Right before she nudged me out the door, Ms. Tongren made me watch her curling tongue press against her two front teeth. “Look at me, Katie” she said, and exhaled the thhh from her cheeks. She sounded like a snake howling from inside a leaking balloon, and her scrunched up face and flaring eyes made her look like one. When the hissing stopped, she took a breath and turned back into my speech teacher. “You see?” she said, shrugging with the corners of her lips. “It’s easy.”

The whole way down the hall I practiced curling my tongue up toward my two front teeth. I begged my mouth for a hiss that wouldn’t come. Ms. Tongren pushed the air out so effortlessly. Like a leaf that moves in a breeze. The same air seemed to take wayward routes on its way out of me, like I had to slurp it through all the wrinkles of my brain before it could even make a sound. There were three of us from Ms. Limbeck’s class who had to practice our speech every day—Jamie, Jacob, and me. Jacob could always tell when I was flustered. “Ms. Tongren knows you can do it, Katie!” he said. Our shoes clapped on the polished vinyl floor. “And I know it, too!”

I smiled at Jacob, and he smiled back. Jamie (whose l’s and r’s had a habit of slouching into w’s) blew her blonde bob away from her nose and held up the picture she’d drawn during our session with Ms. Tongren. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re gonna do—”

Jamie’s face contorted like she’d swallowed a warhead. The three of us stopped in the hall until she got it out.

“Great,” she said.

Ms. Limbeck was waiting for us outside the classroom. As usual, she was wearing a big boxy dress that made it look like she had on a bunch of other dresses underneath it. She would never say it out loud, but I knew she resented the three of us. Always holding up the class readings, getting special treatment from Ms. Tongren; we were her three daily reminders of her limits as a teacher. I watched as she forced an exasperated smile at Ms. Tongren down the hall, and when I looked back that way, Ms. Tongren was giving me two big thumbs up. My gut melted into the floor, and I left it there as I entered through the door to rejoin the rest of my class.

Inside the classroom: a column of stares and giggles and sighs and whispers rolling around in flawless jaws like glass marbles. Jacob, Jamie, and I took our seats at our desks, farther away from each other than we thought should be allowed. I took a deep breath and practiced curling my tongue again. In my hands I held the picture I’d drawn with Jamie and Jacob and Ms. Tongren. There I was, standing on the shore of Raystown Lake, my father standing behind me. A fond summer memory. At least, all the traces of one—sun, sand, family and whatever. The truth is, I’d stolen the memory from Jacob. I was so focused on my stupid defective face that I couldn’t remember what I actually did over the summer, besides go back and forth between my mom and dad’s houses. Nobody wanted to hear about that. “I went to Raystown Lake, remember Jacob?” Ms. Tongren said, pressing a perfectly manicured nail onto the blank piece of paper in front of him. “Show me.” I got my fat fingers working on my fake illustration before she could press her perfect nail onto my blank sheet of paper.

Ms. Limbeck shambled to the front of the class and clapped five times. All the kids in class clapped five times in response, with the exact same cadence. “Alright, everyone,” she sighed. “We still have a few presentations left to go before recess, and I expect everyone here to show the same amount of respect for these presentations as they got during their own. Capeesh?” I looked around the room. No one was laughing, but I knew they wanted to. I just knew it. My heart felt like it was throbbing inside a cracked glass jar. “Jamie,” Ms. Limbeck continued, “you want to kick us off?”

Jamie looked at me from across the room with the widest eyes I’d ever seen. I nodded at her and saw a lump move like a tidal wave through her throat when she swallowed. She blew her hair away from her nose and shuffled to the front of the class. The flames of errant chatter were shushed into flickering murmurs that wisped around the room. Jamie’s drawing shook in her hands as she flipped it around for the class to see. A picture of a big green diamond, with white lines running along each edge. “This summer—” She looked at me, looking at her. Then we both looked at Jacob, who was sitting with his hands folded in his lap and his legs crossed, looking impossibly attentive. He looked like an old man sitting in a child’s body, his hairless white legs like two strands of linguini hanging from a pair of cotton shorts. Jamie and I both erupted into laughter at the same time.

During the first week of school, I came inside from recess early and saw Ms. Limbeck leaning out of the classroom window, blowing cigarette smoke into the tomato garden the kids one grade ahead of us planted the year before. Looking at her now, I could see on her face that blowing smoke into the tomato garden was all Ms. Limbeck wanted to do at that moment, and the only thing preventing her from doing so was three faulty kids who, at current pace, would not finish their presentations before the recess bell rang. “Jamie!” she snapped. “Get a grip.”

Jamie cleared her throat. “This summer,” she said, holding back laughter. “I went to watch the Baltimore Orioles.”

Every word was music. Every syllable a symphony. Jamie’s teeth flashed brighter. Her hair shined blonder. I was so overjoyed for her that I forgot to practice positioning my tongue for a few seconds. When her presentation was over and the class started clapping, I picked up where I left off, gormless words still stuck in my teeth like rotten popcorn kernels.

“Good job, Jamie,” Ms. Limbeck said. I could see her jotting something down in her notebook. Probably a drawing of herself blowing cigarette smoke into the tomato garden, if I was to guess. She eventually looked up from her work and croaked, “Alright, who’s next…”

As Ms. Limbeck’s gaze closed in on me, I found I was silently shaking my head. She fixed her sights to the edge of my desk and saw me look up with tears in my eyes. I saw her mouth do something familiar. It’s what a mouth would do if a mouth could dream of falling and wake up right before it hit the ground. Whatever words she had planned on saying clung like burr husks to the back of her throat. And in an uncommon act of sympathy, she continued scanning. And scanning, and scanning, and scanning at last until there was only one option left in the room. “Jacob,” she said. “Come on up.”

Jacob uncrossed his legs and sprang to his feet. He was halfway to the front of the room when he realized he’d forgotten his drawing, so he sprinted back to his desk to swipe it. On his way back up, I felt him knock his knuckles on the back of my wooden seat. I could just about hear him say it—be good luck, Katie. Once he was at the front of the room, he bowed to no one in particular and spun his drawing around for everyone to see. In one wild effort he detonated the phrase from his entire body like a giant fart. “This summer I went to Raystown Lake!”

The room was silent. I saw a few kids nod along in approval. Jamie and I sighed a breath of relief. Jacob pointed to the swath of blue that encompassed the entire right edge of the paper. “Here be the water, and here be the sand.”

Ms. Limbeck’s voice pierced through the second, more unsettling silence. “Here is the water, Jacob. Remember? And here is the sand,” she said.

“Here is the water, and here is the sand,” Jacob repeated. He pointed to some stick figures near a pitched tent. His voice raised considerably when he said, “And here be my family.”

A few kids in the class started giggling. Jacob saw them and managed to produce an uneasy chuckle of his own. “And here,” he said, hesitating for a moment before smiling wide, “be the boats!”

Bellows of laughter swelled in the classroom. The recess bell rang out and rescued Ms. Limbeck from having to restore order. The relief I felt from not having to speak hovered around my head like a halo at first, but as I rose to leave the room it became heavy and starving. It was around my neck like a collar as I passed by Ms. Limbeck’s desk. She stopped me on my way out. “Katie,” she said. She swung open the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a small carton of American Spirits. “Be ready to present after recess.”

I walked out into the early autumn sun with my tongue tucked under my teeth. I’d have to wait a full fifteen minutes of recess before getting up in front of the class to talk, but every time that felt overwhelming, I thought about the way Jacob loosened everyone up beforehand. And I was still laughing at the way he’d been sitting there with his legs crossed. It was just one of those things I knew I’d be able to retreat to for comfort. I made my way down the macadam path toward the playground to find him. I wanted to tell him how good he did, especially at the beginning, and that I thought he was only going to get better. The earth gave away under my sneakers as I stepped onto the shredded tanbark. I saw him standing alone, in the shade underneath one of the tube slides. His hands in his pockets, watching as everything and everyone passed by around him. Dust hung low in the humid air between us, and as I approached Jacob I saw that a group of boys from our class had beaten me to him.

The boys formed a circle around Jacob and were smiling, like God had just come down from the sky and told each of them a secret. Standing and smiling and waiting to taste the right kind of breeze. Finally, one of them put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder, and growled in a gravely, extravagant voice, “Here be the water.” The other boys laughed. Jacob looked around and smiled nervously. “Good job today, Jacob,” the boy continued. “Most of the time you talk like a caveman, but today you were a pirate. We all liked it a lot.”

The breeze came through and severed the string holding Jacob’s head up. His face sank to his feet and he nodded at them like a broken marionette. The boys all clapped him on the back and dispersed.

I looked over at the swing set, where Jamie was alone and pushing herself harder than anyone I’d ever seen, thrusting herself fiercely into the air like she could disappear through it. I tried to curl my tongue back against my two front teeth like Ms. Tongren showed me. I forgot what I was supposed to do after that. Jacob emerged from underneath the tube slide. He bent his index finger like a hook and puckered one wet eye toward the sun. “Yarr,” he said. “Yarr.”

The glass jar inside my chest whirled around and around and splintered itself with tiny fractures that my heart still couldn’t beat against hard enough to break. I just kept curling my tongue. Really curling it, over my front teeth and over my nostrils. I could taste the salt in my snot but I just kept curling. Over my forehead and above the tube slide. So high that it blew in the wind like a sail. A boat emerged from the harbor of my jaw. I spit the whole thing out right there on the tanbark. My saliva shimmered wet on the deck. We were going sailing—Jacob and Jamie and I. First across Raystown Lake, then to any other sea we could escape to. Any other sea that would have us. And no one—not Ms. Tongren or Ms. Limbeck, the boys from class, my mom or my dad, and certainly not each other—could say a word perfect enough to blow us away. The bell rang. Recess was over. I cut off my tongue and lashed it to the mast. Another one grew in its place. And I could tell by how it tasted like iron that this one had a lot more to say.

Dan Shields is from Middletown, Pennsylvania, home of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of 1979. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, and others. Find him on Twitter @DanDotShields.