The High School English Teacher

The high school English teacher had one job.

In theory his job was to prepare his students for the big test at the end of the year. The students did not care about the test, and none of the staff or lower administration cared about the test. In fact, the only person at the school who cared about the test was Principal Sykes, and she only cared because she wanted to secure state funding to expand the school’s library with a new extension (provisionally called the Sykes Wing) including a full array of cutting-edge computer systems in an aesthetically pleasing layout that would make any of the district’s other principals jealous whenever they came to visit. High test performance, she believed, might loosen the budgets of the state-level decision-makers.

But test prep wasn’t really the high school English teacher’s job.

On his more idealistic days the high school English teacher liked to pretend his job was to instill his students with a deep and abiding love of the written word. Granted, most of his students were fifteen or sixteen years old, meaning those awkward and inhibited enough to possess a lifelong love of reading already knew it, while the rest were already too caught up in sex, drugs, social climbing, and making money to really give a damn whether Hamlet avenged his father’s death or not. Still, it made for a solid enough everyday coping mechanism whenever he got to thinking that the sum total of his life’s efforts could be summed up in whether the school got to build the Sykes Wing next year or had to wait till the year after.

But the aesthetic edification of the youth wasn’t really the high school English teacher’s job.

In more cynical moments the high school English teacher would think his job was to prepare his students for the future that had been planned for most of them. A future that consisted of waking up before any sane human being would ever want to get up to do work nobody cared about, for the majority of their productive time on earth. Work that mostly comprised attempting to increase or decrease some metric, ostensibly for some higher purpose but really just so some authority figure could look good for his or (increasingly) her peers. A life of permanent insecurity in which those more skilled at self-deception would thrive by dint of convincing themselves any of what they did actually mattered, while the more congenitally honest would be haunted by at best an inescapable sense of emptiness and at worst a crushing despair that would one way or another lead them to the cold solace of an early grave.

But social engineering through the conditioning of automatic obedience to authority wasn’t really the high school English teacher’s job.

In reality, the high school English teacher had only one job.

The high school English teacher’s job was not to fuck any of his students.

He couldn’t fuck the ones with swelling virginal DD tits that practically begged to have a hard cock in between them. He couldn’t fuck the ones who actually had a deep and abiding love of literature and could actually say something insightful and interesting about Plath or Donne or Eliot. He couldn’t fuck the one who ambushed him after class to ask about her essay on Prospero and his staff, all the while standing way too close and leaning over his desk so he couldn’t dare look her in the eyes because he’d end up staring down her cleavage, just barely held in place by a couple of flimsy buttons.

But actually, the high school English teacher had a second, even more difficult job: hiding the fact that he had any difficulty at all in doing the first job. Because the high school English teacher lived in a society where one of the basic lies one had to accept was that adult males weren’t just naturally attracted to nubile females who had clearly reached biological maturity, but that something mystical happened when a woman turned eighteen that made it legally allowable (but still frowned upon) for a man to notice her. If anybody ever knew, mobs would come after him in a scapegoating ritual involving mass Tweets, media coverage, losing his job, ending up on the street, and probably getting put on some FBI watchlist that doesn’t officially exist.

So the high school English teacher ended up masturbating to tentacle hentai most nights, which left him feeling disgusted and ashamed, but not as disgusted and ashamed — not to mention legally culpable — as he would have been had he acted on his totally natural but totally forbidden urges.

Nobody was all that surprised when the high school English teacher married one of his former students the day after her graduation — and as it happened, a week to the day before ground was broken on the new Sykes Wing.

This marriage completely solved the high school English teacher’s problem.

… for a couple years, at least.