The School Bully (6 page)

She went into her mother’s room. Beth Fowler was snoring. Anna walked over to the dresser and picked up the bottle of Valium.

“Sorry, mom,” she said. “But tonight I need this as bad as you.”

Anna’s students were less than thrilled to find that their new favorite teacher was being forced to enforce disciplinary policy after all.

“How’d they find out you told us?” asked one of the students, a slim girl that reminded Anna of
herself
. The girl’s name was Penelope, but her classmates called her Pixie.

“Someone told the headmaster what I said,” she replied.

The other students all turned in unison to look at Hannah Bartlett, who crossed her arms defensively across her chest.

“Snitch,” someone hissed.

“Please.” Anna raised her hands. “It doesn’t matter. For the record, I still disagree with the policy and the headmaster knows I do. But taking your frustration out on other students isn’t going to change Mr. Chance’s mind, so let’s just concentrate on having a good year in spite of it, shall we?”

“It’s dumb anyway,” a boy named Gary piped up. “Somebody told me they just show you the paddle and don’t use it. They said that everything about people getting whacked with it is made up.”

Anna’s mind flashed back to the day before. She’d been standing up to teach since she’d arrived that morning.

“No, I don’t think it is made up,” she replied. “In fact, I’m sure that people do get paddled. And if anyone is worried about it, then the best thing to do is to make sure they just follow the rules.”

“Listen to your teacher, kids. She’s a smart lady.” Logan Chance was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame. He wore a tweed jacket, thin white sweater, brown pants and loafers. He looked relaxed and handsome. Anna wondered how long he’d been eavesdropping.

“Miss Fowler, may I?”

She nodded, indicating he could enter.

“Miss Fowler meant well yesterday,” he said. “She has convictions, and I want you to have them too. And just for the record, the fact that she has to follow the rules and will be held accountable does not mean she should be seen as any less of an authority figure. In fact…” His eyes fell on Hannah Bartlett. “…if I even suspect that one of you is showing Miss Fowler any less respect than she is due, I’ll expel you on the spot. I don’t care who your daddy is, got that?”

The students nodded solemnly. Hannah’s face was flushed with anger, but she didn’t argue. Anna couldn’t help but to feel vindicated and satisfied. Logan Chance smiled at her as he left, and her heart lurched a little. She looked down so the kids wouldn’t see the flush that rose to her cheek. One of the things that Anna hated about being so pale was that it made hiding her embarrassment or pleasure exceedingly difficult.

The students seemed to heed the headmaster’s directive and Anna’s fears that they’d lose respect for her turned out to be simply that - fears. It was just a bonus to have them get excited about the unit on Shakespeare, especially when she told them she’d let them act out “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the end of the semester if they all worked hard.

When lunch rolled around, she sat at the staff table with the other teachers. Most were older but even so they treated her with respect and some even solicited advice and complimented her on how enthused her students seemed.

Anna ended the day with a great sense of satisfaction. The only damper came when she
walked in the door to find her mother crying over a video of the last vacation she’d taken with her late husband.

“Mom…” Anna walked over and snapped the television off.

“We had such a good time,” Beth Fowler sobbed.

Anna came and sat down beside her. “Mom, you hated Aruba,” she laughed. “You said it was too sandy, remember? You said the landscape looked like
Tatooine
from Star Wars…”

Her mother laughed a little in spite of herself and dabbed her eyes with the corner of the bathrobe she’d been wearing when Anna had left the house.

“I know,” she said. “But your father was with me and now…”

“Mom…” Anna put her arms around her mother’s slim shoulders. It felt so odd, being the caretaker.

“Have you eaten?” she asked. Her mother shook her head.

“Mom...” Anna tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. She stood and went to the kitchen. Half the orange chicken was left, but Anna felt guilty serving her mother leftovers. Maybe a home-cooked meal was in order. She made chicken with a basil cream sauce, steamed some asparagus and served it all on a bed of jasmine rice. To her relief, her mother ate almost everything on her plate. Anna made a mental note to stop ordering take-out.

After dinner, Anna perused the family DVD collection for a movie they could watch. Nothing romantic, no comedies, and certainly not the action-adventure flicks that would just remind Beth Fowler of her husband, who could watch Die Hard a hundred times and never get tired of it. She settled on a spy thriller. It was one that Anna had never seen before, and she was actually enjoying it when she heard a noise. She sat up in her chair and looked towards the window.

“Did you hear that?” she asked her mother.

“Raccoons.”
Beth Fowler glanced nonchalantly towards the window. “The gardener needs to trap them.”

Anna resisted the urge to tell her mother that the gardener wouldn’t be the gardener much longer if she started sending him after wild animals. She got up from her chair and opened the front door, and promptly dropped the drink she was holding. A car was speeding down the driveway, its wheels turning up gravel. Anna knew enough from living in the inner city to make a mental note of its license plate. Then she went to her own car, which she could see didn’t look quite as she left it. Someone had dumped a whole bag of rotten garbage on the hood. The stench was incredible.

“Great,” she said, and went inside to get a bag and some rags.

“What was it?” her mother asked.

“You were right,” she said. “It was raccoons.”

“Where are you going with that bag?” her mother asked.

Anna stood there, thinking. “I need a liner for my trash can in class,” she said. “I’m going to put in my car so I don’t forget.”

Her mother looked at her suspiciously. “They don’t give you trash bags for your class?”

“The economy’s tight, mom,” she replied.

Beth Fowler nodded, her mind turning to other things. Anna went back outside and held her breath as she picked up the egg shells, dirty diapers and putrefying meat that coated her Mazda. She hosed it down and then walked down to the pool house, where she showered herself and slipped into terrycloth robe. She came back in through the back entrance and was relieved to find her mother had already gone up to bed.

Anna suspected who was behind the attack, but she couldn’t confirm it until the next morning when she called the police station and asked a deputy her mother went to church with to run the plate she’d seen on the fleeing car. It belonged to Beck Bartlett, Hannah’s older brother. Beck was a sophomore, and Anna had learned from one of the other teachers at lunch that he was a problem student who suffered from dyslexia and some other learning disabilities. Beck was a good athlete, but had a reputation for being a bit dim-witted and impressionable. It didn’t take much imagination to suspect the popular and pretty Hannah to convince her older brother to deface a teacher’s car.

But the knowledge put Anna in something of a dilemma. If she went to Logan Chance, he’d expel Hannah and Beck. Expulsion was a big deal, worse even than a paddling. Some kids - especially kids like Beck - ended up with worse problems if they got kicked out of school. Anna decided not to tell the headmaster. This was something she preferred to handle on her own.

She didn’t mention the incident in class, but Hannah’s smug behavior confirmed her suspicions. Throughout the day she acted as if nothing happened, but after school she went downtown to the mortgage company Beckwith Bartlett ran and waited patiently until he agreed to see her.

“Miss Fowler, right?” he asked, extending a hand that resembled a pudgy, pink starfish. “I hope you aren’t having problems with Hannah. She promised the headmaster she wouldn’t text in assembly after you took her phone, which, by the way, I think was a bit of an overreaction…”

“No,” she said. “This is a bit more serious, Mr. Bartlett.”

Anna told him what had happened. She handed him a scrap of paper with the license plate written down on it. Beckwith Bartlett looked down at the paper, grim-faced, as Anna told him about the damage to the car.

“So what do you want? Money?” he barked. “Is that what this is about?”

Anna was so surprised she couldn’t speak for a moment.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t want your money. I just want your kids to be held accountable.”

“Then why didn’t you tell the police?
Or the school?
I mean, if my kids were really involved...” He held out the paper with a dismissive snort.

Anna refused to take it.

“I didn’t tell them because they aren’t the parents,” she said coldly. “You’re the father, Mr. Bartlett. One would think that you’d want to know what your kids are doing...”

“Alleged to be doing,” he said, his fat face growing red.
“Alleged.
There’s not a shred of proof other than your own statement. Look, miss; I know where you come from. I know what kind of kids you’re used to teaching. But these kids here are well-bred. They aren’t hooligans like you’re used to...”

Anna stood looking at him, disdain rising in her like a wellspring.

“No, Mr. Bartlett,” she said, finally taking the paper.
“They’re worse, because they have every advantage the kids I used to teach never had. These kids are just throwing back everything you’ve given them in your face, and you can’t be bothered to deal with it. Clearly I made a mistake coming here.”

She turned to walk away.

“Yeah, leave!” she heard him say. “I’ll be talking to your boss, Miss Fowler. Apparently, Bridgestone is pretty desperate for teachers if they’re hiring the likes of you!”

Anna ignored him and surprised herself by keeping a calm demeanor as she exited the building and headed home. She walked into the house as if nothing were wrong and cooked
grilled salmon with tarragon,
brussel
sprouts and crescent rolls. She’d picked up a key lime pie on the way home because it was her mother’s favorite. Beth Fowler surprised her daughter by eating two pieces of pie and then agreeing to take a walk to burn the calories. Afterwards they played cards until nine, at which point Beth Fowler announced it was time to go to bed with Prince Valium. Anna worked on lesson plans until midnight.

The next morning she arrived at school to find a strange woman in her classroom.

“I’m
Lia
Phelps,” she said. “The school secretary called this morning to ask me to fill in for you.”

“Fill in?” she asked.

“Yes,” the substitute said. “Apparently you have an urgent meeting with the headmaster.”

Apparently, the school had a creative way of keeping its teachers in the loop. Anna was fuming as she walked to the office, and trying not to worry about what awaited her. It was no surprise that Beckwith Bartlett was sitting in Logan Chance’s office. What did surprise her was his expression. The man who had been so antagonistic the day before looked subdued and uncomfortable now. As she entered, he flushed read and stood up.

Anna looked from the headmaster to the clearly upset father of her student.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ll let Mr. Bartlett tell you, Miss Fowler,” the headmaster said.

Anna looked at Bartlett and waited.

“I owe you an apology,” the man said. “You came to me yesterday with good information and in my….stubborn pride I managed to make a complete ass of myself. I said a lot of terrible things to you, so you can only imagine how I felt when I came home last night and overheard my daughter laughing to her friend over the phone about what she’d gotten Beck to do to your car.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “It’s not easy for me to admit this, Miss Fowler, but what you said yesterday was correct. My kids are jerks.
Both of them.
What they did to you was unforgiveable….”

“No, not unforgivable,” she said. “It was stupid.
Really stupid.
And possibly even criminal. But it’s not the kind of thing that I think should follow them the rest of their lives, which is why I came to you instead…”

She looked at the headmaster now, and noted for the first time that he was giving her the same stern, hard look he’d given her just before he’d taken the paddle to her quivering backside. Her stomach rolled at the memory and she swallowed hard.

“They’ve been expelled, Miss Fowler,” Logan Chance said. “Both Beck and Hannah are out of here. And what they’ve done is going to be reported to the police by their father.”

“Mr. Chance,” she began. “I think…”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not this time. This is the best course of action, and their father agrees. It’s why he came to me.”