Upright Beasts (2 page)

“You think you'll be the only one rewarded. I can see into the future, and I know exactly what horrible tragedy you're heading toward.” Her voice is very loud now. “While you, you can't even see what's in front of your own nose!”

Through the veil of Paula's brown hair, I watch Lydia and Bulger disappear up the staircase.

One quirk of the school is the teachers' lounge, which sits in the middle of the circular cafeteria. The school is three stories tall, and the lounge is a large cylindrical structure at its center. The lounge is constructed from tinted windows. This dark glass faces the clear windows of the classrooms with a twelve-foot gap between them.

Most of the students, even those who are convinced the teachers have vanished, find the teachers' lounge eerie. Consequently, only the least popular and most powerless of the cliques—the dweebs, the dorks, and the dinguses—occupy any of the classrooms facing the lounge. The rest of us only enter those rooms to scavenge for supplies, and even then we hoist our T-shirts above our noses to mask our identities.

Perhaps it's inaccurate to call this structure the teachers' lounge. This is merely our assumption. Nothing about it, from the outside, appears particularly lounge-like. Its doors are bolted shut, and it's the only area—other than the outside, of course—that is inaccessible to us. Any surviving teachers must be inside if they remain in the school. We have searched all other rooms and found no bodies, living or dead.

While holding a pile of reheated tater tots in the scoop of my shirt, I run into Lydia as I round the curve of the lounge. She is sitting on a cafeteria table and drinking a diet soda. When we collide, the tater tots scatter and bounce off the black glass.

“Whoops!” she says. I watch her mouth as she speaks. Her lips are plump and appealing. I haven't yet kissed a girl's lips. I've only had Beanpole Paula's touch my cheeks.

“I'm sorry,” I say. I get on my knees to sweep up the brown barrels rolling in the dust.

“Don't worry about it.” She bends down in front of me, her padded breasts at the exact same level as my eyes. She is wearing lavender deodorant. The smell wraps around me, and I begin to feel dizzy.

“Do you remember me? We were in health together, maybe biology too.”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “You used to draw those funny pictures on desks of the teachers being eaten by monsters, right?” She laughs, and I laugh with her. “I'd almost forgotten about that. It was so long ago it seems like a dream.”

I look into her eyes as her hands place the tots in mine.

“What the fuck are you two doing on the floor?” yells Clint Bulger, emerging from the kitchen with a plate of fries.

I don't believe Bulger suspects anything, but he has begun squinting at me when we use adjacent urinals in the boys' room.

Sneaking out of an algebra classroom, I run into Beanpole Paula and Timmy (I have decided that this is indeed his name). They're whispering by a corkboard with sign-ups for clubs that no longer meet. With one hand, Timmy strokes Paula's improbably thin forearms.

“I didn't see you there,” Paula says, backing away suddenly from Timmy.

Timmy says nothing, only shifts his eyes between Paula and me.

I've decided I can no longer allow my friends to be aware of my assignment. I have to write in a boys' room stall while moaning and feigning stomach problems. I may have to abandon the paper altogether. The faction that hates our missing teachers grows stronger every day. I don't want to arouse any suspicion. It's best to blend in.

“How's your paper coming along?” Tommy (I was mistaken before) says to me. He is leaning against the lockers and drumming on his knees.

“What paper? I got rid of that a while ago,” I say loudly. “I used a Bunsen burner from the biology closet.”

“Bunsen burner? That sounds like a test term. Are you reading old tests?” Tommy smirks.

I have been downgraded out of his closest circle of friends.

I think most of us believe that time doesn't really exist outside the school. Or at least we act as if it doesn't. That is to say, we know there was life before the school, in theory, and that there will be life after the school, if we can ever get out. But the time that passes here is the immediate time, and the problems of our life in the school are the problems that seem most real to us. Take, for example, my situation with Lydia. I would likely trade years of my future for her soft lips underneath the bleachers today.

Beliefs evolve. Many of the students who only yesterday hated our teachers now deny they ever existed. Tommy angrily tells us that no teachers ever lived, and if they did, they certainly didn't teach. They only watched us and recorded our actions and doled out punishments or rewards while laughing from inside the dark lounge.

“But I remember the lessons,” Carmichael says meekly. “I can still smell the eraser dust and hear the squeak of chalk.”

Tommy hooks Carmichael's neck with one arm and mercilessly digs his knuckles into his scalp with the other. The rest of us watch with our convictions hidden inside.

There were teachers once. There was Mrs. Blackwood, Mr. Cupp, Ms. Urrutia, Mr. and Mrs. Slaughter, Ms. Lispector, Mr. Gunten, Coach Neck, Coach Cuthbert, Principal Always, at least two nurses, several guidance counselors, and other assorted faculty members and school staff whose names I have forgotten.

This is something I still believe.

Tensions are becoming increasingly apparent in our group. Carmichael and others are rebelling at Tommy's ascendency. Beanpole Paula tries to broker peace. I fear for the worst.

I must confess that I can no longer remember the specifics of any teacher. Their faces are Rorschach blots in my mind.

In the early days, when we were all still close, I scavenged with Paula and Tommy. We found objects that are hard to explain: cold cups of coffee, stacks of gold stickers, a woman's shoe stained with Wite-Out. Is it possible these articles aren't real? That they were fabricated by some unknown force? (The force inside the dark lounge?) Did we students, in our weakness, fabricate whole memories from these scattered, pointless items?

Even these few remains are disappearing. Roving bands scour the old classrooms and destroy all heretical items on the orders of Bulger.

Did I forget to mention that Bulger has recently, through a series of calculated attacks and negotiations, consolidated
power among the school groups? All decisions about the school must now go through him. He holds court in the equipment room, surrounded by balls and sticks.

I'm not sure what is happening with Paula. She does not confide in me anymore. She won't talk to me alone, only in our group, and even then Tommy will tug at her elbow if it's for more than a sentence.

“I've got to go,” she says, looking at the floor.

Her change in habits has led to odd feelings in my stomach. I used to think of Paula as an old friend, no different from Carmichael, Jamal, or anyone else. But now that she is no longer close to me, I begin to regard her in a new light.

How did I, before, miss the delicate shine of her brown hair or the way her eyes feel so joyful even when they are full of sorrow?

There has been a significant development. Timmy Thomas (herein lies the source of my confusion) and Jamal have discovered camouflaged cables running from the teachers' lounge. The cables are hidden beneath the carpet and disguised as school spirit decorations running up the pipes. When the cables reach the ceiling, they blossom out through various vents and openings.

This information was turned over to Clint Bulger, who praised Timmy and Jamal for their service. I always knew that Timmy wanted to be a part of Bulger's crowd, and had only settled for us when he was spurned. Now Bulger has promoted them to official members of his clique.

We're not sure where the cables lead. There are whispers that the teachers are still watching us through hidden cameras. That one day soon they will surface and either reward or punish us for our actions. The old beliefs reemerge.

Bulger is angered by these rumors. He believes they give hope to radical elements.

“Cut them,” he orders. “Cut them all.”

“Paula?”

“Oh, I didn't see you there.”

“I was waiting for you. I have things I have to tell you. Things about you and about me. Weird things, wobbly feelings in my chest that I've started to discover.”

“Oh no, not now! It's too late now.”

Two tears begin to form in the corners of her lovely eyes.

Disaster! My assignment on the state of our education has been found. I'm dragged through the coldly lit hallways by two ex-linebackers. Although I'd stopped working on the essay a long time ago, I couldn't destroy it. There was some small hope glimmering in the back of my mind.

The ex-linebackers toss me on the equipment room floor. Clint Bulger sits on the coach's chair. To the right, Timmy Thomas whispers into his ear. To the left, Lydia flips the pages of a magazine with her delicate fingers. She doesn't even look down at me. Why had I ever imagined the possibility of a connection between us?

In front of me lie the crumpled pages of my assignment and an old teacher's tie that I had saved from destruction.

“What do you have to say about all this?” Bulger bellows.

“How did you get my locker combination?”

Timmy chuckles. “Did you think I'd forget about your precious essay?”

“You know that worship of the false teachers is forbidden,” Bulger says. He stands up, holding an aluminum baseball bat as his staff. He picks up one page of my essay and smooths it out.

“The goal of our education is to afford us the skills needed to graduate and pursue further education at greater institutions.” He snorts. “What does that even mean? That our education never ends? That we're trapped in a hell of infinite schools?” He crumples the page back up and tosses it on the floor.

“The concept of the teachers is absurd. What kind of teacher would leave their students? Such a teacher would be no teacher at all. So, we must conclude that the teachers are a false tale that students tell themselves to avoid facing the real struggles in their lives. They're a myth, and a harmful one.”

“If that's true,” I say, getting to my knees, “then who do you think is in the black lounge?”

“Silence!” Timmy yells.

Bulger merely laughs.

I'm being held in the equipment cage. My guard passes me Gatorade and granola bars through the gaps. Clint Bulger comes to see me, to ask if I repent. I say nothing.

“You know,” he says, sitting on a kickball, “you look very familiar to me.”

“Yes!” I say, hoping to appeal to his sense of fraternity. I crawl closer to the wire grid. “We used to ride the bus together. We both sat in the back row. We were almost friends.”

“No,” Bulger says. He sighs and rises. “You still don't understand. There never was any bus.”

I'm napping on a pile of gym mats when I hear a voice softly say my name.

“They let me see you,” Beanpole Paula says. “I said I'd reason with you.”

She slips me a chocolate chip cookie through the gap. Her hand brushes mine as she does.

“Thanks,” I say.

Paula is silent as I take a bite.

“Do you really want to leave the school so badly?”

“I could stay,” I say, leaning against the cage. “I could stay with you.”

She gives me a look that feels as if it is traveling to me from some vast, cold distance. Then she turns her head away.

“I'm with Timmy now. You know that.”

“I don't know what's true and what's false. I only believe there must be a better, more important place than this.”

“Then I hope you find it,” Paula says. She starts to say something else, but instead turns away with her mouth partly ajar.

Past crushes, friends, rivals, and strangers alike jeer and shout as I'm dragged through the hallway. My head pulses as it hits the tile floor. A little stream of blood trickles out of my nose. When I raise my head, I see the dark teachers' lounge towering over me.