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You know the drill - all the actors in this script are of legal age. This is the first of a five part series. Although it's not critical that you read them in the order they were written, I think you will enjoy the series much more if you do. In any case, I hope you enjoy the story!
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A personal thanks to Bernard Lyons, a dear friend in Dublin, Ireland who provided me with his generous and timely editorial insight and is also very available to meet any straight women out there who can appreciate good looks, incredible intelligence, unparalleled sensitivity and a wonderful person. As always, thanks B!
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I guess even if I'd given the matter much thought, I don't know how I would have really felt about returning to my former high school as a member of its faculty. In many ways going from student to teacher seems to be one of life's great role reversals, perhaps second only to becoming a parent. I hadn't been away long enough to forget how it felt to be a student and now I was returning as a teacher.
The transition would have been even more shocking if I knew about the many changes that would occur as a result of my new position. I had no way of knowing that my life was about to change in a way I could have never imagined, even if I'd lived for a thousand years. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how everything in my life turned upside down and why I'll never be the same person.
My name is Jordan Elizabeth Peters and I'm twenty-three years old. Well actually, I'll be twenty-three on my next birthday. Last March, several months before I finally finished graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin -- as in Hook 'em Horns, I started my job search with the usual high level of anxiety. You all know the drill and I'm sure each of you has had to endure it at some time in your life. You're finally forced to leave the protected environment of academia for the dreaded 'real world.'
In truth, our professors have been threatening us with this evolution all year long and I too was sort of dreading it, but I knew I couldn't remain in the womb forever. Well, I guess I could have, but someone had to start paying pay back those damn student loans.
Incidentally, has it ever occurred to anyone that the only entities that benefit from us knocking ourselves out in college are the state and federal governments? Since a college grad is supposed to earn more than a million dollars over a non-grad in their working lifetime, just imagine what that means in taxable revenues. Okay, here's my point: why then do those governments not absorb the expense for at least an undergraduate degree? Yup, graduate school teaches us to ask these kind of probing questions.
Anyway, even though I had always wanted to be a teacher, I actually had a much loftier goal in mind for myself. I intended to stay on course and eventually earn my Ph.D. in Education and try to eventually move into school district administration. It wasn't that I didn't want to teach, god knows that is probably my true calling. But I did have ambition and I knew about the obscene salaries that many of the School District Superintendents in Texas were making. Anyway, everyone has to have some sort of plan and that was mine.
I focused my job search in my hometown of Houston, Texas where I applied for eight high school teaching positions with several of the prominent School Districts in the area. I even applied with the same ISD where I actually grew up and went to school nearly six years earlier. Outside the Houston School District, my former ISD was one of the largest in the state and I knew they would probably have the greatest number of open teaching positions and their pay scale was also attractive.
I know what you're probably thinking, this poor girl has no adventurous or independent spirit whatsoever and in a way you're absolutely right. But my parents were just working class people who couldn't afford to help me pay my college expenses and after graduation I had those pesky student loans looming over my head. My dad was kind enough to offer me free room and board for as long as I needed it in order to pay off my loans, but to take advantage of such an offer I obviously had to accept a position in the Houston area. Well, I did have two degrees so I weighed the pros and the cons: let's see, I was flat broke and I knew I wasn't going to receive a better offer. It didn't sound like rocket science to me.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past that I would have never considered living at home after college. But it didn't take long for me to do the math and I knew that if I lived frugally, then I could buy a new Honda Accord and put a little money aside for post-graduate school tuition at the University of Houston. After I played with the numbers for a while I realized that I could be totally out of debt in about five years. Well, at least a girl can dream.
After the interview with several officials from my former ISD I was surprised that I was offered a position on the spot to teach Biology and Chemistry. What I wasn't exactly prepared for was that the position was to be at my old high school, which I'll refer to as Memorial High for the purpose of my little tale.
It wasn't that I dreaded going back to Memorial High. The truth was, I never even imagined that such an option might ever present itself. To make matters worse, I knew that in my mind I hadn't mentally moved on yet from that time and place and I was a bit intimidated at the prospect of returning to a venue that didn't hold a lot of warm and fuzzy memories for me. I considered the offer for a brief moment and then bit my lower lip and accepted the position with a big smile, knowing full well that I'd have to deal with all the ghosts eventually.
For better or worse, I grew up as an only child. My dad, Bobby Peters, worked at the post office ever since he graduated from Memorial High the year I was born. My mom, Elaine, seemed to bounce from one minimum wage job to another during my entire adolescent life, lacking any apparent goals or ambition. Just when I would remember her work telephone number, it would invariably change.
I never thought about why that was at the time, but when I was in college it struck me as very peculiar and I had made a mental note that I wanted to ask her about it one day during one of our rare mother-daughter discussions. As I recall, we had four of those moments in my life and I thought that we were about due for another one real soon. I really loved my mom, but there were many times that between the two of us I felt more like the parent.
We all lived in a modest three bedroom, two bath single story house in Harris County. It only had about sixteen hundred square feet, but it was big enough for the three of us. I was friends with several of the girls in the neighborhood and life seemed fairly normal and routine to me. I knew we didn't have a lot of money, but that was never something I obsessed about. Like all females, what I did obsess about was my appearance and that, along with schoolwork and my pet cat, virtually consumed all of my time.
It was during the summer after fifth grade when I finally realized that I was probably never going to be beautiful. I can still remember feeling the knot in my stomach when I arrived at that sole-searching realization about myself like it was only yesterday. Swallowing that pill was unknowingly made even more bitter by my daddy, who always called me "Beautiful" since I was old enough to walk. Now it was clear to me that he was just being my dad.
After my little epiphany things just continued to go down hill from there. As a result, I was way short in the self esteem department as a child and I would probably have been a textbook candidate for some adolescent counselor's couch.
Okay, so you've probably realized by now that I was what most people would describe as 'average.' At five feet-four inches tall, I was neither heavy nor thin, but at least I didn't have the dreaded weight monkey on my back, like several of my anorexic friends. My face was not at all unpleasant and when I started using make-up in ninth grade I was actually pretty surprised at the result. My boobs seemed to stop growing before I turned sixteen and sadly the development that my buxom mother always told me to expect from her genes never materialized. From an upbeat perspective, at least I never had to wear a bra. I guess I'm always trying to make lemonade out of life's lemons.
Most everyone used to tell me that I had two incredible assets, which were both passed onto me from my dear mom. Although my hair was a non-descript light brown color, it was thick and I always wore it very long and straight, with it usually falling somewhere between ten to twelve inches past my shoulders. I never had split ends and I never suffered through a bad hair day in my life. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that I've kept the same style to this day.
Although I really love my hair, I always knew that my greatest asset was my eyes. They were a really beautiful and very unique emerald green color and I had people complimenting me on them ever since I was in first grade. It was also one of the few things in life that I never got tired of hearing.
So, as I matured I remained relatively conservative in most of my views and I knew just as the sun rose in the east that I would never become part of the glitzy social scene that would make or break my collection of high school memories.
But facing that reality early on certainly didn't make high school any easier for me once I finally got there. I knew I was destined to sit on the sidelines as a spectator, while a select group of popular students would dominate the social landscape and I accepted that fact as if it was a Darwinistic principle of evolution. I knew that I would never be a cheerleader, go to the prom, or ever get to wear a boy's letter jacket. I knew that I'd never be popular.