dashlit:

in sixth grade my homeroom teacher caught this kid stephen saying,
“that’s so gay.”

so he told the class that for the rest of the week, anytime you wanted to express something negatively, you could say,
“that’s so stephen.”

and it started out as a joke, where even this stephen kid was going around using it, laughing at it, not really caring. it was funny, i guess.

but then one of his friends got a bad mark on a test and said,
“that’s so stephen.”

we had a blacktop recess and everyone kept saying,
“that’s so stephen.”

and when we got too loud doing groupwork and had to separate and work silently, everyone in the class kept muttering,
“that’s so stephen.”

and the weirdest part was that even though it was just a word we were using, even though it had nothing to do with stephen,
we all sort of blamed stephen.

and as everyone kept using “that’s so stephen,” all week, you could see stephen himself finding it less and less funny.
we played a game called “pamplemousse” in french class and everyone got stephen out right away if they could.
someone literally went and found one of stephen’s art projects when nobody else was around and ruined it so he had to start over.

and when my homeroom teacher found out about it, he sat everyone down and told us that it wasn’t okay to say “that’s so stephen” anymore. that the things we’d been blaming him for weren’t his fault and the things we’d been doing to him weren’t fair.

he told us that stephen couldn’t help it that he was stephen. he didn’t choose to be stephen. he was born stephen.

and that’s when it clicked.

we all felt pretty stupid, i think, for sort of falling for it, but i’ll be damned if i’ve ever had a teacher get a lesson across so utterly and completely as mr. bernard did.

it hadn’t even been the full week.