3. Nadia
3
NADIA
“Happy New Year!” Amos Hendrix, the music and drama teacher, announced to the entire teacher’s lounge as he entered.
Today was Monday, so Amos was rocking a red knit sweater vest. Tomorrow would be orange, Wednesday would be yellow, Thursday would be green, Friday would be blue, Saturday would be indigo, and Sunday would be violet. Every week, Amos ROY G. BIV-ed his way through his knit sweater vest game. As a Black gay man in his sixties who grew up in the South, he used his wardrobe as a subtle way of expressing his rainbow pride.
When I was a student at Firefly High, Mr. Hendrix taught at the high school and was my favorite teacher. He had since stopped teaching teenagers because he didn’t like to compete for attention with technology. As a co-worker, it took me several years and one drunken night of karaoke at a teaching conference in Atlantic City where Amos took first place in a celebrity look-alike contest before I’d been able to drop the formality of calling him by his last name. He entered as James Earl Jones, and I placed third, entering as Amanda Seyfried. I was beat out by Elvis, who took second.
Besides carrying the distinction of being my favorite teacher when I was a pupil, Amos now held the honor of being my favorite co-worker as a teacher. I often referred to him as my work husband. At least I had a husband somewhere. We commiserated, aka gossiped, during staff meetings, at drop-off and pick-up duty, yard patrol, and during lunch and recess. He and Leti Rios, a divorced, single mom of teens in her forties who worked as the school nurse, were the two people I worked with who kept me sane in this cesspool of fakeness and treachery that was the Firefly Island Unified School District. I wasn’t sure who was worse, the faculty, administration, board members, or the parents. I regularly checked my back for knives. It was cutthroat out here in these academic streets. If there was a bus, fellow teachers were quick to throw each other under it if it gained them favor in the eyes of parents, the board, or the administration. They were worse than the Housewives .
“Happy New Year!” Mr. Yates, who taught fifth grade; Mrs. Lindon, who taught third; and Mr. Wimbley, the P.E. teacher, all responded in chorus.
“Happy New Year.” I lifted my coffee mug to him as he lowered down into the seat across from me. “Did you and Bernie party it up?”
“If by party it up you mean play Scrabble until nine and then go to bed, then yes, we partied it up.” He smiled as he reached his hand across the table and covered mine. “What about you? How are you?”
I could see that there was genuine concern in his eyes. “Fine. Just a little tired.”
“Tired?”
“Yeah. Those slopes kicked my ass.” I intentionally excluded the fact that I still hadn’t recovered from being hungover from three nights ago.
“Slopes?” he repeated as if he had no clue what I was referring to.
“Yeah, my trip up to the Catskills.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. Remind me, when did you get back?”
“New Year’s Eve.”
He blinked, looking a little confused, then shook his head slightly before asking, “How did your hot date with Will the Wonderboy go?”
Amos had given Will the nickname because on his Cupid Connect profile, he described himself as a child prodigy, citing his prolific gaming skills. He’d gone as far as stating gaming and sex were his superpowers. That really should have been my first red flag. My standards had truly dropped to a dismal level. But I didn’t have to worry about that for the next year.
“It was fine, I guess.” I shrugged. I didn’t want to badmouth Will. It’s not as if he’d done anything that bad. It wasn’t his fault I’d seen a ghost of exes past and freaked out, then had to be taken home early. “I don’t really remember a lot of the night. It was pretty blurry after my fifth shot of tequila.”
Amos stared at me with a fixed expression before his left brow lifted in a perfect arch. “I heard you turned into a pumpkin as the clock struck midnight.”
“Really?” This town should be called Gossip Island, not Firefly Island.
“Word is your fairy godparents Ashley and Declan practically had to carry you out to their luxury carriage once the ball dropped and then whisk you away. Alone.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” I defended myself, although I really didn’t have a leg to stand on considering I didn’t remember getting home. “Who did you hear that from?”
“Miss Shaw told Mrs. B, who told Mrs. Rojas, who told Edna Rice, who told Sally Burke, who told Bernie.”
I hated playing the telephone game. It was like six degrees of gossip separation. Caroline Shaw owned Pretty in Peach, the OG beauty salon in town, before Kendra Abernathy opened The Beauty Mark a few years ago, which Miss Shaw didn’t appreciate. She saw it as a personal slight and direct competition even though it served a much younger demographic since Kendra was forty years younger than Miss Shaw. I, myself, was not one of the Gen Z patrons of The Beauty Mark because Kendra never made any secret about the fact that she had a massive, Grand-Canyon-sized crush on Callum, something, much like Miss Shaw, I did not appreciate.
But I digress.
For the over-forty crowd in Firefly, the salon also served as the gossip hub of the small town. Miss Shaw lived across the street from Southern Comfort, and one could find her on most nights sitting on her porch watching the comings and goings of the bar. Mrs. B, who owned the boarding house in town, had a standing appointment to get a blowout at Pretty in Peach every two weeks with Miss Shaw, where the two women exchanged gossip like state secrets. Sonja Rojas played in a weekly Mahjong game at the boarding house with Mrs. B and was also in a walking club with Edna Rice called The Pace Makers. Edna Rice and Sally Burke both volunteered at the animal shelter. Sally Burke worked at the post office with Bernie, who had been a postman for the past forty years. Bernie was my work husband Amos’s actual husband.
“Soooo.” Amos took a sip of his coffee. “I take it you won’t be seeing young William again?”
“Nope.” Especially since young William showed up on my doorstep New Year’s Day, he’d texted several times. Each time I’d made it clear to him, again, in no uncertain terms, I wasn’t interested. Unfortunately, he was one of those men who assumed I must be playing a game or playing hard-to-get. I wasn’t guilty on either count. I genuinely had no desire to see the man again. So, I’d had to block him. “Actually, I won’t be seeing anyone.”
“Oh.” Again, Amos was behaving oddly. He lifted his mug to his lips and sipped before continuing coyly, “Did someone finally lock you down? Have you traded in your single card status?”
From the moment Amos sat down, he’d been acting strange. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was, but since the bell would be ringing in a few minutes, I decided to press on.
“Nope. The opposite. I’m a single pringle. I’m taking Dry January to the next level. I’m getting sober on steroids. I’m doing a substance, social, and sexual detox. My New Year’s resolutions are no drinking, no dating, and no dick.”
I waited for some sort of reaction. A gasp, maybe. A look of horror or even amusement. I’d settle for minor curiosity or just a follow-up question. But I got none of that. He just sat staring at me with a blank, unreadable expression on his face.
After a few seconds passed, he blinked and shook his head slightly. “Sorry, are you serious? I thought for sure you were kidding. I was waiting for the punchline.”
“I’m not. I tallied up all the hours, days, weeks, and months I’ve wasted over the years sincerely and earnestly trying to meet Mr. Right, and what do I have to show for it? Hangovers, several UTIs, and a bar set so low even Wile E. Coyote, flattened by a steamroller, couldn’t limbo under it.”
“Wow, that’s quite a visual.”
“I’m serious. My standards just keep dropping because I’m lonely, and I want to be with someone so bad that I realized I was starting to talk myself into settling.” I took a deep breath. “And I started seeing things.”
“Seeing things?”
I hadn’t told anyone about my Callum Knight sighting. Mainly because I’d been hibernating since NYE, and the only person I’d seen was Ashley, and she didn’t know Callum because she hadn’t grown up here. The other reason I hadn’t let anyone in on the ghost from exes past sighting was because I didn’t want anyone to think I was actually certifiable. My mom had mental health issues, and I worried, sometimes, that I’d inherited them.
“When I was at the bar, I thought I saw Callum ,” I whispered when I said his name, as if I was scared to speak it. I wasn’t sure why. It’s not like he was Candyman, and if I said his name five times, he appeared.
“Oh no.” Amos sat back in his chair and placed both of his hands flat on the desk in front of him. “You don’t know?”
My stomach dropped out from under me. “Know what?”
“I thought this was all…” He waved his hand in front of me. “I thought you were just building up to the big reveal.”
“Big reveal? What reveal?”
“Callum’s back.”
“What?” It’s not that I hadn’t heard the two words that Amos had just spoken; it was that they really weren’t computing.
“Callum Knight is back.”
My heart began to pound so fast and so hard I was sure that it was going to burst out of my chest.
“What?” I heard myself repeat the same word, but I honestly couldn’t manage to say anything else.
“Danielle Marsh passed away last week. Didn’t you hear?”
I shook my head no.
“Oh, that’s right. You were on the ski trip.”
Danielle Marsh was the woman who Callum’s dad had an affair with. No one knew about it until after his dad died, and he left provisions for her and the daughter that they shared in his will.
“Danielle named Callum as Chloe’s guardian.”
“She did?”
Amos nodded.
Why would she do that? As far as I knew, Callum hadn’t been in touch with her. But then again, I hadn’t been in touch with Callum, so maybe the two of them were close now.
“So does that mean…is he…did he come back to stay? To live here?”
The bell rang, indicating the doors of the school would be opening, and students would be flooding the halls.
Amos and I both stood. “I don’t know details. All I know is he’s back.”
As I walked down the hallway toward my door, my head was ringing. All I could hear was white noise. I tried to look at the positives; at least I wasn’t going crazy. I hadn’t imagined seeing Callum; it had been him. The realization that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination should have made me happier than it did; instead, I didn’t know how to feel.
Callum Knight was back in Firefly. He was here. After ten years. And he probably hated me.
I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up again, and this time I was stone-cold sober.