It had been a little over a week since Anna had stepped foot in Bayville High. Time seemed to simultaneously fly and crawl by. It was nice, she supposed, to get out of the house after her and Scott's mandatory leave of absence from school at both Principal Darkholme's and Xavier's request. When she was first told - not asked - about the idea, she was angry. All she wanted was to put the events of the mountain behind her and move on. She figured the faster she could get on with life, the better. Now that she was back in school, back under Darkholme's watch, all she wanted was to crawl back under her sheets at home and pretend the world beyond had simply evaporated away.
She was technically aware of what was happening in her U.S. history class, but she felt little more alert than one of the posters of presidents hanging on the wall, watching what was going on below. They were talking about WWII, the lead-up, and the first few blows of the war. Anna knew the story as well as anyone did. The Germans were bad, and the Americans were good. There was Pearl Harbor and Nazis and all sorts of crappy stuff, but the good guys won, and that was what was important. Despite that, Mr. McCoy was determined to be twisted up in weird details and the supposed moral complexities the German people were made to face.
He talked about what it must have been like being a typical German citizen before the war when Hitler was still on the rise. How so many people at the time dismissed the guy for a weird greasy loser, and how sure they were that his insane ramblings would never turn into anything. Then how this strange cult of personality somehow appealed to the disenfranchised fringes of society and used their anger and frustration to transform them into devoted believers. The whole thing snowballed till finally, as Mr. McCoy put it, 'Germany became the first nation to fall to the Nazi Regime.'
After the lecture, the class had its typical rounds of fast-paced questions and 'Factoids,' but Anna couldn't hear what was said past the buzzing in her ears.
Eventually, the bell rang, and students funneled out the door with Mr. McCoy shouting after them about chapters to read that night. Usually, Anna was the first to rise and slip through the door just in front of her desk, but her legs didn't move, and her arms didn't reach for her backpack, still sitting in a heap at the foot of her chair.
She could feel Mr. McCoy's eyes fall on her, but she didn't return his look. "Anna, are you alright?"
Anna felt like a statue in her chair. She somehow managed to feel the full weight of her body resting on her bones as she sat. "…how could they have not known?"
"How could 'they' have not known 'what?'" She wasn't looking at him, but she could hear worry color his voice. "What's going on? Are you feeling unwell?"
"How could so many people not know that Hitler, of all people, was a monster?"
A pause leadened the air till she eventually heard the soft souls of loafers treading the vinyl floor. Eventually, Mr. McCoy entered the frame of her vision. He leaned his back against the whiteboard and rested the heels of his hands on the metal rim that supported the erasers and pens. "You're still going through it, aren't you? A few days is hardly enough time to…" His lips curled inward as he searched for the right words "to process what you went through back there."
She looked at him. "Well, how? Wasn't anyone smart watching him? Didn't anyone care?"
McCoy looked at her, then the tips of his shoes. "Well, it's not so cut and dry. Some certainly did. Hitler was hardly subtle about his beliefs at any given point. He was a lunatic through and through. Thing is, the world can't stop for every madman out there. Most of them fizzle out and end up becoming nothing. That's what so many thought would happen to him. It wasn't really till it was too late that most Germans saw what a monster had spawned right under their noses."
"They should have known. They were stupid not to know. They could have stopped so much suffering if they were just paying attention."
"I understand the frustration, but you also can't paint a whole people with such broad strokes. People certainly knew Hitler was an awful man, but unfortunately, others with either hate in their hearts, or wanting something to believe in after going through the horrors of WWI, or may have simply wanted to be heard, took up his cause. Hitler wasn't the first of his kind in history, and he won't be the last. We can only look and remember what happened in order to prevent what may occur in the future."
Anna shook her head. "Someone still should have done something! They were careless and blind and - and -" She couldn't stop the heat and tears from bubbling in the corners of her eyes. She wrenched them shut, but tears slipped through despite.
"Hey - it's alright! This was a long time ago, and this piece of crap is long dead."
Anna pressed her lips together tight enough that they lost their color, and she shook her head even faster. "I should have known. I should have known!"
"Anna, what should you have known?"
"Everything! I should have known everything! It was all there under the surface - I'm sure of it! I should have just looked!" The buzzing grew louder in her ears, and her whole body trembled till she felt something heavy drape over her shoulders. She probed at its edges with icy fingers and found the fuzzy inner lining of a jacket.
"It's alright," She heard McCoy say from somewhere nearby. "You couldn't have known. Everyone gets fooled every once in a while, and it's easy to be confused when you want to believe the best in others. It doesn't matter how clever or discerning you are, which you are both, Anna. People just get fooled sometimes. It doesn't make you lesser or an idiot. It means the opposite. It means you have a good heart, and you want to believe everyone else is on the level too."
Anna let her body be warmed under the heavy weight of the jacket for a little while longer. Her breathing eventually caught up with her, and slowly opened her eyes to a bright sunlit room with her teacher sitting in a small chair across from her.
"Sorry," She pressed her thumb into the corner of either of her eyes. "I'm so tired of crying all the time."
He smiled, "Don't be. Sometimes you got to let those feelings come out, and sometimes it's not always convenient."
She looked past his shoulder at the whiteboard, which was weighed down with cluttered dates, phrases, and drawings of little countries. "I remember -" Her tongue licked her dry lips, "when I first met you - you told me that you find 'what, how, and what next' by looking at history. When you told me that, I thought you sounded real freaking dumb."
McCoy snickered and plucked his glasses off his nose. "Yeah, I got that feeling from you."
She didn't look at him, only kept staring at the board with glazed eyes. "Thing is… I could use some help knowing what to do next."
"Well, at the end of the day, only you can decide what to do next, but maybe a little insight from history can help decide."
She looked at him. "When you talk about these dead people and all this stuff that happened forever ago, you talk about them like they're still around."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, in other history classes - it was just about when George Washington did this and Lincoln did that. But with you, it's all about -" She rubbed her chest with her hand in a spot near her heart, "feelings, people's morality, their… I don't know… lives."
"People have always been people. They weren't always some subject on a page. George Washington had problems with his teeth and was super sensitive about it, Abraham Lincoln was once a part-time wrestler, and - what I find to be the great equalizer - everyone we read about in this class at some point had diarrhea."
Anna snorted. "What?"
"It's true, isn't it? Doesn't everyone get it sometimes?"
"I mean, yeah, but - ew!" Her face scrunched, and she laughed despite herself.
McCoy smiled down at her. "All these people we read about, they were people just like you and me. They had fears, insecurities, downfalls, and triumphs. It's why I enjoy learning about them and their stories. I learn, and it makes me feel a little less alone in the world."
She blinked, "Less alone?"
"For myself, at least, yes."
Anna's chin fell towards her chest, and she found herself staring at the top of her desk.
"Are you hungry?" McCoy checked his watch and then stood. "Your lunch is just about over, but you can have some of mine if you want."
"Nah - I mean, I couldn't"
Before she spoke, he had already stood, walked to his desk, produced half a sandwich with a shiny red apple, and passed it on to her. "Nonsense. Couldn't let one of my students go hungry."
She stood, accepted the food, and looked up at him. "Well… thanks."
He smiled, picked up the chair he had been using, and stowed it away on the other side of the room. "You should get your gear and get headed to class. Bell is going to ring any minute." He turned and made to return to his desk.
Anna gathered her belongings and then approached his desk with his coat in hand. "Thanks for… um - you know."
He gently picked up his coat from her hands and nodded gracefully. "Of course, and remember - you're never alone. There is always one story or another to be learned from the past. As for the present, you can count on me to be in your corner."
She smiles and nods. "Thanks, Mr. McCoy."