Bellaire
“Faces” by Pranav Prakash
On the first day of English III, Ms. Shah memorized our names and said we, eighth period, room 408, would go places. How could she know where we’d go without knowing where the fuck we’d been? We laughed. In her face. We stuck our tongues at her. Bit our thumbs at her like Sampson to Abram in Verona. Said, “teach, you don’t know us like that.”
On the weekends, we ate the Pac-dots and shot down aliens in Mr. Guzman’s Washateria with quarters we swiped from the senoras, cô nương, aunties, and the occasional grad student. Smoked and joked. Slurped Icees and purp drank. Swayed to Selena and Usher. Sucked faces and drowned in our feelings. Kicked around bullet shell casings and threw rocks at taillights.
Back then, we all thought Frankie O’Dwyer was a gnome before his hormones supercharged him eleven inches the summer before freshman year. Now he changes alternators on jalopies at the Guatex Auto and talks about how he’s got a thing that will make him rich.
All Gina Balanquit ever wrote about was horses because she wanted to be a vet. On the weekends when we split happy hour palabok at Balanquit’s Kitchen, she soaped down dishes for her parents. Now she sells hotdogs with bulgogi fries at a brick and mortar across from the Mexican Consulate and rescues strays.
Luis Ortega was always at the board because he had an angel’s handwriting. Before Sharpstown Mall folded, guy tossed enough Tranq to put the west side to sleep because of his ma’s medical bills. He got netted at sixteen but cleaned up so nice you wouldn’t recognize it when he preaches at First United about how God saved a sinner like him for Unimundo’s cushy 10AM slot on Sundays.
Altonio Howard did time. Dantrell, Jamarcus, and Tyson did time. Kelvin Vu did time for hotwiring. Got out and went to law school. Now the side of every Metro bus between the loops and billboards along I-10 has his grinning mug and trademark—“Vu’s Got You.”
Everyone shopped at the Gessner Fiesta, where Juana Rodríguez’s dad chopped meat and mom stocked shelves. They were the only Mexicans squeezed in with all the Chinese, Thais, and Viets, in the Woodblossom Complex, where every unit was a shade of the rainbow. She repeated the tenth grade but now lives in New York designing apartment buildings.
Tobias Jackson managed rentals at the Blockbuster in the same plaza. After school, he presided over A/V Club and dreamt of moving to Hollywood with his Super 8 and twenty bucks. Now he bartends in Austin and runs a small picture show from his backyard.
Across the street from the Blockbuster, Stephanie Herbert warehoused at the High Times tobacco shop, where her boss left her prego at fifteen. A few years later at the community pool, she drowned her kid saying that God asked her to do it.
Then there were who Ms. Shah nicknamed “The Usuals”: Zelwin “Beans” Green, Aurelio “The Furious” Bautista, Andre Taylor, and Benjamin “Benjy” Shamoon because each day they usually came late, decamped at the bookshelf, stared into space, then bolted two minutes before the bell rang.
The Usuals ran ball games after school from five to seven, but none of them could shoot for shit much less dribble. Afterward, they’d roll up to the Sharpstown food court just to fuck with Patrick Miller while he tossed dough at the Sbarro. Miller came to class each day but always passed out halfway. Ms. Shah cleared her throat so much to wake him that we tried to offer her water. Now he lives in Katy with his boyfriend.
We called Zelwin “Beans” not because he was small, he was, but because one time he shit himself running to the restroom from cafeteria beans. People were still spinning that yarn until he joined the Marines, went to Iraq, and came back without a leg. Now he files paperwork for the VA.
We called Aurelio “the Furious” because he loved cars and had a shrine to Dominic Toretto. He wanted to get into nursing because his mom worked at Ben Taub’s ICU, but she died from the first COVID wave. A month later, he raced some rando down 610 at midnight, crashed into a barrier, and flew through his windshield. Some say it was grief.
Almost everyone remembers how Andre cranked out Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” during Romeo & Juliet. We all thought a Tony was in his stars, but then his parents split during ninth grade. He mirrored his pops in everything: got himself a baby mama, divorced, and strung out.
Benjy never fucked with grammar back then, but during poetry unit dude spit verse like he was born again. On the weekends, he ran around Diho Square with Omar Winters, who was fastest on the track before his torn ACL, because “our masjid’s up Ranchester,” an obvious lie that fooled no one except for maybe Frankie.
Benjy winged for Omar because Omar had a thing for Cecily Chen (we called her CC). And CC was in the area because she was tight with Jenny Pham. They used to trade back and forth first and second on the highest spelling quiz scores. And Jenny stuck around because she had eyes on Danny Nguyen.
And Danny loitered in the lot ‘cause he was always tryna bag that one St. Agnes Prep white girl, Michelle or Madison or whatever, who stopped at the teahouse where he made boba. He put a ring on that one at twenty-six. They had two kids before she divorced his ass at thirty. Now he sees his kids every other weekend and drinks himself under the table.
Jenny now runs a nail salon dynasty and lives in River Oaks with her white banker husband and all the other the rich white folks.
CC and Omar were a thing until they broke up before high school graduation. She waited tables before Baylor gave her a full ride, now she’s on track to leading oncology at Memorial Hermann. Omar runs an aid shelter in Third Ward, and you can find him downtown on the weekends giving away food to the street sleepers before HPD drops by to slap him with a citation. Maybe they still talk, who knows.
If you wanted Chinese food, Peter Fung had us haul ass down Gessner toward Tan Tan, joint with the flashy sign like it was always Christmas, where we wolfed down the shrimp fried rice and the wonton noodles.
Next to Tan Tan one could get a bowl of shaved ice on the cheap. Fung would always push his glasses up saying that it was still just some ABC crap, which didn’t compare to the o.g. bao bing in Beijing. Fucker still stole bites from us like we weren’t looking while lecturing us on how his grandma hid Mao Zedong inside a hole from the Nationalists.
So the story went until that time Adesola Eziri called bullshit on the tale and said she might as well have been related to Mandela. We were all still like, “what the fuck is ‘ABC’”? Fung and Eziri didn’t talk for a month then they made up, had a kid together, and now live in St. Louis.
Nina Shields was the reason we even knew how to say words like “incomprehensible,” “oubliette,” and “indefatigable.” Senior year, she got caught in the girls’ restroom with a water bottle full of Vodka. She lost all her scholarships but still went on to work at Goldman Sachs, somehow.
Most of us liked to lounge at the Taco Cabana and take in the sunset rush hour down 59. If we had anything left, we’d roll over to Goodwill opposite Sharpstown for a shirt or two, but Devika Patel dressed like every day was a runway because her daddy ran the Burlington Coat Factory. Even had Ms. Shah asking for fashion tips. Devika went to Paris to study fashion but drank and smoked just to keep up until her liver couldn’t anymore.
Joanne Fontenot could multiply five digits by five digits in her head in less than three seconds. Everyone thought she was gonna be the first anything—human, woman, human woman—to walk on Mars. She got into Columbia, slept around, dropped out, moved to Portland, and now lives somewhere between a bubble of smoke and the edge of a forest.
Anyone who wanted fresh Bok choy or that imported tofu got it from the Hong Kong Market No.1 up Gessner at Point West Shopping Center. Then it turned into a MaMa into a 99 Ranch into a Kroger into an H-Mart.
Behind that ran the Westpark Tollway where, one week before senior prom, Benjy ran—according to eyewitnesses on the police report—in front of a corvette going twenty over sixty that left him in a coma because it was Houston and because he texted Farrah Hamraoui because she was the only person he wanted to talk to, because his parents’ green cards had expired, because there was nothing left for him and his folks in Palestine, because he had this whole dream for them spilled out in twenty messages, but Farrah was too busy studying for the calculus final.
He slept for a year while everyone was off at college or work or the military or whatever else was available. His parents had to pull the plug eventually because the debt was sinking them. At the funeral, his older bro Hamid recited his favorite Darwish. The girls wept, and the boys just looked at the emptiness between their hands.
And even though Farrah went on to teach math at Rice, to marry a nice guy in real estate, and to give birth to two girls and a boy, she still kicks herself over Benjy. It’ll take time, we tell her, not really sure ourselves. Every so often, we ask her to tell us what Benjy had written to her, but she just looks at us and smiles.
Still, on the last day before summer break, high school, and the rest of our lives and the rest of its joys and heartbreaks, Ms. Shah told us she’d seen how much we’d grown. Reiterated her belief that we would go places. We still didn’t believe her, but we didn’t stick out tongues either. Because it was too much to answer to. More than what anyone had ever given us.
If you try googling “Ms. Shah Eighth Grade Sharpstown Middle School,” you’ll find eight other Ms. Shahs teaching at five other schools in our district and one over but not our Ms. Shah. Never ours. Like she was never real.
Everyone has an idea of the places Ms. Shah went. Some of us think she went to nursing school. Others think she got married and had a kid or went to live on a farm in Switzerland. Another version had her move to another city where she kept teaching until she died. Maybe, had we known then, we might have said something more than “have a good summer,” before shuffling off.
About the author
Vinh Hoang is a Vietnamese-American writer and filmmaker born and raised in Houston, TX, now based in Chicago. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Previous work can be found in Bridge Eight Press, Defunkt Magazine, Glass Mountain, and South Dakota Review.
about the artist
Pranav Prakash is a multidisciplinary artist and humanities scholar. He is a Junior Research Fellow and Director of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Christ Church, University of Oxford. After receiving foundational training in papermaking, bookbinding and Western calligraphy at the Center for the Book, University of Iowa, Pranav learned watermedia monotype printing at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado, and letterpress printing at Schola Musicae, Bodleian Old Library, University of Oxford. He was trained in Perso-Arabic calligraphic styles at the National Association of Iranian Calligraphers in Tehran, Iran, and the Qasid Arabic Institute in Amman, Jordan. Although he works with a variety of media, most notably watercolour, gouache, pastel, chalk, oil and acrylic, he is most fond of ink and reed pens. Through his artwork, he grapples with a range of political and social issues that have historically affected underprivileged communities in India, Iran and Central Asia.