Numbers by David A. Poulsen

Author:David A. Poulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Six

It’s weird when a teacher in your school dies during the school year. I mean, not that it ever happened before. But there we were on a Thursday morning — everybody standing around the common area all going, “Did you hear about Mr. Saarkahn?” “Isn’t it awful?” People were hugging each other and a bunch of the girls were crying. Some kids were getting flowers and other stuff to put by the door of Mr. Saarkahn’s room.

The thing is, it all felt a little too television for me. I know that makes me sound like a cold-hearted creep, especially after almost laughing in the middle of Uncle Herm’s funeral, but this just seemed wrong. I’d never had him for a teacher but I knew Mr. Saarkahn wasn’t real popular in our school. He was East Indian or Pakistani or something and I’d heard kids say he was pretty hard to understand. Some had said really unpleasant things about him or at least about his teaching. Now he’d had a heart attack while he was out jogging and right away there was a shrine happening and people who didn’t like the guy when he was alive were some of the loudest mourners.

I’d seen him in the halls and the cafeteria a few times, but I hadn’t really thought about him very much at all, which is about how I figured most people in the school were when it came to Mr. Saarkahn. Except the ones who said the nasty stuff and did bad impersonations of his accent.

I mean it was sad — he had a wife and a little kid and he wasn’t very old — but I just thought the scene in the common room was a little much. To tell the truth, the thing I was really thinking about was how much death there seemed to be around me all of a sudden. I’d gone through most of my life up to that point without thinking about death and dying hardly at all. About the only time I’d ever thought about it was when my grandpa died, and he was really old which made it seem okay. Or when somebody famous, an athlete, or an entertainer or some world leader, died. And those deaths seemed really far away.

But just in the last while there’d been Uncle Herm and now Mr. Saarkahn. And there were the pictures Mr. R had shown us of all the bodies piled up in ditches during the war. But then maybe that didn’t count. I mean, had those pictures been real? Didn’t matter; they looked real. And it all seemed part of an awful lot of death. I don’t know if it scared me or what, but I know I didn’t like it.

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