How did I, before, miss the delicate shine of her brown hair or the way her eyes feel so joyful even when they are full of sorrow?
There has been a significant development. Timmy Thomas (herein lies the source of my confusion) and Jamal have discovered camouflaged cables running from the teachers’ lounge. The cables are hidden beneath the carpet and disguised as school spirit decorations running up the pipes. When the cables reach the ceiling, they blossom out through various vents and openings.
This information was turned over to Clint Bulger, who praised Timmy and Jamal for their service. I always knew that Timmy wanted to be a part of Bulger’s crowd, and had only settled for us when he was spurned. Now Bulger has promoted them to official members of his clique.
We’re not sure where the cables lead. There are whispers that the teachers are still watching us through hidden cameras. That one day soon they will surface and either reward or punish us for our actions. The old beliefs reemerge.
Bulger is angered by these rumors. He believes they give hope to radical elements.
“Cut them,” he orders. “Cut them all.”
“Paula?”
“Oh, I didn’t see you there.”
“I was waiting for you. I have things I have to tell you. Things about you and about me. Weird things, wobbly feelings in my chest that I’ve started to discover.”
“Oh no, not now! It’s too late now.”
Two tears begin to form in the corners of her lovely eyes.
Disaster! My assignment on the state of our education has been found. I’m dragged through the coldly lit hallways by two ex-linebackers. Although I’d stopped working on the essay a long time ago, I couldn’t destroy it. There was some small hope glimmering in the back of my mind.
The ex-linebackers toss me on the equipment room floor. Clint Bulger sits on the coach’s chair. To the right, Timmy Thomas whispers into his ear. To the left, Lydia flips the pages of a magazine with her delicate fingers. She doesn’t even look down at me. Why had I ever imagined the possibility of a connection between us?
In front of me lie the crumpled pages of my assignment and an old teacher’s tie that I had saved from destruction.
“What do you have to say about all this?” Bulger bellows.
“How did you get my locker combination?”
Timmy chuckles. “Did you think I’d forget about your precious essay?”
“You know that worship of the false teachers is forbidden,” Bulger says. He stands up, holding an aluminum baseball bat as his staff. He picks up one page of my essay and smooths it out.
“The goal of our education is to afford us the skills needed to graduate and pursue further education at greater institutions.” He snorts. “What does that even mean? That our education never ends? That we’re trapped in a hell of infinite schools?” He crumples the page back up and tosses it on the floor.
“The concept of the teachers is absurd. What kind of teacher would leave their students? Such a teacher would be no teacher at all. So, we must conclude that the teachers are a false tale that students tell themselves to avoid facing the real struggles in their lives. They’re a myth, and a harmful one.”
“If that’s true,” I say, getting to my knees, “then who do you think is in the black lounge?”
“Silence!” Timmy yells.
Bulger merely laughs.
I’m being held in the equipment cage. My guard passes me Gatorade and granola bars through the gaps. Clint Bulger comes to see me, to ask if I repent. I say nothing.
“You know,” he says, sitting on a kickball, “you look very familiar to me.”
“Yes!” I say, hoping to appeal to his sense of fraternity. I crawl closer to the wire grid. “We used to ride the bus together. We both sat in the back row. We were almost friends.”
“No,” Bulger says. He sighs and rises. “You still don’t understand. There never was any bus.”
I’m napping on a pile of gym mats when I hear a voice softly say my name.
“They let me see you,” Beanpole Paula says. “I said I’d reason with you.”
She slips me a chocolate chip cookie through the gap. Her hand brushes mine as she does.
“Thanks,” I say.
Paula is silent as I take a bite.
“Do you really want to leave the school so badly?”
“I could stay,” I say, leaning against the cage. “I could stay with you.”
She gives me a look that feels as if it is traveling to me from some vast, cold distance. Then she turns her head away.
“I’m with Timmy now. You know that.”
“I don’t know what’s true and what’s false. I only believe there must be a better, more important place than this.”
“Then I hope you find it,” Paula says. She starts to say something else, but instead turns away with her mouth partly ajar.
Past crushes, friends, rivals, and strangers alike jeer and shout as I’m dragged through the hallway. My head pulses as it hits the tile floor. A little stream of blood trickles out of my nose. When I raise my head, I see the dark teachers’ lounge towering over me.
“This heretical loser has turned his back on all of us,” Bulger shouts. The student body has assembled on the different floors overlooking the cafeteria. They are silent and watching. “But we aren’t unreasonable people. In fact, we want to give him a choice. He may repent and return to his clique, or he may live for the rest of his days inside his sacred lounge.”
The shouts of the students fall around me. I look up at the different faces staring down. Some are sympathetic, some seem angry, but most are simply bored. The most venomous face belongs to Timmy. He spits on the tile floor.
Paula is next to him, and her eyes are red. I look into them, hoping, perhaps, for some sign. I think that maybe she will leap forward and block the entrance, telling the whole school of our love. But she doesn’t move. She looks back at me with resignation, as if she is reminiscing about those lost, carefree recesses spent swinging together on the monkey bars.
I turn back to the looming walls of the lounge.
“If he has nothing to say, so be it,” Bulger says. “Boys, open.”
The ex-linebackers jam crowbars into the door of the black lounge. It takes four of them to finally swing it open with a loud crack. The inside is the blackest black I have ever seen. As the doors are pulled open, everything turns silent. I can no longer hear the heckling or shouts of my fellow students. My friends and enemies fade away behind me. The only thing before me is the darkness of the lounge.
I’m on my knees in front of the doorway, holding my assignment out in my hand.
IF IT WERE ANYONE ELSE
A bald man buddied up to me in the elevator, but he was no buddy of mine. He was much older than me, yet more or less exactly as tall, not counting my hair. He was holding a brown paper bag over his crotch.
“Does this go all the way to the roof?”
I made a big show of putting my newspaper down and turning my head. “What the hell do I know about the roof? What would I do all the way up there?”
We stood still as we moved up the building.
“Just a friendly question.” He licked the bottom of his mustache with the tip of his tongue. “Hey, do you like candy beans?”
There was no one else on the elevator, and then the doors opened and a woman in a green pantsuit stepped in. She looked at us and moved to the other corner.