Chapter 5: The Pedophile Teacher and the Panic Attack

Mr. Abernathy. The name itself conjured images of stale cigar smoke and the faint, unsettling aroma of mothballs. He was the kind of teacher who made you question the entire concept of public education, and by extension, humanity. His tweed jacket, perpetually rumpled, seemed to house a secret ecosystem of crumbs and lint, and his eyes, magnified behind thick spectacles, had a disconcerting habit of lingering. Not in a "concerned educator" way, more in a "if this guy were a predator in the wild, he'd be wearing a trench coat and offering candy" kind of way.

Today, Mr. Abernathy was particularly… Abernathy-ish. We were dissecting frogs in biology, a classic Luna-approved activity involving gore and the faint possibility of accidental dismemberment. Most of the class, including Jecka, who sat across from me with her usual serene focus, seemed to be having a relatively normal, albeit slimy, experience. Me? I was having a Mr. Abernathy experience.

He’d ambled over to my table, ostensibly to check on my frog’s circulatory system, which, frankly, was less important to me than the rising tide of nausea in my stomach. His hand, surprisingly clammy, brushed against mine as he pointed to a particularly stubborn artery. “You’re doing excellent work, Luna,” he’d rasped, his voice like sandpaper on dry wood. And then, the clincher, the thing that made my meticulously constructed emotional armor begin to crack: “Such delicate hands for such a… robust specimen.”