The Cupid Caper

by Kristen Ethridge

  Amanda nodded. “The phrase has evolved to mean something else, as language so often does. I find it fascinating how words change through time.”

  What Luke found fascinating was the passion written across Amanda’s face. Her eyes sparkled with bright glitter, the apples of her cheeks glowed a dusty pink, and her features fully animated as she talked.

  He’d mentally made fun of her Globe Theatre doorway for the last two years. But now he saw it in a completely different light.

  Amanda Marsh hadn’t decked the entry to her classroom out to look like the world’s most famous theatre because she possessed an arts-and-crafts streak gone awry, as he’d always assumed. She turned her classroom into Shakespeare’s world because she wanted to bring the literature she loved alive in tangible ways for her students.

  He found that outlet in chemistry lessons—solutions mixing, Bunsen burners lighting, test tubes and beakers holding experiments as they took shape. She found it in words, in the alchemy of personal expression.

  “What?” She took half a step back from where she’d stood and the fire that had lit her face just moments before burned down to the dusty embers of self-consciousness and wariness.

  “Nothing.”

  That word’s meaning hadn’t changed through the centuries, but the chemistry teacher knew without a doubt that he doth protest too much, in a completely modern sense of the phrase.

  “If you say so.”

  Luke could tell Amanda wasn’t convinced.

  Her implication that he was thinking something through was completely spot-on. But there was no way he was sharing the thoughts in his mind with her. She’d think he was crazy.

  In all honesty, Luke thought he was a little crazy at this very moment. He’d worked under the same roof with Amanda for two years. They hadn’t had much personal interaction, and what there’d been…well, he’d just never paid too much attention.

  But starting with that trip to her classroom yesterday, everything changed. And now, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Clearly, she’d picked up on it too—so he wasn’t even being subtle about it. He’d like to blame it on fumes in the lab.

  Except there were no experiments going on in here.

  Just the experiment in his mind where he wondered what it would be like to be someplace with dim lighting, candles, a glass of wine, and Amanda Marsh explaining the finer nuances of Shakespeare’s sonnets to him.

  Luke hopped out of the chair like a firecracker had been planted in the seat.

  He had to get his mind back under control.

  “Stupid Cupid,” he muttered to himself.

  “What?” Amanda laughed as she said the word, making the “a” in the middle drag out for several syllables.

  Think fast, Baker.

  Luke waved in the direction of the trash can, where the red envelope lay atop the heap of discards. “The Cupid Caper. If you didn’t send that to me and I didn’t send that to you, then what’s going on?”

  Amanda’s eyes went round with mock surprise. “Oh, you didn’t send this to me?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Amanda’s eyes stayed broadly open, but they no longer conveyed surprise.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant that I don’t do things like The Cupid Caper.”

  She tapped her envelope lightly against her leg. “Things like The Cupid Caper? You don’t believe in fun? Or love? Or both?”

  “Of course I believe in fun. What kind of guy do you think I am?”

  He hadn’t believed in love for a long time. But that was better left unsaid.

  “I don’t know, Luke. I mean, we work together, but I don’t really know you.” Amanda continued to play aimlessly with the red rectangle.

  For some reason, her reply made the hair along the back of his neck prickle with the sense of a mild challenge. Before he’d had a chance to think further, he found himself meeting the test.

  “Well, we could change that, you know.”

  “What?” There she went again, dragging out that vowel.

  “Not knowing each other. How late are you going to be here tonight?”

  Luke sniffed the air. Some student had to have left some jar open, some test tube uncapped. Stray chemicals had to be blamed for this.

  Or pheromones. You know, they’re your body’s chemicals, Baker.

  “Probably until about five o’clock. I’ve got a rehearsal with the drill team officers after school.”

  “Ok, then. I’ll stop by your classroom at five. Will that work?”

  “Yes, I guess so, but…” Amanda’s thought trailed off. Luke could see her searching for the right words. “But it’ll work for what, exactly?”

  “Dinner.” Luke sounded far more confident than he felt. He hadn’t been on a date since he started teaching. Of course, that had initially been his own choice as he navigated the career transition. Then as the months passed, it turned into something else entirely.

  Apathy.

  Once he left Global Health, he’d discovered the rush of knowing your work made a difference. It had been the perfect complement to his sky-diving, rock-climbing, triathlon-completing adrenaline junkie ways.

  And he’d decided he wasn’t settling for anything less than that again.

  Especially not in love.

  Since he’d made that decision, Luke had never found anyone who stoked his curiosity like the lithe, red-headed English teacher started doing twenty-four hours ago.

  He couldn’t figure out why he’d seen her a thousand times before, but never noticed her.

  “Did your haiku tell you to do this?” The skepticism slid back across her face like a mask.

  “My haiku?”

  “From The Cupid Caper. Are you sure you didn’t send this?” She lifted the envelope up by her face. “You can be honest. If it was a joke, I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  Luke closed the space between them with one step.

  “It wasn’t a joke.” He could smell her perfume and decided the high, sweet floral notes had to be the most pleasant thing to ever come from a lab.

  He balled up his fists and stuffed them in his pockets to keep himself from reaching out and wiping that uneasy look of Amanda’s away.

  “It wasn’t a joke. And I don’t take directives from haiku. I don’t even know what it said.”

  She slid her envelope between them. “Open it.”

  Amanda’s voice barely rose above a whisper.

  Luke took one hand out of its pocket and grasped the red paper. He just barely grazed the top of her pointer finger with his own, but her softness sliding under the tip of his finger caused an undeniable chemical reaction inside his skin.

  Pheromones. Definitely the pheromones. They poured out like foam-topped liquid on draft beer night at a baseball game.

  Slowly, Luke leaned back and tugged the envelope open.

  “The old class/A teacher goes in/The sound of kids.” He read the syllables slowly, allowing his pulse the chance to do the same. “That’s not five-seven-five.”

  Amanda tugged on the paper, angling it toward her. “No, it’s a play on Basho’s The Old Pond, the most famous haiku written. It goes ‘The old pond/A frog goes in/The sound of water’.”

  “O-o-okay. There’s a reason I teach chemistry, I guess.”

  She smiled and the light returned to the smooth curves of her face. “Can we see what yours says?”

  Amanda looked at the note discarded on the trash can, and Luke turned to go pluck it out. “Here you go. You do the honors.”

  She opened it carefully, but didn’t say a word. Luke took it from her, and mentally chided himself at his realization that he’d hoped to brush her narrow fingers again.

  “So much depends upon/The Cupid Caper/Glazed with hearts and flowers/Beside our favorite teachers.”

  Luke shook his head strongly. “That’s not even a haiku.”

  “No. That’s a play on William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow. We covered it in my Amer
ican Lit AP class last week. This has to be one of my students.”

  “Amanda, this whole Cupid Caper is strange enough to me, but I sure don’t want some student flirting with me. Maybe we should just turn these in to Liz.”

  Liz Langton was the Assistant Principal who oversaw the Student Council, and therefore The Cupid Caper.

  “Yeah, I agree. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Give me yours and I’ll take them both after school while you have your drill team meeting.”

  Amanda handed him her poem carefully, as though she could pick up cooties from the paper.

  “Now, what were you stopping by for?” Luke had gotten so caught up in red envelopes—and red hair—that he’d never actually asked her why she’d come to the chemistry hallway.

  “Oh, I wanted to talk with you a little more about Violet Clark.”

  Just then, the bell rang.

  “Ok, well, that’s our cue. We can talk about it tonight, though.”

  Amanda pursed her lips in thought. But as the hallway began to fill with student chatter, the only thoughts Luke had were definitely not educational.

  Well, actually, maybe they were closer to the average high schooler’s thoughts than he cared to admit.

  “Tonight then. I’ll see you after drill team.”

  “See you then.”

  As she stepped back through the doorway, Luke feared the only thing he’d see until five o’ clock was the image of her lips, cotton candy pink and puckered up as though they were ready for a kiss.

  A kiss he couldn’t give a co-worker, no matter how many haikus sang Amanda Marsh’s praises.

  THE CUPID CAPER

  Chapter Three

  The talk of drill team practice was everyone’s Cupid Caper poems. The officers passed them around, squealed a little, and speculated on the meaning.

  Not for the first time, Amanda noted that a teenager’s ability to read too far into seventeen syllables was worthy of some sort of CIA-level detective work.

  What shocked Amanda was how a certain grown adult she knew well couldn’t stop from doing the same. If Luke Baker hadn’t sent that poem, who had? She really hoped that it wasn’t a student, because that would just be far too awkward. But since she’d taught both the Basho poem as part of a poetry unit at the beginning of the year, the logical conclusion brought her to believe she had to be someone’s teenage crush. And then the fact that she’d just taught The Red Wheelbarrow not two weeks ago…well, she felt certain whoever was behind these poems was sitting in her class.

  “Did you hear Ms. Pantego got a poem too?”

  Amanda’s ears perked up and she interjected herself into the girls’ conversation without pause for thought. “A teacher got a poem?”

  “Yeah.” Schuyler Welch nodded her head, honey blonde ponytail bobbing along in agreement. “And she wasn’t the only one.”

  Lindsay Moore jumped in next. “Nope. Four teachers got them. I put together some of the envelopes.”

  Four teachers? Then it probably wasn’t a coincidence. Amanda held her breath a little bit, hoping Port Provident wasn’t about to become a bad TV investigation special. They’d say that Port Provident was a school straight from the pages of Lolita.

  Her mind began to run faster than a roller coaster, up one side of the hill of absurdity, then careening down the back side, thoughts, speculation, and questions flying with wild abandon in the wake.

  “So who is sending them?” Amanda tried to keep the tension out of her voice. She wanted to just play it cool. Sniff out the information. Then make a plan to take it back to Liz Langton and get it stopped before everything went too far.

  “I can’t tell you, Miss M.” Lindsay crossed her arms in a gesture of wordless defiance.

  “Lindsay. You have to tell me. If students are sending these to teachers, we can’t have that. We’ve never had this many teachers get pulled in to The Cupid Caper. If something inappropriate is going on, we have to stop it.”

  The roller coaster in Amanda’s mind continued to move.

  “It’s been approved.”

  Lindsay was a rule follower. She didn’t have any problems doing just as she was told. Normally, Amanda regarded this as an admirable character trait, something every teacher wanted in a student.

  But right this second, Amanda fervently wished Lindsay was a typical seventeen-year-old gossip. The drill team lieutenant knew more than she was letting on—that much was obvious.

  And Amanda needed to know what Lindsay knew.

  “I heard you got one too, Miss M.” Schuyler couldn’t hold back a saucy grin.

  A low whistle came from Mary Beth Parker. “You go, girl.”

  Amanda put two fingers in her mouth and let out a whistle of her own. Shrill and forceful, the sound echoed off the shiny hardwood floors of the gym and stopped the girls in their tracks, just as she’d intended.

  “Yes, I got one. And I think it came from a student. So I need to know what you girls know so we can straighten this out before it gets bad. You know me. And you know I’m not going to a dance with one of my students, not even as a joke. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Hopefully she could make them see the issue clearly.

  “Why do you think it came from a student?” Mary Beth sat down behind Schuyler and started to braid her friend’s thick ponytail.

  Amanda thought back to opening the red envelope in Luke’s classroom. Although she hadn’t really expected for him to admit to sending the poem, a part of her wished he hadn’t been so dismissive of the idea.

  Realistically, she knew he didn’t reciprocate her crush on him.

  But it would have been nice if he had.

  But then again, he was stopping by her classroom in a few minutes. And they were going to go somewhere and talk about Violet Clark’s application to the STEM Academy. She’d finally gotten her chance for time with Luke Baker away from campus.

  But she knew it meant nothing more than two teachers trying to help a student.

  And for someone whose life’s calling was teaching, that should have been enough.

  Too bad her heart spoke louder than her mind.

  She remembered the words Luke had said earlier.

  Stupid Cupid, indeed.

  “Miss M.? We’re waiting. Why do you think it came from a student?”

  “Oh…” She’d been caught. Good thing the girls weren’t mind readers. “Because both the poems were takes on poems I’ve taught in my classes.”

  “Both the poems?” Mary Beth stopped stuffing a T-shirt into her bag. “You got two? You have two Cupids?”

  Oops.

  Open mouth, insert jazz shoe-clad foot. She could feel a cramp poking at the ball of her big toe. The small knot of muscle fibers twitched slightly, then sent tendrils like spider’s legs sliding through the surrounding tissue.

  “No, thank goodness, I don’t.” Amanda pointed her foot, then flexed, then repeated the action slowly. She needed to work out that cramp. And some time to pull together her thoughts.

  “Then what did you mean?” The girls all started talking over one another, as teenage girls in a group tended to do. Some days, Amanda wondered how she maintained her sanity. Today clearly was shaping up to be one of them.

  First crafty poetry, then excitable high school girls.

  And then the dinner she’d aimlessly daydreamed about for since new teachers were introduced at the first staff meeting of the year, two years ago.

  But now that the day had arrived, she wasn’t too sure about walking into her dream. Sometimes real life was just too…real.

  That’s why she liked literature so much.

  What if she went out with Luke Baker, discovered he was completely boring, and realized that two years of daydreaming had been a waste?

  Now that she was less than an hour away from getting what she’d thought about for two years, Amanda wondered if she shouldn’t have just been content to be the Port Provident High School version of Walter Mitty, full of grand ideas and the
lofty triumphs of the imagination.

  “Hey, Miss M.” Mary Beth tapped Amanda on the shoulder with an insistent finger. “You’re totally zoned out.”

  “Oooh. Cupid’s got her. She’s thinking about her poems.” Schuyler giggled.

  “Poem,” Amanda retorted. “I told you I only got one.”

  “Yeah, but you said ‘both the poems.’ That’s two. Who got the other one?” The girls all closed in as Schuyler refused to let their drill team director off the hook.

  “Dr. Baker got one too. We happened to be together when we opened them.”

  Schuyler’s eyebrows lifted and she nodded her head, an impish smile on her face. “Dr. Baker’s kinda hot.” The other girls nodded in agreement.

  “Girls. Stop.” Amanda had to end this now. It was bad enough that she’d spent two years of faculty meetings staring at the back of his head and noticing the way his shoulders filled out his lightly-starched button down shirts perfectly. But knowing her drill team girls had basically done the same…ugh. She had to shut it down. For her own sake—and Luke’s. He’d been bothered enough when they’d discussed the potential source of the poems. This wouldn’t be well-received either.

  “But Miss M. You kinda started it.”

  “Yeah, and I’m ending it. Just tell me what you know about these poems sent to teachers.” Amanda waved her hands in front of her in the universal sign for “hush” as the girls started talking over one another again. “Lindsay. It’s time to come clean. This really isn’t funny. The Cupid Caper is supposed to be light-hearted, but we can’t have students sending sonnets to teachers.”

  Lindsay looked around to make sure no one else had entered the gym. Just as Amanda suspected. The Student Council Vice-President knew more than she’d let on.

  “They’re not coming from students, Miss M.” The matter-of-fact tone in her voice left no room for doubt or argument. Amanda knew Lindsay told the truth.

  But the truth didn’t make any sense.

  “So where did they come from? Y’all said there were several teachers who got them.” Amanda channeled her inner Sherlock Holmes. She was determined to get to the bottom of this.

  “I don’t know, exactly. Mrs. Langton signed off on it. When I received the forms, they had all been filled out in her handwriting. The buyer was listed as the Port Provident Baccheus Society.”