Franc tried his absolute best to not wait up for Jermaine, he really did.
He was exhausted from not sleeping much over the last several weeks and from having his heart ripped out and shoved back down his throat. All he desperately wanted was to go to sleep. That was it.
He laid in his bed and stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. He kept willing himself to fall asleep. He tried relaxation techniques, he tried counting sheep, he even tried convincing himself that everything that was going on around him was simply a dream. Nothing seemed to work. He just laid there.
And laid there, and laid there.
And laid there.
Then the moment he had been dreading came along: he heard the front door close and his brother's steps coming toward their room.
When Jermaine walked in, Franc pretended that he had been asleep for hours. He even threw in a couple of irregular snores that he knew he was prone to do in his sleep. That stopped pretty quickly, though, when he realized that he could smell his beloved's . . . Penny's perfume on Jermaine. That was the moment when he accepted his fate and decided that the only thing he could do was try to look at the bright side.
At least he always got a good night's rest when he cried himself to sleep.
The next morning passed uneventfully. He avoided talking to anyone as much as he possibly could and hurried off to school where he shuffled through his classes until he got to English . . . the one class he shared with HER.
He just hoped that Unpleasant Plaisance would have some kind of assignment that would keep him from watching his beloved . . . Penny. Her name was Penny. That fact still hadn't sunk in.
Luckily, his teacher did have an activity to keep his attention, but that silver lining came with a very dark cloud. They had a test that day that he had forgotten about.
Crap.
Ms. Plaisance walked through the class handing out the test as she explained the format. "The test consists of fifteen essay questions. Each one must be at least a page long with textual evidence to support your argument."
Franc stared at the test in disbelief. "Fifteen pages WITH textual evidence in less than an hour? You've got to be kidding me."
"Excuse me, Mr. Bar," said Unpleasant Plaisance unpleasantly. "But complaining about the test isn't going to give you any more time to work on it or improve your grade. And as I understand it, you don't exactly have much room to risk losing any more points in my class."
Apparently, he hadn't been talking to himself like he thought. Oops.
Franc looked around the room as everyone worked furiously on their tests. He deliberately avoided looking at Penny and returned his attention to his own test lest the Unpleasant One accuse him of cheating. As he tried to read the first question, he found that none of the words made any sense. He could make out the words: blue, author, historical, etc. Unfortunately, he couldn't make any sense of them when put together.
He couldn't take it anymore.
"Excuse me, Ms. Plaisance, but is it a superiority complex or an inferiority complex?" he asked rather loudly.
"I beg your pardon," she said suspiciously. A few students looked up.
"Well, a test this difficult can't possibly serve any educational value. No one could possibly complete, never mind pass, this test. If your purpose with this test isn't to help us in our education, your purpose must simply be to make us miserable." At this point, he had the entire class's attention. "That means that either you are so full of yourself and power drunk that you simply get off on making your students miserable, or you realize what a worthless piece of shit you and your class are and try to compensate for your blowoff subject by making an unnecessarily difficult class so that you feel a little less like a tapeworm in someone's ass!"
"Mr. Bar!" No one in the class had ever seen Ms. Plaisance so furious, but Franc had a full head of steam going at this point and wasn't about to stop there.
"Or maybe, the problem is simpler than that. Maybe you just haven't gotten over the fact that your husband couldn't stand what a relentless shrew you are and left you. Maybe you feel like the slowly rotting corpse of a harpy you are and misery simply loves company. Maybe, just maybe, you are so bitter about the fact that no one loves you that you can't stand the sight of anyone else's happiness!"
Ms. Plaisance's face had never been so red with anger since anyone in that class had been in High School. Her voice shook ever so slightly with the white hot rage burning inside her. "That's it . . . "
Franc held up a hand to interrupt her. "Don't worry. I'll see myself to the principal's office."
And with that, Franc Bar stood up and walked out of the room followed by the stares of disbelief, fear, and admiration of the other students in Unpleasant Plaisance's third period English class.
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