Fraction too much fiction

The moment I discover his figure among the former students and teachers; it is as if a piece of rusty barbed wire is being dragged along my ventricles. And then I know, I understand for sure why I never should have come to this school reunion

I barely manage to hold the cup of coffee in my hands. Drops of the brown drink are trickling along my fingers. The person I started a conversation with frowns. ‘Are you okay?’ she wants to know.

Are you okay? I did pretty good, actually. Until I learned about the presence of the bogeyman. Till then, I felt really comfortable being at this high school reunion. To be honest. I had doubted for a long time whether I wanted to go. What does it add to your life, I wondered. Wouldn’t it be better if I focused on the future instead of going back to the past? To the years in which uncertainty and shame were as normal to me as the music of Queen and Wham!

I decided to go anyway. What harm can it do to look back every now and then? To laugh and cry about your mistakes?

However, I had not anticipated the scenario that I would encounter Mr. Beechnut. Alexander Beechnut. My Geography teacher in the second grade. My phantom, my banshee. Of all the moments in my adolescence, I am most ashamed of what happened to him. Or rather: what we as students did to Alexander Beechnut.

He was new at school when we were taught by him. We had just finished our first year. We were no longer green, inexperienced. Perhaps that is why we targeted our Geography teacher. He was an easy game. A student-like appearance, a tendency to stutter when he got angry, small in stature. A pigeon among rattlesnakes.

What did we do to disrupt his lessons? We threw sponges (by which the blackboards were cleaned), we made fires in the trash cans, we sang songs, we ignored his assignments, we ate bread and drank coffee, we walked out the classroom when we felt to do it. Every week we invented something new to bully and tyrannize him.

How many times did Beechnut not ran out of the class room? Crying? And just as often did we stay behind. Laughing, proud.

“Weren’t you in my class too?” Before I can hide, he addresses me. He is dressed in a black turtleneck, faded jeans, sheep wool socks, sandals. But it is unmistakably him. Of course, his hair is thinner, his face more sunken, his eyes duller. But that is not strange. Not after everything he has had to go through that year.

Rumours were that he had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital the moment he left our school. There were even stories that he had committed suicide. He should have jumped from a bridge.

That is why not a single hair on my head expected Mr. Beechnut to be present at the reunion tonight. Who invited him?

“Weren’t you on the school team?” He is courteous, polite. There is nothing to indicate that he is spiteful, hateful. But me? What does he expect of me? Apologies? Should I burst into tears, get on my knees and explain to him that it was never my intention to humiliate him like that. To destroy his life, to crack his self-esteem.

“Looking back, I managed to stay at the school for only one year,” he says. “Nevertheless, they sent me an invitation to the reunion.”

What would have become of him? What becomes of mentally ill people? I don’t dare think about it. They often remain unemployed, I realize. Sometimes they even end up on the streets.

“Looking back, I should never have started,” he says. “I wasn’t suited to be a teacher. I didn’t know anything about pedagogy.”

Doesn’t he smell like sauerkraut? Urine? Mud? And do I have this on my conscience? That I, together with the other classmates, ruined a life forever? And why? Because it was fun?

“And you, what became of you?” he wants to know. I start talking on autopilot. But in the meantime, it seems as if I’m drowning in an ocean of guilt, shame and powerlessness. In a high-pitched voice, I still manage to ask what he does these days.

“After that one year, I went on to study mathematics,” he says. “I am now Professor of Statistical Neuro-imaging at Cambridge.”