I shrug, ears burning. “Dunno.”
“Mmmk. How are you anyway? Haven’t talked to you in a while. New boyfriend?” Lina smiles warmly.
“Nope. Zero. Zilch. Men are trash,” I tell her, slowly backing away towards the door of my classroom.
“Amen!” Emmanuel’s voice yells from the other side of his door, so loud you can tell he is standing right next to it and definitely listening to every word we’re saying.
Lina frowns, tilting her head.
“Well, Lina, would you look at the time?!” I glance down at my wrist, at a watch that I’m not wearing. “I gotta go prep for my next lesson. And… gotta pick up my kids. Let’s catch up soon, okay?” I say as I reach my door, reaching behind me and blindly searching for the knob. I find it and wrench it open. “Bye!” I shout and slam it shut behind me.
TWENTY-ONE
Oliver
It’sthe afternoon of the Fall Festival, and it couldn’t be a more perfect day. It’s one of those early November days in Brooklyn, where the sun is bright in the sky and warm on your face, but the breeze is a cool bite, a day that practically begs you to be outside. The leaves are turned and tumbling through the air in a mosaic of red and orange, and the air smells crisp and tight, like the crunch of an autumn apple.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of students and their families here, a far larger turnout than the planning committee expected. After a few last-minute phone calls, we found enough parent and teacher volunteers to handle the larger than expected load.
At my last check with the ticket booth, we had already raised over ten grand, and my mind whirs with the possibilities of what to use it towards. Lobby air conditioning for poor Ethel? A new playground structure? Basketball hoops? A freshly painted track? I look around the yard, and I’m distracted from my thoughts with sounds of screaming andlaughing children, faces flushed red from exertion and the bite of the chill.
My job now is ‘working the room’, or ‘the schoolyard’ in this case, I suppose, greeting and moving through and among parents, community members, district employees, and local elected officials there for the photo op. Engaging in conversation, “so nice to see you” and “how’s the baby” and “how’s business” and “thank you for coming” and “thank you, really, for your generous donation”. It’s exhausting, yet a necessary evil, and I find myself gravitating towards a generous mass of wavy, chestnut brown hair.
“Georgia, hey,” I say, tapping her on the shoulder. When she turns, it’s as if the sun moves out from behind a cloud, and I’m blasted by the force of her radiance. I blink. “Georgia, I’d love to for you to meet our Council Member, Yasmin Khan. Yasmin, this is Georgia Baker, one of our 3rdgrade teachers.”
Georgia directs her smile to the council member, and the two immediately fall into an animated conversation about the upcoming Participatory Budget projects for District 35. I feel my body release its tension as Georgia unknowingly lifts some of the weight off my shoulders. She’s good at this, a social butterfly to my… earthworm. I find a good few minutes to just relax and enjoy myself and this wonderful community gathering that we created together.
I wander over to one of the game booths we have over at the edge of the yard, next to the massive bounce house. I’m playing ring toss with a few of our fourth graders when I hear a “PSSSSST” coming from behind the bounce house. Confused, I hand my ring to a student next to me, and wander over to the sound.
“Hoy! Ollie!” stage-whispers my mother, who is gripping onto my younger sister Izzy’s arm, the two of them peeking around the edge of the bounce house and wearing identical grins.
“Mama? Izzy? Why are you hiding? What are you doing here?” I frown. “Wait…Did you pay to get in?”
“Psht. My son is the principal here. It’s free for me and your sister.”
“Ma, it’s not…” I mash my palms into my eye sockets. “It’s a donation. To the school. This is a fundraiser,” I tell her, exasperated, giving her and Izzy a kiss, making a mental note to throw in a hundred-dollar bill for the two of them later. “How did you get in?”
“We found a big hole in the fence,” my sister tells me, matter-of-factly. “Ma is pissed because one of the barbs scratched her fake Louis Vuitton on the crawl under.”
“Well, that’s what you get forsneaking intoanelementary school fundraiser, Ma,” I say, shaking my head.That money we made should go to fixing that fence, I think. “Why are you guys here? I already told you I’m coming to the family dinner tonight.” I look at my watch. “That’s in, like, four hours. I was going to go straight there after this.”
“We wanted to spy on your crush,hah. You never told me what she likes to eat, so we came to find out for ourselves.” Ma pokes me in the stomach.
Sputtering, I yell, “Are you fucking serious?!”
“LANGUAGE, Oliver!”
“Ma, I told you a million times, I do not have a crush on anyone. I am the boss here, and it would be extremely, extremely inappropriate for me to have any sort of relationship with any of my employees,” I tell her, chest heaving with the force of my outburst. “I didn’t text you what she likes to eat, because. She. Is. Not. Coming. To. Dinner,” I yell, feeling like I’m ten years old again and need to stomp my foot to get my point across.
My mother and my sister are no longer looking at me.
“When you say ‘she’, Oliver,” Izzy says, nonchalantly, “you wouldn’t happen to be referring to that pretty, spicy littlething over there, fighting with a man four times her size, would you?”
I feel my heart drop to the ground.
I whirl around and immediately spot a crowd of people surrounding Georgia on the far side of the yard. Her back is to me, but she is toe to toe with an especially red-faced, enraged Mr. Jones.No.
“Hala! That’s her, all right. Did you see his face?” my mom is saying, but I don’t hear her, my blood beating in my ears.
