A Bittersweet Introduction

Jack is sixteen, shy, and a loner. His life is about to be changed by a new teacher, the smart, enigmatic, beautiful Miss Pearson.

Chapter 1

A Bittersweet Introduction

 

To Jack, there was something that most people missed about high school life. The dropouts he'd met, and the students who were headed towards dropping out, often claimed that school 'just wasn't for them' or that they were 'just s**t at every subject'. What they didn't realize, at least in Jack's mind, was that there was another variable holding them back. The teachers.

 

A teacher could make or break a subject, in Jack's point of view. A charismatic, enthusiastic teacher could make a topic as dry as calculus seem almost interesting! They could bring education to life, as corny as that sounded.

 

But on the other side of the coin, a bad teacher could make their lessons hell. There was apathetic bad, like Jack's old history teacher Mr Bisby - teachers who simply didn't care about their subject or their students anymore and so were content to simply assign pages from a textbook almost as old as the period the class was studying, all the while sitting at the front of the class working on their novels or trying to peer down the schoolgirls' blouses.

Then there were the actively bad teachers - the ones who took a disliking to particular students for no apparent reason other than they looked slightly like their childhood bully or something. These were the teachers who kept you in after class because "you were making obscene faces during the lesson", and who failed your essay because "this font choice is completely ridiculous". In Jack's opinion, the people who really hated high school often had teachers like these to blame.

 

Mrs Ronan had been one of the former. Her advanced years hadn't made her mind any less sharp, and she had made English lit classes an absolute joy for Jack and the rest of his class. Even the troublemakers at the back of the room who would come to class high or ping the girls' bra straps through their shirts as they walked past showed considerable respect towards her.

 

She had abandoned the old curriculum of Dickens and Shakespeare, saying that "as incredible as those men were, there is a whole world of literature being totally ignored in English lessons, and I intend to show it to you all."

And so Elizabeth 'Betty' Ronan's Year 12 English lit 201 class of 2012 had been assigned texts as fascinating and varied as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of Western literature, the works of Raymond Chandler, pioneer of the hardboiled detective novel, all the way through to debut-novels by contemporary Scandinavian romance-thriller authors and Stephen King novellas from the nineties. Mrs Ronan's philosophy was that all literature was magic, and was worthy of study, appreciation and admiration.

 

Her passion of her subject had inspired a love of reading in all of her pupils, especially Jack. Before this year, he had been a nothing. He played no sports, no musical instruments, was a member of no clubs and had few friends. He had spent his evenings watching reruns of crappy sitcoms and playing Call of Duty on an X-Box that received more care and maintenance than his own flabby body. Since he had had Mrs Ronan as a teacher, however, he had joined the creative writing club at school and made a handful of close friends, as well as countless acquaintances. He had been getting out of the house more and more often, going to the public library to pick up paperbacks by the bagful. He had even had a narrative poem of his own creation published in a local journal - but only after Mrs Ronan had lovingly read, critiqued and offered insightful feedback on it first.

 

Mrs Ronan died on a windy September morning while crossing the road. The crossing was on a corner that the locals had been complaining about for years. Visibility was poor, the road was cracked, and teenage hoons in tricked out cars frequently dared each other to take it at the highest speed they could. Mrs Ronan, grocery shopping in hand, had been blindsided by a septuagenarian doing fifty in a grey Plymouth van, with his brain drowning in seven shots of cheap bourbon. She held on 'til the hospital, but died while her husband was still racing across town from his hastily abandoned workplace to be with her, his tie fluttering madly in the breeze as he sprinted across the hospital parking lot, up four flights of stairs and into a small, air conditioned room where a very kind, very professional doctor in bloodstained scrubs told him all there was to tell.

 

Rumour was that Mr Ronan was planning on selling up their old villa and moving to Europe or the states. Too many memories here, apparently. Jack supposed that made sense.

 

The accident had been on a Sunday. The school term was only two-thirds through, and Jack had no idea what to expect as he walked into English class period one on Monday. The principal, Mr Muldoon was there, and he gave the cliché condolences and obligatory remarks about her 'outstanding character' and 'love for life' as the class silently and respectfully took their seats.

 

After the principal finished forcing out his stilted and unnecessary eulogy, he cleared his throat and announced that there would be a trainee English lit teacher, fresh out of teaching college, covering the class for the rest of the school year. At this he gestured to the classroom door, which then opened. Muldoon had always had an irritating flair for the dramatic, and had apparently told the new teacher to wait outside until this point.

 

The woman who walked in was beautiful. The woman who walked in would change Jack's life forever.