I saw the news on the Smoking Gun website. “The 37-year-old Arkansas woman is the 3,496th teacher to be arrested this year on charges that she had sex with an underage student.” This was quickly followed by the news that a Texas teacher, a former Miss Texas contestant, was arrested for having sex with an 18-year-old student. Miss Texas? The lucky fucker! For some reason, I was incredulous that that many teachers had been arrested. Apart from the obvious reaction that every man has, ‘Where were these teachers when I was in school?’ which includes the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the judge, and all the rest of the men involved in the hypocritical process, I wondered why would a grown woman want to have sex with a skinny pimple-faced teen? Then I read that as many as 20% of students have had some sort of sexual contact with a teacher. Man, that’s a lot of hanky panky in the schools. I started researching the saga of one such teacher who’s story didn’t make it into the main-stream media.
Roberta
Roberta was mentally ill, as a number of prominent mental health professionals had testified. Mental illness is always defined by deviance from societal norms. Roberta’s behavior was outside the norm, at least outside the acknowledged, admitted norm, even if it was not really outside the norm of the actual behavior of people. For example, a brother and sister desiring to marry would be considered mentally ill, as well as criminals, today. But in the Egyptian and Incan civilizations, it was quite the norm; in fact, it was a religious imperative, ordained by God, for the ruling families. There’s proof that God is a woman. Look how often she changes her mind on what is right or not. One hundred years ago, an uncle marrying his niece was normal. Voltaire set up house with his niece. Today, Voltaire would be classified as a sexual predator and undergo court mandated mental counseling until he overcame his illness. Poor insane Voltaire, and he didn’t even know it. He thought he was Enlightened. One hundred years ago, Mark Twain wrote, "From the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick to receive the candle." Seven? And no one lynched Twain? In some places today, the age of consent is as low as twelve. The first Age of Consent law was enacted in Britain because girls as young as ten were being forced into prostitution. The law made the age of consent 12 so that girls could not be forced into prostitution until that age. The Puritanical elements in America forced various states to follow Britain’s lead. The age limit has crept up over time as do-gooders tried to stop sex until the age limit isn’t congruent with real world behavior. Any law violated by 60% of the population makes no sense. Today, having consensual sex with a person under eighteen makes one a molester. Same behavior is normal yesterday, but makes you a wacko today. Or is that the other way round? Come on Ms. God, make up your mind.
That is why Roberta stood in front of a judge, her lawyer at her side, the prosecutor looking smug because he had gotten tons of publicity from this trial and helped his re-election chances immeasurably. Justice doesn’t matter when re-elections are involved.
“Miss Edwards,” the judge intoned. “Your conviction carries a sentence of up to twenty years in State prison. Normally, you would undergo counseling during incarceration. It has been pointed out to me by your counsel that the women’s prisons in this state do not have the necessary counseling for this type of crime.”
The prosecutor was starting to look a little uneasy at this point. He had pushed for a twenty year sentence. That sort of sentence was good for the law and order vote. The six o’clock news would be full of his face trumpeting the conviction of a child molester. In this case, the child stood six-foot-two, weighed in at a muscular one-seventy-five, and shaved daily but that was beside the point. The Judge was weaseling a little and the prosecutor was worried. ‘Necessary counseling, my ass,’ he thought. ‘Just give her twenty years, you old windbag.’
“Taking into account all of the relevant facts, especially the testimony of both the defense and prosecution expert witnesses…” the judge glanced at the prosecutor.
The prosecutor fumed, ‘Shit! The judge is going to blame it on me. "The prosecution’s expert witness," my ass.’ He was already composing his outraged comments to the press.
The judge continued, “…it is my opinion that the need for counseling outweighs the necessity of confinement. The expert testimony of the mental health professionals that you represent little or no danger to society with counseling and with the obvious benefits of counseling, compel me to sentence you to five years probation, the term of the probation to be shortened if you successfully complete the recommended counseling program. If you fail to complete the program the sentence will revert to twenty years in State prison. In addition, you are to have no contact, and I mean no contact, with the victim in this case. Also, you will have no contact with minors unless supervised during the period of probation. Do you understand these terms?”
“Yes, your Honor,” Roberta said quietly.
“Good. See that you adhere to them rigorously. I will most certainly impose the sentence of imprisonment if you violate the terms of your probation,” the judge said sternly.
“I understand fully,” she said.
“Make sure you complete that counseling satisfactorily. Court is dismissed,” he said, rapping his gavel.
“All rise.”
As the judge disappeared, Roberta was hugged by her lawyer.
The prosecutor said nothing as he hurried past, hoping this wouldn’t wreck his campaign. “I’ll need a quick high profile case that I can win,” he mumbled to himself. Maybe he’d have the vice squad raid a couple of massage parlors and take the news guys along. That was always good for coverage. The news guys loved filming the scantily clad women, the public loved the salaciousness of it, and the parlor would be back in business before the week was out so no one was hurt. Except for the women with the arrest record, but the DA didn’t care about that.
Across town, Jason sat in a quiet office listening to a matronly woman talking. He had trouble keeping his eyes open.
“You must learn to deal with being a victim,” she droned.
Jason laughed. Victim. Hell, every guy in school was begging him for details, hoping they could pull off boffing one of the teachers themselves. Every female teacher had hordes of boys itching for a chance to be the next Jason. Victim? He was a hero in the eyes of the guys. Jason also noticed how many of the girls flirted with him now. After all, if an adult woman like Miss Edwards had seen something in Jason, there must have been a reason. And the salacious details that came out in the trial of how happy he kept her, made wet panties common among the high schools girls.
And the admirers included his dad, who had clapped him on the back when he heard the news and congratulated Jason. That is, until his Mother practically took off Dad’s head with her screaming about how her poor son had been abused. Dad had been publicly contrite after that. He would occasionally give him a wink when Mom wasn’t looking. Jason knew his dad’s real feelings. Jason was also well read enough to realize that his mother’s reaction had more than a tinge of jealousy in it. It wasn’t the fear that he had been hurt; he obviously wasn’t hurt. He had a smile you couldn’t take off with a blow torch when he was with Roberta. Jason’s mother nearly had an attack when she found out ‘that hussy’ wasn’t going to prison. Jason had really stirred the pot, on purpose, by innocently asking, “Does that mean we can have sex again?” His father had nearly choked on his Scotch as his mother turned pale and collapsed onto the couch.
So Jason sat, leaning back and trying to look attentive, as the doctor talked. She wasn’t a real doctor to Jason. She was a PhD in Psychology. All she could do was talk. He remembered one of the first sessions he had with her. He had asked, “How long do we do this?”
“Jason, you know each session is fifty minutes.”
“No, I mean how long do I have to keep coming?” he asked.
“Well, your parents want you to come, to help deal with the trauma,” she said.
Jason laughed to himself. ‘Trauma? The only trauma was all the beating off I had to do after they arrested her. Parents? Yeah right! Dad would never make me do this.’
“The school district is paying for these sessions, to help your recovery,” she explained.
Jason thought about a comment his mother had made about not suing the district if they paid for the sessions. No one really cared about how this actually affected him, if it did at all. They only cared about what they were getting out of it. It all became too much and anger crept into his voice. “Yeah, and when the money runs out?”
“Jason, you won’t be abandoned,” she soothed.
He laughed, “Abandoned. I want to be left alone, damn it.”
The doctor sat back. “Jason, anger at your therapist is quite common. It means we are moving forward. It is the anger towards your tormentor that is being re-directed at me. Let your anger out,” she said.
“You mean Roberta?” Jason asked incredulously. The doctor nodded. Jason started laughing. “Oh my God. Angry at her?” He had to wipe away the tears. “Have you ever had sex?”
The doctor started, “This isn’t about me…”
“I guess that means no. I’m angry at the police for locking her up. I’m angry at my mom for keeping me away from Roberta. I’m angry at the laws for being so completely stupid. I’m angry at you for not getting it. No wonder you are full of these stupid platitudes. If you ever had sex like Roberta and I had you’d know better than to say I was angry at her. My God, the stuff we did. I think I was in Heaven when I was with her.”
“There is more to love than sex,” the doctor tried to interrupt and bring the session back in line.
“Who said anything about love? It was sex. And we both enjoyed it. That’s what’s making you all so mad. We had sex and enjoyed it. That is the crux of the whole thing, isn’t it?” Jason stood up. “Doctor, I have a confession to make. I had sex with a beautiful, lovely, intelligent, sexy woman and I enjoyed it. How are you going to make me feel guilty about that? Now, you can continue to collect your $150 an hour, but let’s get one thing straight. I don’t feel bad about what Roberta and I did. I wish we could still be doing it. And if you had ever experienced sex like that, you’d understand.” Jason sat down.
For once, the doctor was speechless. There was a long, long silence as her mind frantically tried to fit this in with known DSM protocols. Of course, it was never going to fit because Jason wasn’t a victim and he hadn’t been hurt. There was nothing to cure. The dilemma for the doctor, as there is for so many counselors, was that she needed a victim in order to make money. No victim, no money. Most teens were easy to talk into being victims. They were used to being indoctrinated in school: how they should feel, what they should believe. Jason was different. After a long silence, she finally said, “I think that’s all for today.”
Jason smiled as he stood. “Thanks, Doc. I feel a million times better finally getting to tell the truth.”
They had been caught by chance. While they weren’t in love, they certainly were infatuated. They were carefree, blissful, and therefore not cautious. Roberta and Jason went to a theatre near her apartment, holding hands like the lovers they were. As they walked through the mall, laughing together just because they were happy, Edna Crankheit, embittered spinster and math teacher, saw them. They continued on their way, watched the movie, and retired to her apartment for an hour of sweaty sex before Roberta dropped Jason off at home.
Edna fumed the rest of the weekend. What rankled the most was how obviously happy the couple were. Edna wouldn’t admit it, but that was what bothered her the most. The little slut. By Monday morning, Edna had worked herself into a towering rage at the damage being done to the teaching profession by that slut. That Jason had learned more about English in Roberta’s class than he had the entire rest of his school career didn’t matter.
Before class on Monday, Edna stormed into the principal’s office. After 20 minutes of being harangued, he knew he had a problem on his hands. He did what he knew he had to under the law. He called the police.
The detectives interviewed Edna Crankheit, the principal, and several of Jason’s teachers. They called Jason’s home and asked to come by. They got his Mother’s permission to search his computer. They found the e-mails, steamy and luridly detailed. It was enough to get a search warrant to seize Roberta’s home computer. They found the same e-mails. The case was complete. Even if Jason didn’t testify, the physical evidence, the descriptions of sex they wanted to have, and sex they did have being on both computers would tie a pretty red bow around the case. Any jury would convict on the e-mails alone.
Roberta was arrested the next day and her life dissolved into a nightmare.
Jason and Roberta lay stretched out on the rug. Jason’s head was lying on Roberta’s chest and her hand swirled in his hair, making little circles as she played with it. She had a dreamy smile on her face. They were nude. Jason also smiled, a smile of contentment. The air of the room reeked of passion, theirs. They had spent the past hour slowly making love.
Roberta was teaching Jason how a woman needs to be loved. Like most teen boys, Jason’s idea of sex had been twenty seconds of whacking and spilling his seed in a hankie. Roberta was teaching him about foreplay: kissing, touching, caressing. She was teaching him about control, how to control his own reactions so that the woman had time to get to her climax, but also how control allowed his own climax to become so much more powerful. As he learned, he was rewarded with Roberta’s frantic reactions of pleasure and Roberta’s willingness to teach him even more. In the month they had been together, Roberta had become the best instructor Jason would ever have.
After sex, they would talk about books, Roberta’s other passion. She introduced him to many of the classics of Western literature. In turn, Jason introduced her to speculative fiction. At first, Roberta held the genre in disdain. But as she read some of his favorite books, Fahrenheit 451, Dune, Foundation, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Roberta recognized that these were romances set in some future world. They explored the world together, physically, in bed, and spiritually, through books. Jason became a man. Of course, this was her greatest sin, bringing maturity to a teen. Teens were supposed to remain children until they turned 18. Then, on that single day, they were supposed to instantly mature into adults. No wonder so many 20-something’s were still mentally children. They had never matured when they were supposed to, in the years after puberty.
They had grown close over the two months of school. Roberta would give Jason a reading assignment, just for him. He would read, thinking of Roberta. She was the heroine and he was the hero of the Romances he read. Then they would talk about what he had read.
There was never enough time during the school day. Roberta was taken with Jason and Jason was in lust for Roberta. It was Jason who had the courage to take the plunge, a plunge that turned out to be over a cliff for Roberta, but that was foreknowledge that she could not have.
“Miss Edwards,” he started out. “I really would like to talk to you about the Romance of the Rose, but there just isn’t enough time in school. Would it be possible to get together on a weekend? I know you are probably busy, but maybe just some time?”
Actually, Roberta wasn’t busy at all. She resisted at first, knowing that she held some improper thoughts about Jason. But it certainly couldn’t hurt anything for them to get together to talk about one of the greatest love poems of all time. It was so wonderful watching Jason’s mind expand. “All right. How about Saturday?”
His throat constricted and he felt butterflies in his belly. He was going to be alone with her. “Sounds great.”
That Saturday, Roberta picked him up and they went to her apartment. They sat on her couch talking about Romances, the genre that developed from the minstrel singers. She had a book of Chansons in French which she read and then translated for Jason. Both of them felt their blood rushing from the intense sensuality of the poetry. After one slightly risqué poem, they both turned at the same moment. Their lips were just inches apart. Their lips were drawn together as if magnetized. Neither could resist the impulse which drove them now. They kissed. The erotic is in the mind and their minds had been primed to it for hours, days, weeks even.
Jason was a virgin and Roberta had only one brief affair, in college, with her professor of Old English literature. Jason’s fumbling attempts could have allowed Roberta time to reconsider, but her mind was caught up in the erotic atmosphere she and Jason had created. She wanted to feel… romance, sex, yes, his body. Oh God, she wanted to feel his body against hers just like the Chansons in their glorious language spoke of it.
When Jason’s hand first touched her breast, any resistance vanished. She pulled away and Jason thought it was over. Instead, she took his hand and led him to her bedroom. He couldn’t believe his good fortune.
After, they lay in her bed, both sweaty. Now that the initial desire had been sated, Roberta began to think. “Oh, we shouldn’t have done this,” came blurting out.
Jason looked stricken. “Was I that bad?”
Roberta pulled away from her own disjointed thoughts to look at Jason. She could see the dismay on his face and she laughed. “No, silly. You were wonderful,” she said caressing his cheek. Wonderful was a bit of an overstatement. But he had managed to please her after his third orgasm allowed him to last long enough. “I meant, if someone finds out, I’ll get fired.”
Jason sat up. “Miss Edwards…”
Roberta interrupted with a laugh. “Don’t you think you should call me Roberta?”
Jason looked abashed. “Yeah. Roberta, I will never tell anyone. Not anyone. They’ll never know.”
He was so earnest that Roberta believed him. He wasn’t going to be bragging in the gym. Maybe they could be together. She looked at the handsome young body before her, so much like the statues of Donatello, so beautiful in their youthful eroticism. She had loved the David, which Mary McCarty called "a transvestite's and fetishist's dream." She had almost reached out to touch the shiny bronze skin, to run her hand over the penis of the statue. The Italians following the Greek example knew that physical love, Eros, was every bit as valid as Spiritual love, Agape, and they portrayed the beauty of Eros in their art. Now, she had her own David. Hers was ivory colored and made of warm flesh instead of cold bronze.
Jason was taking Junior English and got the new teacher, Miss Edwards. He filed into class late and got stuck with a chair in the front center, one of two chairs left. ‘Shit,’ he thought. ‘She’ll be able to see everything I do.’ There would be no sleeping for Jason this semester.
Nervous, Roberta kept her head down, reading. She wasn’t really reading, she was just too nervous to look at her class as they filed in. She wondered if she would ever get used to it, greeting a new class. This was third period and the first two had been as difficult. The bell rang and the class quieted expectantly. Roberta looked up.
“Oh my God,” breathed Jason under his breath. ‘She’s hot.’
“Welcome to junior English, a study of the literature of America,” Roberta said as she stood and walked to the chalkboard.
Roberta had come to teaching early. She was only 23 when she started, just having completed her degree in Old English Literature. She chose that because there were only eight extant texts in the entire corpus, the most notable being the epic poem Beowulf and the poem Caedmon's Hymn.
It wasn’t that she was lazy, though it might seem picking this degree because it had the least reading might indicate that. No, Roberta loved reading and literature. But she loved what she loved. Orlando by Virginia Wolfe, a love letter 500 years long. Le Morte d’Arthur, The Romance of the Rose, those were what she loved. She was in love with Romance in all its manifestations. She didn’t want to be forced to read tawdry tales of real life by some professor in Modern Literature.
But it was an English degree and so she became a teacher at Central High. Roberta wasn’t very worldly, having grown up in her little world of books and Romances. If she had only known.
Jason was stunned. Not only was she beautiful, but her body was to die for. And she was wearing a skin tight dress that was cut short. She was a Goddess. She couldn’t be a teacher. Teachers did not look like this. He didn’t hear any more of the opening lecture as his mind wandered along fantasy paths. He was hard the entire class, though he didn’t really notice until the final bell sounded and he couldn’t get up from his chair.
Jason couldn’t take his eyes from her. Because he wanted to somehow gain her attention, he paid attention in her class as he did no other. That night he raided his family’s library and started reading books she had mentioned that day, even though they weren’t required.
Roberta noticed this boy who came to class every day, attentive, who knew the answers to her questions, and was able to bring into the discussion comments from some of her favorite works.
One day, perhaps two weeks into the course, Jason stayed after class. “Miss Edwards?”
“Yes, Jason?” she asked.
“I’m reading Orlando,” he said. Roberta was stunned that this boy was reading one of her favorite texts and it wasn’t even in the course. It was a British book. Her appreciation for Jason soared. He continued, “I don’t understand why the sex change of the protagonist. What did the author want to do with that? I mean, what’s the point?”
Roberta was exultant that this boy had spotted the exact critical point that was at the heart of the text. Maybe he hadn’t worked it out yet, but he knew this was the critical point of the book. She felt close to him, glad he was making the same journey into these books that she had made at his age.
What had been only a teacher student relationship, though one of admiration, was about to change for Roberta. What had been a simple fantasy for Jason, the kind of fantasy a million boys shared every year, was about to change. It was something so small, so simple it shouldn’t have made any difference at all.
She held his eye. He looked up at her. A spark jumped from being to being, was reinforced, and jumped back. They both felt it. It was that spark that lit the fuse that led to Jason being victimized by Roberta, the sexual predator.
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Roberta was teaching Jason how a woman needs to be loved. Like most teen boys, Jason’s idea of sex had been twenty seconds of whacking and spilling his seed in a hankie. Roberta was teaching him about foreplay: kissing, touching, caressing. She was teaching him about control, how to control his own reactions so that the woman had time to get to her climax, but also how control allowed his own climax to become so much more powerful. As he learned, he was rewarded with Roberta’s frantic reactions of pleasure and Roberta’s willingness to teach him even more. In the month they had been together, Roberta had become the best instructor Jason would ever have. 
