Cerealmancers - Ch. 1

Cerealmancers Chapter 1 Audio

The last day of school arrived like an appendectomy—too late to prevent the pain and misery, but just in time to keep anything from exploding. Mr. Forrester had been teaching for nearly two decades and the feeling he would burst before the end of May came on stronger and stronger each year. He knew he was probably just becoming an old fart, and teachers had been saying it since the profession sprung into existence, but kids these days were monsters. Impossible to teach monsters. Sure, every generation loudly proclaimed the cultural downfall of the youth and could point to the latest boogeyman. In the nineties, they had blamed rap music and video games. In the roaring twenties, they had blamed jazz and flapper dresses. But over the last seven or eight years he had watched the internet and smartphones transform his students into a different beast altogether. Like going from a werewolf to Cerberus.

On top of the students, and much worse, was the attitude toward education put forth by the district. In lockstep with the rest of the country, the number one priority was testing. As if more time testing knowledge instead of acquiring knowledge would somehow lift graduation rates. In reality, it meant they stole prep time from the teachers, crammed in additional instruction time, and expected teachers to still get their jobs done. Never mind that all the testing meant more documentation. In order to stay on top, teachers had to work through lunch, stay late, or bring work home with them. Often all three. And in Oklahoma, they did it for less pay than almost any other state in the union.

A knock at his classroom door alerted Mr. Forrester to the fact he had been staring at the chalkboard in a daze of bitterness. Again. He shook his head and opened the door, swinging the doorstop into place with his left foot.

“Good morning, Breakfast Club,” Mr. Forrester said to the three students waiting in the hallway, clutching boxes of cereal.

The three friends could not have been more different. Vince was tall, broad shouldered, and muscular in a way only student athletes get. He was a member of Broken Arrow’s depressingly small percentage of black students, a fact Mr. Forrester couldn’t help being mindful of when Vince was the only student of color in a sea of white faces. In class, he was outgoing, loud, and a diligent student, never coasting on his reputation as the star quarterback of the football team.

Barrett, whose messy, curly hair hid the fact it was poorly cut, was a scrawny little nerd with a never-ending supply of comic book t-shirts, which Mr. Forrester could relate to as a former scrawny little nerd. Now at forty-one, he veered toward pudgy, balding little nerd. But that was the natural evolution of the things.

And then there was Sam. Always in a dark hoodie with torn jeans and little striped gloves with the fingers cut off. She brought with her a cloud of Febreeze that couldn’t quite cover up the weed smell, like a depressing look at what Pigpen from Peanuts would grow into. She, like so many other students, had a hard situation at home. It showed in her appearance and demeanor, but she had nearly perfect attendance and decent grades.

Though the three teenagers were different, they had been friends since sixth grade, when those differences mattered less. They had all been in his class in ninth grade and he remembered being surprised until they explained it to him. When tenth grade rolled around, they came to him and asked if they could meet up in his classroom once a week for breakfast before school. Because of their different academic focuses, they no longer shared a class or a lunch period. Breakfast once a week was the best they could do to spend time together at school. Mr. Forrester admired that they stuck together when so many would have let the pressures of high school force them apart. That alone would have been enough for him to say yes. Then Barrett had said, “Yeah, we’ll be like that old movie The Breakfast Club!” At which point Mr, Forrester had to explain that A) Citizen Kane was an old movie, The Breakfast Club was not, thank you very much and B) The Breakfast Club was about Saturday detention, not friends eating cereal before school.

So even though that had hurt his soul, Mr. Forrester agreed and The Breakfast Club was born. They had met every week through their sophomore year and with today’s meeting they will have done the same through their junior year. It was crazy to think these kids were going to be seniors. He still thought of them as their fresh faced ninth grade selves.

“You’ll have to make room at the back table near the window,” Mr. Forrester said. He had rows of equipment and chemicals on all the tables as part of his last day ritual of having the students help him count his inventory.

“No problem, Mr. F,” Vince said, dropping his stuff into a chair and gently pushing open a space on the table. Sam and Barrett moved a large portion of the chemicals and supplies to the window sill.

“I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it today,” Mr. Forrester said. “With it being the last day and all.”

“You kidding?” Barrett said. “We’d drop our streak. Can’t have that kind of karma hanging over us.”

“Yep, we’re here rain or shine,” Vince said.

“Speaking of rain,” Sam mumbled from the confines of her hood. “Can we crack the windows a little? It’s hot in here.”

Outside the rain came down in windy sheets, accompanied by the rumble of thunder and the occasional flash of lightning. A typical Oklahoma thunderstorm to end the year on. Sam was right, it was hot in the room. His biology class was on the second story and the school skimped on air conditioning like it was a teacher’s salary.

“Go ahead and pop the window,” Mr. Forrester said, shifting back behind his desk. Maybe the smell of rain would overpower Sam’s Febreeze aura.

“Still got our milk?” Vince asked.

“Kept it just to be safe,” Mr. Forrester said, nodding to the little fridge under his desk. Forrester had convinced the school to pay for the fridge to hold cold samples of experiments. He did use it that way for two weeks of the year, but the rest of the time it was home for his lunch, a steady supply of Diet Pepsi, and The Breakfast Club’s milk. Today, the fridge was empty except for the milk, in preparation for the end of the year.

Vince came around the long desk to retrieve the milk and take it to their table. Then the tinkling of cereal pouring into bowls filled the air, followed by the steady crunch of mouthfuls just a bit too large. Mr. Forrester let the kids settle in. They would be fully awake in a few minutes and start talking in a rush of animated exclamations as they caught up. It always made him smile. They were a reminder of the good part of teaching. Seeing how bright and funny and interesting so many of these kids could be if they were given the space to show it.

Mr. Forrester knew he had a reputation as a hard-ass. That reputation scared some kids from signing up for his class, preferring to attend Mr. Weiss’s class, where things were sillier. Weiss was known to thwack the desk of sleeping students with a dead eel that had been sealed in plastic for observation.

Forrester relied on discipline and high expectations. He believed students would rise to the level of expectations you set and for the most part he was right. There were always a few stubborn holdouts each year but for the most part, he got his students to buy in. By the end of the year, the students who had complained at the beginning of the year often thanked him. Because while he set nightly reading targets and weekly quizzes and notorious tests, he also trained the students on how to take notes and study. Those skills tended to blend over into other classes.

That was what made Forrester the happiest, knowing he was setting his students up for success in their academic life. Few of the kids who came through his class would ultimately go into careers where they needed to know biology. It was a graduation requirement and a worthy one in Forrester’s opinion, to teach students about the world around them. But it was certainly a background class, providing a basic understanding so that fifteen years from now they could say “oh yeah, I have a vague understanding of how mitochondria work.” Which was all well and good. The skills of discipline, learning hard things, studying, and following through on high expectations, those were skills they would use forever.

In the last few years, it had felt increasingly hard to impart those lessons. The students seemed less focused, with phones buzzing in their pockets and backpacks. And the demands of testing made it harder to stick to his personal curriculum. He’d always had the mantra of if he could reach one kid in each class—just one—his job was worth it. That task felt so much harder now.

Mr. Forrester rubbed at his eyes. He was tired. Emotionally and physically. All he had to do was make it through this one day. He could do that.

“I’m going to walk over to Building B for some coffee,” Mr. Forrester announced. The caffeine would help for sure but more than anything he needed to move, stretch his legs. A walk always helped curb his anxiety. “Don’t start dissecting frogs or anything while I’m gone.”

“Aw man,” Barrett said. “You know I love the kick of formaldehyde in the morning.”

“Yeah and there’s nothing like the insides of another creature to make you feel alive,” Sam said.

“You weirdos are the reason I have to keep these cabinets locked up,” Mr. Forrester said, shaking his head in mock seriousness. He gave a dismissive wave and walked out the door. He trotted down the steps and opened the door to the stormy elements.

His building, Building M, was on the opposite corner of campus from Building B, the administration building with the teacher’s lounge. Broken Arrow High School was a sprawling assembly of buildings labeled A through O. When you looked up the school on Google Maps it looked like a community college. The buildings made a large rectangle with the library nestled in the middle and two expansive grassy courtyards on either side of the library. Covered walkways connected the buildings, though they only got used on days like today. For the most part, students crisscrossed the lawn, taking the hypotenuse route to their next class.

Mr. Forrester stuck to the walkways, keeping almost dry. The occasional gust of wind sent horizontal rain rushing under the protective awnings. It was still early enough that the walkways were a trickle of students rather than the torrential onslaught of the passing periods. He watched as almost every student walked by with their face illuminated by their phones. Even in groups, they often huddled together, eyes on devices and sharing the occasional bit of laughter. Mr. Forrester remembered the chaos of his earlier years teaching. Students running around, never shutting up, someone always—always!—shouting inexplicably. He had prayed for silence. A little bit of peace. He hadn’t realized how eerie it would be when that wish came true.

Mr. Forrester knew he sounded suspiciously like Old Man Yells At Cloud from The Simpsons. He tried not to be a curmudgeon. He really did. But even the fact he used the word curmudgeon meant he was halfway there. The harsh truth was that he was burnt out when it came to teaching. For nineteen years, he had given his best shot. He’d put the time and effort in to make it a close fight, but teaching was Apollo Creed and he was Rocky Balboa. In the first movie. A great effort but not enough to beat the champ. Like Rocky, he took a substantial moral victory from the fact he had stood in the ring and taken his lumps. Unlike the Italian Stallion, Forrester was not eager to get back in and take more.

After next year, he was done. Throwing in the towel at twenty years. He was grandfathered in and would be able to retire. Now teachers had to go another five years. He could only imagine the requirement going up. It was so hard to find teachers willing to work in Oklahoma they had to do what they could to hold onto the ones they had. Which was probably going to lead to a bunch of bitter old teachers, mentally checked out and doing almost more harm than good. Mr. Forrester saw it happening already and didn’t want to be one of them.

He made it to Building B and shuffled into the teacher’s lounge, where a pot of sad Folger’s coffee perpetually lingered. Typically, Mr. Forrester eschewed the limp imitation of coffee for his Diet Pepsi but that was all at home now. He could conceivably use the vending machine but it felt wrong to pay for soda at work. Plus the machine had a tendency to eat bills. Grabbing a paper cup, he poured from the coffee pot, leaving room for cream and stevia. He preferred coffee black when the quality demanded it. This however was merely a caffeine delivery mechanism. The cream and stevia would make it a palatable one.

The reason Mr. Forrester needed the extra boost of caffeine, other than just being a teacher who made it through another year, was that he was taking night classes. Pre-med courses so that when he retired he could go to med school. Hopefully, he’d then go on to a research institution but he could also see himself happily going into family practice. It had seemed a little crazy at first, starting med school in his forties. His wife had said so even while fully supporting him. One of the many wonderful attributes of his wife was that she put up with whatever nonsense dreams he had. The idea had started as just that, a nonsense dream, but his wife had said “Why not?” and the question hung around for weeks. But then he’d watched a student superglue his hand to a door and realized many of the knuckleheads he was teaching would go to medical school. It would take them a little longer but in say, eight years would he rather have one of these doofuses as his doctor or a fifty-year-old former biology teacher who was now a few years out of med school? That settled it for him and he enrolled.

The work was hard but rewarding. He loved learning. The long, tired days felt worth it now that he was aiming at something. A goal beyond mere survival. It had honestly reinvigorated his teaching, a side effect he was happily surprised by.

Mr. Forrester finished fixing his coffee and headed back out into the storm. With the warm coffee working through him and the promise of a caffeine boost in the near future, his gaze softened on the students he passed. Yes, many had their phones out but quite a few didn’t. They were just kids doing the best they could in the world the previous generations had left them. After a particularly close lightning strike, the boom on its heels loud enough to make Mr. Forrester spill a few drops of coffee, a few delighted shrieks and shouts filled the courtyard like old times. And just like that, some sips of coffee and a stroll in the elements, and things felt okay again. Mr. Forrester smiled into his cup. We are far less complicated than we want to believe, he thought.

He rounded the library and a large flash of light accompanied by a deafening roar brought him to a sudden halt. Blinking away the after images, he realized he had spilled a significant portion of his coffee on himself. Before he could consider how easily futures turn and the role a cup of coffee can play in determining the quality of your day, he heard screams. Not the shrieks of startled joy.

Terror.

Coming from Building M.

He started walking faster, sloshing coffee over the sides of his cup. Then he broke into a run. As he burst through the doors of the building, the fire alarm blared to life. Students and faculty streamed out of the building, pushing against Mr. Forrester, turning him into a salmon swimming upstream.

A crowd of teachers and students surrounded his room. He pushed roughly through and stared in disbelief. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Thick smoke filled the air, streaming into the hallway. Tables were overturned. Little fires sprung up in four or five places. In a panic, Mr. Forrester turned to the thinning crowd.

“Did they make it out?” Mr. Forrester asked. “Vince, Barrett, and Sam. Did they make it out?”

“There were kids in there?” Someone said, horror filling their voice.

“We didn’t see anyone,” someone else said. Followed shortly by “We have to get out of here, this isn’t safe.”

Mr. Forrester had stopped listening. His heart thumped in his ears, a bass counterpoint to the fire alarm. He considered the smoke for a half second. Then he plunged inside.