The Last Day of Second Grade

Last Day

June sat at her desk and touched the corner where she'd scratched her name with a paperclip back in October. She hadn't meant to do it. Her hand had just been moving while Mrs. Prescott talked about the water cycle, and suddenly there it was — JUNE — tiny and crooked in the wood.

She traced each letter now with her fingertip.

Today was the last day of second grade.

The classroom looked all wrong. The walls were bare where the posters used to be. The reading corner had no pillows. The cubbies were empty except for a few forgotten pencils and one sock that nobody ever claimed.

It looked like a room that was forgetting them.

"Alright, friends," Mrs. Prescott said, clapping her hands twice. "Let's make sure we've cleared out everything. Check your desks, check your cubbies. If it's yours, take it home."

Everyone jumped up. Chairs scraped. Kids laughed and bumped into each other. Marcus was already wearing his backpack like he might sprint out the door any second.

June didn't move.

She opened her desk and looked inside. There was one purple crayon — the flat kind, not the round kind — with the paper peeled halfway off. There was a folded note from her friend Willa that said Do you like dogs or cats better? Circle one. June had circled dogs. Then crossed it out. Then circled cats. Then written BOTH in big letters and drawn an arrow.

She put the note in her pocket.

At the bottom of the desk, she found a crumpled worksheet from November. It was math — the hardest kind they'd done all year. She'd gotten a sixty-two on it, and Mrs. Prescott had written in green pen: Almost! You're so close. Let's try again together.

June remembered that "let's try again together." She remembered sitting at this exact desk the next morning while everyone else was at recess, and Mrs. Prescott had pulled up a tiny chair right beside her. Mrs. Prescott was way too big for the tiny chair. Her knees came up practically to her chin, and June had laughed, and Mrs. Prescott had laughed, and then they'd done the problems one by one, and it hadn't even been that hard.

June put the worksheet in her backpack. She didn't know why. She just wanted it.

"June!" Willa ran over and grabbed her arm. "Can you believe it? We're gonna be THIRD graders!"

"Yeah," June said.

"Third graders get to use the big playground. The one with the twisty slide."

"Yeah," June said again.

Willa tilted her head. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

But her throat felt tight, the way it did when she was trying very hard not to cry about something that wasn't even sad. Because it wasn't sad. That was the confusing part. Everyone was happy. This was supposed to be happy.

Mrs. Prescott put on the playlist she always played during pack-up time. The song about the banana came on, and the whole class started singing it because they'd been singing it all year. Even June sang a little, under her breath.

She looked at the window. The same window she'd looked out of every single day since September. She knew exactly how the tree outside changed — green, then orange, then bare and bony, then tiny buds, then green again. She'd watched the whole thing happen from this chair.

What if next year's classroom didn't have a window?

What if the new teacher didn't play the banana song?

What if June sat at a new desk and it just felt like someone else's desk?

Mrs. Prescott started handing out popsicles. Orange ones. June took hers and said thank you, and the cold sweetness tasted like the last day of something.

"Can I tell you guys a secret?" Mrs. Prescott said, leaning against her desk. She looked around at all of them. "On the first day of school, I was nervous."

"YOU were nervous?" Marcus said, his mouth orange from the popsicle.

"Very nervous. I kept thinking, what if this class doesn't like me? What if I mess up? What if it doesn't feel right?"

Everyone laughed. Because Mrs. Prescott mess up? Mrs. Prescott, who knew every single kid's birthday and always had extra Band-Aids and once did a cartwheel in the middle of a science lesson?

"But then," Mrs. Prescott said, "I met all of you. And it felt right almost immediately."

She paused.

"Almost," she said again, smiling, "because Willa spilled an entire bottle of glue on my shoe in the first ten minutes."

"IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!" Willa shrieked, and everyone cracked up.

June laughed too. A real laugh.

Then the bell rang.

Just like that.

The same bell that rang every day, but today it meant something completely different.

Kids grabbed their bags. Hugs happened fast and sloppy. Someone yelled "BYE FOREVER!" which was dramatic because they'd probably all see each other at the pool next week.

June stood up slowly. She pushed her chair in. She let her hand rest on the back of it for a second.

She walked to the door, and then she stopped.

She turned around.

The classroom was almost empty now. Just Mrs. Prescott, erasing the last few words on the whiteboard. The date — June 14 — disappeared under the eraser.

"Mrs. Prescott?"

Her teacher turned around. "Hey, June-bug."

June opened her mouth, but the words got stuck. She didn't even know what the words were. She just knew she didn't want to leave this room. She wanted one more regular Tuesday. One more morning meeting on the rug. One more time hearing Mrs. Prescott say "Who has a thought about this?" in that way she said it, like she really truly wanted to know.

Her eyes got hot.

"I don't want—" she started, and her voice wobbled.

Mrs. Prescott crossed the room in about three steps. She knelt down so they were eye to eye.

"I know," she said softly.

"It's not even sad," June whispered, and a tear slipped down anyway.

"It can be both," Mrs. Prescott said. "It can be good and sad at the exact same time. That's actually what it feels like when something really mattered."

June wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

Mrs. Prescott reached over and opened her desk drawer — the big one, where she kept the special markers and the emergency chocolate. She pulled out a small yellow sticky note and a pen.

She wrote something and pressed it into June's hand.

You were my favorite part of Room 14. Go be someone's favorite part of Room 21.

June read it twice. She folded it carefully and put it in her pocket, right next to Willa's note about dogs and cats.

"You're going to love third grade," Mrs. Prescott said.

"What if I don't?"

"Then you come find me, and we'll figure it out. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here in this room."

June looked around one last time. The bare walls. The empty cubbies. The one sock.

"Okay," she said.

She hugged Mrs. Prescott tight — the kind of hug where you press your face into someone's shoulder and just breathe.

Then she walked out the door, down the hallway, past the water fountain with the weird gurgle, past the mural the fourth graders painted, through the big front doors and into the sunlight.

She could hear kids yelling and laughing in the pickup line. Summer was starting. Everything was wide open and waiting.

June put her hand in her pocket and felt the two folded notes — Willa's and Mrs. Prescott's — both soft and warm from being carried.

She took a big breath.

Then she ran to find Willa, because Willa was talking about the twisty slide again, and June had decided she wanted to hear about it.