The Purple Pencil

"Hey. Boys. Hush," I mumbled, delicately inching my glasses back up my nose. "We need to finish our stories about Tupac and Kendrick Lamar for your English teacher."

Like most of my days as a first-year music teacher, it had been a tedious one. Weariness mingled amidst bone marrow by 9am, multiple fights were on the brink of eruption at various times throughout the day, and I had to find the gumption to tutor sixth-grade boys in math and English.

The boys nonchalantly picked up their frazzled notebooks and dragged plastic chairs to the side of my desk, poking each other's sides with stumpy crayons and whispering about a basketball game after tutoring.

I studied each student in front of me, curious about the type of day they had. Johnny was notorious for self-serving smack talk, earning an accurate reputation as a verbal instigator throughout the building. Did he get a strike on his behavior sheet? My eyes shifted next to Josh and James, who were laughing about that day's lunchtime snafus. They appeared to be in fantastic spirits, but I wondered if their jovial cafeteria attitudes earned them a warning or two. My gaze fell lastly to Jonah, who was fiddling with a flowered mug of off-brand mechanical pencils on the edge of my desk.

"Do you need one?" I quietly asked, trying not to embarrass him. He swiftly plucked one out of the mug without answering.

"Miss Gibbons, I want a mechanical, too!" Josh interjected. It took me a few months to adjust to hearing mechanical pencils called only by their descriptor, but I had grown to appreciate the simplicity.

"No, you're fine, Josh. Jonah forgot a pencil. You have a pencil. I'm starting to run out."

Josh rolled his eyes quickly before sinking back into his chair, searching his pockets for the small pencil I watched fall to the floor a few minutes ago.

"In your notebook, you should have those stories we started writing last week in tutoring." I flatly said. "Go on and get those out for me."

"What stories?" James asked. "We didn't write any stories!"

"James. Yes we did. We did last week. We started learning about quotation marks and what they do, and-"

"Miss Gibbons, I'm telling you, we didn't start any stories-"

"And we passed our papers around the circle and wrote down different things in different stories about our favorite rappers," I finished, voice brash with irritation. "I don't want to argue about it. I wouldn't lie to you: we started writing those stories. Did you miss a day last week?"

While James paused to reflect on his schedule, I put a sleepy hand to my face and massaged the right side of my forehead. I too paused for a brief moment to garner the last of my weekly allotment of patience. I was ready to go home and chug a Rolling Rock.

"Miss Gibbons... Hey. Miss Gibbons!"

I flicked my eyes in the direction of the voice and saw Jonah with his new mechanical outstretched toward me.

"Can I trade you pencils?" Jonah questioned.

"Boy, no, you can't trade me pencils," I joked, thinking the pencil was defective. "I'll just get you a new one."

"No, no. That's not why. I got a purple pencil, and I wanted to trade you because you said purple is your favorite color."

I worked at an underfunded Tile 1 school, and the vast majority of my students's caregivers struggled financially, working endlessly to support themselves and their children. There was never an extra five dollars for a field trip, and our fun family nights were infamously under-attended. Because of these hardships, us teachers were thrilled when a student arrived on-time, with sweet smile on their face and school supplies tucked into primary-colored backpacks. And if they didn't, we had tissues to dab tears, calming materials to soothe a rough morning, and the all-important pencils.

I knew Jonah had a lot going on outside of school, so it was humbling to realize this young man remembered this conversation on a specific day about something so trivial. If Jonah put in that much effort to remember my favorite color, then I could give him that much more effort in helping him learn how quotation marks are properly used.

"Yes. Yes, Jonah. We can trade pencils. Thank you for remembering. That was very kind."