2015 – Barry’s twelfth grade
One time, on Halloween day, with everyone dressed up, the girls as sexy versions of any female character or celebrity imaginable, the guys more into goof, she had reached the armoire at the end of a lesson to bring a specific map of Oceania back to the front of the classroom. As she opened the door, Barry had jumped from inside, dressed as the killer from the Scream movies, Ghostface, and she had fallen on her butt in front of all the class, almost dying of a heart attack and the witch hat she was wearing knocked off her head when she hit it on the corner of a desk. He had peed his pants laughing but, removing his mask, he had grimaced with concern seeing her on the floor with her face pale and her horrified eyes.
“Oh my God Ms White!” he extended his hand to help her get up, “I didn’t mean to make you fall! You’re ok?”
“You’re… supposed to be in Computer Science class, Barry!”
“I know” he found that particular part of his scheme hilarious, “I skipped the whole period waiting for you to open that armoire”
In the end, they had all laughed, that day and, for his devotion, Barry had even received a round of applause, which Eugenie had timidly followed. Then someone shouted : “Oh Lord! The teacher’s head is bleeding!”
She had had to go to the hospital to get her scalp stitched from the incident, a very minor and dull task for the doctor who had completed it but, because it was her head she had hit, she had been obligated to stay in for the night to make sure she didn’t have a concussion. She had sat there, in her bed, feeling completely healthy, wishing she was home with her cat, wondering if Terence thought she had moved away and abandoned him. And she thought about her life that night. Her divorce, her students, the plans she had made when she was her students’ age and the dreams she had left unfulfilled with time passing and, because it had been a long day and she was frustrated, tired, she had started crying, silently, by herself, until she finally fell asleep.
In the morning, she brushed her teeth, got dressed, and fled from the place. All the results were solid in her tests and her brain was intact, so she wished all the staff a very nice day and hurried to exit the building and drive back to her cat, take a nice hot shower, forget about school, about students, about the hospital, and binge watch something on Netflix, either a documentary about some conspiracies or a love story happening in some royal family. Barry was sitting on the hood of his car in the parking lot with a bouquet of daisies and what seemed to be grass in his hand. In his other hand, he had the witch hat Eugenie had lost in the commotion of the previous day.
Eugenie fell prey to despair a little deeper inside her being. Was it definitely too much to ask to just be left alone, and live a drama-free existence, where students like Barry would not intrude? A small curiosity lingered in her heart, although the dominant feeling was the unwillingness to spend the energy finding out what this new Barry shit show was all about. And yet something in Barry’s face was different, he was not smiling or parading, his usually very dynamic and tossed-around hair was flat, disciplined, and it looked like he was wearing an ironed shirt.
“What are you doing here, Barry?” Muscle memory, your teacher’s tone, interested, she thought, your muscle memory, your eyes, interrogative, open. What a profession, it occurred to her. What a random sisyphesque job.
“I’m not skipping class, if that’s what you want to know”
She looked at her watch, “I think you are skipping class, at this hour”
“Is your head okay?” he asked with the hopelessness in his eyes so real it pained her for a second, before she remembered he was the cause of her having wasted an entire day and night sleeping in a hard, back-breaking hospital bed in a room smelling of terrible disgusting hospital smells.
“Of course, my head is fine! It was just a little hit, Barry”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, really, I didn’t feel a thing” It was true. Her back, however, was killing her after waking up on that atrocious mattress.
“You’re going to have a scar for the rest of your life?”
She shook her head, thinking about it “probably not. I really doubt it. It’s all under my hair anyway so there isn—”
“I am SO SORRY” he interrupted and exclaimed passionately, like he had been waiting for this moment for hours –which was probably the case— aiming at one of her hands to land the hat in it, which she dusted, a bit unsure, “it was a stupid joke, and I understand if you are angry at me and—”
“I’m not angry at you, come on, you silly goose, on which planet do you live?” she said warmly, really wondering if it was grass that he had picked up to mix with the daisies and as she noticed, oh, one very deflated dandelion on the side of the bouquet, a leaf fallen from a tree on the other side, something that looked like an actual branch or, perhaps, an iron picket from a fence, “it was a prank, and an accident, come on Barry, cheer up!”
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“I got expelled for one day” he shrugged with great somberness.
“Well, you did create a hazardous situation”
“I did… I feel terrible, for your head”
“WHAT COME ON” keep your cool, she encouraged herself, don’t raise your voice. “Barry, my head is all good! In which language do you want me to say this to you?”
“In Swiss language” he said, inspired, looking in the distance, “since you grew up in Switzerland”
“It was Sweden. Barry, stop speaking like a crazy person, the is NOTHING wrong with my head” she repeated, eager to bring closure to this episode and finally be able to go home, and rejoice in the fact that this deplorable event was forever in the past. “It was nothing! It’s just protocol that the clinic keeps patient who hit their heads, that’s all, and it’s all completed now, and I’d like to go home”
“Just so you know, I’m planning to burn this Halloween costume I wore to scare you, and sing a litany when I do”
“Ghostface?”
“What Who?”
“Ghostface” she repeated, “that’s the name of the killer who puts on that mask, you know, in the Scream movies”
“There is a movie called Scream?”
She squinted at him, wondering why anything existed on Earth, “yeah, an… old movie” she reluctantly said, “a killer who— nevermind that’s… lovely, burning it all, you know, lovely idea, very cathartic” she supposed “very creative. Although you could keep the costume, I mean, it’s pretty good and scary for Halloween”
“Maybe even recite all the important cities of Martinique in your tribute”
“Wow, look at you, being so full of ideas” She had watched the first and second and even third Scream volumes at the movie theater, attending those iconic horror events with her little high school girlfriends, while Barry was busy not being born, probably not even being an idea in his parents’ heads. Now, her own head was starting to hurt for real, but not from getting banged on a table, no, it was a possible true headache, maybe even the beginning of a migraine. It was all him. Plenty more gray hair would follow.
“I wish I had memorized the poem I wrote to you my first year, you remember?”
“Ah yeah” she hesitated, challenged to locate the memory, so she lied “I remember, that would be appropriate” She had the hazy feeling it might have been about volcanoes, though, and awful.
“Oh my god, there was blood everywhere” he continued, unstoppable “I scarred all the Freshmen students for life”
“There was literally like, two drops, and there isn’t even blood on my shirt, look” she showed him, pulling on the blouse she had been wearing and slipped back into, on the way out of her observation room “and those Freshmen are totally desensitized to violence”
“Still” he insisted “I know what I did was bad”
“Come on, Barry, enough with this negativity! Can you just stop thinking about it, this is not the end of the world! No one got hurt and—”
“You got hurt”
“I mean, like, hurt hurt. The school didn’t burn down, no one died, I got a day off, you got a day off too, actually, so come on!”
He thought about it for a very long time, which made Eugenie wonder if he was daydreaming or reflecting on his actions, or if she had lost his attention altogether. Finally, he nodded gravely, accepting her invitation to move on. “So you got like, free food or whatever in there?”
“Yes. Free food, yaaay” she thought back about the slimy breakfast puree and soft slice of bread and tepid artificially sweetened cup of tea she had been forced to ingest to be allowed to leave. It was all him. Grey hair, separation anxiety on her cat, back pain, disgusting food, all him. All Barry. The source of all evils.
“Did you see any mad things in there?”
“Mad things?”
“Like, someone died while you hung out there in the hospital?”
“Sweetie, just give me the flowers and go do something nice, like, I don’t know, go eat some donuts or go put-putting, go to the arcade”
She was a hundred percent certain that Barry had been about to tell her that the flowers were actually just happening to be there but not related to her situation, either destined to his grandma or his girlfriend but, she saw, something flashed in his eye at the last second and he appeared to decide against one last joke so, she guessed, he must truly have felt bad for the whole ordeal, after all.
With great ceremony, he handed her the very sad bouquet and she smiled as brightly as she could : “wow, this is beau-ti-ful, behold this! I’m going to put it in a vase when I get home. I’m going to take a picture of it and post it on Facebook” she lied. This is going to the trash bin. She might even open her car window on the drive back and ditch it on the side of the road. A small revenge.
“Do you want to take a selfie together with it?”
NO I WANT YOU TO LEAVE ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, “Well…” please, Lord, shut him up, let me drive away from this place, she implored the heavens, “that wouldn’t be very ethical you know, as a teacher, if I published a photo of a student from my school on social media”
“No I mean, just as a souvenir, for you”
I wish you got struck by lightning right now, she prayed, and forgave herself for her harshness. She was sleep deprived and a little depressed and her neck hurt because she was almost thirty-four and because of the horrendous mattress she had spent the night on, “Barry, thank you for the visit, and the lovely uh… bouquet, and goodbye, okay? See you tomorrow at school, alright?”
Barry nodded again, very happy with himself, proud of his arrangements of wild flowers, and extended his arms for a hug. Cringing inside, wishing she could disappear into a hole, Eugenie went in and let him hug her. For once, he didn’t smell like gasoline or marijuana, but of fresh soap. And grass.