Howard Banning
The tortured teacher
CHAPTER ONE
Linda White pulled down her skirt so it would reach her knees as she began walking toward the administration building at Marley High School in Marley, California. If you didn't, she reminded herself, all the boys would be staring at your legs all day long.
Linda hurried into the building, saying, "Hello," to the few students she recognized from the first week of class. She wanted to keep making a good impression on the administrators, since it was her first job and she was years away rom getting tenure.
Besides, she and her husband Steve had sunk everything into this move into Southern California, leaving Ohio just a few weeks before. He'd gotten a job with a micro computing firm and after weeks of frantic phone calling around the Los Angeles area, she'd found this job of teaching world history to high school students.
It had been a change, a big one. The kids amazed Linda. Most of them, except for a few hippies and a sprinkling of blacks bussed into the school from downtown, tried to act and look like movie stars. They all had sun tans and blonde hair and expensive clothes that were usually worn as tight as humanly possible.
Well… it was a job that paid well and she and Steve needed every last penny to help pay for their house's mortgage. Besides, the staff at the school was pretty nice. They'd already been able to make some friends with a few of the younger teachers at the school.
She strolled into the faculty room and breathed a sigh of relief. At least in here you didn't feel like you were constantly on stage. Everyone was more or less equal and you didn't have the constant creeping fear that some kids might freak out on something.
"Hi, Linda!" five or six different voices chorused. "Hello, everyone," she said and flashed a big smile. People always told her it was her biggest physical asset, that smile. She was cute, they'd say, never pretty. Perhaps it was the smile that detracted from people noticing a nearly perfect body that was always clad in very sensible clothes. Like today, where she was wearing a white ruffled blouse and a plaid skirt. The one problem she'd worried about when she accepted the job at the high school was that there would be lots of big strong boys making eyes at her. It was silly, of course, but sometimes she'd feel oddly unprotected, maybe because her husband Steve was only her size about five-foot-five and not particularly muscular.
But everything had worked out fine so far she had no complaints, although it was clear to her that she was boring the daylights out of the kids in her class by talking about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. She'd always considered Alexander the Great one of the most fascinating figures in history. But the kids in her class, save just a few of them, would fall asleep if they had the chance. Since they had to sit, they'd pass notes instead. But Linda had been advised that as long as no one actually disrupted her lecture severely, there wasn't really too much to worry about.
"Let me tell you," Dan Jencks, who taught geography, said at the "Welcome Back Faculty" party a few days after school had started in early September. "As long as no one tried to hold you up with a gun, be grateful. Just keep on talking, make it as interesting as you possibly can and perhaps some of it will eventually seep into their thin little heads. You could do so much worse than this. Guys who I went to school with and are now teaching in the tough parts of town now tell me that they carry a gun with them at all times. Believe me, this is a school."
She couldn't really figure out why this man, who looked to be in his early 30's, was confiding in her. So she said, "Well, Dan, I appreciate your telling me that, but I'm not really sure why you brought it up, if you don't mind my asking you."