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Mr. Harmon’s Girls

By Elliott Gish

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The first day of school. Bright, cold, the sky that special autumn blue. All of us in new clothes and fresh white shoes, bold and laughing, shy and silent, angry and turned darkly inwards. We streamed into the building in clumps, braving the dark recesses of its brick walls with only our knapsacks to protect us. Some of us moved in groups of six or more, most in fours or threes or twos, and some—the ones who couldn’t make friends, or could but didn’t want them, or had them but were, for whatever reason, not speaking to them just then—by ourselves. We filed raggedly into a freshman English class and there he was, sitting casually on the edge of the battered teacher’s desk.

He was tall, though all adults seemed tall to us then. His dark curls were longer than we were used to seeing on a man, especially in that school, in that time. He sat ankle over knee, jaunty, irreverent. A smile revealed two bottom teeth snugly overlapping. His little round glasses kept slipping to the edge of his nose, making a break for freedom; the eyes behind them were the mildest shade of blue. Over his left shoulder we could see what he had written in charismatic cursive on the board: MR. HARMON.

“But you can call me Rodney,” he told us after we’d all sat down, and we murmured at the novelty of an adult freely offering his first name, as though it was a little treat he’d decided we had earned. He was new to the school, he said, just like us—he had left a job at a high school on the other side of the country to accept one at ours, traveled an unfathomable distance just to be there with us. It made us like him. So did his hair, and his glasses, and the shy, sly flash of his smile.

Some of us thought about him later, after school, in our beds. Most of us didn’t. We did not realize, then, what he would become. (Continue Reading…)