SK01 - Waist Deep by Frank Zafiro Read Free Book Online Page B

the job. I recalled the sharp pain of bullets slamming into my shoulder and through the back of my knee. I saw the crazy eyes of the old woman who dared me to search her home. And I saw the eyes of that little girl later on, still and fixed, on the silver table. Staring up. Silent. Accusing.
    I shuddered. Ugly was right.
    She didn’t notice my reaction and went on, “I can never change it completely. None of us can. We can only try to make our trip through this world more bearable.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “With art,” she answered wistfully. “Compassion. Mercy. Any of those will do.”
    I wondered if that were true.
    “Forgive me,” she said with a warm smile. “You’re not here for philosophy.”
    “It’s all right,” I told her. “My grandmother used to say something similar.”
    “What did she say?”
    “That we can’t control other people, only how we react to them.”
    She gave me a slightly puzzled look.
    “She usually added that if we react in a positive way, we might change the world just a little bit at a time.”
    “One deed at a time,” Mrs. Byrnes mused. “Or one person at a time.”
    “That was the gist of it, yeah.”
    “Your grandmother was a smart woman,” Mrs. Byrnes said. “For my part, it seems t he older I get, the more my thoughts tumble out before I have a good look at them. And being a teacher, I frequently have a captive audience, so I become self-indulgent.”
    “It’s all right,” I repeated. “Really. How about the teachers? How’d she get along with them?”
    Mrs. Byrnes chuckled and sipped her tea again. “Ah, yes. The teachers. Well, we are a strange lot, Stef.” She looked at me again. “You appear to be in your thirties. Do you still remember high school?”
    “Sort of,” I said.
    “Oh, come now. You don’t remember how strange your teachers were? How they didn’t even seem human at times? In fact, for many of my students, it is a shock to their systems to discover that I am very human. That I get ill, that I have emotions and get sad or angry, or that I eat dinner, go to the movies, make love…” She smiled mischievously. “It never occurs to them that I do any of those things. That I live. ”
    I remembered those feelings. A teacher was a symbol, not a person. In the egocentric world of a teenager, teachers were just bit players who sat all night at their desks, eagerly waiting for their students to return.
    She watched me. “You do remember.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “So then, there is the answer to your question.”
    The answer. The answer was that the g eometry instructor saw nothing but the pentagon and rhombus and the C 2 =A 2 +B 2 equation. The English teacher was too busy chasing the French teacher. The history teacher had a year’s worth of chalk dust on the sleeves of his wool coat and cared more for the glory that was Rome and the genius that was Thomas Jefferson than the faces in front of him. The computer teachers saw bits and bytes and programming strings, but little else.
    The teachers didn’t notice the students any more than the students noticed them. High school was a microcosm of the real world.
    Mrs. Byrnes stared at me, a curious smile playing on her lips. “Haven’t thought about high school in a while, have you?”
    “No,” I answered truthfully. Hardly ever, until Matt Sinderling came along. I cleared my throat. “What do you teach, Mrs. Byrnes?”
    “ Marie ,” she said. “Please. And I teach Spanish. All four years of it. And I am one of the drama advisers, as well.”
    And drama is where her passion lies, I realized in a flash. I had a brief vision of Marie Byrnes thirty years ago. Her hair was a deeper black then, I was sure, and had none of the gray streaks in it today. I imagined her expectant eyes looking for a challenge, her teaching certificate in hand and the theater beckoning. Or had she tried her hand at acting first, and slipped into teaching because she hadn’t made the grade? I wasn’t