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celestialmilfs · 1 year

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Classroom Blues

Character: Melissa Schemmenti Word count: 3,310 Warnings: Car accidents, panic attacks, PTSD Genre: Hurt/Comfort Rating: T

Description: Tires screech against pavement, shrill and cruel. Aluminum crunches. Glass shatters. Every single kid stops what they’re doing. --- It’s never been so frightening to look out the window

“That’s looking great, Noah!”

You smile over his shoulder, and he beams back at you before returning to his crayons.

Second graders are so easy to please.

You walk past him to get a look at everybody else’s paper plate dinosaurs. Nathan’s is breathing fire. Tyrone gave his a little princess crown. When you asked, Jamila said hers is ‘a apatopasaurus’ and that she refuses any further comment.

Fantastic work, overall.

It’s looking mighty fine outside too; the day is stretching into afternoon, and the sun blazes into the art room, etching on the walls the shadows of the easter bunnies the first graders had made last week.

The clock is slowly ticking towards two, and you’re only fifteen minutes away from a hot McVegan — no tomato, and two hours of the Good Place. Jamila lifts her hand as high as she can and speaks before you can even get to her.

“I’m all done,” she says. Her apatopasaurus is made of three plates instead of one, and the legs have pink pipe cleaners for both claws and a tongue. There’s a little tear drawn beneath its googly eye.

“Oh, wow.” You turn it around and smile at the glitter glue spots drawn on the other side. “This is really great, Jamila. You wanna help me put it on the—“

Tires screech against pavement, shrill and cruel. Aluminum crunches. Glass shatters.

Every single kid stops what they’re doing.

“Look!” Samantha yells and runs to the window. Half the class follows her, crowding in a line to catch a glimpse. God’s mercy that most of them are too short to see past the supply shelf. It offers you no such protection, though.

Just by the crossing outside, a black car is crushed against a DHL truck. Must have been going way outside the speed limit; you’re barely allowed to hit 40 out there because of the kids. The left side is completely collapsed around the truck’s hood, but you can see the driver just fine from here.

Dead.

He’s dead.

You snap into action.

“Hey, come on,” you say and start herding them away from the windows. “The ambulance guys will handle it, okay? Let’s get back to work.”

Your voice sounds distant to your own ears, like you’re speaking into a bottomless tunnel. The kids don’t seem to hear you either. More likely they’re just not listening because they’re eight-year-olds and most of them haven’t had time to even think about death yet.

They haven’t been to a funeral on a perfectly sunny day, just like this one.

Haven’t hung upside down by their seatbelt in a upended car.

Or seen how broken glass mangles a face.

Stop.

You blink yourself back into the here-and-now. Your knees are already beginning to feel weak, ready to buckle under the slightest strain.

Just breathe. Ten years of practiced technique, honed to perfection. Breathe.

For the kids, if not for yourself.

The minute hand on the clock ticks over to fifty-three. A few kids, the same ones who always put the watercolors back where they belong once they’re done, were kind enough to head back to their seats, but that still leaves you with eight children glued to the glass, watching the driver get dragged out of the car. He’s dropped onto the pavement. Someone’s trying to resuscitate. You can tell from here that it won’t work.

“Okay, I mean it this time.” You try to cover your trembling voice, to apply the gentle authority you’d seen Barbara pull a thousand times. They don’t move an inch. Maybe it’s the gulf of difference in experience, maybe it’s just Barbara being Barbara, or maybe they can tell that you’re afraid.

You sigh and peel the kids off the window one by one and escort them into their seats. Inelegant. Methodical. Your limbs function outside your jurisdiction in a world entirely of their own. When you bring your hand to hover in front of your face, it feels lightyears away, a limb puppeted without its master.

You can still feel crumbled glass embedded between the creases of your palm.

Breathe, damn it.

“Who was that guy?” Jamila asks even after you’ve sat her back down by her dinosaur.

“I don’t know, buddy.” You brush cardboard clippings off her shorts and onto the floor. The fabric is void of feeling under your prickling fingers. “But I’m sure they’ve called an ambulance. They’ll take care of it.”

Sure enough, when you glance at the road, Janine is buzzing around the truck driver, her phone already glued to her ear.

The bell rings at last. The kids yell out in joy and their wave of conversation washes you back ashore for a second. They grab their bags, forget their plates and stickers and markers, and are out the door in record time. They’re so excited.

You can’t tell them to slow down, to stop, even, until the commotion outside is finished. You can’t do anything but stand still and listen as their voices ebb away into just an echo.

Pills. Where are your pills.

You stumble to your bag and search it with trembling, unsure hands, like fingers against a jammed car door, dipping into the seams to tear the whole thing off if you have to. You throw your keys on the table, same as your wallet, your planner, your lighter, and a handful of stray pens; all of them in a heap that slips over the edge and to the floor. You turn the whole bag inside out, but can’t find the pill bottle.

Your chest is getting tighter, heavier, like the spaces between your ribs are stuffed with cotton, like you’re trapped under a ten ton truck careening off the highway uncaring of casualties.

Breathe. Remember to breathe.

You can’t breathe, that’s the whole fucking problem.

The room is empty. Your only companion is the sun, and even she’s about to dip behind the buildings on the other side of the street.

You fall to your knees, grasping at the collar of your shirt, your fingers far too stiff, too jittery to undo one single button. You tear them open anyway. One flies under the shelf, like a body clean through the windshield. He said he didn’t need the seatbelt; it was such a short trip anyway. His legs were bent wrong six times over down in the ditch.

The world becomes muffled, stuffs your ears with ringing to keep you from hearing your own scratchy, frightened heaves for air. To save you the fear. The shame. You claw at your throat, at your chest, hoping you might dig out the chunk obstructing your windpipe.

You want to scream. So much. You’re mentally holding yourself by the shoulders, begging yourself to keep quiet. You’re in a position of authority. A child sees you like this, it’ll go down to the parents and you’re in trouble. Abbott’s in trouble. You can’t afford that.

You remember the mud staining your shirt when you’d crawled out, your leg broken and your face dripping with blood. You still don’t know if it was yours. Sirens, nearby. A broken airbag. A broken neck.

Blood.

You back up against the wall and your head bangs into the bricks with a sudden jerk, though the pain is nothing, nothing compared to—

A hand lands on your shoulder. You jump back in fright, your other arm flying to shield your face. Something hot drips down your cheek, but you can’t bring your fingers up to check, can’t trap yourself in that knowledge.

“Whoa, okay,” someone says. “No sudden touching. Gotcha.” The voice sinks like a rock into deep, dark water, far off and twisted. You can’t move to see who it is, who’s come to watch you in your weakest, most undignified moment.

“I’m gonna take your hand,” they say. “That okay?”

You nod, but the movement is stiff and thick with tension, just like the neckbrace they’d given you, after everything. You had a rash for weeks.

Your hand is enveloped by another, the touch soft, the fingers a little cold. There are rings right above the knuckles: two of them plain bands and one with a big, sharp stone on it. You squeeze the hand hard, hard enough to make the other person groan a thick, hefty ‘ow’.

“Okay. Think you could try and breathe with me? Doesn’t have to be perfect.”

The person doesn’t wait this time. They take a deep breath, exaggerated enough for even you to hear, and then exhale, like wind in the trees on a stormy night when nobody should’ve been driving in the first place.

Your attempt in following them is sad and broken. The air remains trapped in your throat, refusing to flow all the way into your lungs, no matter how you try to wheeze it in or out.

“Good, keep going.”

It’s not even remotely good, not even passable, but you keep it up anyway. In and out, but it’s more like i-i-i-i-in-in-in and ooo-out-o-ooout. This doesn’t deter the person sitting next to you, though. They keep their breathing even and deep, and you follow them, out of pace and rhythm in a one-sided dance where you keep crushing your mystery partner’s toes.

“You’re doin’ real good,” they say, and a thumb is drawn across your knuckles, soft and soothing, free of crusted blood or thick, soupy mud. “Just keep going.

Ain’t no point in rushin’ it, right?”

You do as you’re told. In and out. Your pained attempts slowly start to resemble what the other person is doing, more of a mirror than a reflection in disturbed water. The locked knots in your muscles start unwinding themselves open one by one, and you suddenly find yourself sagging forwards without control.

Arms wrap around your torso and your head knocks into someone’s clavicle instead of the floor. You’re shifted like a living doll into a more comfortable position and your nose buries itself into the nook between the person’s neck and shoulders. You inhale a lungful of syrupy perfume and papaya shampoo.

The clock keeps ticking. The rhythm anchors you, keeps you safely here on the classroom floor where there’s no cars, no highways, no forgotten seatbelts.

“That any better?”

Melissa Schemmenti moves her hand to your back to draw big, smooth circles into your shirt. You manage a dazed, exhausted nod.

The classroom is swimming back into view, bit by bit, color by color. Chairs abandoned where their occupants leapt out of them, craft supplies all over the floor. Tamir forgot his backpack.

“The kids—“

“Are fine,” Melissa says. Her arm slides off your back and around your shoulder instead. She squeezes you tight. “Janine and Gregory were on herding duty.”

“Ok,” you whisper. The clock ticks on, and your stomach dips when you read the face: ten past three.

“You wanna talk about it?” Melissa asks.

The scenery fades in and out, transforms into the woods by the highway and back into an elementary art class in disarray. A mess, both ways. You press your knuckles into your eyes and watch the sparks.

“I’m not sure,” you say.

Melissa nods and clicks open her phone. She shoots someone a text, though you only realize to look away by the time she’s about to write something to Janine.

“Thanks, though” you mumble into the crook of her neck. Your body is dipping straight past relaxed all the way into half-dead. Your fingers feel like spaghetti noodles.

Melissa huffs a laugh. “It’s no trouble.”

You sniff and wipe your cheeks. Apparently you were crying after all.

“How did you find me?”

Melissa puts her phone back in her pocket and you can feel her jaw tighten. She’s thinking.

“I was coming to check on the kids because, well. You know.” She waves her free hand toward the window. “I saw you go down. Fell right off your feet. Scared me to hell, you know.”

You grimace. “Sorry.”

“Pssh,” she says. “Like I said. It’s no trouble.”

You watch the splotch of sunlight, still persistently on the wall. Another hour and it’ll be gone.

You start to peel yourself off of Melissa, pausing mid-movement to wait for the ringing in your ears to ease up, and lean against the wall instead. Melissa, thankfully, keeps her arm around you for support.

“I was in a car accident,” you say.

Melissa’s brow shoots to her hairline when her head whips around.

“It was bad.” You rub your fingers together; a feeble attempt to get some feeling back into them. “I was sitting in the back and my best friend was driving. Her boyfriend was in the passenger seat.”

Deep breaths. In and out.

“They both died.”

“Jesus,” Melissa says, spits the lord’s name in a way that would make Barbara send both of you to sunday school. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Still.”

“Yeah.” You clear your throat, hoping to buy yourself a second of time to stave off any further admission; words you know you can’t keep to yourself right now but ones you’re embarrassed to admit regardless. “I can’t even watch tv shows about that stuff ever since. Of course it would find me in the front yard.” You scoff. “Figures.”

Melissa sighs, soft and smooth, so unlike your own strained, barely calmed breathing. “Shit.”

You can’t help the smile. “Yeah.”

“You feeling any better?” she asks.

You give your neck a little roll, wiggle your fingers and your toes. “I think so. I don’t think I can walk just yet, though.”

“That’s all right. My dinner plans can wait a couple minutes.”

Footsteps draw your attention to the hall. Barbara appears in the doorway in her light brown jacket, her and Melissa’s purses both slung over her shoulder. She takes a quick look at you and then stares meaningfully at Melissa, posing a silent question.

Heat floods into your cheeks, your neck, your ears. It could’ve been Janine, could’ve been Gregory, even Jacob, but of course it has to be Barbara Howard, the singlemost composed person in the whole world, who stumbles in on you crying into Melissa’s shoulder.

Her divorce papers were recently filed, though, so if anything, she’s probably very familiar with the feeling.

Melissa mimes ‘five more minutes’ at Barbara, and there’s a silent battle of wills between them, a conversation you couldn’t even begin to understand, after which Barbara sighs with a smile on her face, bows her head and disappears back into the hall.

“You gonna get home okay?” Melissa asks you when the sound of Barbara’s heels has faded.

“Yeah. Usually I bike, but I think I’ll walk home today. I’ll be fine.” Melissa’s face dips into a frown as she very seriously doubts you. There’s no escaping that look, and it only takes you a second to start sweating. You wonder how people actually trying to fight Melissa Schemmenti aren’t immediately recuded to cinders.

“I swear,” you say, and draw a cross over your heart. Melissa smacks her lips and tilts her head as she assesses your woozy, bulldozed self. Apparently you aren’t shaking that bad, because when she straightens herself, she says, “Okay. But.”

You want to groan. A good sign. Your feet are a little closer to ground again.

“You text both me and Barb when ya get home. Is that clear?”

You lift your hand in a salute. “Crystal.”

Melissa laughs, a smoke-worn, throaty sound that pulls you another inch closer to reality.

“Keep that up and no Schemmenti leftovers for you,” she says. “Cheeky little shit.”

She somehow drags a laugh out of you, short and genuine and good, and it’s not like none of this happened, but it lets you put a band-aid on the wound at least.

“I think I could try getting up now.” You try putting a little pressure on your foot, and though your leg doesn’t immediately smack right back to the floor, it does tremble a significant amount. Heat crawls down your neck again as you ask,

“Could you, uh…”

“’Course.”

Melissa gets to her feet with a strained groan and a ‘fuck my fucking knees’, but manages to get herself standing. She offers you her hand and you take it, keeping your free palm firmly against the wall as she pulls you to your feet. It’s an unsteady operation, one that leaves you dizzy and winded, and nearly back on your ass more than once.

Once you’re safely standing, Melissa gathers up the contents of your bag and hands it to you, but only once she’s made sure that you can actually carry it. She holds you by the shoulders all the way to the hall, and doesn’t let go until the door has safely clicked shut. You still keep your hand by the wall, though. Just in case.

“I’ll have to come in early tomorrow to clean up,” you say with a sigh.

“Don’t even think about it.”

When you look at her, Melissa is staring you down with the intensity of three suns. Whole solar systems, even. You put your hands up in surrender.

“Only if you’re sure,” you say. It is a relief, you have to admit. Especially if you still have to run to the pharmacy to get your prescription refilled.

“Don’t you worry your li’l head about it.”

She walks you all the way to the entrance, where Barbara is still waiting with a paperback book propped on Melissa’s bag.

“All cleared up, then?” she asks.

“Yup,” Melissa says. Short and sweet. Barbara doesn’t ask any further question, though you doubt it’s from lack of interest. At least Melissa has a dinner story to share, if nothing else.

You all slip out the door, but Melissa stops you there. She looks you over, head to toe, her lips pursed and her hands fiddling with the strap of her purse.

“You sure about this?” she asks. “I could give you a ride.”

You fish your keys from your bag and close your fingers around the one meant for the lock on your bike.

“I’ll be okay. And I’ll text you.”

Melissa raises her brow.

“Both of you.”

The idea of sending Barbara Howard a text of any kind outside a professional environment feels like some kind of a breach of protocol, but Barbara herself doesn’t seem phased. Outward, at least.

Janine is going to lose her mind when you tell her about this.

A cool breeze slides under your thin shirt, and your arms erupt in goosebumps.

“I better get going,” you say, but can’t get yourself to walk over to the bike rack just yet. Your fingernail digs into the notches of the key, and you try to figure out something to say, anything that could put into words just how much Melissa has done for you in one afternoon. In the end, you decide to go with something simple.

“Thank you, Melissa.”

She looks amused, truly like she’s done what anybody else would have. Like it’s nothing. You wonder if she’ll ever know how much it means, even if you tried to tell her.

“Eh.” She shrugs. “It was no trouble.”

How perfectly Melissa of her.

“See you tomorrow,” you say, and with one final wave and a smile goodbye, you start heading for home.

Behind you, once you’re definitely out of range, Barbara turns to Melissa.

“What happened?” she asks.

Melissa watches you clear the crosswalk and waits until you disappear behind the Subway.

“I’ll tell you later, hon.” She presses a kiss to Barbara’s cheek. “First we need to eat. I am too fucking hungry to talk.”

“Melissa Ann Schemmenti,” Barbara gasps, “you watch that tongue of yours.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Barb.”

“Incorrigible,” Barbara mutters and heads for the car. Melissa doesn’t miss the smile on her face.

“Love you too.”

#Melissa Schemmenti #Reader #Melissa Schemmenti x Reader #Melissa x Reader #Abbott Elementary #Reader Insert