Between Bells
Aerie
Monday
The fluorescent tube over the B-wing staircase can’t decide who it wants to be.
It sputters like an indecisive heartbeat—on, off, on—catching chalk dust that never really left, not even after they drowned the halls in bleach last week.
Under the hum, the air tastes like lemon and wet mop—cold air pretending it’s clean.
Somewhere in the vents, something ticks, not a clock—more like the building clearing its throat.
I stand underneath and count my breaths between the ringing of bells.
Four in, four out.
Even numbers only.
8:05 for the first bell.
8:09 for the second.
If I move now, I can make my locker by 8:10, which leaves forty seconds to stop pretending I can fix a light with sheer attention.
The second hand on the hallway clock jerks forward instead of gliding, a slight stutter that makes time look nervous.
The stair rail is cool under my palm, paint rubbed to a smooth bone by a thousand anxious hands.
The cinderblock walls show the ghosts of old posters—PROM, VOTE, BLOOD DRIVE—peeled away in rectangles of lighter paint.
Waxed tile tries to slip my sneakers half an inch each step—fresh gloss laid over last year’s grit.
A sun-faded ”Class of 23" banner droops above the exit, the three half-peeled into a 2.
A draft slides down the stairwell and lifts the ends of the paper crane garland that the art club forgot to take down in June; the cranes sail and bump and correct themselves like they’re practicing being alive.
I adjust the stack in my arms: a fresh schedule printout (one for the locker, one as backup), an emergency contact form my mother already signed, a composition notebook with last year’s blue gel-ink ghosts peeking through the first page.
My nails are chipped, baby-blue.
I keep meaning to buy remover, then I don’t, so the chips look like the paint on the lockers: flaking in neat little moons. I tap the edges of the papers three times for luck.
It’s a soft door I can close on a loud morning.
“Move or be a door,” a senior boy says, laughing, squeezing by with a backpack that’s definitely trying to start a fight. I move. I am very, very good at not being a door.
The hallway runs too straight for comfort, a two-hundred-foot funnel of drowned-mustard lockers. The chipped corners look like bitten lips.
The fluorescent lights hum in a disjointed rhythm, casting the corridor in an erratic glow reminiscent of an unkempt aquarium—some areas blazing bright while others remain shrouded in shadow.
Dust motes drift in the bright sections like they’re auditioning for snow.
On the green bench by the vending machine, someone has created a small ecosystem of fossilized gum—pink, gray, one heroic strip of electric blue—layered in like geologic sadness.
The vending machine hums, then nudges a spiral snack one coil too far before gravity returns it like an apology. Someone’s drawn eyes are on the “NO FOOD OUTSIDE CAFETERIA” poster; the poster now stares judgment at every bagel.
“Okay,” I whisper, to no one and to myself, the way you talk to a staircase before you climb.
“A two, a three, a four.”
Sometimes numbers make the hallway into a map.
Sometimes they make me feel like I have a secret.
Two freshmen practice falling for a TikTok and keep forgetting to laugh the same way twice.
The custodian peels the tape off last year’s prom banner with slow patience, stacks it in a neat square like a folded summer. A teacher shoulders a rolling cart full of untouched packets that say WELCOME BACK in a font that apologizes.
The water fountain coughs before it sprays; three heads turn out of instinct, then pretend they didn’t.
A cart’s front wheel squeaks the same note every fourth rotation, measuring time louder than the bells.
Locker 132.
Combination: 34-18-9.
I spin and miss; the light coughs, stabbing shadow in the corner of my eye.
I overshoot thirty-four by a hair and have to wind past zero like I’m apologizing to the dial.
Reset.
Again.
On the third try, it opens with a sigh, as if it were bored with keeping my things.
Inside: one Polaroid crooked on purpose—Mom in scrubs, hairnet askew, laughing at something off-frame; me at ten with a spelling bee trophy too big for my arms.
The tape never lets it sit perfectly straight.
Perfection, I’m learning, prefers “almost.”
I slide the schedule into a small magnet clip and check it against the folded twin in my pocket—first period AP Calc with Mr. Foster, B214.
Then Honors English with Ms. Blake, B110.
I say the rooms in my head and picture where they live: the turn, the pinch point, the sticky tile near the water fountain that grabs shoes like a tongue.
The printer sneezed a dot of ink on the A in AP.
I take out my pencil and correct it even though nobody but me will ever notice.
Graphite flashes silver when the light hits—quiet proof I was here.
I circle B214, light pressure.
Circling makes it friend-shaped on the map.
A pack of sophomores eddies around the bench, perfume and hair gel and lemon cleaner biting into an almost-nostalgic stink. “Did you see the TikTok? The homeroom skit?” one girl asks, holding her phone flat like a communion plate.
Half the screens wear spiderweb cracks under cheap films; thumbs still know every path by muscle memory. “Which one?” another says, already laughing.
“The one where the teacher’s like, ‘Syllabus means nothing to me’ and then falls through a ceiling tile—”
“That’s not real,” a boy says, smiling into his screen, because it doesn’t have to be.
Somewhere down the corridor, somebody plays the sped-up song hook that ruled the summer.
The chorus flips my stomach the way riding over train tracks does: familiar and a little out of control.
A field trip of eighth graders passes, led by a guidance counselor, clapping a rhythm that only she hears.
She keeps counting heads under her breath, a smile only landing after number eight.
Someone’s sneakers squeak in a pattern that keeps almost making a word.
I pull my composition book.
Date at the top in neat square numbers: September 7.
Under that, the list that keeps me from going static:
Open the locker.
Check the schedule.
Keep your shoulders low.
Make eye contact if spoken to.
Smile small.
Don’t apologize unless you mean it.
The paper edge finds the split beside my thumbnail; pain, neat, and convincing.
In the margin, I write the sentence I woke up with so it has somewhere to live besides my ribs: If I stay small, the world passes like a train—fast, loud, but it never hits me.
“Yo! Aerie!” Luca’s voice cuts the hum like it has a key.
He moves like hallways were built for him, stride and bounce, a mini basketball spinning from finger to palm like a coin; he’s charming.
He smells like pine deodorant and cafeteria coffee, which means he was at the park at sunrise and then bribed the vending machine into friendship.
There’s a scratch on his cheek—rim rash, probably, the court’s love bite.
“You survived summer,” he says, dropping his shoulder against the locker next to mine and catching the ball before it hits the floor.“Senior year. Our last first day. You feel old? Because I feel eighty-seven.”
“Eighty-seven-year-olds don’t say ‘yo,’” I say.
My mouth lifts, betraying me.
He’s been doing that to my face since we were twelve.
“They do if they’re cool,” he says.
He peeks into my locker like it might have a second Narnia behind the notebooks.
“Aw, the photo. Hey, Ms. Lizeth,” he tells the Polaroid, then softer, “Hi, tiny you.”
“She’s still around,” I say, tapping my temple.
“She just learned how to use a planner.”
“Bet.”
He extends his hand.
“Schedule. I’m going to memorize it and then only walk you to the wrong classes for comedic effect.”
I hand it over.
“AP Calc, B214,” I say, like a password.
He makes a face like he licked chalk.
“Foster smiles like a calculator. But he’s fair. English with Blake next? Nice. She pretends to hate everyone and then writes college recs that make you cry.”
“I don’t cry at school,” I say automatically.
“You cry in your bones,” he says, like he’s narrating a nature documentary about a rare creature whose habitat is the second row by the window.
The first bell brays long and metallic.
Shoulder muscles pop up and down the corridor.
Doors slam three at a time like a chord.
Above me, the fluorescent picks a side (on) for exactly two seconds.
It feels like a blessing I don’t believe in.
“Two minutes,” I tell myself, and the stack in my arms becomes a checklist I can handle.
Papers squared.
Pencil.
Vanilla lip balm.
Phone.
Ponytail retied, elastic smooth under chipped polish.
I breathe in bleach and out numbers.
“Hey,” Luca says, dropping his voice so it belongs to our square foot of air.
“You good?”
I nod.
The word yes sits just behind my teeth like a lozenge.
“I’m good.”
“You’re good,” he says.
He makes it true by saying it like that.
That’s his real magic trick.
We start walking.
The hallway does its swallowing trick, and anybody not keeping pace becomes part of the bench.
A junior records herself doing a “first day fit check” while a powdered-sugar donut sheds a constellation of white across the tile.
“Rate me one to ten,” she says, and five people say “ten” without looking up.
The “NO FOOD” poster looks on, offended and sticky.
Somewhere, a locker refuses to open, and its owner negotiates out loud: “Thirty-four, eighteen, nine, don’t embarrass me like this.” The lemon bleach lives at floor level and stings the backs of my eyes.
I blink it back and count ceiling tiles to B214.
Numbers don’t fix everything, but they give me something firm to put my feet on.
The building has its own language.
The PA crackles and stops for no reason; eight people look up like they’ve been called by name.
The speaker clicks again, like a throat about to speak, then thinks better of it.
The elevator for the accessibility wing dings once and then gives up.
A poster for College Night curls at the corners; someone has written ask about fee waivers in careful block letters beneath the glossy promise.
A security guard with a lanyard of keys pretends not to notice two freshmen trying to climb into a trophy case for a photo. His radio murmurs numbers and a street name; he answers with a sound that isn’t a word but still means copy. He says, “Don’t,” without looking.
They don’t.
“Did you hear?” a boy behind us says, voice set to broadcast.
He’s a hallway natural, chin up, eyebrows doing half the work.
“Lopez says no more late passes. ‘Tardy bell is a lifestyle choice.’”
“You see the stair TikTok?” someone else says, because everything in September is a question about something you already saw.
Someone plays the chorus again.
Someone shouts “left!” to a friend and means it.
A teacher with a lanyard full of conference badges starts doing traffic-cop hands at the B-wing pinch point. “Let’s move with purpose,” he says, which is adult for good luck with the ocean, children.
By the time we pass the display case with the dusty wolf mascot head inside, the rumor has already grown legs. “Harley,” someone says. “Miami,” someone else says.
“Older,” adds a third voice with authority, “like twenty.”
A girl swears she saw a helmet by the cafeteria.
Another claims he’s not even a student; he’s a temp security hire.
“Ms. E told attendance she’s got a new transfer today,” a junior announces, angling his body like a stage and letting his voice ride the metal.
“Dude drove up from Miami on a Harley. Tattoos everywhere. Like a movie.”
“Shut up,” Copper Hair says, delighted.
“That’s not legal.”
“Bet,” he says, and in this hallway, bet is binding law.
“New transfer. From Miami. On a Harley.”
Above me, the fluorescent blinks again—off, on—as if it heard the rumor and couldn’t help reacting.
The second bell, the shooing one, slices through the last bits of hallway theater.
Doors start closing.
Papers shuffle.
The noise compresses to the between-class hum that lives in the walls.
At my locker, I nudge the Polaroid into alignment even though it won’t align.
I slide the schedule back into the magnet clip.
A school police radio crackles at the far end of the hall; the words are static, numbers, and a laugh.
Through the stairwell door window, I can see the sky in a thin rectangle—September blue washed pale by the fluorescent wash.
Someone two floors up drops a stack of photocopies; the sound waterfalls down the stairwell, white sheets slipping off the last day of summer.
Luca leans in close enough that his pine-coffee breath nudges the air by my ear.
“Text me if Foster starts in on limits. I’ll fake a medical emergency.”
“Your medical emergency is that you talk too much,” I say.
“It’s chronic,” he says, and grins the grin that used to get him out of trouble and now mostly gets him detentions he doesn’t mind.
A guidance counselor wheels a cart of new laptops past, each box taped and labeled like a sleeping animal. The janitor’s radio, three corridors over, whispers a salsa song that keeps missing the downbeat of our bell by exactly one second, so the hallway feels a half-step off reality.
A little weather sneaks through the cracked window at the end: wet street, bus exhaust, a metal tang that rides the air whenever the seven train passes.
I smooth the corner of my schedule where the printer chewed it.
I lift the paper to the light so the ink glints like a humid thought.
My hand is steady. That counts.
We pass a corkboard layered in flyers: WOLF DEN—FIRST FRIDAY—QUEEN OF THE RING in bold teeth; COLLEGE FAIR; COMMUNITY BOARD MEETING; MISO MISSING—tan mutt photo printed too dark, tear-off numbers hanging like tired eyelashes.
Someone has added a Post-it that says “bring cash for pretzels” in cursive that looks like a friend’s handwriting.
“Fresh paint,” Luca says, nudging the baseboard with his shoe where a glossy strip of blue tries to cover last spring’s scuffs and almost succeeds.
“It’ll scuff by lunch,” I say.
“Everything does,” he says, cheerful, like that’s a feature, not a bug.
By the guidance office, Ms. Lopez balances three latte cups and still finds a way to say good morning to every third kid by name.
The librarian drags a cart of paperbacks toward the English wing and parks it for browsing: The Hate U Give, three battered 1984s, a glossy copy of Normal People that will go missing by fourth period and return in June with underlines no one admits to.
Two boys in letterman jackets practice eye contact with their own reflections in the trophy case and laugh too loudly when they catch themselves looking like boys in letterman jackets practicing eye contact with their own reflections. A girl with a flute case taps the side of it with two fingers, practicing without playing. The building holds all of us like a mouth full of words.
We hit the B-wing pinch point.
Bodies jam.
The social studies teacher in the lanyard has his traffic cop hands.
“Let’s move with purpose,” he repeats, and the line unjams because the line always unjams eventually. The rumor trails us like a kite on a tangled string.
“Miami.”
“Harley.”
“Older.”
“He cut an engine on the curb.”
“Ms. Delgado’s class.”
“AP Gov.”
“Bet.”
I have to look away from the noise to stay inside my body.
Four in, four out.
Shoulders low.
Smile small.
Numbers don’t fix everything.
But they give me something firm to stand on.
Miami.
Harley.
New gravity.
The door to B214 bears a strip of masking tape reading FOSTER in neat block letters.
The glass is decorated with two faded calculus joke comics that no one ever laughs at except Mr. Foster.
A slice of sun catches the metal handle and throws a little rectangle of brightness onto the floor, which refuses to be stepped on. Across the hall, a knot of juniors has decided the lockers are a lounge; one of them tells a story with his eyebrows and three different hand gestures that seem legally binding.
A security guard walks by, nods at the story, and keeps walking, like he used to be a junior once and remembers the laws of eyebrows.
I look at the list in my notebook again, even though I know it by heart. I draw a square beside Walk to B214 and fill it in with slow crosshatch lines that feel like sand smoothing.
The fluorescent above me blinks a final time.
Off.
On.
Decides—for now—to be light.
The hallway inhales.
The bell’s echo slides down the pipes.
A backpack zipper rasps like a saw.
Somewhere distant, a door shuts with that old-school hollow sound that always makes me think of movies where the hallway empties and a single kid stands in the middle like a target.
I am not the only kid.
Not today.
New transfer.
Miami.
Harley.
The words hang in my chest like the second before a chord finds its following note.
They feel like wind pushing a door someone forgot to lock.
Four in, four out.
Shoulders low.
Small smile.
A paper crane rides the AC draft past my shoulder, shadow skimming my sleeve like a tiny permission slip.
——
I walk into B214; the hallway swallows the rest.
