Homeroom Teacher

Chapter 14 - Homeroom Teacher

The building felt hollow now, but for the first time, Torin didn't hate the silence. Empty apartments no longer looked like failures. They looked like opportunities. Each vacant unit meant another chance to put the right tenant behind the right door, someone who understood that rent wasn't a favor they paid when they felt like it, but the price of having a place to live. Torin walked the corridors in the evenings with the ledger tucked under his arm, checking locks, looking through rooms, making lists of what needed fixing. The place was still worn down and ugly in places, but it was becoming manageable, and more importantly, it was becoming his.

Once a week, the camera still came out in 1C. Gia had turned the whole recovery into a series for her channel, filming carefully edited episodes about Torin rebuilding his life after the attack. She softened the lighting, lowered her voice, and made every ordinary moment look meaningful. She played the caring angel who had stayed beside him when he was supposedly at his weakest, talking about patience, healing, and helping someone rediscover his confidence. Her audience loved it. The numbers climbed with every episode, comments poured in, and the engagement kept getting better. Mother Teresa with better cleavage, Torin sometimes thought when he watched her work, but the arrangement was useful, and he couldn't deny that she knew exactly how to sell a story.

What surprised him was that, somewhere beneath all the calculation, he had started getting used to having her around. Gia still irritated him. She was still loud when she wanted something, still capable of turning a simple conversation into an argument, and still had a habit of touching things on his desk that he had specifically told her not to touch. But she had also been there when things were ugly, and she hadn't run when the building started changing around him. Torin wasn't ready to call that trust, and he certainly wasn't going to admit that he enjoyed her company, but the silence felt different whenever she wasn't there.

The bigger problem was the apartments themselves. A bat could frighten people, and a ledger could prove what they owed, but neither one could fill vacant rooms with reliable tenants or turn an aging building into something that actually made money. Torin had begun looking at the numbers differently. He needed to understand property values, contracts, deposits, taxes, regulations, loans, and every other part of the business that existed beyond collecting rent at the end of the month. If he was going to rebuild the building properly, he needed to know what he was doing.

So he enrolled in an evening cram school that prepared students for the real estate agent examination. He paid the fees in full instead of asking about installments, then went home with a schedule, a stack of registration papers, and the uncomfortable realization that he was about to become a student again. The thick textbooks were already waiting on his desk at home. He had bought them weeks earlier, before he had even signed up, and they were already covered with folded corners, handwritten notes, and enough highlighted passages to make the pages look bruised. Torin had spent several nights studying alone, usually after the building had gone quiet, forcing himself through legal terminology and property regulations until the words stopped looking like another language.

His first class was held in a cramped third-floor classroom above a row of aging shops. The room smelled of old chalk, stale coffee, and cheap air-conditioning that rattled whenever the compressor kicked in. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, washing the students in a pale, tired glow. Most of them looked like people who had jobs during the day and had come here because they wanted a better life badly enough to spend their evenings memorizing laws and regulations instead of drinking with friends.

Torin arrived early and took a seat near the back. He placed his textbooks on the desk, opened the first one, and looked around the room without much interest. He expected the night to be boring. That was fine with him. Boring was useful. Boring meant learning something that could eventually put money in his pocket.

The classroom door opened a few minutes later.

The instructor walked in carrying a worn leather bag, followed by the scrape of several chairs as the students straightened themselves. She placed the bag carefully on the desk at the front, pulled out a stack of papers, and turned toward the room with the practiced expression of someone who had already taught the same material hundreds of times.

Torin looked up. His eyes locked onto hers.

Alisha.

For a second, the classroom seemed to lose its sound. The years between then and now collapsed so quickly that Torin could almost hear the old classroom bell again, could almost smell the chalk dust hanging in the air and feel the hard wooden desk beneath his arms. Same sharp eyes and thin mouth. Even the voice that came next was unmistakable—the same voice that had once called roll every morning in high school, clipped and impatient, as though his name appearing on the attendance sheet had personally offended her.

“Good evening, everyone. Let's begin with attendance.” Torin didn't move.

He stared at her from the back of the room, his fingers slowly tightening around the edge of the desk. The anger came before the memories had fully formed, hot and immediate, rising from somewhere he had buried so deeply that he had convinced himself it was gone. Old humiliation. Old resentment. Things he hadn't thought about in years suddenly came rushing back with faces, voices, and moments he had spent a long time trying to forget.

The memories came back all at once, not as a story but as pieces of a place he had spent time trying to bury. The old classroom.

The boys crowding around his desk while he was trapped in his chair, hands grabbing at him whenever he tried to pull away. Permanent markers dragged across his skin while they laughed and told him to sit still.

Then the photograph of his mother, printed out and passed around like a joke, followed by things Torin had never been able to forget and had never been able to tell anyone without feeling sick.

He remembered going to Alisha afterward with his voice shaking, telling her everything that had happened, every name, every detail, every word they had said. He remembered the way she had looked at him without really looking at him, her attention drifting past him as though his humiliation was an inconvenience she wanted to finish with. Later, she had told the boys that he had complained again.

The next day was worse, and the day after that was worse still.

Torin sat through the entire two-hour class without moving more than necessary. He copied down every word Alisha put on the board, turned pages when she told them to, and kept his face completely neutral whenever she walked past his desk. He didn't ask a question. He didn't answer one either. The other students slowly packed their books as the class ended, chatting among themselves as they filed toward the door, completely unaware that the man sitting quietly in the back had just been dragged through one of the ugliest years of his life.

Torin waited until the last student had left before closing his textbook.

At the front of the room, Alisha was erasing the whiteboard. She had her back to him, moving the eraser across the final lines of notes until only faint traces of writing remained. Torin picked up his bag and walked toward her, his footsteps quiet against the floor.

She turned when she heard him approach and gave him the polite, automatic expression teachers used when they weren't sure why a student had stayed behind.

“Can I help you?”

“Teacher. It’s me. Torin. From high school.”

The eraser stopped in her hand.

For a moment, Alisha simply stared at him. Her eyes moved over his face, searching through the years for something familiar. Then recognition began to settle in, slowly enough that Torin could watch it happen. The polite expression disappeared first. Her mouth tightened, and something uneasy flickered across her face before she managed to hide it.

“Torin…” she said carefully. “How… how are you?”

He gave her a small, calm smile. There was no accusation in it, which seemed to make her even more uncomfortable.

“Don’t worry about it, teacher. Let’s talk while walking to your apartment.”

She hesitated only a second before nodding.

“Yes… Yes, of course. How have you been?”

Torin picked up his bag and waited for her to finish gathering her things. He said nothing about the past, nothing about the boys, and nothing about the things she had ignored. He simply stood there while she locked the classroom, wearing the same calm expression he had carried through the entire lesson.

Then they stepped out of the classroom together and into the quiet corridor.

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