Chapter 3 Distractions #3
“Whatcha working on?” he asked as usual, his pretty face all animation.
“A baby blanket for a friend’s sister,” he said, liking the short answer very much.
Marcelle eyed the yarn—white with sprinkles—critically. “Nice,” he said, “as long as there’s other colors.”
“This is only the beginning,” Isaac promised him solemnly. “There’s going to be a whole rainbow, and a teddy bear and a pot of gold.” He held up the tiny square. “Think of this like a pixel in a picture. The pattern calls for five hundred of these.”
“Wow,” Marcelle said, cocking his head with interest. “That’s… I never thought of that. So, you get enough squares in different colors, you can make anything.”
“I’ve got books full of patterns,” Isaac confirmed. “You can also do half-color squares.”
“Huh,” Marcelle murmured. Then, brow wrinkled like he was thinking hard, he pulled out a sheet of graph paper from his binder. “Hey, can we design our own blankets and then figure out how many squares they take?”
Isaac blinked. “Mmm… yes, but you can’t do it by counting only. You’ll have to show me how you used algebra to get it done.”
“Ooh….” Marcelle’s eyes got big. “I’m on it. Can I get credit for this?”
Marcelle was currently working on a C, which for him was a big furry deal, but Isaac was impressed—damned impressed—by the kid’s initiative, and by his ability to see math in everyday things—including art.
“Mmm… I’ll add fifty points to your lowest test grade,” he said, thinking that should pull the boy’s grade up nicely.
As he glanced around, he saw a number of kids pulling out their own graph paper and the colored pencils they were required to bring to class and gazing at him with expectant expressions.
“Okay, then,” he said, walking up to the whiteboard.
“Here’s the deal. The blanket I’m working on is twenty squares by twenty-five squares.
You can make yours twenty by twenty, but no smaller.
” He wrote the assignment down and then outlined it.
“No fewer than five colors, with three algebraic equations showing how you figured out how many squares of each color you’d have to make to create your blanket. ”
“Are you going to make the best one?” asked one girl, and Isaac grimaced.
“Honey, something like this takes me a month, and my friend already picked out the picture he wanted—”
“But what if we make something really good?” Henrietta asked, and Isaac figured he’d let the unseen Luca be the bad guy.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said soberly. “I’ll ask my friend if he’d want to take a look at the designs and see if one of them would work instead of what he picked out. And if I do make it, remember, it’s for somebody else.”
“That’s okay,” Henrietta said happily. “My grandma can teach me how to make granny squares. Maybe I can make my own blanket instead.”
And that set them off—but in a quiet way. As each kid planned and plotted and sketched, they talked about somebody they knew who crafted and how if they’d known, they could have been making their own pictures with squares and half-squares too.
Isaac watched magic happening and turned to Marcelle, who was grinning at him with absolutely no shame.
“Look what you did,” he said softly. “Aren’t you proud of yourself?”
Marcelle nodded. “Absolutely always,” he said.
“You should be,” Isaac told him. As the bell rang and the kids packed up their colored pencils and graph paper reluctantly, Isaac texted Luca to tell him what he’d inspired, thinking the man had been kind, funny, and good company the night before. Maybe he’d enjoy knowing—
Awesome! Can I—I mean, can I come to your classroom and judge? Like a contest and everything? When is the assignment due?
Isaac stared at the text, absolutely gobsmacked.
Two days before the final, the last Friday in May.
Great! I’ll be there! Can we still work on the blanket even if we don’t know what it’s going to be?
Isaac thought of the two hundred tiny white squares he’d need for the majority of the blankets in the pattern book.
Sure. If we make too many squares in one color, we can sew them up to be a sweater or a stuffed animal.
Awesome! Tell the kids yes! And I’ll be by your house on Saturday to learn so I can do my part!
Isaac gave a thumbs-up to that, because he didn’t want to… to… give the (right?) wrong impression, and then glanced up when he realized he wasn’t alone in the room.
“Marcelle?” he asked.
“Did your boy say yes?” Marcelle countered.
Isaac grimaced. “He’s not my boy—”
Marcelle rolled his eyes. “Well, he should be. That look on your face when you were texting—it had ‘That’s my boy’ written all over it.”
Isaac resisted the urge to shift his eyes left and right, like some sort of deviant. “I should be quieter about expressions like that,” he said, then felt compelled to add, “And he’s not my boyfriend—and he’s only thirty.”
His reward for that was a snort. “Yeah, don’t give me that. You’re making a five-hundred-square blanket for this guy’s sister. He’d better be important. But why didn’t you make him a sweater?”
Isaac thought about the crap-brown thing he’d shoved in the back of his yarn bins the night before.
“Sweaters are an awfully big commitment,” he said.
“For somebody I’m not dating yet. No, he did something nice for me, and I offered to make him something, and he really wanted a baby blanket for his sister, and he was willing to help make it.
” Isaac shrugged. “It’s more like I found a new friend than a new boyfriend. ”
Marcelle’s pixyish features took on the calm superiority of the wisest sage. “What was the nice thing he did?”
Isaac swallowed. “How old are you?” he asked, because damn if this kid wasn’t just pushing into his business.
“No—this is important,” Marcelle said. “You are the only teacher here that’s out. Did you know that?”
Isaac sighed. “Do I ever.”
“Yeah, and you don’t… we didn’t even know you had a husband until he passed away last January.
You get to be happy. Like Ms. Michaels with all them kids.
She’s happy, and her husband’s a computer programmer, and she’s run off her ass.
We know that because she tells us that. You don’t tell us anything. ”
Isaac knew that was the trend in teaching—to be a real person to your students.
Todd had hated that trend, hated that Isaac had to host clubs or spend his time after school supervising activities.
In spite of the fact that other teachers brought their significant others to things like football games and plays, he’d never shown the slightest interest in Isaac’s job and had insisted, with a faint curl to his upper lip, that Isaac keep his name out of any class discussion.
And now….
Isaac thought about his boring house and his quiet life and how the highlight of his day was knitting on his porch with his audiobook or going yarn shopping with Luca’s grandma. Hell, babysitting for Roxy was a big deal on the weekend.
“I’ve got a small, boring life,” he said apologetically. “I—”
“Yeah, now.” Marcelle’s eyes had narrowed. “I bet you were hell at a rave back in the day, weren’t you?”
Isaac should have said no to that—he should have. But Marcelle was looking at him with… admiration. And camaraderie. And for a moment, Isaac wanted to feel young. He didn’t want to be grieving; he wanted to be hopeful.
So Isaac held his finger to his lips and pulled out his phone, calling up Katy Perry’s “Part of Me,” which had been his anthem in his twenties.
Then, after setting his knitting and his phone on the table in front of the whiteboard, he stood in the space between the table and the student desks and…
Danced.
Marcelle came up next to him, watched his feet, and started parallel footwork, following him through the first half of the song, when Roxy—who had apparently heard the music from the hallway—walked in and joined them, her own moves not bad at all.
And she was joined by Sheryl before the song finished winding down.
The song came to an end, and it was the four of them, a little breathless and definitely warm in the spring afternoon, laughing.
“Yeah,” Marcelle said, grinning as he grabbed his backpack. “You were a hell-raiser. You too, Mrs. Michaels. Don’t deny it. You guys give us hope that being a grown-up isn’t all the suck, right?”
“Sure,” Isaac said, still catching his breath. He was reaching for what was left in his soda as the kids walked away laughing.
“That was fun,” Roxy said, taking a swig of her own soda. “Why’d we do that again?”
Isaac gave her a bemused smile and indicated the extra credit assignment on the board. “Apparently,” he said, as surprised as anybody, “I am not allowed to be dead yet.”
He watched her smile grow. “You never will be. Now explain what this is to me so I can do it too.”
He did, and she got impressed, which he felt like she shouldn’t be, because dammit, the kids had thought of it, but even after they called it quits and went out to their cars, he realized he’d dodged a bullet.
Marcelle had asked him what Luca had done that had made Isaac so grateful he’d go to such an awful lot of trouble for a near stranger.
He told me it was okay to be angry.
And that’s something Isaac hadn’t had permission to do in a long, long time.