Mr. Abernathy's Glare

The smell of chalk dust and stale sweat, a potent cocktail of adolescent anxiety, wafted through Stuart’s sinuses, as solid and real as the lukewarm tea he was currently nursing. He blinked, the fluorescent hum of his kitchen dissolving, replaced by the harsh, unforgiving glare of the classroom lights at Northwood Secondary. And there he was, looming at the front of the room, a monument to righteous indignation: Mr. Abernathy.

Mr. Abernathy. The name itself was a coiled spring of dread, a man whose every utterance seemed to echo with the thunder of impending doom. Stuart remembered him as a mountain of tweed and disapproval, his face a roadmap of stern wrinkles, his eyes like twin chips of granite that could bore straight through your soul. Today, it seemed, Mr. Abernathy was particularly exercised. The air crackled with an unnamed tension, a palpable sense of impending disaster that made the hairs on Stuart’s arms stand on end, even now, decades later.

He was a boy again, all gangly limbs and ill-fitting trousers, perched precariously on the edge of his desk. The memory was so vivid, he could almost feel the rough grain of the cheap wood beneath his fingertips, the nervous tremor in his knees. He was supposed to be paying attention to Mr. Abernathy’s droning lecture on the finer points of algebraic equations, a subject that had always felt like an impenetrable fortress of numbers designed to mock his very existence. But Stuart’s mind, as was its wont, had wandered. It had taken a sharp detour, landing squarely in the verdant fields of his imagination, where algebraic equations were replaced by the far more pressing matter of whether Brenda Peterson, the girl with the sunshine-yellow ribbons in her hair, had noticed his new, albeit slightly too short, haircut.