Chapter 4: Cecil’s Dream
He feigned interest in every agenda item and remained sufficiently alert
Cecil’s Dream
Chapter 4 of Sex in the 7th Grade
The Mountainview school board required all administrators to attend every meeting regardless of whether there were any agenda items pertaining to their respective schools. The press and parents would be there. It was good public relations.
Although Cecil Dunn feigned interest in every agenda item and remained sufficiently alert in the unlikely event that some question was directed his way, his mind wandered during those meetings that sometimes lasted past midnight.
It was a shame, he thought, that of the three women on the school board, he found only one of them, Mrs. Ferry, to be somewhat attractive. Everyone called her Kitty. She had olive skin, brown hair and eyes to match. In her mid-thirties, married, she had a very sweet, sharp daughter, Felicia, in the seventh grade of the junior high.
Cecil happened to know through a mutual friend, that Kitty was having an affair with a twenty-three-year-old French teacher he had recently hired at the junior high. The spark no doubt flown during a parent-teacher conference early in the school year.
Cecil was happy for the young teacher who appeared to be green in matters related to the opposite sex, at least prior to meeting Kitty.
As a way of passing time during those board meetings, Cecil would imagine Kitty with that young teacher making love in some isolated deer camp or perhaps even right at the junior high school in the late afternoon when their schedules permitted. Unlike her colleagues on the school board, Kitty was a regular visitor to the Mountainview schools; so it was not unusual to see her in the building. The French teacher’s room was on the third floor and had a huge storage closet. That’s where Cecil pictured them having sex, keeping one eye and an ear out for the custodian who made plenty of noise as he did his rounds after school.
Cecil hardly knew Kitty’s daughter, Felicia. She was one of those well-adjusted kids, a bit of an introvert, and almost never in the principal’s office. So on a Friday morning just before Christmas vacation, he was surprised to see Felicia standing in the outer office talking with the school secretary.
They look to be having a serious conversation; so after Felicia departed, Cecil stepped into the outer office to see if there might be some problem or issue he should know about regarding the seventh grader
“Is everything okay with Felicia?” he asked the secretary.
“She’s fine,” she responded, “I was asking her about her mother.”
“Kitty,” Cecil asked, “is she okay?”
“Yes, she’s recovering nicely; didn’t you know?,” the secretary lowered her voice, “she’s at Central Northern Hospital recovering from surgery just yesterday.”
“No, I didn’t know,” Cecil also lowered his voice, “What’s wrong?”
Then in a whisper, the secretary added, “yesterday Kitty had a double mastectomy; they discovered her cancer just last week, and because it was the fast-moving kind, they decided to schedule the operation before the holidays; Felicia says her mom is already up and doing fine.”
“My God!” Cecil mumbled.” as he returned to his desk where he dropped into his chair with his face in his hands; he was having trouble believing what he had just heard about Kitty. When the secretary said “mastectomy,” his heart jumped and his mind flooded with images of a vivid dream he had remembered when he woke that morning, but had then forgotten. Now it played back to him
In his dream he had been walking along the main street in Mountainview when he came to a small car parked at the curb with its back door open; drawing closer Cecil had peered into the car to see Kitty Ferry sitting alone in the back seat; naked from the waist up, exposing her breasts. No words were spoken; Cecil had started toward the car, but that’s where the dream ended. Nothing more. Just Kitty sitting there with her small, nicely rounded breasts exposed just for him, he thought, to see.
Cecil sat in amazement. Wondering; questioning the nature of human beings. How could it have been? He had known nothing of Kitty’s hospitalization; yet there she was in his dream exposing her breasts that had — in reality — just had removed a few hours before.
Throughout the rest of the school year, Kitty visited the junior high less often. Cecil surmised that she and the French teacher had broken off their affair.
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