The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “Right?” He laughed a little. “I want to live somewhere I can go outside and get fresh air all year long. I guess I’m just tired of the city. I miss California.”

  And it misses you, I thought fervently. “And you want to work for yourself.”

  “My mom told you? Yes, I have an idea for a company. I’m talking to some investors, but it would be a lot easier if I could have funding with no strings attached.”

  “Like as a gift from your grandmother.” Although, that would come with strings of its own, tying him more securely to her.

  “A loan would work for me.” Now he did sigh. “Anyway, we’ll see. She’s in her element this weekend, yanking my relatives’ chains and making them jump through hoops to prove that they deserve her money when she dies.”

  “It’s dreadful,” I said. “The whole thing is dreadful. And odd.”

  “I agree. And let’s talk about something else, because I’ve spent way too much time on my grandmother during the past few days. What are you up to, Lanie? My mom said you went back to teach at Starhurst. Didn’t you get enough of it after, what, thirteen years going to school there?”

  “It was a great opportunity,” I said defensively. “I wanted to teach kindergarten, and they had an opening. You know how they like hiring alumni. It’s hard to get a job as a new teacher, right out of college.”

  Brooks held up his hands. “Good, great! Teach at Starhurst if you want to. I just remember that you didn’t really like it much. At least, I remember that you didn’t enjoy your freshman year.”

  It was too dark for him to see the color rising in my face as I recalled what I had done, how I had tried to fix things after my freshman year with his help. “It’s different being back there as an adult. And besides the social…issues I had, it was a great education.”

  “Yeah, they crammed a lot into our heads, that’s true,” he said dourly. “Sometimes I look back and get this feeling of relief because it’s over.”

  “Wait, didn’t you like going to Starhurst? You were so popular! You did so well, at everything.” I tried to read his expression in the darkness, but he picked up the glass of vodka and took another swig. A long one.

  “Where do you live now?” Brooks asked me. “In San Francisco? With friends somewhere?”

  I pointed across the yard. “That’s me, there.”

  He squinted. “In the guest house?”

  “Yep. All seven hundred square feet of it. I haven’t calculated the cubic inches.”

  Brooks smiled into the darkness. “You really didn’t make it far, huh, Lanie? Across your mom’s yard and back to your old school.”

  Yeah, I had really done great. It certainly was impressive. I stood up. “I need to go.”

  “Hold on. I was joking about that.” He stood too.

  “I know.” I stepped back and he held out his hand.

  “I’ll walk you in.”

  “No, I need to go home. Across the yard. Bye, Brooks. I hope…I hope it works out with your grandma.” I said the last part over my shoulder, because I was motoring. Maisie needed me to take her out, I was pretty sure.

  “Lanie…bye,” I heard him say after me.

  It was hard to shake off the past, I knew that. It clung to you like tar on the beach, and just like tar, it left stains behind.

  ∞

  “Ready?”

  “No,” I answered.

  She waited a beat. “Now?

  “Still no.” I rubbed my forehead. The school’s schedule was different the next day due to an assembly, and it had left me fifteen unplanned minutes of prime kindergarten wiggling and not-paying-attention time before morning snack. I needed to fill those minutes with something good.

  “How about now?” Jolie asked. “Ready?”

  “No!” I started to laugh. “You’re worse than my kids.”

  “You know that I pay my babysitter by the hour, right?” she asked me. “And you’re aware that you teach kindergarten? They’ll forget all that by next week.” She pointed at the careful lesson plan I was drawing up, trying to incorporate all the things that I had learned in my teaching classes in college about different styles of learning, the suggestions about classroom management from the principal, tips I’d picked up from the books that the counselor had given me on social/emotional development, and finally, some actual academic content. As academic as you could get with kindergarten.

  “I’m just trying to prepare them well so that when you have them in second grade, you’ll say, ‘Wow. That kindergarten teacher was a real humdinger. How lucky those children were to have her. How lucky I am, too, to get such well-prepared students so my work is now so easy,’” I explained to Jolie.

  “I do hope I get a chance to use the word ‘humdinger’ in the future. I feel like it fell out of style and I’ve been working on bringing it back.” She reached over and closed my planning book. “That’s enough. You have to go with the flow when you’re teaching. If you plan every moment, it stagnates.”

  It was easy for her to say, as a four-year teacher. She could go with the flow because she had a mental file of ideas and activities that had worked well for her in the past. On the other hand, if I didn’t have every moment planned, I still entered into panic mode, like everyone’s worst nightmare: standing naked in front of a kindergarten class with nothing to do with them. As if somewhere along the way, my clothes would come off also. I opened to tomorrow’s page again and ran my finger over the words.

  “Let’s go,” Jolie urged me. “There’s a margarita with my name on it and I need to find it before someone else does.”

  “I don’t feel like there’s a limited supply, or anything,” I said, but I did reluctantly close my planning book. “There will be other margaritas if that one goes to someone else.”

  “Let’s hurry anyway,” she told me. I flipped off the lights and locked my classroom door and we walked quickly down to the parking lot in the twilight. “Did you hear about the assistant AD?” She hopped into my car as soon as the door unlocked. “Fuck, it’s freezing.

  We’d stayed later for a faculty meeting, and it was pretty cold for December—almost 50 degrees at five o’clock. I shivered too. “What about the athletic director?” I asked.

  “The assistant athletic director. He’s out, escorted off campus today. That was what everyone was whispering about at our meeting. I heard there are compromising texts with at least one student. Do you know him?”

  I suddenly flashed back to my sophomore year, limping into the training room because I had stepped on a ball in PE and fallen on gravel. Again. I had come around the corner…

  “No, I don’t know him very well,” I told Jolie. “He was a high school PE teacher here when I was a student, though.”

  “He’s always been a real pig, very suggestive with me, like saying how he would love to step in and help me keep my sheets busy since I don’t have a man in my life, that kind of bullshit. But I never imagined he’d be carrying on with a student. Allegedly,” she finished, and rolled her eyes. “I wonder how they’re going to handle this one.”

  “‘This one?’ There have been others?”

  “Not teacher and student, not while I’ve been here, but a sex thing, I mean. When I first started, two of the teachers were having this torrid affair. Married teachers, I should say, and not to each other, middle school math and upper school history. That was how Shirley earned her stripes. She smoked them out and got promoted.” Jolie snorted. “She was like a bloodhound, but it paid off for her.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, watch yourself around her,” Jolie advised me.

  If I ever started a torrid affair with another teacher, I would definitely hide it from our boss. The possibility of that seemed remote, but you never knew.

  “Is that why people hate her?” I asked. I thought back to the few nights I had gone out with a group of teachers from our school. Shirley had always been a topic of conversation, and most of it hadn’t been flattering.

  “
Why don’t you know this?” she asked me. “Get yourself in the loop. People hate her because even though they shouldn’t have been doing that, having an affair, Shirley made it a gigantic deal, got them fired, and moved herself up the chain of command. No one likes how she operates. I mean, she does a good job with the parents, and she really has helped me when I’ve had issues with students. But she advances her career by hurting other people. Before taking over the lower school, she got assistant head of the middle school in the same way, ruining someone else’s career. And her narc network really bothers everyone. Like the librarian? He tells her everything. Gretchen, too.”

  “Mrs. Rosse?” My aide was a narc? I had known that she and Shirley were very friendly, but I hadn’t known there was a purpose behind it.

  “Yes, definitely. She and Shirley are thick as thieves. Ah,” Jolie sighed happily as I turned into the restaurant parking lot. “Finally we will be united, margarita!”

  The place was crowded, even on a Monday, but we found a table, squeezed in, and managed to place a drink order. “Tell me about your weekend,” Jolie said. “Let me live a little through you.”

  “I didn’t do that much. Well, I reorganized my t-shirts. My drawers have never looked better.”

  “Maybe you didn’t understand that I was looking for something exciting,” she said. “I read about your mom’s party. There were tons of pictures online but I didn’t see you. Were you there?”

  Almost every social event in the county was immortalized in the online newspaper because there just wasn’t that much going on where we lived. Plus, my mom was always happy for publicity. I had seen the camera clicking away at the party and had turned the other way. “Oh, right, my mom’s thing. Yes, I was there.”

  Jolie laughed. “But your focus was on drawer reorganization.”

  “The party was an unbelievable time. Drugs galore, orgies, the whole nine yards. Is that better?”

  “Much. Sounds like a real humdinger.” She took a large sip of her drink. “Mmm, that’s delicious. Well, whatever happened at that party, it had to have been better than my Saturday night, which consisted of grocery shopping then falling asleep at seven o’clock with my daughter, and later waking up with her finger up my nose. She thought it seemed like a good idea. It was snot.”

  “Oh, that was so bad.” But we were both laughing. The table next to us erupted in laughter also, and I looked over at them. “Oh, shit,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Jolie looked over, too.

  Marin County just wasn’t large enough. At the next table over was a group of guys I recognized, who had been at Starhurst with me, a few years ahead. They were all friends of Brooks’ and they represented pretty much all of the starting water polo lineup from his senior year. It was the team that had won the county, then the league, and finally the state championships.

  “It’s nothing,” I told Jolie. I ran into people I knew from when we had been at school together all the time—as I said, Marin was small. Their reactions were funny. Some of them tried to be friendly, like they hadn’t been absolute asses to me at Starhurst; some of them ignored me, like they had no idea who I was, certainly not the girl they had either taunted or iced out; some of them, like Coco, Felix’s mom, just kept on acting like they had in high school. Bitchy. These guys were either doing the ignoring thing, or more likely, were too busy having fun to focus on a weird girl they used to know.

  Good. “Ok, I’ll tell you for real about the party,” I said. I described the clothes, which I knew Jolie was into, the food, the iced vodka. The guy from the opera in the city who started singing towards the end of the night, probably after a lot of that vodka, whose voice carried down into my house. It was so beautiful that I had brought Maisie out onto the lawn to listen and started crying because it made me so emotional.

  “Wow,” Josie marveled. “When you say ‘guy from the opera….’”

  “I think he’s the principal tenor in the current performance,” I explained.

  “Do you realize how charmed your life is?” she exploded. “You get to go to these fancy parties and drink vodka and listen to real, live opera? You’re so lucky!”

  Maybe I was. Maybe not. Brooks had just walked in to join his friends, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.

  Chapter 3

  Jolie whistled, a long, loud whistle that would have been really inappropriate if the noise of the bar hadn’t drowned it out some. It was pretty inappropriate anyway, but I got where she was coming from. “Who is that?” she demanded. “If I didn’t understand what it meant to bear a child, I would say that I wanted to have his baby.”

  “That’s Brooks Wolfe,” I said briefly. “He went to Starhurst. All those guys did.”

  “Holy fuck, I didn’t even notice that table. Am I blind? I was way too margarita focused. You should have told me!” She gave each one of them a major once-over. “Do you know them? Are any of them available?” She was practically drooling, and I understood that, too. The water polo team had been full of eye candy. And sure, athletic talent and all that.

  First I watched Brooks greet his friends, all of them hugging and shaking hands, laughing. It seemed like it had been a while since he’d seen them. He sat down at their table, still smiling and laughing, back slapping, and Jolie and I just kept staring like we were watching a movie on the big screen. All we needed were bags of greasy popcorn and giant sodas, but she took down her drink like it wasn’t alcohol instead.

  “Are you done?” I asked, pointing at the glass. “We should go. You have a sitter, right?”

  “We just got here!” Jolie protested. “You haven’t finished your drink. Do you not want to see these—I guess I would call them gods, right?”

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see one of them in particular. It hadn’t gone exactly how I had wanted it to at my mom’s party…or anything like I had wanted it to at my mom’s party. And now, here I was in my work clothes, still no red nails and probably my hair was ratty again. “It’s a school night and I have more prep to do. I should probably run you home.”

  “Lanie?” Brooks called over. He stood up and smiled at me.

  Well, never mind, then. I waved and mouthed “hi” to him.

  He looked around the table and motioned and pointed, like he wanted us to join them. “Come sit with us.”

  Oh, hell no. “Great!” Jolie said, and jumped up, so excited that she left behind the last drops of her best friend, the margarita. She grabbed my hand and propelled us over to the table.

  When I didn’t speak, she squeezed my fingers, hard.

  “Ow! Right, sorry. Brooks, this is Jolie. She teaches second grade at Starhurst,” I said.

  “It’s a real pleasure,” Jolie purred. “Who are your friends?”

  Brooks introduced everyone around the table to Jolie. She had a smile from one ear to another. “So nice to meet you all.”

  The man next to Brooks stood up and put his hand out to me. “Hi. I’m Luca.”

  “Uh, yes.” I shook his hand. “Lanie. Lanie,” I repeated, a slowed-down version. Luca had started at Starhurst in fourth grade when I had been in first. We had gone to school together for all the years since. Both of us worked on the newspaper, and we took Ceramics together when he got to his senior year without ever completing the art requirement and got stuck in a class with freshmen. In fact, I had sprayed him with slip when I hadn’t put the splash pan together correctly on my pottery wheel and turned on the high-speed spin. Mostly I had sprayed myself, but everyone had gotten a little taste of my cold, dirty clay-water.

  “Here, have a seat.” Luca pulled over a chair, putting me between himself and Brooks, and I slowly sank into it. Jolie was already seated across the table between two guys that I remembered had been the year behind Brooks at our school. “Your friend teaches at Starhurst?” Luca said to me. “That’s where we all went.” He gestured around the table.

  “I know,” I said. “So did I.”

  “Luca, you know Lanie. Lanie March,” Broo
ks told him.

  “You’re Lame…” He stopped himself and looked horrified. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

  I was sure I was going to burst into flames of embarrassment, like a spontaneous combustion thing, and really, I was kind of welcoming it. “That’s ok. I guess we’ve all changed some since high school.”

  “You’ve…you’re…” Luca stopped again. “Yes, you’ve really changed. I would not have thought you were the same person.”

  “Still the same Lanie,” I said. The waiter put beer and glasses on the table and I took a long swig out of one of the bottles, not really caring who it was meant for.

  “What have you been doing since Starhurst Academy?” he asked.

  “I’m a teacher there now,” I said. “Like Jolie.”

  “So you never left,” he said, smiling.

  I kind of nodded and drank more of the beer that wasn’t mine. “What about you?” I already knew he had headed east to college, that afterwards he had gotten very successful. I read the alumni bulletins. But I let him tell me and the conversation around the table ratcheted back up. Jolie was laughing uproariously.

  “You should have seen me in high school. Lanie, have I ever shown you pictures?” She held her hand above her head and rolled her eyes. “Goth. Hair up to here and enough black eyeliner to put Nefertiti to shame. I was a mess.” She smiled across the table at me. “I also listened to death metal at high volumes, which made our really nice, normal neighbors really, really love me. Thank God we grew up, right? Can you imagine if we were the same as we were then?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Lanie?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Lay-Me,” the guy next to Jolie said, quietly to his friend, but I heard him.

  And that was it. “Jolie, I have to go. Maybe you can get a car or a ride? I’ll see you tomorrow at school.” I pushed back the chair with my legs and moved quickly, what some might have called a jog, for the door.

  “Lanie?” I heard her call after me, but I’d had enough. I didn’t have to sit there and listen to their crap anymore.