Fanatics

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A LONG TIME AGO, when my grade eight teacher got so fed up with my behaviour that she kicked me out of class, she had no idea-she was so knotted with anger she wouldn’t have cared-that her outburst of frustration would lead to a crime.

Mrs. Sykes was cursed with wide, wet rubbery lips. When she talked, water gathered in the corners of her mouth and her lips shone with moisture. If she was irritated, as she was that day, the spit machine went into high gear and produced a tiny rainstorm that made you feel as if you’d stuck your head out a car window on a drizzly day.

“Go away!” she shouted.

The classroom door slammed in my face. I shrugged my shoulders, wiped my cheeks and forehead on my sleeve, and ambled down the hall to the library. Mrs. Tanner greeted me with a sour, unsympathetic look and heaved her bulky body from her chair behind the checkout desk. Muttering that this was the third time in a month, she thrust an old book with a blue cloth cover into my hands and ordered me to sit in the corner farthest from her desk but still in her line of vision.

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