The bullet that killed him found a place in the cheap drywall of the high school, which had been put there by sweating men, who swore as they spackled and insulated. The insulation itself wrapped through the wall in the wooden foundations of the school's frame. So it would be unfair to say that the bullet was pulled out of the wall, because it wasn't all one wall, it was a part of the wall, and the only part of that wall that got any attention were the corners of it which were splattered with Mr. Thomas's blood. The way the dried drops spread out, the police department brought in some measuring tape and did some math problems to discover that the gun that killed him was held a foot and a half in front of his head, and that the bullet hit him a bit left of the bridge of his nose. They could have just asked his murderer, or anybody else in the classroom, and they did, but it gave the forensics guys something to do in a small town.

It was an ugly yellow room. He used to sit at his chair and look at the paint on the wall and think of the hateful colors in hateful ways. There were times when he could have re-painted the walls with less hateful colors, but he never would have done it, even if he hadn't died. Mr. Thomas thought of the job as a job, and what bothered him about his job never actually hurt him the way it ought to have bothered him. There were kids who came in drunk, but he just sent them to the front office for the assistant principles to sort out, and those assistant principals usually just sent the stupid drunk kids back to class, being bogged down with more serious offenders. Mr. Thomas wasn't angered by this, because he knew it was the way things were. The drunk kids that re-entered his classroom after getting kicked out usually resigned in shame to the back rows of desks and didn't bother anybody but themselves when the booze dried out of their bodies. Everything he caught himself worrying over was always somebody else's problem. That, he decided, went with the territory. A high school is a wall stuck between childhood and adulthood, and his job was to be a brick in that wall, to remain unnoticed under the spackle and drywall, and to be, eventually, replaced as repairs demanded. If he hadn't been murdered, he would have taught for six more years.

One of his freshmen, Amber, was twisted on a few prescription drugs, which weren't hers to take in the first place. She discovered these through her closest, dearest friend, Nicole Carmell. Nicole was awful to her out of sloth. She could have remembered certain things, like money for the tip when they went out for dinner, Amber's phone number or that her phone existed, or the year's age difference between them and its implications, but Nicole was lazy in her friendship. Having an admirer was enough for her, without muddying the waters with human kindness. Nicole brought Amber to parties and pretended to treat her to alcohol and music, which were both free, but Amber didn't know any better. Nicole brought her into bedrooms and basements where pharming went on. Amber took pills with beer and felt them move like little satanic bugs down her throat, and all of that was under Nicole's direct supervision, similarly fucked up on some capsule or another, Xanax, MSG, you know, you know.

All through this, Amber had a feeling that, in spite of all the picking up she did after Nicole, she wasn't being accepted or even acknowledged by Nicole, just permitted to ride in her wake and pick up Vicodin crumbs when they dropped.

She had a falling-out with a boyfriend, and he hadn't been directly prescribed to her, either, and they actually met at first at Nicole's insistence. Nicole put the two together and expected things to work out, and they didn't. Nicole had very little sense in pairing boys with girls. She put a shy and impressionable and pill-fucked-up girl with a straight-edge boy, and, two weeks later, when they tried and failed at sex, there was a commotion in the bathroom. Amber's rope was cut and her body dropped and an ambulance drove up and drove off with her in the back. She hanging around Nicole after that, stopped pharming, went to a community college and never tried suicide again until she had her first child, but that happened a long while after Mr. Thomas, her old English teacher, was slaughtered by Nicole's brother's stolen Luger in his hand.

Nicole went to the bathroom and found Amber inbetween a bathroom stall. Nicole thought she knew Amber pretty well. She'd known Amber was doing poorly in school because of all the time they hung out together, and that her parents must have been pissed all the time about this, but suicide was far from her thoughts. While Nicole watched and nodded, Amber started balling a jock, drinking and taking pills, flunking classes and fighting with her parents. Nicole never showed that she was proud of her in any of this, though she thought she did.

Nicole walked into Mr. Thomas's room as the hallway to the bathroom started to get noisy, and as the commotion from the neighboring rooms started to grind up with the news of what had happened. Other Nicoles were breaking the same kind of news, and Mr. Thomas knew why. His job was not to give in, especially not when faced with hysteria. His job was to teach, so he taught. Nicole, with red, puffy eyes and her powdered cheeks turning into steep ravines of expensive makeup, with all her goodwill collapsing like a ragdoll on a line behind her, wanted to disrupt his class, which, with Mr. Thomas at the helm, was not disruptible.

And, faced with this immovable object, Nicole got nothing but pissed. She'd lived her life in high school without having to look at a teacher any more than she desired. She didn't harbor malicious feelings towards any of them- well, she did, but they were casual enough to attribute to youth and bitchiness, and she forgave herself of them as she forgave herself everything else. She'd never had to hate a teacher like she now had to hate Mr. Thomas, because he wouldn't go away, let her do what she wanted to do regardless of the consequences. It wasn't about Amber killing herself anymore, unless that fact became convenient to the tirade forming in her mind against Mr. Thomas. He was holding them against their will. That, thought Nicole, was kidnapping.

Nicole opened the door and looked Mr. Thomas in the eye. She resolved her entire being towards his destruction. It would be uncompromising and beautiful. This was all decided in that moment.

"Can I help you?" Mr. Thomas said.

"I need to talk to my brother."

"You're interrupting my class," Mr. Thomas said.

"It's an emergency." She put some stress on the last word, and cracked her voice a little. Mr. Thomas buckled and Felix and Nicole went out into the hall.

"Amber just tried to hang herself."

"What?" Felix didn't know Amber outside of a red head and considerable tits and some parties. He thought about her for a while. Nicole took this as a dramatic pause.

"She had Thomas, too."

Nicole let the words hang. She'd decided Mr. Thomas was a tyrant, and only had to nudge her brother towards her own ends. That was all the sowing of murderous seeds she needed to do.

Felix went back into the classroom with some more pout to his eyes. He was angry for a few reasons. Felix was a rum guy, and Mr. Thomas was a wine lover. Felix thought alcohol was God in a molecule. He felt strong, happy and sure of himself when he got drunk. He was always around friends and within reach of his girl. He saw people sip at shots and got pissed off. What were they drinking for? Why sip?

It was a euphoria Mr. Thomas never let himself know. Mr. Thomas drank wine because he could spit it out without feeling selfish or wasteful. He liked himself when he drank it out of glasses, because he felt stupid when he got drunk out of the bottle. He never had time to sit down and come to terms with reality, so distorting it made him feel like an absolute dick. What could he trust if he couldn't trust his own mind?

Mr. Thomas would later throw all his wine bottles out of the window of his second-story condo, and that happened after he drank one full bottle and got over-emotional about the near-suicide of one of his own. He felt like driving to a church to pray for forgiveness, but he was too drunk to do it, and decided to create an enormous bonfire of all the vanities of his life, but passed out after seven bottles and a million tears shed over the railing of his little four-room condo. It was good enough for him to return to his work without shame the next morning, unless shame is a cheap wine hangover, which it is. That morning, Felix and Mr. Thomas looked at each other through bloodshot eyes. They were both disgusted.

Felix grew up on discipline and ate sweat for the first two years of high school before resigning all his duties as an upperclassman on the football team to freshmen and sophomores with more energy and drive than him. They admired him because his muscles were big, and he had a steady girlfriend, and had been with her for a long while. The boys wanted to be him until he murdered Mr. Thomas, and even then some of them wanted to be him. Some would even admit it.

He took a dare once and drank 200-proof alcohol in Chemistry, about a shot of it, and Chemistry was right before English for him. That was his first bone of contention with Mr. Thomas, getting caught and suspended for drinking booze from the lab. Mr. Thomas sent him to the principal's office. Felix stumbled in its direction. Halfway there, he changed his course towards the nurse's office and passed out in the doorway when he got there. The bell rang and the hallways filled, and everybody saw Felix vomiting and smothering in his sleep in the doorway.

The second one happened about a week and a half after that, when he got his report card back. He flunked English. Mr. Thomas was on the fence with him, between flunking him outright or showing mercy and giving him a D, but he couldn't be soft on Felix after he showed up drunk. It wasn't just the grade, it was the thing Mr. Thomas had put in the "Comments" box on the side, where it read "frequently disrespectful." Felix thought Mr. Thomas had gone way too far. Felix was a popular guy, and everybody loves a guy named Felix, and nobody has a choice about not loving a guy with such a good name as Felix Carmell. It was his name, really, that forced him into doing things like championing the football team and playing beer pong and listening to an iPod while teachers taught. Mr. Thomas knew that all children were functionally useless, and that the most important thing a high school student had was his umbilical cord, and that Felix had really no choice at all but to be selfish, that it was all being fed to him. If given a choice, Felix would probably do it anyways, drink, party, fight and fuck- because, honestly, who wouldn't? Mr. Thomas intended to flunk the kid for the quarter and pass him for the year, slap his wrist and hope that woke the bastard up, then send him on his way. So it was a complete shock to him when Felix pulled the gun out of his sweatshirt, like a bullet in the eye, which was his last thought.

And here was Felix, perplexed, abandoned outside Mr. Thomas's classroom's door with his sister walking back to wherever she'd come from, the bathroom where her friend now hung. Felix kept thinking of swears to swear at Mr. Thomas, but he knew he couldn't do that, or he would get kicked out of class, and probably would flunk if he got suspended. To him, killing Mr. Thomas and passing his class somehow lived in the same idea, cohabitated the same synapse- it was the removal of the same problem, the English class, the academic sidetrack of his education. Here, thought Felix, was the worst person he'd ever met. Here was a man who decided to stick his nose into a corner of Felix's life where he wasn't welcomed. Felix happily fought and fucked and enjoyed his high school career without the shadow of brainpower or any real stress other than the shadow of a bum knee before Mr. Thomas interrupted his life, demanding all sorts of things, essays, reading, molecules, words, which Felix was naturally averse to. Felix could read and write and speak in sentences and project his voice and understand a grocery list, and, to him, any mention of Dickens or Robert Browning or Chaucer or anybody, Sir Gawain, was completely aside from the point, and the point was weight-lifting and baseball and parties and basketball and pussy and beer. Which are all fine things, if you ever get to do any of them. Now that Felix was flunking English, he couldn't do most of these things, because a bench seat on the football team would turn even a king like him into a eunuch and a freak. Nobody looks cool sitting on a bench and drinking Gatorade and watching. Everybody who went to the games drank at the parties after the games, and he liked free alcohol too much to avoid the parties, and he would gather all these weird looks all year round, all next season, all because of that one son-of-a-bitching English teacher and his one goddamn shot of pure ethanol.

As he went back inside the classroom, with his eyes in shadows, he thought again about the flunking grade, and the comment on the report card, and the stumbling shameful walk back down the hallway towards the nurse's office, where he explained how he'd gotten wasted on lab booze, and all the shameful rehashings of his story, to the assistant principal and the principal and then over the phone to his mother while Mr. Thomas was sitting in the principal's office with him and his Chemistry teacher and tears in his eyes like popped diamonds and Cain's mark prodigal on his footsteps while he retreated out of the high school, picked up with a hangover by his father, so goddamn sorry. And his father almost laughed about it. And it was all that Jesus Christing English teacher, who could have pretended not to notice, or seen what an unsavable student looks like when he drowns in booze and sports, or known a lost and dangerous cause at it fades out in ethanol and the horizon, but Mr. Thomas was a new teacher, and didn't know an ideal from a bad idea.

The school got psych people to talk to grieving student. A substitute teacher took over his classes for the rest of the year. They painted over the old yellow paint job in his room. After finishing rehab, Amber picked up her phone and started to dial her old boyfriend. Halfway through, she hung up.



Sam Virzi is a senior in high school and has published stories in Thieves Jargon, Pen Pusher, Fools of Arcadia, Ourcry and Dogmatika. He's also published a novella with Piker Press.