my loved ones to suffer through this situation the same way I did. I needed them to understand. I told my roommates, their friends, my band, their friends, and everyone else I knew. Since they all knew this professor and of my infatuation with him, they all completely erupted and dissolved into fits of laughter. That laughter felt like a band-aid for my turmoil. It made the entire event seem less fruitless. At least I was getting something out of it.

It was during the telling of this tale months after the fact that the final blow hit home.

I was surrounded by 10-20 of my peers at a study group the semester following the incident. Before we settled into studying, we were all casually swapping funny stories. Naturally, I whipped out “the chalk story” and did my thing. It was not long until the entire room was cringing and laughing with me. One of the boys in the group laughing the hardest spoke up.

“That is not the end of that story.”

My eyebrows shot up, “...Oh?”

He chuckled, “I was in that class. After you left to go to the other classroom, Dr. Brown turned around to us and said, ‘...Well that was f***ing awkward.’ We all thought it was hilarious!”

My face twisted up into a look of agony that I know Emily Dickinson would have liked. The room exploded in laughter, and it took nearly ten minutes for the room to settle down. I have no idea what I studied that night; I could only focus on my embarrassment.

Now, I realize that this is just hearsay. There is a good chance that Dr. Brown never said that and the student made it up to insert himself in the story, but there is just as good of a chance that Dr. Brown did say that and that the entire class laughed with him. The facts of the matter did not matter to me; I felt humiliated. I felt small. I felt... stupid.

This detail altered my view of what happened in a way for which I had not been prepared. It is that detail that kills me the most about this story. In that moment, I learned that I was not a part of the joke. I was the joke. I had not been laughing with my audience, but I was being laughed at. Worse yet, all that time, I had no idea. My inner insecure sixth grader could hardly take that news; I struggled to stomach it. After hearing this addendum, the story did not feel like mine anymore. I felt as if I had been reduced to a dopey character in someone else’s story, which is far less satisfying than my original perspective.

A few years older now, I realize that this mindset was the real tragedy of this story. It is a mindset that I am proud to say I have successfully shaken. I am comfortable looking stupid and learning something new in the process. I can embrace these growing pains and laugh about them fully. I even embrace this story, which is mine and no one else’s. It is probably also Dr. Brown’s, though I am nearly positive he simply brushed it off and feels as if there is no story to tell. Thus, I am my own dopey character in my own silly tale. I am my own punchline, and I intend to keep it that way.

To those who have laughed at me, I salute your excellent sense of humor. To the friends who laughed with me, I am forever in your debt. To the real Dr. Brown, I sincerely hope you never - ever - tell me you read this.

This story does not need a Part 4.