Band Name of the Day

Off on a Tangent

Brought to you by the daring Lotus.

It's BND's first ever Fiction Friday!

A few weeks ago, Lotus issued this dare: "Write a short story in which a teenage girl is hopelessly in love with her geometry teacher from 10th grade and writes made-for-TV-movies and sitcoms about him with her friends."

Well, what the heck. Here goes. Disclaimer: This is not autobiographical in any way. No sirree bob. ;-)

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had to take geometry. I'm glad it was required, because otherwise I wouldn't have taken it. And if I hadn't, I would never have met the love of my life.

When I found out my teacher was Mr. Beckett, geometry became my new favorite subject. Never mind that I was a mathematically impaired music geek; suddenly areas and angles, sines and cosines, diameters and hypotenuses were all I could think about. Well, that and blue blue eyes, cornsilk hair, gangly legs in rumpled khakis, muscular forearms peeking from rolled-up sleeves, Daffy Duck neckties, and a quick sharp wit that pierced my heart.

Aaah, Mr. Beckett. Super smart. Super dork. Super hot. He was all broad shoulders and big hands scribbling on the board, all Irish Spring and gentle correction when I took my stupid questions up to his desk. He teased me into understanding geometry, teased me into liking it, teased me into believing I could do it. I'd never been teased quite like that before. I liked it.

It was the most ridiculous of schoolgirl crushes. I knew it even at the time. But I was powerless to stop myself. I hung around the boys' cross-country team he coached, made him a card on his birthday, baked him cookies at Christmas, named my fish after his kids. Heck, I even joined the math league, where I had to fend off the advances of geekboys who couldn't hold a candle to their geek god, Mr. Beckett.

But all of that was nothing compared to the stories. Oh god, the stories! I cringe thinking about them now. Because the thing was, I was not alone in my addiction: My best friend Merrilee loved Mr. Beckett just as much as I did. We enabled each other's pathology to ridiculous extents, and no one can map the intricacies of the heart like a pair of 16-year-old girls. We talked about him all the time, passing notes in class, huddling in the hall between classes, calling each other after school. We even had a code so no one would realize whom we were talking about. We referred to Mr. Beckett as PS: the Perfect Square.

At first we simply lamented that none of the boys at our school was as smart or good-looking or mature as Mr. Beckett. Then we started to speculate about what it would be like to date him. Well, not really him, of course, because naturally he was too moral to leave his wife for a student (or two) half his age. But a man like him, an older man wise in the ways of the world but young enough at heart to appreciate our comely youth, part older brother, part teacher, part lover. Mr. Beckett, or the notion of him at least, was the ideal boyfriend, and our devotion to him kept us out of trouble with real boys our own age.

Then one day when I was bored in history class — that could have been any day, actually — I jotted down one of the romantic scenarios we had concocted. I didn't use anybody's real name, of course; god forbid my notebook should fall into the wrong hands, and the last thing I wanted was to get the Perfect Square fired for improper behavior. But I got the rest of it on paper, and Merrilee helped me embroider it further over lunch. From our maniacal giggles and furtive looks, you'd have thought we were plotting to take over the world.

Well, you know how it is: you can't stop with just one. Soon we had a small Harlequinesque library of stories about "Dan Tangent." Sometimes Dan was a schoolteacher who realized he was in love with one of his beautiful young students but held himself away from her, pining chastely, until her 18th birthday, whereupon he quit his job and they eloped and lived happily ever after. Sometimes Dan was a firefighter who rescued a beautiful young student during an emergency at the school, and they dated for a while, then eloped and lived happily ever after. Sometimes Dan was a music producer who discovered a beautiful young student at a high school music competition and made her a star, and then they eloped and lived happily ever after. You get the idea.

The stories amused us tremendously, and we started passing them around for our friends to read. By this time we'd changed enough vital information to make Dan a fairly generic hero, not easily identifiable as Mr. Beckett, and the beautiful young student could have been any of us. Other girls jumped on the bandwagon, and soon a small literary society had sprung up around Dan Tangent. We called ourselves the Tangentials. The seniors even went so far as to write bodice-rippers and soft-core porn about Dan. A cast of minor characters coalesced around him, and soon we were speaking of Dan and his friends as if they were real people. New students at our school spent weeks hoping to meet or even date the infamous Dan Tangent before finally learning the truth.

I got so busy helping Helen work out her own romantic travails through a Dan story that I forgot to make Mr. Beckett a Valentine's Day card. I quit math league because it took too much time from my other after-school activities. A dozen of us sophomore Tangentials decided to hold our own Dan-prom in the spring — girls and their imaginary dates only — and it was so much fun that it eclipsed the actual dance, much to the chagrin of the juniors and seniors. At the end of the school year, Merrilee and I both passed geometry with Bs.

By the time junior year rolled around, Merrilee and I were the center of a large clique of writers. When a new English class on screenwriting popped up in the curriculum, naturally we all signed up. We figured we might as well get some easy credit for the summaries and scripts we were already turning out in our spare time.

Our teacher, the tough but fair Mr. Remington, was onto us from Day 1 and forbade us from writing anything about Dan Tangent. No problem! That's why God gave us the search and replace function on our word processors, right? With a few quick keystrokes, Dan Tangent became Quentin O'Kelley or Reggie Chops With Fist or Hideki Tanaka. We were writing TV scripts, for heaven's sake; the protagonists didn't have to be different, they just had to be there.

Looking back, I suspect Mr. Remington was onto that little trick, too, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he encouraged us to team up with the video production class and make one of our scripts into a movie. So we did.

The project wasn't the overnight success we expected. The screenwriting class was made up mostly of Tangentials, so it was mostly girls. And the video production class was mostly boys. Teenage girls + teenage boys? You do the geometry: love triangles everywhere. We had behind-the-scenes and on-set meltdowns that would put any Hollywood diva to shame.

Through it all Mr. Remington sat serenely in the back of the room, interrupting us only when we got loud enough to disrupt the class next door. He spent most of his time grading papers and singing quietly along with the tunes on his iPod, rehearsing his role in an upcoming community theater production of Oklahoma. In my role as executive producer, I had plenty of time to kill as well, so I hung out back there with him.

We chatted a bit, and a bit more. He turned out to be younger than he looked, and funny in a cynical way completely different from Mr. Beckett's sunshiny style. He had a tattoo, which he showed me one night after everyone else had gone home, swearing me to secrecy even though it was just a harmless armband.

I sent him roses on his opening night, sort of as a joke, sort of not. He brought the house down as Curly. A Broadway talent agent in the audience got his signature on a contract before the week was out. He finished out the year teaching, then moved to New York to pursue his thespian dream. We kept in touch all through my senior year — thank god for e-mail!

When I graduated, he invited me to come spend a few days in New York, see the city, get a backstage look at Broadway. He told me to bring a few of my scripts along and he'd show them to a producer friend of his, sort of as a joke, sort of not. I did, and he did, and soon I had a contract of my own.

You can probably write the rest of the story yourself. Mr. Remington and I — his name is Shea — never parted from one another's sides after that. We didn't need to. I wrote the plays, he performed them, and we both became huge stars. We eloped and lived happily ever after.

Today around the world: February 4 is Setsubun (Bean Scattering) in the Shinto faith.