CHAPTER FOUR | DESIREE
The first day of school had taken its toll on me, and by the time sixth period rolled around, I was practically counting down the seconds until the end of the school day.
When the final bell finally rang, I had to resist the urge to belt out ‘Hallelujah.’
I forced myself to wait patiently while all 27 of my sixth period students filed out of the classroom. Once the room was empty, I jumped out of my desk, threw my bag over my shoulder, and made a beeline for the door.
Blinded by the lure of cheap wine and cozy sweatpants, I didn’t realize that a student was blocking the doorway until I nearly plowed straight into her.
“Oh!” I yelped, caught off guard. I stumbled backwards, narrowly avoiding a collision. “Holy shit, you startled me!”
Then my hand flung up to cover my mouth.
“I meant to say ‘darn!’” I said unconvincingly. “Oh darn, you really startled me!”
The student giggled nervously, and I narrowed my eyes as I tried to place her name and face…
“Callie, right?” I asked. “Callie Watson, from first period?”
The girl’s mouth fell open in shock.
“Y-you remember me?!” she stammered.
“I try to remember all of my students’ names,” I said with a friendly smile.
I had always prided myself in remembering the names and faces of my students. It was only the first day of school, but I already had at least fifty names crammed into my mental hard drive.
I didn’t do it to show off or impress anybody. Actually, I did it because I wanted my students to feel important. I knew what it felt like to be a nameless nobody drifting through the halls like a ghost, and I didn’t want my students to feel that way.
The look on Callie’s face told me that the gesture had gone a long way.
“Nobody remembers me,” she said bashfully, staring down at the toes of her dirty sneakers.
“That’s not true,” I pointed out. “100% of the people in this room remember you.”
It was a lame joke -- we were the only two people in the classroom -- but it still earned me a genuine laugh.
“Anyways,” she said, “I just wanted to say thank you.”
“Really? For what?”
“For what you said in first period today,” Callie said. “The way you stood up to Cody Wyatt was so… epic!”
I had to stifle a grin as I recalled the encounter… and the look on Cody’s face when I handed him that detention slip.
“Well,” I said modestly, “As your English teacher, I must commend you on your choice of adjective. It was pretty ‘epic.’”
Callie’s smile widened, and she seemed to be loosening up. Then her demeanor suddenly changed. Her eyes fell to the floor and her cheeks turned a soft shade of pink.
“You were right, you know,” she said softly. “When you said that words can be a lifetime sentence…”
There was a sadness in her voice; the kind of sadness that could only come from experience. I knew what it felt like to be haunted by cruel words, and I could tell that Callie knew, too.
“Has Cody ever said something like that to you?” I asked gently.
Callie still avoided my eyes as she shrugged her shoulders and sighed.
“Guys like Cody say that kind of stuff all the time,” she said. “But nobody cares. As long as they keep throwing touchdowns, they can get away with murder.”
“I care,” I said firmly. “And they’re not going to get away with it anymore. At least not on my watch.”
Sometimes I wondered what the hell I was doing at Hartford High School. Sometimes, when I found myself lost in a sea of students pushing and shoving in the hallways, I wondered if I had made a mistake when I chose to come back to my old hometown high school as a teacher...
But moments like this were an instant reminder that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. When I looked at Callie Watson, I saw a sliver of myself in her eyes.
I came back to Hartford High because I wanted to give students like Callie -- like myself -- a safe place. I knew I couldn’t change the world, but I could make it feel a little less cruel. I could be an advocate for the kids that felt overlooked or forgotten; I could be a voice for the voiceless.
“If you ever need someone to talk to, I’m here,” I said gently. “My door is always open.”
“Thank you, Ms. Leduc.”
“Anytime,” I smiled. I assumed that was the end of the conversation, but when I took a step towards the door, Callie stepped in front of me, blocking my path to the exit.
“Is everything ok, Callie?”
“Actually, umm, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you…”
“Ok,” I frowned. “What’s up?”
“It’s uh…” she wrinkled her face thoughtfully, and I saw panic in her eyes. “Uhh… tonight’s homework!”
“Tonight’s homework?” I repeated.
“Yes. I uhh… was just wondering if you could help me with it?”
“Hmm,” I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes. “Well to be honest, that might be a bit of a challenge.”
“Why?”
“Because I never assigned any homework for tonight.”
“Oh.”
Busted.
“What’s going on, Callie?” I asked bluntly.
“Huh? Nothing’s going on…”
“Are you sure about that?” I raised an eyebrow. “Because it kinda feels like you’re stalling.”
“What? Stalling? No...”
“Look, if you need my help with something, I’ll do my best to help you,” I tried to reason with her. “But I can’t do that unless you tell me what’s going on.”
Callie sighed heavily as she glared down at her toes. “You’ll think I’m being ridiculous…”
“Oh yeah?” I leaned back on the edge of my desk and crossed my arms over my chest. “Try me.”
***
Ten minutes later I was poking my head through the private set of exit doors at the back of the teacher’s lounge.
I flicked my head in either direction, surveying the staff parking lot. Then I pulled my head back inside and hissed,
“The coast is clear, let’s go!”
With all the urgency of a special operative leading troops onto enemy soil, I ushered Callie silently through the set of doors and out across the parking lot.
Most of the cars had already cleared out for the day, but my cinnamon brown Kia Soul was waiting loyally at the back of the lot. I tapped the unlock button on my key fob, and the headlights blinked at me from across the parking lot.
That was our cue; we both darted forward, sprinting across the empty parking lot towards my car.
My footsteps ground to a halt on the rocky asphalt as I stumbled up to the driver side door. I flung it own and threw myself inside, just as Callie did the same on the passenger side. As soon as the doors slammed shut behind us, I pressed my thumb down on the automatic locks.
“Whew!” I breathed a dramatic sigh of relief as I slammed my back against the driver seat, whisking away the imaginary sweat from my brow. “We made it!”
I was about to offer Callie a congratulatory high five, but when I glanced her way, I realized that she was doubled over in the passenger seat. Her head was hung down between her knees and her shoulders were heaving as she gasped for breath.
My mind immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario, she was having a panic attack, or crying, or hyperventilating… or maybe even all of the above.
I was still trying to remember the procedures that I had learned in my first aid training course when she suddenly flung her head up and collapsed backwards into the passenger seat. That’s when I realized that she wasn’t crying or hyperventilating… she was laughing.
“That-- was-- amazing!” she stammered breathlessly as she brushed away the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes.
This time I breathed a real sigh of relief.
It was good to see Callie laugh so freely… especially after seeing her on the verge of tears just ten minutes earlier.
Back in my classroom, Callie had confided that the reason she was stalling was to avoid a group of boys that liked to loiter around the parking lot after school. They had made a game out of following her as she walked to and from the school bus every day, tormenting her with insults and crude jokes.
It had gotten so bad that Callie had stopped taking the bus altogether. Instead, she would get to school early and hide out in the library until the first period bell. In the afternoons, she would bide her time by hanging around the high school until all the buses had left. At that point, the gang would usually get bored and give up on the hunt… and then she could sneak out and make the thirty-minute walk home.
I was horrified to hear Callie’s story. I was even more horrified when she admitted that this had been going on since she was a freshman. And when she told me that the school administration had done nothing to help her, my horror turned to downright rage.
I knew that something needed to be done, but I also realized that this went above and beyond the scope of my newfound confidence and handy-dandy detention pad.
I couldn’t take down this motley crew on my own, but I could offer the next best thing in the meantime, a safe ride home.
Staging a theatrical escape through the teacher’s lounge and making a dramatic dash for my car had lightened the mood, but I knew this wasn’t a laughing matter.
“We’re going to make this right,” I assured Callie as I stuck my key into the car’s ignition. “That’s a promise.”
The after-school traffic had already died down, and I had a clear path as I drove towards the main road. It should have been smooth sailing after that, but we had barely made it half a mile down the road when I saw a procession of glaring red brake lights up ahead.
I eased the car to a stop and craned my neck, trying to see around the long line of cars in front of me. In the distance, I could see the flashing lights of a fire truck parked on the edge of the narrow two-lane road.
“There must have been an accident,” I said, sinking back into my seat. “This could be a while…”
“It still beats walking,” Callie shrugged.
Traffic inched forward slowly. One by one, each car in the procession got its turn to zip over the dotted yellow line and dart around the fire truck. As we crawled forward, we got a better look at the scene up ahead.
At first, I could just see the firemen darting back and forth between their truck and the ditch that lined the side of the road. As we got closer, I saw what they were running to, a grey sedan was wedged inside the ditch. It was crumpled up, like a toy car made out of paper, and the way the firemen crowded around the driver side door gave me a sinking suspicion that somebody was trapped inside…
I clenched the steering wheel and swallowed heavily.
I had never been so close to an accident before, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from scanning the scene as I pulled closer and closer. I was trying to get a better look at the car when I caught a flash of black in my peripheral, and my eyes darted towards the edge of the ditch.
That’s when I saw him.
There were plenty of possible explanations for why he caught my attention. He was huge, for a start. He was built like the Incredible Hulk, with muscles bulging out in all directions. He didn’t share the Hulk’s green complexion, but his arms were covered in tattoos.
Like the rest of the firemen on the scene, he was dressed in all black… but he wasn’t wearing protective gear. Instead he was wearing torn jeans and a black Bauhaus t-shirt.
His black hair was buzzed short on the sides and overgrown on top, and he wore it slicked back in a neat quaff. An equally well-groomed black beard grew along the bottom of his face, and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
Each one of those traits would have been reason enough to stare, but I knew that my eyes weren’t glued to him because of his tattoos or his massive muscles, or even his taste in moody goth music.
Actually, the reason my eyes were stuck on him was because there was something so immediately familiar about him.
I knew him… I was sure of it.
I had no idea who he was, or how I knew him… I just knew that I knew him...
Suddenly a car horn honked behind me, jerking my attention back to the road. It was my turn to weave around the firetruck, and I was holding up traffic.
“Ms. Leduc?” Callie asked from the passenger seat. “Are you ok?”
“Fine,” I said quickly.
I ripped my eyes away from the man in black and focused on the road as I eased my car slowly around the truck. Once I was back in my lane, I glanced at the rear-view mirror so I could see him one last time.
He was staring at the ground, and I caught the perfect view of his profile, the slope of his cheekbones, the straight line of his nose…
My mind suddenly raced back in time, and a vision from the past flashed into view,
It was a dark, moonlit night at the neighborhood park. He was sitting on a picnic table with his head was bowed over a Walkman.
He was eleven years younger, and he was missing the muscles and the tattoos and the beard… but his face was exactly the same. He had the same straight nose and the same cheekbones…
I knew that face…
Rory McAlister.