Running for Home - 18. October 21, 2021

October 21, 2021

Well, it happened. That big blow-up between some of the students that Emma had predicted finally came to a head yesterday. I still have shit for luck, apparently, because it started right outside my classroom. I heard the yelling starting so I went out into the hall. I don’t know which one started it, and I don’t really care, either. That’s Emma and Sean’s problem. So I get out there just as one of the kids surrounds his body in flames and starts tossing them at the other guy. I made them wink out of existence and got their attention. Apparently fire punk was too much of a hot-head (ha ha ha!) to know what was good for him or at the very least who he was dealing with and turned up his fire production and started tossing that shit at me.

I took away all his fire, including all flames he was generating around his own body. He was looking at me in shock, then started getting more and more pissed off as he realized that he couldn’t even make any more flames because I wouldn’t let him. I took complete control and actually removed the very possibility of flames existing in that area. I smirked and told him to stand down.

I was too fucking cocky. The other student chose that moment to charge in at the other kid. I managed to get myself between the two, but this one wasn’t going to stop just because I was there. I told him to back away, but he just yelled something about never listening to a stupid Brotherhood terrorist. He threw a few punches that I dodged and then I managed to trip him. While he was still on the ground I started yelling at him to calm the fuck down and back away, but he grabbed me by the foot and threw me aside so hard that I flew through the wall. I guess I cracked the back of my head off the ground on the way down. My vision was washing in and out, my head was ringing, but I heard something, a familiar voice through the ringing. There were hands on me, coolness, but I passed out.

Fuck, I still have a massive headache. Cecilia – Dr. Reyes, I should say – said that I should heal up fine, but I should avoid future concussions. No shit, Sherlock. It’s not like I was aiming to make a new door to my classroom when I tried to break up that fight. This is at minimum my second really bad concussion, the first being from when Bobby headbutted me unconscious on Alcatraz. I’d had a bad headache for a couple days that time, but nothing like this one. I probably had at least one other concussion when I… from the time in Iraq. I don’t know. Very few of them spoke English, and they didn’t particularly give a fuck about my health, just getting information out of me. Among the many fun activities they did with me, they beat the shit out of me. Repeatedly. Almost every day for a while, until they realized it wasn’t working. Even after that, they didn’t completely stop.

The headache was worse when I first woke up today than it is now. I’ve got some strong-ass pain killers, but they aren’t quite enough to do the job. I just took the next dose, so hopefully I’ll be okay to sleep. I do have sleeping pills too, though. I hope I won’t need them. I don’t like putting any of this shit in my body if I don’t absolutely have to.

When I regained consciousness after the fight, my vision swam a bit before I could focus on the clock. Only about a half hour had passed. Even though I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, I tried to sit up anyway. I groaned because the world started to spin. Before I even had a chance to lay back down, suddenly Bobby’s there on top of me pushing me back down on the bed and yelling at me about how stupid I was.

I wasn’t exactly in the right headspace at that moment, between the spinning of the room and the headache, and I just ended up lying there in this horrible nausea as Bobby ranted away at me. About how typical it was of me to try and handle everything by myself and not call for help when I needed it. About how completely wrong I read the situation, and how he couldn’t believe that after all my years of combat experience I managed to fuck up that badly. About how another student got injured when that dickhead threw me through the wall. About the cost of the repairs to said wall.

I sat up to try and defend myself but in a blissful turn of events my stomach chose that moment to heave. I vomited my entire lunch all over Bobby’s stomach, down his pants and onto his shoes. He stared at me incredulously, breathing heavily, red-faced and probably in a bit of shock. When I had enough control of myself to look up at him, I was about to let loose some scathing invective but the words died in my throat when I caught his gaze.

Worry, that’s what I saw in those eyes. He was pissed at me too, for sure, but it was because he was actually worried about me, even if he was trying to hide it. There was something else in there, too… it was guilt. Guilt? What the fuck did he have to feel guilty for?

I let myself sink back down onto the bed, wiping the remains of the vomit from my chin. It was bothering me, a bit, that I could still read him like that. I mumbled weakly that he’d be better off lecturing me when I wasn’t going to vomit all over him, and even then he should just leave it up to the boss lady. He started to say something else but Dr. Reyes came back from checking on the student that was hurt when I crashed through the wall. She started hitting Bobby over the head with a chart and yelling at him in Puerto Rican-inflected Spanish. I was confused at first as to why Cecilia was yelling at Bobby in spanish, but I'd forgotten that Emma told me Bobby is relatively fluent in Spanish from courses he took in university and she had tried to get him to teach a course in that, too, but he'd refused. As for me? I remember enough from some of the language training I got for missions in Central and South America that I could make some of Cecilia's rant out. Something like she’d heard Bobby chewing me out from down the hall and he was being a complete idiot and needed to leave her ward immediately or she'd be throwing him through a wall. Getting her patients worked up wasn’t going to help them convalesce.

He took one last look at me, muttered a weak sorry and then skulked out of the room to clean himself up. Cecilia did a bunch of tests on me, then gave me some meds for the pain and nausea. My head was the only pressing issue. I had some huge bruises forming all over my back from going through the wall, but they should heal up okay. Cecilia asked if I could sleep comfortably on my stomach or, failing that, on my left side since the bruising wasn’t as bad there. I’m a stomach/side sleeper anyway, so it’s not a big deal. Once the nauseous clenching in my stomach had settled again and it seemed like I could stand without falling over she sent me over to the little adjoining bathroom to take a shower. She had some fresh clothing brought down for me by the time I got out, and the bed and floor had been cleaned of the vomit. I wanted to go upstairs, but she insisted on keeping me down there for observation overnight. Cecilia’s seen the scars all over my torso now that she’s examined me. I probably should have told her about Iraq, about the beatings, about… but I can’t. She didn’t say anything, so she must be choosing to let it be for now. I’m grateful for that.

Piotr ended up bringing dinner down and we ate together. We didn’t talk much. I think he could tell that I really didn’t feel up to it. The headache was pounding again at that point, so I ended up taking another dose of the pain meds. When we finished eating, I asked him if he knew anything about why that fight got started in the first place. Piotr sighed and shook his head. He said there are a few things he could speculate about, but I’d probably be better off asking Emma about it tomorrow. He asked if I was up for other visitors. I just shrugged. I was getting tired, but the headache had started to recede a bit again. I was curious as to who all would make an appearance, as pathetic as that is. I guess that despite Jubilee’s revelations about our group and what people really thought of my past on the shopping trip last weekend, my doubts had developed some deep roots.

Jean-Paul, Jubes, Xi’an and Rachel came to visit, of course. It’s funny that I’m saying ‘of course’ just moments after I admitted I had my doubts. No, maybe it’s not that I had doubts. It’s that I had fear, a fear that the conversation I had at the mall with Jubilee had built my hopes up for nothing. But Doug came as well, then Jim, and then Dani came dragging along a sincere but somewhat uncomfortable Sam. For some idiotic reason, there was this part of me that kept wondering if I was going to see Bobby again. He didn’t come back, of course, and I don’t know why the thought even occurred to me in the first place.

I slept like shit last night, but Cecilia seemed to think I was doing well enough this morning to release me after a few tests for my head and a cursory examination of my back. My bruises look like hell and are sore as all fuck, but they are just bruises in the end. I’ve survived much worse. She gave me a bottle of pain meds and a few sleeping pills to take if I needed them at night. I was relieved of teaching duties for today and tomorrow, and they will extend it as needed depending on how my healing progresses. She recommended that I go eat some breakfast and then get some more sleep. I slept like shit this morning, too, but at least it was more comfortable to be in my own bed this time around.

I ended up meeting with Emma and Sean late this afternoon for a debriefing. They were actually pleased, for the most part, with how I handled the situation. In particular, they were happy that I prevented the firestarter from doing his thing, since the danger to the onlooking students and property damage would have been much higher if fire had been involved. It was strangely vindicating to be complimented like that, especially after Bobby chewed me out yesterday. I’d never attempted a complete and total shutdown of another pyrokinetic’s powers before, and I succeeded gloriously. To be honest the feeling of power I got from that gave me a bit of a hard-on, and I’m getting another one right now just writing about it.

Emma said the whole drama between the two students started because the strong guy and firestarter had been sexually experimenting together for a few weeks now. She knew this, of course, because she was regularly intruding upon students' privacy with her telepathy to keep tabs on them. These two were no different than any of the others. Firestarter finally got to the point where he kissed strong guy the day before the fight, and strong guy couldn’t handle it because suddenly it was real and true intimacy and he and got scared. He started telling people rumors that firestarter was a faggot and tried to kiss him, the later started saying he’d offered to suck his dick too. The rumors and whispers had started earlier in the day but hit fever pitch during their business class – Bobby’s class. After they left class, there were more taunts and words exchanged as they moved down the hallway. The firestarter ended up saying something to the effect of ‘you didn’t complain about it while you were choking on my dick last night. That’s when the yelling started, and when I headed out of my classroom to try and break things up.

Emma was beyond pissed at Bobby because he should have nipped shit in the bud once it became clear that homophobic harassment was happening inside his own classroom. She said he had heard what they were saying and chose not to address the content of the harassment, just the disruption itself. And me? I’m pissed at him now, too. Sure, disciplining your students about homophobic language and maybe even creating a teachable moment out of things isn’t necessarily going to do enough to prevent a fistfight like that one, but you’d think he could take on at least that goddamn modicum of responsibility! Sean is apparently giving him a pass because Bobby hasn’t taught in years and Emma already gave Bobby the nth degree when she accosted him yesterday evening. If Emma’s already raked Bobby over the coals I’m not sure how that’s giving him a pass, but whatever. Doesn’t change the fact that I still want to kick his ass for not dealing with it himself.

Emma proceeded to tell me that they have two tasks they want me to take on in the aftermath of this incident. First, Sean wants me to memorize the names, faces and powers of every student in the school, and then later on start to work on learning their histories. Fuck me, this is going to take forever! I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to do this on top of everything else without losing my sanity. Sean says it’s important because it might have changed the way I reacted to things yesterday. I’m not so sure about that, but whatever. I’ll try to at least make a cursory effort, but I’m not going to let it eat into my personal time.

The second task, though… Emma said it had been a few years since the last time they gave the school as a whole a comprehensive talk on the realities of gender identity and sexual orientation, what it can be like to be LGBTQ, and what it means to be an ally. It was also important for staff to share some experiences and perspective. Of course, it’s me that she wants to do it. I had a bit of a snit fit, asking why she couldn’t get Xi’an, JP, or even Piotr to do it considering that no one other than my current students really knew me. Emma insisted that it is precisely because most of the students don’t know me that I should do it. Fresh face, fresh perspective. The curiosity triggered by novelty. And then she said that the person she wanted me to work with on this project was Robert Louis Drake.

I think they might have seen my jaw somewhere in the subbasement after she dropped that bomb. I was in shock. Absolutely incredulous. The one person, the only goddamn person on staff who I wanted absolutely nothing to do with, and he’s the one she wants me to work with on this project. Sean started going on about how Bobby was in a similar situation, as it had been so long since he last lived and taught here that the students didn’t really know him. They knew ‘who’ he was in the same way they somewhat knew who I was, but that isn’t the same. They didn’t know the personality, the person, just the reputation. He wanted someone to represent the ally side, though Emma gave him this dubious look when he said that. Sean proceeded to rant about how the two of us were the biggest ongoing conflict within the staff and he thought that giving us a project where we had to work collaboratively would help tone things down. Tone things down? Fucking tone things down? I was doing fuck all to provoke any tensions that were there and I am actually quite proud of myself about how civil and professional I’ve been about dealing with him on the job. I told Sean that it was a ludicrous false hope that anything would get better because Bobby hates me with a capital H, and beyond that I don’t want to have anything to do with a close-minded homophobe like him.

Of course, no one had given me the full memo and once again I was made to look like a retard when Bobby waltzed in on the meeting at exactly that moment. Apparently he was supposed to have been there the entire time. The entire time, but he was stupidly late. Bobby got his back up and started saying he was in no way a homophobe. He had gay friends, so how could I possibly accuse him of that?!

That’s one of the oldest bullshit leaps of logic in the book, and I told him so. I asked him how he could consider himself to have gay friends when he stopped hanging out with Jean-Paul and Piotr after they got together four months ago. Hell, he’s stopped even interacting with them save for maybe a quick ‘hi there’ outside of work obligations. I asked him how it’s not homophobic to be okay with your ‘friends’ being gay until they actually get into a relationship. I asked him how he could consider himself ‘friends’ with any of the gays on staff if he’d rejected every single invitation to hang out with any group that happened to include Xi’an, JP, Piotr and/or I ever since I’ve arrived. Being friendly-civil does not equate with being friends, and I’ve seen him all his life question, snark or even visibly cringe at ‘gay’ things – effeminate behaviour, two men holding hands or kissing on television, drag queens, stuff like that. It might not be fucking gay bashing and harassment, but it’s still homophobia.

He claimed that he was maybe like that when he was a young teenager but he wasn’t like that anymore, but I called him on that bullshit too. I saw him cringe when he saw Piotr and Jean-Paul exchange a quick peck at the end of the staff meeting last week. I told him that I didn’t give a fuck if he refused to attend non-work events that I was at because he hates me, but that didn’t excuse him for any of his other refusals if he was supposedly ‘friends’ with these people, especially now that we’ve figured out that he’s basically just holed up in his room and doing nothing most of the time.

By this point he was just totally lost and out of steam, and I was beyond pissed off and I wasn’t going to stay there. I told him, Emma and Sean that until Bobby had done a lot of reading, learning and reflection about homophobia and internalization, until he could sort himself out and see what the fuck he was doing to all of us, until he could clean up his fucking act and be the ally that he says he is and supposedly wants to be, I refused to work on this project with him, or on anything else at this school for that matter. There was no way in hell my card-carrying gay ass was doing a sensitivity presentation about understanding the LGBTIQ community and being an ally with some idiot straight boy who only just pretends that they are okay with the gay. And then I stormed out.

Thinking about things now, I wonder if Emma and Sean at least partly agreed with me. It’s not really characteristic of Emma to allow huge blowups in her presence, especially when she was holding a meeting with business to discuss. Then again, she told me a few weeks ago that her older brother is gay so maybe she understands where I’m coming from to one extent or another. Actually, I’m wondering if all of this is some sort of subtle plot to improve Bobby, and Emma just figured it would be easier to have the bluster and accusation come from me because she knew I’d probably provoke a bigger reaction and it wouldn’t feel as much like an obligation from the boss lady. It’s hard not to roll my eyes at that, but I wouldn’t put it past her. She can be a sneaky bitch.

Regardless, I’m not working with Bobby on this. No fucking way.