North Star
by Riyana Lacson
Sawyer was the first person in the parking lot.
The six wide rows of asphalt stretched out before her, empty as if she were trespassing on a dream that hadn’t yet begun. Dew clung to the edges of the white-painted lines, catching the early light. The air was cool; it was the kind that brushed bare skin awake without warning. Late summer hadn’t fully loosened its grip yet. There was still warmth tucked beneath the morning, lingering stubbornly.
Sawyer stayed in the driver’s seat of her old brown sedan longer than necessary. Her hands stayed resting on the steering wheel.
The dashboard clock read 7:16 AM. It was too early. She knew that. But she had always arrived early to things that mattered.
She took a sip of her coffee and winced at the taste. Lukewarm and bitter. She continued to drink it anyway.
The school loomed ahead of her, two storeys of burnt clay softened by age and sun. The windows, condensed in the early morning air, reflected a pale, unsettled sky. It was neither blue nor gray, caught between the seasons. The image felt almost ceremonial in its stillness.
She had imagined this day for years—the first day of her first year as a teacher. Call it naïveté, but she was a visionary all the same. In her daydreams, the air was golden, the corridors were alive with laughter, and she was ready to take on the world. Instead, the silence was unbelievably deafening. There was no orchestra waiting to swell behind her; only the low hum of the generator and the faint, metallic taste of anticipation.
This was not just her first day at a new job. It was the first day she would enter a school without being protected by the title “student.” If she failed today, it would be fully, publicly hers.
She opened the car door.
The air smelled like freshly cut grass and pavement warming under the sun. As she crossed the parking lot, her steps grew slower, as though her body were negotiating with her.
What if they don’t listen to me?
What if I freeze?
What if I’m not good enough?
Inside, the school smelled of floor wax and Clorox—almost clinical. Fluorescent lights blinked awake one by one as she walked beneath them, her footsteps ringing against the beige terrazzo tile.
She climbed the north staircase slowly, gripping the railing before forcing herself to let go. At the top, she turned into the hallway and watched the room numbers drift past her.
220.
222.
223.
She stopped in front of 224.
A sheet of printer paper was taped crookedly to the door.
Ms. Collins.
It was already curling at the corners, the ink from the black gel pen slightly smudged. It looked like something provisional, like the school itself hadn’t quite decided whether she belonged there or not.
Sawyer stared at it longer than she should have.
She had spent years watching teachers who seemed to inhabit their classrooms—who leaned against desks like they’d grown there, who spoke with the certainty of people who knew they’d be listened to. Standing here now, she felt like an understudy who had missed rehearsal and been handed the script mid-scene.
The door opened with a soft resistance.
The room was larger than she expected. Desks lined up in rigid rows in front of the pristine whiteboard, the clock ticking too loudly in the tranquillity of the room. Even the walls seemed to imitate her—bare of colour and history in a building where there was so much of it.
She set her bag on the desk and sat down, feeling the chair creak beneath her. She folded her hands in her lap and tried to name the unease that trembled inside. It was not fear, exactly, but a recognition of the beginning and all its weight.
Her fingers brushed the smooth edge of her desk. The laminate was cool beneath her skin, worn thin at the corner.
And suddenly, she wasn’t there anymore.
She was sixteen again, sitting in the back corner of an English classroom much like this one. Sunlight spilling across the floor in warm lines. Her teacher stood near the board, talking about whatever TV show they were discussing that day. She spoke without rushing, her voice steady and unforced. The room always listened—not because it had to, but because it wanted to. She had that unyielding power.
Sawyer remembered the day she stayed after class for the first time. She pretended to organize her bag while her heart beat too fast. The room had emptied quickly. Students rushed out of the door to catch the bus.
“Did you need something?” her teacher asked.
Sawyer didn’t plan to ask the question.
“How do you know when you’re doing enough?”
The woman considered her for a moment and gave her a look that felt heavier than judgment.
“You don’t,” she’d said finally. “You just decide that trying is worth it.”
Sawyer hadn’t fully understood it then, but the way she had said it stayed with her. She only knew the words had lodged themselves somewhere permanent.
Back in 224, the buzz of the lights seemed louder.
The hurry-up music soon startled her into motion.
Sawyer’s body reacted before her mind could. She stood, smoothed her hair behind her ears, and turned toward the door as students began to arrive.
They filtered in one by one, sleepy and murmuring, eyeing her with the cautious curiosity reserved only for new teachers and young adults.
“Good morning! I’m Ms. Collins.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
A boy in the back yawned theatrically. Someone giggled at it.
She smiled anyway.
“Before we get into anything too serious, let’s start simple. Write, in one word, how you want this year to feel.”
There was a pause.
A few students exchanged glances.
“You mean… in English class?” one asked.
Sawyer shrugged slightly. “If you want. Or not.”
They looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Then hesitantly, they reached for their pencils and began writing. Some penned their words almost immediately, while the others took a few seconds to think.
Sawyer walked between the desks slowly to see what they had come up with.
Fun.
Engaging.
Interesting.
Easy.
Then, she saw it.
Safe.
The word was written carefully on the page of a girl seated in the far right corner. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, her eyes fixed on the desk. Sawyer didn’t comment, nor did she ask. But she kept it in the back of her mind.
At lunch, alone in her classroom, she unwrapped the sandwich she had haphazardly packed at home and thought about that word.
Safe.
It wasn’t a word she would have chosen at that age. Safety had seemed too small a thing to reach for, too quiet. Back then, she’d wanted brilliance or recognition. But quiet might have been what some of them needed. Maybe wanting safety meant you’d gone long enough without to miss it.
She thought again of the woman who made her feel capable—of the way she never rushed to fill silence, of how she waited, as Sawyer would eventually realize on her own, knowing she already belonged there.
The rest of the day frayed her patience.
Still, she stayed. She breathed. She tried and tried.
And then she tried again.
When the clock flaunted 3:15, she dismissed her fourth-period class.
“All right, everyone. I hope you had a great first day of school. I will see you tomorrow. Be safe!” she said with an enthusiastic facade.
They spilled out into the hallway in succession. Some stopped to say goodbye to her; the rest avoided any possible eye contact.
After the room emptied, Sawyer sat back at her desk, exhausted.
Her gaze drifted to the whiteboard, where a quote she had written that morning remained untouched:
We all live under the same sky, but we do not all have the same horizon.
The words glowed faintly in the light.
She studied them now, realizing she no longer stood at the beginning of something abstract, but at the edge of a horizon that was hers, and that others would one day navigate by.
A few weeks later, Sawyer tried something small. She wrote a paragraph from a short story on the board and asked them to read it silently.
After a few minutes, she asked, “What do you notice? Why is this paragraph so important?”
Silence.
Sawyer waited anyway, heat creeping up her neck. She tried not to rush the quiet.
“It’s kind of… boring,” a boy near the window finally said.
That got a laugh.
Sawyer nodded once. “Okay. Why?”
The boy shrugged. “Nothing really happens. I don’t get it,” he said. “She’s just… in a room.”
A few kids hummed in agreement.
Sawyer nodded like she’d been expecting that.
Another voice, closer to the front. “She talks too much. Like, she’s explaining everything.”
“Yeah,” someone else said. “It’s annoying.”
Sawyer let that word sit there.
Annoying.
From the back came a sound that wasn’t quite a raised hand, but not quite nothing either.
“She keeps correcting herself,” the girl, Jordan, said, almost to the page. “Like she doesn’t trust what she thinks.”
Sawyer looked up.
Her shoulders were drawn in, her pencil resting untouched between her fingers.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Sawyer asked, not directly at her, but to the room.
No one answered right away.
Someone shrugged. “Because she’s wrong?”
Jordan shook her head. “Or because she’s always been told she is.”
That landed in the room.
Some students shifted. One flipped back a page.
Sawyer uncapped her marker, then stopped herself. She didn’t write anything.
“Keep reading,” she said.
They did.
Weeks turned into months.
The classroom changed, not all at once, but in tiny, living increments.
The bare walls began to fill with colour and history: doodles and drawings of cats and apples from restless hands, movie posters for “Lamb to the Slaughter” from their short story unit, and a t-shirt that said “Don’t Make Me Use My Teacher Voice” gifted by a student at Christmas. Laughter replaced the awkward hush. Students stayed after class to talk about things that had little to do with English and everything to do with living and being human.
Sometimes, a student would surprise her with insight; often, they would ignore her entirely. Somewhere beneath it all, she heard that voice. But it was her own now, tempered by the trial of practice and her “why?”
The desks were no longer in rigid rows. They were grouped in fours now—students clustered together like small islands in the open classroom. Sawyer walked between them, letting them settle into the rhythm of the room.
“Yesterday, you each annotated a soliloquy,” she said. “Today, I want you to talk about it. Compare notes. Ask each other questions. Talk about what you noticed. Why does he say these things only when he is alone?”
A low groan came from one corner.
“Just try it,” Sawyer said with a smile. “You’ll learn something.”
In one group, Jordan scribbled in her notebook, pushing it towards the others.
“I don’t get why he’s so stuck. He just keeps talking instead of doing something,” one boy said.
Jordan lifted her eyes from the page. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to act,” she said quietly. “He’s trapped by… everything he’s thinking.”
The group went silent for a bit. Then someone leaned forward. “So he’s scared?”
“Maybe,” Jordan said. Her pencil hovered over the sheet of paper, then added another note.
Sawyer paused nearby, letting the conversation unfold. She noticed how Jordan’s voice—so small at first—was now shaping itself through words on the page and into the group.
“So basically, he’s whining about his feelings?” a boy at the back laughed softly.
“Not whining. He’s…figuring things out. And maybe that’s harder than anything else.”
Sawyer smiled to herself.
The conversation meandered, messy and uneven, but alive. That was enough.
It wasn’t even the first time she’d felt the weight of wanting to make a difference and not knowing if she could.
Her teacher sat at the front, grading, green pen tapping absently against the paper.
“You’re still here,” she said, not looking up.
“Yeah.”
Silence settled again, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It never was.
Sawyer shifted her weight, fingers tightening around the strap of her backpack. She’d rehearsed this in her head all day, the words tripping over each other. Now that the moment arrived, they felt heavier. More real.
“I think…” she started, then stopped.
Her teacher glanced up this time.
Sawyer swallowed. “I think I want to be an English teacher.”
The sentence landed between them.
“I don’t know if I’d be good at it,” Sawyer added quickly. “Or if I’m just saying that because I like this class, or because you make it look easier than it is.”
Her teacher smiled slightly at that, but said nothing.
“I’m scared. That I’ll try and still fail.”
“You don’t have to be great now,” the woman finally said. “You’re not supposed to be.”
Sawyer exhaled, not realizing she was holding her breath.
“But I promise you,” she continued, “you will become great.”
There was no urgency in the way she said it. Just belief, offered freely.
Sawyer nodded, eyes burning, and left quickly before she could say something she’d regret. She stepped into the hallway with her bag slung over one shoulder. The only sound she could hear was her footsteps.
She didn’t feel brave, exactly. Just… aware. A faint pulse of something that felt like possibility threaded through the nervous tightness in her chest.
One evening, long after the buses had gone, she stayed behind to grade poetry analysis tests. It was nearing the end of her first semester. Outside, the January frost pressed blue against the windows. The only sound was the slow scribbling of her purple pen and the janitor emptying the trash in 226.
A soft knock interrupted her.
“Ms. Collins?”
Sawyer looked up. It was the girl who had written Safe that first day—Jordan.
The student stepped hesitantly into the room, holding out an envelope.
“I just wanted to say…thanks,” she murmured. “I used to hate English. But, I don’t know. This year it was different. You made it feel like it’s okay to try.”
Sawyer’s chest tightened. She smiled, too full of words to choose any.
“Thank you,” she finally managed to say.
The girl nodded quickly, embarrassed by her own sincerity and left.
Sawyer sat for a long time after, then opened the envelope.
Inside was a small square of blue-gray cardstock with a faint drawing covering its surface. It was the night sky inked in careful strokes, one star bigger than the others and brighter than the rest.
At the bottom, in neat handwriting, were two words:
North Star.