by Erin Wright
Chapter 32
Hannah
May, 2019
“Hannah, the principal wants you to come to his office after school,” Mrs. Worsop said when Hannah answered the phone, trying to juggle it and papers she was grading and a banana she was trying to eat as her lunch that day.
The banana paused halfway to her mouth.
“Yeah?” Her voice squeaked on the word, as if she were a 14-year-old boy going through puberty. She cleared her throat, trying to push down the panic those simple words wrought in her. “Umm…Do you know why?”
“He didn’t say, but he did tell me that it wasn’t optional.” The secretary lowered her voice and said conspiratorially, “He looked upset to me, Hannah. I don’t think it’s good.”
“Okay,” she said faintly, and hung up the phone. The world whooshed in and out of focus around her as she scrambled to come up with what he could possibly want to talk to her about. The end of school was just ten days away. She’d already signed her contract for the next school year. He couldn’t be upset about her teaching style or the way this year had gone if he’d offered her a contract for next year, right? And, if he was going to be upset by how she taught, why, certainly he would’ve said something to her in the past twelve years about it.
She wanted nothing more than to crawl under her desk and hide for the rest of the afternoon, but of course that wasn’t possible. Her students were pretty well behaved – even Dayton had calmed down after the fire alarm incident, his parents finally believing that his behavior was something to take notice of and acting accordingly – but there were limits, even for them. If she didn’t make an appearance for an entire afternoon, they’d certainly start to notice something was wrong, and her students calling the office, looking for her, wouldn’t exactly help this meeting along after school.
Wouldn’t that just make a fine impression on Mr. Zeller.
She looked down at her banana, her stomach turned by the idea of eating anything at all, and pitched it into the trash can. This was going to be one horribly long afternoon. A classroom full of students just dying to start their summer break, combined with the impending doom of a one-on-one meeting with a pissed-off principal.
She longed to find Elijah to have him hold her and stroke her hair and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but of course, that wasn’t an option at school. They were nothing but professional colleagues on the Cleveland Elementary School grounds. The few times they’d had to pretend in front of other teachers – Amelia not being counted in that group since she already knew – Hannah had been sure that the sparks flying between them were enough to set the school roof on fire, but no one had ever said a word to them, so maybe it wasn’t as obvious as the blood in her face felt it was, blushing being an Olympic sport for her at this point.
The students filed in after lunch, and as Hannah plastered on her best and most cheerful smile as she looked out over her students, she wondered anew why Brooklyn had been gone from school that day. She hadn’t come in early to get cleaned up, and Juan and Juniper had just shrugged when she’d asked them where she was at. Was she sick? Surely Sarah would’ve told Elijah if she were, but Elijah had been just as clueless as Hannah when she’d asked him out in the hallway right before lunch.
Was that it? Them talking in the hallway about Brooksy being gone from school today? Surely not. She’d talk to any parent on that topic. As a teacher, talking to a parent about a student missing school was practically mandatory. And she’d been such a good girl during the conversation. Not once did she run her fingers through his hair to straighten its mussy waves, or across his cheek to help stroke the stress inside of him away. It’d been difficult to keep her hands to herself; he looked like he was wearing a 100-lb pack on his shoulders all the time, and it was hard for her not to want to take some of that onto herself.
“Miss Lambert?” Tahlia said, yanking her back to the present to find 25 pairs of eyes all staring at her.
Her face flushed red. Again. Not just an Olympic sport at this point, she was going to win the freakin’ gold medal for it.
“Sorry, class, just thinking about everything we have to do this afternoon. Lots of projects to finish up before I let you loose for the summer, of course.” She sounded cheerful and on top of things and organized, all traits that were normally true but today? Today she was just faking every bit of it.
At 3:12, she knocked on the open door of Principal Zeller’s office. “Mr. Zeller?” she said, peering around the corner, trying not to throw up from the nerves pushing their way up her throat. She liked her principal, as much as she could like any male adult who was also her boss, which was probably the only reason she wasn’t fainting dead away on the floor from pure petrification.
“Hello, Miss Lambert, come in,” he said, pushing away from his desk and leaning over it to shake her hand before saying, “Close the door behind you and take a seat.”
Close the door? This was getting worse by the moment. The edges of her vision darkened as the room tunneled, and she realized that either she started breathing, or she really did pass out on the floor.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in—
“Do you know why I’ve asked you in here, Miss Lambert?” he asked, pulling her gaze back to him.
She shook her head, trying to focus on his face. His wrinkles and gray hair were swooshing in and out of focus and she wished most desperately in that moment for her glasses to be back on her face. They’d make focusing easier, plus they’d be a shield—
“No, I don’t know,” she forced herself to say. Okay, more like whisper, but who was counting?
“I got a phone call from Ms. Morland today – first thing this morning. I know that after that whole fire alarm debacle, she’s no one’s favorite person, but she was hot to trot on the phone. Accusing you of all sorts of things. Is it true that you’ve been taking care of Brooklyn every morning?”
Hannah’s heart, which had come to a complete stop at the words “Ms. Morland” began thumping along slowly, painfully, as she scrambled to figure out what she was in trouble for. Not her relationship with Elijah, but her relationship with Brooklyn?
It’d been so long since she’d started “taking care of Brooklyn every morning,” as the principal put it, that she’d almost forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to be.
“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and then straightened in her chair. “Brooklyn was coming to school without being bathed; her mother hadn’t combed her hair or made her brush her teeth in ages. The kids started teasing her at recess, singing, ‘Brooklyn needs a bath’ and calling her Stinky Brooksy. So I started helping her get ready in the morning.”
The principal cocked an eyebrow at her. “Is it true that you lied to her mother in order to get Brooklyn here to school early so you could do this?”
“Yes, sir,” she whispered, squirming in her chair. “I told Sarah that Brooklyn needed extra tutoring with her math, so she needed to bring her in early each day.”
“And did she need help with her math?” the principal asked. He sounded like a lawyer in a courtroom, grilling the defendant.
She felt like a criminal. She, the most pacifist, easygoing, law-abiding citizen on the planet, had somehow turned criminal when she hadn’t been looking.
“No, sir. Although,” she added quickly, “we would work on her multiplication facts while I was brushing her hair or washing her face. We’d drill until she could multiply, divide, add, or subtract all in her head in the blink of an—”
“Miss Lambert!” the principal snapped. Hannah shut up. “I appreciate your efforts, truly I do, but it is not your place to be Brooklyn’s mother. She has a mother, and at the moment, she’s one truly pissed-off mother who wants to make a whole lot of waves. She’s threatening to go to the school board with this.”
The world sort of disappeared in that moment. She had her eyes open but she couldn’t see anything and she couldn’t hear anything and she felt herself slumping sideways like a doll propped up wro
ng and almost without meaning to, her head dropped between her knees and she gasped for air, trying to hear or think or…or something.
She felt the principal’s hand on her shoulder – at least she assumed it was he, unless someone else had come into the office – and a low rumble of words, but they weren’t making sense.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Slowly, the cottony cocoon that had wrapped itself around her began to fade away and she could hear words again. “Hannah, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me.”
Her head still tucked firmly between her legs, she nodded just slightly.
“Oh thank God,” the principal said heavily. “I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance or something. Can you sit up?”
She forced herself upright, clinging to the armrests of her chair with all her might. She smiled wanly at the principal, who’d made his way back to his side of the desk. “Sorry, sir, I don’t know what happened—” She drew in a deep breath, still feeling faint. “What happened there,” she finished weakly.
“We haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet,” the principal warned her.
“We…we haven’t?” Hannah echoed. What could possibly be worse than being dragged before the school board to account for her sins?
“Ms. Morland also claims that you’ve been having an affair with her ex-husband, but I told her absolutely—” He broke off and stared at her. “No, Hannah, you haven’t. Tell me you haven’t.”
She just sat there, frozen.
“Miss Lambert, how could you?!” He looked positively shocked to his core, like she just announced she’d taken up pole-dancing on the weekends down at the titty bar. “He’s your coworker and the father of a student. What made you think that was a good idea?!” He was practically shouting at this point and she began to wish for the school board instead. The chances were that they wouldn’t actually shout at her.
Maybe.
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “It just sort of…happened.”
The principal was veering dangerously between pissed off and disbelieving. She wasn’t sure where he would land, and more importantly, where she wanted him to land. There was really no good ending to this discussion that she could see.
“I cannot tell you who you can date in your free time, unless it interferes with your job here at the school. So, with that in mind, Elijah Morland is the last man on the planet who you should be dating.”
Funny he would say that. She’d had exactly the same thought herself all those months ago. And then…well, it had started to seem like a good idea.
A really good idea.
“I know, sir,” she whispered, staring down at her hands twisting away in her lap.
“The only thing saving you right now,” Mr. Zeller said heavily, “is that you’re one of the best teachers at this school. If I could somehow gift other teachers here with half the heart you have, this would be a much better school. I don’t want to fire you, honestly I don’t, but out of all of the stunts to pull, this was a real doozy.”
Fire. I could be fired.
This was suddenly going much, much worse than she’d imagined it could.
What was that called – a failure of imagination? That was what she had.
Getting yelled at by the school board was sounding better by the moment, if it meant she still had a job when it was all over. What would she do if she couldn’t be a teacher anymore? Teaching was what she was meant to be. It was who she was. It was all she’d ever wanted to do. Her father loved to tell stories about her lining up dolls in rows when she was just a toddler and teaching them to sing the ABCs.
Back when her father could remember who she was, of course, or what she did as a toddler.
“The only way forward out of this disaster,” the principal announced, “is to fire Elijah, put you on a year’s probation, and put extra restrictions in place in regards to reporting back to me about students’ welfare. I’m going to trust that after this little stunt with Elijah, you’re not going to start dating Mr. Pettengill, correct?” The sarcasm was practically dripping off his tongue.
“No, sir!” she gasped. Dating Mr. Pettengill…she’d rather be fired a hundred times over. “But…Elijah needs this job. It’s how he sees Brooklyn—”
“This is the best I could do,” Mr. Zeller said crisply, “and more than you deserve under the circumstances, considering just this year’s behavior. But when I look at the past twelve years of your work here…” His face softened. “You really have been an exemplar employee, Hannah. I don’t wish you ill. I just think that this little escapade wasn’t your shining moment, and Ms. Morland is about to make everyone’s life miserable because of it, my life included. I can’t say that I’m real excited about that prospect. Between you, me, and the fencepost, her inheriting all of that money from her parents’ death was the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to her. She has a lot more money than she does kindness or empathy, and that’s not a healthy combination. But it all boils down to the fact that she can hire enough lawyers to keep our school district hopping for the next year, and we just do not have the money to fight off a protracted lawsuit. I proposed this solution to the board, and they agreed to it, but there is no wiggle room here. Do you have any questions?”
She shook her head numbly. Stupid, stupid, stupid Hannah. You try putting your toe out of line the one time in your whole life, and you get a good man fired, you get a child into trouble, and you get your employer sued by a money-hungry woman who wants nothing more than to make everyone’s life miserable.
When you screw up, you sure do a bang-up job of it.
Her head snapped up. “Hold on, what’s happening with Brooklyn?” she asked pleadingly. Yeah, she was getting a child into trouble. What had Sarah done to Brooklyn when she’d found out? Hannah had visions of Brooklyn being locked in a dank, windowless basement without food or water. She felt ill. “Is she in trouble with her mother? Is this why she wasn’t at school today?”
Of course this was why she hadn’t been at school that day; even as the words left her mouth, she felt stupid saying them. She was ten miles behind everyone else, trying to play catch up to the world around her.
“Ms. Morland noticed a pink barrette in her hair and asked her where it came from. According to Ms. Morland, you’d told her daughter to lie to her.” Hannah opened up her mouth to defend herself and the principal held up his hand. “Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know. After she finally got Brooklyn to tell her the truth, she’s been grounded ever since, according to her mother. She won’t be coming back to school this year; with only a week left in the school year, it’s much too late to move her to a different teacher, and as Ms. Morland informed me this morning, she’d rather ‘eat broken glass’ than have her daughter taught by you any longer. You need to calculate her grades based on the work done thus far; do not include any project she isn’t able to finish. Any other questions?”
She shook her head numbly.
“Good. I’ll draw up formal papers in regards to what happened here, and after you read them over and sign them, they’ll be put into your official record.”
She nodded her head again. Official record. This would haunt her for the rest of her career.
She swallowed down hard on the bile rising up in her throat.
“You’re a good teacher, Hannah,” the principal said softly as she rose to wobbly feet. “You just need to remember where the line is, and stay on this side of it.”
She nodded numbly yet again, feeling like one of those bobble-head dolls people put on the dashboard of their vehicles, and escaped out of the principal’s office before he could see the tears trailing hot and painful down her cheeks. She avoided the gaze of Mrs. Worsop as she hurried past and down to her classroom. Putting her head down on her desk, she let the deep, wrenching sobs escape.
But before she could really get into a good cry, though, she forced herself to her feet and snagged her purse and jacket. She was going to go home and spend some
time with her horses. Nothing made her feel better than a long ride on Wildflower…except a long hug from Elijah, of course.
But that was over now. Over, and would never be coming back again.
Chapter 33
Elijah
Bacon the Hamster – he’d barely been able to talk Brooklyn out of calling it Ham the Hamster – stared back at Elijah with one beady eye.
“I’m fired, Bacon. For the first time in my life, my employer said I ain’t good enough for ‘em and they don’t want me back ever again. Fired. Not,” he raised a finger and shook it at the hamster, “that I was in love with the job or nothin’. Who could be in love with cleanin’ up piss and scrapin’ up gum and wipin’ up throw-up? Nobody, that’s who. But it’s the principle of the matter.”
He took another swig straight outta of the whiskey bottle, hardly even feelin’ the burn anymore. He weren’t normally much of a drinker, but since his ex drank like a fish and got everythin’ she wanted outta life, he figured that he’d try it, too. At this point, it sure as hell couldn’t hurt.
It weren’t like he had a job to get up for the next morning, or a kid to watch over.
“Nope, I have nothin’ at all,” he told Bacon. Bacon, apparently not as interested in this conversation as he really oughta been, wandered off and started eatin’ his pellets. “Eat slow,” he called out at the back of Bacon’s head. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to buy another bag of pellets for ya. You best enjoy it while you can.”
Bacon didn’t so much as twitch an ear at him.
Elijah slunk down in the kitchen chair, starin’ blearily at the bottle in his hand. Was it almost gone? He weren’t sure. He held it up to the light and stared through the dark bottle.
A bit swished around in the bottom, but nothin’ more.
“Dammit all, I can’t even get good ‘n drunk without running outta alcohol. Just who in the hell did I piss off in a former life?”
