Note: If you’re new here or otherwise need a refresher, this continues something I started earlier in the year. In terms of narrative form it retains all the charm of a Jello mold made at gunpoint with a bag over my head. If this is redeemed in its present state by anything it is in my mission to see how my abilities (and sympathies) can be sensitive to the code shifts between different students, administrators, other adult types, and, with this episode, teachers.
The History Teacher double-steps at the sound of the first lunch bell, weaving through bodies in the hallway like a fish eluding a predator. Seconds matter as he makes his way to the faculty lounge while the contents of the fridge are rife for the Math Teacher’s habitual scavenging. “Mr. Slenderman,” as the students and even some teachers called him, evinced little enthusiasm for nourishment in and of itself compared to the thrill of what seemed like that last of many previous and unsatisfying means of dividing and conquering through life. The boldest, most legible labeling, such as that on the History Teacher’s paper bag, was hardly an effective repellent.
Relief strikes at finding one other person, a harmless Student Teacher so far as anyone can tell, sitting before a steaming cup of microwavable soup and a granola bar but otherwise transfixed by a fidget spinner taken out of the student contraband basket in the furthest edge of the lounge.
Setting courtesy aside, the History Teacher goes directly to the fridge. The top of his bag is rolled out but that could have been negligence on this part in sealing it. Sitting on the next empty table he pours out the contents—a green apple, a fruit cup, and an apple juice box—and theorizes that his lunch was too unappealing or redundant to raid. He takes the apple, habitually twisting off the top stem.
“What’s on the menu today,” the Math Teacher says through his grin to no one in particular. His ritual commences, opening the fridge and scanning each shelf carefully, humming a made-up song. The humming stops suddenly and his long arms reach deliberately and deeply into the coldest recesses of the fridge. When he turns around and takes a seat at still another empty table, he’s holding a Tupperware container with “MRS. DELGADO” and “HANDS OFF” on blood-red marker over strips of white electrical tape.
The English Teacher, baring an appearance of much greater interest in food compared to the Math Teacher, heaves a passive-aggressive grunt of resignation seeing that her lunch has been annexed to the school’s emaciated jackal and treating it as a jackal without an appetite might well treat it. She instead makes a beeline to the contraband basket, rifling through a history of confiscated flip phones, minidisc players, and discontinued handheld games to unearth a copy of Maxim rescued from a ceiling leak that turned the cover model’s face into a spray-tan-hued cloud while leaving the lower portions distorted only by creases, likely making no difference to its ancestral possessor. She slumps over in the chair across from the Student Teacher, flipping the pages indifferently and eying the granola bar.
Everyone in the lounge freezes into their accepted roles of the period. The History Teacher stops twisting the still-lodged stem and goes to wash his apple. Under the roar of the sink he catches the gravelly tone of the Math Teacher asking him “You afraid of zombies?”
“Excuse me?” the History Teacher says in a voice lilted with fabric softener.
“Me? I’m not afraid of zombies.”
“I wasn’t aware we needed to be.” He moves his attention from the stem to the sticker.
“Well, nothing is off the table.”
“Okay.”
“And I know exactly how the zombies will be when the zombies show up.”
“How’s that?”
The Math Teacher raises his skeletal arm toward the door. “Like them.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Like those ret— … those numbskulls out there.”
“The students?”
“Yeah. They’re like the zombie’s inbred first cousins. Drooling, lifeless things shuffling from here to nowhere. Annoying but evadable. Maybe even harmless.”
The History Teacher stares down and with gritted teeth ensues his struggle with the sticker.
“You’re not a fan of my attitude, are you?”
“I didn’t sa—”
“Not your words so much as your face. Still bright with idealism, no doubt, for your chosen vocation. Educating America’s future. It’s a terrible disease—cured only by reality.”
“He says that to every new teacher,” the English Teacher drones, still fixed on the magazine and adjacent desires.
“I’ve been here for five years.”
“I guess you just have one of these faces,” she says.
“Yeah,” the Math Teacher seconds, “that’s a different sort of disease.”
“What disease?” the History Teacher asks in divided involvement.
“Not sure what I’d call it.”
“Keithfield Syndrome.”
“What?”
“He reminds you of Seth Keithfield.”
“Ah … now that you bring it up …”
“Who’s that?”
“What do you teach again?”
“Social studies?” he says going back to his seat with diminished satisfaction.
“Huh, you could be his replacement,” the English Teacher slides her hand across the table and inches the granola bar away from its oblivious owner. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh?”
“Keithfield was a type, yeah,” the Math Teacher muses. “The kind of teacher who’d wear bright-colored Converse and a cardigan instead of the fleece you’ve got going on there.
“He was partial to sweater vests too, if I recall. And he had a backpack with buttons on the straps.”
“Of bands I’ve never heard of.”
The English Teacher leans over toward the History Teacher as if trying to peer into his soul. “Have you heard of … what was it?”
“Wilco, I think.”
“Wilco?”
“I don’t know,” he says through mealy bites of his apple.
“He’s the kinda guy who had advanced degrees and liked to make a point of it,” the Math Teacher recalls with a sharpened bitterness. “In his way.”
“Keithfield was pretty smart, I guess.” The English Teacher’s thoughts are segmented by unsubtle pecks at the granola bar. “But smartness like that has its limits.”
“Didn’t he used to longboard down the halls?” the Student Teacher interjects cross-dimensionally. “Isn’t he in a coma?”
“No,” the English Teacher says trying to force a hesitant connection. “No that was maybe a sub.”
“He was just the Gifted Scholars Club guy.”
The History Teacher lays the core of his apple on a napkin and peels off the top of his fruit cup. “Gifted and Talented?”
“No this was different; it wasn’t sanctioned or anything like that. Outwardly it was a ‘study group’ but in truth it was a bunch of teacher’s pets he’d collected and did extracurricular lessons, like in the library, in the cafeteria. In the auditorium after hours. Nothing that seemed off-putting at first. Just a bit … smug.”
Realizing he forgot a spoon, and uncompelled to look for one, the History Teacher sips the syrupy fluid, sneaking in pieces of fruit as they avail themselves to his mouth.
“Then it got extra-extracurricular,” the Math Teacher says impishly. “They started meeting at night … in some unfinished condo complex or some such just outside of town.”
“How did they find that out again?”
“A private chat had leaked with pictures of candle arrangements and William Blake quotes spray-painted everywhere.”
“The cutting was never substantiated.”
“Cutting?” the History Teacher asks.
“Just some rumor,” the English Teacher cautions to the crinkle of the granola wrapper. “Some called it the Gifted Cutters Club.”
“Even I thought that was insensitive.”
“I guess people speculated seeing them in long-sleeves in the warm seasons and at gym and the like. I remember he was put on leave and the club threatened to hunger strike.”
The English Teacher and the Math Teacher laughed nostalgically.
“Did they, though?”
“Of course not. The parents got us to retroactively raise grades back up from where they’d lapsed and hand out some letters of recommendation.”
“Even disciples have limits.”
The English Teacher flips the magazine erratically and eyes the now-tepid soup of the Student Teacher. “It’s something we mastered after the other incident.” She pauses with a facial contortion indicative of cerebral indigestion. “That seems so oddly like this one.”
“A creepy echo,” the Math Teacher concurs.
“What incident?”
“The one with whatshername,” the Math Teacher struggled, with hints of performance, to excavate his memory. “Back in, maybe, the ‘70s? The one we’re stuck with.”
“We don’t like to dwell on it anymore than we have to.”
“Incidents like these reveal some crucial truth about smart people, don’t they?”
“What’s that?”
“They can be—,” the Math Teacher raises his voice over the bell, “they can really fucking stupid.”
The line of conversation drops. The teachers arise and gather their bearings as if coming out of an hypnotic delirium.
“Are you doing happy hour?” The English Teacher asks the Math Teacher, putting past wrongs aside for the next day, as they walk out together.
“I have to be in the gym to supervise the Ball decorations. I think I have to deal with the florist too.”
“You drew the short straw …”
“Tell me about it.”
Their conversation trails off. The History Teacher, slower to get back into the groove of things, considers the unopened juice box before abandoning it to fate in the fridge.
“Appleseed Cast.”
He turns to the Student Teacher, who at some point in the heat of the surrounding conversation had shifted out of her mesmeric state into a severe lethargy well suited to a corpse forced by cruel magical intervention back upright.
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Keifer was really into Appleseed Cast,” she clarifies unrolling her right sleeve, laying her forearm onto the table to show what looks from the distance between them like an elaborate scar.
“Is that a juice or something?”
The Student Teacher arises and approaches the fridge in an ethereal gait that jars as much against her pantsuited attire as by her undead-like comportment.
“Mr. Keifer wants me to send you a message,” she tells him with the precision of a reel-to-reel tape lost in storage.
She lifts her arm over the opened fridge door. The History Teacher peers closer noticing figures quickly scrawled in black Sharpie.
“Elaine,” he says in a tone taking on years of coarsening in a matter of seconds, “is that your Social Security number?”