Hot Cheetos and an Empty Seat
A Teacher's Grief: Remembering the Student Who Showed Up Late
Some mornings still taste like Hot Cheetos.
Not because I’m eating them, but because grief has a way of hiding inside ordinary things. A smell. The crinkle of a bag. A flash of orange dust on someone’s fingertips. Grief doesn’t announce itself when it returns. It slips in like a torn page you didn’t know was missing until your hands land on the gap. Suddenly, you can’t read past it without remembering what was taken.
My student used to stroll into my first-period class ten—sometimes fifteen—minutes late. Hood up. Snacks in hand. That same half-grin that said he knew better, but showed up anyway.
“My bad, Miss. I know I’m late,” he’d mumble every time, like it was rehearsed.
Then he’d settle in quietly. Never loud. Never disrespectful. Just there. Just grateful to be in the room. Grateful to be seen.
There was something disarming about him. Even on rough days, he carried light in his eyes, warmth in his smile. He looked like the kind of kid who’d been through more than he ever said out loud—who learned to mask chaos with charisma. He never made excuses. He just showed up. Late, but present.
I never wrote him up. Never kicked him out.
What would’ve been the point?
He wasn’t testing me. Life was testing him. He was surviving.
That’s something you learn after years of teaching in Philadelphia. Some kids don’t come to school for grades or lessons. They come for the space. The calm. The moment to breathe in a world that keeps its foot on their neck. They come because a classroom, on a good day, can be a safe chapter. A place where, for fifty minutes, nobody is trying to edit them down to their worst day. A place where they get to be a whole person on the page—not a problem to be fixed.
Teachers are trained to measure progress in data. Benchmarks. Growth. Percentages. We’re told to quantify impact. To prove it. To document it. To justify it.
But some of the most important victories in a kid’s life can’t be graphed.
Sometimes the victory is that they came at all.
Sometimes the victory is that they walked through the door, sat down, and let themselves exhale for fifty minutes—even if the world outside was loud and hungry and unsafe. Even if it took two trains, a bus, and dodging danger just to get there.
My student had that kind of presence—the kind you remember because it was real. He wasn’t perfect. None of them are. None of us are. But he carried an unspoken dignity. Like he’d learned early that life doesn’t hand out softness, so you hold onto it wherever you can find it. Even if it’s a bag of Hot Cheetos and a seat in the front of first-period English.
Not long before the end of the year, my student was killed.
Shot.
Gone before he could graduate. Before he could truly live.
The grief didn’t arrive all at once. That’s the part people don’t tell you. Sometimes it doesn’t come like a storm. Sometimes it comes the way a story changes when a page has been ripped out—quietly, at first. You keep reading because the world keeps moving, but nothing makes sense the way it used to.
I felt it in the silence of his empty desk.
I felt it when I reached for something to hand him and remembered—mid-motion—that there was no one there to take it.
I felt it in the way my eyes kept flicking toward the door, waiting for him to come in late, apology already forming on his lips.
And I felt it in the absurdity of how the world kept turning—bells ringing, papers shuffling, kids laughing in the hall—while my chest sat open like a book someone had slammed shut too hard.
It rose when I stood over his casket, looking at the face that once walked into my classroom mumbling he was sorry for being ten minutes late.
And in that moment, I felt the sheer unfairness of it.
Because he didn’t get to be late anymore.
He didn’t get to walk in with snacks and a half-grin and tired eyes.
He didn’t get to grow up.
And that makes me furious.
How quickly people reduce a whole life to one cold sentence. Another headline. Another number. Another “that’s so sad” or “thoughts and prayers,” as if that’s enough. As if a child can be turned into a statistic without erasing everything that made him real.
He was more than that.
He was a whole person. A whole life. A whole future.
A bullet doesn’t just end a body. It steals chapters. It rips out the middle of the story and expects the rest of us to accept the ending like it was inevitable.
This is what people outside education don’t always understand. Teachers don’t grieve in abstractions. Our grief has a name. It has a seat. It has handwriting in the margins of a notebook. It has a laugh that echoes years later.
And it changes you.
It doesn’t just hurt. It rewires you.
It makes you flinch when the phone rings late.
It makes you scan hallways with a vigilance that has nothing to do with lesson plans.
It makes you hold students tighter—even when they’re driving you crazy—because you know how quickly tomorrow can be stolen.
It makes you furious at systems, at weapons, at apathy, at the way communities learn to live with constant loss like it’s normal weather.
But it also makes you tender in a way you can’t unlearn.
Because once you’ve watched a child’s story end mid-sentence, you never treat presence as a small thing again. You stop seeing lateness as disrespect and start asking what it took to show up at all. You stop believing your job is only to teach content and start believing it’s to hold the page steady. To be a place where a child can exist without being reduced.
Some days, I still hear his voice.
“My bad, Miss.”
And I think about how much grace he deserved. How much time. How many mornings.
If you’ve never taught in a place where kids die young, it’s easy to believe this belongs to someone else. Another zip code. Another community. Somewhere “over there.”
But grief doesn’t respect borders.
It doesn’t check your address before it takes.
All it takes is one moment. One bullet. One phone call. One empty desk.
And suddenly, life splits into before and after.
So if I’m writing this now, it’s for the people standing in that “after.” For the teachers who keep showing up anyway. For the families who bury children and still somehow breathe the next day. For the kids sitting in classrooms right now, acting fine, carrying storms in their bodies.
And for my student—who showed up late, but showed up.
Some mornings still taste like Hot Cheetos.
And I let them.
Because memory is what remains when someone tears a chapter out of the world.
And I refuse to let the world pretend he was only a number.
