The sun was going down; the light was fading. But she couldn’t bring herself to move quite yet. Lolling back in her chair, her breathing heavy and laboured, Kristina Charles wanted nothing more than to get out of this place. But her body was telling her something else; it was telling her to calm down, relax, take a moment.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath in, then rolled herself forward as she exhaled noisily. After a moment, she opened her eyes again, the papers scattered all over her desk gazing back at her; cold, unfeeling. They weren’t going anywhere unless she moved them, but the last thing she wanted to do right now was touch them, look at them, do anything with them. But she knew that if she didn’t do anything with them now, they’d still be there at the start of next week, and things would just continue to get worse.
It was times like this that Kristina resented the teacher’s life. Even as the rest of the world was being drawn inexorably into the future thanks to technology that seemed to get more advanced by the day, the teaching profession remained resolutely set in its ways, seeming absolutely determined to keep the world’s paper manufacturers in business. Everything was dealt with through some sort of printout; her desk was covered with everything from school newsletters to action plans via behaviour trackers, and she hated all of it. She wanted nothing more than to just sweep it all off her desk, into a black bin-liner and be done with it. She had contemplated it on several occasions, but had never been able to bring herself to do it.
She heard the distinctive “click” of her classroom door pushing open, accompanied by a gentle “tap, tap, tap”; looking up, she saw the familiar face of Martin, her head of department. He was smiling that gentle smile he always seemed to have on his face; she envied his seemingly unflappable nature and wished that she could “switch off” as easily as he seemingly could.
“Hey, Kris,” he said. “Long day?”
“Uh,” she replied. “You could say that.”
“Well, the week’s over now. Why don’t you leave it behind for now and come to the pub?”
She looked from Martin to the stack of papers on her desk, then back to Martin. An unspoken question hung in the air.
“Leave it,” he said. “I know you’ve had a rough time today, and the last thing you need right now is to be fretting about all that paperwork. Just leave it.” He leaned in in an exaggeratedly conspiratorial fashion. “Between you and me, I ignore a good 90% of it. Most of them are like utility bills; you can leave them be until someone comes chasing you for them.”
Kristina chuckled. She’d learned this herself quite early on, but she always found it amusing when someone as seemingly respectable as Martin — her direct superior, no less — effectively urged her to shirk her duties. She was under no illusions; she knew perfectly well that most of her colleagues had managed to survive as long as they had simply by knowing what work them simply had to perform, and what could be safely ignored and left behind.
“Fine, whatever,” she said, shrugging and getting to her feet. “I’m not achieving anything here anyway, and moping in the dark isn’t going to solve anything.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Martin. “I think your first drink’s on me.”
* * * *
Raucous laughter erupted around the table. Kristina made an effort to join in, but felt she didn’t quite get the joke — or perhaps she simply wasn’t in the mood. Either way, she was bluffing, but no-one seemed to notice.
No-one ever seemed to notice her. She was pretty sure that most people around this table probably knew her name, but she was equally sure that not one of them — with the possible exception of Martin — knew anything beyond that about her, barring perhaps the subject she taught. That said, she didn’t know much about any of them, either; in the few months she’d been in this job, she’d had trouble getting to know people, partly due to her own natural shyness and partly due to the fact she’d felt from the very beginning that the staff of Longmore Community College had already formed their cliques well before she’d arrived, and that it would take a more confident woman than she to break into their inner circles.
She picked up her wine glass and swished it from side to side, the swaying waves of the wine within proving vaguely hypnotic. She wasn’t even listening to the conversation around her any more; inwardly, she was counting the minutes until she felt it would cease to be impolite to get up and just leave, but another part of her mind wondered if anyone would actually notice if she did just that right now.
She downed the remainder of her wine and decided to try an experiment. She put her glass purposefully down on the table, picked up her handbag and stood up.
“Y’all right, Kristina?” said Paul, whom she knew only as the Northern PE teacher, and often the butt of some light-hearted ribbing from the “cool kids” of the English department. She was surprised to be addressed by him, but his gently lilting Sheffield accent put her somewhat at ease.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” she said quietly, scratching her face in the way she normally did when she was feeling uncomfortable. “I’m just. You know. I’ll be right back.” It somehow didn’t feel quite right to tell someone she didn’t know that well that she was just going to head to the toilet and decide from there whether or not to make a break for it.
She excused herself and walked out into the corridor that housed the doors to the toilets. As usual, the corridor smelled strongly of urine — a stench that was wafting out from the gents’, she assumed — but once she was into the ladies’, the stink was replaced by that of cheap perfume, presumably applied hastily by young women off out on the town after a long week. There was no-one in the toilets when she entered, but the smell was strong; either the owner of the perfume wasn’t long gone, or must have drenched herself in the fragrance enough for it to stick around long after she had departed.
Kristina opened the door to the cramped cubicle, put the seat down and sat down. She didn’t need to actually “go”; she’d just come here for a moment’s escape and a bit of peace and quiet. She knew that with her mind the way it was at the moment, that wasn’t necessarily a good idea — quiet rooms tended to cause her to dwell on things she would rather forget — but it was, for now, preferable to sitting at that table pretending to be sociable.
Suddenly, she felt a tear run down her face. She had been expecting that she was probably going to cry this evening — she knew herself well enough by now to recognise the signs of an impending mini-breakdown — but hadn’t expected it to come on quite so soon and quite so suddenly. Resigning herself to the apparent inevitability, she just let the tears silently roll down her face until there were no more.
* * * *
“Hey, Kris, you all right?”
It was Martin.
“I’m all right,” she said, not turning around. “I just need to go home. Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “We were just worried about you. You were gone a long time and then you headed straight for the door without saying goodbye.”
“Yeah, I—” she began, not sure where that sentence was going. She started again. “I just. I’m not feeling well. Sorry. See you Monday.”
She started walking, determined not to look back over her shoulder. She didn’t know if he was watching her walk away or whether he’d already gone back inside. She told herself that she didn’t really care one way or the other, but really she hoped that he wasn’t watching her. She felt like a pitiful wreck of a human being right now, and just wanted to curl up in bed and go to sleep. It had been a terrible day to draw a terrible week to a close, and she wanted to leave it well and truly behind her, just like she’d left the stack of papers on her desk.
She knew those papers would be there waiting for her when she got back, and in all likelihood the fallout from the terrible week would still be there when she got back too. But that didn’t matter right now, she told herself. It was the weekend; a time to reflect, relax and regroup. There was no guarantee that next week was going to be as bad as this one, and who knows? All those papers might have magically vanished by the time she got back. If only.
* * * *
“Fuck you!” the kid screeched. His name was Edward, and this had been her first encounter with him. She’d heard his name before in staff meetings, but since he was a serial truant, it was rare for him to be in school. She’d been secretly hoping that his truancy would continue indefinitely, culminating in his expulsion from the school without her ever having to come face-to-face with him, but here he was, every bit as unpleasant as she’d been led to believe.
“Now, Edward,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “If you need to take a moment outside to calm yourself down, please do. Otherwise, please return to your seat.” She could feel her voice quavering as she said the words; she hoped it wasn’t as obvious to the ears of her class.
“Fuck you!” he yelled again, punching the door. He followed his profanity with an incoherent yell that didn’t appear to contain any words, then walked around the room throwing his classmates’ pencil cases and books onto the floor. It was an utterly bewildering sight; it would probably have been comical to Kristina if it weren’t so terrifying. She knew that this kid could snap — further than he already had, anyway — at any moment, and she didn’t know what to do.
Suddenly, something in her mind went, and she felt like she was watching herself, out of control.
“You little shit!” she screamed. “Get the fuck out of my classroom now before I pick you up and throw you the fuck out! If you’re so fucking ungrateful that you can’t be bothered to sit down and shut the fuck up, then just get the fuck out and don’t fucking come back, ever!”
There was a moment of silence. She could feel the entire class looking at her in shock. No-one was breathing. Time seemed to be frozen.
Then he leapt at her with a feral roar, screaming bloody murder — possibly literally. She put her hands up to defend herself and—
She finally woke up, breathless. Her heart was pounding, and the darkness of her room felt like it was constricting her, choking the life out of her. She was panicking, almost too scared to move, but she eventually managed to summon the strength and courage to reach over to her bedside lamp and flick it on.
As the light filled the room, she unsteadily sat up, resting her back against the headboard. It thumped gently against the wall as she leaned her weight back into it. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath just like her CDs had trained her to do, then exhaled through her mouth. Again, in; again, out. Once more, in; one more, out. She felt the panic slowly subsiding, though her heart was still racing.
This kept happening, and she couldn’t control it. Her subconscious mind apparently liked nothing more than to look back on the day’s events, and reinterpret them into “what if” scenarios that culminated in the worst possible outcome, usually involving some combination of furious anger and/or violence. She always woke up feeling guilty, even though she knew that she’d done nothing wrong; in reality, she’d handled things carefully, calmly and as effectively as she could under often difficult circumstances, but in her mind, things had gone as badly as it was possible for them to go.
She knew she had to change, to grow, to get stronger; she just didn’t know how she was going to go about it.
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