My Third Grade Education

by Justin Aclin

                I always knew there was something odd about him.  Or rather, I didn't.  In third grade you accept whatever authority figures tell you as the Truth, and therein lies the true horror of what he did.

                On the first day of school he appeared disheveled, in contrast to the rest of us in our new clothes and new shoes.  He sat at his desk with his head in his hands as the rest of us shuffled in and found the desks with our name cards on them.  When he finally looked up he seemed surprised to see us there.  He jumped up, fixed his tie and then surveyed us for a long time without saying a word.  Finally, he walked over to the chalkboard and drew a giant eye.  Then he turned and faced us.

                "Monsters," he said, "are all around us."  The class snickered.  One boy shouted out that there are no such thing as monsters.  "Yes there are!" this strange man shouted, smashing his fists on his desk and knocking his picture frames over.  The class was silent.  "And I can show you how to avoid them.  My name is Mr. Mezner."

                That was how we met him.  Once it became clear to us that he wasn't joking, we had to take him seriously.  After all, he was a teacher.  Our previous teachers had taught us how to read and write, to add and subtract.  This one was going to teach us how to avoid monsters.  It made sense.  After all, this was third grade and it was about time we started learning the important stuff.  Mr. Mezner made us promise not to tell anyone about what we learned and in return he wouldn't teach anyone else about it.  He seemed to keep up his end of the bargain.  During math class, when kids from other classes came in, there was no mention of anything besides math. But when we were alone, that was another story.

                'The monsters hide in shadows," he told us.  The shades were drawn and the only light in the room was the slivers of sunlight that slipped through the blinds and fell on his face.  "The only way to destroy them is to learn to live like them.  In the shadows."  He picked something up off of his desk and threw it into the darkest corner of the room.  "What did I just throw?" he asked.  When no one responded, he became enraged.  "You have to be able to see movement in the darkness!  Look through the shadows!"

                So I did.  I imagined the shadows as blankets on my bed, and I lifted each one until I saw what was underneath.  "It's a ring," I said.  Mr. Mezner went and picked it up, and then walked over to my desk.  "Very good, Scott," he said, and dropped the ring onto my desk.  "Keep it."  He opened the blinds.  "That's all for today," he said, and walked towards the door. "Behave yourselves for the rest of the day," and he walked out the door.  It was 11:23.  I looked at the ring he gave me.  The ring I earned.  It was a gold circle with no markings on it.  A wedding band.  Quickly I tucked it into the fifth pocket of my jeans with my pennies.

                Over the next few weeks we learned everything a kid could need to know in a world of monsters.  We learned how to use magic ("But don't try to use it yet," Mr. Mezner told us. "It won't work yet."  Naturally all of us tried, and naturally all of us failed).  He taught us how to fly ("but the magnetic fields are only perfect on the peak of K2, the world's tallest mountain, so that's where you have to take off from.").  And he taught us how to find the monsters hidden around us.  "They can look like anybody," he said, "and you might not realize it until it's too late."  None of us were scared, though, because we knew what to do. 

                For the first time in my life I looked forward to going to school every morning.  I always kept the ring with me, but I never wore it because I knew my mom would ask about it.  I kept it in the fifth pocket, and I transplanted it to each new pair of jeans I wore.  Meanwhile in school, all our classes (except math) were taught in complete darkness.  In order to see Mr. Mezner and what he wrote on the chalkboard, we had to peel away the shadows.  We were changing.  Mr. Mezner was changing also.  On the first day he had seemed somehow incomplete, but the more he taught us, the more he seemed to be revitalized.  When we closed our eyes and pressed them with the palms of our hands, we all saw the same lights.  "We are linked," Mr. Mezner said.  "The monsters can not attack one of us without the rest knowing."  I had never felt so safe.  When I was outside of the class, I kept my hand on the ring.  It allowed me to take that feeling of security with me. 

                One day Mr. Mezner didn't come to school.  Instead of goofing off and trashing the room like a normal class would have done, we practiced what we had learned.  We wanted to learn, and the fact that we weren't learning anything new was visibly upsetting some people.  "Maybe the monsters got him," one girl said.  "No," I replied confidently.  "We're linked.  We would have known."  When it was time for math class and we could no longer hide, we went home.  That was Friday.

                On Monday Mr. Mezner still wasn't in class, but the school psychiatrist was.  He looked uneasy as he addressed us, and he continually shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  "I'm afraid," he said, "that Mr. Mezner will no longer be your teacher."  There was no commotion, no outrage.  Each one of us merely looked around the room, wondering who had broken the code of silence.  Finally, someone asked why.  The psychologist looked even more nervous.  "He's been arrested.  I can't tell you any more than that."  Then there was outrage.  He hadn't been arrested.  We all knew it.  The monsters had gotten him.  They had severed our link.  Kids started pressing their palms into their eyes.  Others started waving their arms around, trying to use magic.  Others tried to isolate the magnetic field coming off of K2.  We had to summon everything we had learned to save him.  I grasped the ring so hard that my hand hurt.  The psychologist ran out of the room to go get the principal. 

                They questioned all of us.  Through bits and pieces of information dropped they finally began to gather what he had done to us.  We were all put into therapy.  They told us that there were no monsters, and some of the kids even believed it.  I would just lie on the couch, peeling the shadows off of the ceiling.  I wouldn't believe a word of it.  Until I learned the whole story.

                Over the summer, Mr. Mezner's wife had left him.  Something inside him snapped.  He killed her, and hid the body in his house.  That was how we found him the first day of school.  When he looked out at us, he saw a reason to go on living.  He had to protect these children from the evils of the world.  Whether he saw himself or his wife as the monster I can't say, but he created a fantasy world for himself and taught it to us as truth.

                Going back to school was the hardest thing I ever did.  I was held back a year.  That man's lies took a year from my life.  The other kids who knew the story called us freaks and shunned us.  And still, in the back of my mind, there was a tiny part of me that wanted to believe that magic was real and that you can fly off the top of the world's largest mountain.