Summer break is here, which means it’s also time for a break from pontificating, so I’ll look to my creative writing pen for a time. Some of my students gave me the first and last lines of a potential story; my job is to fill in the middle! This week’s inspiration comes from Makenna Reeder.
It was the start of the year for the Class of 2028. At last, their senior year had arrived! As the elders of the school lined up outside their first-hour classes, the air buzzed with excitement. I waited outside my new-to-me classroom. After years of teaching middle schoolers, I had been reassigned to teach some high school classes.
My first-hour class was a creative writing venture, a class I had always been envious of when others taught it. I loved working with kids to tap into their creative minds and create something exciting. A mixture of juniors and seniors were in my class, though it was senior-heavy.
As I called roll, my head jerked up at the devious snickers I heard from two of the seniors, Kinley and Makenda. They had always been good students, though they had a touch of mischievousness to them. In fact, Makenda had spent two prior years in my classroom writing about how her English teacher would die in new and horrible ways. At the end of 8th grade, she and Kinley had created a comic book all about me dying.
It had all been in good fun, I kept telling myself. But now I wondered how many more ways they could create for me to die.
Shaking off the glint of nervousness that overtook me, I went over the syllabus and focused on the copious amounts of writing we would be doing that semester. It was the usual first-day routine, and the kids filed out of my room as I welcomed the next group of stars.
One of the first projects I had the creative writers work on was writing the ending of a story before anything else. This was along the lines of what J.K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter series. We would then go back and write the rest of the story, allowing us to seed some foreshadowing in the work, since everyone would know how their stories ended.
As I looked over the submissions, I couldn’t help but notice that Makenda was back to her old tricks. The end of her story was about the solution to the murder of an English teacher. I just shook my head and kept going through the rest of the stories.
The next day, another student asked me if I had seen Makenda’s post on TikTok. Even though the social media machine had been sold to interests in the United States, I still hadn’t felt the urge to join the sensation. The student showed me a video of Makenda stabbing a yearbook picture of me with an old-style quill one might have used for writing centuries ago.
She certainly was onymous about her mock killing of me. I assumed this would be part of her larger story for my class. Still, I was a bit unsettled by it all.
After working with Makenda through some of her opening chapters to the story of the death of her English teacher, I grew a little more worried. The daily routine of the teacher in the story matched my own a little too perfectly. The part that bothered me the most was that the routine included what I did after school: when I picked up my mail, when I made supper, etc.
I started closing the shades when I was at home. When my wife asked about it, I told her about Makenda’s creepy story. My wife suggested I talk to Makenda’s parents. I sent an email that night but didn’t hear back before heading to school the next day.
Makenda wasn’t in class that day. When I asked Kinley if she knew anything, she just mumbled something incoherent. I shrugged and went about my day. At the end of the day, I happened to look back at my attendance on the computer. The secretary always went in and marked the reasons for absences. However, nothing was next to Makenda’s name. Strange.
I sat at my desk, which was across from my classroom door. I was immersed in papers and didn’t notice as a hand reached around the corner and turned off the lights. The glow of my computer illuminated my startled face as I heard the door shut. I stood up and walked around to the front of my desk.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp stab in my chest. I gasped and fell to the ground, pulling out a stick with feathers on it. Wait, a quill?
“You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” came a demented voice.
“Makenda?” I asked weakly.
“You had to email my parents. You had to rat me out. I was just writing a good story and needed more information to make it realistic.” I felt another stab, this time in my back. I grunted and slumped to the floor.
“Well, this will make the rest of my story even better,” she said. “I’ll know exactly how the killer feels when she takes out that English teacher. Plus, I got to practice at home.” Another stab. “My parents were ‘worried’ about me.” Another stab. “They won’t be worrying anymore.”
One last cackle penetrated my eardrums as Makenda finally finished what she’d been writing about for over five years, killing her English teacher.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is onymous, which means not anonymous, or out in the open, as in, “The new form of social media forced you to be onymous and not hide behind a pseudonym.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!