Honor Code Anna Berry

Honor Code

Past and present blend together as Peter Brown stands before the mottled oakwood door of classroom 2045, and if he closes his eyes, he can almost feel the strap of a messenger bag weighing on his shoulders and the itch of a woolen uniform against his skin. He has been in this position a thousand times before, waiting for the bell to ring and his teacher’s permission to file systematically into the classroom, only this time Peter is the teacher. Or at least he will be eventually. Twilight is slowly spreading across the sky beyond the weathered Victorian windows, bathing the halls of Croftmire Preparatory Academy in lilac shadow. He has never entered the cathedrallike building beyond the daylight hours, and its dimly lit corridors had taken on a spectral quality in the evening light. A stone gargoyle, speckled white with pigeon poo, snarls noiselessly at the courtyard topiary from a ledge outside the window. Although whether the school’s architecture is charmingly old-school or just plain creepy is up for debate, its halls are undeniably filled with ghosts of Peter’s past. The hollow click of loafers against marble sounds the presence of one of these phantoms.

Peter unconsciously straightens his posture and turns to face the tall figure in a billowing corduroy jacket that is striding towards him down the hall. In the fading light, Peter notices thin wrinkles now line the man’s hard eyes, the sagging skin around his mouth unsuccessfully covered up by a scraggly, peppered beard. Although the decades have given the man’s long face a sallow, tired quality, his expression is the same one Peter had grown accustomed to throughout the four years of his secondary school education. It’s one of haughty boredom, as though the man thought every moment spent socializing was a waste of time, and the sight of it makes Peter seethe with hatred.

“Headmaster Johnson.” He nods with feigned respectfulness as the man comes to a stop beside him.

“Mr. Brown.”

The headmaster offers him a tight, coffee-stained smile and extends a gloved hand, piercing eye contact unwavering as the two men exchange cordial greetings. Peter feels the firm grip tighten around his own, squeezing ever so slightly—a gesture which would have been comforting had he received the handshake from anyone else.

“I’ve missed my favorite head-boy.”

Head-boy. The title makes his stomach churn, but Peter doesn’t let the cover of his humble smile falter for a second. It had been his greatest weapon throughout secondary school, after all. As his peers’ voices had deepened and their shoulders broadened to fill out boxy uniform blazers, Peter had remained short, unimpressively scrawny, and so baby-faced that growing a beard was forever out of the question. However, Peter had learned that his lack of physical maturity came with a hidden advantage. When boys grew a little taller or noticed a scraggly chest hair in the mirror, they often selfrighteously assumed they had all but become men. Peter had never been afflicted by such a burden.

It was a particularly hot first day of school following summer holiday, and a group of boys had swaggered into class with their shirts untucked, wearing dirty sneakers in place of their uniform loafers. Empowered by their newfound sense of manhood, they had forgotten that flippant behavior and disruptions to school tradition were punishable offenses at Croftmire. Peter remembered watching from his desk in the back of class as Headmaster Johnson walked calmly to the front of the room and requested that any student who had broken the school dress code stand and come with him. He led those sheepish boys out to the paved drive in front of the building, where he instructed them to take off their shoes and stand on the sun-baked bricks

until he gave them permission to stop. The torment went on for almost an hour, and murmuring students flocked to classroom windows to watch the criminals utter weak protests and groan in agony as their bare soles blistered underfoot.

That display of the headmaster’s authoritative power had been deeply impressed into young Peter’s mind and he consequently adopted a meek, obedient persona for fear of winding up on the tyrant’s bad side. He was a rulefollower and made excellent grades, so it didn’t take him long to be elected head-boy by the time he was in sixth form. It was a position that offered him perfect immunity from the punishment he so feared, and he operated at the headmaster’s side as his loyal right-hand man. Every Wednesday afternoon, Peter would take his lunch tray from his solitary desk in the library and carry it to the headmaster’s office, where the two would meet to discuss pressing concerns within the student body. Peter didn’t need friends to be aware of his peer’s grovelings. “Peter Brown” and “Headmaster Johnson” had quickly become synonymous, and he spent his last two years of secondary school as a feared outcast. Still, he always found himself telling stories about the number of peas in the shepherd’s pie or the quality of the cricket team’s uniforms, simply to cover the truth that most of the student complaints were about the headmaster himself.

One may say that not much has seemed to change ten years later, as Peter stands to the side and watches Headmaster Johnson walk through the dark classroom doorway and flick on the overhead fluorescents. The classroom appears pristine, as though it were cleaned thoroughly several times a day, but the undisguised must of leather-bound books and chalkboard dust hits Peter with a wave of déjà vu that makes him feel a little sick. As he subtly attempts to steady himself on a wooden chair, the headmaster sets his briefcase down on the teacher’s desk and begins unbuckling the leather straps.

“So Mr. Brown, what made you decide to return to our beloved academy to apply for a teaching position?”

A thousand answers come to mind. Peter’s eyes flit over the headmaster’s shoulder to the messy handwriting scrawled across the chalkboard on the wall. ‘I will not be tardy to class,’ is written about a hundred times, filling the board from top to bottom.

To deliver justice long overdue. To end two hundred years of cyclical misery and fear. To end you.

But instead of revealing the hard truth too soon, Peter just smiles pleasantly.

“Because I’ve missed Croftmire dearly, Headmaster Johnson.”