Current Date: June 5, 2024
Character: Louis Lanoblesse
Race: Human
Age: 23
Current residence: Warwick, New York
Last year, I started teaching a first-grade class. I’d already helped while I was studying—and I’m still not quite done as I’m aiming for my Master’s but that’s coming along too—and I had a fair idea of what to expect. I never really imagined that I would get this far in life. Considering the type of hell that I went through when I was younger, I think I’d made my peace with working at some fast-food place for the rest of my life. My time in the chair changed that, and Jeff coming into my life more permanently changed that too.
I was tutoring more than a dozen students when I first started with my classes at university. I’m grateful that most of said studying could take place online. I was probably just one of the lucky ones because I know that usually, none of the classes that I’ve gone through could be taken online. Maybe it was just a matter of right-time and right-place.
It helped considering that I didn’t want to rely on the chair if I could help it, and I wouldn’t have really been able to cover all the campus distance I would have had to on my own two feet if I’d had to go in person.
The first time I stepped in that classroom with the kids just chattering away together, it made me pause, I had to ask myself if I was ready; I was worrying that they’d hate me, that I’d fail them and just, so many things born of a lifetime spent struggling with bullying. It took a couple of days before that fear started to fail. The kids were all so sweet. Some of them had a whole lot more energy than the others but I adapted, and I learned.
A lot of them had questions about my cane. I can walk longer distances now than I could years ago after I’d just gotten back on my feet, but I still tire out and yeah, I sit on the edge of my desk often enough. My bosses are aware of this and have okayed other things that I might need. There was one teacher who tried to somehow tattle on me for the fact that I wasn’t moving all around the classroom and engaging the kids and that backfired for them, it was something to witness.
For some reason, I truly thought that I’d not have to deal with drama as far as the other teachers were concerned. I wasn’t completely wrong in my belief. Most of them are fairly nice while a few just ignore me outright and I’m fine with that. Of the ones that ignore me, a slightly older gentleman seems to be able to sustain the teacher’s lounge-slash-break room drama all by himself.
I’ve lost count of how often he’ll be on his phone while in that break room—which, he’s perfectly allowed, I don’t judge, and I do text Jeff a little when I’m in there too—but he’ll be speaking loudly, as though he’s gotten a little hard of hearing with age. That, again, that’s perfectly fine. But every conversation is about something whoever poor sap on the other end of the phone did wrong.
Just last week, he was complaining to the unknown that when he’d asked her—his words—to let him down, he had meant literally, not metaphorically. It made me pause just a moment, I might have shared a raised brow with a colleague who teaches a class of second graders, we both shrugged but let it be. I can’t even imagine how that happened.
You have to understand, the man is fairly tall and bulky—to not say a little pudgy around the waist but I’m trying to be nice and I don’t know what his personal life is like and I don’t want to know either—that it would take a fairly strong woman to lift him to any height, especially any height that would require he demand to then be let down.
When it’s not something like this, it’s about a dinner that was too well done.
Or about laundry that had bits of papers still scattered throughout as though pockets had not been emptied.
If the woman on the other side of that phone is his wife or partner, I feel bad for her. He seems like such a miserable person that I wouldn’t want to be around him until the end of everything. Then again, I really don’t know him. I don’t know her. I don’t know anything, and I don’t want to know anything. Maybe all the complaining he’s doing is founded. Maybe she’s a terrible person too and they’re just perfectly matched.
I will never know.
I don’t want to know.
You can’t make me want to know.
I just wish he’d either step out or lower his voice a little. None of us wants to hear him.
Works of JD Beckett 