Chapter 9: Me and History Don't Mix Well

I suppose I should have been shocked to find out that my American History teacher was dead. But honestly, if you had told me one of my teachers was dead, Mr. Hickey would have been one of my first guesses. True, the most obvious suspect would've been Mrs. Dillard, the scary-old biology teacher, but Mr. Hickey would have made the top five easily. He was a very tall, bone-thin man with a slight English accent that we all spent hours imitating outside of school. He was one of those teachers who didn’t seem all that old, but had been at the school forever and whose picture in every yearbook looked exactly the same, just with different hair. Not less hair, mind you. Just different.

Also, it struck me that he was a history teacher. That might not have been an accident.

The class proceeded at its glacial clip, with Mr. Hickey droning on about the women’s suffrage movement from 100 years ago and everyone dutifully scribbling down words and phrases that they thought might end up on a test. I just sat in my chair, head against the wall, nostrils aimed up to catch the occasional waft of fresh air that found its way into the room, and tried not to throw up. Soon enough, the period was over and it was lunchtime. I let everyone else file out while I stayed in my seat, watching my dead history teacher and fiddling absently with my pencil. Eventually, we were the only two in the classroom. Still, I waited. Not sure what for. Not sure what I was thinking. Not sure if I was thinking anything at all. Mr. Hickey didn’t notice me at first; he was preoccupied with something on his computer and had his back to me. Finally, he looked up, saw me, and tilted his head, curious.

“Can I help you, Mr. Thornwood?”

I don’t know why I did what I did. I cannot honestly think of a single possible positive outcome. But from a deep slouch in my chair in the back of the room, fingers still fumbling with the pencil, I tossed a figurative hand grenade on my entire high school career.

“Are you dead?”

He laughed. Quickly. Too quickly. Like “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much” quickly. I just stared at him. He stopped laughing. “You’re serious.”

“You smell really, really bad.”

If someone told me I smelled bad, I’d check my pits and look at the bottom of my shoes. Mr. Hickey? He sagged back into his chair. He understood. I understood. He understood that I understood. “How long have I exuded ripeness, Mr. Thornwood?”

“All period.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Just today.”

He nodded, then stood up and walked over to me, which of course made it even worse. My eyes teared up and I squirmed in my seat, regretting my prying question. He sat on the edge of the desk in front of mine, folded his hands in his lap, and looked down his nose at me.

“So tell me, Mr. Thornwood. What did you do last night?”

Suddenly, the boring old history teacher vanished and was replaced by a slightly-less-boring, incredibly menacing dead man.

“Nothing?”

He wasn’t buying.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Thornwood. You were a very promising young man with a definite aptitude towards history.”

Warning lights flashed in my head. I was a promising student? Past tense? In history?

Suddenly wanting to be anywhere but in that classroom with that walking, talking, teaching corpse, I began to lift myself out of my seat. Mr. Hickey immediately shoved me back down with one arm and held me there.

“Uhm.. Mr. Hickey? Can I go to lunch now?”

“No, Mr. Thornwood. I’m afraid you can’t.”

And he shifted his hand from my chest to my neck, lifted me inches off my seat, and began to squeeze.

I grabbed at his one hand with both of mine but I may as well have been swatting at a marble statue for all the good it did. He held me up, and my own weight and the pull of gravity conspired against me to help him cut off any and all airflow into my body.

All the while, he just looked at me without any emotion. Not joy. Not sadness. Not amusement. He was grading a test. He was killing a student. It was all the same to him.

Me? I was freaking out as well as I could without the luxury of air. Spots flickered in front of my eyes, my throat constricted, my lungs spasmed. About the only good thing was that my sense of smell shut down and for the first time all day I didn’t smell the sickening stench of death.

It’s the little things that make life worth living.

“I always knew this wouldn’t last,” He said calmly, as if now was a good time for his life story. “I’ve been at this school for thirty-three years and I’ve really enjoyed my time here. I’ve met some fantastic students and really feel as if I did a lot of good, made a difference in people’s lives. There’s really no greater gift one can give a child than the gift of education.”

I would have nodded if I hadn’t been busy dying.

“However, not physically aging begins to draw attention after a while. I’ve been more than happy to encourage the Botox rumors in the staff room, but even they begin to lose credibility over time. I thought I had another year and a half before I’d have to invent a family crisis of some sort that would force me out of the district. I never assumed I’d have to kill a child. This is incredibly disheartening. I was looking forward to starting a section on the first World War next week. It’s a truly fascinating and under-appreciated time in history, if you ask me.”

I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t ask him anything because I was blacking out. I momentarily wondered if I was going to just die and then get on with my life. Go to school. Do homework. Play baseball. Would Zoe Francis consider dating me if I were dead? But then my flailing hands once again found the pencil and, acting of their own accord, they rammed it way up Mr. Hickey’s nose and into his brain.

Mr. Hickey instantly dropped me, his hands flying to his face as black gunk spurted out of his nose. I floundered on the floor for a moment until the essence of life, having just abandoned me, came rushing back. I stood up and immediately regretted it, as both my legs had fallen asleep and were now tingling all over as they woke up. I mentally screamed at them to get a move on before Mr. Hickey pulled the pencil out of his nose and finished me off, but they ignored me as usual.

Frantic, I dragged myself backwards from the gyrating history teacher as fast as my arms could move me. Then I noticed that Mr. Hickey wasn’t coming after me. In fact, he wasn’t doing much of anything other than gyrating in place. As my legs joined the party and I stood up, I became less and less afraid of Mr. Hickey, and more and more curious. He wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t screaming. He hadn’t pulled out the pencil. He was just... twitching. Like he’d been shorted out. The black gunk was everywhere now, and the spurts had dwindled to a drip.

His legs buckled and he dropped to his knees a moment before crumbling to the floor, knocking a couple of desks out of his way. Then he just lay there, hands at his side, not moving.

And he didn’t smell nearly as bad.

I’d killed a corpse.

Check me out.