Anton's Odyssey by Marc Andre

required to meet the school guidance counselor, but I completely forgot about the appointment and received an angry message on my module from the school secretary. I ran as fast as I could. As I huffed and puffed to catch my breath, the secretary gave me a long and painful lecture about responsibility.
    The guidance counselor was a porky gentleman named Mr. Yongscolder who had a trimmed, graying beard. He wore an old-fashioned sensitive guy sweater. He didn’t seem too upset that I was late and asked me to sit in a chair facing his desk. He asked me f or my pocket module, and he plugged it into his computer. I mashed my thumb against the vid screen. The computer validated my print, and I consented to upload my school records.
    “Where are you from?” he asked.
    “Yucaipa,” I said.
    “Yucaipa, California?” he said, surprised.
    “Yeah, that’s the one.” I knew of no other Yucapias in the universe.
    “I used to live in Yucaipa after I got my teaching certificate from the University of Redlands. My first teaching job was at Yucaipa High,” he said. “That was a long time ago, twenty-five, maybe thirty years. It was a pretty rough place back then. If I remember correctly, the word ‘Yucapia’ is an old Indian word that means ‘crappy place to live.’”
    Back home we made the same joke on a daily basis, but somehow an outsider cracking the gag came across as judgmental, offensive even. Mr. Yongscolder continued to flap his lips about the demerits of my hometown, either completely ignoring or completely oblivious to my scowling look of disproval.
    “I only stayed there for one school year,” he said. “I was very eager to leave. I got mugged three times in a single month.” With his sensitive guy sweater, Mr. Yongscolder would have been an easy mark for the goons and gangsters. “I had one good friend there,” he said, “Errol Clevins. He taught science. He was a good guy. It’s too bad I didn’t make a better effort to keep in touch with him. Is he still there?”
    The name was not familiar to me. No doubt Errol Clevins, just like Mr. Yongscolder, fled Yucaipa the first chance he got. “Errol Clevins, he was a science teacher right?” I asked, walking Mr. Yongscolder into a rather innocuous street hustle.
    Mr. Yongscolder nodded.
    “He always wore that….” I waved my hands in front of me, pointing back at my shirt, as if my adolescent brain lacked the power to articulate a description of the man’s clothing habits.
    “Yes, he always wore plaid shirts,” he said. Mr. Yongscolder fell into my trap even easier than I had anticipated. I understood why he got mugged so many times.
    “Oh I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said, trying to look both morose and sincere, “Mr. Clevins died. He got knifed.”
    Mr. Yongscolder’s eyes widened in shoc k and horror. “That’s terrible!” he cried. “It was a student who stabbed him, wasn’t it?”
    “Well, no actually,” I said, “it was another teacher.”
    “I don’t believe it!”
    I had to be careful not to overplay my hand. “They said it was the stress of the job,” I said. “The police said the other teacher guy started carrying a knife because he was afraid of some of his students who were gang affiliated. His behavior became erratic. He started talking to himself and quit showering. One day Mr. Clevins confronted him about his body odor, and the guy just snapped and knifed him in the gut. He died on the way to the hospital.”
    “Now that I do believe,” Mr. Yongscolder said sullenly. “Certainly the stress of working with those delinquents could cause you to do strange things.”
    Mr. Yongscolder had forgotten that I wa s one of “those delinquents,” although he would get a stark reminder soon enough.
    “That’s too bad about Errol,” he said. “He was a good man.”
    “I never had him as a teacher,” I said, “but my friends seemed to really like him.”
    Mr. Yongscolder was silent for a while as he processed