"Entertain me."
"Are my conversational skills under par?"
"Yes."
"Well! I see how it is… After all those years of me deigning to be your friend in school… At least I haven't managed to catch pneumonia while on a routine mission in the Australian desert."
"Stop rubbing it in."
"I wouldn't have to if you weren't so—"
"Oh, shut up. Come on, entertain me."
"How?"
"I don't know. Pretend I'm one of your students. How do you entertain them on Friday afternoons?"
"A story?"
"Well. Alright."
"If you say so:
Our story begins with a hero. Let's call him Hero because our hero was a spy and spies can't have real names–"
"What? They can! And Hero's a girl's name."
"Do you want your story or not? ...Thought as much. As I was saying:
Our Hero stared out the classroom window at the dark and cloudy sky; behind him were his classmates: adolescents whose only cares related to the admiration of their peers – friends, crushes and enemies alike. Our Hero was more used to worrying whether his enemies were going to kill him, but he didn't begrudge his peers the thrills of teenage life. He'd been a teenager once – and was one still, physically, if not mentally.
Unfortunately, his peers did not afford him the same respect, and perhaps sensing that he had experienced something so different to what they knew, to what they'd ever know, they shunned him and attributed to him a name with which they thought they could torment him: Druggie. For although Druggies were unlikely to ever have to worry about a plot to destroy the world, Druggies were often absent from school and returned with similar mental and physical scars, at least on the surface. And our Hero's peers thought he was such a Druggie. He rubbed a fresh scar on his neck absent-mindedly.
Now, while our Hero enjoyed the reprieve of his very real adventures, he could not shake his boredom. After all, it was a Wednesday afternoon and no-one felt like doing anything. Our Hero, like the other students, had not been paying much attention. But as the minute hand clicked ever-closer to the twelve, our Hero's bored restlessness began to increase into anxiety. And unlike the other students, his staring out the window became alert and concerned, though he could not have said exactly why. There was a storm coming. He could feel it.
Just as he turned to wake his sleeping friend, the intercom buzzed to life and the headmaster did the job for him.
'Students and teachers: please make your way to the auditorium for a special announcement assembly.'
It took the hassled and tired teacher a few minutes to round up the class and drag them to the auditorium. Thus it was that our Hero's class was the last to arrive.
Our Hero sidled into the very last seat at the very back on the very end, next to the aisle. The headmaster stood blandly at the front, his eyes empty as a vacuum and his hands clasped behind his back.
Behind the students, the doors were shut, as was routine for a normal assembly. But – as you may have guessed – this was no normal assembly.
And then as the locks clicked, the headmaster ripped off the facemask he was wearing, to reveal a darkly grinning Villain. He gestured to a teacher in the front row and she also removed her mask. She dragged a large object from beneath the front row seats and after a pause where the students and teachers tried to see what it was, there was a cumulative retching and gasping.
For the object was none other than their decapitated headmaster. The real one.
Meanwhile, our Hero employed his split-second decision-making skills and asked his friend – the one who had been sleeping, but who now had an ashen face – to quickly text a number dictated by our Hero. Our Hero's friend, prodigious in the art of in-the-pocket-texting, did so with haste.
SOS
At the front, the Villains were not satisfied with their show of gore. They wanted something – someone – in particular.
They called for our Hero.
Our Hero stood silently, reluctantly, and all eyes turned to him. With his scarred arms behind him so none could see their trembling, he announced that he didn't know what the Villains were talking about.
But all the school knew better, for Druggies don't have the sane light in their eyes, the calm-but-not-stoned demeanour held by our Hero. The penny dropped, and the truth clicked into place like the flick of a safety catch.
The Villain smiled nastily. He motioned at some more teachers who removed their facemasks to reveal strange, grinning faces. They also removed their jackets and it was clear that unless our Hero did as the Head Villain said, there would be no more school, let alone students in an auditorium.
Our Hero made his way to the front of the auditorium and stood pale as a pansy under the stage spotlight.
'Alright,' he said, 'I'm a spy.'
The Villain gave him a blackly gleaming gun and told him to hold it to his own head. And Our Hero did. With the light on him, he couldn't see much except the whites of his peers' eyes and the occasional glisten of tears.
There was a sudden, loud bang.
Soldiers streamed in as the Villains collapsed, thick red blood dribbling from wrists and heads.
When all eyes once again turned to the stage, our Hero was gone and the Head Villain was dead; the gun he had given to our Hero rested beside his body.
Our Hero and four burly soldiers stood backstage, talking to a woman whose suit matched her demure hair and glasses.
'The students will have to go to the Beacons, of course," she said. "Ostensibly for therapy and preparation for a next time while we sort out this mess.'
'Of course,' agreed our Hero—"
"You really tell stories like this to your students?"
"What? Yes. Why?"
"This drivel?"
"It's not drivel!"
"It's full of clichés – and you're an English teacher!"
"Doesn't anything at all happen like this on your job? Ignoring the school part, of course – no dramatic entrances, no unexpected villain-reveals?"
"Of course not."
"Well. What about car chases or witty banter?"
"No."
"But this really did happen."
"I know. I remember. I was there."
"But—"
"Alex, your whole life was a cliché until you became a schoolteacher. Nothing in the spy world is even remotely similar to what happened to you. Your experiences are unmatched."
"…Which is why you have pneumonia after a mission in the Australian desert. Right, Tom?"
"Don't rub it in."