Immortal Souls: Phoenix Always

Existenial Bane

Education. The bane of my repeated existence.

My adult mind carries over to each newborn body. Or maybe it's my soul. I don't know the logistics of the operation. Either way, it means I'm born knowing how to read, write, do math, and everything else humans learn as they grow. Pretending that I don't, pretending to learn it all over again, is the hardest part of being born into a new body. Yeah, teaching my chubby toddler body how to walk and talk over and over again sucks, but feigning ignorance is far worse.

It's especially difficult when the history teacher tells his students incorrect information.

"The Nazi concentration camps were originally designed to hold the prisoners, not kill them, but from 1942 onward, they shifted to extermination camps, where the prisoners would usually be murdered within hours of arrival."

"Actually, the concentration and extermination camps were two different things from the beginning," I blurt out. "At first, most people were sent to the concentrations camps where they would die slowly from starvation or torture. But in 1942, the Nazis started sending their prisoners directly to the extermination camps to immediately be killed."

Mr. Aimes doesn't pretend to be surprised. He exhales and sits on the corner of his desk. "And where did you get this fact from, Phoenix?"

I was there, smart ass. "My grandfather is a war historian, and his father was one of the Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz." That's only partially true. Samantha's father was a war historian, and her grandfather was a Soviet soldier, but they both died before I was born in this body.

The European History teacher isn't quite sure how to respond to my comeback. We have these encounters at least once a week, and it's the best response I've had so far. I can't exactly tell him I was living in another body and experienced an event firsthand. Well, I can, but that landed me in a French looney bin in 1889. It was just one little slip up, and suddenly everyone was calling me delusional. I'll never make that mistake again.

Every pair of eyes in class dart back and forth between me and the teacher as we stare each other down.

He clears his throat. "I'll look into that."

The students snicker, and Mr. Aimes wearily resumes his lesson on the Holocaust.

A quadruple-folded sheet of notebook paper drops over my shoulder and into my lap. I eye the teacher to make sure he isn't paying attention to me and carefully unfold the note from my best friend sitting behind me.

If you weren't a straight A student, he would fail you for all the times you've made him look like an idiot.

Btw, Brynn is telling everyone she dumped you because you f**k her like she's a man.

Thanks, Journey. Ugh. I hate high school. I slump down in my desk and continue taking half-assed notes from the lecture without writing her back.

The lunch bell rings twenty minutes later, and Mr. Aimes cuts me a dirty glare as I exit his classroom. I close my eyes to keep from rolling them at him.

He doesn't like me, but he would change his tune if he knew the truth. I wish I could tell him that I was one of the millions of people rounded up by the Nazis and imprisoned in those damn camps. I wish I could tell him how I watched thousands of Romani people suffer and die in the Gypsy compound at Auschwitz, but a soldier favored me so I didn't starve to death or see the inside of a gas chamber. How my fellow inmates spurned and shunned me because of that special treatment. I wish I could tell him the real reason I corrected his mistake.