It's an awkward topic for some. No parent wants to hear about their baby being touched by an authority figure at their school. School is for learning purposes — and they are just children for God’s sake!
“I trusted you! Leave her alone. Go find someone your own age in the real world! Creep!”
There is an argument that the real world and the school world are deeply interconnected by many things including those outside academia. Love lessons are as important as English and Science. Someone has to do the educating in that department too. Why not a responsible adult? Some teachers are barely out of high school when they start their careers. Graduate teachers are not much older than the students they teach.
“Fuck off! Show me where in the curriculum it says you can take my little girl and do what you like with her!”
Teacher-student relationships do happen but almost all of them are never discovered. They fly underneath the radar. They shouldn't occur, but I've had the opportunity to see one up close and personal at my high school. It's a real story. I know enough of its inner-workings to confirm that the affair really happened. I was a student at the school at the time and I know what I saw. In a way, that affair is still happening. The couple got married and now have children.
Oh yes, it went the distance — and, fortunately, it had a happy ending, but not all teacher-student affairs have that fairytale happy ever-after ending. At its beginning, this one was like all the rest. It was dangerous on so many levels. Everyone in-the-know at the time (the suspicious students) thought that he was just an older guy dipping into the pool of fresh and fertile pussy on display at school — and she was a doe-eyed romantic attracted to older makes. As I recall, the creep level was running pretty high between the children. We had no real proof but there were signs the two were hooking up.
Their private lives were supposed to remain apart. It's morally wrong to have their two orbits cross romantically. There were trust issues and a bunch of professional ethics being broken for this relationship to exist. If discovered, a teaching career would’ve ended. A student would’ve been expelled and lost all her academic credits for that year. Her senior year would’ve been tarnished and it would’ve set her future back as she repeated school. The few people who knew of it were sworn to total secrecy. The only reason I can speak about it now is that no one seems to care about it anymore. Even they talk about their beginnings in mixed company. They speak about it so freely that even they don’t remember what lies they told back in the day.
But they were almost caught out and they needed support from outsiders to keep them protected. That’s how I came to be involved. They called on me to vouch for them. I made a good and convincing ally at the time.
It was her final year. There was a month or two left before she was to graduate and whispers were already going on around the school about the couple — it wasn’t half obvious, the leggy blonde spent much time hanging around his staff room. The teachers had become concerned too, and the administration had to confront him about it when the parent’s voices were added to the mix. The student body believed a secret investigation took place. For weeks, there were strange, new officials moving around the administration block and the teacher’s name was called over the PA many times.
The official version the couple passed to me was that they didn’t get together until after graduation day, after the last day of the school year — that very day as it turned out. Not three days or weeks later but that very day. That one day changed everything.
She was no longer a student of the school but an adult female. She wasn’t the responsibility of the school anymore.
When she spoke to Principal about it, she said she saw him across a room, and it was love at first sight (as if she didn’t know what he already looked like. Too many romance novel stories going on in that young head of hers to realise how stupid it sounded). That was what I was told to say too when I was asked. They dated after graduation not before — I don’t think anyone would’ve believed it, but that version of the story provided agrey area of doubt. No one, not even me, could confirm anything happened before it, so, as far as I could see, it’d bought them a month or two. He kept his job and they were off the hook. The new school year had the staff hopping with new classes, new students and new lessons. No one had the time to pursue the investigation like that. The girl was seventeen and above the age of consent. She wasn’t even at school anymore. Jurisdiction fell elsewhere.
The couple’s plan had worked. He kept his job, and she fell pregnant with their first child almost right away. They got married and everything’s fine. That was many years ago now.
But hard evidence of their affair arose just recently. As I said, they speak freely and talk about their meeting like it was someone else’s story, not their own. They’ve forgotten how much deception took place to cover it up.
Over cocktails, she drew out a glossy photo of her from her handbag. It was a picture of her and a close girlfriend in a city nightclub. It’s bent and faded, and you can see it was taken on an old film camera. There was one more person appearing in that picture — but before I say who, let me describe the scene in the image. The two girls are seen holding drinks and toasting each other beside a very famous 80’s dance floor. There are eighties fashions, eighties drinks, and eighties videos being displayed on small tv screens in the background. Down on the right-hand side of the picture was the date it was taken, something that was common in 80’s cameras. The third person in the photo is a certain male teacher. I could easily do the math. Our teacher had taken two fourteen-year-olds to a bar and provided them with alcohol. That changed everything for me. It was proof the affair started years earlier. The words underage drinking and paedophilia came to my mind. It raises more questions about what was really going on back then. Was he sleeping with one blonde or two? Were there even more young girls in his line-up that no one knew about, not even this blonde child lover? Was that photo only the tip of an iceberg?
I know love comes from anywhere at any time. It's in our DNA to find love, seek a mate, let love grow where and whenever we find it, and we say age shouldn’t matter. If it’s true love then that’s what it is. You can’t stop it when it starts. Leave lovers alone and let them find peace. We should mind our own damn business.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t abide by this way of thinking.
Two girls?
Dammit! That's just wrong!
Take one and leave the other for someone else you selfish bastard!
-A
