Fiction: Out Behind the Gym, That’s Where the Action’s At

By Travis Flatt

"I knew your daddy, Patrick," Dr. Collins says, feral and panting in his booze and sex-stinking office, leaning against the closed door. His dangling hand fiddles with the lock. Lock, unlock, lock, unlock. 

He's going to fire me. 

Fire us.

And if he fires me, what then? What do I tell Sara? 

“Baby Got Back” is pulsing from the gym, rolling the entire school like the lazy river at a waterpark. 

"You can't fire me, Jack," Rachel says. She's sitting next to me, us across Dr. Collins desk. She keeps playing at taking my hand, then dropping it. Grasp, drop, grasp, drop. She's about five-eighths drunker than me and twice as courageous. 

Dr. Jack Collins, interrupted from his speech about knowing my parents--I knew his parents too, we went to fucking grade school together--purses his lips and runs his cheap watch and hairy forearm across his sweaty brow. 

It’s a hot night. 

 

###

 

It was hot out back behind the gym in the faculty parking lot where Dr. Collins caught Rachel and I fucking, us having slipped away from our chaperone duties, snuck away to Rachel's Hyundai at the worst possible moment. 

We weren't the only ones outside, not by any means. 

It’s Prom, the occasion I lost my virginity. But that was twenty years ago and in a different parking lot. As we staggered, giggling, out to Rachel's car, I saw the student parking lot,  a sideways skyscraper of steamy windows on wheels. I caught a distant glimpse of some kid’s foot, heel upward, sole pressed against glass, turning and slowly wiping clean a black half moon. I stood, momentarily transfixed, saw the toes clench.

Rachel, seeing what I saw, yanked my arm, said, “Gross. Hurry up.” 

All night inside, we'd been moving gradually closer and closer, like the deadly gravity of an event horizon. I haven’t seen her in a dress and heels since her wedding, and that night I leered, complimented her too many times. My ex didn’t speak to me on the drive home. Some cheerleaders noticed us standing shoulder to shoulder during a slow dance and insisted we latch up--Rachel and I. Rachel teaches Drama and I teach English II, we've been friends forever, since we were in high school. Two grades apart at this exact goddamn high school, sadly. Truth be told, I've always wanted to fuck her, but boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives–like chaperones–always got in the way. 

As coworkers we flirt. Our mismatched trajectories–break-ups, divorces–bruising each other's egos, and alternate between playful, cold, and fanged. 

We slipped off through the auditorium where I learned she keeps a bottle of Jack Daniels hidden in the costume closet. She tugged me along out the stage exit door where she stopped to remove her heels and carry them bunched in one hand. That’s when I saw the steamy foot. We edged the corner of the student lot, wove around the greenhouse, and finally made the back of the complex, behind the gym, the faculty parking lot. 

By then, we’d been swapping pulls off the bottle of bourbon. She dropped her keys twice before we made it into her backseat. Once entwined and sprawled there, she unbuttoned my jeans while I turned the bottle up, over enthusiastic, coughed and spluttered whiskey onto my shirt and into her hair. 

She sat up with a start and clunked her head against the bottle. I thought things were over but she just crossed her eyes, mock dazed, and grabbed the bottle from me and took bubbles from the bottle to demonstrate how it’s done. I grasped under her blouse, yanked her clumsily out of her bra. We spilled as much as we drank, clawing at each other, let the heavy, square bottle fall to the floorboard. She climbed on top of me, half-naked. 

"Let’s go to your house; your smells like a distil–" I said. 

"Shut up; fuck me," she growled, all syrup–breathed.  

And I did. Or tried. Crashing around the car, her drunk and hot for me, me unable to get my boxers off and soaked in her sweat and sex. 

Dr. Collins appeared at the driver’s window and beat the flat of his palm fit to crack the glass. We scrambled to cover ourselves and I found the overhead light. There was no need; a flashlight beam spotlighted us. An SRO officer appeared at Dr. Collins’s elbow. 

A fight had broken out in the gym. Two football players, also drunk, bashing each other over a schwag weed deal gone bad.

 

###

 

The fight–Dr. Collins, relates, shouting in his office, more or less blow by blow. Beer cans lay crumpled on the carpet here where he's hidden all night. This, everyone knows, is how he spends most school days.  

"You can't fire me," Rachel says. "You're drunk, Jack." 

Dr. Collins says, "I caught you. I caught you, Rachel." And he points a unsteady finger at Rachel. 

I see it now. He's not mad about our neglect of duty. 

Rachel, who just barely had time to re-dress, stands and straightens herself. "Go fuck yourself, Jack."

"I've got to call my wife," I say, glimpsing religion, catching sight of the light, coming up for air, not knowing what in the fuck I'm going to say but knowing I need to be the one to say it. 

Rachel walks for the door and Dr. Collins lets her go. We watch her click heels down the hallway, LL Cool J pumping. 

Dr. Collins leans into me. "You know she does this with all the--" 

"Fuck you, Jack," I say. 

He stumbles to his office chair. "No–I should call your wife. Sara? Sara Willows?" 

We all went to school together. 

I don't know whether to hit him, or if he's right? 

"You were a little tattle-tale turd in school, too, Jack," I say, and then decide to just chase after Rachel, finish what we started.  

I catch up to her in the doorway to the gym, and she looks like she doesn’t know whether to kiss me or punch me. 

“Go home to your wife, Patrick,” she says, and stumbles trying to open the doorway. 

I take her wrist. “That’s dead,” I lie, and add,  “We’re getting divorced.”Another lie.  

She looks at me, now certain who I am. She shrugs. “Fuck it.”

“Let’s go,” I say, and take her hand. “Out back behind the gym, I heard. That’s where the action’s at.”

Travis Flatt (he/him) is a teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear or are forthcoming in HAD, Bending Genres, JMWW, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and many other places. He enjoys theater and dogs.