2012 – Barry’s ninth grade

  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 pimples.

  “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 :

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “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 un-surprised.

  “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 passed 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.