2. Mia
TWO
Mia
I wake up on the second day of school with a splitting headache.
I know the source of the headache. It’s because we only have two days before the kids come in to set up our entire classroom, but Principal Thomas spent the entirety of yesterday talking at us. That only leaves me one day to set up an entire classroom for thirty-one kids.
In previous years, Oliver would open the school building for teachers a week before the first day we needed to report, giving those of us who wanted to an entire week to set up and prepare.
Principal Thomas wouldn’t let anyone in the building without her present. I would know, because all seventeen of my emails to her in August went unanswered except for one.
No one is allowed in the building without me present.
-Principal Thomas
I took this to mean that she would not be present before the first day of school.
I know it’s going to be at least an eight o’clock night tonight, so I take my time getting out of bed, doom-scrolling on my phone instead. I know it’s Elias’s typical shower time, so I give him some space. The last thing I need right now is to be blasted in the face with his dripping wet chest when he exits the bathroom.
I groan, scrubbing my face with my hands. I have refused, refused to even think about that moment this summer, especially what I did afterwards. Nothing happened, actually , I tell myself. I just got off to the image of Adam’s perfect mouth, blue eyes, and one perfect curl going down on me. His tongue licking me just like he licked the salt off his hand. That’s exactly what happened. I find myself daydreaming about it now, absentmindedly circling a nipple with my finger, when Elias pounds on my door.
“I’m coming in,” he yells a split second before doing so, wearing nothing but a towel and indeed blasting me in the face with his dripping wet Hercules chest.
“Gah,” I squeak.
Elias stops short and zeroes in on my boobs. I look down and see my nipples poking obscenely through the thin material of my tank top.
“Gah,” I squeak again, gathering up every square foot of my comforter in my arms and pulling it up to my chin, pulling myself together along with it. “WHAT DO YOU WANT, ELIAS?! CAN YOU KNOCK?!”
“I did knock,” he tells my chest.
“You have to wait for a response before entering, dickwad?—”
He finally meets my eyes, moistening his lips at the same time. I look away. “But we’ve never done that,” he tells me.
I want to gouge my eyes out. “We need to revisit our Privacy Policy. Remind me why you live with me, and not your best friend?”
“Because you asked me to? Because Leo makes too much money and doesn’t want to live with the ‘poors’ in Brooklyn, so he has his own one bedroom in Tribeca that’s double the size of our entire apartment?”
I sigh. “What do you want?” I ask again, exuding calm, cool, and collected.
He comes to sit on the side of my bed, moving his head and trying to catch my eyes every time I try to look away. “Will you just look at me?” he demands.
“I am looking at you,” I mutter.
“Meems, come on,” he pleads.
I finally meet his gaze for the first time since August. We look at one another for a beat. I clock the green of his eyes, the bronze and blue flecks you can find if you look closely enough, rimmed with dusky brown lashes that curl up like a tidal wave. The slight curve of his twice broken nose. I notice he’s gained some new freckles over the summer.
I want to wave hello to those freckles, want to give them a hug. They’ve been constant, cyclical friends, like the friends you would make and only see at summer camp. Freckle friends that would say hello every July, in the woods behind our houses or on the beach of Wildwood.
“We need to talk,” he tells me.
“We absolutely do not need to talk,” I retort.
“You’ve been weird ever since the Bathroom Incident?—”
“I do not know what ‘incident’ you speak of?—”
“And I need it to not be weird anymore because I miss my Meems. And honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken you almost thirty years to see my dick,” he finishes.
“I’ve seen it before. You’ve grown up since then,” I mutter.
He gives me an indescribable look. I close my eyes, hoping that he either goes away or I disappear.
“I can still see you,” Elias tells me. “I thought you figured out you don’t turn invisible when you close your eyes when you were five.”
“Probably later than that,” I grumble, “since the two of you convinced me otherwise for a very long time.”
“So do you wanna talk about it, or do you wanna forget it ever happened and never speak of it again and then go back to normal?” he asks me.
I open my eyes. “The second thing is an option?”
He grins, the Dimple popping out. I greet it like an old friend, too. “Yep.”
“Let’s do that one, then.”
“Great,” he says, clapping his hands, and I pray to all the deities in the world that his towel stays wrapped. “Do you need help setting up your classroom today?”
I breathe a sigh of relief. For the towel staying put, and for the offer of help. “Yes, please. Do you not need to set up the gym?”
“No?” he responds, looking at me like I asked him if the Apocalypse has begun.
“You know, there are some really cool things you can do in that gym, and some good P.E. unit plan ideas I saw on this teaching blog I read?—”
“Okay, Ms. Best Practices,” he says, standing up and walking out of the room. I don’t look at the movement of the muscles in his Prometheus back. He flexes them anyway. I throw a pillow at him. “Let’s leave in forty-five.”
Elias stares at the giant stack of color coded labels in his hands. “Did you buy these yourself?”
“No,” I mumble.
“Meems.”
“I didn’t.”
“These are professionally printed labels for literally every bin, bulletin board, vocabulary word, name tag, any piece of print in your classroom. And they are all in the same color scheme.”
“I wanted to go with a sunset theme this year,” I mutter.
“And what is this? Specially colored anchor chart paper?! These are like forty bucks a pad!”
“Red is math, orange is ELA, pink is Social Studies, and lavender is Science,” I whisper.
“And you had these made? On Etsy or some shit? Or bought it? What did I tell you about spending your own money on school supplies?” he asks me, outraged.
“Usually I make them myself, but Thomas didn’t let us into the building early this year! I knew I’d be crunched for time, so I had them made!” I explode. “It’s just one school year. And look,” I say, flexing the labels. “They’re built to last! They’ll last all year! The kids deserve it!”
“That’s not the point, Meems. You can’t afford to be doing this. You care way too much about this shit.”
I’m extremely irritated. “Just because you don’t care at all doesn’t mean that all teachers feel the same way,” I shoot back. “If you’re just going to complain, then you can go.”
“I care about the kids, not about the color scheme and typeface of my classroom!”
“I’m about to kick you out of here, Elias?—”
“Do you at least put stuff on that donor website so you can get some of this stuff donated?” he demands to know.
“Sometimes, but I couldn’t for the beginning of the school year. Just get the fuck out?—”
“I’m just trying to help?—”
“So then help me hang up the bulletin board paper, and then you can go?—”
There’s a knock on my door, and the rest of my third-grade team comes filing in.
“Oh look,” I grumble, “Teammates who won’t judge me for my classroom environment choices,” I say, mostly to Elias.
He sighs, exasperated.
Emmanuel Jean-Baptiste, one of my favorite people alive, glides in and sits next to me, crossing his legs elegantly. “Girl, I learned many years ago to just let you have your neuroses.”
His co-teacher, Chaya Ackerman, no longer pregnant, walks in behind him. “I think it’s nice to have organization,” she says.
Georgia Baker stomps in behind them, wavy hair huge and extra frizzy from the Brooklyn-in-September humidity. “I judge you for your classroom environment choices.”
“That’s because your room is a literal explosion,” Tamika, our stunning and fearless grade team leader, says to her.
Georgia shrugs. “Hey, as long as the kids are learning.”
“SEE,” Elias yells at me, like a five-year-old.
Georgia hands me an iced coffee, saying, “Second day of school treat,” and I realize the entire team is sipping on one. She eyes Elias. “I got one for Lina, but I just saw her, and she said she’s already too hopped up on caffeine. I guess you can have hers.” She hands it to him. “Just don’t tell Oliver I gave this to you,” she says, referring to her boyfriend and our ex-principal.
“Hey,” Elias says, after taking a sip, “ you were the one hitting on me at that one happy hour.”
Georgia shrugs, nonplussed. “It was a dark time. Oliver is hotter than you, anyway.”
Elias thinks about it for a moment. “Yeah, true. In a different way.”
“Oliver is like half-Filipino Superman,” Emmanuel chimes in. “You’re giving…” He looks Elias up and down. “Lax Bro Captain America.”
Elias beams. “I’ll take it.”
“Did I use that correctly in a sentence? ‘Lax Bro’?” Emmanuel asks us earnestly.
Tamika shrugs. Georgia, Elias, and I nod.
I take a giant gulp of coffee and stand to hang up the bulletin board backing paper. I pick up the giant roll, and Elias moves to take the end, stretching it out.
“Can two of you do that wall?” I ask the rest of the team.
Georgia puts her hands up in surrender. “No way. Last time I hung something up for you, you got all pissed that there was a wrinkle, took it down, and did it yourself. All passive aggressively.”
Tamika and Emmanuel stand. “We got you, girl, but then I gotta go,” Tamika says.
We catch one another up on our summers, with Elias and I avoiding the mention of the State of New Jersey as a whole. We then predict the future of our upcoming school year based on what we saw in last year’s second graders. Elias turns out to be a particularly useful resource, since he’s the only one who saw them regularly all last year.
“There’s one kid who’s obsessed with the subway… like he knows the routes of every single train line in the city. If you give him a starting point and a destination, he can tell you the most efficient way to get there,” Elias tells us.
“Ooo, yes, he’s one of ours,” Chaya, the special education teacher in the Integrated Co-Teaching classroom, says. “I’ve met him before. He rocks.”
Elias looks up at the ceiling, thinking. “Then there’s the little boy who won’t keep his hand out of his pants, the little girl who wears a smart watch and uses it to text her mom all day, and the kid with the extremely severe peanut allergy. Make sure he always has his Epi-Pen in his pocket. Otherwise, typical stuff for those kids. Behind two years on social skills. Have meltdowns when they’re asked to share or take turns. But you all are used to that.”
We nod gravely. Those two years of remote and hybrid learning really did a number.
The team slowly trickles out after that, going to continue working on their own classrooms. Elias steps out to get a snack from Ms. Barbara.
I’m sticking the labels on the bins of my classroom library when Lina knocks and walks in.
“Hey, Mia,” she says. I smile at her, but it drops when I take her in. Her riotous curly hair is in a topknot that lays limp like a half-filled water balloon down the back of her head. She’s not wearing any makeup, has huge dark bags under her eyes. Her posture is defeated, so different from the calm, cool confidence she usually portrays.
“Are you… okay?” I ask her, worried.
“I’m fine,” she says, waving her hand. “Just a lot going on.” She smiles at me warmly. “How are you doing? How was your summer? I hope you got to relax.”
“It was okay,” I say. “Tried to chill. Failed, mostly.”
She nods sympathetically. “Same. I did summer school.” We both cringe. Summer school sucks.
“So, I have something to ask you,” she tells me.
“What’s that?”
“Our principal,” she says, with a look of mild disgust, “wants to spend thousands of dollars of our school budget to send teachers to this international education conference in New Orleans next week.”
I frown. “But we haven’t even?—”
“Believe me; whatever you’re about to say, I know. But alas,” she sighs, “she’s the boss. So she’s making me choose a teacher to send. I want to send someone who will actually attend all the sessions and panels, take thorough notes, and be able to turnkey everything learned back to our team. And I’m thinking that there’s no better person than you.”
I start having a mild panic attack. “It’s… But…My…” I can’t get any thoughts out, as they all enter my brain in a rush.
“Don’t have a panic attack. I know it’ll only be the second week of school. I know you’ll just be getting to know your kids. I know you think this could set your kids back on your lesson pacing. But hear me out,” she says, reading my mind like an AP who moonlights as a psychic. “You’ll only be missing one day of school?—”
“—that’s so many days,” I whisper-cry.
“—you’re the type of person to leave detailed plans for a substitute,” she goes on, ignoring me. “You’re going to spend the next five school days with your kids building the foundation for strong relationships. It’ll be fine, Mia.”
I start pacing the room. “But the substitute won’t know the nuance of… and a day is a lot to be behind on… and kids value consistency… and?—”
“Please, Mia,” Lina pleads with me. The tone of her voice makes me stop pacing. I look at her disheveled self, the bags under her eyes, the stress lines in her face. This woman is working her ass off. She’s stressed the fuck out. Ugh.
I think about work, and I think about Lina as a supervisor. Before her, Oliver. Work is the one place in the entire universe I don’t feel stepped on or over or through. I feel seen here. By my supervisors, by my coworkers. I’m good at what I do, and people take note. And I like that.
“Fine,” I say, as Elias walks back into the room, munching on a bean burrito. Just one.
“Fine, what?” Elias says. “Hey, Lina.” He then surprises me by pulling a plastic wrapped bean burrito out of his back pocket and handing it to me.
“I’m going to a conference in New Orleans next week,” I grumble, taking the burrito.
A huge smile takes over Elias’s face, his green eyes crinkling in the corners. “I’m going, too!”
Lina sighs. I’m confused. “How the hell are you going?”
“Principal Thomas is impressed with my teaching abilities,” he says cheerfully. “She asked me to go yesterday.”
“Principal Thomas did?” I ask, disbelief coating my tone.
“Yeah, hater , she says I’m a great teacher, so she wants me to go,” he shoots back.
“I’m not hating on your teaching abilities, I’m just shocked that Thomas left her office.”
“She didn’t, really,” Elias says sheepishly. “I kind of?—”
I narrow my eyes. “You Dimpled your way into this, didn’t you?”
Lina sighs and stands up to go. “You wouldn’t be my second choice, Elias, but here we are,” she says, defeated.
Elias frowns at her.
“I’ll book everything for you guys today. Tickets, flights, hotel, all that stuff. Keep an eye out for my email.” She opens the door to my classroom, turning back at the last second. “Thanks again, Mia. I really appreciate it.”
“Of course, Lina,” I mumble.
The door shuts, and Elias and I look at one another.
“MARDI GRAAAAS!” he screams.
“That’s in March, Elias,” I say, mashing my face into my desk. A weekend in New Orleans with a dick the size of New Jersey. Amazing.