High School Scandals

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Kathy slipped him a note in class the next day.

He tucked it into his pocket and thought: two more days until the spring vacation, and that was probably why Collins wasn’t coming down harder on him.

The man was playing a waiting game, letting the time off work to his advantage by calming down the kids.

So for these two precious days Dallas intended to let the students decide what they were going to read. Led by Angel Matthews, the class brought their own poetry, and Dallas was pleasantly surprised to listen to a number of the mod writers. He was pleased that the kids were into poetry of any kind, even the angry, formless stuff.

They were reading, they were finding their own delights in literature, pursuing their own thoughts, and wasn’t that what it was supposed to be all about?

Reading or listening, the kids were intense, dedicated to something beyond themselves, and that was a living wonder.

Still, Dallas couldn’t help glancing at the door from time to time, expecting a raid from the PTA, or from representatives of the school board. The vacation, he reminded himself; the enemy was banking on that to protect their lines, and what the hell could he do about it except take a vacation himself?

Out of town, he thought. Once he had been a nut on the outdoors, really digging camping trips. He still had some of the equipment around, and that might be just the thing he needed to get his head straight, a few days in the coastal woods. There was a national forest about sixty miles up the highway where a man could get off and be by himself, to look into himself and see what was happening there.

At lunch, he was ostracized by the other teachers in the lunchroom, and Selena Johnstone pretended he wasn’t alive. He had the special and carried his tray to a far corner, sitting at a small table alone with his books. In one of them was Kathy’s note, which he unfolded and read.

“Lover,” it said in her hurried scrawl which always gave him trouble on test papers, “I hope you had fun with the other kids. Daddy has me grounded and he’s watching me closely, won’t let me out of his sight. I thought about running away, but I can’t leave you. And there’s the class picnic in two more days. You forgot that didn’t you? It will probably turn into a political meeting, and we’d like you to be there. Miss Snow is the chaperon that right? But you know how weird she is. Can you come darling? To the picnic, I mean.”

He closed the book on her note and finished his meatloaf with green peas, drank the tepid coffee and ignored the limp salad. No picnic for him; no involvement with sexy girls when he was trying to figure out what his next move should be.

Back in the classroom with no stopover at the teacher’s lounge, he jotted an answer for Kathy on a piece of scrap paper He told her he was going alone into the national forest for awhile, and why. He wouldn’t be far from town, he said, and would stay close to the coast But he would see them after vacation, and thanks. Chaperone, he added, is spelled with an “e”.

When he got home that evening, after passing the note to Joey Nottingham his phone was ringing. The attack was starting all over again, some of the callers harping on his arrest for assault, some of them taking the new tack and yelling about his using dirty books in the classroom. After the sixth call, Dallas left the phone off the hook.

He polished off some soup and crackers, then checked out the camping gear It was all there although the pup tent didn’t look very waterproof now. It wouldn’t matter, he thought. If a storm came up, which wasn’t likely this time of year, he would pack up and head for home. As he put things together, he began to like the idea more and more and wondered if he wasn’t simply running away from a difficult decision.

No, he thought; he’d decide in the woods whether to quit or not, taking his time and looking at the problem from all angles. And he would do it without screwing any or all of the girls; who could think around them?

The soup didn’t hold him, and he went out again. Camping trip on his mind, he automatically turned into the familiar drive-in. When she came to his car, Dallas said, “Sorry; I didn’t mean to come in here,” and started the motor again.

Dee said, “Wait, please. Look-I-there’s no good in saying I’m sorry because in a way I’m not.” Her eyes were big and soft, and the tight little, blouse outlined the firm, heavy tits as she leaned to the VW window “I mean, about making it with you. My aunt-Dallas, I told her that I wouldn’t testify against you no matter what she wanted me to say. And I told her that if she used that film to pretend you were some kind of swinger not fit to teach the kids, I’d-I would swear you and I are planning, to get married. I mean, that would make it better for you, wouldn’t it?”

He touched the, warm roundness of her arm where it rested upon the rolled-down window. “Thank you Dee. I don’t think I’ll need your testimony, but it’s a nice gesture, and I’m grateful.”

Tears leaped into her hazel eyes, and she said, “I-I mean it Dallas: If you and I-if I hadn’t screwed it all up-oh!” And, she fled toward the kitchen, her gloriously modeled ass jouncing with every step.

He drove out of that parking lot and halfway across town to a hamburger stand where the waitress didn’t know who he was, and didn’t care.

The next day, the last day before he could split to the woods, was hectic. The lads were after him to meet them, and Kathy Cohn’s eyes were the most reproachful of all. After class, she hung back taking a chance on being found out, her expression telling him that she obviously needed to talk with him. She covered her real motives by pretending to be interested in a book she held out to him across the desk.

Smiling coyly, she said in a whisper, “You fink!”

She was so damned cute, her purple eyes direct, her lips soft and appealing. He stared at her damp, tender lips and remembered how they had felt wrapped around his stiff cock, recalled how she had worked her mouth up and down on the head of his prick and swallowed his semen when it erupted.

He said, “Kathy-I have to get my head straight.”

“You’re thinking about quitting,” she said. “Don’t be so fucking noble. Because even if you do cop out, the kids aren’t about to stand for that. They might burn down the school, and I mean literally. Maybe not so much because of you personally, but because they don’t like to see that kind of heavy pressure applied to anybody.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “If I do quit, it will be because I’m not afraid of the bastards, but for you guys-and all the kids that will come after you here.

How the hell can you learn anything about literature if the school is going to cut the guts out of the English program?”

Placing her small forefinger on the open book, Kathy, nodded as if he was dispensing pearls of great wisdom, but she murmured, “How the hell can we let them do this? And listen-my daddy fired the detective, but he’s trailing you himself; he thinks he can do a better job.”

“He’ll have to backpack then,” Dallas said. “I’ll see you when you get back Kathy.”

Relenting, she smiled at him and said, “That may be sooner than you think.”

He watched her go; his eyes falling to the sexy wiggle of her small, trim ass and the fluid movement of her legs. She exaggerated soles and high heels the girls were wearing accentuated the symmetry of their legs he thought He would miss that kid, the fiery passions that boiled unchecked through that sleek and practiced body.

Would she be screwing the other guys on the class picnic? Probably; Miss Enid Snow, chaperone with an “e” was a quiet lush. The kids had chosen her because she would sit somewhere and sneak shots of bourbon until she fell asleep. If she woke up, she’d flutter and say my, my, weren’t the days getting soporific.

She would then trot o the ladies room and get smashed all over again.

So the kids could slip around in the woods and ball, have a regular Roman orgy out of doors. Dallas frowned as he gathered papers on his desk; or was that the Greeks, who went m big for screwing in the bushes?

In the parking lot coach Roger Parnell was just climbing into his station wagon, and his quick glance at Dallas carried pure, virulent poison. Farther down the line, Selena Johnstone was backing out her Datsun. Enid Snow didn’t have a car, she shared gas with the math teacher Mr. Kingston hadn’t come down yet; he liked to leave the impression that he stayed longer in his office each day because he had work to finish.

Dallas had already locked up the house, and the camp gear was stuffed into the bug. All he had to do was change clothes, but he had jeans, a rough shirt in the car, with boots and an outdoors jacket. He’d put them on when be got to where he was going.

He drove up the coast highway, looking out once when he passed the spot where the four men had tried to clobber him, turning on music as the, road began to climb. He was into the mountains soon, the VW purring along as if it was also happy to get out of town for awhile.

At the turnoff he had in mind, Dallas nosed the car in and parked it a hundred yards or so off the road. He didn’t like to get too far from the sea, as he’d told Kathy, and here the climb was steep. He wouldn’t be bothered by other campers. When he got to the top of the wooded grade, he was sweating and wishing be hadn’t brought so many rations.

That night, he didn’t pitch the tent, but snugged into his sleeping bag and watched the stars until he fell asleep.