The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  I was too upset to look. I was starting to get nauseated, wondering how the meeting was going to go with me completely unprepared, and trying to think if I could somehow recreate what I was missing. “I don’t have my other bag and I know that the file is in there. I left it at home.” I had been a little bleary that morning, leaving an hour before my normal time for our before-school required meeting about the perverted AD. Brooks had kind of pushed me out the door, but even the thought of him didn’t make me stop and smile…Brooks. He could help me. I could text him and ask if he could bring me the file. I picked up my phone.

  “In SF but I can be @Starhurst about 2:30. Too late?” he wrote back almost immediately.

  No, I texted, that would be great, and I tried to calm myself down.

  Jolie was picking at her food, which was all green, unlike what she usually brought from home. Generally her lunches were leftovers gobbed together or whatever she found in her cupboards or fridge, like old, hard cheese, or, once very memorably, a jar of ancient eggplant chutney from a gift basket abandoned in the teachers’ lounge and some teething biscuits to put it on. “What is that?” I asked her, pointing at her fork.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Some kind of power eating thing,” she said glumly. “It’s supposed to give me energy, but it can’t if I’m not able to choke it down.” She closed the container. “I’m going back to see what the kids are getting today. I really want something with zero whole grains.” That probably wasn’t going to happen in this cafeteria but I didn’t want to dash her hopes.

  The kindergarten dismissal was at 2:30, so by 2:35 I was out at the traffic circle in front of the school, waiting for Brooks to pull up and drop off my file on Felix. The poor little guy had gone through another bad day today—we all had, because of it—and Marilyn and I had been barely able to get him into his car seat to go home. Eventually she’d had to bribe him with candy (which I knew wasn’t something I was supposed to support as an educator, but it worked, so I was giving it a pass).

  I was pacing and looking at the road when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tall figure walking down from the opposite way, the visitor parking lot. He raised his arm in a greeting and before I knew it, my feet were kind of running in his direction. Ok, totally running. Brooks was grinning as I skidded to a stop in front of him, putting my hand on his chest to stop my forward momentum.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m going to pretend that you were that excited to see me, not just really worried about your papers.”

  “What?” I had forgotten about the papers, and my upcoming meeting. I was stuck standing there, my hand still on him, smiling like an idiot up into his handsome face. He held up a yellow file folder. “Oh, yes. Thank you so much for bringing this!” I said.

  “Any time.” He looked around at the Starhurst campus. “I haven’t been up here in a while.”

  “It’s a lot different from when you went to the lower school. They’ve remodeled and moved a lot around.”

  “Can I see your room?” he asked me. “Where you make the magic happen?”

  “Sure, but I don’t know about magic. Today Emilia told me that she liked kindergarten a lot because I said so many silly things, like how pears and cherries grow on trees. It cracked her up.”

  Brooks laughed too. He swung his arm over my shoulders. “Where does she think they come from?”

  I kind of wriggled in happiness next to his body. “Well, duh, she knows that fruit comes from the farmers’ market. This happened after Jefferson told me he had seen me working on the street corner. I’m hoping he meant he saw us out for walk near our house, not that he’s mistaking me for a prostitute.” Brooks laughed again and pulled me a little closer to his side, just as we passed the Spanish teacher. She almost twisted her head off her neck looking at him, and the librarian who was walking with her swept over both of us with his beady eyes.

  “I don’t often use the word ‘cute,’ but this room may be the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” Brooks told me as I gestured him into my classroom. “Did you decorate all this?” I nodded, and he turned in a circle, taking in all the colors and the art. “It’s amazing.”

  “Thank you.” I glowed with pride. I had put a lot of work into getting this room just how I thought it should be, even if Mrs. Rosse liked to sniff about “clutter.”

  Brooks picked up one of the chairs, which looked dollhouse-sized in his hand. “Really? They’re this little?”

  “They are the cutest things ever,” I admitted. I showed him all the pictures I’d taken on the first day of school so he could put faces to the names he heard every day, and he pointed at one, eyebrows raised. “That was when Mac was still insisting on wearing his cape and mask to school. He’s not doing the superhero persona anymore,” I explained. “It’s much easier for him at snack and lunch without the covering on his face.”

  “You must laugh all day here.” Brooks was, pretty hard.

  “I want to laugh a lot of the time. When I don’t want to cry or scream.” I paused. “I’m making it sound like teaching kindergarten is a very emotional experience.” I glanced at the clock. “Ugh, I have to go to my meeting. No time for the extended tour, including the book boxes and the art drying rack. Please note the pictures on the wall next to the door as you leave.” I pointed. “These are watercolors of what the kids wants to be when they grow up. Matilda drew a butterfly and she didn’t mean it figuratively. We’ll have to see how she’s planning to make that happen.” He nodded appreciatively and walked me back out into the hallway, where we immediately ran into Coco strutting past in her yoga pants. Oh, shit.

  “Brooks?” she asked. Her eyes widened in genuine shock. “Brooks Wolfe? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m dropping something off for Lanie,” he said. “Bye, Coco. Lanie, I’ll see you at home.” He touched my cheek briefly and walked off past the fountain and toward the parking lot.

  Coco turned on me. “What the fucking hell is going on?” she asked loudly. A group of fifth graders wheeled around to stare, eyes gigantic.

  “Can you please lower your voice?” I asked quietly, and mine was shaking.

  Coco looked at me for a moment longer, her chest heaving under the puffy jacket, and then she went off very quickly toward Shirley’s office. I followed a lot more slowly and took a seat in between Shirley and Jacqui, the school counselor, across from Coco and her husband. I took out my prepared remarks, as I was calling them in my head, and turned to Shirley. “Can I start us off?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “Let’s hear what Felix’s parents have to say. Mr. and Mrs. von Schaffgotsch, welcome back to Starhurst.”

  “Tell me again why we’re here,” Mr. von Schaffgotsch replied. “I’m missing my game.”

  Two bright, hot spots of color burned in Coco’s cheeks. “Oren, you’re missing your chess game because of this woman,” she told him, and pointed at me with a perfectly painted fingernail. I folded up my hands with their imperfect nails and put them in my lap. “We’re here because she claims that there’s something wrong with our wonderful son.”

  We all looked at Oren von Schaffgotsch. I had expected him to be older, because I knew that he had adult children (i.e., they were older than Coco). What I was not expecting was for him to be ancient. Like he had already been old when he had his first batch of kids, and now he was an octogenarian if I was being generous.

  “Felix?” he asked, and smiled at his wife. “There’s nothing wrong with Felix. Boyish hijinks. I was the same at his age.” When was that? I asked myself. During the Civil War?

  Coco turned back to us and sneered. “See? Hijinks.”

  I took out the page with my little speech and cleared my throat. Shirley glanced at my paper and reached across me to turn it over, face down.

  “I’m so glad that you two were able to come today,” she told the Von Schaffgotschs. “On behalf of the school, I want to apologize for the problems that your family has experienced this year. I know we can do bett
er and that Felix can thrive here. I would like you to take this meeting as an opportunity to explain how you think that we can accomplish that. We are all eager to hear what we can do to improve.”

  “What?” I stared at Shirley. But it came out like, “Wah?” because my mind was exploding and I couldn’t form the word. Was she saying that Felix’s problems were the school’s fault somehow? That they were my fault?

  She turned to me. “Obviously, Ms. March is a young teacher, and I feel that mistakes have been made with Felix. Again, I apologize.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Mrs. von Schaffgotsch, you mentioned before that you believe that personality differences between you and Ms. March are the root cause of these classroom issues. Let’s try to resolve these differences so that you and your husband, and Felix, of course, are happy with his education at Starhurst.”

  “It’s not personality differences,” Coco announced. “She hates me. She’s jealous of me. And it’s the fact that this woman,” and the perfect nail indicted me again, “isn’t morally fit to be in charge of children. I have a few things to say about her past.”

  Despite what she had already said during this meeting, I still expected Shirley to step in. To say that anything that had happened in the past between me and Coco wasn’t relevant, how Shirley herself had been a witness to Felix’s problems and I wasn’t to blame. That he needed our help, for all of us to work together so he could thrive. Like she had said the first time that Coco had come to meet with us.

  “Please, continue,” Shirley told Coco politely. Now I waited eagerly for a dam to break somewhere and sweep me out in a wall of water, away from this office.

  Instead, Coco looked at me and smiled, and I remembered that smile all too well from when we were in high school. Then she turned back to Shirley, and as her husband Oren quietly nodded off, Coco did tell. Everything, beginning with the end of my freshman year when I had stolen her boyfriend by offering him sex, and then I how had moved on to screwing half the male student body.

  The whole time she spoke, Shirley took notes, as if any of it mattered in how we would help Felix. As if any of it approached the truth. Coco talked, and talked, and talked, and she smiled at me the whole time she did.

  Chapter 11

  There was knocking on my door, but I put the pillow over my head and tried to ignore it. It would stop soon.

  More knocking and a muffled bark accompanied it. Then Brooks started talking to me through the door. “Lanie, you have to get up. It’s past noon.”

  Could that have been right? I had actually willed myself to sleep for more than…I thought but my brain was fuzzy and I couldn’t calculate the hours. I had been coming home from school and getting right into bed, not emerging to eat dinner, and dragging myself back out in the morning, barely making it back to school on time. That was how I had handled Thursday and Friday, anyway. Now I had two days—well, one and a half since I had slept away some of Saturday—where I didn’t have to be at that place. I planned to make the most of it by staying in bed the entire time.

  “Don’t make me take the hinges off,” he threatened.

  “It’s unlocked,” I called, then pulled the sheet over my head so Brooks wouldn’t get to see me in my just-woke-up state.

  I heard both him and Maisie enter and he helped her up on the bed, where she snuffled around my head until I finally pulled down the sheet. But I put my wrist over my eyes.

  “You can’t stay in here forever, Peanut. You’re going to start growing moss.”

  “I’ll get up.” I didn’t move.

  “We’re going for a hike.” And then he started to tickle me, my ribs and my hips, until I had to take my arm away to protect myself and also had to shriek a little, making Maisie excitedly bark and jump on my stomach.

  “Ok, ok! Ten minutes,” I told him. “And you have to leave.”

  “I’ll be outside the door and I’m timing you.”

  Not more than half an hour later we were up in the hills. It had finally warmed up a little and I felt like spring was in the air. Usually that would have made me very excited but at the moment, it didn’t have the same effect. We hiked in silence, well, Brooks and I were silent, and Maisie huffed and snuffed until she lay down on the trail and he put her in the backpack.

  Brooks bridged the conversational divide. “Lanie, can you at least tell me what happened in that meeting?”

  What had happened was that Coco had humiliated me in front of my boss and my colleague and Shirley had let her. She hadn’t said one word in my defense, not when Coco said I was unstable, promiscuous, and stupid. Coco ranted at me and Shirley took notes until finally I stood and left. Jacqui, the school counselor, had followed me, and as she’d shut the door, I heard Shirley apologizing again to the Von Schaffgotschs, saying something else about my inexperience. Jacqui had gone to my room with me, telling me that she was sorry to have been a part of what had just gone on and she was going to report it to someone higher than Shirley. I hadn’t even been able to speak at that point.

  The next day, Shirley had come to my room and told me that she had been informed just before the meeting that that the Von Schaffgotschs had made a substantial donation to the school, and by that she meant that they had basically given multiple buildings. She had tried to find me to let me know how the situation had changed, but I hadn’t been in my classroom.

  “How has the situation changed?” I asked. “Felix hasn’t changed. His parents still aren’t going to help him or us. I mean, help me.” I had realized there was no “us.”

  Shirley had frowned and said I was just going to have to make it work with Felix.

  “Not that it’s relevant, but none of what Coco said about me was true, and I think it was completely inappropriate that it was part of our meeting,” I’d told Shirley, and looked steadily at her without crying. Really, it was my proudest moment of the week that I managed to do that.

  “It doesn’t matter what she says,” Shirley dismissed my words, not acknowledging if I was correct or not. “Just get through the rest of the year without rocking the boat. The president of the school’s board of directors is now personally involved.” She turned to leave, but then had one more fun thing to tell me: “The Von Schaffgotschs have requested that you have more supervision with Felix, so expect a lot of observations by me and other teachers. Have a good day.” She had given me a grim smile and left.

  I wasn’t going to say any of this to Brooks. First, it didn’t matter. I was going to finish up the year and do the best I could with Felix, and with Coco, who had been so triumphant when I’d seen her the morning after our horrible meeting that she was almost floating off the ground. Second, I was just so humiliated, again. Again, I was the idiot at Starhurst. I could barely stand myself, and I certainly didn’t want Brooks to feel that way about me too.

  So when he repeated his question, asking what had happened in the meeting, I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it and I also needed to think about something else. “No, I don’t want to discuss it. You’ve been working hard. Tell me what’s happening with you,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment, but he let me change the subject. He talked to me about maybe hiring people, one or two to keep getting things off the ground, then looking for office space somewhere in the Bay Area, where rents were generally crazy. He told me about a lot of things he was working on and I paid careful attention, mostly quietly, but asking questions and commenting a little, too.

  “Thanks for listening to all that.” Brooks put his hand on my back briefly. “It’s really helpful for me to talk things through, out loud. I like being on my own and working for myself, but sometimes I feel like I’m in an echo chamber. Like the walls are getting closer, sometimes, too.”

  “That office is really small,” I agreed, and he laughed.

  “Passing it off as a bedroom would be a stretch, unless people enjoy sleeping vertically.” He paused. “Would you tell me if you thought this wasn’t working? If you th
ought it was a bad idea?”

  I couldn’t believe that my opinion would mean that much to him. “I would tell you, because I would try to help you. Are you having doubts about it?”

  “I always have doubts.” He looked at the incline ahead of us. We both leaned forward to propel ourselves up. “I hope I’m doing the right thing. I have this thing about keeping my head down and staying on the path, even when I’m heading straight for a wall.”

  “I’ll tell you if I think you are,” I said, huffing hard as we went up. “And any time you want to talk to me about what you’re doing, I’m available.” Brooks put his hand on my back again to help propel me to the top.

  “You know, I might be able to help you too, if you’d talk to me,” he said.

  I kicked a rock and took a deep breath as we crested the hill. We stopped for a moment, admiring the view, and Brooks kept his hand on me. It felt comforting. “I had the meeting and it didn’t go well,” I said simply.

  “I guessed that. Why?”

  I slid a little on the gravel as we started down and Brooks moved his hand to around my arm. “The family donated a shit-ton of money to Starhurst so the principal no longer backs me up. That’s all I really want to say about it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I thought the administration understood that the kid had some serious issues.”

  “They do. He does. But now it’s all my problem. C—the mom said terrible things about me,” I admitted. “She is a bad mother, she just is. But she made it sound like I’m some kind of low-intelligence reprobate, and that’s why Fe—that’s why my student is struggling. I may not be the most experienced, or maybe even a very good teacher, but I know that she’s wrong, and she’s lying about me, just like she always has. She can’t give up this grudge she has against me. If I could go back and not do that, take it all back, I would,” I continued, but I was talking to myself, thinking. I looked up at Brooks. It was hard to read his expression behind his sunglasses and baseball hat.