“What does a CEO do?” another child asked.
“I have meetings with clients, look over contracts, and make big-picture decisions about the fiscal direction of the company.”
The children’s eyes glazed over and one boy in the front shouted, “Booooooringgg.”
“Tanner, let’s keep our words respectful,” Ivy chided.
“What did you want to be when you grew up?” another child shouted.
I was fucking sweating. How did I turn this around? “Um, well, I worked in ocean conservation for a while.”
“I like the ocean!”
“What’s a conservation?”
“It’s where you play music! My mom told me!”
“That’s a conservatory,” Ivy said. “Conservation means to protect something. So ocean conservation is…”
“Protecting the ocean!” the children shouted in unison. Well, that was mildly cute.
“Fish James comes from the ocean!” A girl pointed at a fish tank in the corner containing a betta fish.
Excellent. Time for me to shine with my trivia knowledge. “Betta fish actually live in freshwater, not the ocean.”
Tanner crossed his arms. “So you don’t care about protecting Fish James?”
Last year I negotiated a two-hundred-million-dollar merger. That was leaps and bounds less stressful than this. “Conserving freshwater habitats is also very important to me,” I said seriously.
Tanner narrowed his eyes but then he nodded.
Phew.
“Did you protect the ocean from sharks?”
I chuckled. “Nah, we worked to protect everything inside the ocean, including sharks. I actually swam with sharks once.”
The kids gasped.
“Did it eat your arm?”
“No,” I responded dryly. “I still have two arms. I was in a big cage underwater to protect me, but most sharks are actually really peaceful. Sometimes they attack people, but we have to remember that the ocean is their home.”
“Ms.Winter, can we swim with sharks?” a girl shouted.
“Probably not, Madison,” she said, receiving a resounding round of “Boo”s. “But remember, we have our field trip to the New England Aquarium in a few weeks.”
The children cheered. “Mr.King, are you going to come to the aquarium with us?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think—”
“We do need chaperones,” Ivy said, an evil glint in her eye.
The children cheered.
When I left the classroom a while later—Lucy’s mom at my side and a form confirming me as a field trip chaperone folded in my pocket—I wondered how my life had gone so off the rails so fast. But if I was honest with myself, I’d had more fun talking about ocean animals with Ivy’s class than I ever had at my “boring” job.
I held the door open for Lucy’s mom and we stepped outside. I tried not to squirm under her piercing gaze.
