The final bell rang. The students loaded up on the buses and the buses pulled out for the weekend. I didn’t move. The clicking of heels signaled Mrs Brollish’s approach. I looked up as she entered and stared into the wrinkled hag’s face.
“Mr Gibson,” she said. “If you’ll follow me, please.” I hopped off the chair and followed along behind her back to her office. No words were spoken. Brollish looked quietly pissed. That was a plus. But if Beouf or some other Union representative wasn’t present – no…just Beouf…only Beouf…
If Beouf wasn’t present, the only words out of my mouth would be ‘Union Representation’.
There were three chairs, pulled up in front of the Principal’s desk. The center one was obviously for me. There was a step stool and everything this time. Sitting in the chair to my right was Mrs Beouf. To the left, face red and snot dripping from his nose with Janet looming over him was Jeremy; former student and current accuser. No one looked happy.
So this was the trial…
“Mr Gibson,” Brollish started. “Thank you for being so patient. Are you aware of why I asked you out of your classroom today?”
I said nothing. I just looked over to Beouf and she nodded. “I don’t think you told me, ma’am.”
“One of your former students,” she gestured to sullen looking Jeremy, “wrote an essay accusing you of…” she paused. In a sane world; in a fair world, they could have just said I was accused of wearing diapers and laughed it out of the room. I reminded myself that the world wasn’t fair every morning I woke up for a reason.
“Symptoms of an acute and chronic maturosis flare up,” Beouf said, filling in the silence with more clinical sounding pseudoscience bullshit.
“Yes, that,” Mrs Brollish agreed. “May I read it to you?” Beouf nodded to me. I nodded back to Brollish. She read the whole damn thing word for word and I did my best to keep a blank face, I had to act as though I didn’t know what she was going to say and was seriously considering the accusations leveled against me. But I couldn’t act as though it had any other effect on me or I might seem guilty. “Is any of this true?” she said when she’d finished reading,