The chalk didn't just squeak; it shrieked. To me, it sounded like a frantic heartbeat—seventy-two beats per minute, perfectly timed with the rhythmic twitch in Leo Miller's left eyelid.
I stood at the chalkboard of Room 302, my fingers coated in a fine white shroud of dust that felt like a second skin. I loathed the dust. It was chaotic, entropic. It settled on the lapels of my white t shirt, defying the order I spent every waking hour trying to maintain. This was my purgatory: a basic remedial class. Fractions, decimals—the pathetic building blocks of lives that would never truly live up to anything.
I turned to face the sea of slumped shoulders and glazed eyes. Twenty-four students. Twenty-four variables I couldn't solve, or more accurately, didn't want to. The air was thick with the scent of sour sweat, cheap floor wax, and the metallic tang of the ancient radiator that hissed in the corner like a cornered animal.
"A fraction," I said, my voice low, stripped of the performative enthusiasm my colleagues used like a shield, "is a division of the soul. You take a whole—a person, a life, a plan—and you break it into pieces. The denominator tells you how many pieces you've been shattered into. The numerator? That's all you have left."
I watched them. Sarah Higgins was chewing on a strand of hair, her eyes glued to the clock. Marcus Reed was etching something jagged into his desk with a compass. And then there was Leo Miller.
Leo sat in the "dead zone" in the back corner, where the Wi-Fi signal died and the shadows lingered. He wasn't looking at the clock. He was looking at me. Not with the typical defiance of a bored teenager, but with a cold, clinical curiosity. It was the look a coroner gives a body that hasn't quite realized it's dead yet.
"Mr. Miller," I said. I felt the chalk snap between my fingers. The sound was like a small bone breaking. "If I have a debt of four thousand dollars and I only pay back one-eighth of it, what remains?"
Leo didn't blink. The twitch in his eyelid stopped. "The debt remains, sir. The interest just gets hungrier."
A few students snickered. I didn't. I stepped away from the board and began to walk slowly down the aisle. My footsteps were the only rhythmic thing left in the room. As I moved, I felt the weight of the object in my pocket—a heavy, cold piece of brass that had no business being in a school. It pressed against my thighs, a constant, bruising reminder of why I was here instead of where I used to be.
"Mathematically, Leo. I asked for the number."
"The number is three thousand five hundred," Leo said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its adolescent edge. "But that's just the math on the board. In the real world, if you owe that kind of money to the wrong people, the math doesn't matter. They don't take fractions. They take limbs."
The room went silent. The radiator let out a final, dying hiss and fell still. I stopped at Leo's desk. I leaned down, my shadow eclipsing his workspace. I could smell the stale cigarette smoke clinging to his hoodie, and beneath that, something sharper. Bleach.
My eyes drifted to his notebook. It wasn't math. It was a list: names, dates, and a series of coordinates. At the bottom of the page, drawn with precise, architectural lines that no seventeen-year-old in remedial math should be capable of, was a diagram of a house.
My house.
The blood in my veins turned to slush. I recognized the notation style—the way the ingress points were marked with small, red 'x's. It wasn't the work of a failing student. It was the work of a scout.
"See me after the bell," I whispered, the words barely vibrating in the air between us.
"I thought you liked things to be balanced, Mr. Kwame," Leo replied. He smiled for the first time, and it was a jagged, ugly expression. "I'm just trying to make sure the accounts are settled."
I turned back to the front of the room, my heart now racing far beyond seventy-two beats per minute. I looked at the chalkboard, at the fractions I had written. They didn't look like numbers anymore; they looked like scars. I realized then that I wasn't the one teaching a lesson today. I was being observed.
I picked up a fresh piece of chalk, my hand trembling almost imperceptibly. I began to write a new equation, something far beyond the curriculum. Something for me.
2 2 2
X + y =z
The Pythagorean theorem. The geometry of triangles. The strongest shape in nature—and the easiest one to use when calculating the trajectory of a fall.
"Open your books to page forty-two," I commanded, my voice regaining its iron edge. "We're going to talk about what happens when things don't fit perfectly into boxes."
For the next forty minutes, I spoke, but I didn't hear myself. My mind was a kaleidoscope of worst-case scenarios. I thought about the bruised thigh under my briefs, the phone call I hadn't returned, and the man who had told me three years ago that a living was also the "perfect way to disappear."
Disappearing was a mathematical impossibility. Matter cannot be destroyed; it can only change form. And as the minute hand on the wall groaned toward the twelve, I understood that my form was about to change into something much darker than a teacher.
The bell rang. It wasn't a sound of liberation; it was a starting gun.
The students scrambled, chairs scraping against the floor in a cacophony of indifference. Sarah, Marcus, and the others vanished into the hallway, leaving behind the scent of cheap perfume and teenage apathy.
Leo Miller stayed seated.
He closed his notebook slowly, the spiral binding clicking like a latch. He stood up, and for a boy his age, he seemed to occupy too much space. He walked toward the front, stopping just short of my desk.
I didn't look up. I was busy tidying my desk, aligning my pens so they were perfectly parallel. Red. Blue. Black. Always in that order.
"You didn't finish the problem on the board, sir," Leo said, pointing at the unfinished theorem.
"The class ended," I replied, finally meeting his gaze. "The time for solutions is over."
"Is it?" Leo reached into his pocket. My hand instinctively moved behind the back of my shirt, my fingers brushing the cold, hard brass of the grip.
Leo pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and laid it on the desk. It was a clipping from a newspaper, merely a year old. The headline was obscured by a coffee stain, but the photo was clear: a black sedan submerged in a dark lake, the headlights still glowing under the water like the eyes of a deep-sea monster.
"My father lived in that town," Leo said softly. "He told me that the man who drove that car wasn't a drunk. He said the man was a genius. A man who knew exactly how much weight it would take to sink a secret."
I felt the room tilting. The "dark edge" I had lived on for years—the thin line between a new life and an old grave—was finally crumbling. I looked at the boy—this variable I had catastrophically underestimated—and realized Leo wasn't a student. He was a debt collector.
"What do you want, Leo?"
"I don't want a passing grade, Mr. Thorne. I want you to show me the rest of the math. The part where the bodies go."
I reached out and turned the paper over. On the back, someone had written a single number in red ink. It wasn't a fraction. It wasn't a decimal. It was a zero.
The sum total of my life since that night at the lake.
"Get out," I said, my voice a gravelly ghost of itself.
"See you tomorrow, sir," Leo said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. He moved with a predator's grace. "Don't be late. We have a lot of ground to cover."
He walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. The hallway was empty, the lockers standing like silent sentinels. I stood alone in the center of the room, the flickering light above finally giving out, plunging the back of the classroom into total darkness.
I walked to the chalkboard and picked up the eraser. With one violent, sweeping motion, I smeared the fractions, the theorems, and the logic into a cloud of white dust. I breathed it in until I coughed, the powder coating my lungs.
I wasn't a teacher. I was a man with a gun in my pocket and a ghost in my classroom. And for the first time in three years, the math finally made sense.
The door clicked shut, locking me inside a room where the only way out was to solve the equation of my own survival.