The Past Lives of Gregory Kaplan

The Past Lives of Gregory Kaplan

Todrick shouted, “Bitch shut the fuck up,” and the classroom ignited into laughter that wasn’t playful. It burned with heat and mockery, sharp enough to make my skin crawl. With it came the crystal-clear message: Old man. You’re finished.

My so-called scholars moved like they had no bones, no boundaries. Desks drifted in and out of formation. Bodies twerked and jiggled. Voices stacked until the room vibrated like a hive about to swarm. I stepped toward the noise, my pulse racing. Todrick was tearing into the new girl, who snapped back with a cackle that made my teeth ache.

“If you can hear my voice,” I said, reaching for authority I wasn’t sure I still owned, “clap once.” Nothing. Not even a pity clap. “If you can hear my voice, clap twice.”

I clapped sharply, hoping muscle memory would save me. A few eyes flicked my way, unimpressed. The boys slinging dice in the corner caught my glare and scattered like roaches under a kitchen light. “If you can hear my voice,” I tried again, “clap five times.”

Five claps answered. I shifted the rhythm, doubled it, teased it, and they followed—suddenly synchronized, suddenly mine. Relief surged through me—then curdled. Something heavy slid into my gut. Not fear. Recognition. The old feeling I’d spent years outrunning. You can’t do this, I used to say. My therapist called it a “midlife shift in consciousness.” I called it self-sabotaging bullshit.

And yet, here I was. Haven Hurst Academy had dragged me out of retirement. I couldn’t explain why I’d said yes. The building felt wrong—yet eerily familiar. Its hallways stalked my dreams. Its walls felt like they remembered me.

Dr. Dancy, the principal, had impressed me with her old-school discipline. She didn’t take no for an answer. She also had a way of looking at me too long, like she was waiting for me to reveal something I didn’t know I had.

The classroom fell into an uneasy quiet. My pulse thudded in my ears. A low hum crept through the air, faint but insistent, like static under skin. The lights flickered—once. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Antonia. I didn’t answer.

“Mr. Kaplan?” Todrick piped up again, too eager, fake smiling. “There,” he said, pointing to my desk. “Whose phone is that?” I followed his finger to a flip phone that buzzed on my desk. “That’s not my—” I began to say before the world vanished.

The sound wasn’t an explosion, the way movies teach you to expect one. It was pressure—deep, and sudden—like the room inhaled all at once. My ears stopped up and popped painfully. The lights flared white. Air folded inward. For a fraction of a second, I felt weightless, suspended inside my own breath.

Then the floor rushed up with an inferno that incinerated everything.

Desks whirled past like frisbees. A body struck something hard and didn’t move again. Papers drifted down like ash. The fire alarm wailed, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that dismissal was going to be late today.

I woke up to beeping.

Bright light burned behind my eyes as Antonia’s voice cut through the fog. “Gregory? Baby, can you hear me?” I tried to answer but my mouth refused. I realized the beeping sound came from the monitors above my bed as she guided a straw to my lips. Water burned its way down. She told someone on the phone I’d been unconscious and that I was waking up. The police were involved, she said, and a detective waited near the door, pretending not to watch me. What happened to my students? I wanted to ask, but the question never made it past my lips.

“You’ve been talking in your sleep,” Antonia said days later, concern and worry etched into her delicate features. Snow blanketed the hospital parking lot behind her. “You’ve been saying the same thing.”

She hesitated, then: “I am a guardian that walks the wall.”

I turned my face away. Not because I didn’t remember—but because I did, and I wasn’t ready to let her see it.

The dreams came anyway.

A stone orphanage with gargoyles hunched over the entrance. Stained-glass windows blinking in the sun. Children laughing. A bell ringing. Then night swallowing everything whole.

When Antonia returned, she brought her good home cooking—and our granddaughter, Chelsea. Love filled the room. But Chelsea watched me too closely, like I might vanish in a puff of smoke if she blinked.

“Pawpaw,” she whispered, climbing onto the bed. “I’m glad you went back in.”

I smiled, though my chest tightened. “Went back where, baby?”

“They said you went back in and saved them…”

I didn’t remember saving anyone.

But Dr. Dancy did.

She visited after they left. She didn’t sit—just stood at the foot of my bed, hands folded as the room seemed to shift around her. “You carried four children out,” she said. “Multiple witnesses confirm it.” Her eyes didn’t blink. “The blast originated on your desk.” The word desk hit harder than blast. “You may have been the target,” she added softly, as if testing my reaction.

“Thank God you weren’t there,” I said bitterly as cold stone rose in my mind. Chains rattling. A boy’s hand slipping from mine in smoke. I could barely breathe.

That night, Dr. Dancy returned. No knock. No announcement. She wheeled me to a shuttered wing of the hospital, the corridors whisper-quiet beneath the hum of fluorescent lights. “This wing once housed long-term psychotherapy patients,” she said lightly, as if giving a tour. “Now we use it for our research.”

The room awaited me. Machines stood ready, cables coiled like patient snakes. She secured my arms and legs—not rough, not gentle. Just efficient.

“We’ve been watching you for some time,” she said. “You show consistencies we don’t often see.”

“What kind?” I asked.

She smiled. “Persistent ones.”

A low tone filled the room. “Count backward with me. One hundred… ninety-nine…”

Chelsea appeared—but not as Chelsea. A small, dirt-smudged red-haired boy stood barefoot in the dark, pounding on a door that would not open. I tried to rise. The restraints held me tight.

“In every reincarnation,” Dr. Dancy whispered, her breath hot and spoiled, “you find your way back to the threshold. This time as Gregory Kaplan. Before, as an orphaned little boy…”

As the machine warmed beneath me, memory slid into place. Haven Hurst had never been a school, or an orphanage. Not really. It was a seam in the world, stitched and restitched across centuries. I had known its corridors before this body, before this name. The children always found me there. And I understood, at last, why I never crossed the threshold—only stood watch, keeping time, clapping them into order, waiting for the next life to begin