Teacher

When I was in sixth grade, I was in band. Clarinet. I wanted to play saxophone, but grandpa had a clarinet so that's what it ended up being. The band instructor was a middle-aged woman, who I'm gonna refer to as Ms. Frond (I'm watching Bob's Burgers while writing this) so as to protect her identity. Anyways, I didn't have a lot of friends, so I had a lot of extra lessons after school. After a while, she started offering me extra lessons at her house. Even then, that made me uncomfortable and I refused. She was pretty persistent though, and would offer at least once a week. Eventually, I just stopped going back for extra lessons.

Anywho, one day Ms. Frond announced that we had been invited to be in the Christmas parade downtown. Awesome! That's great! The school is literally a year old, it's great for exposure and best of all, fun for the kids. We were so excited. We all had extra rehearsals, and the school made sure we had whatever we needed. Permission slips were signed, everything went perfectly.

The day of the parade, we all meet at our designated area. As we get dropped off, Ms. Frond tells the parents where to pick us up at the end, and her and some parade officials were the ones watching over us after they left. The parade starts, and everything goes smoothly (at least, from my perspective. i was so nervous there could have been a 5-float pileup and I wouldn't have noticed). At the end, everyone gets picked up and I'm the last, left alone with Ms. Frond.

Ms. Frond immediately grabs my hand after the last kid is out of sight, and tells me I can call my mom from her house, and she starts booking it, me in tow. I had very little experience being on my own and didn't know how to act in this kind of situation so despite the fact that I had recently been uncomfortable around her, I went along. Looking back, it probably didn't look that unusual to anyone because she wasn't tall and I really shot up in sixth grade so it's not like I was being dragged. I kept up pretty well. I couldn't tell you where in particular she took me, but it was definitely further out than where everyone else parked. Her car is the only one in sight and she starts a beeline towards it. It was one of those dark blue-green SUV's that pretty much everyone had in the late 90's.

Suddenly, I hear my name being yelled behind me. I turn and see my mom, panting and sprinting towards us. Ms. Frond's grip tightens and she speeds up. Mom yanked me from Ms. Frond's grip and without a word, took me to her car, and we went home where she proceeded to fawn over me, which was confusing because I was pretty much ignored 99% of the time. I had no idea what just happened. I never saw Ms. Frond in school or heard anything about her ever again. I don't even know her first name to look her up and my family never spoke about it again.