Rat Face (The Strange Tale of Abraham Lincoln Panim)

Rat Face

(The Strange Tale of Abraham Lincoln Panim)

Abraham Lincoln Panim came into this world like any other baby. He was created with love, and love is what he got as he matured in his mother’s stomach.

His mom, Diana Panim, a petite, 30-something English teacher at a local high school with perfectly styled brown hair and a bent for the latest clothing styles, wanted her child—whether it was a boy or a girl—to have a better childhood than she had.

She never knew her mother and father, and was given up for adoption at birth for reasons she never knew. She went from one foster home to another, but never had a permanent place to call home. She never believed in herself, but others did, and as she became older she had many mentors that helped guide her into adulthood.

She often said that if she ever had her own child, things would be different, much different, and now, being of child, she could prove that.

Mrs. Panim grew larger and larger as the days went into months, and her pregnancy was a normal one. Except that every once in a while, whenever she ate cheese, or anything with cheese on it or in it or related to it, she would get a swift kick from the inside of her ever-bulging tummy. Even if she viewed a piece of cheese or even thought about cheese, she would get swift kicks in her stomach that made her sick.

She loved to eat cheese, and before she was with child, she ate cheese each and every day, and remembered doing so from the earliest memories of her life to now.

“This kid is at it again,” she thought one day as she got a swift kick, “he is giving me agita even before he gets here.”

Her husband, Marcus Panim, a struggling writer who was short in stature as well as he was in prestige, and who worked at a local publishing house writing for trade books about subjects he wasn’t really interested in, shrugged off all of this.

Putting his hands on his hairless head, he would tell his wife in such instances, “He is even a strong boy even now,” presupposing the gender of their soon-to-come child. “I guarantee that he is going to be a football player, or something where he can use his strength. And I will bet that he will make plenty of money.

“And remember, we agreed that I would name him. Any boy with such strength needs a strong name.”

Mr. Panim repeatedly told his wife that he knew their child would be a boy because he had a lucky penny, flipped it in the air, and if the coin landed on heads, the child was going to be a boy, if it landed on tails, the child was going to be a girl.

It landed on heads.

Mrs. Panim continued to feel the intense kicking every time she ate cheese throughout the nine months of her pregnancy, and nothing that she did could stop it.

“Doctor, I always get this kicking in my stomach whenever I eat or smell or am near cheese,” she said to her gynecologist, Dr. Newsom, a tall, willowy sort with nicely parted hair. “It doesn’t matter if it is American cheese, Muenster cheese, Mozzarella cheese, even cream cheese ... I get kicked inside to the point where I think the baby is going to kick itself out of my stomach.”

“Then don’t eat cheese,” the doctor told her, with a broad smile on his face. “Stay away from the cheese.”

“But I love cheese,” Mrs. Panim replied. “I think I have eaten some type of cheese each and every day of my life.”

“Well now, you can’t eat cheese,” the doctor responded. “NO MORE CHEESE UNTIL THAT BABY COMES OUT OF YOU.”

This made Mrs. Panim upset, but her husband tried to console her.

“So you don’t need to eat cheese anymore, at least until the boy is born,” he said, again assuming the gender of their soon-to-come child. “What is the big deal? Just don’t eat cheese for now, you can go back to it after the baby is born.”

“But I love cheese,” said told her husband. “Why does this kid kick me so hard when I eat cheese, even when I am near cheese, or even when I think of cheese?”

“He is showing you how strong he is,” her husband stated. “NO MORE CHEESE!”

Mrs. Panim accepted this declaration by her doctor and her husband, but she felt very bewildered at the notion that not only could she not eat cheese until after her baby was born, but that they baby she carried, that she helped create, would make her feel so uncomfortable when she ate a piece of cheese, any cheese.

She asked around among her friends who were either pregnant or had been pregnant about their pregnancies, and the odd occurrences they had when they were with child.

“No, not with cheese,” said a fellow female English teacher at the school where Mrs. Panim was a teacher, during lunch in the teacher’s room. “But every time I would have pickles and pasta, I would get really bad gas. I would eat them together, a nice bowl of pasta with pickle pieces all over it. I would wash it down with milk, and boy, did I get a lot of gas. But it is something I craved, so I ate it anyway.”

The other teachers around them laughed, but Mrs. Panim looked bemused as the woman went on.

“ ... heck, I could have filled up my tank with all the gas I had,” her teacher friend said, guffawing at her own joke as he sloshed a pickle into her mouth. “And every once in a while I still get a craving for milk and pasta and pickles.”

Mrs. Panim managed a weak smile, was cordial to her friend, but knew this problem was something much larger than what her fellow teacher had said to her about her own pregnancy problems. She even felt some stirrings in her stomach when she tried not to think about cheese, and true to form, as she walked back to her empty classroom in between periods, she got another swift kick, and another, and then one more, the strength of which sent her reeling to the ground in agony.

“Mrs. Panim, are you OK?” nervously asked a student who saw her fall and rushed to her side, along with dozens of other students.

With seemingly the entire student body circling Mrs. Panim, within minutes, medics soon arrived.

Mrs. Panim had completely blacked out when she fell, and was rushed to the hospital as students and teachers followed the medics and the gurney that they had placed her on right outside the front door of the school.

A day or two later, Mrs. Panim, still not fully awake and not quite making out where she was or what happened to her, finally came to, slowly opening up her eyes and trying to focus on what was before her.

She saw two nurses standing before her as her vision slowly came into focus.

“Where am I?” she shouted, nearly jumping out of the bed in doing so.

One of the nurses, a tall, thin woman with long hair neatly tucked under her nurses’ cap, came over to her to get her straightened in the bed while trying to calm her down.

“Everything is fine, everything is good,” said the other nurse, a short, kind of squat older woman with grayish white hair tied up in a bun on her head, as the taller nurse put her arms on Mrs. Panim’s shoulders. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Mrs. Panim finally realized that she was in a hospital.

“Why am I in a hospital?” she shouted to the nurses. “Why am I here? Where is my husband?”

The shorter nurse, who looked very familiar to Mrs. Panim, even in her current state of grogginess, said to her, “You took a great fall at school, and we had to bring you here to get better.”

When the words “get better” came out of the shorter nurse’s mouth, Mrs. Panim put her hands on her belly, and realized that it wasn’t as round or full as it had been.

She panicked. “Where is my baby? What happened to me? Where is my husband?”

The shorter nurse approached Mrs. Panim, and even in her current condition, she could see that the woman had thick legs and a slight limp. As the nurse got closer to the bed, Mrs. Panim tried to make out her nameplate, but only got to “M-E-Y-“ as she tried to gain her composure.

Mrs. Panim continued with that chorus of questions as a tall man in a white coat, Mrs. Panim’s gynecologist, came into the room and approached the bed where she was laying.

“Mrs. Panim, I want to talk to you about why you are here.”

Once she recognized Dr. Newsom, Mr. Panim thought she might get some answers. “Why am I here? Where is my baby? Where is my husband?” Mrs. Panim continued to shout out, but the doctor put his finger over his mouth to try and get her to stop shouting and to listen to what he had to say.

When she finally quieted down, Dr. Newsom spoke.

“Mrs. Panim, you had quite a fall at school the other day. The EMTs came as fast as they could, and you were brought here to the hospital, and —“

“Where is my baby?” Mrs., Panim asked again, shrieking out her question.

“Your baby … well, when you fell, it was necessary to force childbirth a little bit … you were almost at term, anyway, and you fell in such a way that we thought that it would be the better situation for both you and your child to be separated.”

“Where is my baby?” Mrs. Panim shrieked again. “Where is my baby and where is my husband?”

“You are a bit … well, you are a bit weak to hold and … well … see the child just yet,” the doctor said, as he put his right hand through the hair on the top of his head like a comb. “You don’t realize that you have been in here a week already, and you are just now coming to.”

“A week? Did I fall on my head? Where is my baby?”

“You fell in kind of a weird way, falling on your face and when the EMTs came, they said your hand was holding its nose in such a way that it kind of … well … it kind of looked like you had smelled something quite unappealing to you and that you were trying to not smell whatever that was.”

Mrs. Panim thought about how she was thinking of cheese when she had fallen, so the whole thing made sense to her as she reached up to her face and for the first time, felt a large swath of bandage on her cheek and nose.

“Mrs. Panim, the nurses took all of your vital signs, and they appear to be OK, but I think I want you to give it another day of rest before you will be able to see your baby.”

“If my vital signs are OK, why can’t I see my baby? I want to see my baby, and I want to see my husband.”

The nurses and the doctor each made a nervous smile as they all looked at each other.

“Mrs. Panim, I would wait a day or two, or maybe even three, before I saw the child,” the doctor said, trying to hold back what appeared to be a nervous chuckle. “It will make the surprise even … I mean the surprise at whether the child is a boy or girl, even … well, even more … um … stupendous!”

“I want to see my child, and I want to see my husband!” Mrs. Panim shouted. “If my vital signs are OK, then why can’t I see the baby? Is the baby sickly or anything like that?”

“Well, no … but Mrs., Panim, please listen to reason … waiting an extra day or two after you haven’t seen the child for so long when you were out isn’t going to spoil the … the um … the pleasure of seeing your child for the first time a day or two from now.”

“If I don’t see my child right away, I am going to speak to my husband, and I will sue you. Do you want to be sued?”

“Well, no, but Mrs. Panim, listen to reason.”

“There is NO reason not to see my baby,” Mrs. Panim said, as she got off the bed, stood up still attached to the IV, and started to unsteadily leave her hospital room.

“Mrs. Panim, wait … Mrs. Panim … Mrs. Panim … !,” the doctor shouted as she pushed him and the nurses aside as she left the room.

“I dare say that that woman might have a heart attack once she sees that kid,” the doctor said, suppressing s short laugh as he looked at the nurses, who continued to have nervous smiles on their faces.

A phone rang in the maternity ward, and a nurse picked up the phone.

“Maternity ward,” the nurse said.

“Yes, this is Dr. Newsom, and SHE is on down to see you,” with the emphasis on the word “she.”

“Should we let her see her little … bundle of joy?” the nurse asked with a little giggle.

“She is going to have to see that kid sometime, we held it off for long enough, let her see her kid, no matter what, and have a nurse, or maybe even a doctor go with her,” said the doctor. “This way, we will have backup if she … well … if she can’t take all the joy she is going to get from seeing this kid.”

As the nurse hung up the phone, Mrs. Panim entered the maternity ward with her IV still fully attached to her arm.

“I want to see my baby!” she yelled at the nurses stationed there.

“But m’am,” one of the nurses said, “You still have on the hospital gown on, and —“

“Let her in, but go with her to see her kid,” said the nurse who was on the phone with Dr. Newsom. “Go with her, and help her if she needs it.”

As they walked together further into the ward, the nurse, a young woman seemingly right out of nurse’s school, with long blond hair under her nurse’s cap, said to Mrs. Panim, “You were out for a couple of days, so we put your baby with others, and you can view the baby through the glass for now. I am sure you will be able to hold your child soon.”

The nurse and Mrs. Panim went further into to the ward, navigated all the twists and turns, and finally came to the viewing area, where some of the newborns could be seen behind glass.

Mrs. Panim hurriedly looked from one baby to another.

“Which one is mine?” she asked. “Is it a boy or a girl? Which one is mine?”

All the babies could be seen clearly as Mrs., Panim’s eyes darted from one baby to another.

The nurse knocked on the window, alerting another nurse that she needed her help. The nurse tending to the babies went to the far back of the area, almost instinctively, and turned around one baby who was facing the wall in the opposite direction of the other babies.

“There is your baby, m’am,” nervously stated the nurse with Mrs. Panim, who put her arms on the new mother’s shoulders when she pointed out her new child. “That is your son,” she said, as the inside nurse turned the baby around so Mrs. Panim could see him.

As Mrs. Panim caught sight of her son for the very first time, she smiled a broad smile, but the nurse holding onto her shoulders passed out at her side. Other nurses and doctors attended to the fallen nurse, but Mrs. Panim kept her eyes straight on her new son.

“He is beautiful,” she said. “Simply beautiful.” I can’t wait until I can hold him, feed him, bathe him … “ Mrs. Panim said, oblivious to the fallen nurse and to the hubbub surrounding her baby, and the reason that the nurse helping her passed out.

Her new son looked like a rat, had the face of a rat, was hairy from his head down to his toes, and although he did not have a tail, that is where the tale of “Abraham Lincoln Panim” actually begins.

When Mrs., Panim was finally set to be released from the hospital, she had asked for her husband an endless amount of times, but whoever she asked, she was told they did not know where he was.

Finally, she confronted Dr. Newsom.

“Where is my husband?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” the doctor said, again putting his hand through his hair like a comb. “I just don’t know where he is.”

Right before Mrs. Panim was going to be allowed to leave the hospital with her son, one of the nurses who attended to her when she was out, the older nurse, with thick legs and a limp--told Mrs. Panim about the supposed whereabouts of her husband.

“You must swear that you won’t tell Dr. Newsom or anybody here that I told you this,” the nurse said.

Mrs. Panim nodded in agreement.

“Your husband visited the hospital to see how you were doing when you were out cold, and he was taken to see your child for the first time by me, and it happened before you were well.

“When I took him to see the baby in the maternity ward, and he was shown the child, he shook his head back and forth and back and forth so much that I thought he was going to throw his whole body out of joint.”

Mrs. Panim started to cry.

“He then did something kind of odd,” the nurse continued. “Your husband just stood there for about 10 minutes shaking his head, and then, he took out a penny from his pocket, and flipped it in the air.”

“What?” Mrs. Panim said through her sobs.

The nurse continued. “I clearly saw that it fell on heads when it hit the ground, He picked it up, put in my hand, turned to the nurse’s station, thanked them for showing him his son,, and then he left.”

“He hasn’t been back here since?” Mrs. Panim asked through her sobs as the nurse gave her the penny.

“No, I am sorry, we have not seen him since.”

Mrs. Panim promptly put the penny among her belongings, and walked to the maternity ward to get her son.

She kept the penny in a plastic bag stapled to her son’s birth certificate, safely stored in her bedroom vanity.

Abraham Lincoln Panim now had a name. He might have been named after a coin that his father gave to a nurse, but Mrs. Panim still kept her part of the bargain between she and her now evidently estranged husband, giving her son a strong name to match his gender, the gender that her husband knew before anyone else did, simply by flipping a coin.

So as Abraham Lincoln Panim grew up, Mrs. Panim raised him as a single mother. She never took down her wedding photos or any photos of her husband, and she always thought that he would return.

Abraham Lincoln Panim had a tough go at it from the very beginning, and it continued through his childhood.

Although his mother believed he was the cutest baby she had ever seen, few people agreed with her. When she would take her son out in his baby carriage to get some sun, Mrs. Panim and her baby were the target of many taunts.

One time, a few weeks after Mrs. Panim brought her son home, and the weather had turned from cold winter to less-cold spring, a woman wanted to see the child Mrs. Panim was wheeling around. She was with her own teenage daughter, and the two approached the carriage on a bright spring day.

“May I see your baby?” asked the woman, overdressed in a winter coat meant for temperatures 30 degrees lower than they actually were.

“Don’t bother them,” said her daughter, neatly styled in a spring outfit. “They have better things to do—

“I would be happy to show you my son,” Mrs. Panim said.

The elderly woman approached the baby carriage with her daughter, turned down the blanket that was covering young Abraham Lincoln Panim, and she shrieked, but not with joy.

“This is not your son!” screamed the woman, and she, like the young nurse several weeks ago, fell to the ground by the side of her daughter.

“Mom!” she screamed, took one look at the child herself, and wobbled a bit, but not enough to fall to the ground as she bent down to tend to her mother.

“That’s a dog, or maybe a rat, that’s not a human being!” yelled the younger woman. “You should be arrested for parading that thing around here! And if my mother is hurt, you are going to hear from my lawyer!”

Mrs. Panim knew right then and there that the world would not be as accepting of her son as she was, and she never again took him outside during the daytime, preferring for strolls at night, when street lamps and the light of the moon were the only illumination.

When she would go out at night with her son, she would instinctively look for her husband, anticipating that he would be coming home at last.

But she looked and looked and looked, and he was nowhere to be found.

But that ended up being the least of her problems.

Abraham Lincoln Panim was the world to Mrs. Panim, but the world appeared not to be ready for Abraham Lincoln Panim.

After she gave birth to her child, Mrs. Panim had a tough time going back to her job at school, but she felt that if she could find someone to watch her son during the day, she would be able to do so.

After trying out several nannies—and most of them being too horrified at the sight of the baby to stay around very long—Mrs. Panim was worried that she would not be able to find anyone to watch her son.

One day, Mrs. Panim was in the local supermarket, shopping for groceries, and she had her son straddled to her as she was looking through the produce section.

An elderly woman, with her white and gray hair tied neatly in a bun on her head, entered the store after Mrs. Panim did, and the older woman went right to the produce section, moving right next to Mrs. Panim as each looked over the store’s selection of lettuce.

“The price is so high right now,” said the older woman, who moved from side to side with a slight limp. “I do wish I could make myself a good salad, but everything is so high. And my feet hurt so, I just can’t gallop over from one market or another to look for produce.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Panim, with one eye looking at the produce, and with the other eye looking at the older woman’s feet, which she saw were kind of large for a person of that stature, as if her feet were swollen. “Prices are very high.”

“And they really must rub you the wrong way,” Mrs. Stottle replied, as she saw the baby that Mrs. Panim had straddled to her. “How do you feed your child, anyway? I hope you can do it better than I can feed myself.”

The two women got to talking, and Mrs. Panim learned that the older woman’s name was Mrs. Stottle, she was a widow, had a husband who passed away just recently, and although he had a small pension, she was finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.

When Mrs. Panim got a clearer look at Mrs. Stottle’s face, she thought that she recognized her, but could not place her.

During their talk, Mrs. Panim found out that Mrs. Stottle had plenty of time on her hands, as she told Mrs. Panim that the only time she left her apartment was to go food shopping.

As Mrs. Stottle talked, Mrs. Panim continued to try and figure out why she knew the older woman, but to no avail.

“Listen, Mrs. Stottle, to help you out, how about me hiring you to be a nanny for my son,” Mrs., Panim said, confident in the fact that she somehow knew this person, e3ven though she could not place her. “I will bet that you would be a great nanny for my son while I am at work, and I would definitely pay you a very fair price for your services.”

Mrs. Stottle said, “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t watched a baby in so long a time,” and then the elderly woman began to sob.

“What’s wrong,” Mrs. Panim said. “Is it something I — “

“No, no, it is nothing you said,” Mrs. Stottle replied. “It just brings up … well … some memories I have of … .”

Mrs. Stottle wiped away the tears, got back her composure, and said,” Yes, yes, I do believe I can do it! What’s your baby’s name and can I take a look at the child?”

As Mrs., Stottle got close, Mrs. Panim pulled away, not ready to allow the older lady to take a peak at her son. Finally she took a deep breath, and did not pull back anymore.

“His name is Abraham Lincoln Panim and here he is,” as Mrs. Panim took back the blanket that her son was wrapped in to reveal the child’s face to the older woman.

Mrs. Panim sensed that the older woman would recoil, like all the other nannies she tried to hire did, but Mrs. Stottle did not even wince, putting her hand on the child’s head.

“Mrs. Panim, I would be honored to watch little Mr. Abraham Lincoln Panim while you are at work,” Mrs. Stottle said as she squinted to get a better look at her new charge. “He looks like a fine young man. I don’t have any references, but I know — ”

“I will need you to watch him during the week, five days a week, from about 7 a.m. to about 4 or 5 p.m.,” stated Mrs. Panim, almost in disbelief that Mrs. Stottle agreed to the assignment.

Mrs. Stottle reached into her pocketbook and her hands fumbled inside of it, and finally she found her glasses.

“I can’t see too well right now, and even with these glasses, my eyes aren’t what they used to be,” Mrs. Stottle said as she put the glasses on. “Nope, I still can’t see that well, but your son looks like a fine boy to me, as best as I can see him, at least.”

Mrs. Panim had never heard anyone say that her son was “a fine boy,” and she kind of forced a little smile on her face when she told the older woman, “And please, no cheese. Do not feed my son any cheese, do not even have any cheese in anything you want to eat. My son appears to be severely allergic to cheese, any cheese.”

“Oh yes, I would love to watch the little boy,” Mrs. Stottle said. “When can I start?”

“ … and he hates to be taken outside during the day,” Mrs. Panim continued. “I have tried to get him a little air during the day, but I guess the sun gets to him … I will take him out when I get home in early evening. Remember, you don’t need to take him out during the day, he much prefers the evening.”

Soon after this chance meeting, Mrs. Panim went back to her teaching job, fully confident that Mrs. Stottle would take care of her child while she was away at work.

But somehow, no matter how hard she thought about it, she could not place Mrs. Stottle at all. She knew the face, but she didn’t know a “Mrs. Stottle” or anyone with that name.

Mrs. Panim often sat up nights, trying to figure out who Mrs. Stottle was. When she did sleep, she continued to sleep on the right side of the bed, leaving the other side of the bed empty, just in case Mr. Panim ever decided to come home.

Abraham Lincoln Panim grew up like any other child would, progressing from being a baby to being a toddler and then, being of school age.

Mrs. Stottle did everything a nanny could do to make her new charge comfortable and familiar to her, taking up her new job as if she were born to do it.

She doted on little Abraham Lincoln Panim as a grandmother would, which the little boy loved,

Mrs. Stottle would arrive promptly at 7 a.m. each weekday—never a minute early or late—and she fed him, played with him all day, took care of his dressing, his feeding, and whatever else was needed.

And from day one, she would tell Abraham Lincoln Panim over and over, as if the little boy could understand her every word:

“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

She would try to go outside with her little charge, but she learned that he didn’t take too kindly to being taken outside during the day. Mrs. Panim reiterated that she did not have to do this, because she would take him outside when she got home, but Mrs. Stottle tried, and tried again, and tried many times to get her young charge out into the daylight, but each time, it did not work.

Whether it was people howling at the child when they took a gaze at him, or the child acting up like a tornado when he got outside, the daylight and Abraham Lincoln Panim did not mesh well.

When Mrs., Panim arrived home at about 4 or 5 p.m. each day, Mrs. Stottle would have a laundry list of things to tell Mrs. Panim about her son.

“Your son did so well today,” said Mrs. Stottle on one particular day. “He ate up all his food, he didn’t give me the least bit of problems when I had to take care of his diaper, and we played all day. My feet hurt, but that is good—it means we had a full day!”

“Great!” replied Mrs. Panim, worn out from her busy day at school but happy that her son was doing so well with his nanny, who she seemed to know, but simply could not place days and months after she was hired.

“And,” Mrs. Stottle said that particular day, “you know, a lot of the hair on his little body is falling off, falling off in bunches when I bathe him.”

As little Abraham Lincoln Panim was getting older, moving from a baby to a toddler, much of the hair on his body was falling off, at least from the neck down.

And later, as he approached school age, the hair on his face also was falling off, leaving his face almost hairless—except for a clump of thick hair on his upper chest, hair that still protruded from his lip and nose area, and, of course, the thick swatch of dark hair he had on the top of his head that kind of made a point at his brow and went down both sides of his face, below his ears, making him look like he had dark sideburns on each side of his head.

Although a good portion of the excessive hair was falling off, Abraham Lincoln Panim still kind of resembled at rat, but a not-so hairy one.

“Wow!” said Mrs. Panim. “What type of shampoo are you using on him?”

“Just the usual stuff,” Mrs. Stottle said. “I don’t think it is anything I wouldn’t use on myself, if I had the need to bathe myself like I do your son.”

Eventually, when he was about four or five years old, Abraham Lincoln Panim lost almost all his excess hair—except that burr of hair on his upper chest, the thick hair that he had on his head that stretched down to make sideburns that went past each ear, and the hair protruding from his lip and nose area. but his face continued to resemble that of a rat, with a sharp nose, little beady eyes, and the excess hair had not totally fallen off of his face.

And he still could not stand the smell of cheese, often going into convulsions when he would smell any type of cheese wherever he was.

When Abraham Lincoln Panim was enrolled in nursery school, he had a very tough time being with the other children, who often taunted him about the way he looked.

One little boy called him “Eddie Munster,” and the name stuck with the young boy, so much so that most of the children in school knew him by the name “Eddie Munster” more than they knew him as “Abraham Lincoln Panim.”

One day, when he was in nursery school, and with his mom back at work, Mrs. Panim received a phone call from Mrs. Stottle. She excused herself from her class for a moment to take the call.

“Mrs. Panim, I have to get your son from nursery school,” Mrs. Stottle told Mrs. Panim. “Something … happened there … I don’t know much about it, other than he is OK … .”

Mrs. Panim face showed concern, “What happened?” she asked Mrs. Stottle. “What happened?”

“Let me go get him and I will let you know,” said Mrs. Stottle, who said goodbye before Mrs. Panim could say another word.

Mrs. Panim called the school office, they sent another teacher up to watch her class, and she herself made a bee line to her son’s nursery school.

When she got there, and ran into the school, she saw Mrs. Stottle already there, on her hands and knees, with her big feet sticking out as they always did, and as she got closer, she saw that the older woman was attending to her son. The nursery school teacher was also there, trying to calm down the howling little boy.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Panim,” said the nursery school teacher, who appeared to be holding back a snicker as she spoke. “Your son got … well … he was … .“

“This is an abomination,” Mrs., Stottle yelled, as Mrs. Panim now fully saw her son, fully covered in yellow goo.

“ … one of the other students brought in a jar of Cheez Whiz, and squirted the stuff all over your son,” said the teacher, again holding back a snicker as the other students were laughing on the other side of the room.

“ … we all know he hates cheese, and the kids think he … well … he looks a lot like ‘Eddie Munster’ … so they squirted him with the cheese,” said the teacher, who left Abraham Lincoln Panim with his mother and Mrs. Stottle as she walked over to the other side of the room with the other children.

“ABRAHAM LINCOLN PANIM IS A RAT! ABRAHAM LINCOLN PANIM IS A RAT!” the children yelled over and over again in unison, delighting at the sight of the Cheez Whiz-covered boy.

One little boy, named Brandon Hartung, held the nearly empty bottle of Cheez Whiz over his head in joy as the taunts got louder and louder. He held it over his head with his left hand, as his right hand was covered with a glove.

When the teacher went over to the other students, she tried to calm them down. “Now class, that is not fair,” she said. “What you did was … what you did was—“

And then she started to laugh herself, not being able to hold in her snicker any longer.

Mrs., Panim and Mrs. Stottle carried out the still Cheez Whiz-covered boy, and the taunts got even louder and louder.

And the nursery school teacher’s laughing got louder and louder too.

That was the last time Abraham Lincoln Panim attended a school of any kind during his young life.

But he still continued to hear Mrs. Stottle say over and over, “Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

When Mrs. Panim, her son, and Mrs. Stottle arrived home that day, and after the boy was cleaned up, Mrs. Panim sat on the sofa in her living room, her head in her hands, crying.

“What am I going to do, what am I going to do?” she repeated over and over and over again. Mrs. Stottle came by her, sat down on the sofa next to her, and tried to comfort her.

“He will be fine. He will be just fine,” Mrs. Stottle said, putting her hand on Mrs. Panim’s back. “He is a fine young boy, and don’t take what happened today as an omen for things to come. Abraham Lincoln Panim will do well in life.”

“But what am I going to do about nursery school, and even when he goes into kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade … ? Mrs. Panim asked, still sobbing between each word of her question to Mrs. Stottle.

“I have an idea,” replied Mrs. Stottle, as Mrs. Panim continued to cry. “I have a wonderful idea.”

Mrs. Panim looked up briefly as the tears continued to fall out of her eyes. “What idea is that,” she asked Mrs. Stottle.

Mrs. Stottle stood up and walked to the side of Mrs. Panim. “A number of years ago—“

“What’s the idea?” Mrs. Panim interrupted.

“Just hear me out,” replied Mrs., Stottle. “Please hear me out.”

She gave Mrs. Panim a wad of tissues to dry her eyes, and then the older woman told the younger woman about her idea.

“A number of years ago, long before you were born, I went to school, and probably thought that I would meet the man of my dreams and get married and live in a home surrounded by a white picked fence and have scads and scads of kids myself,” Mr. Stottle said.

“What does this have to do with--?” Mrs. Panim asked.

Mrs., Stottle sat down on the couch next to Mrs. Panim and put an arm around her.

“Let me continue,” Mrs., Stottle said. “Well, my knight in shining armor did not come to take me away, and once I got through high school, I decided to go to college, which, back then, wasn’t something a lot of young ladies did.

“I went to college, got my degree, and since my knight in shining armor never came to rescue me, when I had my college degree, I reached a point where I had to decide what I was going to do with my life.

“I decided to go into teaching, and I ended up teaching for a number of years.”

When Mrs. Panim heard this, her tears stopped coming out of her eyes, and she looked at Mrs. Stottle.

“Please let me continue,” Mrs. Stottle said. “Anyway, I taught for a number of years at a local school. I taught young kids, kindergarten, first, second grade, children of that age.

“And even when I was teaching, I always thought that my knight in shining armor was going to come, and one day, he did! He was another teacher, by the name of Herman Stottle, and he came from another school to teach at my school. He was so handsome, so tall and good looking, and really smart. He was in the room next to mine, and the moment I saw him, I knew that my knight in shining armor had finally come.”

Mrs. Panim, now completely composed, said, “Well, that is all fine and good, but what does all of this have to do with my son? You probably taught many, many years ago.”

“Yes, I did. But back to my story … Herman and I were married after about a year, and we had a wonderful marriage. He continued to teach, and so did I.

“Then, after a number of years of teaching, I found that my eyesight was failing, and my feet were killing me. I could still see, and I could still walk, but not very well. Herman and I went to a number of specialists, but they could do nothing for me.

“Finally, after about 25 years of teaching, I could no longer do my job because I simply could not see well, nor could I stay on my feet for any long period of time. I had to retire. But I asked my principal if I could mentor, or tutor, special children, kids who he thought had the potential to be really successful but didn’t have the confidence to get to that point, or maybe were a little different than what you would call the ‘normal’ child.”

Mrs. Panim’s still red eyes lit up, as if a light bulb went off in her head as Mrs. Stottle went on with her story.

“So even though I couldn’t see well, nor walk well, for a few years, I tutored one child each year. Mr. Stottle continued to teach. We could not have children of our own, so his class were his children and my special student was my child. I know that might seem odd, but that is how we looked at it.

“One year, I tutored a beautiful little girl, who was a foster child and who I knew would succeed with whatever she did. She had little confidence. Children had made fun of her, she was very self conscious of the way she looked, but during that year with me, she came out of her shell, and her body changed, and she looked like every other young lady you would see in school.”

Mrs. Panim wanted to speak, but Mrs. Stottle put a finger up to the younger woman’s mouth.

“I was Miss Meyer back then, and that little girl was born with a tail. When it fell off that year, it was like that little girl was a different child.

“And that child, that little girl who went from a moth to a butterfly over the course of that year, was YOU!”

All of a sudden, the past came into focus for Mrs. Panim. Mrs. Stottle and Miss Meyer were one and the same person. She was the woman who helped her during that one very important year when she was growing up, when she still had a tail that protruded out of her that she was so self conscious of that she always tried to cover it up as best she could.

She never went swimming, never exposed it to anyone, but her classmates knew, and she was the victim of taunting and numerous jokes from both boys and girls.

But then, with Miss Meyer tutoring her, she finally found a friend, someone who believed in her, and the tail literally fell off.

And Mrs. Panim suddenly remembered Mrs. Stottle’s large feet, which she always complained about, and how large and sore they seemed to be.

After that year, she never saw Miss Meyer again. She often wondered what had happened to her, but it all came to her very quickly …

“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

“Oh, Miss Meyer … Mrs. Stottle … I so often wondered about you and what had happened to you,” Mrs., Panim said as she hugged the older woman.

“Please let me finish my story,” Mrs. Stottle said. “I tutored kids like you, kids a little bit out of the ordinary, for a number of years, until my eyesight wouldn’t allow for it anymore. Mr. Stottle eventually retired, and I am sorry to say he passed away a little while ago.

“But even if I wasn’t teaching, I always renewed my teaching license, and I still have it. If you allow me to, I will be Abraham Lincoln Panim’s teacher. He can be home taught, and never have to deal with those people again.”

Mrs. Panim screamed “Yes!” and that was signaled the beginning of a new chapter in Abraham Lincoln Panim’s life that was ready to unfold.

Abraham Lincoln Panim was home schooled, and he learned about the world from Mrs. Stottle. He learned the three R’s from her, and once he was able to read and write and do basic math, he progressed to social studies, English, foreign language, and he progressed very quickly.

And as he progressed with his learning, Mrs. Panim also progressed in her school, rising from a member of the teaching staff to a lead teacher, then to a guidance counselor, and finally, to the principal’s position.

Both Mrs. Panim and her son were fast learners, picking up things quickly, and Mrs. Stottle was more than happy to accommodate each one’s needs, even as she was herself getting a bit older.

Abraham Lincoln Panim was getting older, but he retained his rat-like features. Mrs. Stottle tried to get him to be more social, but even if they went outside to do some schoolwork, he often covered himself up with a scarf so nobody would see his face.

The boy always waited patiently for his mother to come home from school, and the two always ventured outside in the darkness, whether to get some fresh air or to get some exercise or just to talk.

If someone approached, Abraham Lincoln Panim would cover himself up with his scarf, just to make sure nobody stared at him. Even in the dark, his features, he felt, could still be seen.

The mother and son often talked when they were together in the evening when they went out for a stroll.

“Mom, whatever happened to daddy?” Abraham Lincoln Panim would often ask his mother.

She would always hesitate when he asked the question, trying to come up with a new answer every time the question was asked. But it all came down to the very same thing.

“My son, your father was a good man,” she would say. “I just think that he lost his way, and he will return home to us one day.”

And she would always add, “And he would be so proud of you!”

When Abraham Lincoln Panim was younger, that response sufficed, but as he got older, it didn’t do the trick anymore, but he let his mother say the same thing, because he felt it soothed her own soul.

Abraham Lincoln Panim believed that he knew why his father never came back home, and he knew the reason was him and the way he looked.

But he would never tell his mother that, because he felt it would make her sad. But he always asked the question, hoping that one day, maybe something would be said, something would come out of his mother’s mouth that would be new, something that he could understand.

Mrs. Panim stayed steadfast to her explanation, and something different never was spoken about her husband and Abraham Lincoln Panim’s dad.

But he still asked the question, hoping for a different answer that he never received.

Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mrs. Stottle became an exceptional learning team, with the boy speeding ahead from his contemporaries and finishing his public school education at 16 years of age, or two years ahead of his peers.

But Abraham Lincoln Panim was not up to his peers in other areas, such as in social situations. And with no father at home, he had many questions about life, but he felt ill at ease talking about them with Mrs. Stottle or even with his mother.

During one of their late night strolls, Abraham Lincoln Panim asked his mother, “How did you and daddy meet, and how did you end up having me?”

Mrs. Panim stopped in her tracks, and did not know what to say.

“Well, we met … “ she hesitated. “We met on the street one day. It was around holiday time, and we were both rushing around at night, and I guess we didn’t see each other … we bumped into each other, and we both fell onto the pavement. He was so bundled up with his heavy jacket and scarf, and I could barely hear him talk, but we kind of fell in love right then and there.”

“When did you get married?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t for several months later,” Mrs. Panim told her son. “Daddy always told me over the phone that he had to get things done first before he could see me again, and I guess that I just fell in love with his voice, and that he actually paid attention to me. We talked every day on the phone, but he did not want to see me in person just yet.

“He kept on telling me that he had to get things done so I would be proud of him, and then one day, he did what he said. He had done whatever he wanted to do, we met, had a few dates, and finally, we married.”

“And how did you have me, mom?” Alexander Lincoln Panim asked his mother, and again, she hesitated in her reply.

“For the birds and the bees, you did well in biology, so I am sure you know how you came about,” she told her son.

“No, I know all about that, but how did you have ME?” meaning, how did you have a son with a rat face that hated cheese.

It took Mrs. Panim a few moments to come up with an answer, which became her stock answer whenever the subject would be broached. “We had you because we loved each other,” and the subject was ended right then and there until it came up again during one of the mother and son’s night time walks.

Although Alexander Lincoln Panim had earned his high school diploma, he sought more knowledge. Mrs. Stottle could only provide him just so much, and Mrs. Panim had her school to run.

Two years had passed, and Abraham Lincoln Panim was now 18 years of age.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim,” said Mrs. Stottle one day when she and the boy were studying with each other, “there is so much more for you to learn. You have a high school diploma now, and I really cannot teach you any more myself.”

“So how am I going to learn more?” asked Abraham Lincoln Panim, pretty much knowing the answer to his question.

“I will talk it over with your mother, but I believe it is time for you to venture out into the world, but do it without me or your mother leading you,” said Mrs. Stottle. “It is time you went to—“

“College?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked, knowing that that was the answer.

“Yes, that is what I think you have to do,” Mrs. Stottle said. I mean, I simply cannot teach you what you need to know at this point, and quite frankly, I am getting a bit older now, and my eyesight and my feet are not well … maybe you should go out and meet people, make friends, go out and live your own life.”

“But how can I live my own life—“

“You can, Abraham Lincoln Panim. You might just have to take the good with the bad, and there is so much more good to higher learning than bad. I think you should try it, at least try it.

“Remember what I always say, ‘Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.’

“But Mrs. Stottle—“

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, I do believe it is time for you to experience the outside world. Don’t equate it what happened to all those years ago when you were a little boy to now. Colleges have a much more liberal view of the world and people. I think that you will fit right in. Nobody will notice you as being odd or different—

“Because you aren’t odd, and you aren’t different.”

Later that day, when Mrs. Panim arrived home from school, Mrs. Stottle broached the subject to Abraham Lincoln Panim’s mother.

During one of their regular walks in the evening, Mrs. Panim decided to sit down on one of the benches where they usually took their walks, which was somewhat unusual, because the mother and son were used to walking and rarely stopping.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, Mrs. Stottle brought up something to me today that I have been thinking about a lot lately myself, and that is—“

“Going to college, mom.”

“Yes, and I agree with Mrs. Stottle. It is time you get out on your own, meet people, and get a higher dose of education.”

“But mom, I don’t know, I haven’t been in school—“

“Yes, for many years, But with Mrs. Stottle’s help, you were able to learn, and you learned well. You are 18 now, you aren’t a baby anymore. I think it is high time that you tried to go to a public college.”

“But mom, I still look like a rat.”

“Nobody cares what anyone looks like when you get to college. And to me, you are very handsome, anyway.”

“Mom, come on, I look … well … different than a lot of people do.”

“But that is what colleges are for, to blend people from all different backgrounds into one. I loved college. Maybe you will too.”

“But will college love me?” asked Abraham Lincoln Panim, as the mother and son left the bench and continued their walk into the moonlight.

That talk signaled the beginning of a new chapter in Abraham Lincoln Panim’s life that was ready to unfold.

With his mother’s help and through some of her high school connections, Abraham Lincoln Panim became a freshman at the local college, but he was enrolled in night school, which was his own choice. He simply felt better taking courses during the evening, and he thought that he could handle this new challenge better during the evening than during the day, and his mother agreed.

The new freshman enrolled in liberal arts, and he was sent off to college by both his mother and Mrs. Panim in the early fall.

“I am so proud of you,” Mrs. Panim said upon his first day as a college student. “You look just great, and you are going to get in fine with the other students.”

“They will be so impressed at how smart you are, and I am sure you will make friends right away,” said Mrs., Stottle.

“I hope so … I am kind of nervous,” Abraham Lincoln Stottle said to the two ladies, as he headed out the door with his mother, who drove her son to college on this first day.

The two got into the car and sped off.

“Mom, I am a bit nervous,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said as the car approached the school. “What do I do, what do I say … ?”

“Just be yourself, and everything will work out fine,” replied Mrs. Panim, who tried not to show it, but she was as nervous, or even more nervous, than her son was.

They pulled up to the school, and Mrs., Panim stopped the car.

“Son, this is it,” Mrs. Panim said.

“Mom, I am so nervous.”

“Try not to be. Be yourself. Be ‘ABRAHAM LINCOLN PANIM,’ and everything will be fine.”

The boy kissed his mother and exited the car. He had a scarf around his neck, which he lifted over his face, both to protect himself from the cooler autumn air whisking around the campus and to cover up his face.

As he approached the building, he stood on a long line of people waiting to get in. He stood on the line, behind a female student.

The female student, long blond hair all bundled up in a heavy coat, turned to him, and she was wearing dark glasses, and he saw her with a guide dog. He figured that she was blind. “Man, it is cold out here. I wish they would open up the door already. I am frozen.”

“Yes, it is a bit cold out here,” Abraham Lincoln Panim replied, talking through the scarf that was covering his face, all but his eyes.

“Boy, you must be really cold,” the girl said, reaching out and feeling his scarf over most of his face. “I wish I had a scarf like that.”

“Well, I … well … I kind of like the scarf around my face.”

“It kind of muffles your voice, I can barely hear you—but look, the line is finally moving!”

The line moved, and the students went to their classes.

“See you sometime,” the girl said.

“See you around,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, as he looked for room 222, the room he needed to get to for his first class.

Finding the room, he walked in, sat down in the back corner of the class room, but did not take off his coat, nor did he remove his scarf from his face.

The teacher finally came into the class, a tall, thin man with practically no hair on his head.

“Hello, I am Mr. Figg, and I am going to be teaching you English … sir, are you staying for tea or are you about to leave?”

All eyes turned to Abraham Lincoln Panim, still all bundled up with his jacket on and his scarf being made even tighter as he realized the teacher was speaking about him.

Abraham Lincoln Panim stood up, took his jacket off, put it on the back of his chair, but kept his scarf on.

“Sorry, I have a cold and don’t want to pass it on to anyone else,” he told the class, as sweat poured down from seemingly everywhere on his body.

The teacher was not paying attention at this point, and the class began, with Abraham Lincoln Panim continuing to wear his scarf through this class and into the other classes he took that evening and during that first week of college.

Abraham Lincoln Panim kept his scarf on for the first few weeks of classes, and when asked why he continued to wear his scarf, he said that he had a cold, or that he was cold, or he gave any other excuse he could provide so that the inquirer was at least somewhat satisfied with the answer.

He pretty much kept to himself, so the inquiries weren’t that many, and that made it easier for him to wear his scarf during classes.

He was also doing very well in his classes, getting mainly A’s on all of his work.

In between classes, Abraham Lincoln Panim went where most of his fellow students went, to the cafeteria to take a break and to maybe have a cup of coffee or eat a sandwich.

As was his norm, Abraham Lincoln Panim went to the cafeteria, ordered a cup of coffee, and sat alone at a table in the back of the massive room. He took out his books and studied them, and there generally was no one around him, as most students on their break sat with others further up in the room.

One day, Abraham Lincoln Panim followed the same protocol, but for the first time, he saw a group of fellow students, both male and female, pulling up some chairs to a nearby table and sitting directly opposite him.

“Hey, Abie, why don’t you sit with us?” one boy yelled out to him.

Not ever remembering when he was ever called “Abie”—and not liking it one bit--Abraham Lincoln Panim briefly looked up from his book.

“Well … I am into studying for that test we have in English tomorrow … I would like to, but I need to bone up on a few things,” he replied.

“We’ll give you a couple of things to bone up on!” the boy replied, pointing to a girl who was sitting with him at the table, who Abraham Lincoln Panim recognized as being the blind girl who spoke with him while he waited on line during his first day at school. “You can bone up on her!”

The girl pushed the boy away, but he continued what he had to say.

“Hey Abie, why do you wear that scarf all the time? You cannot possibly be sick anymore. I am sure you are a very handsome guy, and I am sure the girls will love you if you just get rid of the scarf.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim briefly looked up, but he did not respond.

Then the boy asking all the questions came over to him, and directly addressed him.

“C’mon, Abie, let everyone look at you and see what you look like!”

Before Abraham Lincoln Panim could do anything, the boy grabbed his scarf, and began to pull it. Abraham Lincoln Panim tried to hold back the pulling, but in a few seconds, the scarf was off, and all eyes in the cafeteria were on him.

“Ha! ‘Eddie Munster’ is back!” the boy yelled, as everyone saw Abraham Lincoln Panim without his scarf, with his rat face in view. “Remember me, Abie?”

In horror and trying to cover his face, Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up at the boy, and who he was came into clear focus to him—it was the same boy who taunted him in school years earlier, Brandon Hartung, the boy who years earlier had poured Cheez Whiz all over him to make fun of his rat face. And he still wore a glove on his right hand.

As seemingly everyone in the cafeteria was laughing at him, Brandon Hartung ran back to his table, took a slice of pizza with his left hand, and rubbed it--including both the sauce and cheese--all over Abraham Lincoln Panim’s head.

Abraham Lincoln Panim, with laughs cascading from one end of the cafeteria to another, got his things, picked up his scarf from the floor, and ran out of the cafeteria as quickly as he could. He ran all the way home.

Abraham Lincoln Panim never attended college again in person.

When he explained to his mother what had happened, Mrs. Panim tried to console her son.

“Look, it was my fault,” she said to him that night. “I … I thought that people in college would be a little more open to everybody, no matter who they were, where they came from—“

“But not for a rat-faced boy like me,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “Mom, please don’t blame yourself. I guess that I am … I guess too different, with my rat face. That has nothing to do with you.”

No walks were taken that night. Abraham Lincoln Panim was devastated. He went into his bed, shut off his light, and tossed and turned as he tried to sleep.

Once he did finally fall asleep, he had some terrible dreams that night, experiencing what had happened to him over and over and over, until he woke up in a cold sweat.

Abraham Lincoln Panim thought to himself, “Let me go to the bathroom. Let me put some cold water on my face, and then maybe I can get back to sleep.”

This happened for days, if not weeks. Abraham Lincoln Panim never slept through the night, hounded by his nightmares.

In the meantime, Mrs. Panim arranged with the school to have her son take his classes at home. Class work was sent to his house via special delivery, he would do the work, and then whatever he did was sent back to the teacher for grading.

He took all his tests at home, and was able to complete his coursework in about two years. Mrs. Stottle helped him with some things, but he generally did all the coursework himself.

At age 20, Abraham Lincoln Panim received his bachelor of arts degree in the mail. He did not attend any ceremonies, although his mother and Mrs. Stottle arranged a little party for him when he received his diploma.

“Son, you have done a great job getting that diploma,” Mrs. Panim said. “And you really earned it, studied hard, and you have made me so, so proud.”

She then brought out a big ice cream cake with the inscription “Congratulations to the Graduate!” and placed it on a table in the living room, and Mrs. Stottle began to cut the cake.

“You have done a great job,” Mrs. Stottle said, but she looked wobbly as she cut the cake.

She fell backward on the floor, and with his mom trying to revive the older woman, Abraham Lincoln Panim called 911.

The EMTs came and put Mrs. Stottle on a stretcher as his ice cream graduation cake melted off the table and dripped onto the floor.

Abraham Lincoln Panim and his mother knew the end was near for Mrs. Stottle when the EMTs carried her out of their house, and later that night, Mrs. Panim received a phone call from the hospital, telling them that Mrs. Stottle had passed away.

The hospital called the Panims because they had tried to locate any family for Mrs. Stottle, and could locate no one. Mrs. Stottle had no family, and Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mrs. Panim were the only “family” she had.

“We have one question for you,” said the hospital worker making the call to Mrs. Panim.

“I will try to answer it if I can,” Mrs. Panim sobbed through her tears.

“Well, it is not really a question, but it is … Look … I don’t know how to say this … I don’t want to be crass, but we are going to have to move the body to a funeral home soon … but please, can you come over here, right now? It is of utmost importance that you do.”

“Well, yes, we have to make arrangements, but it is so late—“

“Please m’am, please come over here as soon as you can.”

Mrs. Panim woke up Abraham Lincoln Panim, who wasn’t really sleeping, but thinking about Mrs. Stottle and praying that she would be OK, even though he knew that she was really sick.

The two of them dressed, and went directly to the hospital. They were shown the room Mrs. Stottle was in, and they approached where the older woman was, in a bed near the room’s one small window.

As they approached, with tears falling down both of their faces, they saw that Mrs. Stottle was covered up by her bed blanket from nearly head to toe.

An attendant came into the room and saw Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mrs., Panim at Mrs. Stottle’s bedside. As the attendant approached, so did a few nurses and doctors, all crowding around the bed.

The attendant said, “Thanks so much for coming here so quickly. I mean, you really needed to come here as quickly as possible.

“Why? Does she have to be moved immediately?” Mrs. Panim asked. “I mean, couldn’t this have waited a little bit? It happened just so suddenly … it is so early in the morning—“

One of the doctors stepped forward.

“No, it had nothing to do with that, It had to do with … I mean, I guess we have some questions … maybe you know something—“

Through his scarf which was over his mouth, Abraham Lincoln Panim said, “Please get to the point. Why were we called and asked to come over so quickly?”

The doctor approached the bed and grabbed the end of the bed sheet covering Mrs. Stottle.

“I … well … .”

He lifted the bed sheet, and exposed Mrs. Stottle’s feet.

To various gasps, Abraham Lincoln Panim and his mother saw the exposed feet, and looked at each other.

What the Panims saw were two hooves, much like a horse’s hooves, protruding from Mrs. Stottle under the bed sheets.

Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mrs. Panim made sure Mrs. Stottle had a proper burial at a local cemetery, and even had a custom headstone made for her.

It read:

“To a saint of a woman.

A true educator, teacher, companion and friend.

Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

The Panims had lost a true friend, and after a period of mourning, it was time to move on. Mrs. Stottle would have wanted them to do just that.

Mrs. Panim went back to school, but it was now time for Abraham Lincoln Panim to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, and do it without the guidance of Mrs. Stottle, the one friend he had in all the world.

He looked through the want ads in the local newspaper, but always thought that nobody would hire him because of his rat face. He couldn’t keep his scarf on indefinitely, and one day, whoever hired him would find out, and he wouldn’t last very long at any job because of that rat face and the embarrassment it would cause for him.

One day, during their evening walk, Mrs. Panim asked Abraham Lincoln Panim about his future.

“So, what do you think you would like to do with your life?” she asked. “I know you have been looking at the want ads in the newspaper.”

“Yes, I have,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “But once they find out about me, who is going to hire me? And if they hire me, once they find out, I will be shown the door.”

“Maybe I can help you,” Mrs. Panim said to her son. “Let me make some calls, do some work on it. Give me a few days.”

Mrs. Panim was tired that particular evening, and she proceeded to go back to the house, but Abraham Lincoln Panim decided to continue his walk, as in the corner of his eye, he had seen someone nearby who interested him.

A long and lean girl with long blond hair had passed him any amount of times while on his late walk, and this time, he saw her sit down on a bench. He also saw her trusty dog with her, a dog which always seemed to accompany her when she did her running.

As she was already sitting, and it wasn’t very far away, Abraham Lincoln Panim approached the bench and sat down at the other end of it.

“Nice night out here,” he said to the girl, hoping against hope that she would reply.

“Yes, it is beautiful out here, perfect for me and my friend here to do our running,” the girl replied, but she did not look at Abraham Lincoln Panim when they spoke.

Abraham Lincoln Panim saw that the girl never looked at him as they continued to converse, and he asked about her dog.

“It is a seeing eye dog. He helps me to see,” the girl said, and it finally dawned on Abraham Lincoln Panim that the girl could not see, and was blind, and was the same girl that he had met when he went to school, and that she was friendly with Brandon Hartung.

“He helps me to maneuver around here, and not bump into anything or anybody,” she told Abraham Lincoln Panim.

“You mean, you can’t see anything?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know that she was blind.

“No, I can’t. I never have been able to see anything, and little Snuff here helps me out, helps me get from one place to another.”

The dog than nudged the girl as Abraham Lincoln Panim moved his scarf a little bit away from his face.

“You know, I kind of know you from school,” he said to her. “I met you on the line the first day, we were on the line together--”

“Yes, I thought your voice sounded familiar,” the girl said as she got up from the bench.

“Ooh, it is time for me to run a little more, and then I have to go back home.”

As she began to run, she said, “Nice meeting you, again,” and began to run with her dog seemingly leading the way.

“What’s your name?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked, but she was too far away and did not respond.

Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to sit on the park bench for a few minutes as people moved about. He wasn’t the only one taking it easy on one of the benches, as he saw a few benches down, out of the corner of his eye, that there was what he thought was an older woman sitting, too.

He got up from the bench, instinctively looked a few benches down, but the woman was gone, almost as quickly as he had seen her.

Abraham Lincoln Panim went home after that, and he had a lot on his mind.

Mrs. Stottle was still on his mind, and what about his future?

And what about the girl. Would he see her again?

Abraham Lincoln Panim thought about his future quite a bit during the next several weeks. He also went for walks at night, every night, in hopes of meeting up with the girl he had met running during the evening.

He went on these walks many times without his mother, who was busy with school affairs for a few weeks and came home late and exhausted.

And since he was hoping to meet the girl who was running each night, he was kind of happy that his mother was too busy with schoolwork to accompany him. He was a little embarrassed, and he didn’t want his mother to know.

Abraham Lincoln Panim met with the girl just about every night for the next few weeks or so, as she ran every night, and he could pretty much figure out when she would stop for a rest, at the same place and time each and every night.

“How are you doing tonight?” he asked her as she took her regular break during one of those nights.

“I am doing fine,” she replied. “How are you doing?”

“I am OK,” he replied. “It seems to be a little cool outside tonight, and it looks like we are getting a lot of clouds up in the sky. Maybe we are going to get rain.”

“I think we are going to get rain too. I can’t see them, but my bones ache a little bit more when I am running when the weather is like it is, and my pal here”—pointing to her dog—“he kind of gets a little more steady when he is running with me. He doesn’t want me to stumble and fall.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim nodded approval, even though he realized that the girl could not see him.

“Well, look, since I think it is going to rain, I better get moving,” the girl said to Abraham Lincoln Panim. “I guess I will see you around.”

As she got up and started to run, Abraham Lincoln Panim remembered that he had wanted to ask her name, but as she ran away, he decided to put off the formal introduction for another night, something he had done since he met her. He had never had the nerve to ask her name, and she never asked him for his name.

As he got up from the bench, he once again saw what he thought was an older woman sitting a few benches down from him. When he started to walk home, he turned to see the woman again, but once again, she was not there. He didn’t think much of it, and went home.

As for the girl, he thought, “Another night won’t matter much,” he thought, and he headed home in the darkness as raindrops began to fall from the moonlit sky.

He arrived home after the walk, and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, which had papers all around on it, work that Mrs. Panim was doing when her son arrived.

She pushed everything aside when he came in the door.

“Son, please sit down here. I need to talk to you,” she said.

Abraham Lincoln Panim took a seat.

“What’s up mom?” he asked her.

“Have you given any thought to what you are going to do with your life?” she asked him. “Mrs. Stottle isn’t around anymore, and while I am at work, all that you do is putter around the house. You don’t really do much until the evening, when you take your walk.”

“I have given it some thought, but I really don’t know,” he replied. “Who is going to have me with my rat face?”

“Well, for now, I think I might have something for you,” she replied. “I pulled a couple of strings, and I think I have a job for you—right in my school.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim stopped right in his tracks. “In your school? What could I possibly do in your school?”

“You can substitute teach in my school,” she said. “Look, it could be a good job for you, get your confidence up, put you in front of people and the rest of the world.”

“But subbing? Mom—“

“It is steady work, you can work five days a week, make some money, maybe eventually get your teaching credentials and become a regular teacher. I think it might be a good thing for you.”

“But mom, with my rat face—“

“The kids won’t know and won’t care. And you can wear the scarf if you like, no kid is going to tell a teacher what to wear.”

“But being a sub—“

“Look, we are in dire need of substitute teachers. I thought you would be a good fit. You are young, out of work with no job … you can pick up the curriculum pretty well, and I am sure the kids will like you once they get to know you.”

“But mom—“

“Look, Abraham Lincoln Panim. I pulled a lot of strings to get you this opportunity. It is the best I can do. But if you don’t want it—“

Abraham Lincoln Panim hesitated. “Well … when do I start?” he asked.

“You can begin on Monday. I have classes that desperately need a sub, someone like you. It might be a job, but it might also be fun.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim nodded in agreement, but he thought that somehow, this job would be anything but what his mother said it would be.

Mrs. Panim and her son arrived at school on Monday, and both went to the main office, which was a beehive of activity, with people moving about, doing their jobs as the school week was ready to begin.

“Attention, everyone,” Mrs. Panim said. “I want you to meet ‘Mr. Abraham.’ He is going to be doing some subbing at the school, so I want you to get to know him.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim, tightened up on his scarf, which was already pulled tightly around his face. He did not know that he was going to be “Mr. Abraham,” and not be introduced as the principal’s son.

Mrs. Panim riffled through some papers on the desk in the main office.

A woman came up to Mrs. Panim, and handed her some additional papers.

“Sol is out again. He just can’t kick that cough,” the woman said as she handed the papers to Mrs. Panim. “He such a great teacher, I hope he won’t be out too long.”

Mrs. Panim looked at the papers. “Oh, I see Mr. Praeger is going to be out today. Yes, I remember, he came in with a terrible cough the other day, and I figured he had a really bad cold.”

She then addressed her son. ‘Mr. Abraham,’ that is the class that you are going to be substitute teaching for today and as long as Mr. Praeger is out.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim took a big gulp, not at first realizing that his mother was addressing him as “Mr. Abraham.”

“OK, where do I have to go and what do I have to do?” he said as he pulled his scarf even tighter to his face.

As ‘Mr. Abraham’ and his mother left the main office, a few teachers had been checking their mail, and one male teacher turned around to another and said, in a hushed tone, “So this kid is taking over for Praeger … nobody really takes over for Praeger, you know. We’ll make this kid feel sooooo welcome here.”

The two laughed and continued to look through their mail.

“Just follow the substitute teacher instructions that are in the upper draw of his desk, and don’t forget to take attendance,” Mrs. Panim told her son as they walked to the room together. “Remember, there will be a couple of students who will think that today is a holiday because their regular teacher is out. Let them know that you are their teacher for now, and that they should pay attention.”

They climbed up the staircase together, and arrived at room 222. As they opened the door, students were milling about in the room as they entered.

“Hi, Mrs. Panim,” said a girl who was sitting in the front row near the door.

“Hello, Melissa,” Mrs. Panim replied. “How is your brother doing?”

“Oh, he is doing fine. He is out of school now, and he is looking for work. Maybe he can work here?”

Mrs. Panim did not answer as she walked to the front of the class with her son in tow. She cleared her throat and everyone stopped what they were doing.

“Class, Mr. Praeger is out today. He might be out for a day or two, and while he is out, I want you to give Mr. Pa … err … ‘Mr. Abraham’ … all the respect and attention that he deserves as your teacher.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim was still not comfortable being called “Mr. Abraham,’ and while he was still pretty nervous, he figured that it was better off that his mother did not want the class to know that he was her son, or at least related to him.

He would have liked to have been called “Mr. Panim,” another name that he had never heard before, but he understood why it was better being known as “Mr. Abraham,” in the school at this moment.

He moved to a spot behind the desk as Mrs. Panim was exiting the room.

“Remember students, please give Mr. Abraham your utmost respect,” she said, the door closing behind her as the class said in unison, “Yes, Mrs. Panim.”

As the door closed, all the students in the class were sitting in their seats, but within a few seconds, all the students got up and began to mingle like they did before Mrs. Panim and Abraham Lincoln Panim entered the classroom.

Abraham Lincoln Panim was too busy to notice. He nervously ruffled some papers as he looked for the class roll, and then he turned around, wrote his name “Mr. Abraham” on the blackboard, and he located the class roll.

“OK, class, I have to take the class roll. Is Michael Anton here?”

Before Michael Anton could answer, Melissa stood up from her desk.

“Don’t tell him anything,” she blurted out. “He is only a sub.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim heard this, and he said, “Listen, the faster I get this done, the faster I can get on with the lesson for the day … Mr. Praeger left some things here that I need to do with you.”

“I’m Michael Anton,” a boy in the back of the room said, and as Abraham Lincoln Panim read down the roll, some students said they were here, others just ignored him.

“Look, if you are here, and I mark you absent, you know that the office is going to check you out and find out where you were when you were supposed to be in class, so you might as well answer that you are here.”

Some students who didn’t answer before when their names were called finally told Abraham Lincoln Panim that they were, in fact, in the class, while others simply decided not too, with the continued urging of Melissa.

“Don’t tell him anything. He is just a sub and we will never see him again,” she continued to tell the class.

Abraham Lincoln Panim remembered that his mother, while entering the class, called this girl “Melissa,” so he knew she was present even though she never told him that she was there. He just looked up the name “Melissa” and put a check mark by her name. Others he knew he missed, but after asking them to tell them they were there, if they refused, that was going to be their problem.

Abraham Lincoln Panim put away the roll book in the desk, and then he became “Mr. Abraham” as he addressed the class.

“OK, I think I have everyone. Today, Mr. Praeger wanted us to start off with a spelling test, so let’s get that out of the way.”

The class let out a collective groan, but most of the students finally sat down and took out their composition books to take the test.

“OK, the way that Mr. Praeger does it is that he asks you to spell the word, and if you can also put the word into a proper sentence, you get a bonus, so the first word is ‘discover.’”

Most of the class started to write down the word in their books, and tried to use it in a sentence.

Melissa raised her hand. Abraham Lincoln Panim turned toward her.

“Yes, your name is Melissa, right?”

“Mr. Abraham, why do you wear that scarf around your face so tight like that?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim stumbled over the words to answer her as quickly as he could.

“Well, you see, Mr. Praeger is sick, and some of his germs might be all over the material he left for me to do with you, so I am just taking an extra precaution. I don’t want to get sick … and then you would have a sub for the sub!”

The class laughed, and Melissa, evidently satisfied with his answer, started to write in her composition book.

Abraham Lincoln Panim went through the words in the test after that, one after another, and he then collected all of the students’ test sheets.

The morning of Abraham Lincoln Panim’s first day as “Mr. Lincoln,” the substitute teacher, went pretty well after that, with lesson after lesson completed.

It went so well that when the lunch bell rang, Abraham Lincoln Panim did not know that so much time had passed as the students got up from their desks and exited the room.

As Abraham Lincoln Panim sat at his desk and the students exited the room, he looked out at the empty room, breathed a sigh of relief, and took out his own lunch from a big pocket in his jacket.

“Maybe this won’t be so bad after all,” he thought to himself, as he also left the room and went to the teacher’s room, which was right down the hall from the classroom.

He entered, and a group of teachers were chatting as he came into the room.

“Hi, my name is ‘Abraham’ and I just took over Mr. Praeger’s class while he is out sick,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said as he looked for a place to sit down and eat his lunch.

Most of the teachers completely ignored him, continuing their chatting without taking a breath.

Abraham Lincoln Panim sat down on a couch in the room where he could find some space, took out his lunch, and read over a few papers for his class.

One teacher, a short, stubby looking man with thick glasses, broke away from the chirping teachers and sat down next to “Mr. Abraham.”

“You are new to the school, aren’t you?” asked the teacher. “My name is Mr. Sedall, Joe, and I hear that you are taking over Praeger’s class while he is out.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Abraham Lincoln Panim, as he extended his hand to shake Mr. Sedall’s hand, but the teacher never extended his hand to him. “Mr. Abraham” drew his hand back as quickly as he had extended it.

“What’s your background?” Mr. Sedall asked Abraham Lincoln Panim as “Mr. Abraham” withdrew his hand in response to Mr. Sedall.

“Well, I graduated—“

“You know that Praeger, even if he is an old coot, is really a great teacher, you know.”

“Yes, I have heard that he is a fine teacher. But let me tell you about—“

“He has been here for such a long time, and I know that he has probably gotten pneumonia again. He gets it every so often, and we love Sol as a teacher here.”

“Yes, I have heard that. But let me answer—“

“Well, you are young, and I know you are looking for a teaching job, but just let’s get things straight,” Mr. Sedall firmly stated. “That is Praeger’s job. You are just a sub, nothing but a sub. That is not really your class.”

“I never said it was,” said Abraham Lincoln Panim, pulling up his scarf as he was getting a bit nervous about what was happening.

Mr. Sedall smiled as he got up from the couch.

“So, you are just going to be here for a little while, and let’s be on the same page, OK?”

“I don’t know about the future, but right now, I am teaching these students—“

“You are nothing but a sub,” Mr. Sedall repeated, through his smile and clenched teeth. “And I have one more question to ask you.

“What is with that scarf over your mouth? What gives with that?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim heard the chatting teachers start to laugh. He got up, and left the room, went back to the classroom, and finished his lunch there.

He vowed never to tell his mother about what had happened in the teacher’s room. “I will take care of it myself,” he thought.

Abraham Lincoln Panim got through that first day, and when his mother arrived home an hour later, she had some good news for him.

“Mr. Praeger will be out for at least the rest of the week, so you are going to sub that class through Friday,” she told him.

“Thanks for letting me know, Mom,” he replied. “I know it is a job, but can I actually have fun while working? Is that something that is OK?”

“Yes it is,” she replied. “If you enjoy your job, if you love your job, it is almost not like a job. It is almost as if you are being paid to do something that you really like to do.”

And the next few days went quickly. He would enter the room, the students would be milling about, and he always saw Melissa talking very actively with a few students surrounding her each and every day.

And each and every day she asked “Mr. Abraham” why he wore a scarf so tightly around his face. And Abraham Lincoln Panim had the same answer for her each and every day: “I don’t want to get sick, because then, you would have a sub for a sub.”

The students didn’t laugh as hard as they did the first time that he said this, but his reply always seemed to quiet the class down, including Melissa, who after hearing his reply, went back to her schoolwork.

The days went by quickly for Abraham Lincoln Panim, and the class was getting to know him better as he was getting to know them.

Mr. Praeger had called in a few assignments for the class to do while he was convalescing, and “Mr. Abraham” and the class got through them.

Melissa and the other students would ask at times why “Mr. Abraham” wore his scarf all the time, but other than that, everything went pretty well with the students.

Although Abraham Lincoln Panim had vowed not to go to the teacher’s room ever again after his previous episode with Mr. Sedall, he decided late in the week to give it another try, and at lunch, he lumbered over to the room, opened the door, and sat in the same place on the same couch that he used during his previous time there.

He just planned to sit there quietly, eat his lunch, and go back to his class after lunch.

Again, a group of teachers were chatting amongst themselves, and again, Mr. Sedall broke away from the group and sat next to “Mr. Abraham” as he had done the previous time.

“You know, it is easier to eat your lunch if you take the scarf off your face,” Mr. Sedall said.

“Well … I keep the scarf on because of germs,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “I guess I am something of a—“

“Something of a rat-faced guy?” the teacher asked, as the other teachers in the room laughed as Abraham Lincoln Panim pulled his scarf up even tighter over his face.

“We did some snooping around. You are Mrs. Panim’s kid, and we remember that when you were born, you looked just like a rat,” said the teacher. “Do you still look like that? I guess it is good to be the principal’s son. How else would you get this job, or ANY job?”

The other teachers laughed as Abraham Lincoln Panim got up, took his lunch, and proceeded back to his classroom, entering it, closing the door, and sitting at his desk.

He vowed right then and there, once again, to not tell his mother what had happened, but he learned a lesson:

“I will not go into that room with the other teachers ever again,” he said to himself. “I am going to make this work.”

Friday came, and the day began as any other day did, with the class roll being taken, and more and more students were answering that they were present. “Mr. Abraham” was beginning to recognize names, so even if they didn’t answer, he had a good sense of who was there and who was not.

An extra bonus on this particular Friday was that on Monday, there was no school, as it was a day off leading to several other days off during the winter mid-semester break.

The school would be closed a week, and Abraham Lincoln Panim would have a full week to feel good about what he was doing, and a full week to find out where he was needed in the school next.

The weekend went by quickly for Abraham Lincoln Panim, and the glow of his first real workweek was still as bright as could be.

Once the school reopened, he and Mrs. Panim went to school together, as they had the previous week, and the mother and son both went to the office together as they had the previous week.

As they entered, Mr. Panim went directly to the front desk, as her son strode in behind her.

“Oh, it looks like you have the same assignment as last week, as the regular teacher is still out,” she told her son. “He might be out just today, but whatever the case, it’s your class again.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim smiled under his scarf, because he knew if he could handle the assignment one week, he certainly could do it again, for however long it took.

And this time, he went up to the room himself.

He opened the door, and as has been the norm from his first day, the students were milling about the room. As “Mr. Abraham” walked into the room, Melissa, who had a crowd around her, opened her eyes even wider than they normally were.

“Good morning, Mr. Abraham,” she said. “I guess you are going to be our sub again?”

“That’s right, I am going to be your teacher again,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to her as he confidently strode to the desk, and started to read the roll call of students in the class, one after the other.

“Melissa—“

“Oh yes, Mr. Abraham, I am here. I wouldn’t miss today’s class for anything with you here,” she said in a snickering tone, as the rest of the class giggled along with her.

“Mr. Abraham” simply passed by her remark and continued to read off the roll. When he was finished, he began to write some lessons on the blackboard, turning his back to the class.

As he turned his back to the class, Melissa quietly turned to the rest of the class, shook her head, and nearly all of them shook their own heads too.

The morning went quickly for “Mr. Abraham” and his class. He did all the lessons that needed to be done, collected some homework he had given them, and it quickly reached the lunch hour.

“OK, class, we will pick up on this after lunch,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said as the bell rang for the lunch break. When the bell rang, all the students got up from their seats and left the class pretty much in unison.

“See you after lunch,” Melissa said, laughing with some of her classmates as they left the classroom.

When no one was in the class except for him, Abraham Lincoln Panim took out his lunch and began to eat, and think a bit.

“Maybe I can make a real go at this,” he said. “Maybe I have found something that I can do for a long time.”

The students filed back into the classroom pretty quickly after the lunch break, and as usual, they were led by Melissa, who took her usual seat, the first seat by the door in the first row.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Abraham,” she said, with even more of a perk in her speech than normal. “It is so good to see you again after a nice lunch break.”

“It is good to see you, Melissa, and your classmates here,” “Mr. Abraham” replied. “We have plenty to do this afternoon, so let’s dive right into it.”

Melissa nodded over to another student seated next to her, and whispered, “Sure, he is going to be taking a dive, all right.” The other student smiled, nodding in agreement.

“Mr. Abraham” began the afternoon lessons, and the day went quickly for Abraham Lincoln Panim, as the clock quickly got closer to the 3 p.m. end of the school day time.

During the arithmetic part of the lesson, “Mr. Abraham” turned to the class as he finished writing on the blackboard.

“Does everyone understand this?” he asked, looking around the room. “It is getting late in the day, we only have a few minutes left, so if there is anyone not understanding this, we need to talk about it—“

“I’m not sure about it,” said Melissa as she raised her hand to get “Mr. Abraham’s attention. Responding to her plea for help, Abraham Lincoln Panim walked over to her, anticipating her questions.

“What seems to be the matter, what’s the problem?” he asked, as he bent down to see Melissa’s work.

“I don’t know, what is the problem?” Melissa asked, as she yanked on Abraham Lincoln Panim’s scarf, which went from being held tightly around his face to falling on the floor, revealing his secret to the entire class.

“My brother said it was you!” Melissa screeched “You are that rat-faced guy that my brother told me about. You have a rat face! And you hate cheese!”

The class laughed, and Abraham Lincoln Panim bent to the floor to quickly retrieve his pulled-off scarf.

And as he was doing this, he realized … Melissa Hartung was Brandon Hartung’s younger sister, the very person who had terrorized him when he was in nursery school and when he was in college.

“Not only did my brother warn me about you, but Mr. Sedall said you were the rat-faced guy!” Melissa bragged to the class. “They both knew what they were talking about—you are a rat face!”

“Rat face! Rat face! Rat face!” the class yelled almost in unison, and Abraham Lincoln Panim was only saved by the 3:00 p.m. bell that rang.

The class filed past him as he was still on the floor, trying to cover his face with his scarf.

He sat there as the last child filed out of the room.

“Mom, I can never, ever go back there,” Abraham Lincoln Panim told his mother that evening. “How can I face the kids, now that they know I have a rat face? How can I go back?

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, I just don’t know,” said Mrs. Panim. “Maybe it will be better that they know what you really look like and who you really are. You won’t have to disguise yourself anymore. It is all out in the open now.”

“But mom, the shame … the shame of it all. They will constantly make fun of me. And Melissa Hartung … I will never hear the end of it from that girl, never. And I won’t ever hear the end of it from Brandon Hartung, either. We seem to always meet up, one way or the other. Having his sister in the class—“

“Look, the regular teacher of that class has pneumonia. We just found out about it today. We have no one else to cover for that class for as long as he will be out. We have you. We have so few substitute teachers with all the budget cuts we have been through.

“You are competent, you know what you are doing. We haven’t had one single complaint from either the kids or the parents about you.

“Son, we really need you to continue teaching that class, at least until their regular teacher returns. I mean, I cannot imagine what you went through, but we absolutely need you to cover that class.”

“But mom—“

“Please give it some thought. You are doing so well that maybe, just maybe, you can even become a regular teacher.”

“With my rat face, I can’t do anything right.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim grabbed his coat and his scarf and abruptly left the house, slamming the door on the way out. He needed to think, and since it was nearing the evening, he decided to take his usual walk, this time alone.

“I just don’t know what to do,” he thought to himself as he neared the usual area where he would take his evening walk.

He sat down at his usual bench, and the moonlight framed him as he sat, and sat some more, more sitting than most times when he ventured out of the house during the evening.

He closed his eyes, not to sleep but to think.

After a long while, with his eyes still closed, he heard some footsteps approaching him, and after opening his eyes, he saw that it was the blind girl that he had met at school with her dog. She sat down on the bench, and she and Abraham Lincoln Panim began talking.

“What’s your name? Funny, all the times that we have met here to chat, and seen each other in school, well, I never got your name.”

“Oh, sorry, it’s Ariel.”

“That’s a pretty name. My name is—“

“And my dog’s name is Snuff.”

“Oh, that is nice. I … my name is—“

And just then, Abraham Lincoln Panim could see in the moonlight a figure coming toward them, a male figure, who was walking and then started to run as he got closer to them.

“Hey Ariel, who is this guy? Is he bothering you?” screamed the man as he approached the bench, not seeing clearly who it was.

“Is this the guy who has been hitting on you for the past couple of weeks?” the man said, as he got closer and saw that it was Abraham Lincoln Panim.

“So, it is old Abie, the rat-faced boy,” the man said, and Abraham Lincoln Panim could now see clearly who it was.

“My sister told me all about you in school, when she pulled off that idiotic scarf you had on, and that the entire class knows that you have a rat face.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim could now clearly see that it was Brandon Hartung—along with his right gloved hand--in the moonlight.

“Well, stay away from my girl,” Brandon said, as he pulled up Ariel from the bench with his left hand, and as Snuff scowled.

“No, Brandon, no … he isn’t bothering me … stop, you’re hurting me!” Ariel protested.

“Sorry, ‘Eddie Munster,’ you aren’t getting my girl. Stay away and stay away for good or your rat face will meet my fist!” Brandon yelled as he dragged Ariel away from the bench. “Maybe once my fist hits your face it will be an improvement!”

Abraham Lincoln Panim watched Brandon and Ariel and Snuff move on into the distance, moving further away from him as he watched them fade into the mist.

He shook his head as they faded into the distance, and once again, he saw the older woman sitting down a few benches down from where he was. He saw her, and then when he got up-from the bench, and he looked again, she was gone.

Abraham Lincoln Panim went home after the incident with Brandon and Ariel, still not sure about what to do at school.

He took out his key, opened the door to the house, and made a bee line directly to his bedroom. He prepared for bed, and crawled into it. With the lights off, he was still able to see a framed picture of a smiling Mrs. Stottle that he had on the desk in his room.

“If Mrs. Stottle was still around, what would she tell me to do?” he thought, as he finally dozed off.

He had a rough night, the worst that he could ever remember. He tossed and turned and had visions of Brandon and Ariel jumping back and forth in his nightmares.

He heard the taunts from Brandon--“rat-faced boy” and “Eddie Munster”--constantly in his nightmares, and he tossed and turned all night.

He also saw bright lights as he slept, going off and on constantly, and loud noises, not lightning and thunder but something bright and very loud, hurting both his closed eyes and ears.

And Abraham Lincoln Panim also saw himself with his rat face and without his rat face, as both images flashed off and on during the intensity of the nightmare.

The intensity of his nightmare was so much that night that he ended up falling out of the bed onto the floor.

He woke up, lying on the floor, and in the pitch black of night, he felt he needed to go to the bathroom and put cold water on his face. He went to the bathroom with the lights out, reached out for the faucet, put on the cold water, and cupped his hands so that he could gather water, which he threw on his face.

Abraham Lincoln Panim felt the cool water on his face, and then decided to take a drink of the cool water to try to further calm himself down. He reached for the cup dispenser on the wall, pulled out a cup from its bottom, and filled up the cup with water.

He took a drink of the cool water, stood there for a moment, and then dropped the cup where he thought the trash can was. He heard the cup hit the floor.

He bent down to pick it up, but could not find it, so he stood up, turned on the light, found the cup and put it in the trash can.

He stood up, intending to put more cold water on his face. He turned on the faucet, cupped some water in his hands, splashed it on his face, and looked in the mirror to see how he looked after another splash of water.

He looked, was ready to walk away, but did a double take, and looked in the mirror again.

He stared into the mirror for a couple of seconds and saw his face. It was rid of any semblance of his former rat face. His nose was smaller, there were no whiskers coming out of the sides of his lip, and his mouth and teeth were straight and normal.

He peeled away the top of his pajamas, and saw that there was on hair at all where it had been before.

Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to stare into the mirror, looking at his new countenance with astonishment.

“This has got to be part of a nightmare,” he thought to himself. “This isn’t me. This can’t be me.”

He continued to stare into the mirror, shook his head a few times, and then went to bed.

“Let me get through this nightmare,” he thought to himself, and then went into a deep sleep.

As opposed to his initial sleep that evening, this one was a calm one, a good one, a restful one.

Abraham Lincoln Panim got up from sleep, and walked into the bathroom, taking his day’s clothes with him, pretty much forgetting about his “nightmare” from his sleep time.

He did what he always did each morning, prepare for his shower, step into the bathtub to take the shower, and when it was over, turning off the water and coming out of the tub, wiping himself down.

Abraham Lincoln Panim put on his underclothes and then, finally, looked into the mirror, still not remembering his “nightmare” from that evening’s sleep time.

He peered into the mirror, looked real hard and long, and saw his new features.

“That’s me!” he screamed.

“Anything the matter?” Mrs. Panim chirped from outside the bathroom.

Abraham Lincoln Panim stood there without a sound.

“Abraham Lincoln Panm? Anything wrong in there?” his mother now yelled.

“No … mom … nothing … is wrong,” Abraham Lincoln Panim finally responded. “Everything is right!” as he continued to stare in the mirror with glee at his new countenance.

He got fully dressed in the bathroom, not once taking his eyes off of the mirror.

“I do look so good now, I can’t believe it,” he said to himself. “I look better than I ever dreamed I could look. I am actually handsome … so handsome—“

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, why are you taking so much time in the bathroom today?” his mother asked, this time from outside the door. “You are going to school today, aren’t you?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim, continuing to look at himself in the mirror, took some extra moments to respond.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim—did you hear what I said?” his mother asked again.

“Umm … yes, everything is good.”

“So are you going to school today? Are you going to teach that class?”

“Umm … oh yes, am I going to teach that class!”

“That is what I am asking you.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to stare at himself in the mirror.

“Yes, mom, I mean, yes, I am going to teach that class!” he blurted out.

“Great. Are you coming out of the bathroom now?

Abraham Lincoln Panim was done dressing, but not done admiring himself in the mirror.

“My, I think I am about the most handsome man I have ever seen,” he thought to himself. “No more rat-faced boy for me!”

He picked up his scarf, looked at it a few times, and decided to put it around his face as he normally would do.

“It’s not the right time to tell mom about what happened,” he thought to himself as he finally emerged from the bathroom, all dressed and ready to go for the day at school.

He exited the bathroom, and went to the kitchen to eat breakfast. His mother came to the kitchen a few minutes later, and stared at her son as he ate some cereal.

“Why do you have your scarf on now?” she said to him, pointing out that at home, he rarely wore his scarf.

“Just getting ready for the day,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, as he looked up from his breakfast, and sported a wide grin from under his scarf that only he knew about.

Mrs. Panim and her son arrived at school that morning, and as usual, the two entered the main office together. The principal sifted through her usual papers that she received each morning.

“Oh, I see that they want me at the district headquarters today,” she said to a woman behind the front desk and to her son. “I guess I better be going there now, it looks like an all-day thing. Claire, can you call them and tell them I will be there right away?”

The woman nodded in agreement, and sat down at her desk and made the call as “Mr. Abraham” signed in and went directly to his class.

He opened the door of the room, went directly to the desk, sat down, and thought for a moment.

“Do I take off my scarf right away and show how things have changed, or do I give these kids the shock of their lives by putting that off a bit?” he thought.

Abraham Lincoln Panim decided to keep the scarf on for now, and went through some work on his desk as the bell rung to begin the day. His class soon filed into the room, led, as usual, by Melissa, who did a double-take when she came into the room.

“Mr. … Mr. … umm—“

“Yes, I’m here,” “Mr. Abraham” said to her and the other students who all couldn’t believe their eyes that “Mr. Abraham” was still their teacher.

“But … I thought—“

“Well, I guess you thought wrong. Now how about sitting down and let’s get the work out that I gave you the other day.”

The class sat down, but all had looks on their faces of not believing that “Mr. Abraham” had returned.

Abraham Lincoln Panim, still with the scarf around his face, took note of this.

“Well, how about paying attention to the work we need to do rather than to my rat face?” he said. “Now you know my secret, but let’s delve into something way more important.”

The class finally got out their work, still with signs of disbelief on their faces.

“You never know what other surprises there might be during the day, so let’s get to what we need to do!” “Mr. Abraham” told them, almost with an impish twang to it.

The morning progressed as it should have, with the students doing their work as instructed by their teacher.

It was getting near lunch time, and Abraham Lincoln Panim was in the middle of conducting a spelling test with the class.

“I hope all of you studied your words, and I hope all of you can pass this test. I mean, even a rat-faced teacher like me thinks that if you study hard enough, you shouldn’t have any trouble with this test, or for that matter, any other that I give you.”

The students began to move unevenly at their desks, as they felt that “Mr. Abraham” was reminding them of the horrid day when they exposed him as a rat face.

“OK, here is the first word. The word is ‘referendum,’ and today, I will give you a sentence with the word in it, used properly. ‘The conference approved a move for a referendum next year.’ The word is ‘referendum.’”

Some of the students quickly wrote down the word, others seemed to be having trouble, including Melissa. “Mr. Abraham” saw that she was having a problem, and walked over to her at her desk.

“What’s the problem, Melissa?” he asked. “Are you having a problem spelling the word ‘referendum’ or do you just want to pull off my scarf again?”

Melissa fussed at her desk. “Well, I really didn’t think you would be here again—“

“So you didn’t study,” “Mr. Abraham replied. “Because I was the rat-faced sub, you didn’t think I would be coming back here, is that it?”

Melissa hesitated, by finally said, “Yes, and why are you still wearing your scarf if we know that you have a rat face?” she asked.

“You are right, Melissa, I really should take the scarf off,” and with that, Abraham Lincoln Panim virtually ripped the scarf right off his face, to show the class his new features.

Melissa nearly fell out of her seat when she saw “Mr. Abraham’s” new countenance, and as she was doing this, the other students craned their necks to see what all the commotion was about, with some doing their own double takes when they saw what their teacher now looked like.

“He is soooooo handsome now,” one female student said after seeing “Mr. Abraham’s” new face for the first time. “Maybe he was wearing a mask the other day.”

“Maybe he had plastic surgery,” another one said.

“It was Melissa who hatched this whole thing with you the other day. It’s Melissa’s fault,” another student sitting near Melissa told “Mr. Abraham.”

“No, come on, let’s not get into that here,” “Mr. Abraham” said. “But it looks like Melissa didn’t study for her spelling test. I am sure she knows what she did and didn’t do, and we will leave it at that.”

Melissa sunk in her chair at what had happened.

“OK, let’s get back to the spelling test,” “Mr. Abraham said, and even though the class did get back to the test, most of the students weren’t paying much attention as the words were read out to them.

“He is so handsome,” one female student said to Melissa, who was sitting in front of her. “What is the matter with you anyway? What did you get us all into? You made us look really bad!”

Melissa sunk further into her chair as the test went on, and she counted the minutes until the lunch bell rung, running out of the class at full speed.

As the students hurriedly followed Melissa out of the class for lunch, Abraham Lincoln Panim picked up his scarf, put it around his face as he had been doing, took his lunch out of his bag, and went straight to the teachers’ room.

He opened the door, sat down where he normally did, and kept his scarf on when he began to eat his lunch.

Mr. Sedall was talking to his usual group of teachers in the back of the room, and then seeing “Mr. Abraham” sitting and eating lunch, he winked at the other teachers and came over to where “Mr. Abraham” was eating lunch.

“Hey Abraham, I can’t believe you are still here,” Mr. Sedall said. “You have a lot of guts, coming in here again. But I give you a lot of credit, you must really be a glutton for punishment.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to eat lunch, not acknowledging Mr. Sedall’s presence at all.

“Hey Abraham, I am talking to you,” Mr. Sedall said, raising his voice with each syllable. “I’ve been here 20 years, and when I talk to you, I want you to listen, and to listen good. But then again, you really think you are taking over that class from a real teacher, somebody who has been here even longer than me, so what can I expect?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to eat lunch without acknowledging Mr. Sedall’s presence.

“Hey, if you aren’t going to give me respect, at least eat your lunch without your scarf on,” and with that, Mr. Sedall pulled Abraham Lincoln Panim’s scarf off his face.

“Look at me, Mr. Sedall, where did you get the impression that I had a rat face,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, as Mr. Sedall blinked and did a double take when he saw the young teacher’s handsome face.

“But … but … you had a rat face … what happened to … ?” said Mr. Sedall, barely getting the words out of his mouth. The other teachers there saw what had happened, and crowded around Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mr. Sedall.

“Where is my rat face, Mr. Sedall?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked once again. “I am quite handsome, aren’t I? And I am certainly better looking than you!”

“My, he sure is,” said one of the female teachers to a few of the other female teachers who had crowded around Abraham Lincoln Panim and Mr. Sedall when the commotion happened.

“I’ll say,” said another female teacher.

“I want his phone number,” said another.

Mr. Sedall rose from the couch, brushed himself off in a nervous sort of way, and walked to the other side of the room while the female teachers, and the male teachers, began to talk with “Mr. Abraham.”

As the bell rung to end lunch, three of the female teachers walked out of the room together.

“That is the last time I listen to that blowhard Sedall about anything,” one said. “He does this to all the subs, and I really can’t stand it, I don’t care how long he has been here.”

“Yeah, he’s a blowhard,” said another, and Mr. Sedall was right behind them as the left the room.

“He had a rat face,” Mr. Sedall said to them. “My eyes were not playing tricks with me. HE HAD A RAT FACE!”

Abraham Lincoln Panim walked back to class, without his scarf on. As he walked past teachers and other students, all of them pretty much stopped in their tracks to look at “Mr. Abraham,” but he shooed them away.

“Yes, I am so good looking, but let’s get to class before the bell rings, or we are all going to be late,” he said. “We can all admire my handsomeness another day.”

As he said this, Abraham Lincoln Panim had many thoughts running through his mind.

“Did I really say this? … Should I be saying this? … Doesn’t it make me look stuck up and full of myself? … “

“YES, YES, YES … !” he said out loud as he approached the classroom.

When he opened the classroom door, “Mr. Abraham” went to his desk, and saw the students file in, with Melissa once again the first one into the room.

She sat in her usual first seat in the first row, and as her fellow students came into the room, they scowled at her, each and every one of them, and as each student came in and looked at her, she slid further into her seat.

“Melissa, sit up in your seat, or you are going to fall on the floor,” “Mr. Abraham” said to her, as the class laughed. “I was on the floor the other day, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is not a good place to be.”

He continued, “I think Melissa might have, what shall we say, her tail between her legs a little bit right now. Melissa knows what she did, and she has to live with it. Let’s move on to our work.”

The day went well for Abraham Lincoln Panim and his class. The students were attentive, they did the work they were supposed to be doing, and everything went as well as he could have hoped.

Every so often, he would see both teachers and students peering through the small glass in the window that was in the classroom door. He would look over, give whoever was at the door a wink, and those at the door would scamper away.

“Boy, I am so happy to be in this class, because ‘Mr. Abraham’ is, like, the most handsome man I have ever seen,” said one girl in the back of the room to another girl just ahead of her.

“Yes, he is so dreamy,” said the other girl.

“Who is so dreamy?” “Mr. Abraham” asked the two girls as they spoke to each other.

“Umm … umm … well … you are, ‘Mr. Abraham.’ You are!”

“Well, you might find me dreamy, and you might be right, but we still have some work to do, so let’s put the dreams aside and get to what we are supposed to do,” “Mr. Abraham” said, with a definite chuckle in his voice.

He eyed Melissa in the front row, and she sunk further down into her seat as Abraham Lincoln Panim spoke to the other two girls.

He turned to Melissa and said, “And Melissa, sit up in your seat,” he said. “That tail between your legs seems to be pushing you off the chair. It’s better if you sit up.”

And she did just that. Or at least tried to, as all eyes of her fellow students were on her, with that same scowl that they came into the room with after lunch.

The school day ended, and on this day, since his mother was not at work and was at a conference, Abraham Lincoln Panim had to walk home all by his lonesome.

After his class filed out of the room, he got together whatever work he needed to take home, put his scarf around his neck—not around his face--and made his own way down the hall to the exit.

As he did this, he noticed both male and female teachers, school workers and aides, lunch room ladies and whatever students were still in school, almost moving to the sides of the hall, to the left and to the right, parting the hall in half and clearing the way to him to proceed to the exit.

Teachers, students, aides and whoever else was there—both male and female--stared at him as he walked past them, and he had a slight smile on his face as he moved past them, knowing that he was being stared at—and liking the feeling.

Some people whispered, not thinking that he could hear them.

“He is the most handsome man I have ever seen,” said one female teacher to another as “Mr. Abraham” walked past them.

“Rat face? That is the face of an Adonis,” said another.

“Now we have competition,” said a male teacher. “What chance do I have against this guy?”

“My goodness. He is just so handsome,” said one lunch lady to another. “I wish he was my son.”

“I wish I had him as a teacher,” said one of the female students who stood near the exit. “He is so … I mean so—

“Oh dry up,” said a male student standing nearby. “He is way out of your league!”

“Mr. Abraham” opened the door and left the school for the day, walking on the same streets he and his mother regularly passed when they drove by car to and from the school.

And if Abraham Lincoln Panim got a great reaction when he walked down the school hall to the exit, that reaction continued as he walked up and down the streets to his home, from people who did not know him.

“My, what a good-looking young man,” said and elderly lady to her friend, who had just come out of the local supermarket.

“Yes, wouldn’t we all love to have him as our grandchild,” said her friend.

‘No, dear, I want him as my … husband!” the other woman said, and both chuckled but never lost their gaze of him.

Abraham Lincoln Panim could see out of the corner of his eyes that male and female, young and old, were staring at him as he walked home, and staring at him with awe.

He thought to himself, “I like it, I really do,” as he tugged on his scarf. And why shouldn’t I like it … I have been through hell all through my life because of that … that … rat face that I have, err, had, so why shouldn’t I like all the attention I am getting now?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim came to the front door of his home, took out his key, and put it into the keyhole as two young girls stopped in their tracks to look at him. The key was already in the keyhole, but he purposely took extra time to turn the key and let himself in as the young girls giggled when he turned around and winked at him.

“Yes, I can get used to this, I can get used to this every day,” he thought to himself. “I can never tire of this … and I deserve it, anyway.”

Mrs. Panim came home some time after her son had arrived home. She opened the door after reaching into the mailbox to get the mail, just a few letters, which she put under her arm as she entered her home.

As Mrs. Panim came in, she put her things on the couch in the living room, and she moved toward the kitchen. She took a drinking glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the sink tap and sat down, looking very tired and worn out.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, where are you?” she said in a loud voice. “Come into the kitchen, please.”

Her son was in his room, admiring his features with a hand mirror he found stashed away under the bathroom sink.

“Just a minute,” he said, taking one last look of himself in the mirror before leaving the bathroom and tossing the hand mirror on his bed. He also took his scarf and put it around his face as he had done before, sometimes in his house but not every time.

As he walked out of the room, he put on his scarf, tightening it around his face as he had when he was a rat face.

As he was doing that, he looked at the picture of the smiling Mrs. Stottle that was there. He looked at it, almost seeking approval for what had happened to him.

Abraham Lincoln Panim stared at the picture for a second. “I don’t know, it doesn’t look like her smile is as wide as it was the last time I looked at the picture,” he thought to himself. “I must be so happy that I didn’t see it before.”

He thought nothing more of it, and walked into the kitchen. His mother motioned for him to sit down at the kitchen table.

“I have had a very stressful day, lots of things going on where I was, and I hear that a lot of things were going on at school while I wasn’t there,” Mrs. Panim said to her son.

“What happened—“ said her son, but he could barely get the words out before his mother interrupted him.

“I want to focus on what is happening in school, the other stuff is important, but what is happening in school is what I want to speak to you about,” she said.

“Mom, what is it? I am a little busy—“

“Look, I have some good news for you, so you better listen. When I got back to the school late in the day, I found out that the teacher you are subbing for is going to be out indefinitely, so you are going to lead that class for the foreseeable future. You have done well, and you really earned the spot.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim smiled a broad smile, that could even almost be seen behind the scarf, which was still pulled tightly to his face.

“I am really proud of you, Abraham Lincoln Panim. But as proud of you as I am about this, you are not going to use the school as your personal model runway and show everyone how handsome you are now.”

“How did you find out?” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to his mother as he slowly took off his scarf.

“Look, I knew this was inevitable,” she said to him. “I just did not know when it would come. These things happen in our family, or sometimes they do not happen, with others. Remember Mrs. Stottle when she passed away? Remember her aching feet? Remember when we saw her, and her feet had never changed?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim nodded in agreement.

And when it happens, if it happens, it happens,” she said. “And we certainly don’t strut around like a peacock, showing ourselves off as if we are some type of Adonis, somebody above everyone else.”

“But mom—“

“Look, when this happens, if it happens, we are humble. We do not draw attention to ourselves. We simply go about our business, and we don’t forget when people made fun of us.”

“But mom, I never told anybody to stare at me, I never told anybody to ogle my good looks, I never told anyone to adore me—“

“Listen to yourself. Listen to the words you are using—ogle, adore—just a few days ago, you were upset at how you looked and would never want anyone to stare at you like they did. Today, you are so different!”

“Mom—“

“Listen, I know when this happens, it puts you in a place that you cannot believe that you are in. Think of those that this never happens to, like Mrs. Stottle. What would Mrs. Stottle think of your behavior right now?

“And the thing that gets me the most is that you never told me. You wrapped yourself up like you always do in the morning with your scarf, and you knew the change had happened. You went to school, making people—and your own students—very uncomfortable around you. And you never let me know—you even came in here a few minutes ago with your scarf on, and you rarely wear the scarf in the house.

“You could have told me. I mean, Abraham Lincoln Panim, don’t get me wrong, I am happy that you went through the change. Like I said, not everyone does. Mrs. Stottle never did, she had to live with that for her entire life.

“But to milk the whole thing like you have done, and to push people’s face right in it, I mean, do you truly understand my mixed emotions here? We don’t judge people by how they look. We judge them by how they act. Remember what Mrs. Stottle used to say, ‘Do unto others—“

“But mom—“

“Listen, we have always been truthful about things, but this time, at one of the most important times of your life, you never told me, never let on to anybody, and then, you made your “debut” at school and made people feel uncomfortable as you strutted around the school like Superman.

“That will not ever happen again, do you understand? Never again.”

Mrs. Panim got up from the table, and went into her bedroom, loudly closing the door behind her. Abraham Lincoln Panim said, “I’m sorry,” but he doubted he heard her.

He picked up his scarf as he left the kitchen, and he went back into his bedroom, laying on the bed where his hand mirror was. He again looked in the mirror, but put it down quickly on the bed.

“Is she so upset that I am now the most handsome man in the world, or is she upset that I didn’t tell her what had happened to me?” he thought to himself as he once again picked up the mirror, admiring his features as he continued to think about what his mother was thinking about him.

“I think Mrs. Stottle would be proud of me,” he thought, as he glanced over to her photo. He saw that her smile was now gone, replaced by something of a blank look on her face.

“I must be tired … I must be seeing things,” as he turned away from the picture, and stared into the hand mirror again and again and again.

With his new-found confidence and exuberance, Abraham Lincoln Panim decided to take a walk that evening, a walk like he had taken many times before. But with his physical change, this was going to be a walk like no other.

He got up from his bed, put on his jacket, and wrapped his scarf around his neck, but not on his face. He also stuffed the mirror into his pocket, and then he walked to his mother’s bedroom.

“Mom, I’m taking a walk,” he yelled through his mother’s still-closed bedroom door. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

Mrs. Panim heard her son this time, and said, “Take that walk, and maybe it will help you think!” she screamed back.

He walked outside the house, letting the door close by itself behind him. He entered the fresh air with a big smile on his face, and he began to walk with a cadence that he hadn’t ever remembered that he had in previous walks with himself and his mother.

It was turning to evening, and there was barely enough natural light to use as the street lights popped on, illuminating the area of his walk, which led to the nearby park, as his walks always did.

“Why aren’t people stopping and admiring me?” he said, but while it wasn’t completely dark, it wasn’t as light as it was during the day. “I guess it is too dark for people to admire me,” he thought.

Abraham Lincoln Panim walked his usual walk, and he went by a few other people walking in the park, and a few did, in fact, stop to look at him, some young girls and some older women. He knew they were looking at him, and almost instinctively moved his scarf even further down his neck so it would expose more of his face to everyone.

He reached the point where he normally stopped, sat on the same bench that he had sat on many times before, and took in the night air as people passed him going both ways. Some stopped to look at him, and he sat up when he knew they were staring.

“I have to give them a full look at my features, so I better sit up straight,” he thought to himself as he moved up on the bench.

Abraham Lincoln Panim sat on the bench for some time, and then he saw in the distance a woman jogging with her dog, and as the woman came closer to him, he saw that it was Ariel and her dog Snuff.

“Ariel, Arilel … it’s Abraham Lincoln Panim … please take a rest,” he said as she came closer to him. “Please … .”

Ariel approached, and guided by her seeing-eye dog, sat down on the bench.

“Hi, Abraham Lincoln Panim,” she said, still taking in her breath from her run. “I am really, really glad to see you.”

“And I am too,” he said, thinking to himself, “If she could really actually see me now!”

“Look, Abraham Lincoln Panim, I really want to apologize for the way you were treated the other day. I am sorry that Brandon screamed at you like that. He told me who you were, and what he was so upset about.”

“So he told you about my rat face?”

“Yes, and I really don’t care about that,” Ariel said. “I mean, I can’t really see anything anyway, and you have a nice speaking voice and you are so kind, that well … look, I am blind. Who am I to say anything about how you look, when I can’t even see you?”

“Well, Ariel, things have changed—“

“Yes, they have changed. After Brandon did what he did, I had a long talk with him, and we are no longer a … a … couple, let’s say. He didn’t take it very well, but we aren’t together anymore.”

A big smile crossed Abraham Lincoln Panim’s face, and he tugged at his scarf. “You mean, he is out of your life?” he asked.

“Yes, we are not together anymore,” Ariel said. “He showed what a big jerk he was when he yelled at you like that. I don’t care if you have a rat face, you seem to be a nice guy. Brandon and I were going together for a short time, and it went both good and bad, but I guess you can say that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was no need for what he did, because all we were doing was talking.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim pushed himself up in the bench. “Look, things have changed—“

“Yes, they sure have,” Ariel said.

“Listen, I am not trying to hit on you or anything, but if you aren’t with Brandon anymore … might you like to … well might you like to go out for coffee maybe … things have changed—“

“Yes, I was hoping that you would say that,” Ariel said. “If you hadn’t asked me, I am pretty sure I would have asked you!”

The two laughed, and the conversation stopped, as Abraham Lincoln Panim sat with a broad smile on his face in the moonlight, and Ariel sat back for a few moments.

Some young girls walked past the bench, and each time, Abraham Lincoln Panim sat up straighter in the bench, as he knew he was being stared at without Ariel even realizing it.

“Boy, a lot of people are walking in the park today,” she said, as she finally got up from the bench and was ready to continue her evening jog.

“Wait, before you go, when can I—“

“How about tomorrow, we meet right here at this exact time? It is where we finally met and spoke anyway, and we can take it from there.”

“OK, Ariel, I will meet you here tomorrow at this exact time.”

“Yes, and don’t forget, Ruff, will also be here, so it will be a threesome!” she said as she started to run away from the bench.

“See you then,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said as Ariel ran off into the distance.

He continued to sit on the bench for a few moments, with his arms stretched out from one side of the bench to the other, and a big smile on his face.

At least this time, when people passed him by and stared at him and giggled, he didn’t respond at all. He had other things on his mind.

Once again, he looked over a few benches, and the older woman was sitting on a bench.

He blinked, and once again, she was gone.

“I must be seeing things,” he said, as he walked home with a happy jaunt that he had never experienced before.

The day leading up to Abraham Lincoln Panim’s meeting with Ariel went quickly.

As was the norm now, he chose to walk to school rather than ride in the car with his mother. Not only was the walk good exercise, physically, but also was good exercise for his ego, as people continued to stare at him and his new good looks.

He didn’t stare back, but he knew what people were staring at.

Abraham Lincoln Panim arrived at school, was still being stared at by teachers and students alike, taught his class, was mooned over by several of his fellow teachers during lunch, and got through the day without a hitch.

He did not see his mother at the school that day, and he thought that maybe he was better off not seeing her, because of what had happened before.

“If she can’t handle my handsomeness, I guess that is her problem,” he thought to himself.

After his workday ended, Abraham Lincoln Panim walked home again, and prepared for his meeting with Ariel. As he lay on his bed, he continued to admire himself in the mirror when his mother came home in the early evening.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, I’m home!” she said as she opened the door and it closed behind her.

“I’m in my room, mom,” he said. “But not for long, I have somewhere to go soon.”

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, I have something to tell you. That’s why I came home later than I normally do.”

“Sorry mom, I have to go,” he said, as he hurriedly moved past her and moved toward the door.

“We can speak later, I don’t have time now,” he said, as he rushed out the door, leaving his mother standing and shaking her head as the door closed behind him.

Abraham Lincoln Panim went to the park and to the very spot on the bench that he said he would be when he and Ariel last got together. He was a little early, but it gave him extra time to reflect on what he hoped would be a great time with her.

It also gave him extra time to preen and let people look at him, and people did just what he expected them to do.

Finally, after some time, he saw a figure in the distance, and as she came closer, he saw it was Ariel and Snuff.

She sat down next to Abraham Lincoln Panim, with her dog dutifully at her feet.

“Hi! I hope you didn’t wait too long for me?” she said.

“No, I have only been here a few minutes,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, clenching his teeth at the white lie he just made. “Where might you like to go tonight?”

“I usually go to the corner diner on my street, right outside the park,” she replied. “The food is good there and not expensive, and they are very pet friendly with Snuff. I’ve gone there since I was a little kid, and they know what Snuff is there for. We can go there if you like.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim didn’t know where the diner was, but he said, “OK, just let me know where it is—“

“How about you follow me. I’m not that great on directions, anyway, so it would just be easier for you to follow me.”

“Sounds good to me—“

“I will take you there as part of my daily run. Do you jog yourself?”

“Well … I … don’t worry, I am sure I can keep up with you.”

“OK, you want to go now?”

“Why not?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim and Ariel got up from the bench, and Snuff also sat up on the ground, and Ariel began to run.

“Just follow me,” she said, as Abraham Lincoln Panim started to follow her. He realized that she meant what she said—she was running—and that he would have to run, too, to keep up with her.

He was not used to running, but he kept up with her, somewhat, as he moved into the near distance from him. As he followed her lead, he was running in the direction of the older woman who he had seen many times sitting on one of the benches. He saw her again in the distance, but as he approached, once again, she vanished from sight.

“Maybe I’ve been seeing things,” he thought to himself as he passed the bench where he thought he saw the older woman.

The run continued. Not only did he feel a bit fatigued, but the running was making him perspire, and it moved his hair out of place, so he kept moving his hair back where it should have been, which slowed him down as compared to Ariel and Snuff, who were way ahead of him, but still in sight.

After a few minutes, Ariel and Snuff reached the end of the park, and stopped on the pavement.

“Where are you?” she yelled, and Snuff turned around, pointing in the direction of Abraham Lincoln Panim, who finally caught up with her.

“I thought you said you could run?” she asked, laughing as she asked the question.

“Well, I can run, but I guess I can’t run as well as you can,” he replied, as he fixed his clothes and pushed his hair back to where it should be through huffs and puffs.

“I don’t look my best. I am sweaty and my hair is probably a mess. I won’t get too many looks looking like this,” he thought to himself.

The diner was across the street from the park, and he and Ariel and Snuff proceeded to prepare to cross the street.

“Do you need help crossing the street?” he asked Ariel, extending his arm before he answered.

“No, not me,” she replied. “Snuff takes real good care of me,” and as she said this, Abraham Lincoln Panim pulled his arm back to his side, and then used his hand to push his hair up on his head as he, Ariel and Snuff crossed the busy street and walked into the diner.

“Hi Ariel. How are you doing?” said a man at the front of the diner by the cash register.

“Charley, I am doing fine, and Snuff is doing fine too,” she said. “Oh, and I want you to meet Abraham Lincoln Panim. This is Charley, the owner of the diner. I have known him since I was a little kid.”

“Nice to meet you Charley,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, extending his hand, the one that had been pushing back his hair after the run, to the man, who was about 70 and had white, balding hair.

The two shook hands, and Charley led them and Snuff to a table near the back of the full diner. As they walked to the table, Abraham Lincoln Panim could see out of the corner of his eyes that people were stopping their eating and their conversations and were staring at him as he walked to his destination.

“Even though I’m a mess, they still stare at me. Man, even the way I look, people still think I am so handsome … I love it!” he thought to himself.

“Here is your usual table, Ariel,” Charley said, as he pulled out the chair where Ariel was going to sit, with Snuff at her feet and Abraham Lincoln Panim sitting in the other chair.

“My, what a nice-looking boy your new boy friend is,” Charley said to Ariel as the two were seated. This made Abraham Lincoln Panim smile, and he primped a bit more as

“No, he is not my boyfriend,” Ariel replied.

“What happened to that other guy, what was his name, Brandon? What happened to him?

Ariel did not reply, and she hurriedly picked up the menu from behind the napkin holder. Abraham Lincoln Panim thought this was kind of odd, since Ariel could not see what was on the menu.

“Charley, let me have a cup of coffee, and Abraham Lincoln Panim, would I be able to get a cheese Danish too?

“You can get whatever you want,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said as he quickly looked over the menu, realizing that Ariel had asked for a cheese Danish and almost defiantly said, “The same for me too.”

“OK, and the usual for Snuff, I presume,” Charley said. Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up, not knowing what that meant as Charley walked away after the two placed their order.

“Listen, I’m sorry that what’s his name … Charley … brought up Brandon,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to Ariel.

“No need to be sorry,” Ariel replied, fidgeting with the salt shaker as she spoke. “Charley has known me for ages. He was almost like a second father to me. He kind of took me under my wing, even more so than my parents did.

“He told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do in life, that blindness could allow me to see things in a different way than most people. I know he really cares for me, and I guess he wondered about Brandon, because we came here so often for a good amount of time. Forget it.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim heard what she said, but even being in the back of the diner did not stop people from looking up from what they were doing and staring at him. He knew he was being stared at, and while Ariel was talking, he continued to primp himself up.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim,” did you hear what I said?”

“Uh … yes … I did,” he replied as he had his fingers in his hair, continuing to put it back into place as people turned around and stared at him.

“I still can’t believe that people think I am so handsome, even when I don’t look my best,” he thought to himself. “Wow, if only they knew that just a few days ago, I was the boy with the rat face. Now, I am the most handsome man on the planet!”

After a few minutes of talking and getting to know one another, Abraham Lincoln Panim and Ariel were approached by Charley, who brought them their order.

“Here is the coffee and the cheese Danishes, just like you like them, Ariel, and here is something for Snuff,” Charley said as he bent down and gave the dog a biscuit. “Nothing is too good for my friend Ariel and her new boyfriend.”

“He is not my boyfriend!” Ariel exclaimed, but she did it with a smile on her face that Abraham Lincoln Panim noticed right away while he continued to primp himself.

Ariel reached out, found the bowl with the individual creams in it, opened one up, and poured it into her coffee. Abraham Lincoln Panim drank his coffee black as he took the first bite into his cheese Danish. It had absolutely no effect on him, and he even kind of liked what he was eating.

“I have to tell you, Ariel, that when I was younger, I was very allergic to cheese,” he said, as he bit into the Danish, “but now, I guess I am over it. I kind of like cheese!”

The two continued to talk, and one conversation dovetailed into another.

“I know that you teach at the school … tell me something about yourself.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim took his hands out of his hair, took a long drink of coffee, and said, “Well, there really isn’t that much to tell. I grew up right here, have really never been anywhere out of this area … I was pretty much home schooled by an older lady as my mother went to work as the principal of the school that I teach at.”

“What about your father? What happened to him?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim tensed up a bit. “I really don’t know what happened to him. It’s one of those things … I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“I understand, sorry I brought it up.”

“No, that’s all right. My mom and that older lady, Mrs. Stottle … I had a nice childhood,” he replied, kind of gritting his teeth when he said “a nice childhood.”

“I mean, it was as good as it could be … I would rather look forward, not back, to tell you the honest truth. The best is still ahead of me, I really feel that.”

“I am so sorry I brought up your father … I did not know that he wasn’t in the picture for you.”

“No, don’t worry about it. What happened happened. It’s not important.”

Ariel and Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to converse and get to know each other, but they, and everyone else in the diner, were interrupted by a commotion up front between Charley and someone who had just entered the restaurant.

“Charley, is Ariel here? Is she here with that rat face?” yelled the man who had just entered the diner.

“You have to keep your voice down. You are scaring everyone here,” Charley replied.

“I don’t care. Where is she?” he yelled, and as he looked out at the rows of tables and chairs and the diners in the restaurant, he saw way to the back, and skirted all the tables and chairs and people to get to his destination.

As he got closer, Abraham Lincoln Panim could see that it was Brandon Hartung.

“What are you two doing here?” snapped Brandon as he approached the table where Ariel and Abraham Lincoln Panim were sitting.

“We are having a nice chat.” Ariel said, “This has nothing to do with you.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim saw that all eyes of the diners were on what was happening between the three of them, and not solely on him anymore. Even Snuff stopped eating his biscuit, and started to snarl.

He stood up, and looked right at Brandon.

“Look, Ariel and I were just talking,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “Nothing more. This does not include you. This has nothing to do with you.

“It has everything to do with me. Ariel and I—“

“Look, I would suggest that you move on. All you are doing is causing a commotion here.”

“And what are you going to do if I don’t move on?” Brandon asked as he moved closer to Abraham Lincoln Panim.

People began to move from their tables as the two got closer to each other. Snuff tried to pull Ariel away from the table as his growling got louder.

“I am asking you for the last time to leave us alone,” Abraham Lincoln Panm said as Charley ran to the table.

“You two, you want to settle this, go outside and do it,” Charley said. “You don’t do it in my diner.”

“And what are you going to do if I don’t go away, rat-face boy?” Brandon asked as he cocked his right arm, the hand of which Abraham Lincoln Panim saw was covered with some type of crude glove, as if to prepare for a punch.

Almost instinctively, Abraham Lincoln Panim punched Brandon right into his jaw, knocking him on the floor. Brandon fell so hard that the covering came off of his right hand, to reveal that Brandon had a claw like a lobster instead of his hand.

Ariel bent down to Brandon as Snuff turned the attention of his snarling directly to Abraham Lincoln Panim.

“My glove, my glove!” Brandon screamed, and Snuff brought him the glove as he lay on the floor. He quickly put the glove on, still smarting from the punch.

“How could you do this? How could you cause such a scene?” Ariel screamed out to Abraham Lincoln Panim.

“I was just … I was just protecting myself. He was ready to throw a punch at me with his hand … his claw, whatever you want to call it.”

Charley put his hand on Abraham Lincoln Panim’s shoulder.

“Young man, I never want to see you again,” he said to Abraham Lincoln Panim. “The door is over there. Use it right now, and never come into this diner again!”

“But I was only—“

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, I never want to see you again,” Ariel shrieked as she continued to attend to the fallen Brandon. “You have embarrassed me, you are not my type of person. Get away from me right now.”

As Snuff continued to growl at Abraham Lincoln Panim, he weaved his way to the front of the diner as people stared at him, but not in the way he had been accustomed to.

He left the diner, walking home quickly through the park.

Abraham Lincoln Panim quickly took out his keys from his pocket, and opened the front door to his house. He immediately saw his mother sitting on the couch, which was unusual in itself as in the evening, she rarely sat on the couch, usually going into her bedroom to prepare for the evening.

And not only was she sitting on the couch, but an envelope was on the floor, and his mother was holding a letter in her hands. She also appeared to be staring out into space.

“Mom, what’s going on?” asked Abraham Lincoln Panim.

Mrs. Panim broke out of her stupor, but still stared into space as she said, “Son, you rushed out of the house today so quick. I wanted to tell you that we received in the mail a letter from—“

“From who?”

“From … from your father.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim stopped in his tracks, and ended up sitting on the couch with his mother.

“I wanted to open the letter with you here. He never writes letters to us, never. I thought that this was something that you needed to hear, to read along with me when I read it, but I guess you had more important things to do.”

“Mom, if I would have known—“

“It doesn’t really matter now. I read the letter myself, and maybe it was better off that I read it myself first. It was the first letter we have gotten from him, ever.”

“What did the letter say? Is he doing OK? Is he finally going to be coming home?”

Mrs. Panim did not answer her son right away, and started to shake her head, almost to herself.

“Mom, what did dad say in that letter?”

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, your father isn’t coming home. You’re father is … he is not doing too well.”

Mrs. Panim handed Abraham Lincoln Panim the letter for him to read to himself. The letter said, in Mr. Panim’s own handwriting:

“Dear Diana:

I know that you must be startled to get this letter in the mail completely out of the blue. I am not a good letter writer, so please, just bear with me. I will try to explain the best that I can.

I admit that I am a coward. You were in the hospital all those years ago, and when you gave birth, I was happy and proud, and then I saw our son. I felt bad for him. I know he has gone through a lot, because what you don’t know is that I went through the same thing when I was a child.

I had the same features that I saw in our son when I was a child. I put up with a lot of ridicule from everyone. Even when I started to shed some of those characteristics as I got older, I was still pointed out as “the rat-faced boy.”

And what is worse, and the worst thing about all of this, is that I passed on that gene—or whatever it is--to our son.

I looked at him in the hospital, and my mind raced back to when I was a kid myself, all the stuff that I had to put up with. I simply could not do it again, so I became a coward, and I ran. I simply could not go through again what I had gone through myself as a child, so I ran away from it all.

I was scared, and yes, I was nothing but a coward. What I should have done and what I did were two different things. I was wrong, and I admit it. I left you and our son hanging there without me.

I know it doesn’t mean anything now, but I apologize for my behavior. Diana, I hope that the monthly checks have come in handy, and yes, I was selfish in what I did, but I felt the checks would help our son to grow into the man I knew he could be.”

“Checks?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked his mother as he stopped reading the letter.

“Yes, your father has sent checks to you each and every month since you were born,” Mrs. Panim said. “They were sent directly from a bank outside our area, from another state, and there was never a return address on either the checks or the envelope they came in.

“Several years ago I tried to find out where they came from, but the president of the bank told me that he could not reveal any further information about the checks and where they came from to me. I thought that maybe your father would finally come home, but he never did. I guess the monthly checks gave me hope, but he never came home,”

Abraham Lincoln Panim again started to read the letter.

“Yes, I had the same problem that our son had. I had it through my early years, and I had it during my teen years, although much of it left me by the time I was in my mid teens. By the time I was in my early 20s, I just had the problem with my face, and when I met you, Diana, I still had the problem.

A little while after, I woke up one day, and I looked like every other man around. The problem left me! I could not believe it, and it came at just the right time, because it gave me a chance to know you, and that is when our relationship really blossomed.

Anyway, you know the rest. But let me bring you up to date with the reason I am writing this letter to you.

Seeing our son grow up from afar—“

Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up from the letter.

“What is he talking about, seeing me ”growing up from afar? What is he talking about?”

Mrs. Panim looked up and turned to her son. “Keep on reading, please keep on reading.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim turned back to the letter, and once again began to read to himself.

“Seeing my son grow up from afar has not been fun. As you can tell by the envelope that the letter came in, I actually don’t live very far away from where your house is. I live on the other side of the park. I have seen you, Diana, and our son from his earliest days. I saw you from afar, and I saw him, all covered up with his scarf as I was when I was a kid.

“I hope he has outgrown his affliction like I did, as I haven’t seen either of you walking around the neighborhood together in some time.”

“Dad hasn’t seen me because I haven’t taken walks with you for a while,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to his mother. “So he has no idea how much I have changed, because without seeing you with me, he would have never recognized me.”

“Son, please read on.”

“Diana, I am sick, I mean really sick. I have been in and out of the hospital for the past few months, and the doctors don’t give me long to live. They actually, at least initially, didn’t know why I am so sick, ruling out cancer and a lot of other things.

I wasn’t willing, at first, to tell them my background, you know, about the characteristics I had when I was younger. But I ended up telling them, and they believe that my failing health has something to do with something called ‘zoomorphism’, a very rare disease where animal characteristics are found in humans. The doctors told me that they have discovered that many more people have this than first believed, but most people outgrow the problem as they get older.

They feel that while I did outgrow it, it had some lingering effects on my body, and since they have no other explanation for my current situation, they believe that those effects are greatly impacting my health.

Me, I know that I am dying … dying of a broken heart.”

“Dad … dad is sick?” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to his mother.

“Yes, son, but please read on.”

“I am a sick man. I am not asking for forgiveness. I don’t have long to go. Just writing this letter is taking a lot out of me.

Now that you know where I live, would it be possible, would it be something that you could arrange, Diana, for me to meet our son and to speak with you?

I am hoping he is doing well, and there is nothing that I would like more than to speak with him, even if for a few seconds, a few minutes.

I know that I don’t have much more to go. I just want to meet him, in person, and tell him how sorry I was for my behavior, and really, to tell both of you how sorry I am for what I did and what I put both of you through.

Please do not call me. Simply come to the address on the envelope, and please do it soon.

I hope that I have not upset you too much with this letter. Again, I am not asking for forgiveness, but I need to see both of you, and I want to meet my son and tell him how much I love him.

Thanks. I understand if you decide that a meeting with the two of you is not the right thing to do.”

Sincerely,

Marcus Panim”

“So Mom, are we going to see him?”

His mother looked up again at him as he gave the letter to her.

“Remember what Mrs. Stottle used to say all the time … ‘Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.’”

“So that means we are going to see him?”

“I think if Mrs. Stottle were still with us, she would recite that saying and leave it up to us to decide. So what do you think?”

“I—“

“I think that we should get there sooner rather than later.”

“How about—“

“Yes, I think we will go on Sunday morning to see your father.”

With that, Abraham Lincoln Panim got up from the couch and went into his bedroom. He sat on his bed, then laid down in it, and picked up his hand mirror, which he had left on the bed when he went to see Ariel.

He looked in the mirror.

“My father … I am finally going to meet him,” he thought while he gazed into the mirror. “Why did he have to leave like he did? He really hurt mom …

“I am sure that he will find me as good looking as everyone else does. Ariel doesn’t want me, I don’t care at this point. My father wants me, and I just know that when he sees me, he will be … “

He stopped his thought, trying to think of a word that would fit.

“Impressed. Yes, impressed. He will be so impressed at how I look.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim put down the mirror, and closed his eyes.

He fell asleep quickly.

The day came quickly.

Abraham Lincoln Panim woke up, looked in the bathroom mirror several times before he went into the shower. When he was done, he shaved, and put on a special aftershave that Mrs. Stottle bought him years ago that he had never used.

He then got dressed, and decided to really get dressed to the hilt, picking out his best suit and tie to wear to meet his father for the first time.

“My real ‘Sunday Best’ to make me look even better than I already do,” he thought to himself, admiring himself in his hand mirror numerous times before he was done.

He finally emerged from his room, and went into the living room, waiting for his mother to be ready to go.

In a few minutes time, she was done, and she was dressed in business attire, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, why are you dressed like that?” his mother asked him. “You are dressed like you are going out on a big date. And that smell … why did you dunk yourself in aftershave like that?

“We are going to see your father. We aren’t going to a wedding, or a bar mitzvah—“

“I wanted to dress my best to ‘impress.’ I want my father to see how good I look.”

“Don’t you think it is more important for your father to find out who you are, your accomplishments, how you have matured, rather than what you look like?”

“It is all in the wrapping. If the outside wrapping is so attractive, it just makes everything else … well, not second best … but it helps to have a good wrapping. First impressions are very important—“

“Your father said he is dying. Your father just wants to meet you. He doesn’t care if you looked like you once did. He doesn’t care at all. He just wants you to be there—“

“Yes, but I want him to see what he has missed when he skipped out of here. He missed you and he missed me—“

“No, Abraham Lincoln Panim, he missed the old you, the boy who did what he had to do to get by, who wasn’t so stuck up with his appearance that nothing else mattered.”

“Mom, I was stuck up on my appearance back then, but just the opposite way. I hated the way I looked, with that rat face. People made fun of me, I couldn’t even barely go outside without people looking at me.

“Now, I can go outside and do whatever I want because people admire me. They look at me and think, ‘That is the way I want to look.’ But they know they can’t look this good. I give them hope … and don’t forget, I always wear my scarf to remind me where I was, and where I am now.”

“You have become … I don’t know … you have become more vain about your looks then you were before. What would Mrs. Stottle say about all of this?”

“Mrs. Stottle … Mrs. Stottle would admire me too.”

After that remark, Mrs. Panim gave her son a long glare. Her son saw her eyes, and they seemed to be red and tearing.

“Enough about that,” she said through the tears. “Let’s go and see your father. And please, for me, please just act like you really are, not like you are acting today or during the last several weeks.

“Please, if not for yourself, please do it for me.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim got his jacket and wrapped his scarf around his neck. He then helped his mother on with her coat.

“Son,” Mrs. Panim said as the looked at the envelope of the letter her husband sent her, “I think we will walk there, It doesn’t seem to be too far away.”

The mother and son left their home to take a walk together, something they had not done in a while. She thought that the walk would do them good, clear out both of their heads and make them focus on what they were going to be doing.

Abraham Lincoln Panim had other thoughts.

“OK, so we are going to walk. That is great. It is a nice day out, people will be around, and I know that they will look at me … and think I look great!”

Mrs. Panim and her son got to the door of Mr. Panim’s home, and Abraham Lincoln Panim saw the doorbell and pushed its button, which produced a loud ring.

There was an intercom on the door. After a few seconds, a voice came through the intercom.

“Who is there?” the voice said.

“It is Mrs. Panim and my son.”

“We were expecting you. OK, I am going to buzz you in.”

The buzz came, and Mrs. Panim turned the doorknob and the door opened. Both stepped into a small foyer, and they almost immediately saw a woman with her back turned. The woman was poring over some papers, and Abraham Lincoln Panim noted that she appeared to be an older woman, short in stature, with her hair tied up in a bun.

In an instant, the woman put down the papers and turned toward the mother and son.

“Hello, I am Nurse Stottlemeyer, and I have been taking care of Mr. Panim for a few years. He has been very, very sick.”

Mrs. Panim gulped, and Abraham Lincoln Panim looked at her and said in a whisper, “It’s Mrs. Stottle!”

“No, it can’t be,” his mother replied. “She died several years ago. She just looks like her. Her last name is different.”

“She said Stottlemeyer. Didn’t she tell you that she was ‘Miss Meyer’ before she got married?”

“Hrrumph!” said the nurse, trying to get the full attention of Mrs. Panim and her son. “Are you ready to see Mr. Panim now?”

The mother and son quieted down, both shaking their heads affirmatively.

“Mr. Panim has requested to see you each individually. He can only see you each for a few minutes. He simply does not have the strength for any time more. Mrs. Panim, would you like to go in first?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Panim said, still kind of staring at the nurse as she was led to a room by her. The nurse, who had something of a limp, opened the door and let her in to speak with her husband alone.

Abraham Lincoln Panim sat down on a couch in a corner of the foyer, nervously put his hand in his hair, pushing it up in place, and when the nurse came back into the room, he continued to stare at her.

“Can I help you with anything?” the nurse asked, aware that she was being stared at.

“No … no … you just look like someone that my mom and I used to know,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, staring at the woman’s thick legs. “No, it can’t be.”

“What can’t be?” the nurse asked.

“Umm … nothing … umm … how do I look?

The nurse hesitated, then said, “You look like an average person your age,” as she went back looking at her papers.

“No, how do I really look?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked again, a little more forceful this time.

The nurse looked up from her papers. “Look, you appear to be fine to me. You look good enough to see your father, if that is what you are asking me.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim, looking for a different answer than he was getting, sat back on the couch, and continued to play with his hair. He looked around the small room, which was pretty barely furnished, but across the room, he saw a plaque on the wall. It appeared to have some writing on it, and not being able to clearly see what the plaque said, he got up from his seat and walked over to wall where the plaque was.

The nurse looked up from her papers, saw that Abraham Lincoln Panim had become interested in the plaque, and said, “Yes, I put that up a year or so ago. It is something I believe in fully, and I hope that everyone believes in it, to tell you the truth.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim got to the plaque, and read its inscription to himself:

“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim read the plaque over and over to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. After a few minutes of doing this, he heard a door open, and saw his mother come out of the room.

The nurse went over to her, as Mrs. Panim looked clearly distressed, crying and shaking as the nurse led her to the couch to sit down.

“Can I get you something, m’am, maybe some water to calm you down?” said the nurse to Mrs. Panim.

“No, no,” Mrs. Panim said through tears. “I will be OK.”

“I pretty much expected your reaction. Mr. Panim is pretty sick, and he has been that way for awhile,” the nurse replied. “If you need anything, let me know.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim rushed over to his mother, but the nurse stood between him and his mother.

“It is your time to see your father. Are you ready to see him now?” the nurse asked.

“Yes, yes,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said, as he put his hands through his hair again.

“Do you have a mirror? I need to make sure—“

“This is not a beauty pageant,” the nurse replied. “Go in like you are.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim followed the nurse to the door, and as he did, he instinctively pushed up his scarf over his face, exactly as he had worn it when he had a rat face.

The nurse opened the door, and Abraham Lincoln Panim entered. He looked to the left, and his father was lying on what looked like a large hospital bed, with tubes and nozzles coming out of seemingly every part of his body.

With all the machinery covering his father, he could barely see his father’s face, and barely could see his eyes.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim, please come closer to me so I can see you,” his father said, and his son moved closer to him so he could see him better.

“How are you doing dad?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked.

“I can barely hear you,” Mr. Panim said in a very breathy voice. “Why do you have that scarf over your face?”

“Well—“

“Please take it off. Your mother told me all about it, and I know all about what you look like now.”

“Abraham Lincoln Panim almost ripped the scarf off his face, and it dropped to floor, exposing his full face to his father to see.

“So dad, what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“What do you think about how I look? Aren’t I—“

“That is not important now,” his father said, followed by numerous coughs. Abraham Lincoln Panim was ready to go out to get the nurse, but the coughing stopped.

“I’m doing as good as I possibly could be, with all of these things coming out of me,” his father said. “Now tell me about you.”

“Dad, you still haven’t told me how I look.”

“Well, I will answer that when you tell me how I look.”

His father then started coughing again.

When the coughing stopped, Abraham Lincoln Panim asked his father, “Why did you leave--”

“I was a coward,” his father said through more coughing. “I saw you as me, going through a good part of your life with a rat face. I remember what I went through … I just could not do it again.”

“So you just left us? I never knew you, but do you know what you did to mom?”

“Yes, I do. I really do. And I was sorry, I told her so today. You don’t know how many times I wanted to come back to the two of you, but I just couldn’t. I was scared, I was a coward. I thought that the money I sent each month made up for me not being there, but I was a fool. I missed out on so much.”

“And we missed out, especially mom. Do you know we used to walk in the park when I was a kid, and I always thought she was looking for you when we were there. You said in your letter to us that you often saw us from afar in the park. Why didn’t you ever come up to us, contact us … I mean, you were so close.”

“Yet so far,” his father said, followed by more coughs. “In my mind, I was thousands of miles away from you, even though there were times I was just a few feet from the two of you. I am just so sorry for what I have done to both of you.”

There was a pause in talking, and then Abraham Lincoln Panim said, “Now dad, what do you think about me … your are ‘impressed,’ aren’t you--?”

“Look, I know that you became a teacher. Mom says that you are a good teacher. That is really what I am concerned about. You became a—“

Before his father could finish his sentence, he began to cough uncontrollably, and the nurse came into the room, walking over to Abraham Lincoln Panim.

“I am sorry, but his health is very bad,” she said in a whisper. “I can only give you a few minutes with him. He is weak. I can’t give you any more. Please say your goodbyes and meet your mother in the foyer.”

Abraham Lincoln watched the nurse go back out the door, and when she left, he said to his father, “Dad, what did I become? Please let me know, what did I become?”

The nurse peaked her head through the door. “Young man, you have to leave now.”

“But dad did not finish what he was saying—what did I become dad, what did I become?”

The nurse came over to Abraham Lincoln Panm, put her hand firmly and forcefully on his shoulder, and tried to lead him out of the room. He resisted.

“I just want to know what my father said I had become. That is all I want to know.”

“Look, I am sorry, you must leave now,” the nurse said. Mrs. Panim, much more composed than before, came into the room, and she had to lead her son out.

As they left the room and the nurse closed the door, Mr. Panim, still thinking his son was in the room, said in almost a whisper,

“A success.”

Mr. Panim coughed some more, and then closed his eyes.

Abraham Lincoln Panim and his mother never heard what Mr. Panim said, as the door had closed behind them when he answered his son’s question.

“What was I, what was I?” Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to scream out as his mother put her hand on his shoulder.

“Keep that thought. Maybe the next time we visit, your father will answer you,” she said to her son.

The nurse turned to them as she showed them out the door.

“If there is a next time,” she said, as Mrs. Panim and Abraham Lincoln Panim walked out the door and walked home.

They didn’t say a word between them.

Neither Mrs. Panim nor Abraham Lincoln Panim heard about Mr. Panim for many weeks.

The monthly checks still came, again directly from the bank without Mr. Panim’s home address.

A few times, Mrs. Panim retrieved the letter that Mr. Panim had written to them some time before, copied the return address onto a new envelope, and wrote her husband a new letter, but she never received a return letter from him.

Abraham Lincoln Panim suggested to his mother on more than one occasion that the two should go over to his home again, but she would not do so.

“He wanted us over there the one time, and we obliged him,” she would tell her son over and over again. “If he wanted us to come over another time, he would have written me back.

“He never did, or at least, he hasn’t yet, so until he does, I think we should stay away from him, at least for now.”

In the ensuing weeks, and with the weather warming up, Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to take walks in the early evening, but he did not enjoy the walks as he once had.

People did not stare at him when he would walk to the park, and into it, as they once did, and he found that he was staring more at them than they were staring at him.

Each time he had his walk, he would sit down on the same bench where he met Ariel and Snuff, but he never saw either one of them again.

And again, he found that he was staring at people more than they were staring at him.

He also would periodically look down the row of park benches to look for the older woman who seemed to be always sitting on one of the far-off benches, but she also was nowhere to be found, even though Abraham Lincoln Panim still looked for her.

With little to keep his interest, his time in the park became shorter as the weather became warmer, and he spent less and less time in the park during the ensuing weeks.

But he still made the walks, almost out of habit, and he did not give up hope that he would see Ariel and Snuff, and the older woman in the distance, once again.

One evening, he dutifully made one of his walks, and once again, he went unnoticed by others, him staring at them more than they were staring at him.

He sat down on the same bench, looked for Ariel and Snuff, but they were nowhere to be found.

Abraham Lincoln Panim sat for a few minutes, and then felt it was time to leave. As he had continued to do, he looked down the row of benches, but this time, he saw what looked like the older woman sitting a few benches away, like she had done before.

He got up, and ran towards where she was, and stopped at the bench where he had seen her sitting.

But as he ran over to where he thought she was, seemingly in a blink of an eye, she wasn’t there anymore. He briefly looked around, but she was gone.

“I thought I saw her,” he thought to himself. “I know I saw her. She was here, I just know it.”

As he walked back to his house from the park that night, he didn’t see anyone pass him, which he found very unusual. And when he got to his house and took out the key to open the front door, he found his mother sitting on the couch, holding a letter and weeping. There was also a medium-sized box on the couch which appeared to be unopened.

“Mom, what’s the matter?”

Mrs. Panim tried to get out the words, but her tears washed away any hope that she could say something. Instead, she handed over the letter she was holding to her son, who read the letter to himself:

“Mrs. Panim:

I regret to inform you that your husband, Mr. Marcus Panim, passed away after a long illness.

Adhering to his wishes, he was cremated, with his ashes in the enclosed urn. He had no worldly possessions, but I am sending you this last, final check, which amounts to all the money he had in the bank.

He wanted you and your son to have it. He had nothing else to give you but this money. I have already taken out my final pay from his account, and I have also paid off any outstanding debts that he had.

Again, I am sorry to have had to tell you this way, but it might be for the better.

Be Well,

Nurse Stottlemeyer”

Abraham Lincoln Panim dropped the note on the floor, and he sat down next to his mother, who continued to cry. He put his arms around his mother, but no tears came out of his eyes.

“What did I become?,” he thought to himself. “Dad, you left us before you could finish your sentence … how could you do that to me?

“Dad, what did I become?”

Not much happened during the next few weeks after Mr. Panim’s death.

Mrs. Panim, after grieving for a spell, ended up putting the urn with her husband’s ashes on a shelf in the living room that held numerous photos of Mr. and Mrs. Panim during happier days, including their wedding portrait. She had never taken the photos down during Mr. Panim’s absence; the urn was the first addition to that shelf since he left.

Abraham Lincoln Panim’s grieving time was much less than his mother’s. He really did not know his father well, so although he had met the man briefly, it is not as if the man was a major presence in his life.

However, he continued to think constantly about that unfinished sentence, constantly asking himself, “Dad, what did I become?” over and over again.

He continued to take walks late into the afternoon into the early evening, hoping that Ariel and Snuff would venture back into his sights, but that never happened. He also looked for the older woman sitting a few benches away from him but she, too, had vanished.

Every once in a while, when he would sit on the bench, his mind would drift to the same question he constantly asked himself: “Dad, what did I become? What did I become.”

He asked himself that question constantly, but he never formulated a possible answer to the question.

Mrs. Panim took some time off from her duties at school, but after mourning for a few days, she decided that the best place for her to be was in school, and she returned.

Abraham Lincoln Panim returned almost immediately to school. At this point, school had become his refuge, but things seemed different to him even there.

When he would walk to school or back home at the end of the workday, no one appeared to be looking at him, and he found that he was staring more at the people he passed in the street than they were staring at him.

When in school, his class had pretty much returned back to the way they were when he first took over the class. The students were not as attentive as they once were, had stopped staring at him, and there were some occasions that he had to discipline a few students for their behavior in class.

As for his relationship with other teachers, he continued to take his lunch in the teachers’ room each day of the workweek, but the teachers pretty much ignored him, and he often sat alone while eating his lunch. Nobody stared at him anymore, none of the female teachers fawned after him, and the teachers pretty much excluded him from any discussions they had.

He was cordial to the other educators, always saying hello to them when he entered the room, but he rarely received any reply.

The days turned to weeks, and the warmer weather had come upon the school as it moved on to the last days of the school year.

On one of these days, Abraham Lincoln Panim had another rough morning in the classroom when the bell sounded, and his room emptied as students went to lunch.

As he always did, Abraham Lincoln Panim took his lunch out of his drawer, and proceeded to the teachers’ room. He entered, and said “Hello” to the other teachers without any response. He sat down on the same couch he always sat on, and proceeded to eat his lunch. And as had been the norm, nobody spoke to him, or even seemingly acknowledged that he was there.

As he ate his lunch, he saw the usual group of teachers talking. On the far side of the room, he also saw someone he had not seen before, who was sitting at a small table in the corner of the room.

To Abraham Lincoln Panim, at least from what he could see from the back and with a glare in his face coming from the window by the table, the person at the table appeared to be a woman who was sitting there, all alone. Based on what he could see through the glare, it appeared to be a woman who was sitting away from everyone else in the room.

He didn’t think anything of it, and he continued to eat his lunch. He was also looking over some papers, a recent spelling test that he gave his class that needed to be graded, so he took out a pen and looked over the tests one by one.

But as he was finishing his lunch and concentrating on the tests, he felt a “p-lunk!” right next to him, and he looked up from the tests, and the woman who he had seen sitting alone at the table on the far side of the room, had sat next to him on the couch.

“Hello, how are you doing?” asked the woman.

Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up from his tests, and he looked at the woman. He did a double take.

“Anything wrong?” asked the woman, who was now clearly in his sights.

The woman was older, and even though she was sitting, he saw that she had thick legs and he also saw that she wore her hair in a bun on her head, something he did not see when she was sitting across the room.

“Mrs. Stottle? Are you Mrs. Stottle?” he asked her, now thoroughly focused on her.

“Mrs. Who?” she asked. “I didn’t get the name you asked—“

“Mrs. Stottle. Mrs. Stottle. You are Mrs. Stottle.”

“No, you must be mixing me up with someone else.”

“But your ARE Mrs. Stottle.”

“No, I am Mrs. Meyer. I guess I must look like someone else. But I have been Mrs. Meyer for the past, I don’t know, many years.”

“But you look like Mrs. Stottle. You talk like Mrs. Stottle—“

“But I am not Mrs. … Mrs. Stottle.”

When Abraham Lincoln Panim calmed down a bit, Mrs. Meyer told him about herself.

“I was a teacher, a regular teacher, so many years ago. I met another teacher, we were married, and I left the profession. But when he died a few years back, I came back to teaching, as a sub.”

“But … well … –“

“Yes, I know, you have never seen me before, Actually, in all my years of teaching, I never taught at this school, not as a regular teacher and not as a sub. Just about all of my teaching was at the school on the other side of town. This is my first time here. No one knows me here at all. But you have to go where the work is.”

“Yes, but Mrs. Stottle … I mean, Mrs. Meyer—“

“Look, the bell is about to ring for the next class. I walk with a bit of a limp, so I have to leave a minute or two early. But just let me leave you with this thought:

“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

When she uttered these words, Abraham Lincoln Panim became so ruffled that he dropped his test papers on the floor. He bent down to pick them up, gathered them quickly, and looked up, but Mrs. Meyer was gone.

“Mrs. Meyer … Mrs. Stottle … Mrs. Meyer—“ he shouted out, but no one answered as the bell rang to begin the next period.

As the other teachers filed out of the room, Abraham Lincoln Panim sat there, completely perplexed.

“Mrs. Stottle WAS here,” he thought to himself. “She was here. I know she was here.”

The bell than rang, with Abraham Lincoln Panim having not moved from the couch. Other teachers came into the room, and he realized that he needed to get back to the classroom immediately. He gathered up his things, and ran out of the room as quickly as he could, right to his classroom, where he saw his class lined up outside the door.

“What happened to you, ‘Mr. Abraham.’ You look like you just saw a ghost!” said Melissa, leading the class at the door as she always did.

As he unlocked the door and let himself and the students into the class, he had a tough time getting into the educational rhythm, as he kept on thinking about the older lady with the bun on her head.

His class continued to be rambunctious, but he let a lot go this time around, because he, himself, could not concentrate fully on the class, only on that woman.

Somehow, he got through the day, and as the students exited the class, Abraham Lincoln Panim continued to sit at his desk, pretty much staring into space while he thought of the older woman.

Finally, he realized that he had been sitting at his desk for many minutes, and when the janitor came in to start to clean the floor in the class, he knew it was time to leave.

He gathered up his things and left the school, and this time, he didn’t know if anyone was staring at him, and he wasn’t the one doing the staring, either. He walked right home, opened the door, and went right into his room.

The hand mirror was on his bed, but unlike most other times since he lost his rat face, he did not look into the mirror at all. He pushed it aside, and just put his head on the bed’s pillows, pretty much lost in his thoughts about the older woman.

Later in the afternoon, his mother came home, and while she was taking her coat off, Abraham Lincoln Panim hurriedly left his room and saw his mother go into the kitchen and take out some food which she was going to prepare for dinner.

“Oh, I didn’t think you heard me come home,” Mrs. Panim said. “I know I usually tell you that I am home, but today was a really busy day for me, and honestly, I don’t think I have the strength—“

“Mom, I had an interesting experience today,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to his mother as he sat down at the kitchen table. “Can I talk to you about it now?”

“Yes, I guess so, but as you are talking, I need to get this food going, or we won’t eat until late, and I know you like to go for a walk—“

“Mom, I met a teacher today in the teachers’ room … well, do you remember when we went to see dad, and the nurse … I mean … we both thought that she looked like Mrs. Stottle?”

“Well … yes … I thought that she kind of did at first, but the more I looked at her, the more I know that I must have been grieving for your father, because I don’t think she really looked like her that much at all.”

“Well, I did, and the more I looked at her, the more I knew that she was Mrs. Stottle, as odd as that might sound.”

“It is impossible. But what is your point?”

“Well today at school, while I was eating lunch, I saw this older woman … she was sitting alone, an older woman, and she … she started to talk to me … I had never seen this woman before … but she looked like Mrs. Stottle.”

Mrs. Panim chuckled. “You know what they say … we all have a double somewhere.”

“No, mom,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “She looked like Mrs. Stottle, talked like Mrs. Stottle, was a teacher like Mrs. Stottle—“

“Just a coincidence. These things happen,”

Abraham Lincoln Panim then stood up from the kitchen table.

“And you said that the woman was older … a sub?” his mother asked him.

“Yes, she was in the teachers’ room and she told me that she normally taught at the school across town, and had never been in this school, so she didn’t know anyone … but for some reason, she came over to me.”

Mrs. Panim stopped preparing her dinner meal, and turned toward her son.

“Now, you are sure that you met this woman in the teachers’ room?” she asked.

“Yes, while I was eating lunch.”

“That is really odd. Do you remember her name?”

“Meyer, Mrs. Meyer.”

“No … no … I am thinking about today, and all of our teachers were present, with the exception, or course, of Mr. Praeger, who you have taken over for. We didn’t use any substitute teachers today.”

“What? How could that be?”

“And you are saying her name was Meyer? I don’t know a single sub by that name, and an older lady … no, I don’t know any sub named Meyer in the entire school district. You are sure of it?”

“Mom, I swear to you that she was there. She sat right next to me. She was an older woman who walked with a limp, and she wore her hair in a bun. I swear to you that she was there.”

“Sorry, you must be mistaken. There is no Mrs. Meyer who I know as a sub, and we did not use subs today at all.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim made a bee line back to his room, jumped on his bed in dismay, and the hand mirror feel to the floor with such a thud that it cracked right down the middle of the glass.

He did not notice what happened.

The weeks came and went quickly for Abraham Lincoln Panim.

The end of the school year was nearing, and his class was getting more rambunctious and out of control by the day.

He did what he could with his class, but it was clear that they were not in the same learning mode that they were in right after he had lost his rat face.

But he persevered, did everything he was doing before when the class was listening to him, and he dutifully took each day as “a new day,” but the class continued to act up on him on a regular basis.

With just one more week of school, the class was acting even more out of control than they had been during the previous weeks. As he was trying to teach, the class was laughing while his back was turned, and as he turned around, he saw Melissa toss a ball of paper to the back of the class in the direction of another student.

“Melissa, this is not the gym. What did you throw back there?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s really nothing.”

“Mr. Abraham” went to the back of the class, and picked up the ball of paper, which had fallen short of its destination. He started to unroll the ball of paper.

“’Mr. Abraham,’” Melissa said in a giggling voice. “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim ignored what she said, and fully unrolled the ball of paper. In big block letters, he read it to himself:

‘HE’S GONE. HE’S GONE. WE DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO HIM ANYMORE. MR. RAT FACE IS GONE!”

“Mr. Abraham” looked up from the unrolled paper.

“What does this mean, Melissa? What do you mean ‘He’s gone?”

Melissa started to laugh out loud, and the class followed her lead, laughing until the bell rang for lunch. The students got up from their desks and ran out of the room, laughing all the way out.

Abraham Lincoln Panim stood where he was, pretty much not moving, and once again, he never received the answer he was looking for.

After a minute or two, when he looked back and forth at the unrolled paper, he rolled up the paper himself, threw it in the wastebasket, and hurriedly got his lunch and walked directly to the teachers’ room. He sat down in his usual spot, and ate his lunch, gulping it down faster than ever.

As he ate, he once again looked around for Mrs. Meyer, but she was nowhere to be found. Instead, he saw the usual group of teachers talking as they normally did. Among them was Mr. Sedall, who had not said a word to him since he lost his rat face all those many weeks ago.

Abraham Lincoln Panim finished his lunch in a flash, and then took out some more papers to grade. This time, Mr. Sedall broke away from the other group of teachers and sat next to him on the couch.

“Hey, ‘Mr. Abraham,’ bad break.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up from his papers. “What do you mean, ‘bad break?’”

“Well, I thought you knew,” said Mr. Sedall, smiling and seemingly holding back a full laugh. As he did that, the group of teachers that had been talking together gathered around the couch, also with big smiles on their faces.

“You sure you didn’t know?” Mr. Sedall asked.

“Know what?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked.

“I don’t know if it is my place to say this,” Mr. Sedall said.

“Say what?”

Well … Praeger is better, He isn’t sick anymore. And like I told you a long time ago, we wanted him back.”

“So, what does that mean?”

“You are gone, you are out of here, you are history when the school year ends in a few days,” Mr. Sedall said with a big smile on his face. “Praeger is coming back, and you are gone!”

The other teachers let out a big laugh as the bell rang to end the lunch break.

“What do you mean?” Abraham Lincoln Panim asked again and again, but Mr. Sedall and the other teachers filed out of the room, laughing all the way out.

Abraham Lincoln Panim sat there motionless. The bell for the afternoon period rang, but he was still sitting there. He finally realized that he had to get back to his class quickly, got his things together, and ran back to the locked door of the class.

He was met by Melissa and the other students.

“Hey, ‘Mr. Abraham.’” Melissa said. “Why are you running? Did a cat catch your rat face … err, your tongue?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim ignored what she said, and the class filed into the room, giggling and laughing from the moment they entered the room until they left school at the end of the day.

During the afternoon, very little work was done, and the students seemed to be in almost a festive mood. “Mr. Abraham” tried to teach them, but again, he was constantly thinking about what Mr. Sedall told him, and he had a hard time concentrating during the afternoon, which seemed to go on longer than it really did.

When the afternoon bell finally rang and the students left the classroom, Abraham Lincoln Panim was happy to see them all go, but he called over Melissa before she left the room.

“Who told you about me?” he asked her. “How did you know?”

Melissa was still giggling. “Look, I have to meet up with the other kids, I have to go.”

“Please, just answer me one thing and then you can go. How did you know?”

“About you losing your job?” she asked, as an even broader smile broke out on her face.

“Yes, please tell me.”

“Well, OK … I heard about it a few days ago from Mr. Sedall.”

“Why is Mr. Sedall telling things like this to you behind my back?”

“He’s my uncle. I see him all the time outside of school. He’s my uncle, my Uncle Joe. He told me, so I told all the kids—

“Listen, I have to go—“ and Melissa ran out of the room, giggling and laughing all the way out.

Abraham Lincoln Panim just sat at his desk, and continued to sit there as the janitor came in to tidy up the room.

“Anything wrong?” the janitor asked him, but he did not answer.

The janitor, sensing that something was wrong, came closer to the front desk where Abraham Lincoln Panim was sitting.

“Believe me, I know all about it,” the janitor said to him. “I have been doing this for 40 years at the school. You would not believe some of the things that the kids have said to me here.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim barely heard him, and the janitor saw that he was upset.

“Listen, I have seen it all and heard it all for the past 40 years, but let me tell you, I have said this one thing over and over to myself when things seem low, and it has helped.

“This is what I have said:

“Do unto others as you would have the do unto you … treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself.”

Upon hearing that, Abraham Lincoln Panim abruptly looked up, but the janitor, who had been right at the desk when he uttered those words, was gone. He looked around the room, but the floors were still dirty, as if the janitor had never been there.

After looking out at the classroom, Abraham Lincoln Panim got his things together and left the room.

Abraham Lincoln Panim walked home, and again, he felt that nobody was staring at him at all. In fact, for a late spring afternoon, he discovered that he was just about the only one on the street at the time.

He walked straight home, opened the door, and he saw his mother sitting on the couch.

“Mom, what are you doing home so early?” he asked her.

“Sit down, son,” she said.

Abraham Lincoln Panim took of his jacket and his scarf and put these things on another chair near the couch, which is where he put his briefcase. He then sat down on the couch opposite his mother.

“Mom, what is going on? In school today—“

“I know what happened in school today. I did not want it to happen that way, but let me explain. First of all, that is the reason that I am home so early. Let me—“

“What is going on?”

“Let me tell you. Please let me talk.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim slid back on the couch, and listened to what his mother had to say.

“This has been a very difficult time for both you and me right now, what with your father and everything else. And then, to get this thrown on top of everything—“

“What—what about my job?”

“I am getting to that. Let me explain.

“A few weeks ago, the days that I came home very late from school, I was at various conferences with the Board of Education. They only have a certain amount of money that can go around, and they were talking about budget cuts.

“One way that they cut the budget that they have is to get rid of teachers, get rid of administrators, and even get rid of schools. And that is what they were talking about during these meetings that I attended.

“But mom, what does that have to do with us?”

“Let me continue.

“One of the reasons that I was at these meetings is that our school was being looked at as one that might be closed down at the end of the school year. There is a similar school on the other side of town, and the Board of Education believed that that school could handle both their own pupil population and the new population of students coming from our school.

“So after long and hard deliberation, they decided to close our school down. Some of our teachers will go to the other school, but for all intents and purposes, or school is history after the school year ends.”

“But what about now? How does that affect me …?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim knew that he had made a mistake with that question, and he rephrased it.

“ … how does that affect you and me?”

“Well, since everything will be moving over to the other school during the next school year, after the current school year is over and done with, I am out of a job. The other school has a principal who has been there forever, but there is no place for me, so I am out of a job in a few days. I am done.”

“Mom, that is terrible,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said to his mother as he moved closer to her and gave her a hug.

After he let go of the embrace, he saw that she had started to cry.

“Mom, I am sure there is some other school you can work at.”

“No, because of the budget cuts, there is no place for me in this school system. I am done. I think I am going to have to retire, retire before I wanted to.”

Tears were streaming down Mrs. Panim’s face. There was a long pause, and then Abraham Lincoln Panim asked his mother:

“Mom, what about me¿ I am sure the school on the other side of town needs someone like me … I am so young, so good at what I do—“

Mrs. Panim wiped away her tears and tried to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth.

“Mom … mom … ?

Mrs. Panim wiped away some more tears.

“Abraham Lincoln Panim … you are also out of a job.”

“Why mom … how can I be out of a job? I did a—“

“Remember, I pulled a lot of strings for you to even get that job. You had no experience, you had no teaching license, you had nothing. But you filled a need when we were in a pinch. We had no idea that Mr. Praeger would be out as long as he was, and you kind of fell into the job.

“Now that I don’t have a job and I can’t pull any strings anymore, you are also out of a job.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim stood up.

“How can that be … how can that be … ?

“In fact, Mr. Praeger is well enough to come back right now, and the Board of Education wants him to come back and teach the last few days before the end of school, and they are retaining him for next year, even with the budget cuts. Maybe he knows someone in high places … I just don’t know, But he is being retained.

“So today was your last day as a teacher. I have to go back and tie up some loose ends, so you have to give me everything you have from your class, and I will give them to Mr. Praeger when he gets to school.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim was incensed. He started to pace back and forth.

“Look, that was not my decision. That is what the Board of Education decided. Mr. Praeger is a well-respected teacher who has been doing this for years. You just started out.”

Abraham Lincoln Panm continued to pace back and forth as his mother kept on talking through her tears.

“That is one reason that I was home so late every night. I have had a long career, and while the end came a bit sooner than I thought it would, I tried to convince the Board of Education to keep you on, but again, without—“

“Mom, I am going to take a walk,” said Abraham Lincoln Panim to his mother, and he grabbed his jacket and scarf and headed out the door, slamming it as he left.

He hurriedly got to the park, and sat on the bench that he usually sat at. It was earlier than normal for him to have come for his walk in the park, but the sun soon faded.

He thought to himself, “Ariel … then dad … now this. What is happening to me?”

Abraham Lincoln Panim looked around, hoping to see the older woman sitting on the bench some ways down from him, but she was not there. And as had happened when he walked home from what became his last day as a teacher, he didn’t see anyone at all walking in the park.

“What is happening? What is going on? What am I? What did dad say to me?”

He put his head in his hands, and started to cry.

“I almost wish that I was that rat face again … no, I do wish that I was that rat-faced guy again. I REALLY DO WISH I WAS THAT RAT-FACED GUY AGAIN!”

Abraham Lincoln Panm sat there weeping, as the sun gave way to the dark, with the moonlight the only light cascading down on him.

THE BEGINNING

Rat Face (The Strange Tale of Abraham Lincoln Panim)

Friday, August 28, 2020

What's Next?

Thursday, August 27, 2020

The Entire Novel, Chapters 1-40