The Stand-up Guy, Chapter 1

“In the year following the massacre at Columbine High School, the nation’s fifty largest newspapers printed nearly 10,000 news stories related to the event and its aftermath, averaging about one story per newspaper every other day”

 

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be- Kurt Vonnegut

 

Chapter 1 

Robert Gideon reached frantically for the rear double doors to Joshua Chamberlain High School, pulling when the sign said push.  A nagging February wind nipped his exposed neck; he’d forgotten his wool scarf.  The cold metal of the door handle stung his bare hand; he’d forgotten his gloves too.

He was supposed to teach his first period English class in five minutes, not enough time to be ready.  His heart was jackhammering because he was late enough for work when his wife, Helen, closed the front door, walked down the hall pulling a suitcase.  By the time he realized chasing the yellow cab along the slush-covered street was futile, he was another ten minutes behind.  His head was a sputtering Roman candle as he had stood in the street freezing until a car horn and a “get the hell out of the road!” brought him around, wondering, had she looked back at least?

The door finally spilled him into the immediate warmth of the school building, books splayed on the floor.  He grabbed them up, tripping on the straps of his leather bag, the tension strangling him, but kids were running out of the building, not toward their homerooms.  He heaved himself from the floor and scrambled up the stairs, toward his classroom.

“Where the hell are you going Mr. Gideon?” a boy said, running past him, toward the exit.  “Kid in the gym’s got a gun!”

“Running late,” Robert said, missing the part about the gun, just trying to ignore the tight knot in his gut saying Helen was gone and he’d never be ready in five minutes for twenty-five high-school kids.  Twenty-five fifteen-year-olds with the cool judgment to see in a second that his life was crumbling around him.  Stumbling in with his tie askew, his books a jumble, he might as well waltz in without pants on.

At the top of the stairs, the word gun penetrated his confusion in an instant and he froze, cold sweat on his back, soaking his shirt.  His stomach gave a lurch and then twisted even tighter.

“Gun?” he said to no one.  The second floor, north hallway was vacant and glaring with the blue reflection of fluorescent lights on polished linoleum.  This hallway ran east and west, the stairs he took putting him in the middle.  His room was at the eastern end of the hall next to another set of stairs descending to a foyer and to the gym—the gym where a kid was supposed to be brandishing a gun.  Every other day of his 6 ½ year career he entered on that eastern side, by the gym, but today the parking lot on that side was full because he was late.

He touched the lump in his pocket, his inhaler.  How many shots had he already pumped into his lungs?  Twelve to fifteen inhalations a day, his doctor told him, was the most he should need.  And that was after insisting Robert didn’t really need the inhaler at all.  “It’s all in your head, psychosomatic.  I’m telling you, you haven’t got asthma.”  But here were those steel bands wrapped around his chest and squeezing him like a bear hug from a steroid-pumped body builder.  He had inhaled at least five doses of Ipratropium already and it was still very early.

Halfway between the stairs and his room, he stopped again.  He’d been running to his classroom like that was the one place where order would be restored, as if there, in his refuge, he would no longer be vulnerable.  He imagined his clean, polished shoes neatly tucked under his desk, waiting for him to switch out of his slush-covered L.L. Bean boots and itchy wool socks.  He would write today’s assignments with neat, looping cursive letters on the spotless whiteboard.

“In the gym,” he said, glancing at lockers, classroom doors ajar, and rooms empty.  The kid with a gun was in the gym, at the bottom of the stairs—the stairs next to his room.  “Oh, shoot,” he said weakly and his voice echoed in the empty hallway. 

After he turned around twice, he spotted the janitor’s closet twenty feet ahead.  At the same time, he heard the gym doors slam open and then sneakers on the stairs, coming toward him.  No time to think.  He dashed for the closet, almost there, when a girl leaped over the last two steps at the end of the hall.  Robert stopped short of the mop closet.  Samantha Moretti, a sixteen-year-old student, was racing toward him as fast as her thin legs could carry her.  For that panicked moment, he thought the wide-eyed girl might crash into him, full speed.  He dropped his books at his feet and braced himself for a collision.

And then she was in his arms, hugging him.  “Mr. Gideon, I think Anthony Townsend snapped and he’s got a gun!  Oh, God!”  She buried her face in his chest, sobbing.  “Do something!”