SK01 - Waist Deep (7 page)

14

I hobbled down the empty school hallway, my knee stiff after sitting in Jenkins’s office.
Battered orange lockers stood like silent sentries along the walls.
Posters announcing fundraisers and school dances were taped above the lockers.
I smiled slightly at the inanity of high school.

“What’s so funny?” asked the man to my right.
He gave me what he probably thought was a hard stare.
His large belly strained the tan polo shirt he wore.
The words
District 17
and
Bill
were embroidered on the left breast.
He carried a digital telephone and wore black slacks and black boots to round out the ensemble.
I wondered briefly if the school district had given any thought to how much this outfit resembled the
uniform
Nazis
wore
.

“Nothing,” I said.
“Just happy to be alive.”

Bill grunted disapprovingly.
He came to a stop and pointed to a door.
“Teacher’s lounge,” he said.

I nodded my thanks, but he didn’t leave.
It was apparent that Jenkins was going to take me up on my offer of having an escort.
We went in together.

When I was a kid, the
Teacher’s Lounge held some mythical quality.
It was a forbidden zone for students.
Not even the teacher’s aides or those with most-favored status were allowed in.
When I got
a little
older, I imagined it to be a den of iniquity where my
English
teacher quickly gave his last four papers a ‘B’ grade in order to turn his attentions to the
supple prize that was my French
teacher.
In spite of the historical irony of the French and English getting along, I figured it had to be true.
There was no other explanation for how I passed
English
in high school.
Mr. Henderson
was too busy trying to bang Miss
Couture
.
It had to be.

In reality, the lounge looked like any other break room in the country.
It could have been lifted whole and dropped in any office building in River City and it would’ve fit right in.
Coffee pot, sink, a lunch table and a couple of easy chairs, along with a TV in the corner.

Another image of childhood crushed, I thought sarcastically.

A woman in her fifties sat at the lunch table with a cup of tea and a newspaper.
She wore a shawl made of light blue yarn and half a dozen bracelets on each wrist.
She didn’t look up as we entered.

“Mrs. Byrnes?”
Bill said.

The woman lifted her head, adjusted her glasses and took us both in.
Her eyes quickly registered recognition of Bill and turned to me.
“Yes?”

“This is—“

“Stefan Kopriva,” I interrupted him and stepped forward.
I offered my hand and she shook it lightly.
Her touch was warm and her face open.
We exchanged pleasantries.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Kopriva?”

“Stefan,” I said and smiled at her.
“Or just Stef.”

“Very well.
Stef.”

“I’m looking into the disappearance of one of your students.
Kris Sinderling?”

Her face paled.
“Disappearance?
I knew she’d run away, but has something…else happened to her?”

I shook my head.
“Her father’s worried and has asked me to try to find her.”

“Are you a private detective, then?”

“No.
Just a friend.”

Mrs. Byrnes studied me closely then.
Her eyes bore into mine.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, until I began to wonder what she saw there.
“
So her father
knows you’re here?”

I nodded.

She looked past my shoulder at Bill.
When her eyes returned to me, she sipped her tea and flashed me a warm smile.
“Okay, then,”
Mrs.
 
Byrnes
said
.
“What can I do to help?”

I sat down opposite her.

“Tea?” she asked.
“I have almost a full box of peppermint.”

“No, thanks.”

She looked up at Bill and her lips pressed together briefly.
“We’ll be fine, Bill.
Thank you for showing him the way.”

There was a long pause.
I imagined Bill struggling with what to do.
In the end, he sighed.
“I’ll be in the hall,” he said.

“That’s not necessary,” Mrs. Byrnes said.

“Principal’s orders,” Bill said, a touch self-important.

Mrs. Byrnes shrugged and her eyes followed him as he left the room.
When the door closed, she turned her eyes to me.
“They have to keep us liberals in line, I guess.”

I smiled.
I voted Republican in
two of
the last three elections, but I liked her anyway.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“Did you know Kris?”

She nodded.
“Of course.
Everyone does.
All the girls want to be her and all the boys…well, you know what most of the boys want.”

“She’s popular then?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Byrnes said.
“Very popular.
Though I don’t think that is any surprise to you.
She is very beautiful and in this society, that is an automatic ticket to popularity.
Particularly in high school, where maturity is a rare commodity.”

“You sound a little…”

“Bitter?”

I nodded and she laughed lightly.
“No, I’m not bitter.
I am resigned, though.”

“Resigned?”

“Yes.
I am resigned to the fact the world is what it is.”

“And what is that?”

“Superficial, for one thing.
And, in my darker moments, I suppose I would say it can be ugly.”

I thought of my time on the job.
I recalled the sharp pain of bullets slamming into my shoulder and through the back of my knee.
I saw the crazy eyes of the old woman who dared me to search her home.
And I saw the eyes of that little girl later on, still and fixed, on the silver table.
Staring up.
Silent.
Accusing.

I shuddered.
Ugly was right.

She didn’t notice my reaction and went on, “I can never change it completely.
None of us can.
We can only try to make our trip through this world more bearable.”

“How do you mean?”

“With art,” she answered wistfully.
“Compassion.
Mercy.
Any of those will do.”

I wondered if that were true.

“Forgive me,” she said with a warm smile.
“You’re not here for philosophy.”

“It’s all right,” I told her.
“My grandmother used to say something similar.”

“What did she say?”

“That we can’t control other people, only how we react to them.”

She gave me a slightly puzzled look.

“She usually added that if we react in a positive way, we might change the world just a little bit at a time.”

“One deed at a time,” Mrs. Byrnes mused. “Or one person at a time.”

“That was the gist of it, yeah.”

“Your grandmother was a smart woman,” Mrs. Byrnes said. “For my part, it seems t
he older I get, the more my thoughts tumble out before I have a good look at them.
And being a teacher, I frequently have a captive audience, so I become self-indulgent.”

“It’s all right,” I repeated.
“Really.
How about the teachers?
How’d she get along with them?”

Mrs. Byrnes chuckled and sipped her tea again.
“Ah, yes.
The teachers.
Well, we are a strange lot, Stef.”
She looked at me again.
“You appear to be in your thirties.
Do you still remember high school?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Oh, come now.
You don’t remember how strange your teachers were?
How they didn’t even seem human at times?
In fact, for many of my students, it is a shock to their systems to discover that I am very human.
That I get ill, that I have emotions and get sad or angry, or that I eat dinner, go to the movies, make love…”
She smiled mischievously.
“It never occurs to them that I do any of those things.
That I
live.
”

I remembered those feelings.
A teacher was a symbol, not a person.
In the egocentric world of a teenager, teachers were just bit players who sat all night at their desks, eagerly waiting for their students to return.

She watched me.
“You do remember.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So then, there is the answer to your question.”

The answer.
The answer was that the
g
eometry
instructor saw nothing but the pentagon and rhombus and the C
²
=A
²
+B
²
equation.
The
English
teacher was too busy chasing the
French
teacher.
The
history
teacher had a year’s worth of chalk dust on the sleeves of his wool coat and cared more for the glory that was Rome and the genius that was Thomas Jefferson than the faces in front of him.
The computer teachers saw bits and bytes and programming strings, but little else.

The teachers didn’t notice the students any
more than the students noticed them.
High school was a microcosm of the real world.