Chapter 6
Amelia stopped by Bryn’s classroom—Professor Herringbone’s classroom—on three occasions in the following week.
Just for a few minutes each time, to check in, to ask her how she was doing, how she was settling in.
And Bryn appreciated it, though she couldn’t help the part of her that wanted more.
She wanted Amelia to stop by the cottage, to come in, to sit down, to share a pot of tea, to show any sign that she had felt the spark that Bryn fancied she’d felt herself.
Amelia, however, showed no evidence of having felt a spark of any kind.
Whenever she checked in (Bryn’s heart registering impending disaster), she made sure everything was going “all right” (Bryn had no idea what the definition of “all right” was in this context, but agreed that things were fine, mostly because she didn’t want to add to Amelia’s workload), and then nipped back out again with a sweeping swirl of her cape, fully in Headmistress Mode.
Maybe she was always in Headmistress Mode and any hint of something else was a fabrication of Bryn’s lonely mind, desperate for human connection and unexpectedly placed in close proximity to her old schoolgirl crush. That was likely all it was.
Just in case she wasn’t making it up completely, though, she watched for those less guarded moments when Amelia seemed to briefly drop her professional force field.
Never at meals or around students, but Bryn swore she wasn’t entirely delusional.
Which was not the same as believing Amelia Hexford actually wanted her, she reminded herself. Often.
Piper came by more frequently and sat next to her at every meal, which she was grateful for—and suspected they were too.
Surprisingly, in the middle of her second week of teaching, Mr Wicks came around between the end of classes and dinner.
She had to control the jump-scare part of her brain that immediately assumed she was doing something wrong and was about to get in trouble for it.
Of course, Mr Wicks was no longer her professor, or her teacher, or really any kind of authority figure at all. Still, her heart was pounding slightly when she said, “Oh, hello, Mr Wicks.”
“Ms Delmar,” he said with a smile. “You really can call me Robert, you know. You’re not my student.”
She felt herself flushing in some mixture of embarrassment and resistance, and just general flusterment. “Right. I did forget that for a second.”
“It happens to everyone,” he said, and for a moment it almost looked like he might smile. “Everyone who went to school here, anyway.”
“Right, of course.” She realized she’d stood up. A sign of respect to an elder? More likely, a sign of thinking, Please don’t get me in trouble, Mr Wicks, I swear I didn’t do it, even though she had never been the one who did it and her guilt response made zero rational sense.
“How are you coming along?” he asked. “I know this job can be a bit overwhelming at times, and coming in during the middle of the year is harder still.”
“I am overwhelmed a bit,” she agreed, cursing herself for the unintentional word repetition.
She suspected it was an old defense mechanism to appease her mother by echoing back things she’d said.
Sirens did kind of like that sort of thing, but she thought she’d stopped doing it as an adult.
Plus, this was Mr Wicks—she’d once seen him shouting at a first-year whose prank spell had misfired in the Great Hall, causing ice to form over the cobbles of the floor between the main doors and the stage at the far end.
It had only been a dumb attempt to trip a friend, but the spell had more power than the kid expected and went haywire.
The infirmary had filled up with bruises, bumps, scrapes, and two students who had hit their heads hard enough to qualify for overnight observation.
Maybe Mr Wicks’s apparent overreaction hadn’t been as extreme as it had felt at the time.
“That’s all right, it’s very normal.” Was he … trying to reassure her? “Even if you had gone through the entire university program to get your certificate, you would still likely be overwhelmed a week and a half in.”
“That makes sense,” she said, though it had not independently occurred to her. What was wrong with her brain right now? She knew these things. “I’m not used to feeling bad at stuff.”
This time Mr Wicks laughed and it was so sincere, a sound she didn’t think she’d ever heard in four years of being his student, that she inadvertently smiled in response. “No, I remember that about you as a student. Always good at things.”
“I tried,” she said, and then gestured him awkwardly to sit by her desk.
Professor Herringbone’s desk, really, still covered in her things.
Bryn had cleared about half of the blotter in order to set down her own notebooks.
Mr Wicks reached out and picked up a small snow globe, though it was actually a sand globe—some kind of touristy thing from somewhere the professor had traveled to.
When you shook it, sand blew around, landing on cacti and Joshua trees.
“And I’m afraid we lost our best teacher mentor,” he said softly, suddenly bleak. “When I arrived here, overwhelmed and doubting my ability to do the job, it was Professor Herringbone who talked me off the edge of the cliff more than once.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He set the sand globe down. “I cannot fill her shoes and you won’t be able to either, so my advice is to not try. Find out who you are as a teacher, instead of trying to be anyone else.” He hesitated. “Having said that, I do have some thoughts if you want to hear them.”
It was so strange, interacting with Mr Wicks as a colleague.
When she was a student, he had been stern and demanding, and full of the kinds of blustery semi-threats that had started by scaring her and, by graduation, inspired mostly eye-rolling.
But some of that I’m a white man in a position of authority vibe seemed calming to her now, which she would probably have to think about at some later date.
“It’s important to be clear with the kids where the boundaries are,” he began. The fact that Mr Wicks knew the word boundaries was somewhat surprising.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “What does that … look like?”
He spread his hands. “They’re developmentally primed to take advantage whenever they can.
I know you kids always thought I was being hard on you, but it’s important to maintain structure with adolescents.
I think it’s vital to give them something they know they can count on at this stage in their development.
I try very hard to be clear with my students what the lines are and what will happen if they cross them.
Whether that’s about homework or cursing or disrespecting other members of the class. ”
Bryn nodded thoughtfully. That Mr Wicks had this philosophy made a lot of sense. She could reconcile it with his behavior as a teacher. “Right,” she said. “I can probably try that, though I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“That’s fair. And I suppose Antigone didn’t exactly leave you good notes.”
“She left … a lot of notes,” Bryn said, not wanting to sound skeptical about the professor’s tactics, but unable to help her unconvinced tone completely.
Again, Mr Wicks laughed, which sounded strangely natural to him, though she swore he’d never laughed when she was a student. “I’m sure she did. Notes in the margins, notes on little pieces of paper, notes on the walls, even. I would not be surprised, but notes about teaching?”
She shook her head. “Not a single one that I found, and Piper looked too.”
“Well, I would encourage you to look up the MSE requirements and cram as many of them into your lessons as you can. It’s not the most inspiring way to teach, but if this is a temporary measure, it’s probably your best bet.
And of course, let me know what I can do to help.
I will never be Professor Herringbone, but we are all trying to work together here, and I’m invested in that. ”
The comment seemed almost edged. She wondered if that was somehow a critique of Amelia, but she didn’t want to bring it up.
What would she say if he launched into some kind of diatribe against the new headmistress?
“Thanks,” she said instead. “I appreciate it. At the moment, it would be great if I could just get them to pay attention to anything I was saying.”
“It sometimes helps if you can demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. “You have written a whole book. Have you mentioned that to your classes?”
She almost gasped aloud. “No. I mean, I didn’t see why I would.”
“Well, you don’t have to. I won’t insist, but it can be helpful to prove you have game.” With that statement, he rose, nodded cordially, and left the classroom.
Prove she had game? Did Mr Wicks just say game to her?
It was astonishing. Her sixteen-year-old self would never have believed that one day she would be in Professor Herringbone’s classroom as a teacher instead of a student, and that Mr Wicks would come by to offer her support.
She couldn’t help finding the entire scene completely surreal.
She pulled out her laptop, connected to the school’s Wi-Fi, which was significantly stronger in the main building than it was in her cottage, and started looking through the Magical Scholarly Examinations website’s teacher resources tab.
That’s what she was now: a teacher. She started downloading, googling, and taking notes.
At least it gave her something to do that felt like it might be helpful, eventually.