The day thus far had gone ideally for 42 year old Lila Mendez.
A math teacher at one of San Diego's public high schools, she'd been teaching advanced Algebra and Geometry for the better part of a decade. While her job did entail some daily stress and frustration, she counted herself lucky she dealt mainly with students on a college track instead of some of the more rambunctious youth many of her cohorts encountered.
Considering the demographics of the area, many of those 'incorrigible' kids happened to be of Hispanic descent, and as a second generation Mexican-American herself, Lila had a great deal of sympathy for their plight.
Many of those kids didn't have the same built in advantage she'd been blessed with however. Having two involved parents was a supreme blessing, each of whom holding down several jobs at a time during her adolescence to keep Lila and her siblings not only fed, but free to chase the American Dream.
Given the breakdown of the modern family, not to mention the economic plight hitting Southern California even harder than most other parts of the country, there was an increasing amount of students from single parent households, and many of those parents were having harder times finding work. All that led to an increase in gang activity in the area which left the neighborhood Lila had lived in all her life not quite so quaint.
The kids she dealt with on a regular basis had thankfully escaped much of the fallout, but it wasn't hard to look out of her classroom window and see the taggings spray painted in several places to know the wolves were ever present at the door. As depressing as contemplating the future could have been, Lila took a great deal of joy and refuge in the students she sent off to college every Summer, knowing with most of them the future was in very good hands.
While she derived unspeakable pride in her work in the classroom, Lila had also been spending the previous few years taking grad school courses part time at night to get her Masters in Educational Administration. While she could certainly see herself teaching until retirement, there was something constantly gnawing at Lila that she could make more of a difference helping make policy instead of daily homework assignments.
The fact that her Husband's lawn care business had taken off in recent years made grad school much easier to swing, and for the first time in her life, even with one daughter already in college and another only a year away, finances really weren't a constant source of concern.
Basically killing time in her classroom until she had to take her youngest daughter home from soccer practice at 5, Lila meandered through the room, straightening the desks from the group project during the last period and thinking about what she was going to fix for dinner when she got home.
Looking down at her watch, she noticed it was a quarter after 4.
"You could go out and watch the rest of practice down by the gym," Lila presented herself that option but it was a little overcast and the mid Fall breeze did have a little nip to it by San Diego standards.
Having just gotten over a cold, Lila decided to stay in her classroom and get some busywork done on her laptop. Besides, her Daughter, as with most of the kids on the team, hated when a parent showed up to watch practice while the coach was yelling at all of them.
The only real sound at that late hour inside the school was generally the occasional janitor going up and down the hall. Over the years Lila had pretty much trained herself to tune all of that out, the classroom was her domain and there was nowhere she felt safer. That said, lost in the spreadsheet on the screen, Lila didn't even realize a young man was standing in the doorway for several seconds until he cleared his throat.
The flashing cursor on the laptop's screen suddenly became the only movement in the room when Lila looked up and froze.
Waiting for the feeling to return to her lips, Lila finally managed the wherewithal to croak, "...Hello.....Luis," to the young man standing no more than 15 feet away.
It was a rare week that went by that at least one of Lila's former students didn't drop by, or email to say hi. Usually the visitors were students she had great relationships with. Seeing Luis standing there staring back with an intensity she'd never been comfortable with, Lila realized this may have been her first encounter with the opposite scenario.
Lila had seen literally thousands of young men and women pass through her class over the years. There were a handful that left her with more unease than Luis Moralis, but not many. He'd been in her 12th grade Algebra class three years earlier if memory served, and from her best re-collection he'd gone cross town to the University of San Diego after graduation. That was the last she'd saw of him.
With so many students coming and going each year, Lila vaguely remembered something coming up during the tail end of his Senior year, but she couldn't get her brain to immediately process back that far.
"It couldn't have been that big of a deal," she assured herself as she stared up at him standing in the doorway.
While there wasn't on first glance any hint of anger or hostility in Luis' gaze, the longer Lila looked, the more she absorbed the growing blankness of his stare.
"Luis...this is certainly a surprise.....come in," she offered, the words leaving a bitter aftertaste as soon as they left her mouth.
As if waiting for his former teacher to grant him permission to enter, Luis nodded then took a step forward, closing the door to the room behind him in the process.
Any sense of control Lila felt evaporated when she heard the door shut.
"Oh..don't worry Mrs. Mendez...just didn't want the janitors with those big floor buffers in the hall to interrupt us," Luis smiled even though the gesture never seemed to reach the unsheathed daggers of his dark brown eyes.
Luis' words were basically a jumble of sound in Lila's ears as she coiled in her office chair. A chill rippling down her spine, all Lila could focus on were the ivory white shine of his grinning teeth, and the large yellow business envelope sealed in his right hand. Her legs suddenly feeling like two bags of wet sand, Lila couldn't even push her chair backwards as the 21 year old former student approached her desk.
Like a slow loading file opening in her memory bank, Lila desperately tried processing everything she could about the young man now standing directly above her.
The closer Luis got, the more her memory of him filtered back. He was quite sharp, a very intelligent young man, but one who seemed to fancy using his gifts of knowledge and charm more for manipulation than good. She remembered him as an above average student, but also one that didn't like to be challenged. Spoiled was one word that always came to mind when she interacted with him. Lila also recalled that he was quite the ladies' man in high school and how her stomach always rolled when many of the more naive girls fell for his act. Of course at that age, bravado, even if it is false, usually does the trick.
Remembering all that about Luis didn't provide an ounce of re-assurance for Lila as she wondered why he was standing in her room three years after leaving, with the door closed behind him.
"Don't forget there's that panic button they installed under all the teacher's desks," a voice in Lila's head reminded.
The school board had approved those buttons in each high school classroom after a shooting in the district a year earlier, but Lila was not about to reach down and press it. The last thing she wanted to do was make a mountain out of a molehill, and with the system being wired not only into the office, but the 911 system as well, that seemed quite extreme for handling one of her former students that happened to show up unannounced. Besides, this was her classroom and the she wasn't about to show any weakness or loss of control.
Just in case, Lila steadied herself and pushed away from her desk before standing up. Strolling as casually as she could towards the far side of the room, Lila could feel the weight of the young man's stare as he pivoted in the spot he was standing, the large envelope in his hands still draped in front of his chest as if begging her to ask about it's contents.
"Maybe its just his resume or a job application and he's just looking for a reference," Lila tried convincing herself as that yellow square in his hand seemed to take on a life of it's own.
"Last time I was in this room...we didn't end on such good terms," Luis offered, his tone so dry Lila couldn't tell if he was being accusatory or apologetic.
Once again she found herself riffling through her dusty brain cells trying to call up how Luis' Senior year had ended. In a dam burst, it all started to come back to her.
There had been a whiff of a cheating scandal at the school that year. No one was ever caught, but Lila along with many of her fellow teachers noticed several abnormalities in their grading process as the year went on. Having tinkered with a computer program a college professor had developed to weed out such abnormalities, Lila was confronted with a significant shift in grades on that year's finals. While she liked to think of herself as a good teacher who was able to increase a student's performance as the year went on, the spike between the mid-terms and final were troublesome.
A cold exhale left Lila's body when she remembered Luis having one of the biggest spikes. While most of the exams showed anywhere from a 5 to 10 point improvement, Luis' final was over 25 points better than his midterm. Deciding she couldn't just single out a handful of questionable tests, Lila decided to give the entire class a second final. Most of the scores of the second exam fell within an acceptable range of the student's first score but Luis was one of the few that fell off drastically. Her only recourse was to take the grade on the second exam and add it to the final grades for each student.
Luis could now see the fog beginning to lift in Mrs. Mendez's eyes as the past began to filter back to her.
"You cheated on that exam," Lila said defiantly, knowing more than ever now her assumptions back then had been right.
Luis said nothing. Simply dropping the envelope on the center of his former teacher's cluttered desk, he then turned and casually took a seat in one of the chairs that lined the front row.
