Here's the thing: ten years ago when Logan begged some higher power he didn't believe in to make him a high school English teacher? He wasn't being serious. It was a joke. He was just being his obnoxious teenage self.
And yet somehow his slightly less obnoxious adult self was still walking up and down the aisles with a stack of paperbacks, assigning chapters one through five of Catcher in the Rye, due Monday.
"You guys will get along with Holden Caulfield because he's a little crazy and has no effing clue what to do with his life. Also because he hangs out with some prostitutes." Finished distributing the novels, he walked to the front of the room and found a space to squeeze "batshit," "dazed and confused" and "hookers" onto the board before pounding his palm next to the words. "Take this down. Important info for life, but more important for the test." A ripple of laughter ran through the room before the bell rang for lunch and no amount of teacher-induced amusement could keep thirty fourteen-year-olds from leaping from their seats like they were on fire. Logan was glad he didn't have lunch duty.
"Monday, you guys. Don't be bullshitting me about forgetting then," Logan shouted after them, but he was smiling. He flipped his book in the air and caught it before turning to erase the board. The copy he was using was his own- scribbled in and highlighted everywhere- but he had ended up buying each kid the same edition, so they didn't have to worry about being on different pages. The school had actually already had a sufficient number of copies of Catcher, unlike some of the other books he wanted to teach like 1984 or any Shakespeare other than Macbeth or Hamlet. But they were falling apart and he wouldn't have been surprised if the same copies had been used by his kids' parents. He was hoping that the new ones he'd gotten from Barnes and Noble would be banged up enough to fool old Mrs. Krazny next door when her class got a turn with Salinger in a few weeks.
Logan did that a lot, actually. He hadn't set out to do it, but when he'd arrived at Jackson High, things were so bad, he couldn't help it. Other than keeping a sharp eye for kids who were moving oddly or looked especially afraid to go home, he would sometimes take monetary action: new shoes in the lockers of kids whose old ones were falling off their feet, a chunk of grocery money if the cafeteria seemed to be serving progressively smaller portions of aging leftovers. It wasn't like the other teachers didn't buy stuff for their classrooms- the numbers on teacher-purchased supplies in the classroom were actually insane- but he didn't want to call more attention to himself than necessary. So he always kept it anonymous, and he was pretty sure the other teachers didn't know. Dr. Curtis did, but then, he had done a background check on Logan Lester when he had first come to the school.
Dr. Curtis was a success story: a Jackson student who had escaped the neighborhood, gone to college, risen through the ranks of higher education and then come back to try to help other kids along the same path he had taken. He had worked his ass off to do what he had, and was so much more dedicated a principal than his predecessor, or that golfing creep Moorehead from Neptune, or even Clemens, that it was laughable. When he had arrived two years ago, Dr. Curtis had established a uniform to eliminate gang colors and promote school unity. Kids had egged his car, graffitied his house and cursed at him in the halls. But Curtis had waded through all the shit, and the crime levels in the school were actually beginning to decrease. It made Logan admire him more. But no matter how well Dr. Curtis was doing, how many grant proposals he wrote, how hard he worked and how much he cared, he couldn't make money appear out of thin air. When he realized that it was, Curtis had given Logan a look of thanks and never mentioned it aloud. Which was, as far as Logan was concerned, the perfect way to express that gratitude.
Toward the end of his first year at Jackson, Logan had found a girl, Tasha, crying in the back of the library during lunch. She wasn't one of his students, but he had recognized her because she had asked him to be the advisor for a club she was trying to start, debate or mock trial or something like that. He had said yes, but not enough kids had been interested. That afternoon he had knelt down and asked what was wrong, hoping that his discomfort didn't show. Tasha held up a letter from Bowie State, one of the smaller schools in the University of Maryland system.
Logan had said gently, "Tasha, this is an acceptance letter."
"So what?" she had spat. "My family can't even afford the deposit. No way we can swing tuition, even with the aid they're giving me."
"Why don't you talk to Mr. Preston?" he had suggested. "Sometimes guidance counselors have strings they can pull with colleges to help out kids who deserve it."
Tasha had wrinkled her nose, suppressing a snort by only the barest margin. "Preston's too busy earning his rich kid stripes being a one-man war on drugs to be pulling any strings for me." She had smacked her head back against the wall, looking more exhausted and sad than angry. "Four big brothers, and not one of them even made it past the eleventh grade. But I was smarter. I worked harder, I got my hopes up. I was gonna make it, Mr. L. I was gonna be the one." She had balled up the letter and tossed it away. "And now it was all for shit."
Logan had been the one who ended up pulling the strings for Tasha, getting her the merit scholarship that she had earned with minimal effort. But it turned out that not every case was like hers, so ripe that it burst as soon as he touched at the fruit. Sometimes you really just needed to lay down the money. So the next year, Logan had kept his eyes and ears open for kids who were smart and motivated, who had the grades and the drive to make it out, but lacked the cash. It wasn't like he lured them into his classroom with the promise of tuition. When acceptance time came around, he would inquire about extra financial aid for them. If their favorite college balked, he would say that an anonymous donor had come forward who would guarantee a full ride.
He was choosy about who got such endowments. He gave it his all in the classroom, but not even Aaron's bank account could sustain sending an overcrowded high school of kids to college indefinitely. Still, he gave seven or eight of them a start each year. He had started dabbling in the stock market, hoping to earn enough to sponsor a couple more kids. His years of gambling were actually paying off. He played it smart, going with his instincts, and he was pretty sure he could start investing in another kid or two per year.
When the door to his classroom opened, he thought it was one of the kids he was looking at for next year, Danny Webber. Danny was picked on a lot, and tended to spend as many lunch periods as possible in a book club of his own formation that included only him and Logan. It was usually on Tuesdays, and the staff knew to let him out of the caf, despite Dr. Curtis's rule about everyone staying inside to prevent as many deals and fights as possible. Still, Mrs. Krazny had a soft spot for Danny and if she was on duty, he could usually talk himself out no matter what day it was.
"What do you want to look at today?" he asked, not turning away from the board as he finished erasing it. "And Danny, if we're going to do the mid-nineteenth century dudes, can we ditch Poe for something with a little less depression, or at least a little more story? Irving or Longfellow or even some Hawthorne, I'm begging."
"I've had enough of scarlet letters to last me the rest of my life," Veronica Mars answered from behind him. And just like that, Logan wished he that had had lunch duty today.
A/N: For the first time in my life, I will actually finish a chapter fic. I have seven out of a probable eight chapters written (all longer than this one) and they should be posted weekly, I think on Fridays. Currently without a beta, but I kind of gave up on that because every time I tried, they fell through. Anyway buckle up, friends. I'm psyched. Are you psyched?