Back to School

I loved school. I really did. There was something about the beginning of a new school year that felt almost magical. New pencils. New notebooks. New shoes. That particular smell of a classroom that had been closed all summer and was suddenly alive again. I loved going back. Then I had children.

And somehow, when it was time to send them back to school, it wasn't magical anymore. It was sad. I missed them.

The house was suddenly too quiet. Their noise was gone. Their stuff was still everywhere, but they weren't. And I discovered something I hadn't expected when I became a mother: You can be completely happy for your children to go off and learn and grow and have their own lives…and still stand there after they leave and feel like somebody has taken a piece of your day with them.

That feeling stayed with me. So when I started thinking about Back to School, I began with that little ache. The empty house. The empty chair. The strange quiet after children leave. And then, because apparently my imagination can't leave well enough alone, I wondered:

What if something else noticed when the children were gone? What if an old schoolhouse remembered the children who had passed through it? What if a place could miss someone? And what if what it remembered wasn't necessarily something anybody wanted remembered?

That's where the story began to take a darker turn. I wanted to put the horror somewhere that should have been safe. A school. Of all places. Schools are supposed to be about beginnings. About children learning who they are. About growing up and moving forward. But schools also hold memories. Hundreds of them. Thousands, in some places.

Children come through the doors. They grow up. They leave. Teachers retire. Principals change. Buildings get renovated or abandoned. Photographs get put away in boxes. But the walls remain. And I started wondering what happens when something terrible happens and everybody simply decides to move on. What happens to the child who doesn't get to?

That became Petey. And then came the town. Because I think the most frightening thing about Back to School isn't really the old schoolhouse. It's the way an entire community can learn to live around a terrible unanswered question.

A boy disappeared. The town told itself he ran away. The years passed. People grew up. They got jobs. Got married. Raised children. Opened businesses. Sat on historical society boards. Served meatloaf on Fridays. Life went on.

But somewhere underneath all that ordinary life was the memory of a boy who never came home. And that is the part that feels closest to the original emotion that started the story for me. When your children leave, you miss them. You don't stop loving them because they've grown. You don't stop wondering where they are. You don't stop listening for them. You simply learn to live with the empty space they leave behind. And maybe that's why I found myself thinking about a schoolhouse.

Because every school is full of children who will eventually leave. Some leave at the end of the day. Some leave at the end of the year. Some graduate and never come back. And every once in a while, one doesn't leave the way everyone thinks they did. I suppose that's what happens when I take something completely ordinary—a mother missing her children when they go back to school—and let my imagination wander somewhere it absolutely should not.

The children leave. The school stays. And sometimes…the school remembers.