---

Mr. Harmon’s Girls

By Elliott Gish

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The first day of school. Bright, cold, the sky that special autumn blue. All of us in new clothes and fresh white shoes, bold and laughing, shy and silent, angry and turned darkly inwards. We streamed into the building in clumps, braving the dark recesses of its brick walls with only our knapsacks to protect us. Some of us moved in groups of six or more, most in fours or threes or twos, and some—the ones who couldn’t make friends, or could but didn’t want them, or had them but were, for whatever reason, not speaking to them just then—by ourselves. We filed raggedly into a freshman English class and there he was, sitting casually on the edge of the battered teacher’s desk.

He was tall, though all adults seemed tall to us then. His dark curls were longer than we were used to seeing on a man, especially in that school, in that time. He sat ankle over knee, jaunty, irreverent. A smile revealed two bottom teeth snugly overlapping. His little round glasses kept slipping to the edge of his nose, making a break for freedom; the eyes behind them were the mildest shade of blue. Over his left shoulder we could see what he had written in charismatic cursive on the board: MR. HARMON.

“But you can call me Rodney,” he told us after we’d all sat down, and we murmured at the novelty of an adult freely offering his first name, as though it was a little treat he’d decided we had earned. He was new to the school, he said, just like us—he had left a job at a high school on the other side of the country to accept one at ours, traveled an unfathomable distance just to be there with us. It made us like him. So did his hair, and his glasses, and the shy, sly flash of his smile.

Some of us thought about him later, after school, in our beds. Most of us didn’t. We did not realize, then, what he would become.

---

There were few male teachers at our all-girls school, and none of them were like Mr. Harmon. He wore shirts with patterns on them and no ties, and jeans on Fridays, even though they weren’t allowed. He encouraged us to tell him jokes, laughed boisterously even when we stuttered or messed up the punchlines. He encouraged us to think about the texts we read, to ask questions, to argue. Every day he brought in a bowl of hard candy to pass around while we discussed literature. Eating in class was strictly forbidden, but he pretended not to see us do it, conscientiously averted his eyes when a girl popped a caramel in her mouth and began to suck.

“My girls,” he called us, and we thrilled to hear him say it. Under his eye, we were a collective, a flock, and he our gentle shepherd, urging us towards knowledge.

He had us read Shakespeare. Not Romeo and Juliet, which we already knew too much about, nor Hamlet, nor even Othello, which was going through something of a post-Renaissance renaissance in those days. We were assigned Titus Andronicus, that early curiosity of rape and cannibalism.

“You need to read this to understand why the Bard was a genius,” he told us, perched on the edge of his desk, “even though the play is not, itself, a work of genius. All the signs are there, the right elements are in place, but somehow they don’t add up to something great. Why?”

He led us through the play scene by scene: the scheming of Tamora, the murder of Bassianius, the ravaging and mutilation of poor, helpless Lavinia. Every day we each played different characters, although Kyla, who was a year younger than the rest of us and wildly freckled but possessed of a powerful, booming voice, always asked to read for Titus Andronicus himself.

“Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears,” she bellowed, affecting an accent that might have been British, “nor tongue to tell me who hath martyred thee,” and Mr. Harmon nodded approvingly.

“Nicely done,” he said, and fished a caramel out of the bowl. The wrapper fell from his hand to the floor, where he left it.

---

Jenny was the first. She was one of those girls who always came to class by herself, sat alone and spoke to no one, cursed with myopia, acne, and a loud giggle that always carried over the noise of the classroom. She herself recognized the shrill and unholy power of that giggle, hated it, cursed the mother who’d passed it on to her just as she’d passed on her buck teeth.

She lingered in his class one day after the bell rang for lunch, asking questions about the play. She didn’t understand the language, couldn’t follow the meaning knotted together in the lines. She stood first at her desk, then at his, where he perched still in that affable position, one hand resting on his knee.

On his knee, then on Jenny’s hand, which rested flat on the wood of the desk. It was large and warm. She stared at it, feeling her breath hitch in her chest, and it twitched on top of hers, as though subduing the impulse to creep forward, up her arm. The fingers stroked the back of her hand, gently, as though she were a kitten.

It seemed to grow larger the longer it lay there, the fingers expanding outward, the heel of his palm swelling like a drowned corpse. Jenny watched it grow and could not stop the giggle that burst forth from her, a little noise as involuntary as a hiccup. Mr. Harmon smiled and, after a few long minutes, moved his hand.

“Have a good lunch,” he said.

She didn’t tell anybody. She had no one to tell.

---

We watched the movie version of Titus in class after we finished reading the play. Most of us did not like it. The film was loud and muddled in a way that bothered us. It looked like something out of space. We found ourselves unnerved by the violence on the screen, so different from the prim theatre blood that we had imagined while reading. Kyla, we thought, did a far better Titus voice than the old man in the movie.

Greta disagreed, because Greta always disagreed. She talked about the film’s costumes, the set decoration, the thematic devices, with stars in her eyes. She used the word “zeitgeist,” which disgusted many of us.

“I want to make movies,” she told Mr. Harmon, not then and there, not in front of everybody, but later, when everyone else had left and she was helping him coil up the extension cord onto the back of the TV cart. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And I’m going to, someday. I’m going to be the next Cassavetes.”

She said it with careless chutzpah, a defiant gleam in her eye. She knew, saying it, that it sounded absurd, but that mattered less than letting the words fall from her lips, into the quiet of the classroom.

Mr. Harmon smiled and lifted one hand, as though to chuck her sportingly under the chin. Instead he brushed his fingers on the soft underside, gentle enough to tickle. She blinked, unsure of the touch, the intent behind it.

“I bet you will,” he said, and his voice was so kind, so paternal, that Greta could not square it with the feeling of his fingers on the vulnerable underside of her chin. She felt a blush surfacing on her cheeks. His fingers twitched, as though trying to pull her forward. They seemed, as she stood there, to penetrate the soft flesh of her jaw—to push into her face, burrowing upwards towards the inside of her mouth, like worms tunneling towards the sun in the rain. They were going into her head. He was reaching for her brain.

She took a half-step backwards, looked him in the eye. His expression did not change.

It was exciting, a little: that hand, so large, so warm, on her skin. She thought about it later in bed, her stomach churning. She thought of his dark hair, the slight cleft in his chin, the slow slide of his glasses towards the end of his nose. She touched herself, then felt sick.

---

The exam at the end of the semester was a single longform essay question: “Who is the hero of the play, Titus or Tamora?”

For some of us, it was a breeze, a joke, a matter of serving up our own thoughts with a sprinkle of vocabulary words. For others, it was a nightmare.

It was a nightmare for Mauricia. A mathlete champion three years running, she was not stupid, but hers was an intelligence suited to algebra, to chemistry, disciplines in which things were governed by rules and formulas. There was no formula for an essay question. The exam seemed to be asking her opinion, and yet, Mauricia knew, her opinion would not be enough. (Not that she had an opinion, anyway. The stupid play was all about people who talked a lot, then murdered each other. Who could say who was the hero? Who cared?)

She sat for the full two hours, staring at the blank booklet in front of her, chewing the end of her pen until it burst and turned the tip of her tongue blue. The empty page cast a kind of spell. She got lost in the space between the lines.

On the teacher’s desk, the rooster-shaped egg timer he’d brought in to mark the exam period began to ring, making Mauricia jump. She looked up and around, realized she was the only one in the room. Just her and Mr. Harmon, who had already started grading the stack that the other girls had left.

“Time’s up,” he said, pleasantly enough, but with an air of distraction.

“But I’m not done,” Mauricia said.

Mr. Harmon shrugged, not looking up. “I’m sure whatever you have is fine,” he said. “Just leave it on the corner of my desk.”

Mauricia looked down at the blank page again. She had not even written her name. “I don’t have anything,” she said, and suddenly she was crying, loud, bawling baby-tears that made her insides shrink tight with shame. She tried to turn away, to hide her face in her hands, but she knew from the look on Mr. Harmon’s face that he knew exactly what was happening. He got up from his desk, came to kneel beside hers.

“Hey, hey,” he whispered, reaching out to place a hand on her shoulder. It gripped. With the other he plucked her exploded pen from between her fingers, laid it on the desk. “Exams are stressful, I know. Don’t worry about it, you won’t fail. We’ll think of a way for you to make it up.”

There was kindness in his voice, and his hand was on her shoulder, and Mauricia was so grateful for his compassion, so embarrassed by her tears, that she did not notice his other hand settling on her thigh until it had been there for a few minutes. He did not move it, did not reach up under the wavering edge of her skirt. He simply left it there, his eyes not leaving hers. As she watched, the blue seemed to drain from them, leaving behind a great expanse of white threaded with pinkish veins. The pupils in the centres were small and black as the hole left in the wake of the pin.

Mauricia looked at the blackboard. She let her mind go away for a while.

In the second-floor bathroom afterwards, scrawled in thin blue ink on the dingy side of the last stall: MR. HARMON IS A PERV.

---

Everyone came back after Christmas with fresh clothes, new accessories, shoes that hadn’t yet been broken in. Mr. Harmon was there to greet us, his smile as boyish and winsome as ever.

“I hope my girls all had a good break!” he called as we all scuttled to our seats. And if there were, perhaps, a few more empty desks at the front of the room than before, he did not seem to notice.

There was no Shakespeare in the winter semester. Instead, he had a list of books we could choose from for independent study, as well as one we would read as a class. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

We looked at his list of independent study books with some dismay. In Cold Blood, All Quiet on the Western Front, Death of a Salesman, The Red Badge of Courage, Of Mice and Men. All boy books, not a girl’s name in sight. Reluctantly, we each signed our names in a column. Theresa, who wore strangeness like a medal of honour, was the only one who chose In Cold Blood, signing her name with a flourish of her red pen. Theresa wrote everything in red. She didn’t want corrections to stand out, she said.

“I’m interested in murder,” she told Mr. Harmon, and did not react when the rest of the class laughed. We all laughed at Theresa back then, at her slow-blinking eyes, her measured, deliberate speech, her orthopedic shoes. She was easy to laugh at.

Mr. Harmon smiled at her, almost conspiratorially.

“Me, too,” he said, and kept her after class. When she left, long after the last bell had rung, her eyes were thoughtful, half-lidded, gently simmering.

She went to the second-floor bathroom and sat for a long time on the toilet in the last stall, her knees pressed tightly together. A poem was making its way through her head, one she’d read years before, in which blood looked black and birds made milk. When she closed her eyes, she saw parts of Mr. Harmon disassembled before her, edges set aslant, a mismatching of torso and fingers and teeth.

She looked up at the writing on the side of the stall. Her fingers itched. She reached into her backpack for a red pen.

---

The winter howled along, alternating white and grey. We hated the cold, longed for the bright clarity of spring. We looked out the window of the classroom and sighed, thinking of the sun. The wind covered the field outside with snow, blew it away, covered it again.

Mr. Harmon took us through Hawthorne, chapter by excruciating chapter. We began to hate Hester Prynne for her suffering even more than we did the Puritans who tormented her. In the most private compartments of our minds, we wondered if Hester didn’t maybe deserve it. Surely, if she hadn’t wanted whatever she got, she would have said something. Surely she would have fought back. The red A on the cover of the book, with its extravagant serifs like unruly bangs, seemed to taunt us.

In the second-floor bathroom, the writing on the wall grew.

I THINK HE SMELLED MY HAIR WHEN I WALKED BY.

LEFT HIS FLY DOWN. WHEN I TOLD HIM HE JUST SMILED. DIDN’T ZIP.

I SAW HIM LOOKING DOWN MY SHIRT.

ME TOO.

ME TOO!!

LOST AN EARRING. THINK HE TOOK IT.

HE PUT A CANDY IN MY MOUTH. A FINGER TOO.

I FEEL BAD CAUSE I STILL THINK HE’S KINDA CUTE…

HIS HAND WAS IN HIS PANTS WHEN I CAME IN THIS MORNING.

HE SAID HE KNEW I WASN’T WEARING A BRA.

HE TOUCHED MY ASS. HE ACTED LIKE IT WAS A MISTAKE. I DON’T THINK IT WAS.

No one acknowledged the list, even as it grew. Even as we all began to make a point of visiting the last stall every morning, every afternoon, just to see what else had happened. We did not talk to one another about it. We certainly did not talk to anyone else. Who would have listened?

Mr. Harmon ate his candy, offered it to us. Fewer and fewer of us accepted. The spring crept close, like a stalking cat.

---

It was what happened with Kyla that changed things. He had never touched her. Maybe it was because she’d been Titus Andronicus last semester, and the force of her voice had kept him at bay. Maybe it was because she was younger, and looked it. Whatever it was, he had refrained from Kyla, had shown, in her case, a modicum of restraint.

But as the winter wore on and began to turn, wearily, into spring, he began to linger by her desk, to smile at her when she met his eyes, to touch her lightly—on the shoulder, say—to reward her when she answered a question. We saw the blush rise under her freckles. He pressed a candy into her hand, held on longer than he had to, and she laughed and frowned and looked away, perturbed by a feeling of shame.

She never ate that candy, but kept it in her pocket. She felt vaguely that to consume it would be an acceptance, an acquiescence, though she did not know of what.

The rest of us knew.

Don’t, we all thought the day he asked her to help him retrieve something from the basement supply closet. There’s nothing there, he doesn’t need you, he just wants you, like he wanted all of us. But, of course, we did not say it.

We watched her get up and follow him out. We watched her follow him back in and saw at once that something had been taken from her. Her eyes were newly veiled, her mouth a trembling line. Her hands spasmed on her desktop, as though they wanted to grasp something and break it.

In the supply closet he had grown suddenly larger, towered over her like an ogre. Kyla had looked up and seen the top of his head brushing the ceiling, felt herself shrink into his shadow until she was hardly bigger than a doll. He had filled the very corners of the room until it nearly burst.

Underneath the writing in the second-floor bathroom a new line appeared, jagged capitals in red permanent ink:

TUESDAY. BLEACHERS. 4PM.

---

There were still little greyish piles of snow on the bleachers, remnants of a winter that refused to leave. We met there, all of us, while the rest of the school straggled down the front steps and into buses and cars. Two dozen of us, maybe more, maybe less, crowded under the bleachers in an untidy mass, a rat king with tails knotted lucklessly together. We watched the edge of the field to see if anyone approached, but watched each other more closely still. There was camaraderie in our eyes, of a sort, but no trust.

Theresa stepped forward, holding her red pen. We nodded when we saw that. We’d all suspected that she had extended the invitation. It was the kind of thing she’d do.

“Tell,” she said, and we did.

Sarah H had bent over on the way out the door to tie her shoe. He was sitting at his desk fifteen feet away, but she had felt his breath in her ear, heard his voice murmuring a dirty joke as though he’d been standing next to her.

Kris he’d met coming out of the bathroom. He stopped her, asked her about a poetry assignment, stepped closer and closer until she was flat against the wall, the bulk of his body pressing down on her. He held her there for a breath, then stepped back. When she looked, there was a faint indent of her body in the bricks.

So-hyun he’d crept up behind during silent reading, reaching out to brush his fingers against the bra strap that slid down over her shoulder and into view. “The lightest touch,” she said, and reached up to touch the shoulder herself. “I found blisters there, after.”

Riley had run into him after soccer practice, when the locker room was empty. She did not go into further detail, just pressed her tough-girl lips close together until they changed colour.

Valerie had stood in front of him in the cafeteria lineup. She’d thought at first that she was imagining the hand brushing down the length of her dark hair as it swung against her shoulder blades. She showed us the pale streak it had left behind, as though his hand had bleached it.

Each story was a single pebble, held in the palm of a girl’s hand. Alone, they were nothing. Together, they were a landslide.

“Come back here tonight,” said Theresa. Light slanted between the slats of the bleachers, a band of it catching her eyes. Bela Legosi, thought Greta, not without admiration. “Bring anything you have that he’s touched. I’ve got an idea.”

---

It was harder for some of us to sneak out than others, but we managed. All but Ashley B, who had a head cold, and Larissa, whose mother locked her in her room at night and checked the bed every hour to make sure she hadn’t disappeared. The rest of us made it, creeping down stairs and out of windows, leaving the requisite pillows beneath our bedclothes. One by one we crept onto the field, giggling with nerves and something like awe. In the moonlight, the bleachers looked different, primitive and shiningly pale, a monument to a brutal god.

Theresa was waiting for us, cross-legged on the grass even though it was wet and cold, with a tin bucket in front of her. The rest of us squatted awkwardly, offering our assorted objects.

“Put them in the bucket,” she said, and we did. Valerie put in a leaf he had tenderly pulled from her hair. Jenny put in a pencil she’d borrowed from his desk. Greta put in, not without a pang, an essay he’d marked with an extravagant A+ and a sprawling GREAT JOB CASSAVETES! Mauricia put in her exploded pen. Kyla put in the candy he’d pressed into her hand that she could never bring herself to eat. Kris put in a book he’d lent her. We all groaned and rolled our eyes when we saw that it was Lolita.

“So obvious,” murmured So-hyun, and the indignation in her voice gave life to that feeling inside us all. That gift made clear to us his intellectual limits, the laziness of his attempts to ensnare us. It was worse than predatory—it was boring.

After the last item had tumbled into the bucket, Theresa reached into her jacket pocket for a container of lighter fluid. A quick spray over the contents, then the match was in her hand, ready to be lit. She looked at Kyla.

“You have the best voice,” she said. “Say something.”

Kyla opened her mouth. No sound came out. She suddenly looked lost.

“It’s okay,” Theresa said, and reached out with one hand to touch Kyla’s shoulder, briefly. Kyla shuddered, tried to cover it with a shiver. Theresa’s hands, she would say later, were so cold, so cold!—it was like she wasn’t a girl at all, but some strange, amphibious thing. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. You say something, and the rest of us will think it.”

“Think what?” asked Sarah H, and flinched when Theresa turned to look at her.

“We’ll think,” she said, “about what we want to happen to him. What we want him to feel.”

Sideways glances, eyes meeting and falling away, hands straying suddenly to cover areas of the body that he’d touched. We all knew what we wanted him to feel.

“Think it,” Theresa said, “all of you, as hard as you can. Kyla, say something. Do it. Now!”

She lit the match, held it over her head for a moment like a torch, then let it fall into the bucket. The sound the objects made as they caught fire was loud, but drowned out almost immediately by Kyla, Kyla whose voice boomed like a tyrant’s, Kyla who was not now Titus Andronicus but Tamora, Kyla who roared over the crackle of the flames:

“I am Revenge, sent from th’ infernal kingdom

To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind

By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes.”

Her voice echoed madly through the field. In the distance, a dog barked twice, then fell silent.

We sat and watched the objects burn. The firelight cast strange shadows on all our faces, made us weird and wild. Theresa looked at the flames, then at us all, and smiled.

“And now,” she said.

---

The smell of fire was still in our noses the next morning when we shuffled into English class, the stink of smoke still in our nostrils. Ashley B and Larissa looked at us with wide, wondering eyes, longing to ask questions, but before they could, Mr. Harmon himself came into the room, brandishing his battered copy of The Scarlet Letter.

“Hello, my girls,” he said, as cheerful as though he didn’t hurt at all—as though our midnight ritual in the field had meant nothing! “Let’s get started, we have a lot to get through. Chapter twelve, please.”

He began to thumb through the book. This was, or always had been, our cue to follow suit. We’d always done it before. We’d tried to please. Followed his lead. Been his girls, his flock, his sheep.

But now we sat, and stared, and let our hands lie flat on our desks, or dangle at our sides. We watched him find his place. We remembered the fire, Kyla’s booming incantation, the shadows that had made us more than what we were. We did not open our books.

We were not his girls anymore.

After a few moments of silence, Mr. Harmon looked up. He frowned, and his glasses slipped down his nose.

“Chapter Twelve,” he repeated, and reached into the bowl on his desk for a hard candy. We watched the wrapper flutter gracelessly to the floor like a downed bird. “Come on, girls. Dimmesdale’s vigil. What do you think? Who wants to start?”

He looked left, then right. At Greta, whose face was blank as a washed slate. At Jenny, who swallowed an instinctive, hysterical giggle. At Mauricia, who rubbed, reflexively, at her thigh.

“What’s this?” he asked, smiling vaguely. The smile faded the longer the silence stretched out, until finally it trembled into nothing. He had no shield against the roomful of teenage eyes boring into him.

From her seat at the back of the class, Theresa slowly rose to her feet. She still smelled of lighter fluid. Her hair was greasy and sooty, as though she had not showered.

“I am Revenge,” she said, her voice rough from the smoke she’d breathed in, and across the room, Kyla sprang to her feet, hands planted firmly on her desk.

“I am Revenge,” Kyla said, that big voice booming from her tiny body, and at that Mr. Harmon staggered, as though shot through with a bolt. He seemed, suddenly, to be smaller.

The sight emboldened us. Someone gasped. Someone else laughed. Suddenly we were all on our feet, stamping, cheering, making noise, calling out in a raucous chorus of glee and rage.

“I am Revenge,” said Greta, and she watched the way the light painted Mr. Harmon in stripes of shadow as he staggered back further, his eyes growing wide with fear. He reached up to touch the underside of his chin.

“I am Revenge,” said Jenny, barely more than a whisper, and he shook his hand as though it had been burned.

“I am Revenge,” said So-hyun, fascinated and repelled by the way he shuddered and flinched away from something invisible at his shoulder.

“I am Revenge,” said Riley, her teeth bared in a grin, and Mr. Harmon doubled over in pain, clutching himself. Sweat plastered his curly hair to his head.

“I am Revenge,” said Mauricia, louder than all of us, pounding a fist on her desk, banging out a rhythm like a war drum. Mr. Harmon’s glasses fell to the floor. We all heard the crunch as he stumbled forwards, stepping on them.

Trembling and pale, tender as a lamb, Mr. Harmon opened and closed his mouth. A puff of smoke burst from his throat. It smelled like melting plastic, like a borrowed book set on fire, like a burning sweet.

“Girls,” he croaked, his voice as rough as Theresa’s. “Girls, please-”

He stumbled again, fell to the floor and curled like a fetus in agony. As one we surged forwards, surrounding him, staring down at his twitching form. How small he looked to us now! How weak, how soft, how utterly defenseless!

Theresa stepped forward, holding her red pen. She knelt and pressed its tip against his open and unblinking eye. A shudder ripped through his body, made him kick like a dog in a dream.

“We are Revenge,” she said, and finally, finally, Mr. Harmon began to scream.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 928 for July 12th, 2024.

Mr. Harmon’s Girls, by Elliott Gish [hard G on Gish]

Narrated by Louise Hewitt; hosted by Kat Day, audio by Chelsea Davis

---

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you this episode is Mr. Harmon’s Girls, by Elliott Gish. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Before we go any further, this story contains references to child sexual abuse and grooming. If that’s going to be difficult for you, take care of yourself and skip this one. We’ll be back next week.

Author bio:
Elliott Gish wants to creep you out. A writer and librarian from Nova Scotia, her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Dark Matter Magazine, Wigleaf, Vastarien, The Baltimore Review, and many others. Her first novel, Grey Dog, was published by ECW Press in April 2024. She lives with her partner in Halifax, a city full of rain and ghosts.

She can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @elliottgish as well as in other places – we’ll put links in the show notes.

• https://www.elliottgishwrites.com

• https://www.facebook.com/elliottgishwrites

Narrator bio:
Louise Hewitt is enthusiastic about stories in all their forms. She is an advertising copywriter by day, a reader of bedtime stories in the evenings, and a D&D dwarf cleric at the weekends. Lou to her friends, she enjoys cooking up a storm, riding her bike in the rain, feeding ducks, doing yoga, and attempting to meditate. Her favourite stories are about dragons, but pirates and sea serpents are also good. She lives in London, UK, with her partner, her child on alternate weeks, and a very large ginger cat.

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

---

Well done, you’ve survived another story, and a tough one. What did you think of Mr. Harmon’s Girls by Elliott Gish? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

---

I love the introduction to this piece. “Bold and laughing, shy and silent, angry and turned darkly inwards.” A perfect description of a group of teenage girls, in eleven words. And then, Mr. Harmon. Objectively, there’s nothing very sinister there and yet, somehow, there is. Somehow, Elliott Gish manages to put us immediately on edge. What is it… the teeth? The invitation to use his first name? The fact that he’d left a different job and travelled a long way to accept this one?

Why did you have to leave your job, cynical older me asks, knowing full well that 11-year-old me would almost certainly not have done.

“All the signs are there, the right elements are in place, but somehow they don’t add up,” he says, and I thought… you know, they do say that every criticism is a confession…

So… it’s not a surprise when his predatory side comes becomes obvious. It was just a question of when. And Gish doesn’t have to be explicit about it, either, and is not. The interactions are subtle and suggestive, at least to begin with, and all more distressing for that.

Then we have Theresa. Who signs everything in red because she doesn’t want the corrections to stand out. Whose name means ‘to harvest’. Who is, she says, interested in murder. Ah, Mr. Harmon, I think you may have bitten off more than you can chew… in fact, I think the piece that you have attempted to bite off may be about to bite back.

And so it is. The downfall of men like Mr. Harmon so often comes down to the fact that women talk. This is why they’re so often so desperate to prevent it. If they silence the witch, after all, she won’t be able to warn the other women whom she so often counsels.

Mr. Harmon gets his comeuppance, and we can all be glad of that. He will not be travelling to another school, on whichever edge of the country he has not yet tainted, to start all over again with fresh anonymity.

Well done, Theresa.

 

One thing. This is, of course, a story about a predatory teacher. That’s not in question. It’s clear in his actions, both explicit and implied, that his intentions are nothing but abusive. Forgive me, but I just want to underline those actions: the touching, the suggestive comments, the singling out of individuals for ‘special treatment’, the: ‘we’ll think of a way for you to make it up’, the things the girls describe on the wall of the second-floor bathroom.

All predatory behaviours.

However. Simply giving young people interesting books, particularly ones in which they see themselves represented when, perhaps, they don’t see that enough most of the time, that is not predatory behaviour.

That encourages thinking and the asking of questions. Grooming, very often, encourages precisely the opposite.

Are we all clear? Good.

Love to all the librarians out there. Keep fighting.

---

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If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have Bonesoup by Eugenia Triantafyllou [EE-vin-ee-ah TREN-da-fill-you], narrated by Steph Bianchini [BEE-an-KEE-nee], again hosted by me, with audio from Chelsea Davis.

And finally, PseudoPod, and Shakespeare, know….

“Come, let us go, and make thy father blind!”

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.