“What?” I asked. “What did she do?”
The agent looked like he wanted to strangle me but Everett slowly sat up. He had red, bumpy marks from the carpet on his chest, which was bare and extremely muscular. My own eyes widened like Mrs. Pauker’s had when she’d heard the bad swear, but my reaction was admiration.
“She said that she met someone new. I should have seen it coming,” he moaned, then buried his face in his hands for a moment. It was obviously so painful for him. I’d never personally experienced getting dumped, but I could imagine and I had seen it up close before, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did she get together with a friend of yours? Someone from her past?”
“No,” Everett Ford told me. “She’s on set and it’s either the director or the producer. Or her costar, or her driver. Or one of the guys from craft services.”
“So, anyone? Multiple men?” I ventured.
Both of them stared at me.
“Sorry,” I apologized.
“Everett, enough of this. You have to get out there, now.” The agent checked his phone and repeated himself. “Now.”
That last word seemed to register and the Woodsmen semi-star started to get to his feet. He did it in a way that was unsteadyin the extreme, like he almost fell over twice. Once he was vertical instead of horizontal on the carpet, he wavered from side to side—but he stayed upright. The agent took a shirt that had been wadded on the floor and started to pull it over his client’s head, which was a difficult job since there was such a difference in their heights. Everett Ford was plenty tall, at least six-four. The agent was about my level, which was more than half a foot shorter since I was nearly five-eight. During that process, Ford wavered even more and the guy had to steady him—they almost both went down, but then he was dressed.
But things weren’t good. The T-shirt was on backwards, and it was also inside out. He was still flushed and glassy-eyed, and he still had carpet marks on his forehead and on his nose, too. His cheeks and chin were covered by a burgeoning dark beard, like he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. He looked disheveled—so cute, but also such a mess.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I stated, because dealing with first graders wasn’t an easy thing even when you weren’t drunk. You had to be on your toes—or at the least, you had to be able to walk, and I wasn’t sure that was possible for him without assistance.
“Let’s get to it,” the agent said. He swung his client’s arm over his shoulders and started to move toward the door, but he bent under the weight of the Woodsmen player. Some of those guys were built like freighters and Everett Ford wasn’t part of that crowd, but he was in no way small, either. In his half-naked state, I’d noticed how broad and strong he was, the sculptedmuscles of his arms and shoulders, and the—ugh, the alcohol and unwashed smell was even worse as they got closer.
“Hold on,” I said, and I stepped in front of the door. “You can’t go out there like this. Those are children waiting for him.”
“He’s required to do it,” the agent stated. “Move.”
“No, this is ridiculous,” I told them. My heart pounded but I’d been in the classroom for almost two months already, since the school year had started at the beginning of September. I knew those kids and I already cared about them. Who knew what he might do in their presence?
“Move,” the agent stated again, but Everett had something else to say.
“I’m going to…”
We waited, but he didn’t complete the thought. He just went ahead and did it: he puked. It mostly went onto the floor but he’d managed to direct some of it forward, which meant that it also landed on me.
“Oh, geez!” I stared down at myself, at the top that was probably my nicest and that I’d chosen specifically because we were coming here to Woodsmen Stadium today. Like the football players would have noticed it? It hadn’t worked as we’d walked through the building, and this one particular player didn’t even seem to notice that he’d vomited on me. He looked at the floor and swore a lot, and then the closet door was suddenly pushed open.
It pushed directly into me. I fell forward onto the agent and onto Everett Ford, and they hadn’t been stable to begin with. We all went down to the carpet which, I discovered, was not well-padded. I had landed on the Woodsmen player but I also crashed on my elbow, and it hurt. The result was confusion, because we were on the ground, the agent was trying to talk, the man who’d opened the door was also talking, Everett was groaning and swearing, and then I heard the sound of many other voices as well. They were very young voices all speaking at once.
“Miss Harmon?” one asked. “What are you doing with those guys?”
“Why are you doing it with two guys?”
“Why are you on the ground? Are you wrestling?”
“It smells like my car after I left yogurt in there last summer. Only do that if you want your mom to get real mad at you. She will.”
“Is that the Woodsmen quarterback?”
“He’s as old as Mrs. Pauker! Like my grandpa!”
“Not that one! The other one, the one with soup on his face. Why is there soup on his face? Chunky soup!”
“One, two, three, eyes on me!” Mrs. Pauker demanded, but she sounded desperate and it didn’t work. As I untangled myself, I heard parents, too. The one who’d been almost incapacitated by the “bus fumes” now said that she was weak due to the smell of vomit and the other one said he was recording.
I got up just as the door closed in all their faces. The man who’d entered, pushing me out of the way and causing the disaster, had taken charge. “Are you all right?” he asked me. His eyes were on my shirt, which was not all right. It had throw-up on it, and interestingly—no, it wasn’t actually interesting that this was the second time someone had puked on me recently. It wasn’t interesting but it was accurate, because Mya had stomach flu earlier this month but her parents had sent her to school thinking that she was just a little queasy. It had been more than that.
