Behind the Blackboard
By Amber Lee Jordaan
The house was quiet, wrapped in the familiar, domestic hum of a Tuesday evening. In the living room down the hall, Stefan Avery’s parents were winding down, the low murmur of the television filtering through the cracks of his bedroom door. Stefan sat at his desk, the blue light of his laptop illuminating open browser tabs filled with lesson plans, teaching theory, and upcoming curriculum deadlines. He was exhausted. He had spent the last two hours trying to unwind by watching a soccer match, staring at the screen as the players moved across the pitch, but his mind had refused to quiet down. The match was over now. The athletic distraction had faded, leaving him alone with the heavy, familiar weight of his own isolation.
He was highly motivated, a top-tier student teacher with a bright future ahead of him, but his life was entirely scheduled, compartmentalized, and tightly locked. He told himself he had no time for anything outside his studies. Yet, the emptiness in the quiet room was suffocating.
Needing a distraction, Stefan pulled out his phone and opened a chat app. He wasn't looking for a relationship; he just wanted to feel less alone for an hour. As he scrolled through public profiles, a name caught his eye: Ruby.
On a whim, he tapped 'Add.' A few minutes later, his phone buzzed. She had added him back.
It took Stefan three days to work up the courage to actually type out a message. When he finally did, the response was instant. Ruby was warm, sharp, and easy to talk to. Within forty-eight hours, the casual distraction turned into an obsession. Because they had never met in person, Stefan felt a strange, detached safety behind his screen. He poured himself into the chat. They talked for days, stretching into weeks—day and night. He would text her between his lectures; she would reply while he was sitting at the dinner table with his family, his thumb typing furiously under the edge of the wood while his mother asked him about his day.
Eventually, the chat app felt too limiting, and they exchanged phone numbers. The intimacy deepened, fueled entirely by the text bubbles passing between them.
But then, the shift happened. Ruby started to catch feelings. She began asking more personal questions, hinting at what it would be like if they finally crossed the digital barrier and met up in the real world. She was crushing on him, hard.
The moment Stefan sensed her emotional proximity, the walls inside him slammed down. Panic flared in his chest. He had already warned her early on that his student teaching took up all his time, that his studies were his absolute priority, and that he didn’t have the capacity to date. But seeing her affection laid out in plain text made it too real. Without warning, he ghosted her. He just stopped replying. He left her texts unread, throwing himself back into his textbooks, using his academic ambition as a shield to justify his cruelty.
Ruby was devastated, but she wasn't ready to let go of the connection they had built over those intense weeks. Knowing how disciplined and distant he was, she tried a different tactic to shatter his silence. She sent him a couple of naughty, provocative pictures—a sudden, unshielded burst of vulnerability and desire sent straight to his screen.
It worked. The raw distraction pulled Stefan right back in. They started talking again, but the dynamic had completely changed. Stefan was confusing her, playing a frustrating game of hot and cold. He would engage intensely, and then disappear for an entire day without an explanation, leaving her in an agonizing limbo. Yet, a strange pattern emerged: whenever she messaged him first thing in the morning, his reply would be instant, arriving within seconds. He would hold her hand digitally at dawn, only to vanish into his busy schedule by dusk.
For a while, Ruby tried to adapt. She told herself she didn't mind waiting. She didn't even mind just being a good friend, standing on the periphery of his life while he chased his dream of becoming an educator. But as the weeks bled into months, the toll of his emotional disappearance became too heavy to bear. Standing outside his locked door was lonelier than actually being alone. She finally understood that no matter how much she adjusted her boundaries, Stefan would always put his studies first. He was using his future classroom as an excuse to avoid a present life.
To save herself, Ruby quietly removed him. She deleted his number, blocked the chat accounts, and disappeared from his digital world as completely as if she had never existed.
Stefan noticed immediately, but his pride and his rigid schedule kept him from chasing her. He buried his regret in his final year of university.
Two years later, Stefan graduated at the top of his class. He stood in his cap and gown, his family cheering proudly from the auditorium seats as he held his teaching credentials. He had achieved everything he set out to do. A few months into his new career, he met a girl—a fellow teacher who was kind, available, and ready for a real relationship.
They went out on a few dates, but something was wrong. Every time Stefan looked at her across a dinner table, his mind drifted. He found himself dissecting her laugh, her cadence, the way she typed out text messages, searching frantically for a ghost. He didn't want the real woman sitting in front of him; he wanted the phantom behind the screen. He was looking for Ruby in a stranger. Because of it, things quickly fell apart.
Stefan Avery had successfully mastered the classroom, but as he sat in his bedroom after a long day of teaching, staring at a phone that no longer buzzed, he finally understood the lesson he had written for himself: by keeping Ruby behind the blackboard, he had turned her into an unreachable fantasy—one that would haunt every real relationship he would ever try to build.
