I Suddenly Find Myself In Class With Amnesia, But I'm the Teacher?! (Patreon)

I couldn’t tell you what the last thing I remembered was, because I couldn’t tell what order any of them had happened in. Was the last thing I remembered sitting in the back of the English classroom, gossiping with Suzy and Chantel, quietly enough that our half-deaf and eighty percent dead old English teacher couldn’t hear us? What about that moment in science lab where I had a beaker and I was pouring liquid into a retort and then there was a bright light and a boom? Or could the last thing I remembered be the moment where I was crossing the street in front of the high school, and I had my head turned because I was talking to my friend Rob?

I’m a big fan of portal fantasy. English, American, Japanese, it’s all great. Someone walks through a closet and finds themselves in another world. Or they get hit by a car and they wake up in a strange place full of magic. Or they die and get reincarnated as a cute little baby. Usually in a strange place full of magic. Most of these stories involve strange places full of magic.

That might have been fun, if that had been what happened. But no. I suddenly found myself standing in front of a room full of high school students that were filing in the door and finding seats.

Was I giving a presentation? I looked around, but there was no teacher. And then I looked down at how I was dressed – a plain blue blouse with a little pleating, and a very pleated, dark blue skirt, with sensible flats like my mom might wear, and pantyhose, like I would ever wear pantyhose. And then I looked up again, at the students, who were looking at me, and I realized that while they were mostly wearing T-shirts and jeans, the colors and styles were all wrong. Lots of neon stripes, and strategic cuts, and all the sneakers were either black with fluorescent stripes of some kind, or bright colors. And several of the boys were wearing pink. And none of the hairstyles looked like anything me or my friends would be caught dead in.

I reached behind my head and found that my hair was in a bun. In the last things I could remember, my hair was in a pixie cut. Pixie cuts cannot be made into buns. Somehow time had passed that I couldn’t remember. A lotof time.

My hands looked normal. No rings. But my fingernails weren’t chewed. There wasn’t any nail polish on them, but they were neat and clean and didn’t look like fingernails I might have.

The students weren’t looking at me the way students look at other students who are up at the board to do a presentation; they were looking at me sullenly, or expectantly.

I realized then to my horror that I was the teacher here.

If I was the teacher, I absolutely could not have a panic attack, even though I felt like I was about to. I also couldn’t suddenly run off to the bathroom – in all my years of school I have never seen a teacher do that at the start of a class. Teachers always present themselves as perfectly in control, without basic human needs, or else the class senses weakness and eats them alive.

This was exactly the kind of situation you might think to yourself, I’m having a bad dream. But my feet hurt. The shoes were annoying me. I have never noticed how my shoes feel, in a dream. And I was wearing an underwire bra, which was digging into my skin under my breasts. This was not a dream; I don’t dream up those kinds of details.

So. Somehow I was the teacher. I had no idea what I was teaching. I had never wanted to be a teacher – I’d planned to be a marine biologist. A quick eyeball around the class didn’t give me any hints; it was a very, very generic classroom. I did have a whiteboard with markers instead of a chalkboard, and the students didn’t have notebooks in front of them; most of them had something that looked like a laptop monitor, except smaller and without a keyboard, like a really big cell phone. A few had pens, except they were probably styluses for writing on the laptop monitor things, somehow, because without paper I couldn’t imagine how they could use those as pens.

No one was taking out a textbook, either. Seriously, how was I supposed to even guess what I was supposed to teach?

I could run off, I thought. This wasn’t actually my real life. I wasn’t a teacher. I was a high school student. This had to be some kind of Freaky Friday craziness where I’d swapped places with a teacher, somehow.

But… that was a ridiculous idea. Whereas the idea that somehow, something had happened to my brain and I’d suddenly lost years of memory and started thinking I was still a high school student when in fact I was a grown adult teacher… was possible. Implausible, and I didn’t like the idea at all, but it was more likely to be true. And if it was true, that meant this was my real life. This was my real job. And I’d be fired if I admitted I’d suddenly had some kind of brain damage that wiped out my memories of however many years it had been since I was a high school student. Somehow I had to fake my way through this, at least long enough to figure out what was going on.

The bell had rung a minute ago. The students were, mostly, pretty quiet, looking at me expectantly. I’m sure my lack of responsiveness was starting to seem weird.

I had to do something quick.

“We’re going to do something different today, students,” I said, wondering, as I said it, if I or the person whose life I’d stolen said things like “students” to address the class. “Let’s pretend I have total amnesia. I walked into this classroom, and woo! I don’t know my name and I’ve never been here before. Write me a short essay, in your own words, about what we’ve been learning for the past couple of weeks. Fill me in! Pretend I don’t know anything!”

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This is an experiment in writing in "light novel style", despite being an American who writes in English, and "light novel" being a Japanese fiction classification kind of similar but not identical to American "young adult." Not sure the style worked the way I wanted it to.