Asshole. Douchebag. Dick-hole.
I couldn’t wait to be out of his class so I’d never have to see him again.
I hit the refresh button again and held my breath.
CHAPTER TWO: Chase Hollander
I lit another cigarette and poured another inch of the cheap whiskey into the shot glass with the Disney World logo on one side. I was not unintelligent or without a sense of humor. I saw the irony in getting shit-faced drunk by drinking shots of whiskey from a glass with Mickey Mouse’s picture on one side.
The irony was that it perfectly represented how shitty my life had become over the last few years. It was all about my Mickey Mouse problems and the Goofy shit I had done. I was the eighth dwarf: Loser. Whistle to that tune, motherfucker.
There had been bright spots, like the trip to Disney with Emily and Kiley, and those weekends at the beach. Then there were the low spots, like the night Kiley died, or the night I got drunk and stumbled home to find Emily gone.
I took a long drag of the cigarette and let the smoke trail from my nostrils. I picked up the shot glass and knocked the foul liquor back in one gulp. It burned my throat like battery acid. I could only imagine what the smoke and the whiskey were doing to my insides. Shit, who was I kidding. As I said, I was not unintelligent. I knew exactly what it was doing. The thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I was killing myself slowly, but I didn’t care and neither did anyone else.
I licked the whiskey from my lips and stuck the cigarette between my teeth, squinting as the smoke curled into my eyes.
I stared at the blinking cursor on the computer screen. It was waiting for something from me. What was it? Oh yeah, grades…
I was supposed to be entering the grades from the final midterm so the students could see if they had passed or failed my class. I squinted at my watch. It was half past five. The grades were supposed to be online by five. Fuck it. The kids didn’t care. Why should I?
The little bastards. I saw them sitting in my class every day, smiling and chatting like they didn’t have a care in the world. They had their entire lives ahead of them. I was just a fucking speedbump on the highway of life to them, just something to roll over on the way to their entitled fucking lives.
I watched the fucking jocks trying to get the girls to notice them, and I noticed the girls trying to catch my eye, thinking they’d get a better grade if I made them the teacher’s pet.
One of them, a Latino girl with big tits, Rachel Diaz I thought, sat in the front row wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. More than once she’d spread her legs to give me a quick peek at her red panties. Once she wasn’t even wearing panties. She slid her ass to the front edge of the seat and opened her legs wide. Her pussy was shaved clean, pink, moist. I just shot her a hard look rather than a hard cock, and she immediately closed her legs and looked away.
If she thought flashing her pussy was going to get her a good grade in my class, she was dead wrong. She might have had a grade-A cunt, but her midterm essay was a grade B at best.
The saddest thing was, she was the smartest girl in the class. She didn’t have to flash her pussy at me to get a perfect grade. She just had to show up and do the work.
Sometimes I wondered if she flashed her pussy at me because she wanted me to touch it. Then I’d see her with the captain of the football team and realize she was just fucking with me, but not in a good way.
That was fine. The last thing I need was to get involved with a student. That would be the final nail in my academic coffin. Would the pleasure be worth the pain? At this point, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even remember what pleasure felt like.
Then there was Audrey something, the dark-haired girl with the big blue eyes and timid smile who always sat next to Rachel. She almost looked like one of those cute old cat paintings from the seventies, the ones with the kittens with oversized eyes and pitiful pouts on their faces.
I blew a cloud of smoke at the computer screen and picked up the class roster to find her name. There it was, Audrey Ross.
She was a good student, but unlike Rachel, she had to try hard to earn her grades. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She had a good head on her shoulders. She just seemed so afraid of failure that she often torpedoed herself.
Like coming to me to talk about her attention deficit disorder. Don’t give me that shit. I had ADD, OCD, ADHD, and every other letter of the alphabet you could assign to being fucked up.
There it was.
I admitted it to the man in the mirror every fucking day.
I was one fucked-up son of a bitch.
I knew it. My family knew it. The dean knew it.
Emily certainly knew it. It took her two more years of a shitty marriage after Kiley died to realize it, that Chase Hollander was one fucked-up individual.