I refused to ditch the ceremony out of fear of him showing up because Mr Jones didn’t deserve that. He was a fantastic man who deserved to be celebrated for all of the work he had done for the school and the time he gave to his students over the years. For me, he was an angel after my father passed away. I spoke to him a few times a week and after each talk I felt immensely better. Nothing took away the pain of losing my dad, but Mr Jones helped me focus my pain and deal with it rather than let it consume me. I knew Risk, May and Hayes, if they were actually attending the ceremony, were going because they loved Mr Jones. He was their after-school music teacher and second biggest fan after me. He bought them their first instruments with his own money.
He had encouraged them to reach for the stars and now they were stars.
I wasn’t going to let the possibility of seeing Risk mess with showing my respect to Mr Jones. I was a grown woman and even though I was worried about possibly seeing him again I wasn’t letting that keep me from doing something that I wanted. It was likely that I was working myself up over nothing. Maybe I would get a little sad, but sure, who wouldn’t? I loved him desperately at one point in my life but that was the past. Risk probably didn’t even remember me, I was only his childhood girlfriend. He was a rock star now, and thanks to Anna and Hannah Porter, I knew he had been with a lot of women, some really famous ones, over the years.
The chance of him remembering me in his living-in-the-fast-lane life were slim to none.
I entered the school, the familiarity of it made me smile. I headed towards the school’s PE hall where the decorated signs and pictures of Mr Jones all pointed. When I entered the hall, I wasn’t surprised to see it full of people. How packed the place was made me smile. Understandably, not all of the student body could be present, there was just a couple of hundred kids taking up the first four rows of seats. Likely children who had a strong relationship with Mr Jones.
I made my way to an empty seat in the middle of the second back row of chairs. Ideally, I would have just stood at the back of the room, but there were people ushering everyone to sit down on any seat that was available so that was what I did. I ended up being wedged between two stocky men. I was thankful when the ceremony began a couple of minutes later. The lights in the hall were suddenly dimmed and a hush spread across the room. A projector switched on and on the back wall of the room, a film began to play.
“Hi, everyone!” A blond-haired girl wearing black-framed glasses appeared waving happily. “Thank you for coming along today to celebrate the wonderful career our dear Mr Jones has had during his forty-two years at Sir John Leman High School. My name is Sarah Marks. I’m a sixth former and I’m also the student who has been lucky enough to be selected to record and edit this short film for our lovely Mr Jones. I want to quickly thank every student, past and present, and each staff member who appears in the film because without you guys, we wouldn’t get to show just how special Mr Jones is and how happy we are for him to start the next chapter of his life. I think everyone will agree that no man deserves to put his feet up more than him. This is for you, Mr Jones.”
Instant applause filled the hall then it died down as Dr Jones by Aqua began to lowly play in the background of the film, making everyone chuckle. A roll of clips of Mr Jones throughout the years began to play and one thing that stood out was just how happy he was and how big the smiles were on the kids’ faces around him. It wasn’t all games and laughter though; there was a clip of a boy who looked down in one of the school’s hallways and Mr Jones kneeled in front of him, talking to him before giving the student a hug and pulling a smile from him as he wiped his eyes. It showed the ups and downs that the counsellor of a school had but in the end, everything always ended in a smile.
I was smiling happily until my teenage face popped up onto the projected image on the wall, followed by Risk, May and Hayes as they played on their instruments in Mr Jones’s office sometime during our last year at school. Students, and some parents, whooped and cheered before being shushed. There was audio with this clip and normally I would look away or run away, but I was trapped where I was and found that once I saw Risk, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. My heart jumped when teenage Risk leaned over and kissed my cheek, my younger self smiled and looked at him like he was the only boy in the whole world as he sang his rendition of ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. I could hear the teenage girls up front sigh dreamingly from my spot at the back of the hall.