My last name is a derivation of the French name “Theobald,” which roughly translates to “bold, or brave.”
I always found this kind of ironic, because I’m kind of the most cowardly person you’ll ever meet. I’ve spent my whole life running away from my problems, and I don’t seem to show signs of slowing down any time soon.
My therapist sometimes compares me to Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter series (which I’ve never read or watched, because I suffer from wiccaphobia, which is defined as a quite intense fear of witchcraft), and she always tells me that although Neville lived, in the beginning, in a constant state of fear, he, like me, had a background of bravery and heroism, and he apparently ended up saving the wizarding world. “True courage will show itself in the face of adversity,” she always tells me. “So don’t worry.”
But the thing that she doesn’t seem to understand is that my cowardice is never something I’ve ever been ashamed of. Because of it, I’ll probably never be arrested. I’ll probably never get cancer, or get into a car accident (I walk everywhere I go because in Goodland, you’re never more than 2 miles aways from any other part of town). I keep my house pretty well hidden by a mass of Sassafras tress, so I’m in very little danger of getting robbed. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t borrow money from other people, so I probably won’t get murdered by some thug in the middle of the night. I eat healthily, and I take multivitamins, and I rarely drink soda or coffee. Freakish weather patterns and spontaneous combustion aside, I could probably live to one hundred if I wanted to. And while my family and peers often found my lifestyle strange, they never sought to change me.
And then, in 5th grade, I had Ms. Blake. And everything in the world I had ever avoided seemed to congregate in that classroom. I remember, quite distinctly, two things she did on the first day of class that upset me.
Number one: She called each of us up to her desk to speak with us privately, because she wanted to get to know us better. As soon as I went up to her desk, she asked me a question about what I liked to learn in the classroom and what my favorite subject was, but I could stop staring at how sharp and red her nails were. They all looked like mini daggers covered in blood, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer her question. When she noticed I wasn’t responding, she asked me, “Stanley, are you scared of me?” and I had always been told to tell the truth, so I nodded my head. And instead of comforting me, she merely smiled and said, “You should be.”
Number two: After lunch, she had us gather in a circle and talk about what our favorite books were. Afterwards, when we all were supposed to return our chairs to our desks, one of the kids was stuck in his. At first I thought it was one of the other kids, but then Ms. Bake said, “Is something wrong?” and started laughing. She glued one of her students to a chair, just to teach us a lesson about not getting on her bad side, I guess.
So, by the end of that first traumatic experience, I was already certain that I was going to dread going to school every day. I used to fake sick to try to get out of having to spend a day with Ms. Blake, but my parents knew how mysophobic I was (mysophobia is defined as a fear of contamination and germs), and so they never bought that I was actually sick.
Instead I had to “suck it up like a big boy” and try not to flinch every time Ms. Blake came near me. Which was pretty difficult, because she like to call on me a lot. She had a habit of always calling on people when they were unprepared to answer the question, and since I had a habit of never raising my hand, I became one of her primary targets. Thankfully, Bridget Kane and I (the two shiest kids in the class) were bright students, and so we were never caught that off guard.
But eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t take the craziness anymore. She never seemed to follow any sort of rules at all about what was appropriate to teach kids our age. In history class, she had a “special segment” called “Was He Really That Bad?” in which we discussed evil dictators and the positive economic or social benefits they produced during their reign. She essentially was telling us that men like Hitler and Stalin were good people! Unbelievable! And instead of having pop quizzes on useful stuff like state capitals and American Presidents, she quizzed us on collective nouns like a bloat of hippopotami or an implausibility of gnus. “Don’t be such a grouch, Stanley. Besides you never know when you’ll be on a game show or at a trivia contest and a collective noun question will come up. I could win you hundreds of dollars!” she once told me when I protested the nature of her quizzes.
The worst was when she started teaching horror stories in October. After recess we would come back from the playground and all the lights would be off except for a few candles that cast an eerie glow on Ms. Blake’s already ghoulish features. Sometimes, she would even have scary music playing in the background, or she would have a special volunteer (usually Harry) to be the sound effects specialist: making the classroom supply door creak at inopportune times, or blowing into a bottle to make it sound like the wind was blowing. Now, I was the kind of kid who started crying if someone so much as whistled The X-Files theme song within earshot. Clearly this wasn’t going to go over well for me. So after two weeks of pure misery, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I ran to the Principal’s office and told her everything I knew. Unfortunately, this did nothing to actually deter Ms. Blake from her plans. On the contrary, it seemed that, despite her burly exterior, Principal Vachon was just as much of a coward as I was, because she never came back into the classroom to check on us ever again. Even when I had other things to report, like smelling alcohol on her breath, or finding ground cigarette butts in the trash bins, she would just tell me that I had an overactive imagination.
Even worse was the treatment I started getting from other students. No one, even Bridget, wanted anything to do with me after that incident. They started calling me nasty names like “Rat Bastard” and “Sneaky Stanley” and even “Thibo-douche” when Ms. Blake wasn’t around. If I didn’t have many friends before, I certainly didn’t have any by the time winter break rolled around.
I still don’t have many friends really. Once you get a reputation for being a killjoy, you tend to not get invited out to any raging parties. Just as well, since those parties are riddled with all sorts of diseases, sexually transmitted or otherwise. Still, sometimes I wonder what my life would be like now if I had just come out of my shell a little more that year.
But while the other kids beat me up and called me names, Ms. Blake never seemed to get angry at me. And she must have known it was me, because if the kids figured it out in a couple of days, she probably knew the moment Principal Vachon stepped through that door. And yet, though she could have punished me – though she could have “found” me guilty of a commandment, say, she didn’t think I was telling the truth or doing my own homework or something – she was as cordial to me as ever. If anything, she maybe even backed off on calling me out in class. I think she even maybe felt... sad for me? Like, suddenly she realized that maybe terrifying me out of mind every day wasn’t the best way to do her job.
At any rate, she and I seemed to set up a little signal where she would only ask me to answer a question if I made eye contact with her. So that was actually kind of nice of her. And, she had a really strict “no bullying” policy, and while some teachers don’t enforce that kind of thing (for instance, every teacher I ever had in high school), Ms. Blake made sure to punish every student who made fun of me, which made for a pretty empty playground the week after the incident. So, while we probably didn’t like each other very much, we respected each others boundaries.
In return, I didn’t tell Principal Vachon about any more of the crazy stuff she did. And believe me, she did some crazy stuff. Like, once, as part of our creative writing class, she had us visit a graveyard for inspiration. We had to pick a tombstone we liked, and based on the name of the deceased and any epitaphs we might have found, we had to write a story about that person’s life. Some people did really well with that assignment, like Warren Creyton who, although my biggest bully, was a darn good writer. I remember he wrote this really chilling story about a young girl who, while sleepwalking, wandered into the forest, and then when she woke up, she ended up in a field full of flowers that were so beautiful, she never wanted to leave, and then she died of starvation. It was a lot better than I’m telling it now, but I promise it was pretty. Anyway, he wrote all of it based on some little girl’s epitaph saying, “Here lies our girl, the blooming flowers fading.”
I didn’t want to spend more than five minutes in that place, so I chose the one closest to the exit, which belonged to a man named Bryan Shivers, which I thought was a good name for a character anyway. He didn’t have an epitaph, so I just wrote something quick about how he died from drowning in a freezing lake, and that was it. I went to wait in the school bus, but Ms. Blake stopped me and asked to see my story, and when she saw the person I had chosen, she for some reason got really scared, and she asked me to pick someone else. I told her that I had done the assignment, and it wasn’t fair to have me go back in there again, but she screamed at me to “Just do it! Please, Stanley!”
I’d never seen her act that way before, so I figured it must be pretty serious. I chose the one next to him, and when I came back, she let e sit on the bus in silence. When we got back to school, I went to the library to try and figure out what it was about this guy that made Ms. Blake, the most fearless woman I’d ever met, show terror in her eyes. After some digging, I found an article about a serial killer who had lived in Goodland twenty years ago (with a name like that though, I’m not surprised he was crazy. Even the oddly placed “y” in his name gives me the creeps). Apparently, Bryan Shivers killed 15 people in the state of Indiana before the police got a tip about who his next victim would be. They surrounded the house, but before they could get inside, it exploded, killing a few police officers in the process. They found two bodies in the house, and since they had never actually seen what Bryan Shivers looked like before, they assumed that the one holding some sort of incendiary trigger was their guy. And since no one wanted to claim his body, he ended up being buried in our cemetery. It happened twenty years beforehand, right around when Ms. Blake more to Goodland I guess, and the house that exploded was right next to hers, so I supposed it must have scared her pretty badly.
I bring this up, because several months ago, I read an article in the Indianapolis Star that they the police reopened the case, and now they think that the body may have been someone else’s. That Bryan Shivers might still be at large.
Now, I may be the most cowardly person in Indiana, but I know true bravery when i see it. And Ms. Blake was most definitely the bravest, toughest woman I know, even in her old age. So when the very last day I ever saw Ms. Blake was the day that article came out; well, I figure that can’t be a coincidence.
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