Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For the first time in a week, Jif had to pause and catch her breath when Miles knocked on the classroom door Friday afternoon.
“Are you okay, Ms. Pritchard?”
The kids were all doing much better, but still edgy enough even her small reaction made several of them tighten their shoulders and hunch over their desks.
Jif took a deep breath, willing her heart to slow, willing the awkward discomfort of facing him after he turned down her coffee invite to the back of her mind.
“I’m fine, Emma. I bet Mr. Miles and Nix are here.”
She pulled open the door as Hannah announced, “I think we should call Phoenix by his real name. I don’t like being called Hannah Banana, and I bet he doesn’t like being called Nix.”
“Sorry.” Jif made a what-can-you-do face as Miles hobbled in, weight resting on his cane, Nix beside him.
He shook his head. “He goes by both.”
“I like Nix,” Laila responded. “Mr. Miles and Ms. Pritchard call him that, too.”
Jif held up a finger, catching the kids’ attention. “You can call him whatever you want, but we’re not going to argue about it, okay?”
“But what does he want to be called?” Hannah replied. “You always tell us we should use the names people ask us to use. That’s being kind.”
Jif closed her eyes. Where had this self-awareness been when they’d asked Miles what happened to his leg a few weeks ago?
“Both are fine,” he growled beside her, as if he could preemptively end a debate with a bunch of third graders by willpower and an epic scowl.
Clearly, he didn’t understand children.
“If both are fine, then go with me here, okay?” She raised an eyebrow, not sure if he’d agree, but hoping he’d trust her. They were still friends, right? Even though she’d potentially ruined it with her ill-timed invitation. Friends trusted each other.
“Fine,” he grumbled.
“Can you leave Nix with me while you go sit down?”
He passed her the leash and Jif took advantage of the chance to get a quick pet in before the kids swamped him.
“Okay, we’re going to do an experiment.” She couldn’t quite reach the whiteboard and took a step, then paused.
“Tell him to heel.” Miles slowly lowered himself into her reading chair as he gave her the instruction.
“Nix, heel.” She moved, and, amazingly, the dog moved with her.
“See, she calls him Nix,” Elias shouted, as if Jif’s opinion decided the argument.
Before anyone else could respond, she called, “Macaroni and cheese!”
“Everybody freeze!”
“Thank you.” She picked up a marker. “As I said, we’re going to perform an experiment to discover which name Ni...uh, the dog prefers. First, we ask a question.” She wrote QUESTION: WHICH NAME DOES THE DOG PREFER? on the whiteboard.
“Then, we form a hypothesis, which is a fancy term for taking a guess. Usually, we take one guess, but in this case, we’ll have two. Raise your hand if you think he prefers Nix.”
She wrote NIX on the board and tallied the students, then wrote 14 beside it. Then, she wrote PHOENIX.
“Who thinks he prefers Phoenix?”
She tallied the nine students beside the second name.
“Okay, now we’ll do an experiment. We’ll test which one he prefers.”
She walked to one side of the classroom, pleased when Nix followed along, then promptly sat when she stopped moving. She’d never had a dog; never handled one, either, though she loved Abby’s pack.
“Okay, Mr. Miles will call him by each name, and we’ll observe which one he responds to faster.
” She pinned her students with a theatrical glare, making a few giggle.
“Only Mr. Miles gets to call him. Otherwise, you’ll skew the results, and results are very important in science.
” She turned back to Miles. “You ready?”
“Drop his leash.”
She did.
“Phoenix, come.”
The dog’s ears came up, then he stood. He glanced back at Jif, but when Miles called him again, he bounded across the classroom.
Returning to the board, she asked the students what they’d noticed and captured it under OBSERVATIONS.
Then, they repeated the experiment with Miles calling the dog Nix instead.
This time, he didn’t check in with Jif, running across the room to Miles.
Jif asked the students what else they’d noticed and added it to the observations, then she wrote RESULTS.
“What do you guys think? Hands, please. Scott.”
“I think he liked Nix better.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Hands, please,” Jif repeated. “Hannah, what do you think?”
“Well, I guess if he likes it better, we can call him Nix,” Hannah conceded, heaving an existential sigh.
“Nicknames can be hard sometimes,” Jif assured her before turning to the rest of the class. “If someone doesn’t like it, we shouldn’t call them that, but sometimes people love their nickname. It’s something they chose, a truer version of their real selves.”
Puzzled expressions lingered on the faces of a few students, and she shook her head. They were a little young to understand the philosophical nature of her own complex relationship with the name her father had given her.
“In any case, Mr. Miles says he can go by either, so use the one you prefer. Nix won’t be mad no matter what you do. Now, blue table group, I think you get to go first this time.”
The kids leapt to their feet and ran to the carpet, falling on Nix like a defensive line attacking a beleaguered quarterback, but Miles didn’t even lean forward in his chair. He and Nix both trusted the students, now. Jif liked the idea that her guests had learned something in her classroom, too.
She wandered over with some water for Miles.
“The experiment was a good idea,” he said as he took the cold bottle.
Their fingers brushed, a tingle of awareness passing between them, and her voice caught slightly as she replied, “Thanks for letting us do it.”
“I haven’t seen you teach before. The kids really engage with you.” He unscrewed the cap and took a sip.
Jif ignored the phantom loss of his touch—barely there to begin with, certainly not enough to miss once it was gone.
“When they’re interested in the subject, sure, but times tables practice is a different story.
The day of the accident, Elias had been whipping his math wrap around his head like a lasso. ”
Miles snorted, and for a moment, Jif thought he might be crying. Then a dribble of liquid came out of his nose.
She tried not to giggle. She really did, but as she grabbed a tissue box, she couldn’t quite help a titter.
A moment later, his booming laugh filled the room, and while many of the kids whipped their heads around, quick to wonder at the unfamiliar sound, none of them tensed in fear. Even children understood laughter, and understood there wasn’t anything to be afraid of when they heard it.
Jif turned back to the board and erased their experiment.
By the time Miles and Nix arrived, she’d usually finished teaching and handed out all the quiet work assignments.
She let the kids finish them while they waited, or they could read.
It meant more grading on those nights, but for once, she didn’t mind.
It also meant less time during the day to finish lessons, so a few kids always used this time to catch up on concepts they might have missed.
Emma brought her times tables page to Jif, and her lip wobbled. “I can’t remember the song for eights.”
“Let’s sing it together, okay?” Jif shuffled through some papers until she found the right sheet. “We use Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Together, they sang the answers for the eight times tables while Jif pointed to them, then Jif sent her back to her desk to work on it. A few minutes later, she caught Emma mouthing the words over and over, then madly scribbling her answers. She’d get the song stuck in her head and never forget it.
She glanced around the room, then froze when her gaze caught on Miles’s. Had he been watching her this whole time?
His head jerked away, eyes jumping back to the kids at his feet and the dog, rolled onto his back and tail slowly wagging across the carpet as they rubbed his belly, but he couldn’t take it back. Miles had been staring at her.
Why?
He’d turned her down for a date, even if she’d convinced her friends his response had been less absolute than a hard no. Why would he be staring, now?
Maybe she had something in her teeth from lunch.
Surreptitiously, she pulled a mirror from her bag and held it in her lap.
Glancing down, she checked, but they were clean.
She didn’t have any ink on her face, either.
She hadn’t thought there would be—she’d learned her lesson about wiping the dry-erase board with the heel of her hand pretty quickly, but it never hurt to make sure. Her hair looked fine, too.
With a defiant shake of her head, she put her compact away.
Whatever.
Let him stare if he wanted to. Maybe he shouldn’t have turned her down in the first place.