Benjamin's Parasite

by Jeff Strand

  CHAPTER TWO

  Benjamin Wilson sat in his recliner, sipping a cup of hot cocoa and reading a romance novel. He loved the great works of classic literature and tried to instill a genuine appreciation for them in his students, but trashy romance novels were his not-so-guilty pleasure. After about a quarter-hour of bodice-rippin' goodness each morning he was more than ready to start his day.

  He listened, fascinated, as Cindy's alarm clock continued to wail. It had been going off for the past ten minutes, and Benjamin had an almost scientific curiosity about how long she'd let it blare before she finally got out of bed. Alas, his thirst for knowledge had to take a back seat to making sure his sixteen year-old daughter got to school on time, so he finished his cocoa, bookmarked his novel, and wandered into her room.

  Cindy lay face-down on her bed in her nightgown, blankets on the floor, pillow over her head. She'd been a violent sleeper since the time she was two, and he and Margaret had been very happy when Cindy outgrew the need to sleep with them during thunderstorms. Explaining to the doctor that his toddler daughter had broken one of his ribs was not Benjamin's proudest moment.

  Aside from the blanket on the floor, her room was in pristine condition. Her dirty clothes always went right into the hamper, the floor was spotless, and all of her possessions were neatly stored in their proper spot. She was a scary mutant child.

  Benjamin shut off the alarm. "Time to get up," he said.

  Cindy muttered something unintelligible and pulled the pillow tighter over her head.

  "Let's go, you'll be late for school."

  "Five more minutes," she said, with somewhat less than flawless diction.

  "Nope, sorry, the grace period is long gone. And I should remind you that your mother already left for work, so there'll be nobody to keep my evil methods in check."

  "Go 'way."

  "Don't make me tickle you. It's not something I want to do. Don't force me to do something that will give me endless nights of guilt."

  Cindy rolled onto her side, facing the wall, curling her feet up underneath her and keeping the pillow over her head.

  "Yes, being tickled awake would certainly be an uncomfortable start to the day. I know that I would hate to be tickled awake if I were the one ignoring the alarm. I'd probably be grouchy well into the late afternoon. Uh-oh, I can feel my tickle fingers twitching. Must resist...must...resist...but... experiencing...difficulty...with...resistance...process..."

  "Go away, geek!"

  Benjamin adjusted his glasses. "I can't believe you'd call your own father a geek. I haven't bitten the head off a live chicken in days."

  Cindy curled up into an even tighter little ball. She didn't appreciate his fine sense of humor this early in the morning. He'd just have to enjoy it enough for both of them.

  "Okay, fine. Three more minutes. But if you aren't out of bed by then, the consequences will be dire. Dire consequences in three minutes. You've been warned."

  Benjamin left her bedroom and headed for the kitchen, whistling a happy tune. He opened the cupboard, took down a glass pitcher, and began to fill it with extremely cold water.

  He knew that Cindy adored her hopeless geek of a dad, despite the occasional parental torment he bestowed upon her. Sure, they had the usual disagreements that any father would have with his teenage daughter (she wanted to wear too much makeup and too little clothing to school) but she studied hard, kept up an A- average, wasn't pregnant or on drugs or committing rampant acts of vandalism, and could dish out torment as well as she could take it, so they got along just fine.

  He got a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer and emptied them into the pitcher.

  Still whistling, he took down a bowl and a box of the nutritious breakfast cereal that she would ignore in favor of a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart. Benjamin rarely ate breakfast himself, preferring to sneak in a candy bar between second and third period. A poor habit for somebody who was supposed to be educating the nation's youth, but he never had much of an appetite in the morning.

  He picked up the pitcher of ice water and headed down the hallway toward Cindy's room, imagining that horror film music accompanied his sinister march toward his unsuspecting doomed prey.

  She stepped out of her room just as he got there.

  "What are you doing with that pitcher?" she asked, suspiciously.

  "Y'know, it's the funniest thing. This sudden thirst overtook me. I can't explain it. One minute I'm fine, the next minute I need to drink a whole pitcher of ice water. Weird."

  "Uh-huh. Why are you carrying it in the hallway?"

  "Y'know, it's the funniest thing. I just suddenly felt like I needed exercise. Does that ever happen to you? Suddenly feeling like you need exercise? And I thought, well, I could go find some weights to carry around, or I could just use this pitcher of water. When you're as busy as I am, you're always trying to find ways to combine tasks, and so I figured out a way to quench my thirst and get in some exercise. You can steal the idea if you want."

  "I'll pass." She ran a hand through her long blonde hair, which was hilariously tangled. "I could report you for child abuse, you know."

  "Then I'd have to report you to the fashion police for that hair. It's surreal and disturbing."

  "Okay, then truce."

  "Truce," Benjamin agreed.

  Cindy suddenly reached out with both hands, tickling him on the sides and causing him to spill ice water down the front of his blue dress shirt. He let out a yelp as Cindy sprinted into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.

  "It's off to the convent with you, young lady!" he loudly announced. "You're nunning it from now on!"

  "Ooooooh, I'm scared!"

  "You'd better be. I've still got most of the water left and you have to come out of there sometime."

  "Oh, sure, send me off to school doing a wet T-shirt contest. See if I care."

  Benjamin had absolutely no response to that, so he returned to the kitchen and poured the water out into the sink. He removed his wet tie and went into his bedroom to retrieve another one.

  After a moment of deliberation, he selected the red Shakespeare tie and stood in front of the closet door mirror to clip it on. He didn't look bad for a guy who only had slightly over a month left as a thirtysomething. Sure, the gray hairs now outnumbered the black ones, but at least he still had most of them, along with a full beard, neatly trimmed. He was in pretty good shape, with an average physique that was a compromise between plenty of exercise and too much junk food.

  He finished clipping on his tie and wandered back over to the bathroom. He knocked on the door. "Don't miss the bus," he warned.

  "I won't."

  He could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

  "Okay, I'm leaving now. I love you."

  "I love you too, Dad."

  Since she was a student at Prill High, where he taught, there was no reason that Cindy couldn't just ride with him to school each day. But she preferred the bus. She didn't really like to acknowledge that her father was one of the teachers, even though she wasn't in any of his classes. He would've been fine with her calling him "Dad" on school grounds, but in those rare cases where they spoke during the day, she went with "Mr. Wilson."

  It was actually kind of cute.

  He got in his car and drove to school.

  * * *

  Something was wrong. He knew it the instant he stepped into the teacher's lounge, before a word was spoken.

  "Benjamin, glad you're here, sit down," said Principal Reitz. Reitz wasn't in the habit of hanging out in the teacher's lounge, and his normally stern features were pinched even tighter than usual.

  Benjamin sat down on the couch. Only a couple of other teachers were there, Mr. Kramer and Mrs. Schechter, and both of them looked stunned.

  "What's going on?" Benjamin asked.

  "It's about one of your students, Brian Dexter."

  "What about him?"

  Reitz sighed. The man was usually cold and direct in all matters, so this had to be re
ally, really bad. "He was killed last night."

  "What?"

  "Shot. By a neighbor."

  "Oh my...oh my God." Benjamin was suddenly grateful that he hadn't eaten any breakfast to throw up. "He's really dead?"

  Reitz nodded.

  "Oh my God." Brian had a problem with talking in class and never really took the work seriously, but he was a good kid, a damn good kid, and Benjamin couldn't believe this. He just sat there, reeling from the news.

  "So he was murdered?" he finally asked.

  "Not quite." Reitz bit his lip, as if unsure how to phrase this next piece of news. "The neighbor shot him in self defense. Brian was trying to kill his mother. With a meat cleaver."

  "What?"

  "I know, I know, it's crazy, but apparently that's what happened. I don't know all of the details. Supposedly he chased her around the house and all the way over to the neighbor's. The neighbor had a gun and shot him in the chest. Brian died before the ambulance got there."

  Benjamin stared at him, looking for a sign, any sign, that Reitz was joking. But Reitz had never said anything that even remotely resembled a joke in the decade Benjamin had been working for him, and he certainly wouldn't start with one about a dead student.

  "Do they have any idea why he did it?"

  Reitz shook his head. "We don't know much. Did he seem like he was having any problems in class?"

  "No, none. I mean, he was a slacker, but there was nothing to indicate any kind of emotional distress."

  "Did you ever meet the mother?"

  "A parent-teacher conference, and then one other time, I think it was a football game. She was overprotective but a perfectly nice lady." The only possible explanation came to mind. "Did they test his body for drugs?"

  His body. That sounded so wrong.

  "I'm sure that will be part of the autopsy," said Reitz. "I don't know if they've done it yet."

  Benjamin dabbed at the corner of his eyes with his index fingers. "It's gotta be drugs. Jesus."

  "There will be police officers here as soon as classes start, and they'll be talking to his friends. I know that Brian was in your first period class, so if you need some time we can get somebody to cover for you."

  "No, no, I want to discuss it with the kids." Benjamin stroked his beard. "A meat cleaver?"

  "Yes. A meat cleaver."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Benjamin had only been to one funeral in his life. His Uncle Stewart had died about five years ago, and the entire event had involved lots of relatives struggling very hard to say only kind things about the deceased. Aunt Penny, Stewart's widow, had slipped up when she suggested that "demons will chew his balls in hell for all eternity," but everybody else somehow managed to remain polite.

  He was most definitely not looking forward to this one. How were you supposed to behave at the funeral of a kid who died while trying to kill his mother with a kitchen implement? Only deranged serial killers were supposed to use meat cleavers in that fashion. What was he supposed to say to Brian's mom? "I'm so sorry about your son, Ms. Dexter, but, hey, congrats on surviving!"

  Hell, Benjamin even got stomach knots over parent/teacher conferences. He dreaded having to explain to parents that their child was "not living up to his or her potential" (lazy) or "struggling with the material" (dumb). Worse, last year one of his top students had stayed after class one day and tearfully confessed that she was pregnant. He'd done everything he could to help her, and even held the baby before she gave it up for adoption, but he was much more comfortable standing in front of the kids lecturing about old books.

  Today was going to reach previously uncharted levels of pure suck.

  Margaret stepped out of the bedroom, wearing a black dress. "How does this look?" she asked.

  "I didn't think people wore black to funerals anymore."

  "You don't have to, but you're still allowed to, aren't you? I don't really have any other nice dresses."

  Margaret was, as she loved to proudly and frequently explain, the thinnest she'd ever been in her adult life. She was still, in her own words, "a little pudgy," but she'd stuck with the current weight loss program for several months. Benjamin was supportive on both ends of the scale, though he couldn't help but be amused by her efforts to "dress light" before attending a Weight Watchers meeting, presumably to fool the scales. It practically reached the point where she clipped her fingernails beforehand to knock off those last couple of milligrams.

  She looked great and felt great—in both senses of the word "felt"—but the constant fluctuation in body size meant that her wardrobe choices were rather limited.

  "I'm sure it's fine."

  "You're sure, or you think you're sure? I don't want to embarrass myself." Underneath her blonde bangs, Benjamin knew she was getting that cute little crinkle in her forehead that appeared whenever she was worried.

  "I'm sure."

  "Do you think people will think that I don't know that you don't wear black to funerals anymore?"

  "It's for a kid. The fashion police won't be there."

  Margaret grimaced. "You're right. I can't believe I said that. Just trying to distance myself from the whole thing, I guess. How are you holding up?"

  Benjamin sat down on the edge of the bed and sighed. "Not great. I saw him every day. How could he have been so far gone and I didn't notice that anything was wrong?"

  "It's not your fault," said Margaret, sitting down next to him.

  "I know, I know, I'm not trying to be melodramatic and blame myself or anything like that. It's just that there was something seriously messed-up with him, and I should've seen some hint of it, don't you think?"

  The autopsy had found nothing unusual. No trace of drugs. He was a normal, healthy, fifteen year-old boy. The media was fixated on the violent video game he'd been playing that night, but that was completely ridiculous. Benjamin had been almost ashamed to admit to the police that he had absolutely no idea what set Brian off.

  "You only saw him for an hour a day, with thirty other kids in the class. It's not like he turned in his homework with meat cleaver cuts on the edges." Margaret grimaced again. "Bad joke. Sorry."

  "Laugh so you don't cry."

  "Laugh so you don't go completely batshit bonkers is more like it."

  Neither of them laughed.

  * * *

  The first hour of the viewing was only for close friends and family. Though Benjamin was pretty sure that Brian considered him more of a cruel oppressor than a friend, teachers qualified for early admission, so he walked with Margaret into the funeral home. His hand trembled as he signed the guestbook, and for a moment he wondered if he could just flee. "Yep, I was there. Signed the guestbook. Sorry I missed you. How about the design work on that casket, huh?"

  Nope. Not an option. And not something he truly wanted to do. It was important to pay his respects and offer to help Brian's mother in any way he could. He took Margaret's hand as they entered the viewing room.

  A couple of other teachers were standing in the corner, softly weeping.

  Benjamin quickly surveyed the room for Brian's mother. Might as well get the most difficult part out of the way. She was seated in the front row of chairs, surrounded by some people Benjamin didn't recognize. Instead of barging over there to offer his condolences, he decided to wait.

  Nobody was standing by the casket, except for an old woman who was inspecting the flower arrangements as if searching for garden pests, so Benjamin headed that way, feeling a bit queasy.

  "I can't do this," Margaret whispered.

  "Do what?"

  "Go up to the body. I can't look at a dead child. I'll start bawling my eyes out. I'll freak. You don't want me to freak."

  "It's okay. You don't have to." He let go of her. "Have a seat somewhere."

  Benjamin walked toward the open casket, desperately wishing he were someplace else. Maybe a good ol' fashioned root canal performed by a jittery blind dentist with a rusty red-hot pickaxe. That would work. Even if the dentist acci
dentally knocked out a few extra teeth and punctured his uvula, it would be a more pleasant experience than walking up to a casket that held a fifteen-year-old boy.

  Well, maybe not. At his last dental appointment, they'd left him waiting in the chair too long and the Novacain had started to wear off before the drilling was complete. He'd waved frantically and they'd given him another shot, but the pain was excruciating. He certainly didn't want to do that again. So the whole root canal/jittery blind dentist/rusty red-hot pickaxe comparison was invalid. But he'd rather sit through the longest, most miserable all-day teacher in-service than be here. Oh yeah.

  Benjamin made it to the casket. He gazed down at Brian's lifeless, almost waxy looking form. His eyes began to tear up. What a waste. So many things the kid would never get to do. Barely even got a chance to live. It just didn't make any damn—

  The dead boy's lower lip twitched.

  Because this was a somber event, Benjamin withstood the urge to jump back and cry out "Holy shit!" Instead, he fixed his eyes firmly on Brian, trying to figure out if he'd really seen that. The correct answer, of course, was "No, you certainly did not. It was either a trick of the light or a practical joke by your brain. Or if you did see a lip tremor, it was from a cool breeze produced by the funeral home's air conditioner. Stop being such a whack-job."