Murders at Westfield High

Chapter 14

Things went from bad to worse. The word going around was that Mr. Taylor had suffered a heart attack and was at home recovering. The school board assigned an assistant coach, Henry Felton, to take most of Taylor’s classes, but it seems that my class in the last period got the unwanted prize. They evidently considered us to be the bad boys of Westfield High and since Felton had a Biology class in that period, they assigned Victoria Gaines to run our gym and swimming sessions. Evidently, they had forgotten the fact that we swim naked or they just didn’t care. There were only twenty of us in that doomed class, and since we were all seniors, we were unlikely to complain for fear of not graduating.

As it turned out, Victoria wasn’t happy about being assigned to extra gym and swimming sessions. It meant she had to work extra hours because she still had to run all of the girls’ sessions. This was a fact of gender disparity. Women teachers were considered less qualified than men teachers with the same credentials and were often saddled with extra duties. The women’s movement was still a ways off.

I got to the boys’ locker room and immediately stripped, stuffed my clothes and shoes in a locker, fastened a combination lock to the door latch and entered the shower room. I took a quick shower and stuck my feet in the disinfectant bath before making my way down the stairs to the pool.

I saw Neil, Nelson and Josh and standing by the shallow end, and I could plainly see that they weren’t happy at all about the situation.

“I don’t get it,” Nelson said. “Why’d they have to put miss pimple tits in as our substitute instructor?”

“She must like getting her jollies seeing us naked,” Neil said.

“Somehow, I doubt that,” I said. “Women don’t get excited about naked men. I’ll bet they didn’t even consider the fact that we don’t wear suits.”

“Speaking about women,” Josh said. “What happened to you and Julia? I haven’t seen you hanging around her of late.”

“She’s avoiding me. I have no idea why.”

“She’s not the only fish in the sea, Kramer,” he said, sounding as if he were lecturing me. “There are plenty of willing girls out there.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said with a mocking grin.

“Cheer up, Kramer,” Nelson said so that only we could hear it. “The bitch is coming.”

“Line up you guys,” she yelled before she even got down the marble tiled stairs on the girls’ side. She stepped up on the barrier that separated the bleachers from the pool and walked back and forth on the narrow wall, balancing as if she was used to it.

We lined up, each of us trying as best we could to protect our modesty.

“Hands at your sides, boys.”

We moaned, but we reluctantly complied.

She looked at her clipboard. “Anderson?”

Charlie held a hand up.

“Baker?”

Dale held his hand up.

She called each name and when she got to Nelson, she gave him a scolding smirk. “I know your glad to see me, Mr. King, but relax that thing.”

Nelson turned fifty shades of crimson.

We laughed, but we could commiserate with what he was going through.

After she called attendance, she blew her whistle. “In the pool, you guys.”

We gladly obeyed. She made us swim in place while holding on to the scum troth just like Mr. Taylor. Then she blew the whistle. “Out of the pool,” she yelled. “Line up to dive.”