33. Mia
THIRTY-THREE
Mia
The entirety of the PS 2 staff trudges into the auditorium for Professional Development Day. I mean, it’s not like anyone ever happily skips to PD Day (maybe Georgia did when Oliver was still principal), but today feels like a slow march to a funeral dirge.
I take a seat in the back with the rest of the third grade team. Normally, I make us all sit towards the front, but I can’t bring myself to do it today.
Principal Thomas and Lina aren’t here yet, so we chat.
“How are you doing?” Tamika asks me, all concerned mother hen. I assume Georgia and Emmanuel have updated her and Chaya on the situation.
I shrug. “Awful.”
“You haven’t heard from him?” Georgia asks.
“No.”
“Not even at home?” Chaya asks.
“I haven’t been home. I’ve been staying with my brother,” I mutter.
Emmanuel squeezes my hand. “Is your Hot Girl Energy battery replenished yet?” I told him all about it at a particularly drunk and sad happy hour.
“I think it’s still on Low-Power Mode.”
“You’ll get it back,” Georgia reassures me.
“I miss him,” I whisper to no one.
Arms wrap around me from both sides.
The low buzz of conversation in the auditorium comes to a halt once Lina walks in. Something is off. She looks a bit shellshocked.
“Hey, everyone,” she finally says, when she stands in front of the room. “Uh…” She scratches underneath her bun. “Well, I don’t know how to say this without being frank about it. Principal Thomas… won’t be returning to PS 2.”
Shocked silence fills the auditorium.
Emmanuel breaks it. “Are we allowed to cheer?” he asks out loud.
The auditorium huffs a collective laugh, teachers breaking into excited murmurs with the surrounding people.
“Holy shit,” I murmur, looking at my team and grinning. “What does that mean?” I yell to Lina over the hum of the staff.
Lina looks at me knowingly, with a sparkle in her eye I haven’t seen all year. She urges the auditorium to quiet down so they can hear what she’s going to say. “Starting tomorrow, you can move back to your previous curriculum, whatever you had been teaching before the Words of Wonder curriculum. We’re done with Words of Wonder.”
There is actually a collective cheer this time.
“Baruch Hashem,” mutters Chaya.
“Praise Our Holy Mother,” Emmanuel agrees.
I eye him. “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”
“I’m not. I’m referring to Our Holy Mother, Paris Dupree.”
Lina grins. “I just got off the phone with Superintendent Daniels. They are starting the search for a replacement principal immediately. He said to sit tight, but in the meantime, business as usual. I don’t need to micromanage you. You all rock,” Lina says. “I think this calls for a celebration. Early release today, guys. You’re free to go home,” she says, giving us the best gift a teacher could ever ask for. After being rid of an authoritarian principal, that is.
Everyone all but sprints out of the auditorium.
I pick up my backpack and move to Lina. “What the fuck happened?” I ask her.
She’s smiling at me. She lowers her voice so only I can hear. “The supe said he got a phone call from a concerned parent who did all this research about Words of Wonder and the benefits of project based learning, or whatever. The parent found that the Words of Wonder curriculum was written by this tiny company, and that the CEO of that company is a close friend of Principal Thomas. She signed this lucrative contract with him to buy the curriculum for our school.”
She nods her head as my mouth drops open. “That’s not it. That’s obviously a huge conflict of interest, but the parent had more to say. He said that the funds were misused, and that the principal used the budget lines that were for school and building improvement, like the schoolyard and the AC and heating, to pay for the curriculum!”
“Shut up,” I whisper.
“Right?! But there’s one more thing,” Lina is grinning from ear to ear now. “This parent sent in this entire report about why scripted, one size fits all curriculum is detrimental to student learning. Why the way we used to do it, why project based, culturally responsive, inquiry based learning is better.” Her eyes twinkle. “Apparently, it was twenty pages long and had several references from the top minds of our field.”
I freeze. “What… Who was the parent?”
She shrugs. “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it to a student. The parent’s name is Ford Prefect.”
This is the moment my Hot Girl Energy battery starts to regenerate. I feel it building, stacking brick by brick up my spine. It feels warm and cozy and just like home. I smile.
“Do you know the parent?” Lina asks, with a knowing look.
“Yup,” I say.
I know what I want, and I’m going to go get it.
He’s sitting on the couch when I push the door to our apartment, to our home, open.
My battery reaches full charge when I see his face. It’s tight, haunted, with dark rings under his eyes, but I watch something come over him when he sees me. His face relaxes. His giant body relaxes. Inexplicably, he smiles, all crow’s feet and Dimple, like he’s recharged by me, too. His hand twitches at his side.
I realize I’m smiling, too, so incredibly relieved.
I stand there for a few moments as we drink each other in, eyes roaming, tracing the lines of each other’s bodies. I wonder, for a moment, why I’m not more pissed at him. Why I’m not filled with anger or resentment. Why my immediate response to seeing him is relief. This isn’t Hot Girl Energy. It’s more of an I Love You So Fucking Much Energy.
It’s too soon for you to launch yourself into his arms, you desperate hag , I say to myself.
But then he speaks one word with the force of a million different emotions—relief, disbelief, pain, elation, hunger, hesitation. “Mia,” he says, and I launch myself into his arms like a desperate hag.
I curl myself into a ball and he wraps his giant Prometheus arms around my entire body, squeezing the life out of me. My battery is way too charged now. Overcharged. Is that a thing? I feel insane. I bury my face in his neck and inhale the smell of his soap and his skin like a psychopath, but I don’t feel too bad about it because he is doing the same thing to my hair.
I realize I’m trembling as he smooths his hands down the panes of my back. I pull away, and we both have tears in our eyes.
I sniff. “I didn’t know you read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .”
His beautiful green eyes, flecks of burnished bronze and blue hidden within, sparkle at me. “I didn’t. I had to Google the plot. Ford Prefect was the coolest name.”
“Not Zaphod Beeblebrox?”
“Mmm… I didn’t get that far,” he admits. “I only read the first paragraph of the synopsis. But that is definitely the coolest name,” he says gently, with a soft smile.
I trace it with my hand. He drags his finger down my nose, across my cheek.
“I missed you,” I say.
“I’m in love with you,” he says, at the same time.
I stare at him.
“And I’m so fucking sorry,” he continues. “And I missed you, too,” he says, with a soft kiss to my forehead. He pulls back. “I don’t know if this is too late, if you’ve already started… something, with someone else, but will you hear me out?”
I nod, my brain and Hot Girl Energy demanding some semblance of self-respect.
Elias picks me up bodily and deposits me next to him on the couch. “I can’t think while I’m touching you,” he explains.
I understand because I have to sit on my hands. But that doesn’t stop me from tucking my toes under his thigh.
He looks at my feet smooshed under his leg with that same soft smile. He takes a deep breath. “I wanted to have a conversation with you way earlier. Way before… way before Leo. Before I overheard you having that conversation with Andrea. Before you found all those pictures on my phone. Which are all gone, by the way. I realized I was falling in love with you then, and I wanted to talk to you about it. But then I got in my own head.”
I nod, giving him the space to talk it out.
“My entire life, I’ve always been… a fuck-head himbo—” he holds his hand up when I start to protest. “I liked it, Mia. I leaned into it. I liked being a goofball that no one took seriously. It made things easy. At least when I was a kid. But when I got older, it… well, it got kind of old. No one took me seriously when I became a teacher. No one took me seriously when I took over my gym. Girls were dropping me left and right. Then no one took me seriously when I couldn’t hold down a relationship. And it kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believed it myself.”
I find myself reaching out for him, but pull my hand back at the last moment. “I never thought that about you.”
He nods. “I know that. I realize that now. You’ve never fucking been one of those people. Our entire lives, you’ve thought I was amazing. I was your hero?—”
I roll my eyes. “Relax, Lax Bro Captain America. You’re making me seem like a desperate hag,” I tell him, even if I am, in fact, a huge one.
He huffs a laugh. “Sorry. But you’ve always taken me seriously, at least. I guess it wasn’t until… well, until we started… fucking?” We both cringe. “No, that’s not right. Seeing each other? Spending all our time together? Falling in love? Anyway, it wasn’t until then that I started realizing it for myself. That I was pretty fucking competent at everything I did. Because you were always there to remind me.”
“I wasn’t reminding you. I was just speaking the truth,” I tell him quietly.
He smiles at me, and it fills my body with warmth. “Thank you,” he says, genuinely. “But I got in my own head after hearing your conversation with Andrea?—”
“That was all bullshit?—”
“I know,” he says gently. “You explained yourself. I just got in my own head about it. And after you saw those pictures on my phone, reminding me of what kind of person I was. And after Leo,” he says his name with a twinge of pain, “almost caught us, I thought I was betraying my best friend. I started believing, again, that I wasn’t good enough. For you, for his little sister.”
“I’m so sorry?—”
“Stop,” he says. “You did nothing wrong. This was all me. You’ve believed in me my entire life. It took us… it took me pushing you away and being apart from you for me to realize it and remember it.”
“Okay,” I say. I link my pinky with his. He allows it.
“I heard what you said, when you were being all brave and Hot Girl energy and telling me how you were feeling, and I was being a massive fucking asshole and gaslighting you and dismissing you. I’m so sorry for doing that. I did the thing that you hated the most. I did the thing that made me just as bad as everyone else. I’m so sorry about that. That was the shittiest thing I think I’ve ever done. It was me being a fucking idiot and getting in my own head and gaslighting my own self.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, my ring finger joining my pinky in holding his, slowly gaining more skin. “That was really shitty. It might have been the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.” I pause, thinking, exuding Hot Girl Energy now. “No, actually, maybe it was when you dismissed me at the bar. With that woman.” I think about it some more, and Elias gives me space. “No, actually, I don’t blame you for doing that. I dragged Adam to the bar, and he was all over me. I dangled that it front of you, and that was super petty. I’m sorry about that, too.”
He nods, his middle finger joining our finger party. He sighs, his green eyes searching my blue. “I’ve loved you my entire life, Mia, and I’m pissed at myself for taking so long to realize it. I heard what you said. What you said about me, and what I do for you… I’m so glad to be that person for you. Even if this is all coming too late, even if you’re with that fucking soft-looking emo kid now,” he says, his face twisting with disgust and self-loathing, “I’m always going to be that person for you. Forever.”
He looks down at our hands, surprised to see all our fingers interlocked. I let him go, his face breaking momentarily, but only for a second, because I am strong and I am seen and my chin is up and my shoulders are back and my tits are out.
With this energy, I pull his face to mine.
Our lips meet, and it’s perfect and familiar and a lot like coming home.
He makes a sound against my mouth, pulling me into his lap so that I straddle his hips, and I run my tongue along the seam of his lips so he’ll let me in. He pulls back before I can take back what’s mine. “What does this mean, Mia? Use your words, please,” he begs.
“Fuck that soft-looking emo kid. I prefer juiced up Lax Bro Captain America.”
It’s as if the sun comes out from behind the clouds in the way that he looks at me, his grin wide and a little bit feral, in the split second before he drags me back down, lips meeting, mouths open, tongues drinking each other in. Through touch, we share the extent and depth of our love, my hands in his hair and his cheek and his hands on the bare skin of my back and my waist.
“I love you,” I say into his neck.
“Thank fucking god. I love you, too,” he breathes into my collarbone.