Are You Sitting Down? (29 page)

I’m taken aback when I come across two boys who have hooked up and crept down the halls.
They never
went
t
o
gether.
One w
ould
wander off, pretending to go to the restrooms a
l
though there
we
re toilets right by the gym, and the other follow
ed
five or ten minutes later.
They’ve
obviously
prea
r
ranged a place to meet up.
I’ve never found two boys in the library.
Being comfortable isn’t as important for two guys, I guess.
Most of the time, I c
a
me across them in one of the boys’
bat
h
room stalls or in the
lighting balcony in the theater.
I t
ook
my time breaking them up.
If I have a good view, sometimes I i
g
nore
d
them all together.

I memorize
d
their faces so that I c
ould
be sure to avoid them if I ever s
aw
them
in
the park.
Letting one of them get in my car could put my job in jeopardy if I ever pissed one of them off
at school
.
Backseat etiquette, if there
wa
s such a thing,
wa
s to never say anything if you run into one another outside the park.
I’ve never had that problem so far,
but
now I cruise a park closer to the outskirts of town.
It’s closer to the neighboring county’s school
, so few of these kids will travel there just to get off.

Occasionally, I do see some frail pimple faced kid who probably borrowed his parent’s car and lied about some study night at a friend’s house.
He thinks he’s the only questioning kid in town, and he heard about this nameless park in a chat room online.
His heart is racing because he’s driven all the way out here and he has no idea why.
Rather than sit in his car, he’s out walking the trails and sitting on top of the picnic tables.
The other men in cars see him but they won’t approach him for fear of spooking him.
It’s tempting, but they know he’s new and will eventually learn the ropes.

Maybe nothing happens, and the kid jumps
back
in his town car and leaves, or maybe he disappears in the woods with someone taking advantage of his vulnerability.
I’ll pass the kid in the hallway on Monday.
Before, he stood to the right side of the hall with a clutch of books in his hand and his eyes on the ground.
He was one of the few kids still carrying a backpack.
He’s a math or chemistry nerd with an expensive calculator.
After his trip to the park over the weekend, sometimes he looks the same.
But s
ometimes, his chin is up and he makes eye contact now.
He’s tucked his thick black glasses into his pocket and put some gel in his hair.
It’s on those occasions I can pretty much guess what happened to him in the park that night.

Someone made him a man.

I never
saw
the same two guys together twice and rarely caught the same guy and girl together.
The girls
a
re us
u
ally the repeat offenders.
Sluts.
The most popular one was a girl named Danyele Child.
With as many times as I had busted her having sex in the library or in a classroom, I had caught
glimpses
of almost every part of her naked body.
Danyele’s
boobs were big, with some boy’s face often buried between them.
She was thin, like all of these voyeur girls, and the sight of her ribs when she arched back on a sofa or desk made me sick.
Her full bodied, long hair reminded me of some rock star girl on the hood of a car in a music video.
Her confident d
e
meanor made you believe she could snap the head off her lover’s neck once he fell between her thighs.

Danyele used that
appeal
to her advantage in the clas
s
room as well.
It was not uncommon to find her sitting in the front of the class and wearing a low cut blouse if the teacher was tough.
I wasn’t supposed to see how she charmed Profe
s
sor White that day in the biology lab
last semester
.

Professor White had requested extra trash cans every day that week because the labs would be dissecting frogs.
They would need them for disposal of the waste.
After each class, Professor White would collect the smaller trash bags and put them into one large can in the supply closet at the back of the class.
The supply closet was a walk through space shared by the Biology lab on one side and the Chemistry lab on the other.
When
the Chemistry lab was not in use, Professor White would push the larger trash can to the outside of the door so I could come by and collect it.
On this day, he’d left the door
on
the Chemistry lab
side
cracked open.
When I stopped by after the first class to collect the trash
, I saw Danyele
with
Professor White
inside
the supply closet
.

Martin
White was a well respected member of both the staff and the community.
I knew he was Travis’s brother
, and I’d seen him with his wife and kids around town shopping or dining.
Despite all of the very public
hardships
Lorraine White’s family had been through over the past few years, such severity seemed to have skipped over Martin White.
His re
n
dezvous with a temptress like Danyele Child was on the threshold of changing all of that.

Being a large man, there was no place for me to hide and spy on them.
Any communication between them outside the classroom was kept to a bare minimum and practically no
n
existent.
That didn’t stop her from still getting caught with two football players in the girl’s restroom one night at a basketball game.
There was no way Martin White could be thinking clearly.
He’d been seduced by her only to secure a passing grade, and so I felt the need to
save him
.
Their actions angered me, and I knew he was in need of an
intervention
.

I took a chance they would eventually make plans to meet earlier in the day, so I made it a habit to sweep the hal
l
ways on the Science hall
just after
Professor White
arrived each mor
n
ing.
One morning, Danyele arrived
at
the lab before Professor White did.
I ducked into an empty classroom so she wouldn’t see me.
She was eyeing her watch and soon stepped into the dark supply closet out of sight.
On an impulse, I a
p
proached the closet through the Chemistry lab.
Grabbing a heavy micr
o
scope off one of the tables, I swung the door open and caught Danyele by surprise.
Her blouse was unbuttoned.
She looked at me, quite startled as I stepped into the closet.
The look on her face
told me she was trying to think up
some sort of e
x
cuse for her being there.

Before she had a chance to scream, I smacked her across the face with the scope.
She fell to the floor in a heap, knocked out cold.
I crushed her skull with the microscope again to be sure she would not wake
up, and then I buttoned her blouse back up.
I had no interest in what was underneath.
Without hesitation, I picked her up and dumped her into the large trash can
and covered her with smaller bags of waste.

I flipped on the light in the closet to
clean up any
trace of what I’d done
.
The floor was
surprisingly
clean
except for a small pool of blood and some spattered on a cabinet door.
The scope had a bit of blood on it too and was dented.
I buried
it
in the trash
with her
and wheeled
the can
to the boiler room.
I came back to the lab right away for a second look just to make sure nothing looked out of place.

Professor White had still not arrived.
Upon returning to the boiler room, only then did I come to realize what I had just done.
I had no ch
oice but to dispose of her body, but could not risk doing it now at the beginning of the school day.
I would wait until the end of the day when classes were out and the building was empty.
I
locked
the trash can in one of my broom closets and then returned to the hallways to go on with my daily chores.

“Good Morning, Manny,” Professor White said passing me in the hallway.

He seemed as if he was in a rush to get to the lab, a
l
though classes didn’t start for another hour.

“Do you need extra trash cans today, Professor White?”
I asked.

“Not today.
We’ll be dissecting fish in a few more weeks and will need some then.
I’ll give you plenty of advance notice.”
He turned the corner to the Science hall and disa
p
peared before I could reply.

Without him seeing me,
I cut through a few of the classrooms to a view through the windows to his lab.
I watched as h
e knocked on the closet door
.
Wh
en no one answered, he opened the door slowly and peeked in.
I could see his mouth moving
.
I
imagined he was calling out to Danyele
lovingly
, or whispering words of affection to her, although I could not hear him.
Through the window in the closet door, I saw the light come on.
Professor White came back out with a
puzzled
look on his face.
He sat down at his desk and crossed his arms, waiting.