Chapter Text
John Adams High wasn’t his first teaching job.
Technically it was. Jon didn’t start teaching right out of college. He came to it through an alternate licensing route which meant he was thrown after a month of training into “student teaching.” Student teaching was Jon immediately getting left in charge of a class of forty students with nothing but a moldy textbook and the advice “Don’t expect much.”
Technically, John Adams was his first teaching job, but Jon knew from the time he parked his bike that this school would be a cakewalk. In fact, as he was given a tour of the cafeteria he noted that ther was actual cake on students' lunch trays.
Dr. Braeger, the principal before George, warned Jon during the interview, “The students have been known to get rowdy. You’ll have students falling in class, often. And you’ll have to decide whether to derail the other eleven students and address it, or let it go by.”
“Twelve students?” Jon asked. “Is that a pull-out class?”
Dr. Braeger waved his hand. “Our average class has twelve students.”
Jon didn’t care about anything after that. Nothing about this school could be that hard when there were twelve students in each class. Nothing.
Which was why it made no damn sense that his third-period class felt just as bad as the worst day at Kennedy, at least when Shawn Hunter managed to show up.
George had told him over lunch in the first week, “You will find that Mr. Hunter struggles to be in class.”
“Is he behind?” Jon asked. “He hasn’t turned in anything. I hand out an assignment, Hunter takes the paper, folds it up, puts it in his pocket, and then Matthews hands in some half-assed sh–assignment and says they both did it.”
“He is not behind,” George said. “But you will be hard-pressed to get him to read or write a thing in your classroom.”
“How do you know he’s not behind then?”
“He is not behind,” George repeated.
A semester passed with Matthews and Shawn ignoring class for all but three minutes a day when they attempted to take control with questions that had absolutely nothing to do with the lesson. They were immune to the kind of redirection that Jon had perfected at Kennedy. They didn’t mind being given detention until Jon changed the game.
They were reading The Girl Who Owned a City, a dystopian novel about a society where a virus killed everyone over the age of twelve. The main character was a ten-year-old girl with frightening strategic skills who ruthlessly negotiated her way to running a city of children. The children in the book formed gangs and barely managed to survive. His class so far did not understand the seriousness of the situation. They talked about how easy and fun it would be to have no parents around, and how great it would be to live with their friends, like the kids in the books.
So Jon spent the entire class period on an activity to make it real.
“Alright,” he said, handing out poker chips. "Everyone older than you is dead. I’m dead. All you have is what I’m giving you. If you get red chips, you have food. Blue, you have shelter. White, you have water. You can’t survive without all three things. And no, there is not enough to go around. You have ten minutes to survive. Go.”
When Cory and Shawn organized a mutiny, Jon had to hide how funny he thought it was. But when they began pulling books off Jon’s shelves, that turned to anger.
“Whoa whoa,” Jon yanked his Oddysey out of Shawn’s hands. “That’s not part of the game.”
Shawn didn’t even try to defend himself. Cory did it for him from across the room, “It’s a resource! You said to use our resources!”
“That’s not your resource to take.”
In a flash, Shawn went from silly to angry. “You said we can be ruthless. You said everything is on the table.”
“I didn’t mean everything in the world, Hunter.”
“Then you should have said that.”
Jon sighed and saw the other students watching, their poker chips sitting exactly where Jon had handed them out. “Fine. I was doing this for fun, but you know what? New essay.” The kids groaned. “Yeah, yeah. I want a page on how you would feel when you found out everyone older than you was dead. I want adjectives, and at least one simile. And you can blame Hunter and Matthews for that.”
Shawn scoffed. “I don’t think it’s us they’ll blame. Think about that.”
Jon looked between Cory and Shawn. “Detention. Both of you. Actually, Cory, you get regular detention. Shawn, you’re with me.”
The way they reacted you’d think Jon had killed their childhood dog in front of them. Jon felt a little ashamed to have not figured out that the two of them wouldn’t mind going to the pits of hell as long as they were together.
Shawn served his hour of detention in Jon’s classroom with withering glares and theatric scoffing every time they made eye contact. Jon stopped grading papers at this desk after one particularly theatrical scoff. Shawn noticed the change and carefully looked up from where he was drawing on his hands.
“Why don’t you do homework?” he asked.
“Because, Mr. Turner, I am not at home. The planes of existence would collapse and a black star would open up right here at John Adams high.”
Jon raised his eyebrows. “I can’t even begin to dissect everything wrong with that sentence.”
“Maybe that’s a sign you should send me home to do homework, Mr. Turner.”
Despite George’s assertion that Shawn was in no way behind, Jon’s suspicion that he couldn’t read or write grew every class. Maybe well enough to get by, read the movie times and menus. But not well enough to read when called on, or risk turning in an assignment riddled with errors.
This seemed like an ideal time to address the obvious situation. He gestured to Shawn to come up to the desk, and he did–dragging his backpack on the floor behind him. Shawn sat in the front row. “Board’s bigger from up here. Whoa. I feel car sick. Desk sick.”
Well crap, could this kid not read the board? One thing at a time. “What book are we reading?”
“Which one, the one where chess isn’t real, or the one with the bird?”
Jon had no idea what books those were. “Your homework is to write about how you would cope if everyone over the age of twelve disappeared, like in the book. If you work on that for the rest of detention, I will forget about detention for the rest of the week. If you actually get the work in and finish now, you can leave early.”
“Cory too?”
Means to an end. “Cory too.”
Shawn instantly dove into his backpack. He came up with a bundle of papers folded into quarters. John watched him unfold each one a few degrees, then close it and put it in his backpack. As he went through this process, Jon suggested, “If you like, we can read it together, and I can help you with–”
“Do you still have the paper I’m supposed to write it on? Like, a copy? I can’t find it.”
“I gave it to you four hours ago. What’s all that other paper then?”
Shawn ignored that and fished a folded white piece of paper out of his bag. He smoothed the paper out and pulled a pen out of his pocket. Then, for the first time in Jon’s field of vision, he started writing.
“Where is your book?” Jon asked. Shawn’s pen was moving quickly, and from where he stood it looked like actual words were going onto the page.
“Cory has it. Joint custody.”
“Joint custody?”
Shawn didn’t stop writing. “It’s his day. I have History and Science today.”
“Of course you do.”
Just a few minutes later Shawn handed the paper over to him. Jon turned the paper around and saw an essay , written on a Pre-algebra worksheet with no actual math work on it. Shawn grabbed his bag and stood.
“Eh eh eh. Sit. Let me read.”
If everyone older than me died no one could drive exept my cousin Tilla who knows how to drive but Uncle T wont teach me because my dad crashed his car and he he thinks I will too but I wont. Sometimes my mom drives me to Corys house so she wouldnt do that but I think Cory would come live with me anyways.
Because there are a lot of kids where I live and there isnt always a lot of grown ups so it wouldnt be so different for me at least. Maybe I wouldn't be in charge but there would be a gang of trailer park kids for sure. I would help cory because he doesnt know how to do things adults do like talking and fighting but I do and I would protect him and maybe Topanga to. I think because I have to pretend like Im an adult even when there are still adults alive it would be easier for me to be the oldest all of the sudden. I think I would be kind of better at it than most people. They would be really sad about their parents dying and I would be really sad too but it wouldn’t be as big a problem for me.
Bewildered, Jon started reading it again. The writing was middle school level without a doubt, which was more shocking than if it wasn’t. It was better than some of the kids who did more than drag their physical body in and out of classes. And reading how his buddy was Shawn’s number one priority, Jon felt a little guilty separating them for even that hour.
Not the mention the actual content of the essay. But Jon excused himself from worrying about that for now. First the matter at hand.
“You just pretended not to know what book we are reading. This is great, Shawn. This is more than I expect from half the class.”
“I can go right?”
“Yeah, but–”
Before the sentence was finished, Shawn was gone.