The First Noelle
“HEY, MR. B!” Marcelle’s voice cut urgently into Isaac’s dream.
“Hmm?” Isaac mumbled.
“Dude, that teacher is coming—the one who let you take the cat! She’s about to come in. Isn’t she your boss or something?”
“Oh shit,” Isaac muttered, blinking hard. “Did I fall asleep?”
“Yeah, dude. You put in the movie for fifth period, and this is sixth!”
That made Isaac sit up. “Oh my God—Marcelle! You let me sleep through fifth period? I had grades and hats and—”
“All given,” Marcelle said promptly. “You had me set up the gifts, right? Well, they all saw you sleeping, and since I had the grades, I called them up just like you would and gave them their gifts and their grades. It was fine. But it’s the middle of sixth period now, and you need to wake up!”
Isaac wiped drool off his face, took a swig of the soda Luca had packed for him that morning, and tried to get his shit together.
Marcelle was one of three TAs this year, and Isaac was grateful, because the last three weeks since Thanksgiving—when Noelle had come into their lives—had been hard.
Nobody was getting any sleep. Not Allegra, not Luca, and not Isaac.
Colic was a beast, and everybody had taken their turn walking the baby across the floor, but even with three people, sleep was a rare commodity.
Isaac had managed to finish his Christmas knitting (and had bought adorable tchotchkes and candy bars for the kids who weren’t getting hats or fingerless gloves), but this was the last day before Christmas vacation, and he couldn’t remember the past hour of teaching.
His respect for Roxy and Brian had gone up a thousand percent, and he was starting to dream about knitting since he got so little time to actually knit.
But one of the things he’d finished—and was damned proud of it—had pretty much wiped out the last of the brown yarn, as well as the scraps of contrasting yarn he’d had left after doing the student projects.
And it would, hopefully, buy him some goodwill from the woman who had been his nemesis, but who had, as the new semester progressed, worked her way more and more into his good graces by asking after his cat.
Euclid the stoner kitten had continued to be a force of good in Isaac’s home.
In spite of the many, many huge changes that had rocked Isaac’s life since May, walking into the house to be greeted by that insistent orange force of tranquility and evil was still a furry miracle that Isaac didn’t take for granted.
Opening his home for Euclid meant opening his home for Allegra.
It meant opening his heart for Luca, and opening his life for family.
Having this coworker, who used to seem disdainful of everything Isaac was, greet him with a smile and ask him about his cat was along the same miraculous lines of… well, of being able to say, “My late husband used to love sunsets.”
Todd had loved sunsets. It was why he’d made sure the porch had a swing, where Isaac had gotten into the habit of sitting and knitting. Todd had sat with him, and they’d quietly watched the sunset for years of their marriage.
Those moments, quiet, accepting, meditative, had been some of the best moments of Isaac’s life at the time.
But… at the time, he hadn’t spent twenty minutes crocheting garlands with pom-poms out of scrap yarn to soak in catnip so his cat could have an amazingly sparkly afternoon.
At the time, he hadn’t come home to Luca, doing his best cooking with spaghetti and meat sauce and garlic bread because it was Friday and he’d gotten home early and wanted Isaac to start his weekend off doing something besides cooking.
At the time, he hadn’t fallen asleep on the couch with a suddenly somnolent baby on his shoulder, tired to his bones, only to wake up and find that his boyfriend had fallen asleep next to him and the baby’s mother was taking a picture of the three of them because “you look like adorable hell.”
Todd had loved sunsets. Isaac could love that about his late husband. He could also love Euclid and Allegra and Noelle.
And Luca.
Especially Luca, who had brought all of them into his life. Well, Euclid had sort of brought himself, but Luca loved Isaac’s idiot cat as much as Isaac did, so it felt like they’d arrived together.
So Isaac had come to all sorts of peace in the last six months, and part of that peace meant forgiving Paula for being a passive-aggressive twat when he’d first started teaching.
He had no idea where she came from. Had she been raised religious and spent the last ten years getting over it?
Had she simply not realized he was gay and hadn’t realized how she sounded?
Or had he been bitter and defensive and unaware of how much that affected the people around him who weren’t Roxy?
However she had been then, she was becoming a friend now, and the contrast between then and now in his life was so severe that he thought a little bit of knitting forgiveness was a small price to pay for improvement.
But he couldn’t very well give her the gift he’d planned while he was still rumpled and drooling after falling asleep at his desk and letting his student TA do all his adulting for him.
“How do I look?” he asked Marcelle, wiping the last of the sleep from his eyes.
“Like a new parent who just fell asleep on his desk,” Marcelle said astutely. “But she might not see it.”
Still, he was standing up behind his supply table and “observing” his class when she poked her head in, so that was something.
He smiled gamely at her and snagged one of the last gifts from the table, moving to the open door while the students sat immersed in the last ten minutes of Hidden Figures, the happy math teacher’s best movie friend in the world.
“Happy holidays, Isaac,” Paula said with a shy smile. “I added you to my baking list this year.” She handed him a Christmas tin that he understood was full of cookies, mostly because he’d never been on the list before and had been envious as hell of the other people who had.
“Thank you!” Oh wow. His surprise and excitement were genuine—but so was his relief, because he didn’t have to accept the gift empty-handed.
“And you’ve been added to the knitting list.” He held out her package but didn’t quite relinquish it.
“And you get the same talk that Roxy got—don’t expect something big at every holiday.
Some days it’s a pom-pom for the end of your pencil, some days it’s a blanket—it all depends on what I feel like yarning. ”
Paula chuckled and nodded her head. “Understood,” she said.
Her gaze went sideways and got quietly sad.
“I’m grateful to be on the list,” she said.
Then, “It… it wasn’t because you were gay,” she added.
“I know you thought that was why I didn’t like you, but that wasn’t it.
It was… you and Roxy had your own secret club.
You were funny and made all these exciting plans and…
and I felt excluded.” She managed to meet his eyes.
“We’re the same age, Isaac—it hurt that you guys thought of me as the Wicked Witch of the Math Department. ”
He knew his mouth had fallen open, and he was stunned—not just by how much she had revealed, but by how much he had misunderstood.
And how much she’d overheard—he and Roxy had apparently not been as adult in their immaturity as they’d thought.
And he felt compelled to make the same sort of confession.
“My late husband,” he said, “was… was really controlling. Those Wicked Witch comments you heard—one more person, even my boss, telling me what to do was… was going to make me hostile. It wasn’t your fault.” He gave her a small smile. “I’m so sorry we hurt your feelings.”
“I’m sorry your husband was shitty,” she said softly. “We had no idea. We thought you were in mourning, until this semester when….” She gave a little shrug. “You’ve been really happy this year. Tired, this last month, but happy.”
His lips quirked. “Want to see a picture?” he asked, and as she unwrapped her gift, he produced pictures on his phone.
Blessing Noelle, of course, and Allegra holding her infant daughter, and finally, with a burst of trust, the picture Allegra had forwarded to everybody of Isaac and Luca asleep on the couch, the baby tucked up against Isaac’s shoulder.
“Aw,” Paula murmured. “Uncle Isaac.” And then she unwrapped the cardigan, brown with autumn-purple-and-orange trim, that he’d created using a pattern based on the sweaters Paula usually wore when the weather got chilly.
Suddenly all talk of the baby disappeared as she wiped her red-rimmed eyes and said, “Oh, Isaac—I really love this color. How did you know?”
THE REST of the day was a blur—although he did remember Marcelle’s grateful hug when he opened his own gift and got a brown knit hat with Christmas lights dancing all over it, Isaac’s second-favorite item from the batch of repurposed alpaca that had changed his life that day in early May.
In the end, he’d left his cleaned, orderly room with an empty briefcase, because he’d gotten his grades in, and a clean conscience, because everybody who’d tried had passed.
He and Roxy had plans to get their families together on Christmas Eve, which was in three days, and Isaac, Allegra, and Luca would be all about Christmas prep between Saturday morning and that ring on the doorbell.