The Beneficiary
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
6/18/94
Janine Winters always knew she was one of the lucky ones, a rare beneficiary of the social mores surrounding her. She was one woman who actually benefitted from society’s sexual double standards.She’d known male high-school teachers who liked to sleep with their students and got decertified or, in one case, sent to jai. The worst thing that happened to her from her own seductions was that she’d gotten fired once or twice and had to go to another state. The districts that fired her never listed her conduct as a negative reference to her subsequent employers.
Ms. Winters held a private justification for her affairs. She never considered than an abuse of her authority. She told herself until she believed it that she was providing a valuable service to her charges. She was furthering their personal and social development, by teaching her most anxious and inhibited male students to be less afraid of females in general and of intimacy in particular.
Even in the absence of disciplinary action she was always moving from district to district every year or two, never progressing beyond last-hired-first-fired status. She was typically stuck with the classes nobody else wanted, the troublemakers and the unreachables. She’d rent a one-bedroom apartment in a discreet location near the school. Within her first week in a new school, her teacher’s sense for instant chracter recognition would draw her toward the anxious boys, the boys who didn’t dress quite in step with the fashions, the boys who’d never been good at sports and didn’t have hot cars. The boys who seldom raised their hands in class and had a hard time finishing their sentences when they were called upon. There was always a justifiable reason why these boys needed special tutoring after school. From there, it was a simple step to invite them to her apartment on Sunday after church.
It might take three or more tutoring sessions in her apartment before she dared make a move on a boy. But once she did, she was in control all the way. The boy would always be nervous and hesitant; at least one peed his pants the first time she reached over to unbutton his shirt. On the featherbed they were clumsy and awkward but eager to be taught. What she didn’t get from them in the way of orgasms was more than made up by the immensely thankful faces they showed her at the end.
In a typical town, she only had to seduce one boy in this way. Others would then approach her, trembling with desire and fear. She knew she had the power to ruin these boys’ lives forever by implanting a flavor of desire they’d never be able to consummate with any other woman. But she kept on her tiptoes, never crossing the line from initiation into domination.
Ms. Winters knew that she could not keep up this life forever. As she continued to creep toward her thirties and her students remained the same age, the differential would grow and someday become a gulf. Her hair, her clothes, her sense of slang would become out of step with that of the boys, and any attempt by her to keep up with the fads would be perceived as the pathetic actions of a poseur. She would have to become a positive image of an Older Woman. And if she kept on being nice to the nice boys, she would eventually get caught.
She never expected how she finally got caught. Seven female seniors issued a formal complaint. They knew she was sleeping with the boys in the class but didn’t mention it in their documents or statements. The only thing they claimed to care about was that she was ignoring the females in her class, calling on the boys much more often and giving them one-on-one counseling that she never offered to the girls. At the school district’s formal disciplinary hearing, she was defended in passionate speeches by the parents of several boys whose academic performance had turned around for the better under Ms. Winters’ guidance. Ms. Winters was an exceptional teacher and role model, the boys’ parents insisted; someone who should be kept on to help more at-risk students.
But the girls were too persuasive. Showing great initiative and scholarship, they presented results of their private scientific study proving that Ms. Winters routinely ignored female students and their needs. Janine Winters was dismissed at the end of the school year; she received a negative recommendation on her written record and never worked in her state’s public schools again. She spent her 30th birthday behind the counter of a Dairy Queen in Eastern Washington, as part of her first week as night manager. As the controller of the till during her shift, she had to stay up with the girls at the counter while all the beautiful thick-lipped boys who worked there stayed in back at the grill.
