Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The first day of middle school classes was filled with new sneakers and fresh pencils and the anxiety of two hundred children who had spent the summer becoming slightly different people and grown an inch, developed a bit, or hadn't developed enough and were afraid everyone would notice. Or worse, not notice.
Dalene stood at the front entrance at seven forty-five and watched them come in — the new sixth graders wide-eyed and walking too close to their parents, the eighth graders returning with the certainty of people who knew where the bathrooms were and that seventh graders were babies in comparison to them.
Parents hovered at the entrance with the barely-contained emotion of people who had been looking forward to this day after the dog days of summer and were now regretting letting their babies go off into the wild.
"Ms. Austen." Mrs. Kowalski stopped beside her, grandchild in tow. She looked at Dalene's face like a teacher grading a paper. Then she smiled — wide and relieved and entirely genuine. "You look wonderful."
"I feel wonderful," Dalene said.
Eliot had walked her to work this morning before heading off to the station. She'd packed the croissants they'd made over the weekend in both their lunchboxes. He'd kissed her at the corner of her mouth, lips lingering a second longer than was polite. Dalene had worn a huge smile through all of it.
Mrs. Kowalski squeezed her arm and moved on. The grandchild waved. Dalene waved back.
Eliot had been right. She'd been carrying everyone's concern like it was criticism, like the pity looks meant they thought she was broken, like the head tilts and the careful smiles were the town's verdict on her.
They weren't. They were just people who loved her showing it badly because they didn't know what else to do.
Tristan came across the park lot with his equipment bag and his letterman jacket.
She noted, with something that was not quite satisfaction but was in the neighborhood of it, that three separate parents clocked the jacket and exchanged a look.
Mrs. Henderson's eyebrows went up. Mr. Park turned back to his car with slightly more speed than the situation required.
Tristan hadn't seen her yet.
Dalene had a moment to observe him — at the jaw set tight, the stride that was trying for easy and landing somewhere adjacent to it, the expression of a man who had made several decisions in quick succession over the weekend and was living in the consequences.
Brooke had left town on Saturday. Betty Ann had texted her about it Sunday morning with three cloud emojis and a giraffe — which Dalene had no idea what that meant.
Lila had called Sunday morning. Dalene had let it go to voicemail and called her back from the mountain, standing at the top of the trail with Eliot beside her and the whole of the Rockies spread out below them.
She had not thought about Tristan on that mountain. Not once. She hadn't thought about anybody except Eliot. Though he didn't give her much thinking time. Not with all the kissing time they spent together on the peak.
Tristan looked up and saw her. Something moved across his face. She gave him a small, genuine, entirely unbothered smile. He looked away first. She went inside.
The weekend had been extraordinary.
Saturday night Eliot had taken her to dinner.
A small Italian place with candles on the tables and a wine list he'd studied with the focused attention he gave weather data.
He'd pulled out her chair. She'd laughed at him for it.
He'd looked at her with the dry, contained expression that meant he found her funny and wasn't going to say so.
The conversation had been easy in the way that things were easy when you'd already seen someone fall asleep on your couch and come in from the rain and cry in a tree line and none of it had changed anything.
He'd kissed her at the garden gate.
Sunday they'd hiked.
He'd known the trail — had researched it, of course, had checked the weather window, had shown up at her door at eight AM with two packed lunches and the information that the cloud ceiling was going to lift by ten and visibility would be exceptional.
They'd walked for four hours. He'd named cloud formations. She'd identified plants.
He'd kissed her at the trailhead on the way back. She was thinking about it now, standing outside her classroom watching her new students find their seats. She made herself stop. She had science to teach.
Twenty-three faces looked up at her.
New ones, mostly. A few she recognized from the hallways — siblings of former students, children of people she knew from the festival committee, one girl she was fairly certain was Earl Mackie's granddaughter based on the expression of focused, patient assessment she was directing at the classroom.
Dalene loved this part. The first day, the clean-slate quality of it.
Twenty-three young people who didn't know yet what they were going to learn or who they were going to become in this room over the next nine months.
She'd been doing this for six years and it still felt like something worth showing up for.
"Good morning," she said. "I'm Ms. Austen.
This is Earth and Space Science. By the end of this month you will be able to read a weather map, identify fifteen cloud formations, explain the water cycle from evaporation to precipitation, and understand why Montana gets the kind of weather that it gets.
" She paused. "You will also, I hope, find the sky considerably more interesting than you do right now. "
Dalene went to the whiteboard. She wrote: What is a cloud?
"Clouds," she said, turning back to face them, "are not decoration.
They are not background. They are the atmosphere communicating with you in real time.
Every formation tells you something. Every change in the sky is information.
A meteorologist I know told me once that the sky is always honest about what it's going to do. You just have to learn to read it."
She thought about Eliot saying that in her kitchen at one in the morning with flour on his hands. She thought how he was now her boyfriend and they were no longer faking it, but having a real, honest relationship that had formed under the right conditions.
She smiled at her new students.
"Let's start reading," she said.