Scary-Eusctace: A School Scrapbook

A pair of Catholic high-school teachers, love-birds, are pseudo-witnesses to a modern horror-tale evoking ideas about American drought.

A special tragedy-haunting story in honor of the American high-school Columbine shootings on this 20th-anniversary commemoration-year of 9/11. Thanks for reading, 

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A special Catholic school in New Jersey was home to a multicultural student-body, including Asian and Irish-Americans. The coursework in this respected Catholic high-school included readings of Mary Shelley, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Stephen King, and John Knowles.

The library and amenities inside Eustace-Catholic (high-school) were very good, and the cafeteria and hallways were well-maintained and offered a clean educational environment in the United States. These Catholic-school students were grateful they didn't live in troubled areas of the world like Tel Aviv, Belfast, and Sierra Leone.

One teacher was presenting a work by Eamon de Valera comparing the Quit India movement against British rule in the 20th Century with the Irish struggle for Catholic sovereignty from British-Protestant dominions in the 20th Century. The Eustace-Catholic students appreciated how/why these lessons informed their understanding of sociocultural 'customs' and contracts in this emerging globalizing world of Wall Street and the Internet!

One Eustace-Catholic teacher is an Irish-American named Charlize O'Meara who teaches advanced-algebra to 11th and 12th grade students as well as some selected gifted 10th-graders. O'Meara is secretly having an affair with another Eustace-Catholic teacher, but no one knows this.

CHARLIZE: I'm also the assistant-coach of the Eustace-Catholic Irish girls' field-hockey team, seeking to defeat rivals Eastern.

The teacher Charlize is secretly dating is widower Amlan Satan, an Algerian-American Eustace-Catholic English teacher who presented that work by Eamon de Valera about India/Ireland political ideology/customs parallels and paradigms. Charlize finds Amlan worldly and dashing and nerdy and very kind.

Satan encourages his students, mostly 12th-graders (seniors!) to take lunches outdoors and talk about the lessons taught in English (world literature) that day in school at Eustace-Catholic. He believes they'll get a nice fresh exposure to life on Earth.

One day in class, Satan (Amlan) tells his students about the 'Troubles' between Catholics-Protestants in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) and how the 'children' are caught in this modern era matrix of hell, having to become 'martyrs' of this ordeal of socialized and even rationalized sectarian betrayal/wrath normalized into everyday life and how this image of corrupted lifestyle is 'woven' into the media/literature and folklore and street-comics and graffiti of the youngsters growing up seeking to learn more about the true scope of humanity's promises. Satan decides this is a nice reflection of one of the readings of James Joyce's book Dubliners which he presented just one month ago.

CHARLIZE: One of our Eustace wall-art portraits in our world-history mosaic is a painting of the legendary Joan of Arc!

AMLAN: I try to encourage students to compare world-literature to modern cinema/animation to grasp socialized customs.

Suddenly, one day, after talking the first half-day of school off for personal time with each other, Charlize and Amlan drive to school together in Amlan's Saab and kiss for a while while parked in the lot and then head inside the Eustace-Catholic building, only to find the entire school has been violently attacked! The cafeteria is filled with students who're either killed or fled from some horrific crime incident involving a serial-killing. Teachers and students and staff adult are either dead or fled.

One survivor shows Amlan/Charlize a drawing of an eerie mystical horror-figure whom she claims is responsible for the slayings and horror-show that day in Eustace-Catholic that day. Amlan/Charlize are horrified and still traumatized they'd taken the first half-day off that day when the crimes occurred, a 'fortunate romantic' getaway for them which facilitated them avoiding this horrible tragedy...this is still haunting them, and their love-affair. The female Eustace-Catholic student who shows Amlan/Charlize (who've become 'survivor-celebrities' now!) claim the 'demon' responsible for these slayings was a ghoulish small-sized evil 'Irish leprechaun' in some authentic costume and wielding a machine-gun and ancient steel sword. Amlan/Charlize really don't know what to say.

AMLAN: Let's just co-write a book about this American ordeal, darling.

CHARLIZE: There's no other way to get over such a world trauma, Satan.

AMLAN: You're right.

"Fear was Eric's ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize terror. He didn't want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked" (Dave Cullen --- On Columbine Massacre).

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)