The History Teacher

Content warning: pedophilia; sexual assault

Your entry in the California sex offender registry lists you as a six-foot male weighing 225 pounds with hazel eyes and brown hair. Under “Scars/Marks/Tattoos” it says, “Leg, left, nonspecific.” Your offense code is 647.6, stated as “annoy or molest child under 18 years of age.” These descriptions are in capital letters.

You still live in the same county, but in a different city, deeper into the Inland Empire, farther from the coast. I imagine it’s easier for a convicted sex offender to live out there, to blend in and start over. The city, with views of the Coachella Valley and built over a hot mineral aquifer, is described as one of Southern California’s fastest-growing communities. “Naturally occurring mineral waters bubble and percolate to the surface in this get-away-from-it-all destination,” one depiction reads.

The first time I looked you up in the registry, after I was in college on the East Coast, a world away from our valley surrounded by three mountain ranges, your picture still matched my memory of you. The current photograph, though, is of a man who’s reached sixty. You’ve put on weight and are wearing a ridiculous spiked hairstyle as if trying to pretend you haven’t aged. You appear to be gritting your teeth against the picture—the taking of it, the fact of what it means.

You should have written history and philosophy books, held a post at a top university, lectured in old-fashioned wooden halls. I’d like to excuse you as having made a minor mistake and believe you’ll still write books—but you gave that up to prey on young girls. Somehow, I should have known better than to believe you were innocent. But I didn’t, not when I was back in high school and you were my history teacher.

What I did know was that your energy, usually intensified by several cups of coffee and Mountain Dew, infected the entire class. With your skin tanned from part-time construction work, your thick neck patterned by faint diamond lines, your hands rough and too large for your pen, you seemed more like the football player you’d once been than a 40-year-old high school teacher. On the nights you couldn’t sleep, you told the class, you read hundreds of pages of history books. Eventually, you tried to cure your insomnia by running long and hard in the middle of the night through the city’s neighborhoods of tile-roof adobe tract houses.

Your wife was thin and pretty with straight brown hair and worked long hours as a waitress. Sometimes she talked to you on the phone right before class started. Other male teachers said that she kept you on a short leash. Later, when the accusations came, she publicly stood by you. But during my freshman year of college, I heard that she finally left you. I remember thinking, good for her. I remember thinking, I would have left you sooner. But would I have? If I’d stuck by you as a student, would I have stuck by you as a wife?

In class, you read to us from Anne Hutchinson’s testimony at her trial for heresy, telling us about her banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. You taught us that Catherine the Great had amassed her power by sleeping around. That syphilis had plagued European monarchs. You explained that Thomas Jefferson’s, Martin Luther King Jr.’s, and John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs were symptomatic of men in power. As footnotes to the history lessons, what you said was funny and helped us remember more during tests. It would have been different had we known.

One day that spring, I came after school to pick up a paper. You sat at a table by the classroom window, with a stack of essays in front of you. Your elbows rested on the table, and your face was in your hands. You told me he didn’t know what to do. I didn’t say anything. Even if I’d known what was wrong, I wouldn’t have had an answer.

The next week you were gone. You’d been accused of sexually harassing a student, and you’d been put on paid administrative leave. Several of us thought you’d been wrongly accused and that the girl was turning her own flirtations into accusations at the urging of her jealous boyfriend.

Our senior year began, and you wrote college recommendations for me and other students. You worked as a cement finisher. You went on long runs late at night.

Then in November, you were arrested at your home and charged with the misdemeanor of molesting a minor. Police reports state that you’d “engaged for three years in inappropriate touching, lewd comments, and sexually explicit conversations,” beginning when the girl was just fifteen. The girl said she’d been too intimated to come forward sooner.

The newspapers, I felt, had unfairly condemned you. I remember standing at the kitchen counter in my house, staring out at the palm trees in the backyard, and telling you so on the phone. I no longer remember why you would have called. What I do remember is being convinced that the press had gotten it wrong.

The newspapers published more details. The student who’d reported you had told police that she’d become close to you after speaking to you about her family problems. Besides her parents, she said, you were “the only other adult she could talk to about anything.” This was when, you admitted, you started to “feel very affectionate toward her.”

Maybe this is what I was after, too, affection and praise that at home was lost in the chaos of being part of a large family. The oldest of five children, I helped take care of my siblings and the household. I was exhausted in class. You noticed, and looking back, I see that I wanted you to notice, to make me feel as if my work at home and at school were worth the effort, that I was worth something.

I last saw you at my home in Southern California when you came to tell me there would be no trial, that you were going to plead guilty.

I stared at your face, suddenly understanding: You’d been caught and were only admitting that you hadn’t been brilliant enough to get away with it.

You said that you’d been involved with another student at another school. You had to plead guilty; your history made a trial impossible to win.

The last thing I remember you ever saying to me was not an apology. It was not even an excuse. You looked right at me with that half-grin of yours and said, “Teenage girls, what can I say?”