Chapter 8
chapter eight
Emme
Today’s Learning Objective:
Students will examine historical documents.
“If we go out for recess early,” I said, flipping through my plans for the day, “then we’ll have plenty of time for small group reading and writing conferences before lunch.”
Grace tapped a purple pen to my schedule. “I have three kids out for speech at that time.”
“And I have two at occupational therapy,” Jamie added.
“Fuuuuck,” I groaned. Ryan was visiting the school today and while it was all very exciting, it was also screwing up our flexible group schedule. “Okay, then we do a super quick morning meeting and go right into writing conferences. Keep recess at the usual time and then we’re rotating for reading. Whatever time we have left before lunch we can use for read-aloud or freewriting or something.”
Grace hummed. “That might work.”
“Let’s go with this plan,” Jamie said, scribbling down the changes on a sticky note. “Even if we discover five new problems along the way, we’re just going to make the best of it.”
I nodded. There would definitely be surprise problems. “Yeah, and?—”
“Emme.”
Ryan approached from the end of the hall near the front office. He looked thoroughly out of place among the colorful bulletin boards hung at elementary height. His long strides ate up the distance in no time at all. Beside me, I heard Jamie let out a breathy, “Wow.”
“Hi,” he said, holding out two paper cups. “Iced coffee and a smoothie. Since you’re not making them at home.”
“The only way to live is with a drink in both hands.” I took a hearty sip of the coffee—I needed that more than the vitamins and nutrients right now—and motioned toward my friends. “Ryan, I’m sure you remember Grace.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up as he took in my friend, dressed head to toe in black as usual. “As if I could forget.”
“We call her Miss Kilmeade around here,” I said. “And this is Jamie Rouselle. She teaches first grade. Jamie, this is Ryan Ralston.”
Jamie gave him her biggest, brightest smile. She was good at smiling, as strange as that was to say. She had a way of putting people at ease. “Such a pleasure to meet you.”
He nodded and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Thanks for making time for me today.”
Jamie fanned herself with the sticky note. “You’re welcome here any time.”
She was also great at making an innuendo out of anything. I gave her a look that she specifically ignored.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Grace started in that dangerously sweet tone of hers that promised to fuck up anyone who crossed her, “it would be great if you mentioned to these kids that playing professional sports is an extremely rare occurrence, and even if they do wind up in your shoes some day, they’ll appreciate having a solid education behind them.”
“I’d be the first one to tell them that,” he said. “I didn’t choose the college with the winningest team or the best coach. I chose the academic program I wanted above all else.”
And the location. He’d wanted to go as far from home as the scholarships would allow. It still brought out a twinge of pain to think about him leaving. About the time between the start of college training camp and when I left for the University of Vermont, and how stunningly alone I’d been. There were friends who were around for a good time and lots of laughs and then there were friends who burrowed into your cells and altered your genetic code, and Ryan would always be the latter.
“I’m just saying, no big promises,” Grace said.
Ryan nodded. “Understood.”
Jamie kept staring like she wanted to take a bite out of him. I swallowed a laugh.
“I could show you around,” I said. “Or?—”
“There he is!”
At the end of the hall, a dark-haired woman waved at Ryan from where she stood with Lauren, the school principal.
“I think they’re looking for you,” I said.
“They are.” He waved to her in response. “That’s Stella. My publicist.”
He didn’t sound excited about that, but the scowl was nowhere to be seen. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a side hug. I felt his lips brush my temple as he shifted away.
“I’ll see you later,” he said softly. To Grace and Jamie, he added, “Good to see you both.”
He turned and strolled down the hall. I slumped back against the wall when he joined the women waiting for him. Immediately, Grace and Jamie closed in around me.
Grace extended her arm, pointing toward the front office. “What the hell was that?”
I gazed down at my beverage options. Was caffeine really the answer? I wasn’t sure. “What? Nothing! What do you mean?”
“I mean he kissed your forehead,” Grace whisper-yelled.
“That’s…that’s not a big deal,” I said.
“Wait a second,” Jamie said. “Wait just a second.” She waved the sticky note at me. “You never told me what happened at the dinner.”
“What dinner?” Grace asked.
Shit. I never mentioned that to her . The last we’d spent any real time together, not a few minutes between classes or random texts, we’d gotten carried away with work on the seating chart for her wedding reception. For once, I’d succeeded at shoving Ryan into the mental box at the back of my closet.
“A few weeks ago,” I said as casually as possible with two interrogators breathing down my neck. “Right after his birthday.”
“Start at the beginning,” Jamie said. “Leave nothing out.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” I forced a laugh into my words. Even if I could, what would I say? “He’s had some downtime in his schedule and he’s been in town lately, so we’ve hung out.”
And we’re slightly engaged. I think .
“And now you’re friends who give forehead kisses,” Jamie said.
“And get drink deliveries,” Grace added.
I pressed my shoulders into the wall. These two were human lie detectors. “We are making this into more than it is.”
“Or we saw the way Daddy Football was looking at you and know we could’ve been hula-hooping topless and he wouldn’t have noticed,” Jamie said.
“He wanted to put you in his pocket and carry you around all day.”
I didn’t think that was anywhere near true, but it was cute that she thought so.
Grace stared at me straight on. It was the kind of stare that kept her third graders in line and had earned her the nickname Killer from her fiancé. “We’re going to talk about this at lunch.”
The sharp click of heels sounded against the linoleum floors and Audrey Saunders hurried toward us with a huff. The fourth-grade teacher threw an impatient glare toward the ceiling and tucked her white-blonde hair over her ear. “The third floor copier hates me.”
“It hates us all,” Jamie said.
“We’ll be gathering in Emme’s room for lunch today,” Grace said, her stare gentle now. She wouldn’t say it, but I knew she was hurt that I hadn’t told her about seeing Ryan. Not a lot, nothing major, but it was another one of the many growing pains of not living together and sharing every ounce of our lives with each other. It was a weird shift after being joined at the hip since college. “She has some fun new developments she’d like to discuss with us.”
Audrey glanced between us. She had no idea what was happening here. As if anyone could walk into this ten minutes late and understand a damn thing anyway. “I made cinnamon roll blondies last night.”
“I already know that’s going to solve all of my problems,” Jamie said. “And even a few I didn’t know I had.”
Children started pouring down the hall, all lively chatter and squeaky sneakers. Grace took a step toward the door of her classroom. “Writing conferences, recess, small group reading,” she said.
“Right.” I bobbed my head more than necessary.
If I was going to be a convincing fake fiancée, I was going to have to get a lot better at standing up to questioning from my closest friends.
Lunch arrived as usual, at once too early for an adult to eat and too late for kids who desperately needed to get their wiggles out. I’d managed to catch a few glimpses of Ryan as he toured the school with Lauren and Stella, and again when the phys ed teacher invited him to join some activities with the kindergarten class.
Ryan’s jumping jacks were outstanding.
When I got back to my room after dropping my class off in the cafeteria, Grace, Jamie, and Audrey were already waiting for me at the back table like a friendly little firing squad.
My ass hadn’t even met the seat when Grace said, “Something happened with you and the dude.”
I took my time unpacking my lunch and opening a can of seltzer. I didn’t really know what to tell them because I didn’t know the answer myself. And I didn’t want to disclose too much and mess things up for Ryan’s business deals. These women were not about to call up a sports podcast and drop the inside knowledge, but if this was serious enough to get married, it was probably serious enough to keep to myself.
But I had to tell them something. It would be weird to show up here in a few weeks and announce we were engaged after insisting we were just friends. So, I stayed as close to the truth as possible.
“When we were in high school,” I started, tearing my kinda-stale pita into triangles, “we promised to marry each other if we weren’t already married at thirty.” I wrenched open the container of hummus without glancing up at them. “He hit thirty at the end of March. I’ll be there in June. And neither of us are anywhere near married.”
I stuffed a huge chunk of pita into my mouth and shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “What?”
“You’re in a marriage pact,” Audrey said, pointing a celery stick at me. “With Ryan Ralston .”
“I believe you,” Jamie said. “Obviously, I love you and trust you and would never doubt you. But if anyone else told me that story, I’d say it was a darling work of fiction.”
“Believe me, it’s the truth.” I scooped an obscene amount of hummus onto my pita. “I have it in writing.”
“You—you what?” Grace stared at me like she’d never seen me before. “Like, a contract?”
I scrolled through my photos, going way back to high school again, and swiped until I found it. “Like I said, we made a promise at the end of high school. And we wrote it down.”
I put my phone on the table and they leaned in to see the photo of my inscription in Ryan’s yearbook. A minute passed while they read and I ate the mismatched snacks I’d grabbed on my way out of the apartment this morning.
“Why was the cutoff thirty?” Audrey asked.
“Because we were infants and we thought we knew everything,” I said. “Thirty seemed a million years away.”
“You signed it, ‘Love forever, Your (probably) future wife,’” Jamie said, zooming in on the screen. “You also wrote that it was a binding contract and even if he tossed his yearbook off a pier, you’d always have proof.”
I held out my hands. “Yes, to answer your question, I have always been excessively dramatic.”
“You know that sort of thing isn’t binding unless a witch blessed the bargain,” Jamie said.
I laughed. “I didn’t know that, but he agreed to the deal.” I reached for my phone and swiped to the next photo, the one Ryan had texted to me all those years ago as his proof. It simply read, I’ll hold you to it. Your husband.
“Goddammit that’s romantic,” Audrey sighed.
Grace brought a hand to her mouth. “Wow.”
“He’s here,” Jamie said, awe in her voice, “because he’s come to collect. You texted him on his birthday and he wanted to see you that weekend.”
“He waited until it was time,” Audrey said. “After all these years.”
“He wants to go through with it,” Grace said.
I managed a bumbly nod. “I mean, yeah, that’s kind of what we’ve been talking about recently.”
“How serious is this?” Grace asked. “Are you actually considering it?”
The thing about Grace that most people misunderstood was that she wasn’t critical just to scratch a bitchy itch. She asked direct questions and framed things in ways that weren’t always soft or comfortable because that was how she cared. She was fiercely protective. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to the people she cared about.
And she also enjoyed busting balls when it was deserved. Killer really wasn’t that far off base for her.
“I am,” I said carefully. “But I want to be really clear that this isn’t me rebounding from Teddy. I’m not jumping headfirst into the first lukewarm offer to come my way.”
Or that was what I kept telling myself.
“I wasn’t thinking that,” Grace said carefully. “I was thinking that you’ve always had a very…close relationship with Ryan, and I know how much he means to you. There’s a lot on the line.”
“I know,” I said, and I really did.
“If…anything happened,” she continued, “I wouldn’t want you to lose that relationship.”
“I know,” I repeated. “It’s something I think about a lot.”
Audrey peeled the lid off a Pyrex dish. “Cinnamon roll blondies,” she said. “Eat them so I don’t take them home.”
I stared at her for a moment, studying her light tan trousers and cream-colored turtleneck sweater. I didn’t know how she made it through a school day dressed like that. And do it in heels. My god, I’d die. I couldn’t make it through the morning without jabbing myself with whiteboard markers.
“Would you actually go through with it?” Grace asked. “Would you actually marry him because of this pact?”
“Only because of the pact? No. I’m excessive, but I’m not completely irrational,” I said. “There needs to be more.”
Like some soccer franchises owned by a disgustingly wealthy family that makes everyone’s personal lives a business matter and a blindingly vicious desire to make my ex regret his choices.
“So, what happens next?” Audrey asked as she cut a tiny cube of blondie for herself.
“I don’t really know. We’re hanging out right now. I’m going to some of his work events and he’s coming to the wedding with me. We’re just going to figure it out as we go. We’ll see if it makes sense.”
As I said it, I realized how it must sound to them. Like this was a fun little lark that probably wouldn’t lead to anything. Like we might realize this was nothing more than a silly teenage vow made at the edge of our lives.
Everyone was quiet for a long minute.
“What happens if you realize it makes total sense?” Audrey asked.
“It looked like it made sense this morning,” Grace said.
“The way he looked at you made all kinds of sense,” Jamie said.
I shoved a blondie into my mouth.