“That’s so great,” he says, still smiling.
“It’s okay to be nervous,” I tell him, my tone softening. “It just means you care. Anne Letty, the old principal, texted me the other day. She said she’s been retired for two months and she’sstillgetting first-day jitters this week, just out of habit.”
I offer the story as a comfort, a small piece of solidarity. But as I say it, I see a shift in his expression. The laughter fades from his eyes, replaced by something more vulnerable, something uncertain. He looks like he’s about to say something else, something important. He opens his mouth, his gaze fixed on mine, and for a second, the world seems to shrink to just the two of us on these steps.
“Hey, you two! Looking good in there!”
The moment shatters. Two other teachers, Robert Brighton from fourth grade and Sarah Jenkins from third, are exiting the trailer next to ours. They stop, making small talk about the new school year, complaining about Trevor, asking how we’re managing to share the space. I answer on autopilot, smiling andnodding in all the right places, but my mind is stuck on that broken moment with Zachary. Whatever he was about to say is gone, tucked away behind a polite, neutral mask.
An hour later, we’ve finished as much as we can for one day. The trailer looks less like a construction site and more like a classroom, a strange but vibrant hybrid of our two worlds. As we pack up our bags, a weird silence settles between us again, but this time it feels different. It’s not the comfortable quiet of lunchtime; it’s heavy, weighted with unspoken words. Zachary is strangely silent, his earlier cheerfulness completely evaporated. He answers my questions with short, clipped responses.
We walk from the trailer to the parking lot together, and the silence stretches, becoming more and more pronounced with every step. I rack my brain, trying to figure out what happened. Did I say something wrong? Was it the story about Anne? Or was it the interruption? I want to ask him what he was going to say, what was on his mind, but the wall he’s put up feels too high to climb. He just walks beside me, his hands shoved in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the pavement ahead, a million miles away.
When we get close to our vehicles, Zachary meets my eyes and offers a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. I offer a wave and smile of my own before turning to unlock my car. From my peripheral I notice he’s standing beside his car door looking my direction, but not seeing me, more lost in thought. The closing of my car door jars him from his thoughts, then he gets in his own car and drives away, not looking back.
Chapter Eleven
Maya
The steering wheel is cold beneath my clammy hands, a stark contrast to the hot poker jabbing just under my right rib. I focus on the rhythmic thump-thump of the tires over the seams in the asphalt, a metronome counting out the seconds until the next wave of pain crests. It’s 6:04 a.m. The sun is a pale, watercolor wash of pink and orange on the horizon, a beautiful, serene sight that feels like a personal insult.
Last night was a blur of gritted teeth and shallow breaths. The familiar ache in my flank started around ten, a dull whisper that, by midnight, had become a full-throated scream. The debate raged in my head for hours, a frantic tennis match between two equally terrible options. Go to the ER: sit for six hours under fluorescent lights that make my skin crawl, surrounded by the cacophony of beeping machines and coughing strangers, only to be given a shot of morphine and told they can’t see anything definitive on the scans, that it’s “probably just your lupus.” Or stay home: curl into a tight ball, clutch a heating pad to my side, and pray for the agony to subside into something manageable.
I chose to stay home. Now, with the morning light filtering through the windshield, I’m not sure I made the right call. The pain hasn’t subsided. It’s coiled itself tighter, a venomous snake squeezing the life out of my kidney. It feels like I’ve been kicked by a horse, the deep, internal bruising so profound that every bump in the road sends a sickening jolt through my entire torso. The codeine I have stashed from my last full-blown pyelonephritis is barely touching the edges, draping a thin, gauzy curtain over a raging inferno.
My travel mug of coffee sits untouched in the cupholder. I managed two sips before my stomach threatened a full-scale rebellion. The bitter liquid now just sloshes around, its rich aroma, usually a comfort, turning my stomach. I’m driving to school more than an hour before I need to be there, not out of an overabundance of first-day diligence, but because my apartment suddenly felt suffocating. The four walls, my carefully curated sanctuary of plants and art, had morphed into a sickroom. The dent in the sofa cushion where I’d writhed all night seemed to mock me. I had to get out. I had to pretend this was a normal day.
My phone buzzes against the passenger seat, a shrill, insistent vibration. I glance over. It’s Mom.
Good luck on your first day, sweetie! Don't forget to check your email! xoxo Mom.
A familiar, bitter heat floods my chest, a sensation almost as unpleasant as the pain in my back. I know exactly what the email will be about. I don’t even have to look. She gets up at five every morning, paints for two hours while the world is quiet, and then, fueled by creative energy and a misguided sense of helpfulness, she turns her attention to fixing my life.
I pull into the still-empty faculty parking lot, the gravel crunching under my tires, and kill the engine. The silence is a relief. I lean my head back against the seat, closing my eyes,and pull up my email on my phone. There’s the email with the subject line:An Amazing Opportunity!
Inside is a long, rambling message about a local journalist she met at a gallery opening. A woman named Debra Potter who is, apparently, ahugefan of my mother’s landscapes. Debra is writing a feature for thePortsmouth Heraldon “the silent struggle of young women with autoimmune diseases.” Mom, of course, immediately thought of me. She’s already given Debra my name, told her all about my “brave journey with lupus,” and has copied me on this email to facilitate an introduction. She thinks I would be theperfectinterviewee.
My thumb hovers over the delete button. The frustration is so acute it makes my teeth ache. She doesn’t see me. She sees a story, a narrative, a cause. My illness has become her part-time crusade. Last year was the apex of her campaign to make me the poster child for chronic illness. Without so much as a conversation, she booked us as guests on a podcast calledMothers & Warriors, a show about moms supporting their daughters through chronic health battles. She presented it to me as a done deal, a fun mother-daughter activity, like getting pedicures. She’d completely ignored the fact that the recording was scheduled for the same Saturday as the fifth grade county-wide art fair, an event I had spent months planning, coordinating with the art teachers from the other elementary schools in our county, and pouring every ounce of my non-lupus-ravaged energy into.
When I told her I couldn’t do it, that the art fair was my priority, my professional responsibility, she was genuinely baffled. “But Maya,” she’d said, her voice laced with that wounded disappointment she wields like a weapon, “this is a chance toinspirepeople. The art fair is just for kids.”
The argument culminated in a spectacular, wine-fueled blow-out at Thanksgiving, where I finally screamed the wordsthat had been building for years: “It’s my disease, Mom! Not your narrative! I am not your damn inspiration porn!” The silence that followed was as cold and heavy as a lead blanket. We’ve been tiptoeing around each other ever since.
And now this. A journalist. I don’t have time for a journalist. I have a classroom to put the finishing touches on, lesson plans to finalize, and a horde of elementary schoolers to shepherd through the anxieties of the first day. More importantly, I don’twantto talk to a journalist. I don’t want my pain and exhaustion packaged into a neat, thousand-word article for strangers to consume with their morning coffee.
Shoving the phone into my bag, I get out of the car. The morning air is cool and smells of damp earth and cut grass. I was hoping for a few quiet minutes to put the final touches on the room, to lose myself in the comforting, tactile world of sorting clay and sharpening pencils. But as I approach the main entrance, my hopes for a quiet morning before the students arrive evaporate. A figure is standing by the doors, arms crossed over a crisp button-up shirt. Trevor Delaney, the new principal.
“Ms. Gershawn,” he says. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “You’re here early.”
I had a bad feeling about him as soon as Anne told me about her retirement and mentioned he would be taking over as principal. Then, when I met him during the pre-school-year staff meeting that bad feeling had grown even more. He’s exactly the type: a middle-aged former gym teacher who coached his way up the administrative ladder, full of corporate jargon about ‘synergy’ and ‘optimizing outcomes.’ He has the entitled swagger of a man who has never been told no.
“Just wanted to get a head start,” I say, forcing a pleasant tone.
His gaze sweeps over me, landing on the bag overflowing with colorful paper and other art supplies slung over myshoulder. A flicker of disdain crosses his face before he masks it. The rumors are true, then. He thinks art is a fluff class, a budgetary line item he’d love to slash.
“I’m glad I caught you,” he says, his voice dropping to a more serious register. “Could you spare a moment? In my office.”
It’s not a question. My stomach, already a roiling mess of pain and frustration, clenches into a tight, cold knot. I follow him through the silent, bright hallways. The familiar smell of floor wax and the hot breakfast being made in the school kitchen does nothing to soothe my nerves. His office is sterile and beige, the walls adorned with generic motivational posters and a framed photo of him on a golf course. He gestures to a hard-backed chair and settles himself behind a large, mahogany desk that’s conspicuously free of clutter.
