Scary Stories - 8 | In Euclidian Geometry, a parallelogram is...

In Euclidian Geometry, a parallelogram is
a (non self-intersecting) quadrilateral with
two pairs of parallel sides.
During my freshman year of high school, I
had third period Geometry Honors in a portable
classroom- a rickety structure with aluminum
siding that is the size of a single classroom
but stands as its own building.
Portables A-Z were lined up in two neat rows
of 13 outside the main school building.
These individual classrooms presented the
unique dilemma that the students inside them
walked to each portable outside for long enough
to get uncomfortably wet in the rain, but
not long enough to spend precious time putting
on a raincoat.
I’m certain that most teenage girls would
be worried about their outfits, but I was
an exception.
Despite the inconvenience, I enjoyed having
class in a portable.
It was quieter out there, and when it rained
the drumming noise on the aluminum roof could
easily soothe me to sleep.
And, if the wind blew just right on the metal
stairs, a harmony would ring out through the
classroom.
The first day of school my Geometry teacher
seemed completely normal.
Ms. Hambly was a middle-aged lady with freckles
and rusty brown hair who had decorated the
portable with poster-sized memes relevant
to math and 50 cent craft shapes you’d find
somewhere like Hobby Lobby.
She gave us a little printed-off infographic
about the year that included some class information
and logon codes for online programs like the
online textbook.
It seemed she’d doodled a bunch of shapes
along the edges of the infographic while she
was waiting for it to get copied- I had assumed
she was just bored.
She wished us a great year, and luck with
the rest of our teachers before she left.
The second day of school, Ms. Hambly has us
go around the room and said which shapes were
our favorites- a real throwback to kindergarten.
(I answered a dodecagon, because it was the
most obscure thing I could think of.)
After everyone finished, she told us that
her favorite shapes parallelograms.
The foam shapes on the wall, I noticed, were
all parallelograms of some sort.
“Parallelograms are so easy.
They have their definition in their name.
And they’re a riddle.
They’re a puzzle that I’m always deciphering,
and soon, you’ll be deciphering it too.
This year we’re going to learn a lot about
parallelograms.
Soon, they’ll become your favorite shape
too.

I promise.”
It was a promise.
I wasn’t convinced.
The first odd thing I noticed about Ms. Hambly
was that she left all the windows and doors
open in the portable, even with the air conditioning
or heating running full blast.
This wasn’t a problem during the summer,
because I had Geometry in the early morning
when it was still cool out.
But once the fall crept along the entire class
began to get chilly.
“I get creeped out with the doors closed,”
she explained.
“We’re all alone out here.
You never know what could spring out at us
in this room.
Bring a jacket to my class from now on so
you stay warm.”
Rhomboids are quadrilaterals whose opposite
sides are parallel and adjacent sides are
unequal, and whose angles are not right angles.
Rhomboids are the most common shape to be
addressed as parallelograms, although rectangles
and squares are also considered parallelograms.
Our unit on parallelograms wasn’t that far
into the year.
She started off the unit with a long speech
on the significance of parallelograms, which
I fell asleep during.
I wish so badly now that I hadn’t- there
might have been information in her speech
that could give me some sort of clue or reason
as to why she did what she did.
She assigned us a packet on parallelograms
that night.
The next morning she walked into class frantically,
as if something was wrong.
“Get out your homework,” she said quickly.
“I tell you every single day to get out
your homework and you never do it.
You should know what to expect by now.”
We did, but three or four people hadn’t
done theirs, which sent Ms. Hambly into a
sort of rage.
“You’re just trying to make me have a
bad day, aren’t you?
Well, I’ll tell you something, and that’s
that you can’t control my emotions.
You can’t.
And nobody can.
Only I can.
So you can stop trying to make my day miserable.”
The lights in the dingy portable caught her
face, and she looked worn-down, almost frail,
and her hair was frizzy, as if it hadn’t
been washed in a few days.
“Fine, throw it away.
Pretend like the homework was never assigned.
This is a bad habit that you have to break.”
She opened up a powerpoint and adjusted the
projector so that it was on the board.
She muttered under her breath, “I’m trying,
I’m trying so hard, but somedays I just
can’t do this.”
I was driving home after winter color guard
practice at about 8:45 or so, and as we turned
to leave the school via the road that passes
right by the portables, I saw Ms. Hambly walking
towards the staff parking lot at a fast pace,
clutching a stack of papers to her chest.
She looked up as our car passed, and when
she saw me in the front seat, she gave a weak
smile my way.
“Who’s that?”
my mom asked.
“Ms. Hambly,” I answered.
“She teaches Geometry.”
“Is she nice?”
“She’s nice enough.”

A parallelogram with base b and height h can
be divided into a trapezoid and a right triangle,
and rearranged into a rectangle.
This means that the area of a parallelogram
is the same as that of a rectangle with the
same base and height.
Our unit on parallelograms intensified the
next day when Ms. Hambly walked into class,
didn’t say anything about the homework from
the previous night, and pulled up a picture
of a parallelogram on the projector.
It had some parallel and congruent markings
but nothing else.
“Look at that,” she said, motioning towards
the parallelogram.
“It’s just a shape, to you, but don’t
you get it?
There’s always something more.
What does it mean?
There’s got to be something more.
Somedays I can see something more.
That’s all I’m here for; that’s the
whole reason I do this, because Euclid clearly
saw something and I need to find it to.
There’s some other meaning to all of this.
Don’t you feel it?”
I could already hear the snickers around the
class, but Ms. Hambly was dead serious.
Ms. Hambly paced by my desk, and I caught
a whiff of her.
She smelled awful- almost like she hadn’t
been showering, and she was looking increasingly
frail by the day.
Her skin was pale like chalk, and her fingernails
were torn off like she’d been chewing them
off in agony.
But the oddest thing I noticed was that she
had drawn all over her arm.
I could only see what was poking out of the
sleeve of her sweater: tons of little tiny
parallelograms all over her wrist.
The sum of the distances from any interior
point of a parallelogram to the sides is independent
of the location of the point.
(This is an extension of Viviani's theorem).
The converse also holds: If the sum of the
distances from a point in the interior of
a quadrilateral to the sides is independent
of the location of the point, then the quadrilateral
is a parallelogram.
Luckily, the day afterwards was Saturday,
and we had our first snow day of the year
on Monday.
When we returned on Tuesday, the color had
returned to Ms. Hambly’s skin, she no longer
stunk, and the parallelograms had been scrubbed
off of her wrist.
Her hair was thick and luscious.
She jumped right into a well-planned lesson
on proofs for parallelograms, complete with
a powerpoint, and assigned a sensible amount
of homework in the textbook.
Somehow it was a relief- a weight lifted off
my shoulders.
Nobody in the class, even Ms. Hambly herself,
commented on her sudden turnaround in behavior.
But she seemed- detached, and artificial,
as if somehow it was merely a facade.
I fell ill with a fever on Wednesday, and
by Thursday it was clear that I had strep
throat.
I was absent from school on Friday, Monday,
and Tuesday as well.
On Thursday, Matt (a good friend of mine)
sent me a text (I have these saved in my phone;
maybe I’ll upload in the future): Hey, where
u been?
Can’t get through math without you.
Hambly going batshit again.
I responded: Really sick.
You wouldn’t want this.
Even if it meant missing Geometry.
What kind of batshit... parallelograms again?
Yeah
He texted me Monday.
Hey N, not ing around, Hambly’s crazy.
Worse than ever this time.
What’d she do?
FLIPPED out at me and started yelling about
those damn parallelograms.
I swear she’s, like, always high.
She smells really bad again too.
Of course it’s you.
Did you not do your homework again, dipshit?
That’s beside the point.
;)
stfu you know this class is stupid.
I [our friend] is getting a little freaked
out over her too and pretty much nothing phases
her

I started to worry a bit again, and so I convinced
my mom that I was sick enough to stay home
until lunch on Wednesday so I wouldn’t have
to deal with Geometry.
But Thursday was another deal altogether.
When I walked into math class, the entire
portable stank- reeked, in fact.
Ms. Hambly’s hair was sticking out all over
the place in a frizzy mess.
Her eyes were wild and bloodshot, like she
hadn’t gotten any sleep recently.
Even after the bell rang and all the students
filed in, covered their noses, and waited
for class to start, Ms. Hambly did nothing.
She sat at her desk, muttering things to herself
and shuffling papers, and every once and awhile
she’d stand up and walk around the classroom
(much to the dismay of our sinuses) but then
promptly sit back down and began to scribble
things on pieces of paper.
It was the oddest thing I’d ever seen.
The rest of the class didn’t seem to care.
I vowed that I would ask her if she needed
help.
I sat, terrified, rocking in my chair, working
up the nerve to ask if she was alright, and
if there was anything I could do.
The bell rang, everybody else left, and I
nervously crept over to her desk.
“Ms. Hambly?”
“Hmm?” she looked up at me, but her eyes
seemed accusing.
“Uh-” I froze.
“I was, uh, I was absent.
For a week.
Well, a week and a day, but yeah.
So when should I get the work?”
She paused for a long moment, staring me down
suspiciously, and then told me, “Come see
me after school.
I’ll give it to you.”
I left the portable, and the smell of fresh
air hit my nose.
It’s amazing how wonderful nothing at all
can smell when you compare it to something
much worse.
The sum of the squares of the lengths of the
four sides of a parallelogram equals the sum
of the squares of the lengths of the two diagonals.
That afternoon I returned to Portable A to
find Ms. Hambly asleep at her desk.
She was snoring loudly, and her body heaved
with every breath in and out.
There were papers scattered all over the table.
As I dared to walk closer, I realized that
they were covered in parallelograms.
There were hundreds of them- thousands, even,
with words scribbled in the margins trying
to prove something or another.
I wish I could show you what they looked like,
but they are all either in police custody
right now, or destroyed.
Some parallelograms had congruent markings,
others had angle measures, and the penmanship
was nearly illegible.
I couldn’t make out a single word, but the
writing seemed fiercely determined.
The ink often bled out onto the page as if
Ms. Hambly had been pressing too hard as she
wrote.
“Ms. Hambly?”
I asked.
As she looked up, her face struck me.
It was weak and worn- down.
She had a large dot of blue ink on her forehead
from falling asleep against the ballpoint
pen.
Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she told
me.
“I need your help.”
“Of course,” I said softly.
“What?”
“You have to see something in all of this,”
she told me.
“You have to understand that there’s something
more than just these numbers and these figures.
Please.”
She began to hand me paper after paper filled
with her nonsensical diagrams and numbers.
They came from everywhere: drawers in her
desk, underneath the computer.
She even rolled up her sleeves to show me
the drawings on her wrists.
“I can’t rest until I get it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly, standing
up.
“I have to go.
My- my mom’s waiting.”
A lie, and we both knew it.
“Please,” Ms. Hambly begged.
“I know that you can see it.
You’re smart.
I knew it from the very first day.
You were the answer to this question I’ve
been asking my entire life.
Take these.
Take them.”
She began to shove the papers towards me.
“Can’t you see it?
I know you can.
I’m almost there.
I’m so, so close to figuring out the answer.
To all of this.”
“I have to go,” I muttered, and I ran.
I full-out sprinted away from Portable A,
away from my school, and up to the first place
I knew she wouldn’t find me.
The marching band practice field.
I sat on the lamppost where my instrument
section used to gather for after-practice
sectionals.
And I cried, because I was utterly and absolutely
terrified.
That night Ms. Hambly slashed her wrists in
the shape of a parallelogram.
She bled to death on the floor of Portable
A (the door was still wide open).
The janitor found her that night during his
final trash run.
The school was closed for a week during investigation,
and then Christmas break started.
Rumors were all over the school, but I didn’t
confirm or deny a single one of them, because
I knew that the parallelograms were between
me and Ms. Hambly.
And, of course, the police.
When we returned in January, we had a new
teacher who was much kinder to us.
She didn’t like parallelograms as much,
and she closed the doors and windows to the
portable (which was newly replaced, and so
it had the best heating system of all 26).
The weeks following Ms. Hambly’s death,
I became quite interested in parallelograms.
There is something about them that is quite
mysterious to me.
They have so many properties and laws that
it seems that the entirety of the world can
be proved through them.
I found myself up late one night, 7 library
books on Euclid spread across the table, trying
to decipher what it all meant.
Ms. Hambly had meant what she said: I have
the answer.
As soon as I realized how distraught I had
become that night, I threw the books to the
ground.
I ripped two of them to shreds in anger.
There is something I am missing, and there
is something we are all missing.
And I will not stop short of insanity trying
to prove it.