Mr. Scott's Final Exam

The bell rang, but no one paid much attention when Mr. Scott walked in. They never did.  Balls of paper arced in the air. Students sat on desks, stood by desks, leaned on desks. Very few were in the chairs behind the desks. Less than one-fourth, maybe four or five of us out of thirty-two, bothered to face forward.

I didn’t pay Mr. Scott much attention either, I admit, but I have often visualized his next few movements in my mind’s eye: casually laying down his briefcase, he pops it open, pulls out a revolver and aims the gun at Leroy’s head.

A pencil flew through the air like a missile. Someone screamed profanity when it landed and clattered across his desk. The usual cacophony of catcalls, name-calling, and sarcasm continued, unabated by the presence of our teacher.

The shot rang out.

It blasted our eardrums and shocked us into silence. Leroy remained the most silent. A wet wound gaped where a good piece of his skull was missing, and the girl behind him had her yellow blouse blotted with fine dots of red spray. Her eyes were wide, white, and wild behind the sheen of red running down her face. I could still hear Leroy telling her, “Breanna? Shit, that girl is a bitch!”

They were not very good last words, and he would never say anything again.

The barrel of the gun swung to face all of us. I was later told it was a Colt something or other- as if I wanted to know. Leroy’s body lay on the floor, a pool of blood and gore coalescing around his broken head. The rest of us had our eyes, all sixty-two of them, glued to the most insignificant teacher of our long academic careers.

“Now that I have your attention,” Mr. Scott said in a cold voice, “why don’t you have a seat?”

I could almost hear Leroy’s sassy response: “Why don’t you suck a dick?”

Instead, Leroy was dead; no one said anything; and for the first time in recent memory, Mr. Scott’s students did as they were told. The only sound I remember is a few quiet sobs from Caroline Turlington as her shock wore off. Brian Hollows, the kid behind her, shut her up with a sharp, “You’ll get us killed!”

Once we were all seated and facing-forward, Mr. Scott flicked his eyes around the room, then motioned at a couple of boys with his gun, and said, “William. Tyler. Move that bookcase against the door.”

The bookcase was not easy to move but the guys were linebackers, and they managed to slide it against the door, the several hundred pounds of it more or less sealing us in (and any would-be heroes out). I wonder if Will and Ty considered rushing our history teacher in those few moments. Mr. Scott was not a big guy, but then again, the Colt made up for his size. Whatever went through their minds, the two boys did as they were told. Mr. Scott allowed a grim smile to curl the corners of his mouth. It was a bitter and sad smile. He slowly shook his head as if Mr. Scott was disappointed that this is what it had taken to get our attention and keep it.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said, “Now return to your seats.”

He sat on the corner of his desk for a moment, perusing us, as if seeing us for the first time. In reality, it was us who were seeing Mr. Scott for the first time, and he knew it. I realized how little I knew about him. Mr. Scott was short, probably about five-six or five-seven, and his hair was receding from his head in an outgoing tide of white, wispy waves. He wore a boring blue tie over a boring and wrinkled white shirt. His khakis, similarly wrinkled, were just as boring. He was slim with a slight paunch of stomach curving just over the waist of his belt. His face was haggard, worn, tired- the face of someone who has nothing left, and worst of all, nothing to lose. I had heard a very vague story about him being a war vet and that he was not married. It was all I could dig up from even the furthest recesses of my mind.

Mr. Scott had a well-known reputation as a push-over and as a tired old man. You could get away with anything in his class, and that’s why kids signed up for it. All the students who wanted to learn history took Mrs. Ross or Mr. Plane. Unlucky students, like myself, who didn’t sign up quick enough were placed into the leftover slots in Mr. Scott’s class. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to learn. It was more that the rest of class kept us from learning, and Mr. Scott seemed too burned out to manage his classroom effectively.

Apparently, Mr. Scott hoped to change all of that.

“I’m going to teach you the most important lesson of your lives,” Mr. Scott said, his voice breaking the nervous silence. “Have you ever had a friend die in your arms? I have. Do you know well the smell of blood and death? I do.” He paused and motioned towards Leroy. “Now you do, too. Have you ever stood on the edge of hell and peered over? In any moment, you could fall in and burn and burn and burn and die.” His eyes scanned us. “No? I’ve done that, too. Do you know the value of human life? Let me teach you.”

He did not sound crazy. He did not sound angry or happy or sad. He sounded professorial. He spoke as if he was describing the rise and fall of the Whig Party or the election of Abraham Lincoln. But unlike those other lectures, for the first time, his audience was listening.

“I am going to ask you a question, and...”

“This is bullshit!” George Cobb piped up, his Adam’s Apple bobbing. “He can’t get all of...”

The gun cut him off, and there was no more George. The thing that used to be George twitched and slowly slid down in its seat, leaving a smear of red behind it. I think it was at this point that any thought we might have had about rushing Mr. Scott or overpowering Mr. Scott or even talking Mr. Scott out of what he was doing fled our minds.

“If I am speaking then you are not,” Mr. Scott intoned and lowered the gun. My ears still buzzed with vibrations from the blast. “As I was saying,” Mr. Scott continued with a sigh, “the survivors of this ordeal will have learned a lesson unlike any other. You lucky few will walk away with knowledge most people do not have. You will be changed. This day will shape who you are for the rest of your life.”

He paused, licked his lips, and said, “But not all of you are going to make it.”

Adrenaline raced through my body, and yet I, like all of my peers, was frozen in my chair. This was not some movie, television show, or video-game. It was actually happening, and we were all part of it. It was terrifying and exciting. I could smell the blood and the discharge of the revolver. It heightened my senses.

“I’m going to ask each of you a question. If any one of you answer right, you live, and I will put this,” he waved the gun in the air, “away for good. You’ll be the hero of your classmates and classmates’ families. If you answer incorrectly, you will join Leroy and George. Think of it... as your final exam.”

A few of us shifted in our seats, the first real movement since the inglorious death of George. Mr. Scott had offered a ray of hope, a way out of this, but there was still the very real chance that we would end up dead. None of us paid much attention, no matter the lesson. The only time we hadn’t talked throughout the duration of class was when Mr. Scott showed us a war movie with the volume turned up so high, we couldn’t hear ourselves think much less each other’s voices. Come to think of it, this was also probably part of the reason no one had rushed to our aid. The sound of wall-shaking explosions often rumbled from Mr. Scott’s room when he showed his war films.

Mr. Scott’s curriculum spanned over two-hundred years of random dates and facts. He could ask us anything. Mixed with the scent of blood and smoke, I caught a hint of urine. Someone had pissed his pants.

Mr. Scott had devised a very sick way to make his point that we were poor students.

“Amy, are you ready?” Mr. Scott asked, turning to a girl seated in the front row. Amy Adams was a freckle-faced girl with a horrendous case of ADHD. She spent most of class staring at the world map posted on the wall next to her, but I doubt she could have pointed out the Atlantic Ocean if you asked her. She took a moment to peer around the room, looking for help, but all we could do was glare back at her with blank faces. Help would have to come from someplace else. We were in self-preservation mode.

If anyone had heard the gunshots, there was no indication that any help was coming or on its way. No administrator had come over the intercom, descending upon us like the voice of God. These walls were concrete. As I have already mentioned, Mr. Scott often showed us loud war films, and we were on the far side of a very large school, tucked in the back, next to a home economics class and mechanics. The sounds of pounding and whirring machinery were not uncommon in this area of the building. A kid had lost a finger at the beginning of the school year on a buzz saw, and we hadn’t even heard it happen despite the fact he screamed bloody murder all the way to the nurse’s office.

Our classroom might as well have been located in Siberia. We were just as isolated. Amy must have known that. She had no choice but to play Mr. Scott’s game. She gave a weak nod and shuddered.

“Good,” Mr. Scott said. He cleared his throat, an inane little cough that sent a chill through my skin, and he said, “Name three members of the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence.”

Amy’s lips quivered. Tears swelled in her eyes. My heart thudded in my chest, hammering my sternum. There was no way I was going to be able to take this. I would have a heart attack before he ever got to me. I wondered which way of dying would be more painful.

“Thomas... Jeff... Jefferson,” she murmured. Mr. Scott gave a nod and raised his eyebrows, waiting for the rest of her answer.

Amy’s entire body began to tremble. “Ben... ja... min.... Franklin?”

Mr. Scott said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Tell... telling you.”

“Good. One more.”

Even the desk was shivering, making arrhythmic clattering sounds on the tile floor. Amy’s hands clenched the sides of her desk top, her knuckles white. Her tongue made horrible clicking sounds in her mouth. She reminded me of a giant fish, flopping to death: out of water, out of air, out of time. Then suddenly, she stopped. Her eyes got wide, and you could just tell that the light bulb had flickered to life in her brain.

She blurted, “George Washingto...”

The Colt punctuated her answer with an exclamation point. A few of us snapped in our seats as if the bullet torn through us as well. Again, Caroline could not contain her sobs. Horrid, gaspy wheezes emanated from her chest like an asthmatic having an attack, but the rest of us held our collective breath. No one wanted to do anything that would call undue attention from Mr. Scott. For the first time in our lives, we were actually afraid of him. The Colt demanded our respect in a way our lowly little history teacher never had.

Mr. Scott’s cold eyes slowly passed over us with a mix of contempt and disappointment.  We squirmed in our seats, praying that we wouldn’t be next.

He began to speak: “You think this stuff is not important. You’d rather talk about your insignificant problems and drama all day. Conversations that won’t be relevant to anyone, not even you, by this time next week. This stuff, the stuff I talk about and teach every day, people will be talking about that for centuries after you’re nothing but weeds under a long forgotten tombstone. By that time, not even the worms will care about you. But this,” Mr. Scott tapped a textbook with the barrel of the Colt to illustrate his point, “will still be taught in every school in the world. You don’t think it’s important. Well, it’s pretty important now, isn’t it... Dane?”

As soon as Mr. Scott said the name, we all knew Dane Walsh was dead. Dane missed at least three classes a week when he skipped to smoke pot in the bathroom at the end of the hall. In fact, Dane’s brown t-shirt seemed to advertise this fact by adorning a gigantic three-leaved marijuana plant that had the bold, gray numbers “4:20” under it in a font that I think was supposed to look like smoke but looked more like intestines.

“Yes... yes, sir,” Dane said so uncomfortably that I think it was the first time in his life he had used the term “sir.” It was still the most alert I had ever heard him sound.

“Dane, your question is this: Who was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War?” Mr. Scott said. In the unbearable silence that followed, I wanted to scream the answer. It had to be one of the easiest questions that Mr. Scott planned to ask us, and I knew he had chosen Dane specifically for this reason. Dane’s bloodshot eyes flitted back-and-forth as his brain raced to come up with an answer. Jefferson Davis, you stupid stoner! I had a feeling if I said anything, or even signaled Dane in some way, it would be considered cheating, and they’d add my name to the list of the deceased on the evening news.

We all waited. The clock over the board at the front of the room audibly ticked away the last seconds of Dane’s life.

“Pass?” he said. To no one’s surprise, his last words were brain-dead.

“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Scott said, walked down the aisle, and fired the revolver into Dane’s right eye. This time, only one or two of us jumped. The fact that we expected or were becoming accustomed to the sound was almost as horrible as the sound itself. As Mr. Scott walked past our desks, one of us could have put out a foot and tripped him or flung out an arm to deflect the gun or knock it out of his hand, but none of us did. I think part of it was that we were terrified, and part of it was that we had been raised to be voyeurs, seeing all kinds of violence and sex, but we never understood or participated in any of it. In fact, I am sure some of us would have pulled out our cell phones and/or digital cameras and recorded the whole event if we thought we could get away with it. No one did.

Quincy Wood leaned over the side of his desk and retched, a stream of vomit exploding from his mouth and splattering across the tile floor. I couldn’t blame the guy. The smell of blood overwhelmed all other senses. I could taste something coppery in the back of my throat as if some had gotten in my mouth.

One or two other girls joined Caroline by weeping quietly, but I could not take my eyes off Mr. Scott. He demanded our attention. If you didn’t give it to him, it was like strapping a bull’s-eye across your chest.

As if proving this thought, Mr. Scott said, “Thank you for volunteering to go next, Quincy.”

Fifteen seconds later, Quincy was dead. Mr. Scott’s posed question was irrelevant; only its consequence mattered. A glob of something from Quincy’s head landed with a splat on the corner of my desk: an eye. I don’t know why, but this affected me in a way nothing else had so far. For a moment, I could do nothing but stare at it. The black pupil peered lifelessly back, and I had trouble imagining that it had resided in Quincy Wood’s skull only moments ago. As it quivered before me, I felt my sanity pitch, caught in a vortex swirling within the shiny pupil; suddenly I was spinning in a funnel and sinking fast. At its core, a mindless void waited. It yawned with anticipation, and I knew that if I fell in, there would be no escape. 

The sound of another shot hurled me back to reality with a gut-wrenching yank. Reality hit me square on the chin like a right-hook from God himself, but it was the sound of Caroline’s shivery gasps of air that nailed my feet firmly to the floor. Someone else had failed a question, and I was lucky that I had not been called on while lost in La-La Land. I heard the sound of blood pit-pattering onto the tile floor somewhere to my left.

I forced my eyes away from the staring horror on my desk, trained them on Mr. Scott, and kept them there.

We watched in silence as Mr. Scott reloaded the revolver. Again, thinking back on it, this was a moment when some of us could have gone for the gun or we could have overcome him with sheer numbers, but instead, we sat and watched and waited for him to ask us a question. Maybe we all knew that we were due our punishment.

Kids liked to joke that it was only a matter of time before Mr. Scott snapped. The amount of nonsense shoveled upon him daily would have suffocated any self-respecting human weeks or months or years before. In fact, his actions were painfully understandable. Some of us had secretly rooted for a day like this when Mr. Scott would finally grow a pair and put some of the jackasses in our class in their place.

He finished reloading the Colt. I hoped I was not the next jackass.

“Nathan Welty,” Mr. Scott said, and we started all over again. A parade of variably easy and complicated questions was followed by the dumbfounded dead.

The ritual went on without exception: Name. Question. Death.

Clay Fielding. What explorer, Indian fighter, hunter of bears, and militia member was elected as a state legislator and later as a United States Congressman? Bang!

Suzie Walker. What president only served thirty-one days in office? Bang!

Ronnie Martinez. What tragic event took place on March 16, 1968? Bang!

Time could not save us. Our school had this stupid block scheduling that stuck us in mind-numbing, ninety-minute classes. Seconds spread into minutes, minutes into hours. Plenty of time remained for us all to die before the bell would ring.

The room reeked of blood, sweat, and desperation. Paranoia crept over me and whispered disturbing thoughts into my ear. Despite our position in the building, the fact that Mr. Scott showed war movies, and the sound-buffing concrete walls, I found it hard to believe that no one had heard what has happening. Why had no one come? Did they know what was going on in here? Were they letting it happen? I imagined the principal in his office- smiling under his Teddy-Roosevelt-mustache as he heard shot after shot ring out, thinking to himself that yes, Mr. Scott was owed this after years of dedicated service to the school, maybe the kids would learn after Scott set this example, oh well, I wonder if the Yankees will pull it off this year- absurd thoughts for an absurd situation.

Six students down (the last being Tyler, one of the guys who had moved the bookcase against the door), Mr. Scott paused once more to reload the gun. Did our class know nothing? One by one, Mr. Scott was proving that we were, in fact, the ignorant fools we appeared to be. The emotional roller coaster dipped again as paranoia gave way to anger. Horrified at what was happening to us, I also knew we deserved it. Or did we? Did anyone deserve to have his or her life staked over the answer to a high school American History question? The stakes seemed terribly fair. One right answer by any student would set us free, and we couldn’t do it.

“Kelli Vandermeyer,” Mr. Scott said as though calling role. I breathed a guilty sigh of relief, as did the rest of the class in joy-slash-horror. With the exception of Kelli, of course; instead, she froze like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. A pair of earbuds dangled from her ears, the wires snaking and disappearing into the neck of a grey hoodie.

Honestly, I was surprised that Mr. Scott had waited so long to call on Kelli. I had heard more emo-crap emanating from her earbuds than Mr. Scott’s voice all year. She had become lost in the depressing soundtrack of her life and not just in Mr. Scott’s class. The girl never pulled the damned things out of her ears for anyone or anything.

Mr. Scott walked over to her, his scuffed shoes clicking on the floor, and he took care to step over a puddle of blood growing on the floor by Quincy’s desk. With his free hand, he reached out and plucked the earbud from Kelli’s left ear.

“Kelli, did you hear me?” he intoned. The tears glistening in her eyes showed us all that she had.

I’d had a crush on Kelli in sixth grade. She had long curly brown hair, pale green eyes, a a bright smile, and she seemed heartbreakingly sweet. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her smile. When she’d started turning inward, eyes downcast, earbuds throbbing emo tunes, kids spread rumors that her home life had gone bad, but the specifics were always vague. I held the opinion that her friends were probably more at fault for the change in personality, especially the set of uptight harpies she used to chum around with before her change of heart and she went solo. For whatever reason, Kelli had cut herself off from the world, and Mr. Scott had just forced her back into it.

The corners of Kelli’s mouth twitched as she looked upon at Mr. Scott and the revolver.

“Are you with me?” Mr. Scott asked. Something in his tone, a hint of concern, gave me the notion that he hoped that Kelli would provide us with an answer and that he had no real desire to end her life. For a moment, they regarded each other in silence, and I could hear the whine of some overly paid singer croon from the speakers of her displaced earbud.

“Yes,” she said, and a wet diamond streaked down her face. Curls of her brown hair framed her face under the shadowy hood, and I felt an ache in my stomach, shades of my old feeling for her. I realized that I already missed her, believing her death inevitable. The girl hated life; why would she give up this opportunity to leave it?

The whole situation, caught in Mr. Scott’s web of scholastic doom, had set me upon a wild roller coaster of emotional ups and downs- the ups being the hope of rescue or a correctly answered question and the downs being the witness to a dozen murders- with which my mind and thoughts could not keep up. A million voices shouted contradictory arguments in my head, and then Mr. Scott silenced them all by speaking.

“Kelli, what two presidents have been impeached?”

The question hung in the air, waiting to be answered- another easy one.

“Mike Tyson and Bugs Bunny,” Kelli responded immediately. I opened my mouth to cry out; to tell her that her life was too priceless to give away; people would miss her; I would miss her; she had no right to leave us behind or to throw away our lives because she didn’t value hers; a cavalcade of sentences converged at one time in my mouth, but they were all drowned out by the report of the gun.

Kelli’s neck snapped back, her hoodie flew off, and pretty curls of brown hair clung to the wall behind her in smeared red splotches. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. A flash of sixth grade Kelli overcame me with stunning clarity- her in a pink sundress, her hair straightened in a ponytail, lips pink with glossy lipstick and spread in a smile over a set of shining white teeth, the most beautiful girl I had known.

Dead.

You did this, I wanted to shout at the others in the room. It was you! You turned Kelli into a introverted, emotional wreck with your hateful spite and rumors, and you took Mr. Scott and pushed him over the edge, and we’re all here because you’re a set of... fucking... spoiled... worthless... bitches!

I stress I wanted to shout. In reality, I did not. I sat there in impotent rage, my heart pounding Keith Moon drum solos in my ears, and I waited for Mr. Scott to turn and sentence me with a question. I heard someone murmuring, and it wasn’t until Mr. Scott bent over and retrieved the iPod did I realize it was music. The melodious voice echoing from the abandoned earbuds sounded ghostly, a symbol of Kelli’s hurt even after she had found peace, or so I hoped she had. Either way, I felt grateful when Mr. Scott shut off the device.

Our eyes met for a moment, Mr. Scott’s stony grays and my caramel browns, and I felt like a convict caught in the blinding white glare of a prison searchlight during the midst of an escape. His gaze continued past me, and it took me a moment to relax the white-knuckled hands clenching the edges of my desktop. I had been pardoned. For now.

Something in Mr. Scott’s expression lingered on my mind, however. A sadness weighed his face; the corners of his mouth curled down; his brow furrowed; the salt-and-pepper eyebrows arched ever so slightly over a set of cool and dim eyes; he had appeared almost disappointed about Kelli’s failure. I had a terrible feeling that Mr. Scott was not doing all of this out of revenge but out of some greater, deeper need. The feeling grew in the pit of my stomach and spread with sinewy tendrils over me until it became realization: Mr. Scott sincerely believed he was giving us his last and greatest lesson.

“Francis Horn,” Mr. Scott said, his face drawn. Five minutes and five failed questions later, five more students were motionless on the slick floor or were huddled limply over their desks.

One of the last questions had been: “Who served as Washington’s vice-president and was also the second president of the United States?”

We’d even spent a day watching a video about the biography of John Adams. But my fellow classmate racked his brain for indeterminate amount of time (which seemed like a few hours but couldn’t have been but a few seconds) before coming up with: “Benjamin Franklin?” 

I wanted to lean back into my chair and burst into laughter. The whole thing was ridiculous and horrible and pathetic: a black comedy for the ages. And at any moment, the joke would be on me. My tongue lay dry and thick in my mouth like a sausage left out on the stove overnight. Stick a fork in me, I’m done!

A giggle rose from the base of my throat, but I forced the urge away by biting hard on my bottom lip. I tasted blood, but it was a small price to pay for keeping my sanity. Like a dog on a leash, it kept trying to skitter away, and I had to yank it back to me with a gnash of my teeth and a twist of my hand. Slowly but surely, I was losing my grip.

I couldn’t bear to move my sneakers because doing so resulted in a sickening squish. A layer of blood a few centimeters thick deepened on the floor. We waited. Eight of us left. Mr. Scott reloaded.

“Caroline Turlington,” he said, and my heart leapt. Caroline was our last best chance at redemption. Like me, she had been placed into Mr. Scott’s class because the slots had been filled in the other classes. Her family had planned to move to California, but apparently, her dad had received an offer from his company that could not be refused and the family stayed. By the time Caroline had registered for school, all the best teachers were over-scheduled.

So here she was, looking down the barrel of a revolver at Mr. Scott, her dopey dorky history teacher. How many times had I heard Caroline complain about her worthless teacher in her worthless history class who knew less than she did about anything there was to know? Too many times to count. But her whiny complaints in the lunch room overshadowed a drive that could not be deterred for any reason, and I knew that she would take even as hopeless a class as this one more seriously than she let on. Which all boiled down to the simple fact that Caroline, out of all of us, was the most capable of answering any question Mr. Scott might set upon her.

Caroline squeaked, and Mr. Scott must have taken that as a sign of recognition because he asked, “In what year did the United States enter World War I?”

She knew this. I knew she knew this. After this, I would forgive her all the lunchtime rants when she whined about how stupid everything was and how all her teachers didn’t know what they were doing and she couldn’t wait until she could get back into Honors and all the other crap she put us through day after day after day. I wouldn’t make fun of her Disney princess t-shirts, and I’d finally laugh at the corny jokes she obviously lifted off popsicle sticks.

All she had to do was sit there and say in her little haughty, know-it-all-voice, “1917.” That simple, then we could all go free.

Caroline sat there, eyeballs shivering in the sockets like electrified marbles, but when her mouth opened, no sound came out.

“Caroline?” Mr. Scott said. “I need an answer.”

“I... I...” she stuttered, and my brain roared: yes, yes, do it, Caroline!

“... can’t,” she finished with a body-shaking sob. We were all going to die.

Mr. Scott lifted the revolver, and as his finger tightened on the trigger, I saw something happen that had never happened before in the history of Mr. Scott’s American History. A hand went up.

Mr. Scott blinked, caught by surprise. He did not seem to know what to do, and he took a few seconds to simply look at the hand poised in the air. The rest of did the same. We stared at the hand much like those glimpsing the first rocket ship to lift off to penetrate the uncharted recesses of space. The hand, as most hands are, was attached to an arm, and the arm was attached to Bobby Gomez, better known as Bogo.

Leroy had started the nickname, Bogo. Leroy said that “Bogo” sounded like a name for someone’s severely retarded brother, the kind socially-conscious parents would lock up in a basement or attic, somewhere out of sight for the sake of the general populace. This was the type of kid that Bobby Gomez reminded him of with his elementary school bowl-cut, a body that would make Shamu feel skinny, and outrageous body odor. Bogo couldn’t walk past you in the hall without you tasting your lunch for the second time as you tried to keep it down. As Leroy made these observations, directly in front of Bobby, the other kids in class did not disagree. They took up this nickname and ran with it like athletes confidently passing on the Olympic torch. Leroy made his speech- which was in the middle of Mr. Scott’s history class, of course- while Bogo looked back at Leroy with an air of bored indifference and shrugged.

Bogo did not seem to care about anyone or anything, and this kind of person threatened Leroy because if you did not laugh at Leroy’s jokes then you had a problem, or so Leroy assumed and pointed out to everyone around him. Now Bogo was alive and Leroy was dead, and all that nonsense seemed so trivial it made me want to throw my desk against the wall.

Bogo’s hand remained in the air until Mr. Scott said, “Yes, Mr. Gomez?” All the other teachers had started called him Bogo, so even then there was still something in Mr. Scott that I felt sorry for.

“May I answer, please?” Bogo asked. A hopeful silence followed that was only broken by a quiet whimper from Caroline. I wanted to lean over and slap her. I thought about those  who had died, Kelli especially, and I cursed myself that it had taken the kid nicknamed “Bogo” for Christ’s sake to think to raise his hand to a question that he knew the answer. That is, if he did actually know the answer.

Mr. Scott rubbed his chin with the barrel of the gun as he considered Bogo’s request. A certain light had returned to Mr. Scott’s stormy grey eyes, a luminescence that I had never seen there before, and a hint of a strange smile upturned the corners of his mouth. I knew from his expression what Mr. Scott’s answer would be, and I wondered how many long years he had waited for someone to ask him the question that Bogo had just posed.

“Yes, you may answer,” Mr. Scott said, and for once, I thought he sounded like a real teacher. His voice held strong and confident. He stood tall, taller than his height would have seemed to allow. This was what Mr. Scott had wanted all along- a student.

“1917,” Bogo answered in his husky, girlish voice.

“Yes.”  A long pause followed as we all waited for a reaction from Mr. Scott. He seemed to be quietly pleased. He nodded. “Yes, that is right. You may go,” he said.

It couldn’t be over. Not just like that. Could it?

When we just sat there in shocked silence, he reiterated, “All of you. Go.”

We gathered our things like zombies in slow motion. I dared not make eye contact with anyone else, not until we were down the hall and out of sight of Mr. Scott’s room. I slung my backpack over my shoulders, made my way to the front, and with the help of Brian Hollows and Bogo, we managed to get the bookshelf pushed away enough from the door so we could get out. Our shoes squished under us, and Brian almost slipped and would have fallen if Wendy Kuhn had not been there to grab his elbow. The last humiliation of the day would have been to cover ourselves in the liquid remnants of our classmates’ failure.

A hand came down on Bogo’s shoulders, and for a split second, I thought Mr. Scott had changed his mind. I half-expected Bogo’s brains to explode out of the front of his forehead, but instead, Mr. Scott appeared at his side, looked him in the eye, and said, “Thank you.”

Bogo nodded in reply. Mr. Scott regarded him for a moment and then gave us all a final look. My blood went cold as he came to me. I felt my body clench. Then his gaze moved on, and I could breathe again. His sleeves rolled up, tie crooked, skin dotted with blood, Mr. Scott looked weary but satisfied. He kept the gun in a steely grip in one hand. After running his eyes over us, Mr. Scott patted Bogo on the shoulder and turned away.

We let the girls out first, Caroline still sobbing like a baby, and then we followed, first Brian, William, then Bogo, then me. I was the last one, and as I left, I heard Mr. Scott repeat in a whisper, “Thank you.”

As I crept out, I chanced a glance behind me. Mr Scott sat behind his cluttered desk, feet propped up on the history textbook that lay on it. He leaned back in his chair and stared down into the barrel of the gun, and that strange smile had spread from ear-to-ear in a Joker’s grin. I turned away and knew that face would haunt me for a long, long time, and we were all to blame for it.

We were halfway down the empty hall- apparently, no had heard the hell that we had just been put through- when the final shot echoed past us. The sound had an eerie finality.

Bogo looked back, frowned, and said, “Class dismissed.”