“I’m fine,” I said, although I was also disgusting. “What about him?”
We both looked at the Woodsmen player, and the newest addition to our party shook his head.
“Mr. Whitaker,” the agent started to say as he also stood, but the new man held up his hand to signal a halt. I recognized that name, of course. The Whitakers owned much of everything in this part of northern Michigan, like property and businesses, and I was pretty sure that they also owned part of the Woodsmen football organization. It didn’t seem like great news for Everett Ford or his agent that an actual team owner had come here right now.
“A crowd of children just witnessed this,” Mr. Whitaker said to the agent, whose features tightened into an expression I’d seen before. He got the face of someone who wanted to argue but who also understood that it was in his best interest to zip it. It was a face that I probably made a lot when I was talking to my mom and my sister.
Everett Ford didn’t have that understanding. “It’s no big deal,” he told the man who was one of his bosses. For someone so obviously inebriated, he didn’t sound terrible, not slurred or stumbling in his speech. He smelled terrible, though, and now…so did I.
“It’s a very big deal,” Mr. Whitaker corrected sharply. He frowned at all of us, but then tried to modulate that expression as his eyes settled on me. “Miss, you’re free to go clean up. No, hold on.” He took out his phone and made a call, issuing polite but direct orders to have someone bring Woodsmen gear so that I could change out of the throw-up shirt.
“Thank you,” I told him. And now, I had to go back through the door, to the kids that I helped in my job as their student teacher and to the parents, who might still have been recording. I nodded at the agent and then couldn’t help wincing slightly at Everett Ford, who was still on the floor and looking miserable.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend and the caterer,” I told him.
“My wife,” he stated, and that was worse.
“Sorry,” I said again, but Mr. Whitaker had opened the door and then I stepped through it.
It was a word that was repeated a lot that day. “Sorry. Zoey, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Pauker told me a few hours later when we were back at Mitigomin Elementary School. It had to have been the tenth time she’d said it, but there was no reason for that. Despite the problems with Everett Ford, the rest of the experience had actually been great and she didn’t need to apologize.
The Woodsmen people had come through and given gear to all of us, not just me who had needed a new shirt. The students received little footballs and hats, and so did the chaperones. They’d had one of the coaches, Knox Lynch, come and talk to us, and he’d been a popular player in his time on the team so the kids had known about him and were excited to meet him instead. We’d also taken a behind-the-scenes tour with the very nice head of security, and they’d even given out snacks. Everyone knew that the way to a first grader’s heart was through his or her stomach, and it worked pretty well on us adults, too.
“I’m fine,” I said again to Sarah Pauker. I thought that she might have been worried that I’d tell on her, like to the coordinators of the student teaching program at the college I attended, so that she’d get in trouble somehow. I tried at assuage her fears when I continued, “I’m not interested in sharing this story.”
Instead, I sat down on the top of one of the little desks, tired. The field trip had been fun but I’d been glad to get back to the school and now, I was very glad that the day was over. I still wasn’t sure how the other teachers did stuff like have a normal life, because when the final bell rang? I wanted to drop to the ground and nap. But I had class to attend tonight and I had a part-time job, too. Maybe those things also contributed to my fatigue.
We had made it back here for lunch and that was my time alone with the kids, which was fun but a little terrifying (still, even after two months). I mostly walked around to open yogurt tubes and water bottle lids that were screwed on too tightly but I also dealt with problems. Today, Teague and Vonn had wanted toswap halves of their sandwiches because “that’s what friends do, Miss Harmon!” I hated to break up the brotherhood and I didn’t enjoy discipline, but the school had rules about sharing food.
Now Sarah picked up a tiny football that she’d confiscated after telling the kids that they absolutely could not throw them in class anymore, and then one student hadn’t been able to resist. She was serious about limits and consequences and I was trying to be, too: no sharing sandwiches! “I’m glad you’re ok, but I can’t believe what happened with Everett Ford,” she said. “What a mess.”
He really had been. And now that we’d seen off the last student and straightened up the classroom, she’d sat down at her laptop to find out more about him. Sarah was a huge football fan (like everyone else in this part of the state). She had already known a little about Ford, but I…well, I was too busy right now to devote myself to the team. And to be honest, I hadn’t ever been a huge Woodsmen fan. I had attended my high school football games as part of the marching band, but I’d never paid much attention to the professional team in our area.
That was something I kept to myself. When I was a kid, I had read a history book about what had happened to the unfortunate people who’d contracted leprosy. They’d been sent to lonely colonies and been forced to live in isolation, and that was what might have happened to me if I’d admitted the truth about my disinterest in the Woodsmen team.
Everyone (almost) loved the Woodsmen. They lived and breathed pro-football and the bright, hunter orange, the team color, was all around us. Even this elementary school’s mascotwas orange, which didn’t make much sense for a llama. It didn’t really make much sense that they were the Llamas, either, since that animal wasn’t commonly seen in Michigan and as far as I could tell, they weren’t really renowned for either their athletic skills or their bravery or anything. They mostly seemed to spit.
“Oh, look at this,” Sarah said, and turned her laptop so that I could see the screen. “That’s his wedding. He just got married in August.”
It was definitely the man I’d first seen earlier, except he was perpendicular to the ground in this picture. He was also wearing a shirt, a nice one, that was part of a tuxedo. He looked extremely handsome with his dark hair mostly neat, his face freshly shaved, and his brown eyes non-bleary. The biggest difference that I spotted between the prostrate Everett Ford from this morning and the groom Everett Ford on the screen was how happy he looked. He was smiling widely at the camera, his arm around his bride.
But to be honest, he was pretty much an afterthought because she was next to him, and her looks were overwhelming. The woman was gorgeous, like a living doll—like perfection in human form. “Who is his wife?” I asked Sarah.
She squinted at the screen. “Eris,” she read, and then explained, “It sounds like iris, the flower, with an ‘eh’ sound at the beginning. It’s a homophone of ‘heiress,’ someone who will inherit a lot of money.” She was used to describing words. “It looks like she’s an actress and she’s been in a lot of stuff.” But she squinted again and shook her head. “I don’t recognize anyof these titles, but I’m not much of a movie-goer. Or a TV-watcher,” she added.
I got up to look but I didn’t recognize any of them, either. “Click there,” I said, pointing, and that opened a window to a short clip from one of her credits, a movie about an elite group of high schoolers who inadvertently opened a time capsule that led to…there was a long description, but it basically led to a whole lot of supernatural problems and for an unknown reason, they were the only people able to solve them all. None of the actors in the cast pictures looked anywhere close to high-school age—more like late twenties? That included Eris, whose face was taut and unwrinkled but was definitely not that of a teenager.
We waited as our slow school Wi-Fi took a moment to kick in, and then the scene started. All the good-looking “kids” had gathered in their school’s library. They were dressed much, much better than I remembered seeing only a few years before, when I had actually been in high school myself.
The screen froze and we waited again, and finally the dialogue started. “Brannigan, you cannot go alone,” Eris announced. Her voice seemed odd—kind of robotic. “I will go with you and together we will confront that demon from the depths of hell.” She picked up a sword that she must have carried to school that day and held it next to her head, a little close for comfort if she had any sense of self-preservation. The camera zoomed onto her beautiful face. Her features had frozen when she’d finished her line but this time, it wasn’t because of our poor Wi-Fi. The clip played to the end, but her expression didn’t change as the character named Brannigan thumped his chest and let loosewith a kind of war cry, and then a blue demon (either bad CGI or just a puppet) screeched outside the library window.
“That’s the best example of her acting?” I asked doubtfully. It had been like watching someone read a grocery list, but with a medieval weapon.
“Mmm,” Sarah Pauker murmured, nodding. “That’s why she’s not famous. She’s so beautiful but she’s really, really bad.” She studied the other pictures from Eris’s movies. “She and Everett Ford are already getting divorced? They were only married for a few weeks.”
“It seemed like she broke his heart,” I mused. After I’d come out of the storage room at the stadium, I had whispered to Sarah what had happened, how he had lain on the carpet and lamented that his wife had dumped him for someone else. Then the Woodsmen staff had whisked us away, but I’d looked back over my shoulder at the door and felt sorry for the guy.
“Nobody’s saying much about their situation,” she reported, typing quickly and squinting more at the screen. “But she’s D-list and he’s third-string, so they won’t attract as much attention.” She did find two or three pictures of them going out together. Eris, one name only, posed in front of her husband as she stared at the various camera lenses. Her expression was about the same in all of them: she looked beautifully bored, and really, so did he. None of the events they had attended seemed very significant or impressive, like, one was the Milwaukee premier of her latest movie. As far as I was aware, that city wasn’t a hotbed of film action.
