The Sin

I wasn't used to being the boy in the shadows. At my school, I wasn't the one who was admired or respected. I was invisible, a target just waiting to be bullied. The boys in class made fun of me and I felt like it just wouldn't stop. But that wasn't the worst of it. What really hurt was that nobody, really nobody, stood by me. Not my teachers, not my friends, not even those who might understand me. Especially not Ms Andrea Stone, my teacher. She was one who didn't pay attention to me, and when she did, it was only to make fun of me or ignore my efforts. She had the power to run the classroom, and yet she treated me like air. Once she came up to me and said with a look that said it all, 'Why are you even trying? You're not the type who's going to get anywhere.' The words haunted me and made me seem like a shadow that just wasn't enough to be seen.

And now I had invaded her body. In the early morning, my parasite tapped into her frontal lobe after overwhelming her immune system. I was hanging like a string on a balloon, in contact with the nerve cells that could send and receive signals. As soon as I realised that her body was under my control, I took over. I slowly opened my eyes and once again found myself in a different body. It took from the frontal lobe until I felt her whole body. This onslaught of feelings that came to me: Her longer blonde hair, her wide hips and leg thighs, and the large breasts that were constricted on my chest. Even though they were exposed by wearing a bathrobe, I felt the tightness on my chest. Although Mrs Stone's body was foreign to me, it all felt familiar in some way. This was probably because I had not entered the frontal lobe, where thoughts, memories and character are stored, for some time. All of this was now mine, without Mrs Stone having any influence over me or herself. The world around me had also changed, but the pain and anger I had felt were still there. Only now I had the power to make a difference. 

I leant up slowly, slowly shifting my weight until I sat down on the bed. It was still early morning in the room. I felt an extra weight on my chest, pushing me forwards. Even though I knew Kinsley and Chrissy had bigger breasts, Ms. Stone's were bigger and different. It wasn't an uncomfortable feeling, either from Chrissy, Kinsley or Hannah, but the weight was definitely there. I reached under the dressing gown, feeling the bras, which felt a little uncomfortable, most of all I felt they were a size too small, especially on Ms. Stone. I undid the buttons at the back as the length of her breasts fell to the floor. Although I no longer felt any tightness in the chest area, the feeling of the breasts was still there. I touched them, they felt softer but firmer, as if they were just skin. I stood up slowly, seeing my painted red toenails and my wide thighs. I moved around the room. My body seemed to move differently to other women I've had. It was a slight sway that I hadn't noticed before. Every step seemed to be a reminder that this body worked differently to the one I was used to. I could feel my shoulders, which I had to pull back to prevent myself from tipping forwards and to keep my balance. I felt the breasts bounce up and down.

I stood in front of the wardrobe mirror. 'That's what she looks like,' I thought about my former teacher, who despised me. I could feel the control over this body, the authority she had always assumed. This was mine now. I looked into her blue-grey eyes, her oval face, her straight, pointed nose coming towards me. She stared at me and I stared at her. Quite a normal woman, really, if you don't look at my background. The longer I looked Mrs Stone in the face, the more I felt the rage stirring like a wild animal inside me. A part of me wanted to give back all that, all the suffering I had experienced. I immediately remembered my classmates who had mocked me, their faces, the way they treated me like nothing. And then there was Ms. Stone, who had ignored me every day, who had destroyed my soul with her comments.

Before I could exact my revenge, I needed to know what Mrs Stone had known about my death. It was just before five o'clock in the morning when I poured a coffee into Mrs Stone's body. I poured a lot of milk into it, much more than she liked. I then sat at the kitchen table as I drank sip after sip of coffee, immersing myself in her memories. As if swept away by a river current, I emerged from my teacher's perspective that came to be associated with my death.

It was before the beginning, even before I attended secondary school. Ms. Stone received the dossiers of the students who were being received. She looked through them and saw the addresses of all the students. I felt Ms. Stone's anger that she receives a lot of students from the lower class. She thought: 'Who am I to teach these poor people. They haven't managed to get by without scholarships like their parents.' She then ran to the school management and complained to them about the large number of scholarship holders. 'Do I look like I'm putting my knowledge at a disadvantage because of them?' she said angrily. 'They don't know anything,' she continued before being stopped by the headmaster. 

'Look Ms. Stone, as a teacher you have decided to stand up for the children's knowledge, regardless of where they come from or where they live,' he looked at her a little angrily. Ms Stone was rather thinking how much money she was going to make. 'I know she's worried, but that's just a pay grade above me,' he continued. 'Actually, every student needs the opportunity to become a social climber, but the best ones come here,' he frowned, afraid that something bad will happen. 'Give them a chance, and by that I don't mean that you should underestimate their level of knowledge. Instead, give them the opportunity to improve,' said the headmaster. Even though this did not sit well with Ms. Stone, she had to keep her mouth shut. The headmaster's words had not convinced Ms. Stone at all. She was still of the opinion that only hard-earning pupils should be entitled to education.

Hours later, Ms. Stone spoke to a school temp again about the issue, where she argued against it and got upset again. She hadn't given up for a long time. She wanted to show that she was right. Then another memory popped into my head: it was evening, Ms. Stone was crouched in her classroom in front of her teacher's desk, looking at the dossiers she had been able to swap at her own request after brief discussions with the administration. She was looking at the stocks of the spanking students. When I saw the pictures next to their names, I remembered my school days again in a sombre way. Ms. Stone knew where they lived, knew they didn't stand a chance, but she also wanted to have it statued. She took the students in to bring the problems of the underclass with them so that finally the free scholarships would no longer be handed out ceremoniously. It was interesting to learn what hatred they had for the students who came from the lower class; she would have preferred to have them erased from history or, even more sinister, to have them killed.

Then my file came into play: my face, my name, my old life. She looked through it like any other file from the lower class. She thought to herself that she had already found an exampel statue, but she had only seen the CV. She also looked at my grades, which were neither good nor bad on my degree certificate, but my semester certificates were the latter. She took a similar approach with two or three other classmates who I knew from my class but had little to do with. The memory faded and a new one emerged. This time when I was at school for the first time. This time in the presentation round, where I had made a fool of myself. As a leisure activity, I emphasised how much I enjoyed being outside in the fresh air. A sudden loud laugh from Tracey, who then said that I was outside like a crooked bird. The usual whipping pupils laughed themselves silly and I blushed. Ms Stone didn't react at the time, she was laughing inside too. 'Laughable, these people from the lower classes,' she emphasised several times in different ways. 

The longer I delved into Ms Stone's memory, the more I came to realise how much she was actually trying to ignore me. A few days later when I came to school with obvious bruises, another time when I was kicked by John and his gang and then the situation in the toilet where I screamed for help as my head was forcibly stuck inside the toilet bowl and Ms Stone was freezing cold next to it just falling through. Even though I was in her body during the interim, I felt my stomach boil. Instead of stepping in and standing up for her work, she had ignored me and others who had been bullied. In the end, we were all lumped together. Just before the winter holidays, a few months before I died, Ms Stone received an email from the biology teacher, Mrs Mandez, in which she stood up for me and suspected bullying. Ms Stone got a little nervous as she read through the email, clenching her teeth on her fingernails and hoping something wouldn't blow up, otherwise she'd be out of a job. 

She wrote to Mrs Mandez that she shouldn't worry. She would make sure that I was treated properly and fairly. She tried to play down the bullying. She knew exactly what was happening in her class and yet she hadn't done anything about it. Just as I was getting really angry, I found out through further reminders that the school management had intervened themselves, Ms Stone was giving tips and tricks to fool the school management. And just before I died, she met with John after class. I looked in. 'Ms Stone, I wanted to talk to you about Oskar,' he told her. She told him not to worry. 'Look, I just want to beat up Oskar. Not that he's not nice, but because he just annoys me so much.' Ms Stone felt a sense of serenity. She was happy that it was happening to someone from the lower classes. 'You shouldn't worry, I won't punish you,' she informed him, before going on to tell him not to worry as long as he kept his mouth shut, which she told him to do. 

He smiled briefly: 'I just want to teach him a lesson, that's all. So that I can make it clearer to him, I'll make you a proposition: I can beat him during your lesson and do whatever I want to him in return for five hundred pounds.' He took the money and placed it on the school desk. She looked at the money, irritated to be offered such a deal. But her feelings told a different story, she wanted to see someone from the lower classes suffer like this and that someone was me. 'You got it,' Ms Stone accepted the hush money. From now on she had been bribed, before John made his exit and Ms Stone gathered her thoughts. 

I was boiling with rage, I could turn her head, I was so angry. Then I remembered the day I died and jumped back to that day, when she learnt in the morning, just before classes started, that Oskar Roberts, a pupil at Broxten Secondary School, had been found dead in an alley. The pupil, who had attended a secondary school on scholarship, had been stabbed several times. He also had bruises and the perpetrators were still on the loose. Because he was a victim of violence, all other future scholarship holders in the neighbourhood were deregistered. Ms Stone felt relieved that she was finally no longer allowed to teach this rubbish. Once again she thought that people from the classroom did not deserve to get a good education. Since the murder had only indirectly involved her, she knew that an investigation would rule her out. The only thing she had to do now was to grieve and act as if nothing serious had ever happened. She hadn't realised what a psycho woman she was, complicit in one of her students' deaths.

The clock showed just before eight o'clock. I stood in front of her mirror again and looked at myself again. The longer I looked at the woman, the angrier I became. Her actions had killed me. My anger boiled up, I could tell by the way my stomach was rumbling. I looked at her in the eyes. I would have loved to torture her in countless ways, I immediately had a hundred ideas, but I needed a body with which I could exact my revenge on the pupils in her class. Ms Stone was perfect for that. She was the insider of the school, knew a lot about others and could show empathy. I felt sick all of a sudden. I ran to the toilet and threw up the coffee I'd been drinking. I remembered straight away: Ms Stone was lactose intolerant, she couldn't digest dairy products. Actually, she deserved to have me vomit her soul out, but in order for me to really succeed with my revenge, I had to put myself in her shoes. I had no other choice, otherwise the others would realise it straight away.

Before I got dressed, I stood in front of the mirror again and looked at myself. I knew that I now had the power to punish her. The question then arose in my subconscious as to whether it was really fair to act in this way. Should I really be using similar tactics that had driven me to the abyss myself? Then the memory came back to me of how Ms Stone ignored me, hated me and knew the people who drove me into the abyss had to go. I patted her cheeks with Ms Stone's hands and kept telling myself that I was Ms Stone, that I was out for revenge and that they deserved it. Again and again. Over and over again. I slapped myself in the face afterwards, which hurt, but righteously for Ms Stone. My blue-grey eyes stared at me. Ms. Stones body is mine now and eventhough that I can possess her until she dies, I will be in her body as long as I can as a revenge. My hands disappeared downwards and I smiled at my own reflection, knowing that this body will serve me well.