Mister Cellophane, The Early Years

For some reason, my twelfth-grade English teacher has trouble noticing I’m in the room. She was also my teacher for tenth and eleventh grade English without issue, just to add the confusion.

And I’m not imagining things either: I end up accidentally marked absent a few times because she fails to see me raising my hand or hear me calling out, “Here!” when she says my name during roll-call.

I end up having to ask the student next to me to answer for me for the rest of the year. He also takes it upon himself to point out to the teacher when I have my hand raised to answer questions in class. It’s not uncommon for the teacher to ask a question about whatever we’re discussing, me to raise my hand, her to ask incredulously if really no one knows the answer, and the student next to me to raise his hand to say that mine’s been up the whole time. The absences always get fixed and my grade is unaffected, so it’s pretty funny that I’m “invisible.”

The icing on the cake came the last week of school before graduation. The class president gave our English a picture frame with several pictures of our class, explaining that it was for her to remember us by. However, there was an oversight…

I took every single picture in the frame. The other sixty-eight students in my class were each in at least one picture, but I was in none of them. I really am invisible to that teacher!