2015 – Barry’s twelfth grade

School reports didn’t shine so bright in Barry Masquevert’s teenage life but, in truth, he didn’t hate school at all. It was a nice place, much simpler than the other places outside of school in his life. Much simpler than home where he was witnessing his father getting involved into shadier and shadier deals and risking to get noticed by the police. Barry wanted so much to use his superpowers to rob a bank, fix his father’s financial troubles, but that was not what his father had raised him to do, so it was a pretty intricate internal conflict in his young person.

What if he had brought a hundred thousand dollars, pretended it had been some kind of lottery, and saved his dad this way, kept him out of trouble? In the end, this relief would literally be a farce, a theft. It was all going back to the nanosecond where Mr Masquevert had finally located his baby boy, about to be registered into social services, and had claimed his son. He had not done so and worked so hard and taken so much shit and he was not struggling so immensely at the moment to encourage his boy to rob a bank and take money from people who were just as innocent as he or in similar predicaments as his. Barry cursed his father for the complicated message his upbringing created.

So, school was nice. It was also nicer than those lonely nights when he sat on top of a building in the cold, dressed all in black, wearing a ski mask, waiting for sounds and electricity to reach him from the city. Sometimes, there would be something he could do to make sure a very bad thing didn’t happen to an unfortunate individual, distracted before crossing a street, about to fall to their death because they didn’t see there was a big hole next. He saved some lives, but no one knew it. He was alone, cold, sleepy, tired, not doing his homework. He hated it.

And then, when he was finally recruited by the Team, met Hobbes and Marlene and George and all the clique, school had also been a simpler place than the mesmerizing superhero cave Alphonse had carved out of a massive rock and cliff towering the main artificial lake of the suburbs, filling it with high tech toys and an overall feeling of imminent danger. His peers were easier to interact with than those other mutants, some of them being a hundred years old or more, a group within which he felt a bit out of place for a long time. They seemed to have everything figured out but he couldn’t trust them, not yet.

At school, all one had to do was really the bare minimum. He liked to do just that, aim at passing whatever classes he had, win at not getting caught falling asleep during a lesson, and the rest of the time, he enjoyed the normal high school backstage stuff : hanging out, joking around, jumping around, trespassing, doing drugs under the football field bleachers, hitting on girls, vandalizing property, driving teachers crazy when he was having a bad day and looking for someone to pay.

Barry loved to attract attention to himself, which, he saw, was not too bonkers to decode, in the position that was his. He didn’t just love it, he needed it preciously. Yes, he was doing all these things, secretly improving the life quality of the citizens of his town and the city M nearby, but it was all a secret. No one knew. And it was really out of the kindness of his heart, out of the values his father had made sprout inside of him, that he was doing so, because he would have a hundred times better enjoyed playing video games or watching porn after school than dressing like a ninja and pacing the streets to prevent crime. He felt like his powers deserved to be used for good.

So, when at school, he would be noticed, and because he was not a gifted scholar, the noticing would have to be about whatever else he could project. Mostly bad. At the bottom of his heart, Barry was aware teachers didn’t hate him, and no one from the staff was stupid enough to think he was a bad kid but, in the end, teachers, Principal, assistants, janitors, guards, secretaries would all agree he was simply and banally a little shit and a pain in the ass. It was good enough.

The thing he was most looking forward to when waking up too late and sleep deprived every morning was, number one: that girl or that other girl who he would meet in the restroom or under the staircase, and make out with. There were just so many of them, all of them drop-dead gorgeous, their bodies a playground of delights every time, and they fainted like flies in front of him, effortlessly! The way they looked at him, masticated on their bubble gums in front of him, bent their waists in front of him, everything was the Call of the Wild. Barry remembered that he had read a book with that very title before, for English Literature class, and that the story had nothing to do with being a horny teenager in front of a crowd of temptations, but he liked that name a lot.

Number two: his buddies, but he had to rethink that. He mostly liked James, who was always bringing the pills from his parents’ cabinet and brought up the most improbable topics to discuss while he was high or just sleepy. Otherwise, his schoolmates were pretty boring, and navigating lives that were so different from his that he didn’t easily feel connected to them. Robortor, George, would be his first friend, with time, but, at school, he hung out with some boys, some girls, especially the ones who had some recreational resources up their sleeves, innate or stolen, or both.

Number three: there was his Geography teacher, Ms White. He was starting to really be into her, second year of high school. He opened his eyes to his alarm clock and she was the first thing he thought about, although that feeling in itself gave him cause for wonder. The strident ring of the alarm would slowly enter his ears, the light of day from the window sliding through his eyelids, and then he would think: Ms White. She wasn’t motivation enough for him to arrive in class on time every day, no, she was more than that. She was the reason he just plainly got out of bed and went to school, period. For that reason, she should really have held the first position on his list of School Fun things.

Yes, number one, there were the hot girls, cheerleaders, even the timid girls from band who were not wearing underwear under their uniform, but they always behaved the same. And his friends, yes, they were amusing, they were a nice group of pirates, troublemakers, but he could always feel the distance between them when he couldn’t attend such or such party, such session of driving around drinking cheap bear and doing donuts on parking lots because he had his duties. He was fond of his friends but he wished he could have shared his secrets with them, made true connections with them.

They had jokes, prescription medication misplaced from their family bathrooms, but they were always the same pleasantries and the same drugs. Skipping a day of school or a month or a year and returning after a long absence, of bolting through time with speed approaching the sacred number of light enough –which he began to suspect was possible early enough, just before he found his Team, and which filled his heart with dark dread—, changing the velocity time spent itself, he would have found the same environment the next day, the next decade, or the one before. Nothing truly missed, he would have only had to pretend to teachers he cared about catching up on lessons. But with Ms White, it was different : who knew what the day would bring? Every day, content was unique, revealed, rare, radiating. Unpredictable.

For that reason, he rolled himself out of bed, showered, almost never, brushed his teeth, most of the time, and drove his car to school every day. What was he going to do to her today? He didn’t know, and it was a wonderful feeling. She could appear at anytime, in the corridor, he could bump into her in the hall, and he would certainly make sure he was ditching Ethics to sit on the lunch bench with her. She was unpredictable but, most importantly, he felt unpredictable when she was around. Something she triggered in him always fascinated him : a surprise, every new day. An improvisation, a rush, an opportunity. She was his muse.

And, for the first three years of his high school life, he had also sat in her class, every day but Wednesday. The thought shook his neurons into place in the morning, running late, gathering some clothes, cursing the clock on the wall, grabbing a toast or just drinking milk from the bottle as breakfast before leaving the house. Sometimes, his father was back, from his night shift, and had made the effort to stay up an extra hour so they would have a small chat before it was school time for Barry and sleepy time for Mr Masquevert.

Handing him the milk carton, his father did his best to make some chat happen those days, but it was quite difficult for Barry, as all the roles he was juggling in his life left him unsure about how to be a son to this mysterious complex man who had raised him alone. “You’re in love or something?” Dennis Masquevert asked one morning.

“Dad! Why do you ask that?” Barry brushed him off, gulping some milk, grabbing a Capri Sun juice pocket for his lunch.

“You are in love with a girl at school!” his dad exclaimed, sitting at the table and smoking, a glass of water in front of him, “otherwise, why would you rise” he looked down at his watch, “almost on time and be so…. Giddied up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I gather from meeting with your teachers you are not very invested in academics, Barry” Barry shrugged, doing his best to act as a normal teenager, knowing all his dad would have to say would be: “just keep up as best you can with English, Math, History, Geography, that’s all I ask of you, okay?”

He nodded, “I’m not in love with anyone, dad. Everyone at school is so boring”

“Right. You know when I say a girl, I don‘t mind if you’re into a guy either, you understand? Love is love”

“DAD!” Barry shouted, flailing to his car

His father watched him from the doorstep, the glass of water in his hands, a cute smile on his face : “you are bleeding love, my son! It is a Leona Lewis song, you know that?”

“What the f” he waved exaggeratedly at his dad, put the car in reverse, tires screeching against the pavement as he fled the house to a safer destination where constant interrogation wasn’t taking place. Bleeding Love? Who the fuck was Leona Lewis.

Was he in love with Ms White? The question would haunt him, delightfully, every day even beyond graduation. He didn’t care what it was, he just loved it. Wasn’t he allowed to just bask in something nice, for once, something uncomplicated, innocent, just that one time? Yield into some harmless fun? Yes, you are allowed, motherfucker, he would tell himself while driving down the road, parking his car on the student’s lot, you are allowed. He looked at his reflection in the rear view mirror: a bit tired looking, greasy hair, but a fucking movie star, that’s what he was. He walked into school, late, like a conqueror. And sat in the middle of the Geography class with immense joy in his heart.

It was the little things, really. Just the fact that she had just said : “now, just quiet down, I’ll launch the presentation” and he pretended not to hear her, or she was teaching, lecturing, but he was leaning over to Max or Julie, and raising his voice just loud enough for it not to be a whisper, and the magic happened. He would see Max or Julie’s eyes look at something behind him, which was Ms White, and guess, oh, guess, in relish, that she was trailing off and noticing him, gradually noticing the disturbing of the perfect pace she had planned for her lesson. Julie or Max would run a hand under their chin, silently communicating to him that he was causing trouble, but he dove into it more. And bla, and bla, and bla, whatever he would feign to be talking about, at that one moment.

“Barry, is there something wrong with your ears?” Ms White asked.

“No, just got them checked yesterday, they’re all good” thinking, you are cute, you are a cute lady.

“Barry, do you care to share with us the story you are sharing with Alberto right now?” she asked.

“I don’t think it is appropriate for class” thinking, made you look, aha!

“Barry, can you please repeat what I just said, out loud, so I am sure you were listening?”

“You were saying something about uh… icebergs?” I was actually listening ‘cause, you Ms White you, you have such a lovely voice.

“Barry Masquevert!” she lost her cool sometimes, “how many times do I have to request silence for you to give it to me?”

“I’m sorry” he would reply. How many times can you steal my heart, is the real question here.

“You are not sorry! Why are you acting this way?”

“I am immature, you are a sweet creature, when you are angry, Ms White.

When she had argued with him about cellphones and he had driven her to blurt out the infamous ‘I think you miss being punished by me’ in front of everyone, gasping, he had felt a small tremor in his chest, a hint of guilt, as he guessed he had taken it to the next level, publicly humiliating her, but he was also enchanted, because that, out of everything, would seal their bond forever. The anger she had shot at him from her eyes, while he was pretending to savor his victory, was the sexiest thing he had ever seen. Also, now, she would never forget him.

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Why sexy? He was bedazzled. Because she could take it. She was an uneventful teacher, nothing spectacular or eye-catching about her but, her strength, her diligence, her perseverance in her uninteresting subject, her ability to be roasted by an entire class without batting an eye, that was something. Many teachers pretended to be cool but became obviously upset at the first negative comment, overreacting like little bitches. So many walked around with a strong air about themselves, and exploded into blood-drenched crises when triggered the slightest, abusing their positions of power to censor the student population. Some others took the act further into pitiful-ness, laughing an embarrassing moment awkwardly, fighting to save their egos, but not Ms White. When he made her day a little worse, she just had this look, catapulted into his, her mouth shut. She took it like a lady, she didn’t shake in her boots, she didn’t attempt to salvage herself, only her lesson. She was a fucking professional.

He loved her backbone and that she could face a horde of savage teenagers and hold her ground, not shy in front of self-deprecation, not denying her weaknesses, being genuine. Even though most of his peers would have said she lost many battles, in terms of what she initially aimed to accomplish in her ranks, he would have said the contrary. There were some outbursts of anger, yes, some words that they didn’t mean, some disrespectful and out-of-line exchanges but, in the end, there was a trust between the students and Ms White. How did she do that? He wondered. He supposed, because even if something bad happened on Monday, she cleared the slate on Tuesday, and gave second chances. It was a bizarre thing.

She had a good heart. Many called her class boring and indulged in name-calling her or reviewing everything that was wrong about her teaching style, but that was only because after gossiping on classmates, listing fails and successes of burgeoning love stories at school and negotiating off pill debts, bitching about small jobs, guessing who had an eating disorders and how to hack an Instagram profile, there had to be something else to speak about, and it was teachers.How much school sucked and was such bullshit and how much this town was the next thing they’d see in their rear view mirror after graduation, leaving all those terrible dull teachers behind with their parents, bosses, cousins, foster families.

She showed them what it was to be okay in adversity, to be allies while disagreeing, to stick together even after tensions, to give a fair chance to everyone in spite of past disastrous misunderstandings or incidents, to clean the slate off all the classes week after week, to grow as a whole diverse whole and not lose sight of it, no matter the difficulties. For that, he had to admit, she was a good teacher. Sucked at Geography but she was okay at life.

That was the reason they were the perfect pair. Barry knew Ms White didn’t see it this way, rather, she saw him as a bubble gum sticking the sole of her shoe to the ground but he, in his privileged all-knowing position, understood it as bright as day made its brightness obvious.

He didn’t torture her non-stop either. Sometimes, they had nice exchanges, like the day she was trying to project from the new DVD player all the classrooms had been equipped with over Winter break and couldn’t crack the code of the modern technology, he had not been thinking, and he just got up and walked to her desk, plugged one thing, activated the remote control. “Thank you Barry, you are a lifesaver!” she had exclaimed genuinely at him, “this is the only thing I had planned for today! You literally rescued my lesson!” He smiled back at her, saying nothing, nodding. Blank slates! Saving, saving lives, hell yeah, she was not able to ever know it, but saving lives was Barry’s new specialty.

She was good with compliments, and always creative when it came to encouraging the less talented students at her subject, always finding the little thing that would boost them, such as “this map’s scale is all wrong but Jesus! Have you ever seen such beautifully drawn mountains?” she showed the work to the class, making Stephanie blush, “Stephanie, I didn’t know you were such an artist!”

Even the little shits, like him, received some praise, as in “oh, I love your hat today Gregoire, it’s very stylish” or, if she knew something important was happening in anyone’s life, even a student who had gotten on her wrong side the day before, she was still able to treat all of them as human beings: “I heard your sister had a baby, Daphne! Congratulations! Can all the class clap for our new aunt in the room please? MAKE SOME NOISE!”

During a Geography period, there had been a debate about Flat Earthers, and for once, Barry had felt like participating, and he had risen his hand and started talking about his neighbor and the crazy shit the guy believed, like, absence of curvature of the land that he thought, since observed with the naked eye, was proof the planet was as flat as pizza without all the ingredients on it.

Another student had jumped in with the intention to interrupt Barry and Ms White had cut him off: “please, Ben, let Barry speak! Everyone will have their turn!” She could have chosen to grant the floor to Ben, a much gifted and devoted student in Geography, but she was applying fairness and demonstrating, as seemed to be her role as an educator, that everyone was equal in the room. It moved him, that she was kind, impartial to everyone after the hard times were over.

One time, she had detained him on a Saturday morning and had had the unpleasant surprise that her name had been drawn as the supervisor of the detention –that was the deal, as staff members rotated for those extra duties. It was just him and two other guys, who had been caught smelling like weed with dilated pupils first period after smoking inside a car with closed windows on the parking lot like idiots.

Ms White, looking tired and fed up and like she could, herself, use some drugs, at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning, entered the detention room, which was absurdly large for the relatively limited number of students detention was affecting every week. The gigantism of the place framed her little figure all enveloped in a large dress and at least two layers of scarves, clashing big against small. She dropped her backpack on the main desk, gestured to everyone to sit down, “do your homework or whatever, okay?” She retrieved a pile of papers from her pack, fetched a red pen and dove into her marking.

The silence in detention room was something that people who yearned for silence would probably get detained for rather than attending real classes or even real life, Barry observed. Every little rubbing, scratching of pen against paper, move of furniture on floor, was quite blissful, when you thought about it. Here, in this room that was meant to recreate some sort of a prison, freedom happened, from the noise, the business, the rush. It was a forced parenthesis during which he could not bolt, was not allowed to face his father for ill-at-ease chats, or struggle to fit in with his Team of superheroes. Detention was number four on Barry’s list of great School Things.

One of the students suffering the sentence that day had fallen asleep and started snoring in the large room –detention on Saturday morning was in no way going to cancel partying like a rock star on Friday night for the high-schoolers— and Ms White had lazily gotten up, walked slowly to the boy drooling on his math paper, when he began farting in his sleep. Barry and the third kid started giggling and, he had seen on her face that she was biting her lip, trying to refrain from reacting in such a puerile manner to farts –five year old’s comical relief— until she couldn’t hold it anymore and they all started laughing together.

She looked at Barry, shook her head while her shoulders bounced up and down with laughter, and they had shared that funny moment. The next day, they crossed paths in the hallway and he made a little fart noise with his mouth to catch her attention, and she turned around, chuckled warmly, shaking her head, before walking away. She had no animosity toward him, nothing more than the applying of her role, mixed with the acknowledgment that they were people too, brought together for that ridiculous instant of silliness.

With time, Ms White had quickly learned that when Barry was sitting next to her on her cafeteria supervision bench, the goal was to torment her as much as possible before lunch was over, but she always made the effort to show him that she didn’t assume the worst, always started the conversation with a nice greeting, “how are you Barry? How is life?” When she heard that he was working at the car shop after school, she had asked him: “what do you do there? Are the customers nice?”

“Some are di… I mean, jerks, they want the impossible, like, four tyres changed in an hour. And then they yell at us and threaten not to pay” he replied.

“Wow, people are fennecs, Barry, you cannot let them treat you this way”

“Some people think they are better than us at the shop because they show up in a fancy car wearing a suit and all”

“That’s a load of crap. If they are so good, why don’t they fix their own cars?”

“Thanks, Ms White” he had said, you are such a nice lady, I love you.

“You’re welcome Barry. The world is full of pedantic people. You have to know your worth, sweetie pie”

Those times, it was a bit harder for him to continue torturing her, but he knew he had to. The helpful interactions she was offering him were not enough, after all, she behaved like this with all the students, good or bad, called them all sweetie, or darling, and he wanted to be the special one, beyond the sweeties and the darlings. So starting nice, casual, he would always find a way to engage into the pestering path, as if he reprimanded her for granting him her trust, as if he enjoyed betraying her for being kind to him, and the emotion he felt as a result was a mix of culpability and great entertainment, and some enticement that inverted left and right for him.

“Hey” he turned the discussion around, beginning his methodical switch subtly, slowly, marinating in the joy of what was to come, “it’s not going to be a career for me, anyway” You don’t deserve my insolence, you really don’t, but I HAVE to do this.

“What kind of ambitions do you have then?” she asked, unphased.

I have to do this or, when I’m gone, you will forget me, “I have the ambition to get on your nerves” he answered, I have the ambition to be remembered by you, laughing openly he responded something provocative to her, and she chased him away with the thin pile of papers she had brought to her supervision duty like he was a mosquito in a summer room, fuming. Success! Immense success!

He was quite amazed himself at how diverse his approaches were on a daily basis to making Ms White’s life at school difficult, his mind was blown and his heart grew fonder of her seeing how inspired he constantly was. One time, in the middle of Geography class, he raised his hand to speak and, when given that permission by Ms White, he said out of seemingly nowhere, as he had not prepared anything special for the day and was just feeling sleepy: “I cheated in Spanish today, at the test”

“What, Barry?” Ms White was confused and she walked to his desk, one hand behind her ear. He showed her the palm of his hand, all scribbles for the verbs gustar and encantar, “what did you say? No you didn’t, come on!”

“Actually, he did” Mandy came up as a witness, one row on the left, “I saw you look at your hand during the test, you’re such a LOSER” Barry had not been surprised by Mandy’s inflamed testimony, as he had dumped her for her best friend, Becky, ten days ago, but was now dating Millie, her next door neighbor.

Ms White closed her eyes, brought her hand to her forehead, “you’re interrupting my lesson to tell me this?”

“It was weighing on me” he lied.

“Now I have to report you”

Every different kind of place, context, circumstances was good, but Barry especially liked the times when he was able to create an argument between him and Ms White in front of her class, assessing her self-control, her persistence, her energy. That she might have been tired that day, or that it was last period, didn’t prevent her from being consistent in both positive and negative reinforcements. He admired that she passed most of his tests, except for the infamous ‘I think you miss being punished by me’, of course, which would go down in history.

“You could just… let it go” he proposed, shrugging, and the rest of the class discreetly cheered, some:

“Yes, come on, who hasn’t cheated before?”

Or: “Give the guy a break!”

“I can’t” she said.

“Why not?”

She sighed even heavier, eyes wide, astonished at his behavior and naiveté: “I work here, Barry, I’m not here to be the recipient of your tales of cheating during tests or to humor you”

“So you mean we cannot trust you?”

“Of course you cannot trust me! I will report you to the Spanish teacher, and let her decide what she wants to do with that information”

“Snitch!” Someone coughed inside a fist at the back of the class.

She heard it and she didn’t care, a sorry smile on her lips, both her index fingers tapping against each other, “you are just very silly to have told me that in the first place, Barry. You have dug your own hole”

“So you mean we cannot confide in you when we have problems?” he pushed it a bit further.

“Well no, I”

He cut her off on purpose, seeing the frustration grow at the bottom of her stare, but she was calm that day, it was a morning lesson, she still had vigor and reactivity, and patience, “you know, you teachers are also supposed to be on our sides, for us teenagers, we’re going through puberty, and lots of stuff, and some kids have no one to talk to!” he had concluded, sending a wave of outrage through the group.

Ms White stepped closer, her face relaxed, unbothered, and she waited for all the offended whispers to die out, and she let him finish his rant, and she spoke like she would have addressing a small child asking why the sky was blue: “well of course, you can count on teachers, on me, if you need to talk. We will listen, sometimes, we will try to help you if we can. There is not any single teacher in this building that doesn’t care about their students” she lied, as Mr O’Donovan, for instance, didn’t give a rat’s ass. “But” she rose one of her two busy index fingers in the air, “you have to understand, before you spill the contents of your hearts to people working at your school, that if you mention something dangerous, like drugs, or like, bad influences, or abusive situations, I am obligated to act on those. Honestly, this is a double edge sword: you have allies, here, at school, my dear children, but also responsible staff members who have been given the task to protect you and protocols to follow for the best”

He pretended not to have listened to any word of this beautiful summary of the situation, “how is cheating at a Spanish test dangerous?” Barry asked, producing a snob sniffle sound from his nostrils, in control of his little tease.

Another sigh, this time, she went from scratching to massaging her forehead. She had such nice hands, such lovely index fingers and, by that time, the wedding ring on her left side had vanished, “it’s not dangerous, Barry like perilous” she said, “but it is a break of the rules. It’s like if you told me that you had robbed a bank, or committed a crime. I would encourage you to turn yourself in to the police, of course, and”

“Why not encourage me to inform the Spanish teacher of my actions instead of snitching directly to him then?”

“Would you?” she looked at him puzzled, uncertain, “because that would be the best, obviously”

“Yes” he lied.

“I will go with you then, to make sure it is true”

“Then no, nevermind” he giggled.

She rolled her eyes, concluding, “anyway, I cannot let any of you confess such things to me and let you believe that this is a valid system, cheating through life is not a good message from an educator, you have to understand that. All of you have to comprehend the difference between disclosing stuff to your friends or families, and confiding to us, teachers” So she reported him and he got detained. That actually gave him an excuse not to attend the morning briefing Hobbes had planned that Saturday.