19.
***
Scott hated first period.
Every teacher at Meridian High School had at least one down period - an hour when they were supposed to prepare lesson plans, go over grades, and do the sundry other tasks necessary to prepare for their days. First period was Scott's down period, but he never used it to prepare lesson plans, or for much of anything else. For some reason, he usually spent it in his "office" - not much more than a cubby in the room that housed all the physical education supplies - staring at a wall.
Surprisingly, Scott had managed to survive the eight years since the deaths of Chad and Amy. Had even, to some eyes, managed to thrive. He had come to Meridian and proved himself to be a surprisingly effective P.E. teacher, the kind of teacher that the students all hoped they got. Considering that the other P.E. teacher was an elderly man who seemed determined to shout the students in his classes to death, this may not have been much of a compliment, but even Scott knew that he was more than a comparatively good teacher. He was an excellent educator, viewed on his own and not merely when standing next to the crotchety old Mr. Randall.
Part of the reason for his excellence was that he was simply available. Where other teachers invariably tried to finish up their school days so that they could get home to families or friends or whatever else "normal" people did, Scott had no such aspirations. Indeed, he dreaded going home, since it meant he would be going to an empty house full of nothing but the sounds of silence and hopelessness that clung to him like phantoms wherever he went. The only thing that he had found that could exorcise those demons was to be helping his students. And even then, the exorcism was only temporary - the demons of despair came back to plague him at every opportunity.
Which was why Scott hated first period. His free period was the only time he was really and truly alone at the school. The other periods were full of the students and the successes and failures that they - like all teenagers - wore on their sleeves for all to see. They were full of games and sweat and work and all manner of things that could keep his mind off the one thing it inevitably strayed to whenever given half a chance: the past.
But not first period. No, in that period the students were all in school, all busy with their regular classes, so he was usually alone. Even Mr. Randall was off limits, since the other P.E. teacher did use the time to prepare for the day ahead, and had made it clear very early on that he sorely resented any intrusions into the precious time he had each morning from seven thirty to eight twenty-five a.m.
So Scott sat in his office, and sat alone, and though he usually tried to busy himself with something - some new text on PhysEd training, or reading up on the newest teaching methodologies, or simply working on inputting students' grades into the school's computer records - he almost always ended up sitting motionless, silent, staring at the wall ahead of him without actually seeing it. He would sit, and stare, and think.
He would think of his son, so happy and free.
He would think of his wife, so bright and beautiful.
He would think of the family he had had, and the family he had lost.
Often, sitting there in the dim half-light of the poorly lit office, he would hear sounds. The pleasant tinkling of his son's laughter, as though even in death he were still enjoying his last birthday presents. The throaty whisper of his wife as she lay beside him, curled up in his arms after they made love. The loud, brassy sound of the family together at the dinner table.
They were phantom sounds, existing only in his mind, and though Scott knew that after eight years to still be hearing the memories of his family so vividly was not a good sign, still he reveled in them. He could not help but wish that the memories were real, and so when they came he allowed them to consume him entirely.
On rare occasions a student would come to visit him during that first hour, clutching a hall pass and with special permission from the principal to come and see Scott on some emergency or other. When that happened, Scott was invariably cranky and snappish, as though he resented the students' intrusions into his time of remembering, his sanctuary of memory. He knew it was happening, knew he was angry and acting out against the student, but was helpless to stop it. After all, who else could he act out against? God? God, he had decided, was either a myth or a petty creature so small that he was determined to make the world an uglier place by stealing people of beauty and life like his family. So all that was left was to take solace in his memories, and that meant that when his memories were interrupted, he could only respond angrily at the person who had interrupted them, even if the person was otherwise innocent.
It was unfair, Scott knew, but he was also powerless to stop it from happening. The students learned within a year or two of his arrival that bothering Mr. Cowley during his free period was not a good idea, so now, eight years after his arrival at the school, Scott had one full hour each day where he was able to think of his family, was able to revel in their memory, was able to bathe himself in the purity of his past.
Only he knew it was a lie.
Because each year the memories grew more ephemeral, less grounded in reality. Each year, his son's smile widened in his mind, his wife's laugh became ever brighter and happier. Soon, he knew he was no longer even remembering his family, but was instead remembering crude caricatures of them, "perfect" versions of the flawed, imperfect beings he had lived with in happiness for so long. And the perfect versions were not nearly as satisfying. Part of what had made his marriage great, he came to realize, was not the absence of fights with Amy, but rather the fact that each fight ended in making up. It was not that his son listened to him and did everything right the first time out of the gate, but rather the fact that Scott had to work to help him to learn and grow. His life with Amy and Chad had consisted not merely of "good" moments, but of harder times that served to illuminate the good times by giving them a point of comparison.
But more and more in his memory, he was remembering the good and forgetting the bad. In his mind he never fought with his wife, never had a disagreement with his son. In his mind dinner was always ready on time, and rooms were always clean, and teeth were brushed at bedtime and no one fussed when the time came to put away toys. In his mind, the languid disease of perfection stole from him the reality of the hard-earned victories and the lovingly won triumphs. He was no longer living in a past that was real, but only a flawed version of it, only a version where everything was perfect, and so nothing had any real value at all.
But in spite of this, in spite of the fact that he knew his memories resembled the realities they were modeled on a little less each day, Scott could not help but spend time staring blankly at the wall during that terrible first period, sinking deeper and deeper into remembrances of a past that never really happened, because the past that had occurred - the real past, the flawed, imperfect, difficult, wonderful past - was far too complex and wondrous to be encompassed by anything as frail as human memory.
So he hated first period. Because he both felt himself passing into a falsehood of perfection...and still couldn't help drinking it in, like a thirsty man drinking seawater, all the while knowing that it would just make him thirstier and sick, but unable to stop nonetheless.
Today was no exception to that rule, either. He came in early, passing through the main office as he always did, gathering the day's announcements and various other items from his mail cubby. He did this as quickly as possible, hoping against hope to get in and out of the office undetected, but as usual he failed in this mission.
"Hi, stranger!" said a high, chirping voice.
Scott pasted a smile on his face as he turned to face the source of the voice, but inwardly he cringed. Cheryl Armstrong, the school's new secretary, was standing behind him, her perfume wafting about her in an almost visible cloud. She had started work at Meridian High School a few months before, when the school's previous secretary left to have a baby and had decided not to return to her job in favor of remaining a full-time mother, and had immediately decided that she was either in love with Scott or that he would make a great fixer-upper project. Scott wasn't sure which it was, and wasn't sure if there was even a difference in Cheryl's eyes.
Either way, she seemed to be at his elbow at every turn, as though she were some kind of a strangely smiling spirit determined to haunt him out of his misery.
"Hi, Cheryl," he answered, then fell silent. Part of the problem with Cheryl was that she was clearly interested in him, and he didn't know how to react to that. He knew that Amy was gone, had no illusions about that, and also knew that most of his friends in Meridian were of the opinion that he had "suffered enough" and should "move on." Whatever that meant. As though there was some quota of suffering that, once filled, entitled a person to live their lives worry free from that point on.
But Scott knew that was not the case. The one constant in life was suffering. And no amount of it could ever satisfy the cruelties of a universe that demanded happiness like a tribute; that demanded blood like a tyrannical ruler determined to prove his worth by sacrificing any who dared to find joy under his reign.
Cheryl, in fact, proved that fact, because almost nothing made Scott suffer more than having to brave the morning ritual that had come to define his relationship with Cheryl.
"So," she said, as she always did. "Is today the day?"
And Scott, as he always did, responded, "What day, Cheryl?"
"The day you ask me out, we fall in love, and you take me away from all this," she responded brightly.
Scott usually tried to remain smiling, to remain polite throughout this exchange, usually ending the conversation with an awkward excuse why he could not ask her out. He had friends in town. He was busy doing grades this weekend. He had other plans. He had to wash his hair. He had a headache.
But today was different. He didn't have it in him to continue the pleasant lies that were a staple of human existence. He just wanted to be alone, to steep in the false memories of his past life, and Cheryl was standing between him and that goal.
"Cheryl," he said, "I don't mean to be a jerk, but I'm never going to ask you out."
Cheryl's face changed subtly, as though she were the lead actress in a play and her counterpart had just delivered a line that was not in the script. She recovered quickly, though, beaming her smile once again and saying, "Aw, honey, you don't mean that. After all, where else you gonna find someone like me?"
"I'm sure I don't know," he said. And, truthfully, he had to admit that most men would find Cheryl a catch. She was attractive, charming, vivacious, full of life.
But it was that last that made her ineligible for Scott's affections. He could not love someone who was full of life; his attentions were reserved for those who lived in the realm of the dead.
"But it's just not going to work out, Cheryl," he continued. "You should spend some time on someone else."
Again, Cheryl's face changed. But this time she was not able to recover nearly as well as she had the first time. Her lip quivered slightly, as though she had never been turned down before. And perhaps she hadn't - most people didn't tend to turn down the attentions of women like her, Scott knew.
But then, most people didn't have families that had been stolen from them, either. Most people could afford to live in the present, because they had something worth living for there. But Scott was not most people. He could not afford to live in the present, because to do so would be to lose the most important and defining parts of his life. He was already starting to lose the memories of his wife and son; he could not bear to complete the process by crowding out what little remained with new experiences with other people.
Cheryl looked like she was going to cry, but Scott didn't know what to do about that. Should he comfort her? Hardly. That would be inviting her to knock on the doors of his heart even harder than she had been doing before. But he didn't feel right just leaving, either. He wasn't a monster. Or at least, he had never thought of himself as a monster. But perhaps he was wrong about that. Maybe he was nothing but a monster, nothing but a Dr. Jekyll inhabiting the destroyed world of a once-happy Mr. Hyde. Maybe the darkness that lived in his heart had finally escaped into the rest of his life, and would now be an ever-present companion, a new source of misery in Scott's already miserable world.
And now Cheryl was crying, though Scott had not intended for that to happen. He stood in front of her for a long moment, wondering what to do, then finally put out a hand to touch her shoulder.
She slapped it away.
"Don't you dare," she said. "All I've ever been is nice to you, so why can't you be nice back?"
Scott had no answer for her. At least, he had no answer that he could give her there, in the public space of the office. So he simply turned and walked away, hoping that tomorrow, or the next day or the next month or the next year he would find in himself the strength to talk to her, to explain to her why he could never be happy, and so he could never allow himself to get close to her. Because she might actually try to make him happy, and that would bring her nothing but misery and pain. The universe did not intend Scott to be happy - it had made that dreadfully clear to him eight years ago - and anyone who tried to change the universe's plan would find themselves in mortal danger. He couldn't do that to anyone, so he had to keep everyone away; had to keep everyone at arm's distance.
Scott left. He walked with his head down to his own office, unlocking it and walking in without looking up, moving around the balls and equipment that cluttered the room without having to pay attention, because after eight years he knew this room better than he knew his own house.
Which was why it was doubly unexpected when a voice said, "A little hard on her, weren't you?"
Scott looked up, and as he did the papers he had been carrying dropped from his nerveless fingers and fluttered to the floor like pigeons gathering on the ground to feed.
He reached instinctively under his armpit. But there was nothing there. No gun. Not anymore. He wasn't a cop anymore, he was just a middle aged PhysEd teacher without many friends or much of anything to live for.
But that didn't mean he had to leave mortality quietly. And it sure didn't mean that he had to go out without a fight. Especially not when confronted by the monster in front of him.
"Hello," he said, and rushed at the old man in his office, fingers outstretched and looking for a chance to kill.
***