The Whiz--a story (iii)

She was talking about Simon Walters, Mr. Math, a man who so rarely came into the teachers' lounge that first semester that even though we shared a free period, I'd barely said a word to him since I came to Arrowhead. When we talked, he asked such obvious questions that I knew he was working hard at trying to be social. "So, Marshall, I saw you with golf clubs yesterday—you golf, do you?" Every word coming out nervously, words as bite-sized as numbers.

His gangly body was little more than a rack for the double-breasted suits he always wore, in the era of beards and beads. He kept his wispy mustache barely visible, and parted what was left of his hair down the center, about ten years before it became popular. He couldn't have weighed more than say, 120, just out of the shower.

"You don't like Walters," I said, not so much as a question.

"I feel sorry for him," she said. "I really do. Do you realize how much he's given to kids since he's been here? You don't know, Mr. Soerens. He's been here forever, and what's he ever got out of it? Even my dead brother got a yearbook dedicated to him."

"Jess," I said, "I don't get this at all."

"I don't want to ever see him again," she said. "I want to get out of your stupid essay assignment, and I want to quit math, and I want to leave Arrowhead, and I want to die."

"Jess," I said, but that's when it came, when it all poured out, finally, when the tide of her pain couldn't be held back.

"I let him say things to me that he shouldn't say to a student, Mr. Soerens. I let him tell me things I shouldn't have to hear, and it makes me want to puke. He's so lonely. He just says this stuff to me and expects--"

"What kind of stuff?"

She picked a stick off the ground and broke it in pieces. "Must I draw you a picture?"

"It makes you uncomfortable?" I said.

"No," she sneered. "I take all my teachers out here so I can bawl my head off."

I was barely 22, a first-year teacher who drew his daily breath from five periods of teaching English in a basement room where each day I fed my spirit on the lives of my students. Lord knows, alone in the country with Jessica, my brightest student, somebody who talked to me like an adult, I felt no more than a foot away from being another Simon Walters, a man who, it seemed, had unbuttoned his loneliness to the only student he respected enough to want her to understand him.

It pains me to say it, but I think I understood Simon Walters more than I would have wanted to admit—much more, perhaps, than I understood the predicament of Jessica Drost.

"Did you tell Templeton?" I said, pointing back over my shoulder as if the principal stood just beyond the trees.

"I'm telling you," she said. "I know what Templeton will do."

And so did I.

"He says he loves me," she told me. "He stands there over my desk like the teacher, and when all those contest problems are finished, and the other kids are gone—then he tells me that stuff. And there I sit, beneath him, and he goes on and on."

I was, immediately, immensely uncomfortable, even though she was looking down at a stone, her arms crossed over her chest.

"He lives with his mother—did you know that? I mean, did he ever tell you that? I mean, do you ever talk to him?" she said, looking up, as if I were the guilty one. "You know, she treats him as if he was six years old--she does. He's got to do these jobs. She's got them written on the refrigerator-'take out the garbage'-that kind of stuff."

"He told you that?"

"Every single year there's a math contest, you know, and this is my last one. And every night he wants to take me home."

She was almost crying, I remember. ''I'm scared to death of him," she said.

I didn't know how to handle it. I really didn't. I felt almost nauseous. "Did you tell him?" I said.

She laughed. "How do you say no to a teacher?" she said, her bot­tom lip in her teeth. "And he touched me," she said. "Last night he touched me. He tried to make out with me."
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Tomorrow: What to do. . .