Danielle studies me for a long moment, and it strikes me that she seems to be enjoying withholding the story. But then I tell myself that she doesn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, that’s all—she doesn’t want to upset me. And yet I’m starting to wonder if the years haven’t been downright cruel to Danielle Bass, and whether the bright, cheery side she’s shown me so far isn’t a bit of an act. The look in her eyes now seems almost sadistic, as dramatic as that sounds.
Finally she says, “One of Mr. Vernon’s students beat him up during class with a baseball bat a few years ago. Fractured his legs and arms before the other kids broke it up. I remember a kid being interviewed on TV, saying that the attack seemed to come out of nowhere. In the middle of class one of the baseball players pulled a bat from an equipment bag—which he apparently had with him, who knows why—and just started swinging away. I remember the kid said he could hear the bones breaking and Mr. Vernon screaming in this very high-pitched squeal. ‘Like a pig.’ Some other students saved Mr. Vernon by tackling the baseball player, which I thought was heroic. The student they interviewed on TV hadn’t helped take the baseball player down, and I remember thinking, Why the hell are they interviewing him? Get the heroes on camera! I heard Vernon sued the school for a lot of money and then retired. I got the sense—mostly from people gossiping in the diner—that there was some bad blood and some shit may have gotten covered up. A few people said Mr. Vernon was paid to retire quietly, whatever that means. And so he did.”
Paid to retire quietly?
I’m shaking my head in disbelief. “Why?”
“Wouldn’t you retire if a kid beat you almost to death with a baseball bat? I hear he has a permanent limp.”
“Why would anyone attack such an amazing teacher as Mr. Vernon?”
“Maybe he did something fucked up to the baseball player? I mean you hear about teachers doing pervy things all the time, and then all of the community members being shocked as hell afterward. Some people seemed to think Mr. Vernon was having a gay affair with the boy who attacked him, or at least that’s what a few were implying.”
“No way. Not Mr. Vernon. He’d never do that to one of his students. Never.”
“Well, then, maybe the kid just started swinging away for no good reason at all.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Why would anyone blow up the World Trade Center? Why would anyone put a bomb in their shoe and try to take down a commercial airplane? Why do school shootings keep happening? People are sick, crazy, fucked up. It’s a scary world we live in these days. No one can deny that.”
I understand what she’s saying, but she didn’t know Mr. Vernon like I knew Mr. Vernon. He really cared about his students. He was a good man, the only teacher I ever heard of who would meet a student at the diner on a Saturday afternoon just to talk about fiction—reading her first fumbling attempts at short stories, even—because her own mother’s insanity made her home uninhabitable, and no other adults seemed to notice or care.
Nobody’s one hundred percent good, I suddenly hear Ken saying in my head. It was one of his favorite mantras. Everyone’s a little bit evil.
And he proved it time and time again by seducing young girls into making degrading pornography with his company. He’d send out good-looking, smooth-talking young men with alcohol and free lingerie and legally binding contracts with a lot of small print, and they’d never once come home without footage.
“Just put people in the right circumstances, and they’ll do just about anything,” my asshole husband would say as foul cigar smoke curled around his cocky, Tom Selleck–y head.
Every time Ken said something depressing like that, I’d think about Mr. Vernon and feel satisfied that Ken was wrong.
For all these years, Mr. Vernon has been my anti-Ken.
It was enough just to think of him teaching at HTHS—putting good into the world, one lecture at a time. At least one man on the planet was all good.
Why didn’t I ever write to Mr. Vernon after I left high school?
Why didn’t I ever thank him for all he did for me back then?
Do people actually do that—go back and thank their teachers years later, when they’re no longer handicapped by youth and ignorance, when they figure out just how much their teachers actually did for them?
I mean, Mr. Vernon was probably the most influential person in my entire life. He believed in my potential. He gave me a handwritten card on my graduation night and wrote me a beautiful letter—the sort of thing you’d hope a father would write. I never even acknowledged it, never even said thank you, maybe because I didn’t know how or what to write back. Maybe because I was leaving high school behind and Mr. Vernon was high school to me. Or maybe because I was a selfish white-trash bitch, too self-absorbed or too ignorant to show my favorite high school teacher common decency, let alone gratitude. And then when I dropped out of college I was too ashamed to face him again.
The young consume; the old are consumed.
“Are you even listening to me, Portia? Hello?”
I blink and say, “Where is he?”
“Mr. Vernon? How the hell would I know that?” Danielle starts talking about other teachers from Haddon Township High School.
“When did it happen?” I blurt out. “You know—the attack.”
“Shit—I don’t know. Maybe five years ago? Maybe more?”
“So he hasn’t been teaching for more than five years?”
“I’m not sure, Portia. Are you okay? This really upsets you, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize that—”