Love Beyond Words

Chapter 3

As I made my way to first period, I kept my head down and hoped nobody would be able to tell I’d be crying. It was so embarrassing. I felt like a total mess, and wanted nothing more than to just disappear.

Thankfully homeroom didn’t have a particularly high concentration of people who hated me. It didn’t have any people who liked me either, but I didn’t think there was any room that contained one of those unicorns anyway!

I slipped into my seat without anybody paying me any mind and quickly pulled out a book. I wasn’t actually reading it, but hoped it would dissuade anybody from talking to me. The plan seemed to work, but I went totally unmolested until the bell rang.

Mrs. Clementine taught homeroom and English. She was somewhere in her mid-sixties, nearing retirement, and her levels of “give a f**k” were at an all-time low. After announcements she’d get in front of the class and start talking. As long as you weren’t too loud, she didn’t seem to mind if you weren’t paying attention. Honestly with the way she went off on tangents sometimes I wondered if she was paying attention! One minute she’d be talking about the poem and the next thing you knew she’d be talking about some unrelated author… or her cat.

Honestly if you sort of read whatever book the class was covering and passed the multiple choice quiz she passed out every Friday without being too obvious about your cheating, you’d get an A in the class. It wasn’t exactly academically enriching, but nobody in class was complaining.

The problem with first period though was that it was too easy, so my mind tended to wander. That wasn’t a good thing, because it gave me lots of opportunities to stress out about the horrors that awaited me in second period.

History used to be my favorite subject. I feared though that my senior history class had ruined the subject for me forever. And that was, of course, due to none other than Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Wilson was a 45 year old man with a chip on his shoulder. I’d heard that his wife left him a couple years earlier, and he’d really turned mean afterwards. He had salt and-pepper hair, skin that was dark and leathery from a lifetime spent pursuing outdoors activities, and quite possibly the biggest nose I’d ever seen. His mouth seemed to be drawn into a perpetual frown, and he sported a beer belly from the copious amounts of, well, beer, that he’d apparently been drinking in prodigious amounts since his wife left.

The man was unpleasant enough to be around for anybody, but he seemed to have it out for me. I first spoke to the man my sophomore year when he was filling in for my regular teaching who’d had to take off suddenly due to a family emergency. The moment he heard my stutter, he was convinced that I was “mentally deficient” and should be in a special ed classroom. After a couple meetings with him, my Dad, the guidance counselor and even my old speech therapist, the school came down against Mr. Wilson, decreeing that I was not, in fact, “deficient.”

Mr. Wilson never really accepted that outcome, and I felt like every day in class he was on a mission to prove once and for all that I didn’t belong in there. He would constantly call on me, way more than any of the other students. I didn’t know what was worse, the way he would cut me off if he felt I was taking to long to answer, or the anger I’d see in his eyes when I managed to shatter his worldview by spitting out something correct.

If I thought today would be any different, I was going to be sorely out of luck.

“Ms. Kennedy,” he said mid-lecture, glaring at me as he turned his attention away from his powerpoint and towards me, “What was the official cause of the Spanish-American war?”

“Mmm… Maine… sir,” I blurted out as quickly as I could.

“I assure you that the state of Maine had nothing to do with it,” the man shot back coldly.

“No….no… not the state,” I said, struggling even more as my nerves got the better of me, “I…in Cu…Cu…ba. The… the…. the shi….shi.”

Mr. Wilson held up his hand, which I knew meant to stop.

“Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t know the answer, just say so rather than waste all our time. How about you, Mr. Phllips,” Mr. Wilson asked Tate Phillips, who was probably just about the smartest kid in school.

“The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana,” the boy replied promptly.

“Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Phillips,” Mr. Wilson said, shooting me one last glare before returning to his presentation.

I took a quick look around the class, and nobody seemed to be reacting to what had just taken place. It was an improvement over the giggling and even outright laughter that had accompanied those exchanges earlier in the year. It seemed Mr. Wilson tormenting me had passed from entertaining to boring at some point over the course of the year.

It was as good a victory as I could hope for.

The rest of the class passed uneventfully. It seemed Mr. Wilson was satisfied he’d made me look and feel like enough of a moron for one day, and so left me alone for the most part after that.

As soon as the bell ending class rang, I was quick to get out of there, just as I always was.

Third period was usually a good time for me to decompress. It was Civics with Mr. Henry. Mr. Henry was probably the teacher with whom I had the best relationship of all. He gave off kindly grandfather vibes. He was a about the same age as Mrs. Clementine, but unlike her still loved teaching and had no intention of retiring “until they carted him out,” and he liked to say. He had white hair that was thin but still very much there, expressive blue eyes and a bit of a belly. He was always smiling. I think the things I liked about him most though were the kind notes he’d write on my papers about how well I expressed myself in writing and the way he never put me on the spot. I’d have to talk in his class sometimes, sure, but he didn’t ever call on me when he didn’t have to and was always very understanding of my stutter.

I walked into the class and plopped down in my seat, ready to learn about government or whatever else and put history behind me. Unfortunately for me, it just was not going to be my day, because that morning kindly old Mr. Henry uttered some of the most dreaded words in any teacher’s vocabulary.

“Alright class,” he said in his normally jovial voice, “Today I’m going to be pairing you off for a project, and you’ll be working together to deliver a presentation to the class next week…”

A presentation! Those words cut through me like a knife through my heart! I'd have to stand up in front of the class and actually try to talk! It wasn't the first presentation I'd ever been assigned, obviously, but for equally obvious reasons I always dreaded them. It was basically just an opportunity for me to get up in front of my peers and make a total ass out of myself!

Worse still, I'd be getting a randomly assigned partner. Needless to say, people weren't exactly excited to be partnered with little-miss-baredly-speaks-English for these sorts of assignments. I always felt like such a burden, and my classmates were usually pretty quick to make it clear that that feeling was totally justified.

Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, though, Mr. Henry began reading off our partners.

"Jessica, you'll be with Amy," the man read, going through his list, "Mike, you'll be with Hannah. Connor..."

I'd been partnered with Mike f*****g Williams of all people.

My day could not, in any way shape for form, possibly get any worse....