2012 – Barry’s ninth grade
Since his very first day of high school, second period Geography class, Barry had had a major crush on his teacher, Ms Eugenie White. As a Freshman, he had sat in the middle row of her classroom, and the first image of her that remained in his brain forever was that she was not paying attention to the new arrivals of August yet, but was rather occupied by some housekeeping items. She was indeed busy digging into her oversize purse for some papers, frustrated at something. Her mid-length hair was tied lazily into a ponytail, a curl had escaped from it, dancing over the bag as she dug into it vividly, dangling a crooked shadow on the angles of her face. He had first noticed her supervising reception in the early morning, at the arrival of the buses, and had seen the wind disrupt her coiffe and her hairband. He recalled he had spent one extra second sizing her up before he got shouted at provocatively by one of his friends and joined a random Freshman group.
Then she stood up, and saw the students and seemed to half-register them, but she still went on digging inside her bag, until she gave up. Barry watched her, wondered what it felt like to be a teacher, one second still granted your human bubble, absorbed by the secret content of your bag, and the next, on to introduce some people fifteen or twenty years younger than you to a new subject, a new class. He supposed it could be like an actor stepping on stage, although, from his experience, teachers were lazy actors. They didn’t try very hard to get students interested in their classes, just trained them to pass some tests. Had little to say about the core of it and even less useful substance to pass on when it came to real life.
Seeing her transform from the privacy of her desk chair to the front of the class, gesturing with enthusiasm about what they were going to learn in Geography while her face showed little trace of pathos, he watched, intrigued. She was reserved, he saw with time to get to know her, calm, composed, but very warm, encouraging. Matter-of-fact but meaning it. He couldn’t put his finger on it. She would praise her area of expertise, fan-girling over herself and, the next second, make fun of her own individual for being such a nerd or now knowing an answer to a question. Somewhere in his heart the feeling grew that she cared little about Geography but immensely loved teaching every day and she would have been happy just to teach anything.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Which was a lot to say about the feeling Ms White’s vision shaped in him, since he attended a regular small town high school where girls like the ones from the cheerleaders’ teams and their cliques were hot as hell and walked around with the smallest amount of clothes as possible even in the winter, nails done, full makeup, popping pink bubble gum as they were gossiping or cat-fighting, pacing provocatively through the corridors. Then after exploring that one demographics, there were still the female athletes, the geeky ones with their fake unassuming airs of do-not-touch but who possessed some dark urges, and many more categories.
Ms White was old, like, real old, like, his mom’s age if he had had a mom. Almost thirty, he could guess, so he never shared his emotion with his classmates by fear of being ridiculed. Of course, some students fancied their Gym teacher or that Math guy who was also a volunteer firefighter outside of school, that new nurse who was also teaching Health and who looked like a Russian model.
Or Mr Chill, whose real name had been forgotten, as he taught philosophy and entranced his pupils with his vivid metaphors and well-placed jokes, who had risen with time in popularity for a lot of girls and guys. He was even receiving some anonymous love letters in his cubby and, one year, a couple of dudes had dressed up as him for Halloween. Ms White, outside of those extraordinary exceptions, was not typically regarded as the subject of teenage desire.
Was it because he was discovering his powers and freaking out about them, being entirely unable to speak about it to anyone, that he felt attracted to a person that usually didn’t draw oohs and aahs? He didn’t know. He was becoming aware of his uniqueness as an individual, and that he was transitioning into a superhero, but he was also a typical adolescent boy whose only goal was to truly fuck around, charm a crowd, clash chaos into order, and have fun all day, so he didn’t trouble himself with deep questions at that time. Not before he had joined the Team had he finally been deprived of choice concerning his maturity, and been forced to accept to grow up.
He didn’t know why his preferences went to Ms White rather than his fellow female classmates –although he must have hooked up with half his promotion by the time of graduation—, he just knew she made his heart race in his chest when he sat in her class. Even her dressing so ordinary, nothing special, few items of jewelry, unexceptional layers of clothes, made him fall deeper for her. She was that boring teacher of Geography, that everyone imagined had the most boring life outside of school, and he adored her.
Being accustomed to getting all the girls due to his frat boy looks and his apparent indestructible self-confidence and his ability to bullshit anyone, there was no questioning in little Barry’s mind about what was ahead: he wanted to act on his crush for Ms White. For what purpose? He had no clue. He knew she was married –before she divorced at the beginning of his Sophomore year— so he didn’t expect anything from it. At the same time, the aim of this aspiration to act in Barry’s heart was, again, not accompanied by a lot of thinking. But he wanted her to notice him, to feel special about him, and wouldn’t that be tons of fun to put into motion?
So at the beginning, he had tried to be located in her best graces, arriving on time in the morning and standing by her desk to ask her how she was doing and pretending to wonder what they were going to study that day with avidity. She was so beautiful when he could see her so near, marveling at all the details of her simple features as she was just replying stuff to him, sitting at her desk. Her hands, delicate, thin, with pointy knuckles holding her pen suspended above a sheet of paper as she was talking back to him, were a delight. She was always nice, asking him questions too, caring, apparently.
She had the most beautiful eyes, of a doe, dark with long eyelashes, with very expressive eyebrows. Her mouth was the shape of a heart and the color of a rose, and her cheeks sprayed by a little collection of adorable freckles. She was very white, her mid-length brown hair always loosely tied up in a huge barrette like people wore in the 90’s or as a low pony tail, leaving some wavy locks free, brushing softly against her shoulders. When she smiled, her entire face exploded with it and two dimples appeared on the sides of her mouth, driving Barry crazy. She had perfect teeth, their line following her smile like a roller coaster wagon. Her chin was square, her nose possessed a strict bridge in the middle of full cheeks and on top of a fattened throat, so the mix of softness and hardness on her features created an excellent end result.
When she moved, erased the board, wrote the date neatly in the corner, when she passed handouts to the class, she did so with a strange grace. She was not one of those ladies who carried herself like a ballet dancer, no, she was just walking normally, but she had the habit of raising her pinky finger through whatever she was doing, slightly tilting her head as she was speaking or listening, pursing her lips when she was jotting down something at the desk, which created iridescent butterflies in Barry’s gut. One day, those butterflies would be replaced by a steel bullet and he would end up crashing into Ms White’s apartment to ask her to save his life, but the incident was still years away.
Some girls said her class was boring, to the point of wishing a fire erupted at school to put a stop to it. Some boys said that her voice was sleep-inducing. Her teaching style, opposed to her teaching desire which seemed to be burning inside her, was very old-fashioned and the most dreary of all, but Barry persevered for a few months, even writing her a poem about volcanoes, which she ‘absolutely loved’
“Oh my god, Barry!” she exclaimed, her super animated eyebrows like two independent caterpillars on the top part of her head doing a little dance from the series of emotions she was feeling, “I absolutely love this! Especially how you made volcanoes rhyme with nose!” He nodded, very proud of himself. The poem was shit. He had lazily just Googled rhyming words with all the different things you had to know about volcanoes and tried to assemble them into sentences with no rhythm but he knew that she would be touched.
“Yeah. I was inspired when you said that you wished you had been a vulcanologist”
"Really" she couldn't believe it, flattered, "in Scandinavia we have that special and capricious volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, it's a very particu--"
At this point he already had discontinued listening to her, "I, too, wish to become a vulcanologist, one day" he lied.
“Oh my god, that’s fantastic! You’re going to ace the test then”
He always squinted and frowned when he heard that comment back from her: class, grades, tests. She was so obsessed with turning in homework on time and with exams, assessments, slide shows! Jesus, dreary and annoying and demanding academics were not Barry’s strong suit, so he struggled hard to pass through her continuous poking and quizzing and evaluating of her group and seriously wondered how anyone could enjoy their high school experience like this, like, doing actual work, and had serious doubts about being able to keep this up.
His relief from the merciless pace and depressive requirements of Geography class, a subject for which he had no interest, came when he also realized that his humoring and bonding strategy to Ms White was not working at all. Of course, being a nice little Barry on his seat, with all his material ready, smiling at her when she stood in front of the class, raising his hand to answer her very boring questions, she liked him, a lot, she was very fond of him. But she was equally fond of everyone else who was a decent kid, he saw, and even some who sucked at Geography or sometimes skipped her class but apologized, and even students with whom there could occasionally be tensions. He was just an ordinary letter in her alphabet.
Flagrantly, Barry felt different from those other teenagers that Ms White seemed to cherish on top of her list, or with whom she had an extra pinch of a relationship other than handing out papers and collecting them, the students who talked to her, greeted her, asked her about her day, commented something clever in class, asked her advice, confided with her.
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First of all, he was very handsome, but he wasn’t sure at all that this quality of his would cut it when it came to teachers. Teachers, some very strange and unexciting creatures, didn’t seem moved by their students’ beauty or ugliness, rather reacting to incredibly dumb things such as homework turned in on time or a special twist in a school project, a perfectly presented slide-show, a question asked that would trigger an inflamed and party-pooping monologue about whatever they were eager to convey to the new generation. Were teachers also like this outside of school, like, looking for hookups or spouses that would present such spotless academic attributes? That was scary shit to imagine.
Second of all, he was a mutant. He had superpowers, and he was beginning to feel them for real and to acquire a certain control over them. Once, he had even prevented a person from getting hit by a car, without being noticed, making the headlines on the local paper : MYSTERIOUS FORCE PUSHES WOMAN OUT OF CAR’S WAY, SAVING HER LIFE. He felt on top of the world but that, also, was something that nobody knew about and that Ms White would never be able to acknowledge and admire, since he was never going to tell a soul. He had seen too many science fiction movies where the weirdo with special abilities gets locked up in a lab and experimented on for the rest of his life, eventually leading to apocalypse, and steampunk programs rated very low on Rotten Tomatoes.
The idea came to him at the end of a Tuesday, last period being Geography, in the early Spring of his first high school year. That day was incredibly hot for the beginning of the season, promising thunderstorms by mid-week, and the air conditioning hadn’t been wired to be working so soon, so everyone was sagging and sticky, suffering, making fans out of papers, getting rid of sweaters. Sitting at his desk that day, he noticed that Ms White was a bit unkempt, her hair having almost entirely escaped her bun, her cheeks flushed. She had taken off her sweater to hang it neatly on the back of her seat and it was the first time he saw her bare shoulders.
She was old, Barry saw, and her skin was not as flawless and radiant as girls his age’s, and she was much less toned than a fifteen year-old softball player or basic young lady entering a growth spur, but she had nice arms, lovely elbows, and, under her sleeveless blouse, he could guess the curvature of her kidney drop, the small of her back, and her breasts on the other side, bouncing around nicely as she moved. She had a nice body for an old woman, and an acceptable ass. Barry sat down in front of her and waited, troubled by the charm the vision of her was producing in him; he wanted to reach out to her, slowly grab the locks of hair released from the barrette’s grip and brush them off her face, un-sticking them from her sweaty neck, and French kiss her with lots of tongue.
But right away, the electricity in the air had made him feel there was something different about the day. Ms White was not happy about the endless requests for extensions of deadlines in their current project, and she called the students lazy, opportunists, her hands on her waist. She could be strict sometimes and very direct, as all teachers are, but usually, she kept her cool. Someone raised their hand and asked about the rubric for the academic task they were discussing, and Ms White was fuming : “Fantina, seriously? You are waiting to reach the end of the project duration to ask me this? Figure it out, I’m sorry, this is unacceptable”
That was the moment where laughter and shouting occurred in the hallway next to her classroom, entering her sacred teaching quarters through the door left open because of the heat, and Barry saw, with his young Freshman eyes, Ms White lose her shit. She trotted across the room with her hands rolled into fists, fury on her face, her very unique eyebrows frowning and re-frowning, and she yelled : “what’s going on in here?” Silence. The class turned around to mildly appreciate the entertainment, although most of the group was dozing off due to the high temperature and a humidity that was injecting pockets of wet air underneath the wallpapers, resembling some ugly pustules.
“We are uh… rehearsing before a skit” the students from the hallway explained, “the teacher allowed to…”
“Which teacher?” Ms White barked.
“Mr … O’Donovan?” one student answered timidly.
“Jesus. Out of all days, today!”
And then they heard her, after she disappeared from their view further into the hallway, knock on the open door of Mr O’Donovan’s room and severely demand from him that he had a bit of respect for some other classes going on at the moment and, not waiting for his reaction, she paced back in the direction of the classroom where she had left Barry and his peers. They were exchanging amused looks at this point, “wow, she’s an angry bitch!” he heard from someone.
“Giving shit to the English teacher like that?”
“Man, that’s tough, in front of his students like that?”
“Teacher’s on her period for sure”
Barry said nothing, just waiting for what was next. His heart was pounding against his ribs.
“And what about our skit?” the students in the corridor asked as she passed them.
“Your skit? You little fennecs, you’ll just have to swallow it down for now, because, breaking news, there are some other lessons going on at the moment, and we cannot learn with your cacophony!”
Everyone knew that, on school grounds, little fennecs was the politically correct form for little shits and, ‘swallow it’ a nice way to say to someone that they could shove something up their asses, so Barry was beginning to feel extremely pleased by what he was seeing and hearing. Ms White’s voice, when she was pissed, had an animalistic tone, raw, sourdine, cutting like a blade. He realized he really really liked that about her and everything started happening very fast.
She closed the door on her way back into their classroom, didn’t slap it but pushed it into its edges with exasperation, secured it with a little bump. She walked back, head high, to her spot in front of the black board where she sat on her stool, smoke coming out of her ears. A torrential rain of blames fell down on her from Barry’s classmates :
“Ms White why do you hate theater so much?”
“Ms White why did you yell at those innocent kids?”
“Ms White couldn’t you just take a chill pill?”
“Ms White, so you think Geography is more important than English and stuff?”
She let it rain, pour, as she was breathing hard to get rid of the heat in her head and doing her best to ignore the assault of negative comments, and only reacted when she heard: “Ms White, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Excuse me?” she stood up from her stool, putting her hand as a visor, squinting her eyes. “Who said that?”
Barry hesitantly lifted his hand in a new kind of silence, thick, dense. Those were Freshmen, he would remember a long time afterwards, and they were still young enough to be shaken quiet by the use of the F-word in the group. “Barry, what did you just say to me?” Ms White stepped closer to his desk, looking down at him with piercing eyes. She didn’t appear challenged in suspecting him of a crime while he had been good so far, she seemed unsurprised.
“Sorry” he giggled again, a bit lost, feeling like a person with a foot in two separate boats floating away from each other, “I was just going with the flow here, I don’t… actually have an opinion on theater, I don’t kn”
“I asked you: what did you say to me” she repeated, her tone now cold as ice, and some delicious chills twirled around his spine all the way from his butt to the base of his skull. He was sweating profusely. Ice and fire.
“I said ‘what in the world is wrong with you’ but…”
“You didn’t say in the world” she corrected flatly.
“Oh come on…” someone started protesting in the corner of the class, but Ms White cut out the attempt with one snap of her fingers at the end of an arm she darted outstretched in the blink of an eye, not even looking at the interruption, just maintaining her stare into Barry’s. The snap was loud, crisp, sexy, its echo reverberated in the heat.
“I said the F-word” Barry admitted, reconnecting effortlessly with his usual default approach to school and relationships with school staff, which was unapologetic and raw.
“What F-word?”
“I said fuck” this was such a relief, a breakthrough from the good little Barry attitude he was struggling to maintain in Geography class, and he felt exhilarated. Ms White, on the other hand, was unmoved.
“How dare you say that word in my class?”
“I didn’t think you’d hear it” he answered honestly.
“We don’t use those words at school”
“Why not?” Are you crazy? He asked himself. It was Ms White, his favorite teacher, he had a fucking crush on her, she awoke some feelings in his body that were similar to the ones triggered by girls his age but in a different manner, a more subtle, nuanced manner, and he was holding his ground, he, her student, in front of her? He must have been mad! ‘Madness’ he recalled from one of his favorite peplum movies, itself directed out of one of his favorite grandiose comic books ever, ‘madness? This is SPARTA!!!’
Calm down, he told himself. This is not Sparta. Not yet anyway.
“Why not?” Ms White said, “well because here, here, is a place of learning. What if one day you get a job and you haven’t learned to select the most reasonable items of language, and you tell your boss the F-word or the S-word or the K-word –he would forever wonder what that K-word was, for the life of him, he couldn’t tell— and you get your little butt fired on the spot?”
“I’ll just get another job”
“You will just get another job?”
They stared at each other, the heat blowing up in the room, the smell of sweat, melting graphite from the pencils, rancid, iron-filled, the smell of chalk filling everyone’s nostrils. Ms White was looking at him silently, no more anger on her face, just a normal irritated teacher face, eyes locked on him, her arms crossed under her boobs.
“Give me your student ID” she demanded of him.
“What?”
“You heard me. I’m calling your home after class. You have to learn manners, Barry”
He gave it to her, his student card, while maintaining her gaze, doing his best to look as annoyed as she was, while inside, he was bursting with joy and excitement. He watched her slowly walk back to her desk and, in the persisting quietness, write down the information from his little card. She handed it back to him but didn’t let go when he seized it in his hand. “You will learn some manners here, not just Geography. Is that clear?”
“I guess”
“You do not guess, you will say it now”
“I will”
“You will what?”
“I will learn some uh… what was that again?”
“Fo-cus”
“Uh… manners” he said, pretending to be unsure, uninterested. He could see that she was not shaken by their newly birthed sort of interaction, that perhaps, in the back of her mind, due to some experience of training, she had anticipated it, she had gone through that reverse from cozy to affront before, and his mind was kind of blown.
As the class resumed in the suffocating heat, he realized how happy he was. Had he ever been more aroused in his short life? The answer was a close no between that event and the time he had seen Jolene and Samantha make out in the hallway. Normal everyday Ms White was pretty, beautiful, graceful. Emulating strength through her reserved approach to life, sparkling merriness when she was ditching compliments generously. Funny when she was boring and the only one pumped up by her lesson. Angry Ms White, snap, she was something else, she was something else, she was red-cheeked, her eyes darkened, menacing, her jaws tightened, and her hands had a life and an appeal of their own, her hands snapped fingers resonating against the walls. She was delightful.
He had found how he would stir his relationship with his beloved Ms White into something much more on the list of his fortes and make sure she would never forget him: he was going to make her life at school Hell on Earth.