Are You Sitting Down? (19 page)

My route
wa
s
to walk to the end of
the
road.
Once I reach
ed
the highway, I turn
ed
around and c
a
me back one block turning opposite the side we live
d
on.
One street over, I walk
ed
the length of the main road until I reach
ed
another cross
road that c
a
me out just
a few feet
up from our house.
The long re
c
tangular path
was
exactly
two
mile
s
.
I
’
d
walked it everyday for six months straight.
Mom
still
join
ed
me about twice a week.

“How are things going this week?”
s
he always ask
ed
.

“Great,” I
would
answer, and then usually rattle into how I stayed up late the night before grading tests, or how I’m deba
t
ing on whether or not to make the kids do a leaf collection this year.

There ha
d
never been a day of bad news on my behalf to break my mother’s heart.
I
was
my father’s son, but I
could
not be a father to the broken lives of my four siblings.
We babysat Jake for Clare when she had to pick up a shift at work.
I drove Sebastian to
Memphis
to pick up his car, and helped him move to a new apartment back when that girl overdosed in his bed.
We
picked up Robbie and Rachel from school and let them stay with us for a couple of days while Ellen was testif
y
ing in court against Judge Railen.

Travis
was
the only one who ha
d
never asked or e
x
pected something from us, not even when he lost Justin.
I don’t know why.
I remember the shock on his face when Marline and I came to the funeral home.
He humbly told us we didn’t have to come as I hugged his neck, as if his los
s
didn’t
affect
us.
It was as if paying our respects was somehow bothersome.
Travis had always been like that.
He’d step back and let Clare and Seba
s
tian go in front of him when in line for anything, always giving up part of his dinner or dessert when there wasn’t enough
.

As the oldest, the only standards I was expected to set were the ones in the eyes of my proud parents.
Ellen followed almost immediately in my footsteps, going to college and fin
d
ing a
good
job.
We
we
re the only two in the family married with children.
Of course,
then
Clare had Jake.
Children out of we
d
lock were kept hushed back when I was her age, but there ha
d
been at least one pregnant girl in school each year for the past six years where I ta
ught
.

Seeing a white boy dating a white girl had become u
n
common these days.
The guys who dated guys even flaunted their homosexuality with rainbow stickers on their notebooks and pink triangle buttons on their jackets, symbols far more a
d
vanced than the white dove and the peace sign of my day.
Love was still free, but just not as safe.

Love
wa
s also not always permissible, but the human heart
possessed no knowledge
of the laws our society bestow
ed
upon us.
Our brain may know right from wrong, but the heart doesn’t always listen. The rules of love may certainly be unwritten.
It’s who we fall in love with that can find us breaking the rules that are
penned
in a
law
book somewhere.
I don’t know why we act upon such urges.
The temptation is there, and we know it can send our world spinning out of control.
It’s a hunger, a sin to
some that
demands to be satisfied.

I was no different.

Her name was
Danyele Child.
Her friends called her Danny.
She had crisp brown eyes and stringy brown hair when she was in my sixth grade homeroom period.
She would not b
e
come a
n actual
pupil of mine until eighth grade.
Like all the other girls going through puberty around that time, Danyele attracted the attention of her share of young men.
I’d had other students who pretended to have crushes on me, but Danyele was different.
Her notebook for my class had MR. WHITE’S BIOLOGY painted on it with white-out encircled with a large heart and several small hearts around that.
I dismissed it as the doodling of an eight
h
grader.
All the kids decorated their not
e
books with hearts, crosses, initials, peace signs, and the renowned I WUZ HERE that made the English teachers cringe.

She had a habit of dropping her pencil if I walked by her desk, and meeting me face to face beside her desk when I knelt to pick it up for her.
She always seemed to be wearing a skirt in my class, which she pulled up a bit to cross her legs in the aisle.
She was an honor student and passed every test with flying colors.
I was relieved that she never had to stay after class to ask questions or complete a
lab
experiment.
She never made reason to have time alone with me, so when she grad
u
ated I dismissed her actions as being my own perverted thoughts.
I had always kept student-teacher relationships e
x
tremely pr
o
fessional, and had only known one teacher to cross that line during all my years of teaching.

Two years later, I’d forgotten all about Danny when I took a teaching position with the high school science department.
All the students had passed through my junior high classroom at one time or another and were excited to have me as their teacher again.
I’ll never forget th
e
day that Danny walked through the door and took a front row desk.
She was taller with make-up and
full-bodied
hair now.
She wore tight blouses which brought attention to her perky breasts.
Her jeans were
also
tight
,
except for the days she wore a skirt
, which was
a bit shorter than the
skirts
that
had
met the junior high dress code.

High
S
chool Biology was just a bit more complicated for Danny.
She stayed after to complete tests and was always fi
n
ishing late on lab day.
Her A average was slowly dropping to a B, which truly brought fear to her eyes because it enda
n
gered her full paid scholarship to the college she’d chosen.

“Is there anything I can do to keep this from happe
n
ing?”
s
he asked one day after class in an ill-attempted slow and sultry voice with her back arched so her chest stuck out.

“Study harder, maybe get a tutor,” I said walking out of the classroom and leaving her standing there.

Weeks later I was touching her chest in the supply closet in the back of the lab.
I don’t know what language tem
p
tation speaks, only that it had taken control of my body.
My brain had shut down
.
C
ommon sense left me.
Danyele loosened my tie and kissed my neck.
Chills rocketed through every nerve en
d
ing down my back, both from the soft touch of her lips against my skin and from the thought of getting caught.

There, among the microscopes and beakers, I jeopar
d
ized everything in life that I had.
My wife, my kids, my job, and my freedom were all at stake as I reached under the skirt of a
seven
teen year old girl.
I wouldn’t call it blackmail, but Da
n
yele passed the class with an A.
Without my
“
assistance,
”
she would have received a high B.
Although it seemed inane, I w
o
ndered if Danyele would look back on our small affair some day while in college and think about how she prostituted he
r
self for just three
average
grade points.
It probably didn’t matter to her.
In her eyes, those three points were worth about ten thousand dollars each towards her college tuition.

Danyele had two other male teachers that semester.
She r
e
ceived A’s for both of their classes.
One
teacher
was Coach Powers for Health.
Sitting next to him at lunch, I envisioned Danyele practicing her CPR on him instead of the
dummy.
The other teacher was Mr. Kindle for Business and Typing.
Role playing adventures of secretary and boss polluted my head while sitting across from him at a staff meeting.

I only snuck to the supply closet twice with Danyele.
She disappeared six weeks before the end of the school year
, l
ike a ghost
. H
er chair sat empty in
my
class
, a haunting effigy for me
.
Her
classmates gossiped in the hallways about what happened.
I listened with intent to make sure their rumors didn’t involve me.
They didn’t.
Her picture graced the cover of the local newspaper for several days.
POLICE HAVE NO LEADS IN MISSING
TEEN
CASE, the headline read.