LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, I ignored Emily Rubenfeld. Maybe I always found her fascinating and just called the feeling pity, I don’t know, but it was easy enough to mind my own business and just lump her in with the other social outcasts. Until Grade 11 history, when I became obsessed with her. The entire hour she never took a note or opened her History of Canada. She sat there serving the coldest contempt, but a different take on the dish I had often been fed. Going beyond the curled lip and contorted forehead that signalled social dominance, Emily’s disgust was angrier, more generalized, perhaps included herself. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
One day, the bell rang but Emily didn’t get up – she just sat there looking more enraged than usual. I hung around futzing with my binders and pencils as the classroom emptied, trying to muscle the flailing animal of my desires into a sack I could call compassion.
I walked towards her desk and asked if she was okay.
She was quiet long enough that I thought about slinking out of the room. But then she pushed herself up, dropped her books into a black army satchel, said, “Yeah. This class just fucking pisses me off.”
Outside, she lit a cigarette and started walking. I took in her chipped black nail polish, her pale neck beneath roughly cut hair, painfully aware of my pressed Benetton jeans, my shiny ponytail wafting Mom’s stinky Alberto shampoo.
We reached the main road and headed west.
…
Samantha Annie Bernstein is the author of Kitchen Island Poems (Gap Riot Press, 2021), Spit on the Devil (Mansfield Press, 2017) and Here We Are Among the Living (Tightrope Books, 2012), which was nominated for a B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her creative work has appeared in journals including The Fiddlehead and Freefall; her scholarship on class, aesthetics, and social justice was most recently published in English Studies and is forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto with her spouse, children, three cats and an anxious mutt, and teaches Creative Writing at York University. Instagram: @sammyanniebobbie