Everyday Dagaz: teachers

The new biology teacher, Mr. Basanov, was hopeless. Amelia sat at the front of the classroom and watched him duck his head, avoiding students' gazes while he pretended to rifle through his stack of notes. Amelia was by no means a queen bee, but she was popular for a reason. She was good at reading people. And she heard, loud and clear, the tale told by every twitch of his hands, bunch of his shoulders.

After the bell rang and the door was closed, the students settled down. There were several new teachers this year. Amelia had heard that Mr. O'Neill, the new teacher, was smokin' hot. 

Mr. Basanov lifted his head, cleared his throat. "Good morning. This is ninth grade biology." He paused. "Since none of you have bolted from the room, I presume you are all in the right place."

"Don't you mean assume?" That was Trevor Conley. He walked the fine like between class clown and class bully. "You know what they say about assuming."

Mr. Basanov blinked, taken aback, then averted his gaze. "Let's start with roll call."

He was tentative with the pronunciations but did better than some teachers, accepted nicknames a little too passively. Then he scooped up the stack of syllabi. It was the first of many for Amelia. 

They were blue and photocopied and stapled neatly. Mr. Basanov had worried the edges of the first one with his nervous fidgeting and the sides were curled and creased. 

He thrust the stack at Trevor, who grinned and leaned back, didn't take it. 

"Take one and pass it on, please," Mr. Basanov said. He held the papers out again. 

Trevor reached out. Mr. Basanov tried to hand the papers to him, but Trevor closed his hand into a fist at the last second and the papers hit the floor. Mr. Basanov flinched and knelt, started scooping them up. 

Trevor kicked some papers out of his reach. "You know our names, but we don't know yours. That's not fair."

"I'm Tobias - I mean. You probably shouldn't call me that. I'm Mr. Basanov." He scooped up some more papers. He might have been cute, if Amelia were into skinny, pale men with sharp features, vulpine dark eyes and fluffy, disheveled dark hair. He looked too young to be a teacher. That was probably because he was the same age as actors who played teenagers on TV. 

"Tobias," Trevor said, emphasizing the sibilance of the last syllable. "You were a nerdy, unpopular kid in high school, weren't you?"

Mr. Basanov's response was muffled from below desk level. "I was."

"How did that work out for you?"

"Well --" Mr. Basanov popped up onto his feet, mess of papers in hand. He began straightening them with long, graceful fingers. "One day after school a group of football players attacked me with a baseball bat. Terribly cliché. Put me in the hospital. And then one day after school they were torn apart by a pack of wolves and now here I am, your biology teacher." He handed the stack of syllabi to Trevor, whose mouth was hanging open. "Take one, pass them on."

Trevor obeyed. 

Amelia watched Mr. Basanov for the rest of class, the don't-look-at-me hunch to his shoulders, the don't-notice-me dart of his gaze, the don't-hit-me of his posture, and wondered if there wasn't something else beneath. 

At lunch, she saw him with Mr. O'Neill, supervising the chaos of the cafeteria. Amelia and her friends had staked out the table closest to the teachers' regular post so she could get her fill of looking at Mr. O'Neill. Tall, lean, ice-blond, blue-eyed, with a face Pygmalion would have died to carve and died again to animate, the new art teacher was stunning. 

He was, also, apparently friends with Mr. Basanov. 

"You actually told them that?"

"I told you, I was never meant to be a teacher, or any other authority figure."

"What did they say?"

"Nothing."

"Man, if you get reported on the first day --"

"I won't get reported. It's not like I told them I can turn into a wolf and I took the first chunk out of the running back."

"Good point."