Termination Man: a novel (23 page)

“Well, thank you again, Mr. Myers,” Mrs. Martinez said, rising from her desk to show Shawn to the door. “Should I page someone to see you out?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Shawn said. “I can find my own way out. I remember the way.”

Mrs. Martinez gave Shawn a tight smile and ushered him out of her classroom.

Shawn retraced the path that he had taken to Mrs. Martinez’s classroom. He was just about to round an “L” in the hallway toward the school’s main exit when the classrooms on all sides of him began to disgorge students. He must have talked until the change of class periods. Suddenly he was in a sea of young bodies. Half of them were male, of course; but the other half was female. A nubile teenaged girl with fashionably tattered jeans and a pouty expression bumped into him. She excused herself and Shawn gave her a wide smile. She either ignored the come-on or did not notice. Probably the latter, he decided.

Then he noticed something else—something peculiar: None of the students really seemed to be paying much attention to him. He was obviously not a familiar face here; but they must have assumed him to be a teacher or a visiting school board official.
And why not?
There were probably unfamiliar adult faces in these hallways all the time.

So what exactly are you getting at
,
buddy
?
he asked himself.

What he was getting at was that he might as well have a look around, since he was here.
What harm would that do?
If stopped and questioned, he could always claim that he had taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. He had a legitimate reason for being here in the first place, after all. The school principal had invited him here to speak.

Then an adult passed by him in the crowded hallway—obviously a teacher, given the cheap, tacky blazer, hopelessly unstylish tie, and oversized teardrop glasses that looked lik
e artifacts from a museum of bad
1980s
fashion
. But the more interesting thing was the teacher’s reaction—or rather, lack of a reaction. The teacher glanced briefly at Shawn as he passed by, but without the slightest hint of suspicion or alarm.

It was his almost certainly his business attire. The price of the clothes that he was currently wearing would probably equal the weekly salary of any adult in this building—including the principal who had greeted him when he first arrived. Had he been dressed in jeans and a tee shirt—or even khakis and a sweater—he would have been stopped and questioned at every turn. But evildoers didn’t wear Italian suits and black wingtips, did they? The clothes were his free pass—to wherever he chose to circulate within this building.

At first Shawn didn’t have any concrete idea of where he wanted to go, until he noticed Alyssa at the opposite end of the hallway. She was retrieving books from her locker. The familiar sight of the object of his desires simultaneously aroused, humiliated, and angered him. Overall, it was not a pleasant mix of emotions. But it was an irresistible one. Now that he had spotted her, it was impossible to turn away.

And wasn’t it inevitable that he would see her here?
When you added it all up, there had to be some sort of karma at work: his recent disappointment with the Russian porn site, the last-minute dispatch to the high school for the Career Week talk. For the past several weeks, he had been moving toward something. And his final pursuit of Alyssa was it. The chase was drawing to a close. The dam would break soon, he was sure.

Don’t run,
Shawn cautioned himself.
Just walk nice and slowly. Deliberately—as if you belong here. Because right now, you do. 

Alyssa closed her locker. She didn’t notice Shawn as he threaded his way through the students. He tried to avoid the outright shoving aside of kids; but he seemed to be moving against the main flow of traffic.

Then Alyssa headed in the opposite direction, toward an outside exit at the end of the hall.

Now Shawn permitted himself to be a bit more aggressive. Once she made it outside, he could easily lose sight of her. He bumped into a teenaged boy and gave the kid a little shove. The boy’s face registered surprise rather than anger:
How many times had
this kid
been shoved by a teacher or a school board official, after all?
Nowadays educators weren’t even allowed to use overly stern language with kids; physically manhandling them was out of the question.
Welcome to the School of Shawn, little chump.
This thought brought Shawn a moment’s worth of satisfaction, until he glanced back in Alyssa’s direction: She had apparently already exited the building.

Shawn made his way to the end of the hallway, roughly jostling aside several more kids in the process. Along the way, he noticed at least two or three girls who were—in terms of their physical attributes—far more attractive than Alyssa. If you really wanted to be technical about it, Alyssa was just average, he supposed. So why did she have such a hold on him, he wondered.

The answer, he realized, was the fact that Alyssa had so steadfastly resisted him. On more than one occasion, she had defied him, openly denied his desires. Ever since he could remember, this sort of feminine behavior had simultaneously enraged him and magnified his lust. The more a woman rebuffed him, the more he wanted to conquer her—to teach her a lesson.

And Alyssa certainly needed to be taught a lesson, didn’t she?

He pushed through the exterior door at the hallway’s end, the same one through which Alyssa had departed. He found himself on a covered sidewalk that adjoined two school buildings—an older wing and a newer wing, by the looks of
them
.

Out here, the flow of students had thinned to a trickle. Most of the kids had now made their way to the next period’s classroom. Luckily for him, though, Alyssa was one of the few stragglers. He saw her waifish figure striding away from him, her long, dark hair swishing to and fro along her back.

“Alyssa!” he shouted—loud enough so that she was sure to hear, but not so loud that he would attract attention from the entire campus.

She stopped and turned at the sound of her name. It took a few seconds for her to register his identity, he could tell.
The little tease had never expected him to show up here, had she?

Shawn didn’t intended to waste any time. While she paused, he advanced forward. He took a moment to glance around. Now the commons area between the two buildings was completely deserted.

Oh, this was perfect.
They were all alone out here. Just the two of them. No one else to meddle or get in the way.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. “Do you recognize me?”

She looked away from him—first to one side and then down at her feet. He felt his irritation rising.
Why couldn’t she at least look at him?
Was he so horrible to look at? He had a lot more to offer her than any of the boys at this high school, if she would only have the good sense to recognize the facts.
Stupid little uppity bitch
, that’s what she was.

Finally she said: “I know who you are.” But she would still not look him in the eye.

“Well, then, why don’t you at least act like you’re glad to see me? I’m your mother’s employer, you know. I ought to at least rate a hello.”

“Hello,” she said. Then: “Sorry, but I’ve got to get to class.”

He could read the tone of dismissal in her voice.
Did she think he was an idiot or some sort of a pushover?

He had gone to all this trouble of coming to this high school today. Then he had gone to the effort of finding her. He had practically chased her this far. And how did she repay his efforts? With gratitude?
No
. With friendliness?
No
.

She wasn’t even giving him the fucking time of day, was she?

It was humiliating—completely unacceptable.

“Maybe you can be a few minutes late,” he said. He started to reach out for her, knowing this was a horrible mistake, but feeling unable to help himself. She saw him moving toward her, and she cringed in response. Then a nearby door opened and two chattering girls stepped out onto the paved walkway.

The two girls saw him as he reached for Alyssa, and she shrank away from his grasp. Their conversation came to an immediate end as they apparently sensed an unfolding situation—a situation involving a fellow student and an adult man.

Shawn silently cursed the meddlesome pair. He almost told them to quit gawking, to keep moving and mind their own business. But he checked himself—realizing that even his business attire would not permit him that degree of latitude. He would have to resign himself to a tactical retreat.

“Well, Alyssa, enjoy your class. Tell your mother I said hello.”

There,
he thought.
That should
put to rest
any suspicions these two
meddlers
might have.
He was a friend of the family—that was why he had stopped Alyssa.

As soon as he had convinced himself that he was off the hook, he seethed with another irksome realization: His desires had just been thwarted by two teenaged girls—
three
teenaged girls
, if you counted Alyssa.

What if Tom Galloway and the other pricks from the monthly meeting could seem him now? They would all take immense delight in laughing at his defeat, wouldn’t they?

He spun on his heels and walked back toward the entranceway from which he had come. The double doors swung backward with a loud clatter when he shoved them open. He headed down the now empty hallway of the school. On either side, he could see the routine of classes resuming. Students were now facing the front of their classrooms with varying degrees of attention and boredom.

He felt his anger rising—like the other day in Detroit, when the middle-aged accountant had defied him at the intersection. And he realized now—as he had realized then—that such a surfeit of anger would have to be vented.

To his left he saw a pair of doors that were obviously restrooms. He entered the one marked “Men,” and stepped into a semi-dark space reeking of urine, bowel movements, and harsh chemical cleaners.

He also smelled cigarette smoke. He saw a male student with shoulder-length hair, clad in a tattered jeans and an army surplus jacket. The boy was furtively smoking a cigarette over a urinal, in a stance that would allow him to dispose of the burning contraband at the first sign of a teacher. Shawn had burst in so quickly and unexpectedly, though, that he was upon the boy before the young man had a chance to execute his practiced maneuver.

The boy looked up guiltily at Shawn and then down at the cigarette in his hand. This one—like the mass of students in the hallway—assumed that Shawn was either a teacher or a district administrator.

“Oh, shit,” the boy said. It would be futile to discard the cigarette now. He had just been caught red-handed.

“Get rid of that thing,” Shawn said. “And then get the fuck out of here.”

Those words seemed to shock the boy even more than the sudden appearance of an adult authority figure. In a different state of mind, Shawn would have taken a twisted delight in shocking a carefree youngster this way; but he was in no mood now for irony.

Shawn could tell that the boy was thinking about talking back. He might be smart for his age. He might have sensed that this adult’s use of the F-word identified him as an outsider, since school-affiliated adults didn’t talk like that in the presence of impressionable students.

Shawn recalled the confrontation at the intersection in Michigan—how his temper had simply snapped, and how he had let loose his fury on the accountant’s Ford Taurus. This kid had no car to destroy. And unlike the accountant, he had nowhere to run. Shawn knew all too well that he was capable of harming weaker individuals when provoked. If this aspiring hoodlum set him off, he knew that he would beat the young man to a pulp—and there would be consequences. Consequences that neither his father nor Bernie would be able to make go away.

But the boy—who was possibly a sophomore or junior (definitely not a senior)—weighed perhaps one hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. Shawn could have felled him with a single punch. Perhaps the kid was thinking:
If this adult will use that word in my presence, what else would he be willing to do? How far will he go?

The kid apparently decided that the risk wasn’t worth it. He uttered a barely audible curse of his own, flicked his cigarette into the urinal and walked out past Shawn, giving the mysterious and unknown adult a wide berth.
Smart kid
, Shawn thought, as the youth passed by in a waft of cigarette smoke.

Shawn looked around the empty restroom. He saw a metal trashcan. He saw a row of three sinks, each with a mirror above the basin.

He lifted the metal trashcan and aimed for the mirror above the middle sink. He propelled the trashcan into the glass. It shattered in a satisfying crescendo of cracking glass and raining shards. He dimly wondered if anyone would hear the racket; but right now such concerns were secondary. He would worry about consequences later.

The trashcan clanged onto the sink and then onto the floor, rolling about before finally coming to a rest. Shawn paused to admire his handiwork. He was still angry about Alyssa’s rebuff; but he felt that familiar torrent of immediate, irresistible rage subsiding. And this time the damage had been minimal and manageable. He had spent his rage on a mirror in a public high school restroom, rather than on a living, breathing person who could make subsequent trouble for him.