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.
