Loveday Writing

The brief of the AWC Furious Fiction – June 2024 short story competition was as follows:

• Your story must strongly feature a relationship between TWO characters. A dynamic duo. A couple. A rivalry. Siblings. Anything!
• Your story must include someone whispering.
• Your story must include the words JAR, UNIFORM, NEEDLE, and EDGE.

***

Teacher’s Pet

I’ve been Cindy’s teacher since kindergarten.

She’d always been such a good girl: polite, eager to please, conscientious, smart.

But now she’s a teenager.

She’s rebelling at the moment: talks back, smokes, hangs out with a bad crowd, and is sending me and her other teachers over the edge.

I’d heard her and one of her “friends,” Kelly Marsh, whispering in class about ‘more needles’ and ‘the quad after school.’ I had enough of this and decided to follow them.

I made sure I was careful when following them, before catching them in the act – Cindy injecting drugs into Kelly’s arm.

“Cindy! Put the needle down and step away, now!”

“Mrs. Swanson, this isn’t what you think!” Cindy said, placing the used needle in a jar at her feet.

“Injecting God-knows-what drugs into Kelly’s arm, it’s exactly what I think! What the hell were you thinking!?”

Before Cindy tried to cry or plead innocence, another voice interjected, the last one I wanted or needed to hear.

“What on Earth is going on here?” Miss Brown, the school principal, who hated me asked.

“Cindy was injecting drugs into Kelly’s arm.” I responded, before Cindy or Kelly could play the innocent victim, and pointed to the jar on the ground.

“Cindy? What do you have to say for yourself?”

“It’s not drugs, Miss Brown, at least not the illegal kind. It’s insulin.”

“What?” Both Miss Brown and I asked in simultaneous shock.

“Kelly’s dad lost her job and they’re having trouble getting the insulin Kelly needs. My dad’s a pharmacist and my mother’s a nurse, I’m just helping her out.”

“That’s quite a…” before I could finish sarcastically dismissing Cindy’s unbelievable story, Miss Brown cut me off, like she usually does.

“Okay, the three of you in my office now. I think I know how to straighten this out.”

The walk with Cindy and Kelly to Miss Brown’s office felt like it went on forever. I couldn’t wait for her to poke holes in Cindy’s story. I was forced to sit down next to them, as if I was an unruly student too, Miss Brown did have a way of making me feel like one at times.

“Okay.” Miss Brown said with a file open in her hands.

“Mrs. Swanson, Cindy wasn’t lying, Kelly is a diabetic and relies on injected insulin. I believe she was trying to help out her friend. That being said, Cindy, you have no training or experience to inject the insulin. You should have asked the school nurse for assistance. I don’t want to see or hear about you injecting insulin again, understood?”

“Yes, Miss Brown.”

“Mrs. Swanson, whilst this is an unusual situation and I understand why jumped to the conclusion you did, you shouldn’t always assume the worst! Since you need to re-do your First Aid training and Cindy wants to help out her friend, I’m going to send you both off to First Aid and insulin injection training. Hopefully you can both learn from each other.”

“That’s all!” Miss Brown said, waving her hands to dismiss all three of us from her office, before Cindy and I could protest.

As we walked out, I confronted Cindy again.

“Cindy, if Kelly was diabetic, she’d be injecting insulin herself. What was really in that needle?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know” she smirked, opening her school blazer to show me multiple, tiny Snaplock bags taped to the inside. I didn’t know whether her choice to use her uniform as storage for all those drugs was brazen or just stupid.

“Even if you knew, Miss Brown would never believe you, she hates you and thinks I’m an angel now.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if Cindy really was a good girl, or whether it was an act the entire time, is she really rebelling right now, or is this the kind of person she really is?

I don’t know if I’ll ever know.