The Special Teacher

Chapter 1
Just a Job

Ethan knelt down with his knee on the soft but well-worn carpet, his hand placed gently on the knee of the twenty-something man sat before him.

“You’re doing so well!” he praised in the most condescending, the most saccharine sweet voice. He felt so fake using it, so silly. Any normal twenty-something man would have slugged him in the face for using such a patronising tone. But this wasn’t any normal man.

The young man’s bare toes wiggled against the carpet, his navy shorts with their elastic waist and tiny, useless pockets were gathered around his ankles as he sat bare bottomed, exposed, on a brightly coloured but oversized juvenile potty seat.

The twenty-ish young fellow, a six-foot tall well built man with bright blue eyes and curly blonde hair, was named Edward. But to everyone here he was known as Teddy. Little Teddy, a sweet little boy in a grown man’s body.

Teddy smiled. He lapped up the praise in the sing-song voice Ethan used for little ones. He didn’t mind the hand on his knee, on the contrary it was reassuring. He yearned for physical contact, for a hand on his knee, a pat on his head, a cuddle.

The sounds of liquid splashing against plastic alerted Ethan to Teddy’s success. He immediately gave the young man a bright smile, rubbing his knee gently. “Good job Teddy!” he announced.

Teddy beamed as well. “Doin’ tinkles!” he announced loudly, proud of his ability to wet the potty rather than his pants.

“That’s right! What a big boy you are!” Ethan assured, moving his hands to sit tightly atop the man’s bare thighs, to make sure he didn’t stand up or hop up and down on his bottom in excitement and give Ethan a disgusting shower.

Teddy squirmed a bit but didn’t try to move thankfully. He stayed still until he was apparently all done. It was quite an achievement for him. He hadn’t used the potty successfully since he’d enrolled two weeks ago.

“All done?” Ethan double-checked when the noise had died away for several seconds.

Teddy looked down at his crotch, a finger poking into the side of his mouth in concentration. After a moment he nodded sharply, gazing at Ethan with bright innocent eyes.

“Okay, upsidaisy,” Ethan chirped, slipping his hands under Teddy’s armpits not really to lift him, the six-foot tall man was about ninety kilos and far too heavy to lift, but to prompt him to stand up.

Teddy obliged, standing straight up, his hairless, soft penis hanging between his legs. He wasn’t embarrassed by his exposure, he still looked proud at his accomplishment. There was no expectation of privacy here, not a hint of modesty. He just grinned like an idiot, which he was, while Ethan took a tissue from the dispenser and gently dabbed the young man’s pee-pee dry.

Then he leant down to pull the boy’s shorts and undies back up but was stopped by a sharp “No!”

Teddy was fine with the helper cleaning his penis dry but apparently this he had an objection to.

“Teddy, you need pants on buddy,” Ethan explained, knowing the proclivity some of the boys had for nudity.

But Teddy shook his head. “I c’n do it!” he insisted, leaning down and pulling up his thick training pants first, little snowmen and penguins printed on the soft cotton, then his navy shorts. His shirt ended up half tucked into the shorts and undies but Teddy looked satisfied.

“Awll done!” he announced. “See I doned it.”

Ethan chuckled lightly. “You sure did,” he agreed, gently untucking the boy’s bright yellow polo shirt.

Teddy arms closed around him without warning as he finished fixing his shirt. It wasn’t unexpected though. Teddy really liked cuddles. He’d greeted Ethan with a big one the very first time they met. Teddy had no sense of danger or fear of strangers. He was perfectly innocent.

“That’s a good boy,” Ethan cooed softly to him, returning the hug, letting Teddy’s head rest on his shoulder and rubbing the man’s back in slow circles.

After their cuddle Teddy automatically took Ethan’s hand. He didn’t need to be told to do that anymore, it was instinct now, it was routine. If nothing else the little ones here craved such routine and structure. It made them feel safe.

Ethan led the young fellow back across the hall to a door that announced “Juniors’ Jungle!” in bright letters. Ethan wasn’t really sure why they bothered with such a silly sign when none of the children in the room would be able to recognise the letters on it, never mind actually read it.

The door opened easily from the outside, but once they were in, it closed with a noticeable click. The only way out was to enter the four-digit pin code on the pad next to the door. They didn’t want the people in this room wandering around outside. They were all adults, but they needed constant supervision.

As soon as they were inside Teddy broke free. It wasn’t like Ethan could have held him back if he wanted to, the man had three inches and twenty kilos on him. But there was no need to hold his hand any longer, they were safely back with the rest of the class. Teddy hurried straight back to the blocks he’d been playing with before he’d sharply raised his hand and screeched “Poddy!” a few minutes ago.

Ethan didn’t get the chance to see what Teddy was trying to build now as he was immediately confronted by a beautiful young woman with the face of a model and a playful smile. She was the kind of blonde bombshell Ethan had fantasised about since he was a pre-teen. And now she was standing there in front of him topless, her perfect breasts on display.

Unfortunately her pretty blonde hair was in pig-tails and her only item of clothing right now was a pair of navy blue shorts. Ethan frowned, forcing himself to look her in the eye. “Lizzie, where is your shirt?” he asked her firmly.

“Off!” Lizzie chirped happily. She didn’t have the mental capacity to lie, or to feel any sense of body modesty.

“Yes sweetie I can see you got a bit nakey. But where is your shirt?” Ethan tried again.

Lizzie twisted back and forth and pouted as she took one of her long pig-tails and began nibbling at her hair. “Dun’ wan’ it,” she fussed.

Ethan nodded but said, “I’m sorry Lizzie, but at school we have to keep our clothes on. Now are you a good girl or not?”

She pouted hard but finally nodded. “I a good giw-ul,” she said.

“So you’ll put your shirt back on?”

“Yeth,” she agreed in defeat, walking over to the toy box and retrieving her yellow polo shirt, handing it to Ethan and raising her arms straight up in the air. The poor young woman knew how to take her shirt off but not how to put it back on.

Ethan carefully slipped her shirt back on, then sent her off to play with the sensory tub. That settled he looked around the classroom, spotting his counterpart.

“You didn’t happen to notice the naked girl wandering round the room?” he asked Jackson angrily.

The only other man in the room who wasn’t wearing a yellow polo shirt looked up from where he was working on shapes with another boy. Jackson was a year older than Ethan, a fit twenty-seven year old with dark hair and green eyes. He was usually a laid-back guy but he didn’t look relaxed at the moment.

“You know how hard it is when only one of us is in here,” he retorted. “There’s twenty of them, makes it impossible to keep tabs on them all.”

“I get that mate. But really, Lizzie, walking around with her boobs out. You didn’t notice that?” Ethan asked.

Jackson smirked. “I was going to get around to it… eventually.”

Ethan shook his head. “They’re like toddlers Jackson, you can’t take advantage like that…”

“Exactly. They’re like toddlers. Toddlers run around topless, they run around naked. It doesn’t do them any harm, they like it, they’re more comfy that way. So, I let her have her fun for a bit, no harm done,” Jackson said, cutting Ethan off.

All Ethan could do was roll his eyes. He didn’t have time to waste arguing with his colleague. There were twenty oversized toddlers in the room and they needed teaching, they needed supervision.

Ethan had started at Ngatea Special School three weeks ago. It was far from his first choice. He had a degree in psychology and a year’s teacher training. He expected to work in a high school. But there were no jobs and the rent in Auckland was outrageous even with a well-paid job. So he’d been reduced to living at home, doing relief teaching on and off, working weekends and nights at a supermarket. It was embarrassing. Finally he’d applied for this job, fixed-term relief at the special school for intellectually disabled children.

It was not what Ethan had expected. He thought the children would be, well, kids. Instead they turned out to be adults, mostly in their twenties and thirties. At first he’d felt incredibly awkward around them. But soon he came to realise they just had big bodies. On the inside they were just silly little boys and girls, the sweetest and simplest of little tots.

Ethan was now the co-teacher of the Junior Room. His charges were between three and four mentally. They could only learn the simplest of things, their shapes, colours, how different materials reacted to manipulations. The alphabet, numbers, even these were well beyond most of them. The Senior Room had young men and women whose mentality was between five and eight years old, the Nursery was for those with an infant to two year old mentality.

At first Ethan had questioned how a small, rural town like Ngatea could have so many intellectually impaired people. But the principal, Meredith, explained to him that the school accepted students from across the country. Many families moved to the town to send their kids there. Apparently the school had that good a reputation.

Certainly everyone spoke of the woman he and Jackson were replacing, Susan, as an amazing teacher. She certainly had to be, to have managed the class all by herself. Ethan knew he and Jackson were poor replacements, but it was only for 8 weeks after all and it was impossible to get someone truly highly qualified to drop everything and fill in for such a short time. He just hoped they didn’t screw up too badly before Susan got back from her trip to the UK. He wanted a good reference out of this job more than anything.

Jackson was in a similar position but he wasn’t coping as well. Men weren’t natural carers, at least in Ethan’s opinion. But it was natural to have men teaching in a classroom like this, where dealing with the toddlers’ tantrums required physical strength. Again, he had to wonder how Susan did it.

Ethan headed over to where Liam was creeping on the floor, pushing a Thomas the Tank Engine toy train. Liam was mid-twenties, with short brown hair and build similar to Ethan’s, neither thin nor overweight, but not by any means fit. It wasn’t just their similar age and size that made Ethan pay more attention to Liam though. He didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, but it was Liam’s caretaker.

Claire was a very beautiful young woman and clearly had a good heart given that she was caring for her disabled little brother. Ethan had met her at their regular parent/guardian check-ins and they’d immediately hit it off. It had gone so well that they were meeting up over the weekend for dinner. Ethan feared it was a violation of the rules, so he kept quiet about it. He especially needed to keep it on the down low after he’d chided Jackson for getting involved with another caretaker the week before.

But that was different, he knew Jackson wasn’t after a real relationship. He was a dog. All he wanted was to get laid and move on. That was bound to cause him problems if the woman went to school admin.

Ethan looked down at Liam, smiling as he listened to the young man making choo-choo sounds to himself, immersed in imaginary play. He was actually a cute kid, down on his hands and knees in his little uniform with the dirty soles of his bare feet facing up. None of the kids wore shoes or sandals to the special school. Parents were strongly encouraged to send them in bare feet, like they really were in a primary school. Ethan had no idea what the reasoning was, beyond further making them look like little kids. Perhaps that was reason enough. Certainly that seemed the point of the rest of their brightly coloured uniforms. They looked exactly like the local primary school’s but with navy shorts instead of black.

The idea of being kept barefoot didn’t sit that well with Ethan. He had tender feet and was never a very wild rambunctious kid, the kind who usually came to school without any shoes back when he was a little boy. But Liam didn’t seem to mind at all. From the colour of his soles and the obvious calluses he rarely wore shoes outside of school, if at all. In fact it seemed all the kids here shared the rusty brown or tar black callused soles of children who only rarely wore shoes.

Ethan knelt down next to the young man and placed his hand on Liam’s shoulder to get his attention. Liam smiled immediately and moved to sit on his bottom.

“Who you got there buddy?” Ethan asked him brightly.

Liam held up the toy train. “Domas twain,” he said cheerily.

Ethan shook his head. “Are you sure buddy? I think that might be Gordon,” he suggested.

Liam looked at the toy a moment and then nodded with certainty. “Uh-huh! Daz Go-don!”

“And what sound does Gordon make?” Ethan prompted.

Liam knew the answer to this one. He eagerly announced, “Go-don go choo-choo!”

“That’s right! Clever boy!”

“Choo-choo! Choo-choo! Twain go choo-choo!” the excited twenty-something man repeated, twiddling his dirty bare toesies together and shaking his toy train in the air.

Ethan let him get the energy out then asked, “But do trains run on carpets?”

An instant shake of the head from Liam. “No-ooo,” he sing-songed.

“Where do trains belong then?” Ethan asked, scratching his chin, playing dumb.

“Twacks!”

“Of course?!” Ethan declared, slapping his forehead like he’d forgotten, earning lots of giggles from the grown toddler before him.

“Well, do we have any tracks around here for Gordon?”

Liam nodded and dropped back to his hands and knees, crawling rapidly across the carpet, pushing the train in one hand until they reached the plastic set of tracks made specifically for the Thomas set. A thirty-something red-headed woman was pushing the James engine back and forth on it, but it was otherwise abandoned. Liam quickly settled Gordon down on the tracks and began pushing him around, making little tooting sounds for his whistle.

Ethan stood and watched the young man play alongside the woman, Rosie, for a couple minutes. They didn’t play together, they were too young of mind for that, but they got along playing next to each other. They both looked absolutely engrossed, happy, lost in imagination. It was times like these Ethan almost felt jealous of their simple lives.

A finger poking him roughly in the arm ended his reverie and Ethan turned to find a portly man of thirty standing before him, his navy shorts soaked at the crotch, urine running down his legs and onto his bare feet before staining the carpet yet again. The man, Lewis, sucked on his wrinkled thumb with teeth ruined from constant suckling, his eyes glassy and empty of complex thought.

“Had an ack-ee-dent,” the man explained, gripping his wet crotch with his free hand to show his teacher.

Ethan sighed. And this was when he remembered why the last thing he should be feeling for these young men and women was jealousy.

 

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