41. Callie
Callie
I woke up Thursday still glowing after Ben ruined me on his dining booth table. I drifted through my classroom at roughly seventy percent brain function, like a woman who'd been thoroughly dicked into a state of spiritual peace.
I kept catching myself smiling at nothing.
I smiled at the laminator. I smiled at a stapler.
I smiled at a child who informed me he'd eaten a crayon last night "to see what it tasted like," and instead of my usual internal crisis I just thought, valid buddy we're all just trying things, and moved on.
The worry I'd carried out of that goat farm on Tuesday had gone quiet. Ben had told me, point blank, that the three of them were square. I'd decided to believe him, because believing him let me breathe.
The only thing still sitting on my chest was the fact that I was a teacher carrying on with three of my students' fathers, and if the wrong person found out, I'd be hauling my classroom plants to my car in a sad cardboard box.
But I'd gotten good at shoving that thought in a closet and leaning on the door. The door held, mostly.
That evening auditorium was its usual windowless, climate-confused self, too warm in the corners and freezing under the one working vent, smelling like dust and the inside of a student’s recorder.
But the kids were up onstage in various states of snowflake-pageant chaos, and the dads were there, and I stood at the foot of the stage looking at the whole glittery disaster I'd somehow built and felt my chest go embarrassingly full.
Luke had a clipboard and a labeled diagram of where each kid was supposed to stand, which he was trying to enforce against a herd of children who treated stage directions as a polite suggestion.
Cole was crouched at the edge of the stage gluing the runners back onto a cardboard sleigh some kid had karate-kicked apart, his big tattooed forearms covered in glitter glue, looking like a hit man sentenced to community service at an elementary school.
And Ben was at the back wall painting a snowy backdrop, sleeves shoved up, getting more paint on himself than the canvas.
"Professional opinion." He held up his brush. "Does this tree look emotionally available?"
"It looks like a tree that's going through some things."
"So, relatable." He added a branch. "Method painting."
"Mom." Oliver appeared at my elbow with his own clipboard he'd requested after seeing Luke's, and I had never been prouder.
"We have three issues. Jessica says she's the lead snowflake, but there is no lead snowflake, snowflakes are a collective with no hierarchy.
Tommy is eating fake snow. And Noah asked me to be his partner for the mitten song.
" He paused, his cheeks turning rosy. "I said yes. I'm just informing you of the change."
My heart did a jump that had nothing to do with three handsome men and everything to do with the small serious person in front of me who had a friend, who'd said yes to a friend, who was standing here and pretending it wasn't the best thing that had happened to him all year.
"Noted on all three," I said. "I'll inform Jessica that snowflakes are a leaderless society. I'll get the fake snow away from Tommy. And the mitten partnership is approved and frankly the strongest casting decision anyone's made on this production."
He nodded, satisfied, and went to inform Jessica about the leaderless society, which was going to go great.
"He's got a clipboard." Luke had appeared beside me, watching Oliver go with something soft on his face. "You know what that does to me. I'm not okay."
"He filled out a request. Officially."
"Stop." Luke pressed a hand to his chest. "I will adopt that child. I will simply take him."
Luke’s words spread through me like spilled tea, because this was my dream…
the glitter and the leaderless snowflakes and Ben's emotionally unavailable tree and Cole on his knees gluing a sleigh back together and Luke threatening to adopt my kid, this felt like a life.
The kind I'd stopped letting myself want around the time Oliver's father packed a bag.
I stood in the middle of my chaotic auditorium and let myself think the dangerous thought.
This feels great. This could actually be mine.
I should've known better. The universe has a documented allergy to me being happy. It dispatched antibodies immediately, and the antibodies were wearing too much cologne.
"Miss Morgan." Darren's voice came from the wings. "A word?"
I plastered on the smile, the one that had kept me employed all year, and followed him into the prop hallway off the side of the stage, because what else was I supposed to do when the man who was responsible for my livelihood had a request.
The hallway was narrow and dim and stacked with old set pieces, a plywood castle and a sun with a chipped face, and the second the wall cut off the sightline to the stage, his smile changed.
"You've been in a good mood lately." Darren stepped closer than required. The cologne arrived a full second before he did, like an opening act. "It's nice. You're prettier when you're not so stressed. You know you should let me help with that."
"I'm okay, thank you. The kids are doing great, so…" I shifted to step around him. "I should get back. The snowflakes are unionizing."
But then the cologne-soaked son of a bitch blocked me, one arm coming up to rest on a stack of plywood, boxing me into the corner between the castle and the wall. Up close his pecs strained at his polo like two dinner rolls fighting their way out of a bag.
"I've been more than patient with you, Callie.
" First name. He never used my first name.
He leaned in even closer. "I've looked the other way on the chaos, the complaints, the way you let those fathers hang all over you.
Because I see something in you. I think you and I could understand each other, if you'd stop being difficult about it. "
"Principal Beauford." Every alarm I owned was going off at once. "This isn't appropriate. I'd like to get back to the kids."
"Don't be like that. You need a man like me in your life and you know it." And then he dropped in, one hand landing on my waist, his face moving toward mine, cologne and breath and hell fucking no.
I wasn’t taking this bullshit anymore. I turned my face hard to the side so his mouth caught my cheekbone, planted both hands flat on those ridiculous pecs, and shoved.
"No." Louder than I meant, steadier than I'd ever managed.
"Don't you ever touch me again. I have spent all year smiling at you and apologizing to you and folding myself up small so you could feel like the big man with the whistle, and I am done.
You're not powerful, Darren. You're a sad, soggy little tyrant with a god complex and too much body spray, who thinks cornering a woman by a cardboard castle makes him a man.
It makes you the most pathetic thing in this building, and that includes the sleigh a seven-year-old just murdered.
So no. Not in this life, not in any other one. Choke on it."
I realized what I had just said could have cost me my job but at that point I didn’t fucking care.
I was so sick of letting controlling men get away with their bullshit.
But when Darren’s perfect principled mask came off, I was terrified.
He looked absolutely furious, like he couldn’t wait to destroy my life.
"You're going to want to think very carefully," he said in a threatening whisper, "about how you talk to the person who signs your contract."
Then he rearranged his face back into Principal Darren and walked out toward the stage like he'd been getting a drink of water, leaving me alone with a plywood castle, a chipped-face sun, and my heartbeat going like a snare drum.
I made it three steps before my body decided it was done being brave.
The nausea came up fast, that cold-sweat, spit-pooling, we are evacuating the premises feeling, and I grabbed the plywood castle and had a stern internal conversation with my own stomach.
Not here, I told it. My stomach was unmoved.
I breathed and swallowed and stared at the sun's little chipped face until the floor stopped tilting, because throwing up in a prop hallway over Darren Beauford would have been letting him win, and I'd be damned if I gave him a single thing more than he'd already tried to take.
But I didn't throw up, because I am, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, a professional. I got my hands to stop shaking. And then I did something that scared me almost as much as standing up to Darren did: I went to find the guys.
Because I wasn't alone now. I had three enormous men out there who'd told me they had my back, and for once I could let somebody help me carry something. Ben had said let somebody take care of you. Maybe I could.
I held onto that shaky and hopeful feeling all the way to the edge of the wings and then I heard them and I stopped.
They were behind the snowdrift flats, the three of them, and they weren't talking about mitten songs. Their voices had an edge I'd never heard them use on each other, the kind men get right before somebody shoves somebody into a wall.
"-because you keep crowding her, that's the problem," Cole was saying. "Every time I get five minutes alone with her I turn around and there you are."
"That's rich." Luke replied with none of his usual calm. "You had her at her house. Overnight. You don't get to lecture anybody about hogging her."
"At least I'm not following her around with a clipboard like her personal assistant," Ben shot back. "What's the matter, the color-coded calendar not getting you anywhere rich boy, so now you're-"
"Watch it, Ben."
"Or what? You'll schedule me a consequence? Block out forty-five minutes for it?"
"I'm not stepping back so you two can-"
I didn't hear the rest. I didn't need to.
Oh, shit.
Crowding her. Hogging her. Stepping back. Three best friends snapping at each other behind a cardboard snowdrift over who got the most of me. The exact thing Ben had looked me in the eye over a basket of hush puppies and promised was square.
It wasn't square. It was cracking in real time behind a snowdrift, and I was the crack.
And it wasn't just their friendship I was about to blow up. It was my job. My whole careful little life, balanced on a man who'd just looked at me like I was something he was owed. And I couldn't involve them in that.
I backed away before they saw me, got to the front of the stage, and clapped my hands twice in my brightest teacher voice, which did not match a single thing happening inside my body.
"Okay, my beautiful snowflakes! Amazing work, genuinely award-worthy mitten energy but tonight we're calling it early! Grab your things, find your grown-up, no running, Tommy put down the snow, it is not food, we've discussed this-"
"Callie?" Luke stepped out of the wings, clipboard in hand, confused. "We've got another forty minutes on the schedule. The blocking for the second number isn't-"
"It's great! We're ahead, actually, the snowflakes are very advanced this year." I was already gathering my bag, my keys, Oliver's backpack, Oliver himself, moving like the building was on fire, because in every way that counted it was. "Ollie, bud, grab your clipboard, we're going."
"We're leaving early?" Oliver frowned. "That's a change to the schedule. Two changes today. I don't love it."
"I know, baby. I'll make it up to you. Vanilla ice cream, the kind with no flecks."
"Cupcake." Ben now, coming toward me, paint on his forearms and real concern on his face, Cole a step behind him and all three of them moved toward me at once, wanting to help with no idea I'd heard every word, and somehow that was the thing that nearly broke me.
"Hey. What happened? You're white as a sheet. "
"Nothing happened! It’s been a long day, you know me." I got Oliver's hand in mine and aimed us both at the exit. "Thank you all for tonight, really. See you-"
"Callie." Cole's voice was firm, that one syllable doing the work of a whole sentence. Stop. Talk to me. Let me.
But I was already at the door, pushing out into the cold parking lot with my kid and my keys and my pounding heart, gone before any of them could reach me. Before any of them could look me in the eye and tell me one more time that everything was handled.
I'd believed it once. I wasn't going to be stupid enough to believe it twice.