Third period.

The chalk was already a nub when I started, the whole board barely half-done, my handwriting getting smaller like I was trying to conserve it. The fan turned. Left, right. Not at me.

April, always April, the month that sweats through its shirt.

I was mid-sentence when someone appeared at the door.

Not knocking. Just walked by, there standing. A folder under one arm. Faculty ID on a lanyard, new, still stiff, the laminate not yet bent at the corners.

"Excuse me."

I turned around.

"Do you have a spare chalk?"

"Oh," I said. Like my mouth needed a second to catch up with my chest.

"You must be the new teacher... nice to meet —"

The chalk fell.

Not dramatically. It just slipped. Clicked on the floor. A small sound. Nobody moved to pick it up.

And I saw his face.

Salt first.

Always salt first.

Then the sand, the gray kind, the public kind with the cigarette butts and the styrofoam cup half-buried at the waterline like it was trying to hide. The resort was two hundred pesos a head and we didn't have two hundred pesos so we walked past the gate and down the rocks to where the sand turned gray and the locals were and nobody cared who we were and the sun was already going, going, smearing itself orange-pink across the port cranes and the cargo ships and the whole ugly beautiful end of the day.

You were running.

Or I was. I can't... I don't know who started it, it didn't matter, we were both laughing that snorting ugly way, the embarrassing way, the way that costs nothing and sounds like everything, and the sand was wet and cold at the waterline and you slipped and I caught your wrist and then you caught mine and we spun once, stupid, out of balance, and stopped —

Close.

Close like that.

Your shirt soaked through at the collar.

Your breath, maxx yellow and marlboro blue, going fast, going everywhere, everywhere on my face. The sun at your back. Your hair dripping onto my cheek and I didn't wipe it off, I let it run, I let it go wherever it wanted —

Your forehead came down onto mine.

Just.

Rested there.

Your eyes closed.

Your exhale warm on my mouth.

That close. That's how close.

The width of a prayer. The width of nothing at all. I could feel your pulse, or my pulse, I couldn't tell whose was whose anymore, and the ocean kept doing the ocean's thing, indifferent, coming and going, coming and going —

I didn't close the gap.

You didn't close the gap.

We just breathed.

And I kissed your forehead.

The world going orange and we just — stood there — doing nothing with the nothing between us, and the tide came in cold against our ankles and we didn't move... we took it to the edge and held it there and then let the moment pass the way moments do —

quiet.

Gone before you name it.

"Sorry," I said.

I bent down. Picked up the chalk.

Went to the box on the ledge. The new pieces, full, white, unbroken. I took one and I held it out and for exactly one second we were in the same room at the same time, really in it, both of us, his eyes doing something I recognized and immediately watched him sand down and flatten and make small again...

He took the chalk.

By the end. The far end.

"Salamat," he said.

And then he was gone. Down the corridor. Footsteps. Then nothing.

I stood at the front of the room.

Forty kids.

Left, right. The fan.

I picked up the nub off the ledge. Pressed it to the board. Finished the sentence I'd started before the door, before the salt, before the forehead, before all of it — the chalk dragging its small dry scream across the slate —

and kept teaching.