The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “Lanie, I’m a little worried.”

  “No, Scarlett will come out of this just fine. She always does about everything.”

  “Why would I give two flying fucks about Scarlett?” Jolie asked me. The librarian, previously identified as one of Shirley’s informants, looked over at her and I held my index finger to my lips. “I mean I’m worried about you,” she whispered, and when the librarian looked back at his Cobb salad, she gave him the finger.

  “I’m doing great,” I assured her, because I really was. I was flying higher than a kite after the frozen Valentine’s Day on the beach. I felt like a switch had been flipped inside me. Colors were brighter. Things were funnier, and I laughed a lot. I smiled widely at Jolie now, because I just felt a rush of emotions toward her: gratitude for her friendship and her care for me, and really, love. I loved her. I loved my job, I loved my kids, I loved everything. “I don’t think I’ve ever been better, in my whole life. Isn’t life amazing?” I smiled again.

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” She pursed her lips. “You’re a little…up. I know you keep telling me that nothing happened with Brooks, but I feel like something did.”

  “No, nothing,” I promised. Then I thought of looking up at his face as I rested my head against his bare chest, when I saw his beautiful lips coming down towards mine…I shivered.

  “Maybe nothing physically happened, but something happened to you. I always knew you had a crush on him but I feel like it’s changed.”

  “I feel the same way I always have about him,” I answered. Completely, head-over-heels in love. I loved him with every single cell of my body, every second of every special, perfect day.

  “Ok,” she said carefully, then she sighed. “I’m a little worried, is the only thing.”

  “No, everything is wonderful.” I went back to my classroom and even Mrs. Rosse’s sniffs couldn’t bring me down. Nothing could!

  Well, maybe one thing, a little. My mother’s sparkling-clean silver car was in my driveway when I pulled up after work. I heard her voice as I went inside and I took a deep breath. “I’m home,” I called, brushing some spiderwebs off one of my tote bags.

  Maisie came barreling out of the office and collided with my legs and my mom was right behind her, gliding toward me just as she had done on the catwalks in New York and Paris and Milan. “Hi, darling.” A quick frown passed over her features as she looked me over. “Where are the new clothes I bought for you?” she asked me as she pecked my cheeks. I shrugged noncommittally. “Did you have a busy day with the children?” she continued.

  “It was about the same as usual.” I had a few good stories for Brooks. He knew each of my students by name now.

  She was looking intently at my face. “You look tired. On Saturday, I’ll give you some of the samples from our new Valencia peanut skincare line. It should help to brighten up your skin.” She took out her phone and sent a text. “I just asked Ava to get a bag together for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I managed not to outwardly sigh.

  Brooks was watching us from the door of the office, a towering frown on his face. I looked over at him and raised my eyebrows, wondering what was up, but he looked away.

  “I’ve been on the phone all day with Pamela about Scarlett,” my mom said, and sat down on the couch. She patted the seat next to herself and when I took it, she reached for my hair, but I pulled away and twisted it into a knot with a pencil. “As I told her, we all saw it coming.” I rolled my eyes. “I did, Lanie!” But she laughed, too. “Anyway, I think it’s for the best.” She proceeded to tell me why. She seemed to think that Scarlett could do better, that was the gist of her argument.

  “Did you have your meeting about your student?” Brooks asked me, when she paused for breath. “I didn’t think you’d be home so early.”

  Coco had been putting it off for weeks, but we had thought we finally pinned her down to come in to talk again about Felix after school. “Co—the mom cancelled at the last minute. She said she had an emergency that prevented her from attending, which I assume meant that she either just didn’t feel like it or had an exercise class to go to. But my boss, Shirley, called the dad or his assistant or something, so now both parents are coming tomorrow. I think that will be better.”

  “Oh, Lanie, are you in trouble with your boss?” my mom asked, very concerned.

  “No, of course not!” I twitched a little, annoyed. “One of my students is having some problems. What are you doing here anyway, Mom?”

  “Checking in on my investment,” she said. Her cheerful tone didn’t fool me. I looked between her and Brooks. There was a strange, awkward silence for a few moments, and then my phone started to ring, startling me.

  “What’s going on, Jolie?” I answered it.

  “Did you see the email?” she demanded.

  “No…”

  “The shit is about to hit the fan. It’s all going to come out in tomorrow’s newspaper about our former assistant athletic director and his inappropriate behavior with one of the Starhurst students. We’re having an emergency meeting tomorrow before classes, all faculty and staff from lower school through high school.”

  “Oh, God. Did you hear anything else about what happened? What he did?” I thought about the assistant AD with his big moustache and sneering smile. I thought back to him when I was in high school and he was our PE teacher, and…

  “I’m not sure if there’s anything else. Maybe it’s just what we already knew.” And Jolie and I didn’t know too much, despite the endless, whispered speculation by all the teachers in the faculty room when Shirley and her spies weren’t around. “I just can’t believe that this story has taken so long to surface. No one talked to the press until now? It seems like either the school was able to suppress it or maybe the girl’s parents were keeping it back somehow. I don’t know, but I bet it’s going to get ugly.”

  Brooks and my mom were staring at me. “Jolie, I’ll talk to you later after I read the email,” I told her, and we hung up.

  “More problems at school?” my mom asked.

  “No, not at all.” I was dying, dying to tell Brooks, but I didn’t want to get into it with my mom.

  She stood up and smiled at me. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said to me. “You can show me around your neighborhood.”

  I stared at her. “Um…”

  “I’ll get the leash,” Brooks answered immediately.

  Something was very, very weird. My mom and I had never taken a walk together, I didn’t think ever in our lives, and Brooks was still frowning, looking like he was going to hit something. He corralled Maisie and she reacted as well to her leash as she usually did, pawing at it and growling low. “You’ll be fine,” Brooks encouraged her. “Your stamina is really up.” He turned to me. “She ran for a whole block this morning,” he said. “She’s a good girl.” He lost the frown as we both smiled down at the dog, who threw herself onto Brooks’ foot. “Maybe she had enough earlier. I’ll just carry her for a little while. Let’s go, Peanut.” He scooped her up and put his other hand on my shoulder.

  My mom looked at us. “Actually, Lanie, I should get back. I’m working at home today and Ava has been texting me.” She frowned a little. “She’s getting on my nerves.”

  “Ava is the worst,” I agreed, quite happily, because my mom was opening her eyes to it.

  She leaned forward and kissed my cheek again. “Don’t forget my dinner on Saturday,” she reminded me, and I inwardly groaned. It wasn’t a family dinner, which would have been bad enough with Kristian. Ava had already called to invite me to what she had called a “salon-slash-repas.” Basically, we would be trapped at the table with my mom’s artistic and literary friends as they showed off for course after course. It sounded terrible but I had said that I would go. I had my reasons after talking to Ava. I needed to check on the situation at my mom’s house for myself.

  My mom glided over to her car and waved to us. “We’ll talk soon,” she called to Brooks.

 
; We both watched her go. “Aren’t we still heading out?” he asked me, and steered me with his hand, Maisie asleep in his other arm.

  “What was that all about?” I asked him. “Why was my mother here?”

  “She has some concerns about things.”

  “Your business? She hasn’t even given it a chance!” I exclaimed.

  “You know, Peanut, you take my side before you even know the argument.”

  I blushed. “Well, I’m just saying…”

  “Don’t worry about your mom. We’ll work that out.”

  But I wanted to understand what was happening. “Are you really arguing with her about your company? What’s wrong, exactly?”

  “We have some differences of opinion about her involvement. We’re not arguing, but she’s used to doing things her way, and I want to do them mine. It’s fine. Tell me about school.”

  I opened my phone to find the email that Jolie had called me about, and Brooks kept his hand on my shoulder to continue to steer me down the street as I read aloud what the president of the school’s board of directors had sent to all of us. We were instructed to attend a mandatory meeting at seven the next morning relating to an incident which had come to light and would be publicized tomorrow. He didn’t get into any details about the incident, except to describe it as “troubling.” In the meantime, we were strictly prohibited from speaking to anyone, including any member of the press, about anything regarding the difficult situation at Starhurst.

  So I immediately told Brooks everything I knew, which wasn’t much. “From what I’ve heard from the other teachers, it doesn’t sound like it went any further than flirty texts from the assistant AD to one of the senior girls. I really hope that’s all there is to the story, and it’s bad enough that he did that, the pig.” I thought. “Do you remember him?”

  “I think so. He taught PE when we were there, right? I never had him.”

  “He put the moves on a lot of girls,” I said, still thinking.

  Brooks stopped dead. “Wait a minute, Lanie. Did he try something on you?” He sounded furious.

  “Are you kidding?” I couldn’t help but laugh. “Brooks, do you remember me in high school? Do you think anyone, even some kind of pervert like that, would have looked twice at me?”

  He didn’t laugh. His face got even harder, angrier. “I don’t know what you think was wrong with you—”

  “Holy shit, what wasn’t wrong with me?” I asked. I had stopped laughing. “I was as ugly as a mud turtle, as the math teacher so kindly put it when I overheard her discussing me in the faculty room. I was bad at everything, including sports, music, art, and all academics. I was friendless and socially awkward. The most normal human contact I had during the school day was the nice cafeteria lady who always used my name, my real name and not some awful nickname, to say hello to me. How sad was it that I bought lunch every day even when I wasn’t hungry, just to see her?” I drew in a breath which shuddered a little as it went back out of my lungs.

  “Lanie…”

  “The popular crowd took it upon themselves to ensure that almost every single day had something new and awful in store for me, from constantly saying I was a slut, to putting dog shit in my gym locker, to pushing me into a fountain when I was wearing a white shirt and then laughing about my ‘training bra’ showing. And everyone else was afraid of them. They were afraid to stand up to…people and all her friends because the same things would happen to them and they were afraid to be nice to me and get lumped in as targets, so I pretty much had the lunch lady and that was it. I probably would have been happy if the PE teacher had tried something on me because it would have been some positive attention, but he only went for the pretty girls.”

  Brooks put Maisie on the ground. “Lanie,” he said again. “Shit. It was that bad.”

  “It’s all in the past, now. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I said all that.” I started to walk again, but then Brooks pulled me to him, and hugged me there on the sidewalk.

  I stood stiffly for a moment, then closed my eyes against the soft fabric of his coat, and leaned in.

  His arms squeezed me gently. “I’m so sorry it was like that,” he said, and then he kissed my hair, just like he had done on the beach.

  “It was ten years ago.”

  “It seems like it’s pretty fresh for you,” Brooks said, and rested his cheek on my head. And I thought that maybe he kissed me again.

  Someone jostled his shoulder and I opened my eyes. We were still standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He stepped back and looked down at me. “I think it’s on my mind because of the conference,” I said. I meant the one with Coco, but he assumed I was talking about the all-school meeting I would have the next day about the degenerate athletic director.

  “I hope you hear that you’re right, and that flirty texts are the whole story,” Brooks said.

  “If it’s not, it will all come out eventually. The school made a big mistake not getting ahead of this and releasing information first. It’s better to be upfront about problems.”

  “Maybe they thought they could cover it up.”

  “No, because eventually everything surfaces.” I thought back to high school, about the PE teacher, and the training room. I bit my lip guiltily.

  Brooks dropped his hands from my arms and bent to pick up Maisie, who was asleep next to his foot on the sidewalk. “Let’s go home,” he said, and turned. “I should get back to work.”

  “Me, too.” I had prepped a lot for the meeting after school the next day with Coco about Felix but I felt like there was more I could do. I needed to consider every avenue of attack, because I was pretty sure that Coco would come after me personally, rather than dealing with the fact that she wasn’t doing a good job with her son.

  ∞

  Jolie whistled softly as we left the big gym the next morning before the students arrived, streaming out with all the other teachers, administrators, and staff. “We should have brought our quarters,” she said softly. “I never heard such a bunch of bull in my life. We would have contributed a ton.”

  It was true. “Did you understand what they were saying?” I asked, also in a low voice. “Because all I really got was that we were supposed to keep our mouths shut.”

  “I think that was all they said, but they said it about fifteen different ways, and none of them was clear to me. It was like they were talking in code.”

  That was correct. No one who spoke to us in the meeting had ever said exactly what had happened between the assistant AD and the student; no one had exactly said what was going to happen next. There were no forthright explanations or admissions of guilt, just a lot of doublespeak and non-apologies. Everyone who spoke had “sincere sorrow” about something, probably, but they weren’t saying what that something was, except that it “may—or may not—have occurred,” and there had been a lot of “misconstrued intentions” and “failures of communication” and “distress on all sides.”

  But just about halfway through our meeting, the story went up online. As the various school administrators continued to drone on about how “mistakes may have been made” by “one unfortunate individual who hadn’t worked at the school for months” and who was “not an appropriate representative of our common values,” ten million percent of the audience had their phones out and open to the news stories, and it didn’t sound good.

  According to what we all read online, the student’s parents were preparing to sue the school, and the police were investigating as well. “I’m not sure what the hell they were talking about up on the stage, but I know that to me it sounds like a lot more than hurt feelings and poor judgement went on,” I whispered to Jolie as we approached the lower school building.

  “No shit,” she agreed. I unlocked the door to my classroom. “I hope you have a great day. I know you have the meeting about your student later and I’m full of heartfelt sympathy,” she told me. “I mean that as sincerely as the president of the Starhurst board did at the meeting.”


  “You’re as full of it as he was. I meant full of heartfelt sympathy, of course, not full of shit,” I explained, and Jolie grinned. “I hope you have a great day too, without any regrettable incidences that lead to police involvement,” I answered.

  “If I do, we can begin our mutual healing processes at lunch,” Jolie said, and patted me on the shoulder. We both laughed. As I went inside and flipped on the lights, I noticed that Gretchen Rosse had been walking right behind us. Crap. I hoped she hadn’t heard us making fun of the “informational meeting” that hadn’t given us any real information. And more than that, I really, really hoped that the police nailed this guy to the wall, because whatever “regrettable incidences” he had recently perpetrated, I knew he had been awful in the past. I had seen it and he deserved whatever they could throw at him. I felt another wash of guilt run through me.

  At lunch, everyone whispered about the meeting and what it all meant. I reached for my folder of notes for my next meeting, the one right after school with Coco von Schaffgotsch and her husband. The folder wasn’t there. “Crap. Shit.” I pawed around in my bag, hoping it would appear. “Shit!” I went through my tote bag again, but clearly I had left it at home. “I don’t have my file with all my stuff about Felix,” I explained to Jolie, as I started to sweat. It contained Mrs. Rosse’s handwritten assessment (which was more insightful than I wanted to admit), and notes and evaluations from the specialist teachers in Spanish, music, PE, and art. I also had all kinds of samples of Felix’s work so that I could try to show his parents how smart he was when he was able to focus (but I wasn’t going to say smart because teachers at Starhurst weren’t allowed to use that word). Most importantly, my file held a speech I had prepared to give to all of them. A short talk, really, so I could seize the direction of the meeting and carry it where I wanted it to go, per Brooks’ suggestion. He had helped me to craft the words. What was I going to do without it?

  “Check your other bag,” Jolie said. “Don’t you always carry three?” She poked her lunch, which today was in an eco-friendly, steel container. “What do you think this is?” She held out a piece of food on her fork.