Brooks caught me. “Hang on, hang on. I’m sorry, I was being a jerk. Thanks for saying that, ok?”
“You’re welcome,” I answered stiffly.
“Let me see you.” He sat up too, slowly. “Fuck, I’m dizzy,” he muttered. His arm was still around my waist and I was kind of keeping him upright. He held up his phone and I blinked in the light. “Mess up your hair.”
“Huh?” Gingerly, I moved my hands though my hair, ruffling it. Probably making it uglier than it had been before.
“Ok, good.” The light from the phone shone in my face again and I cringed away. “Push on your lips. Make yourself look kissed.”
“What? Oh.” I put my knuckles against my lower lip and rubbed. It was probably about as close as I was going to get to a real kiss in my life.
The light blinded me again. “Hey!” I objected. I closed my eyes.
“No, it’s not good,” Brooks said as he clicked off the phone. “You just made yourself look sleepy or something. Here.” Suddenly he was so close, even closer than we had been lying next to each other. I heard him breathe in quickly then—
Brooks kissed me. I couldn’t have made it up. He really did, pressing his lips to mine, warm and firm. Just for a moment and then he drew back.
My first kiss.
“Now you’re ready. Go ahead, and I’ll meet you downstairs in a minute.” His voice had changed and he wasn’t laughing anymore.
But now I was. “Ok,” I sang. I giggled. “Sounds good.” I giggled more. Brooks had kissed me.
I floated over to the bedroom door and looked back at him when I opened it. The light from the hall flooded the room. He was lying on his back again, arms now over his face so that I couldn’t see it. I watched as he turned on his side and his arm fell away. He snored.
Brooks had kissed me. It didn’t even bother me that I had put him to sleep. I drifted down the hallway to the stairs. Brooks Wolfe had kissed me. It felt like an earthquake had rumbled through my whole body, shaking me off my foundations. I danced down the staircase, back to the party.
“Whore.”
I hadn’t realized how quiet it was in the living room until I heard that word. The music was off. People were standing around, holding drinks, but they weren’t talking.
“Whore,” Coco repeated, loudly enough that I was absolutely sure of what she had said. And that she was saying it to me. Brooks’ ex-girlfriend stood directly in front of me, surrounded by a big group of her junior friends. If looks could have killed, I would have been dead on the spot. “You fucked my boyfriend? You bitch.”
“He broke up with you after prom. He’s not your…” I started, but my voice dwindled and stopped. It was the wrong thing to say. The group of girls facing me seemed to swell in anger.
“Get the hell out of here.”
“Bitch. Get out.”
“Fucking slut.”
I nodded and edged my way around them, tears making it hard to see to find the door. If I hadn’t been here at this house so many times, I wouldn’t have gotten there. All eyes were on me, some kind of sympathetic, but most of them angry. Accusing.
“It’s Lanie March, right? You guys, that’s her name. Lanie.”
“Lay-Me,” Coco corrected. “Lay-Me, because she’s a whore,” she announced loudly. “You’re not getting away with fucking my boyfriend. I’ll never forget this,” she hissed to me.
“Your life is over, Lay-Me,” one of the girls said loud as I finally got to the front door.
Oh yes, I had been right. After this night, things were going to change in my life. Oh, God.
Chapter 1
About ten years down the road…
High-pitched squeals filled the classroom.
“It’s a tarantula!”
“It’s a black widow!”
“Squish it!”
“It is ten million percent not a tarantula or a black widow,” I assured the kindergarteners. Now was the time to show them that their teacher wasn’t afraid, and also turn this into a teachable moment in front of my boss. I plucked a tissue out of the box and corralled the spider in it. God, it was pretty big and hairy. “I’m not going to squish it,” I explained. “We don’t need to kill spiders because they help us. Everything depends on other things in nature.” They listened, quiet finally, staring at the tissue in my hand that held the spider. I smiled. I was such a good teacher. “I’ll put it back outside where it belo—”
The spider escaped from the Kleenex confines and ran across my palm. I shrieked and threw the papers that I held in my other hand and the kindergarteners screamed right along with me. The spider dropped to the ground, then scuttled away, fast, like a damn tarantula. I looked up at the head of Starhurst Academy’s lower school, sitting at my desk, busily taking notes about my performance today on her evaluation form. She looked like she was trying not to laugh. Shit. Gretchen Rosse, the kindergarten aide, was shaking her head and frowning, and I definitely heard her scornful sniff. Awesome.
It took a while to get the kids calmed back down and to assure them that the spider was gone, and had rejoined its friends outside. We lined them up for recess, boy-girl-boy-girl, and my aide, Mrs. Rosse, took them out to the playground.
Here it came. I turned to Shirley, the head of the lower school and my boss, and tried to smile. “Never a dull moment in kindergarten!” I said.
“It certainly is exciting,” she told me. She gestured to the copious notes she had taken about my teaching performance. I thought I glimpsed the word “spider.” “I’ll write this up and we’ll conference later in the week.”
“Any, um, initial impressions?” I asked. I couldn’t wait the whole week, wondering if she was going to tell me I sucked. Or was fired—I was still in my probationary period.
Shirley gathered her papers and smiled a little at me. “You’re doing a fine job, Lanie. I also want to confer with Gretchen before the two of us meet. You know she’s seen it all!”
Yes, my aide, Gretchen Rosse, had seen it all. And had tips for me, which were not really tips as much as they were criticisms of everything I did. I had grown very, very tired of her frowning face and incessant, disapproving sniffs in the 15 months that I had been teaching at my alma mater, Starhurst Academy, and she had been my assistant.
“I don’t have a teaching credential like some people,” sniff, “but I’ve been in the classroom for twenty-eight years, and that’s worth more than any piece of paper,” Mrs. Rosse had told me on my first day of real teaching the August prior, when I was trying not to fear-sweat and fear-puke like I had done during the one and only college alumni interview that I’d had. I hadn’t attended that college.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I had answered. “I’m Lanie March.”
“You can call me Mrs. Rosse,” she answered, so I did. More than a year later, I still called her that.
“Have a good afternoon, Lanie,” my boss told me now. “Stay away from any other nature that wanders into the classroom.” She walked out into the courtyard and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I didn’t mind Shirley, and she seemed fair and even-keeled, but was just no fun to have all these observations and evaluations. Something always went wrong, like the last time she had been there and the top had come off my giant travel mug of coffee and spilled everywhere, and the time before that when one of the kindergarteners had gotten locked in the bathroom and, simultaneously, was unable to get his pants down and he really, really needed to go. And the janitor, Bryan, was sick that day. Me climbing over the stall door to rescue my little student was not a sight any supervisor needed to see.
I stretched my arms above my head and wiggled my jaw back and forth. When I was nervous, I tended to clench it and grind my teeth. “Ahhh,” I breathed out. I moved my hips like I was doing the hula, too, trying to relax.
“Lanie?”
My eyes flew open at the sound of my boss’s voice. She was staring into my classroom from the doorway, her eyes wide as she studied me. Shit.
“I forgot to mention to you that y
ou’ll have a prospective student visiting tomorrow. If all goes well, he’ll start in your class in January,” Shirley said.
“Great. That’s great, I love students. I really love kids.” Oh, Lanie.
“I think you have the right job, then.” She left, and this time, I watched through the window in my classroom to make sure that she was actually gone before I sank down on a beanbag chair and rested my face in my hands. No matter what weird positions Shirley caught me in, I did think this was the right job for me. There were definitely drawbacks that I hadn’t anticipated, like some of the parents, but I wanted to keep my job, and the way I had acted today was not the way to do it. I could do better, and I would. I let myself sit for a moment longer, then I picked up my head and went back to my desk to prep.
When I had first started teaching the previous fall, I came home every afternoon and fell asleep. Something about being “on” the entire day, with 15 kids needing almost constant attention, completely did me in. Now I only did the nap thing a few times a week, but on the way down to my car at the end of the tarantula day, I started thinking that I needed one. According to my watch, it was only three o’clock, but it felt like midnight.
One of my biggest problem kids, Felix, had a tough time with everything that day, starting with saying goodbye to his mom in the morning, moving on to refusing to eat his lunch, to throwing a pencil instead of working in his math group (and it was Bingo to help them recognize numbers, so I knew it was fun—as fun as a math group could be, anyway). I had even been called into the gym to talk to him during PE, which the kids usually loved. He had cried and whined and argued and yelled about everything, especially when Shirley had been there observing and evaluating me, and it had been exhausting. And embarrassing, because obviously, I couldn’t control him.
The problems had begun first thing that morning, when I’d had to try to mediate his goodbye with his mom. It certainly didn’t help the situation that his mom was who she was. It didn’t help me, I meant, that she was my sworn enemy, the woman who had made it her life’s mission to destroy me in high school. She had done a great job, too, very thorough.
“Felix, I have spin,” she had said to her five-year-old son that morning as he hung on her legs, as if he knew or cared what exercise class was first on her busy agenda of self-care. Exercise, lunches out, facials, shopping, massages—it took up a lot of time, way too much of her day to have a moment to care for Felix. I hadn’t thought it was possible, but I hated this woman more now than when I had been 14.
“I want to go home!” Felix howled in response to his mother. “I want to stay with you!”
She yanked her arm away from his grasp, scowling down at her wailing child. “No, you can’t. Marilyn will get you at the end of the day. Let go of me, Felix. What is the matter with you?” She only dropped him off once or twice a week and he was always on his worst behavior with her, and for the rest of the day after she left him.
He kept crying and grabbing at her, and she had turned to me. “Can’t you do anything here, Lay-Me?” she had asked. She pushed her son away and he stood against the wall with the coat hooks, bawling. “Oops, sorry! I mean, Lanie! Miss March?” She had smirked. “Old habit, you know how it is.” She had walked away, waggling her perfect butt in her hundred-dollar exercise pants, without another word to her son. And then he had been an awful pill until his lovely nanny picked him up at the end of our very, very long day.
Of all the nicknames I’d had in school, that one, Lay-Me, was the worst. The summer after my freshman year, I had gotten a certain reputation. In fact, it had been Felix’s mom, Coco, who had invented that particular nickname because she had been angry at me, angry at the idea that I had been with her ex. She had spread made-up details of all the things I had done with different boys at our school (and beyond) to add flame to the fire and poof! My life, what there was of it, had gone up in smoke.
I vividly remembered the first time she had called me that name, as I ran out of Brooks Wolfe’s house after I had been upstairs with him in his sister’s bedroom. I remembered Coco calling me that, along with slut, whore, and skank, in the years afterwards up until she had left for college. By that point it had really caught on, so it didn’t end with her departure. Everyone had called me Lay-Me. Coco had cast the die and it had lasted until I graduated from Starhurst, and I had thought it was finally over.
And then, in the waning days of August this past summer, she had shown up to kindergarten orientation with her son, Felix, who was going to be in my class. Seeing her there was like a colossal gut punch. I had just stared at her, stared at her while she pointed to me as she talked to some of the other moms of my new students. I had wanted to cry—just like in high school. At first, I hadn’t known how I was going to look the parents in the face, but I reminded myself that now I was an adult. I wasn’t that dumb girl anymore, hiding behind the water fountain. I acted like I had no idea what they were probably talking about, and eventually I saw that things were fine. Either Coco hadn’t bad-mouthed me, or none of the other moms cared. But interacting with her sucked. I was very glad she had skipped coming to her son’s intake conference and quarter evaluation, even though they were both required for parents.
I realized that I was shaking my head, no, at the memories of high school and Coco. After all these years, it was silly to still be upset by old teenage nicknames and former classmates. It had just been a long, long day and I was tired. I pulled up the driveway that led to my house, my house behind my mom’s house, and went around the side where I could hurry into the back yard before my mom spotted me. She was having a big party the upcoming weekend, and there was plenty she wanted me to do, probably mostly making phone calls to confirm things and other menial tasks that her assistant was too busy or important to get to. I was not very interested in either attending the party or helping her plan it. I hated her assistant, too. So sneaking back to the guest house where I lived was better.
My mom was the closest thing we had in our neighborhood to a celebrity. She had been discovered by a talent scout when she was in her teens and had gone on a class trip to New York. After modeling for a few years, very successfully, she had met and married my dad, whose family had come over on the Mayflower and then worked their way west to buy a large portion of California. My mom had quit modeling and started a cosmetics business, and even without my dad’s backing, I thought she would have been successful. With his backing, she had started making money hand over fist, adding on to my dad’s pile.
My mom had drive, ambition, and an absolutely killer instinct. Like, get out of my way or I will kill you, cross me and I will kill you—that kind of killer instinct. She ran her company, sat on the boards of several charities, traveled, remarried a guy my age when my dad passed away, and in general, worked hard and lived large. Me inhabiting the guest house in her back yard had distinct advantages, like I didn’t pay rent, but being in such close, constant proximity to my hurricane-force mom definitely had its own set of problems.
I made it back to the guest house successfully, without detection. “Where’s my baby?” I cooed through the door, and was rewarded with a hoarse bark. My little pig-like dog, Maisie, nearly fell over in happiness when I came in, snuffling loudly through her squished-up nose. I picked her up and hugged her. It was certainly nice to feel the love. Not that my kindergarteners didn’t love me, but that was much more of an easy come, easy go relationship. If I were gone tomorrow, they’d all shrug and move on to the next teacher. I felt like Maisie actually cared about me, deeply. In her weird, dog way.
We went out to the little patio behind my house and I tossed her ball a few times, which utterly exhausted Maisie. She threw herself down in a panting heap and I had to go find the purple ball under the boxwood hedge. I squatted down to look for it and had a sudden, vivid memory of squatting next to other bushes, squeezing my eyes closed so that no one would see me when I peed. I had been…three? It was one of my earliest memories: flashes of time at the Wolfes’ house, lights
reflecting on their giant infinity pool that overlooked San Francisco Bay, music and laughter and lots of people. My mom and dad dancing like they were the king and queen of the universe. And me peeing next to a bush.
“Lanie?” Ava, my mom’s assistant, walked uninvited through the gate next to where I was copping a squat. Her lips twisted slightly when she saw me. “Oh. There you are. On the ground.”
It was funny how everything she said to me came out sounding like an insult. “Hi, Ava. Can I help you with something?” I asked, and brushed my dark hair out of my eyes. Ava never had one damn piece of hair out of place. Not a single strand, ever.
“You can,” she answered briefly. “Did you get the spreadsheet I sent to you?” She didn’t bother to wait for me to say no. “Here, I printed it out. I know how you’re better with paper rather than…computers.”
Sort of like it was better to give a monkey a banana rather than expecting it to make paella, that was what she meant.
“I know your mom asked you to lend a hand with some of the party details.” She waved the paper a little. “Do you think you can handle making these calls?” Ava eyed me, clearly doubtful. “Your mother believes that you can.”
But I think you’re a moron, so…I gave her credit for not speaking the words. She tapped her perfectly pink nails on her brand-new phone as she waited for my answer. Not that it was a request, really, because my mom didn’t make them. She laid out her expectations, and you either performed, or faced her wrath as she crossed you off her list.
I stood up and took the paper from Ava. I had been thinking of taking a nap, going on a hike in the hills, making dinner for me and Maisie. She would have a dog-sized portion. “Of course I can handle calling people, Ava. I know how to use a phone.” My voice sounded a little angry so I smiled to show I had been kidding. I had not been kidding. I wasn’t sure how much she trusted my ability to dial.
“You have to clear up the issues listed in column B, ‘Issues to Clear Up,’” she explained. “Here, I’ll highlight it for you.” She reached for the paper.
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