I hadn’t traveled more than two hundred miles since I moved back over five years ago. I told myself that I liked my boundaries and that the lure of any city where I couldn’t sleep in my bed for the night didn’t appeal to me. If everything I needed wasn’t at 716 County Road 45, I didn’t need it.
That’s a lie, and you know it.
When I opened my eyes, I took in the festive decorations of the room with my hands on my hips. As far as the eye could see, red and green holly, plastic snow-frosted cranberry garland, and anything that looked like winter or Christmas covered the cinder block walls. No one could deny that I had a flair for decorating.
My artificial six-foot-tall Christmas tree was bare now, but hours ago, it was weighed down with the homemade ornamentsthat my first graders spent thirty minutes a day creating for the past week. From clothespins reindeer with small red pompom noses to green felt trees lined with glitter, every ornament elevated my tree to a fire hazard of the first degree.
Although my kids weren’t expert artists, the beautifully decorated tree displayed symmetry that a mathematician would be proud of. Christmas tree decorating was one of the many crafty skills my interior designer mother taught me. Just like the three over-the-top trees she decorated in our home when I was a child, my Walmart clearance tree was perfect in every way, at least in my eyes. Even Farmerton’s mayor agreed when he dropped in after speaking at our school assembly last week.
Decorate from left to right. Spread out ornaments of the same size and shape.I heard my mother’s voice in my head as I opened the pictures I took today on my phone. Eighteen bright-eyed students stood in front of the tree and posed like little angels before we placed their ornaments carefully in plastic bags for delivery to their parents.
“Guess what time it is?” My friend Nick Braxton’s shrill voice drew me from my musings when he burst into my classroom like an unexpected snowstorm.
He always acted hyper as Farmerton Elementary’s PE teacher. I joked that many of the kids were calmer than he was. Nick raised a piece of fake mistletoe over the threshold of my door as it closed behind him. He puckered his thick lips like he wanted a kiss.
Nick loved acting like he had a crush on me, but I knew better. Although I was above average attractive, I was the last person he wanted to date. From the minute I came back to Farmerton, I became the object of his fake affection. Game knew game and could spot his cover-up a mile away.
I snatched the cheap decoration from his hands.
“Are you crazy?” I pushed him aside, opening and closing the door to make sure no one heard or saw the foolishness that Nick loved bringing my way.
I faced him with my arms crossed, tired of being an accomplice to his antics.
“Be bold this year and tell your folks you’re gay. We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore. People are pretty progressive.”
Farmerton was a small, somewhat conservative town but wasn’t as backward as Nick thought it was. Sure, most people were traditional and super religious, but many were models of progress.
Haven of Hope and Blessings Christian Church was one example. The megachurch’s pastor, Caleb Stallings, was out-of-the-box. His highly educated wife, Dr. Grace Stallings, admitted to struggling with suicidal ideation before she became First Lady. She reached out to the community, pushing people to embrace diversity and mental wellness in all its forms. I knew of them firsthand since their daughter, Esther, was in my class. The love of God rested on the Stallings family. They had been nothing but kind in their brief interactions with me.
My gut told me Nick was more of the problem than his family and wasn’t ready to share the truth about his sexuality with them.
“Admit to being a Black gay man in rural Georgia? Girl, please.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head with his lips poked out. “Don’t talk to me about progress. You can’t even tell people yourveryalive husband isn’t dead. Why don’t I call Mr. Starks up right now and ask him how he’s doing?” Nick pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his dark slacks.
I knocked the phone down with my hands.
“Why are you so messy? I’m trying to support you.” I whisper shouted in a low voice despite no one being in the room with us.
Nick was two seconds away from being cursed out on school grounds.
I took a deep breath, remembering that if I so much as mumbled the word “ass,” people would latch on to what I was talking about quicker than a tick clinging to a dog’s behind. I straightened my spine and clasped my hands, putting on my calmest teacher’s voice.
“We are role models. Don’t come over here trying to kiss me. I don’t want folks thinking we have something going on. I value my privacy.”
“Chill, girl, with your old lady, uptight self. Why don’t you move out of your big ol’ haunted house into the retirement home next door? I swear the real Ruby Starks was abducted by aliens when you moved to Atlanta. What the hell really happened to you?”
Life,I wanted to say, but held my tongue, knowing that most people in Farmerton could not handle the full story about my scandalous life after graduation.
“Come to my folks’ house and let your hair down. Literally.”
I palmed the tight chignon on the back of my head and frowned. Nick was one of the few people who’d let me present myself as more than a prim and proper school teacher. When I was in college, I was the life of the party and could hang with the wildest of people to have a good time, but life changed me.
I shook my head.
“I’m too old for all that.”
Nick stomped his foot like one of my impertinent first graders.
“It’s your choice to turn into an ugly Christmas sweater-wearing old lady who smells like mothballs and carries around peppermints in her oversized leather bag.”
