Jenna Hastings was a sophomore at Stonebrook, and she went missing the day before Christmas Eve. The last time anyone had seen her, she was leaving the mall, bags of last minute Christmas gifts in her hands, and walking across the parking lot towards the fast food place on the corner. We were already out for the holiday break at the time, so it wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that it became a big enough deal that the news trickled down to us.
I remember us all sitting in my attic, playing Sorry! because we were tired of being outside in the cold. Cassidy had just gotten there and was telling us about Jenna, and at first it was mildly troubling and interesting, but that was all. Jenna was three years older than us, which at twelve might as well have been thirty years, and while we all had some vague idea of who she was, we didn’t have a clear idea of her as a person. Instead she was more of a point of interest or a cautionary tale.
But then Thomas decided to make a joke out of it. Cassidy had finished her short recounting of what she had overheard from her mother’s phone conversation and we were about to get back to the game when Thomas piped up with, “Maybe the Professor got her.”
We all froze and looked at him. His proud grin started to fall away and Mills punching him in the arm finished the job. “Idiot,” she said with a scowl. “That’s not funny. And it’s dumb. The Professor is made up.” We were all nodding our agreement, and even at the time I knew that something felt wrong. We were all either 12 or 13 and none of us were known for being overly sensitive or afraid of dark humor. But we all shared a kind of desperate intensity in that moment—a need to not only rebuke what Thomas had said, but deny it.
I’ve thought about us sitting in that attic, scolding him while he grew sad and sullen. He didn’t like being yelled at, but he didn’t fight back like he usually would. It was as if he knew as much as the rest of us that he had made a mistake beyond bad taste. I think that’s one of the first times I knew we had somehow started to believe in the Professor too.
The following week we were back in school, and we had carefully avoided any further mention of the Professor among ourselves during the break, maybe in some unconscious attempt to kill the idea before it took deeper root. But our hopes that the rest of the school would have forgotten about our stories over the holidays were dashed as soon as we got off the bus that first morning back.
Two of the school janitors had just set up a pressure washer to blast paint off of the concrete walkway just a few feet from the bus lot. They had already started spraying, but we could still see the neon green words emblazoned across the ground like a brand.
THE PROFESSOR TOOK HER. WHO’S NEXT?
We found out later that the vandalism had just been discovered half an hour before the buses started arriving, and they had it removed by that afternoon, but the damage had already been done. The school was on fire with fear and speculation now, and the larger world had started to take notice too. During a class change, we saw two policemen out at the walkway taking photographs of the now partially obliterated message. Then after lunch, we realized that they were still there, questioning several staff about it as well.
The reason was obvious to everyone. They thought it could be connected to Jenna’s disappearance, or at the very least, they wanted to cover every base just to be safe. Either way, this investigation just further validated the Professor’s existence to most of the students. Within the week we were all hearing new stories about the school and the Professor pop up, sometimes told to us by the same people we had initially told the original stories.
For the first few days back we tried to laugh it off or ignore it, and we didn’t talk much about it among ourselves, but there was a tightening cord of tension running through all of us. It was quickly becoming something we didn’t just not discuss, but something we actively avoided discussing. Then a couple of things happened that changed everything.
The first was that the third week of January, Jenna Hastings was found. She had run off with a boy from the next town over that she had been secretly dating for over a year. He was an older boy who had made promises of taking her away from the drudgery of high school life and bossy parents, and who wound up leaving her at a burger joint two states away not dissimilar from the local one he had picked her up from the day before Christmas Eve.
The town breathed a collective sigh of relief, and no one was more happy that she had been found than us. We began joking about how stupid people were to believe in the Professor, how silly it all was. We would sit in our underground hideaway, sounding superior and proud of how everyone had come to believe in something we had made up. But the jokes and the laughter weren’t quite the same as they had been before. Now they felt like we were whistling as we walked through a graveyard, our forced humor and bravado meant to keep dark things at bay.
In the next couple of months, talk of the Professor did die down from its fever pitch after the graffiti, but it never really went away, and by the last week of school that year we had just come to accept that for good or ill, we had created a new legend for the school and the town. I say for the town because there was actually a newspaper article about the Professor about two weeks after Jenna Hastings was found. It was a puff piece in the local paper, and it was trying to trade on the drama of the missing girl who had been found while not explicitly saying her name. But it was undeniably about “the teacher ghost” that locals had started talking about in recent months and gave poor summaries of a couple of the stories. A few of our parents asked us if we had heard anything about this ghost crap at school, and we all denied it earnestly. We were ready to put it behind us.
Then Ellie Marks, or as she was frequently called by her cruel fellow freshman, “Ellie Skidmarks”, made the mistake of picking on Cassidy at school.
Ellie was a heavy-set, unfortunately proportioned girl, and that combined with a dim intellect and a terrible temper led her to frequently shift between pitiable victim and merciless bully depending on her surroundings. Likely from the outside it was like watching some kind of social causality experiment play out. She would get picked on, she would become hurt and angry, and she would take it out on younger, smaller students.
Our group rarely had much problem with bullying, in part because we stuck together and kept to ourselves, and in part because Thomas and Mills would happily beat ass if someone tried to test things. Ellie had tried to test things a couple of times in the past when Cassidy was alone—Cassidy who was small and beautiful and delicate, who had boys already noticing her despite her best efforts to fade into the background. I think we all knew that Ellie had been dealt a harsher hand in life than Cassidy had, and that’s part of why she had never gotten worse than a strong warning from Mills when she had tried saying mean things to Cassidy in the past. But the last week of school, the P.E. classes were all devoted to some combination of field relays and dodgeball, and Ellie just couldn’t resist.
Myself, Mills, and Cassidy were all in the same dodgeball game that day, and we were on the second round. Dodgeball always runs the risk of turning into a brutal free-for-all, but the teacher, Ms. Perkins, did a good job of keeping her P.E. classes in line. No one had gotten hurt and everyone was having a pretty good time so far.
When Ellie got the ball in that second round, she headed straight for Cassidy. Based on the rules, she wasn’t supposed to go over her team’s half of the basketball court to make her throw. And the first throw she didn’t. The rubber ball thudded into Cassidy’s lower back, startling her more than hurting I think, but it was enough to get her off balance and send her to the floor.
It was like seeing a falling gazelle for Ellie. She scooped up another ball as she charged towards Cassidy, waiting until she was standing over her before throwing it hard at her upturned face. Cassidy let out a yell and Ms. Perkins began running over, blowing her whistle and hollering for Ellie to get back. The older girl started mumbling some half-hearted excuse that it was an accident, but the smirk on her face said that she knew she was caught and didn’t care.
Me and Mills rushed over to Cassidy, who was sitting up but had a large red welt starting to rise on the left side of her face and her eye kept pouring water. When she saw the two of us, she started crying. I bent down and hugged her. Behind me I could hear Mills talking to Ellie.
“You just fucked up, Skidmark. We’re going to get you for this.”
Normally Ms. Perkins would have jumped Mills for language and a threat like that, but I think she half wanted to hit Ellie herself. So she just told Ellie to go to the principal’s office immediately and that she would be coming along in just a minute. She then turned back to Cassidy, who I had helped to her feet. Perkins was asking if she was okay, if she needed to go to the nurse, when we started to hear Ellie scream.
It took a moment for anyone to find Ellie because the sound of her screams seemed to echo down the twelfth-grade hall and into the gymnasium. Perkins and an assistant principal (who left the school at the end of that year) finally realized she was screaming from behind the locked metal door that led down into the lower rooms beneath the twelfth-grade hall. They fumbled around until they found the key, and when they opened the door they saw Ellie laying at the bottom of the stairs in a screeching heap. Her right leg had been broken, which could be accounted for by a bad fall down the concrete steps, but what was stranger were the bones of her hands, which had been crushed. They were damaged to such an extent that she could never use the left one well again, and the right one—the one she had thrown the dodgeball with—ultimately had to be amputated after several failed surgeries trying to restore bloodflow.
It wasn’t lost on anyone that this had all happened right after she hurt Cassidy, and it didn’t take long for everyone to also realize that you and Thomas were in class when it happened, and the three of us were standing in front of a couple of dozen witnesses at the time. Plus, there was the fact that Ellie had somehow gotten past a locked door before she fell.
But all of that was secondary to the biggest thing that made everyone at the school certain of what had caused Ellie’s injuries. It was Ellie herself. While she never returned to school at Stonebrook, and we never heard of anyone talking to her about it later, close to a hundred people had heard her screaming down in the dark that day. They heard what she said before her cries of pain and terror had compressed into a wavering animal wail.
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Credits
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