“Oh . . .” She sighed, gauging how much detail to provide. “I mean, to be honest, you won’t even believe the level of crazy we achieved today.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cast list for the play was posted, and some of the helicopter moms went ballistic.”
“Oh, no.” She could picture him in his office, an outdated photo of Isobel and the kids in a frame before him, his pen poised above some document. Their jobs, she often thought—he in his law office and she in front of thirty-five teenagers at a time—couldn’t really be more different.
“One of the moms actually stormed the drama board when the list was posted.”
“Geez,” Mark said. “Did she at least sign in at the security desk?”
“That’s a good question.” Isobel could tell he was only half listening. “Either way, when she was finished reading the cast list, she accidentally punched a kid.”
“Oh,” said Mark. And then: “Wait. What?”
“Yeah. This woman raced into a crowd of kids and accidentally clocked a girl in the gut.”
“Whoa!” Mark exclaimed. “What’s going to happen?”
“Don’t know,” Isobel said. “I guess we’ll see.” The two hung up, and Isobel thought again of Julia Abbott. What could she have been thinking? Probably she hadn’t been, Isobel reasoned, just as she probably hadn’t been thinking two weeks ago when they’d run into each other at the Sadie Hawkins dance. Isobel had been a chaperone, a necessary evil of a Liston Heights teaching contract, and Julia had been a parent volunteer.
Isobel had convinced Lyle Greenwood to dress up with her in the traditional faculty theme of scholars and ballers. If one went with “baller,” as Isobel always did, it was an excuse to wear sweatpants and sneakers. Lyle naturally chose “scholar.” He wore a button-down tucked into belted khakis, but he had also wrapped a little first aid tape around the bridge of his glasses.
At the chaperone table after assistant principal Sue Montague had expressed her thanks to the volunteers, parents started signing up for their jobs—coat check, concessions, and the like. Isobel recognized Julia Abbott among the group. She stifled a scoff at the woman’s smoky eye makeup and sparkly shirt. Did she think the dance was for parents? Julia and Vivian Song took coat check, the job closest to the check-in table.
Isobel and Lyle’s job would be check-in, as usual. She liked looking at the kids’ costumes. “Now,” Sue was saying as the parents walked toward their posts and out of earshot, “we all know that Sadie’s is one of our more notorious events, and we don’t want a repeat of last year.”
Last year, twenty students had left early on a party bus and were promptly arrested for public urination and underage consumption in a local park. The Faculty-Parent/Guardian Alliance leaders had asked some pointed questions at the April meeting about how alcohol managed to make its way onto the dance floor in the first place. “Minors are becoming intoxicated at school events,” proclaimed the attorney father of one of the urinators, “and that’s on you.”
“Here’s how we’re going to work it,” Sue continued. “If a group walks in and you smell alcohol or notice erratic behavior, raise your red marker.” She raised a Crayola to demonstrate. “That will prompt Officers Sullivan and Markert to Breathalyze.”
Lyle whistled. “We actually got the Breathalyzer this year. I’m impressed.”
Sue nodded. “If we can’t get this dance under control, I’m ending it. So, Lyle, you and Isobel will work the table for the first forty-five minutes. The officers will turn away latecomers. The rest of you are roamers. Check in with the parents and monitor behavior. Let’s make this happen.”
Kids started streaming in through the doors at seven fifteen. Isobel stopped a group in revealing beach-themed costumes and matter-of-factly told them they could either put on the baggy gym shirts and shorts she would provide or go home and change. The kids tromped back to the parking lot, sunglasses perched on their heads. Others walked up to the table, smiled politely at Isobel, and provided their names and student IDs. Isobel had raised her red marker a couple of times, but so far, the cops hadn’t denied anyone admittance to the gym.
“Good work, Johnson,” Lyle said, during a lag. “Fifteen minutes to go.”
Isobel noticed Julia Abbott lurking near the sign-in table, checking her phone. She’d felt the woman’s gaze from across the foyer a few times during the evening. She hoped she wasn’t planning one of those impromptu parent-teacher conferences that irritated her so much. There was nothing like trying on flats in DSW while answering questions from a Liston Heights mother about poor grammar.
“I’m just waiting for Andrew,” Julia said when she looked up. “He should be here any moment. Andrew Abbott,” she clarified.
“Yes,” Isobel said. “I’m Isobel Johnson, his AP English teacher. I’m Tracy’s teacher, as well.”
“That’s right.” Julia stepped toward her. “I read Tracy’s paper recently. The one on ‘The Story of an Hour.’”
Here it comes, thought Isobel. She willed herself to maintain a neutral expression. “Tracy has a lot of potential.” She glanced at the front door, hoping they’d both be distracted by more arrivals.
“I was curious,” Julia said, “about the conclusions Tracy drew from the Chopin story. How are you mitigating the idea that marriage and children are nothing but traps?”
Isobel blinked. Beyond the door, she could make out a group dressed in Western garb descending the steps of a rented shuttle bus. “I don’t mitigate their thoughts,” she said. “My students draw their own conclusions about the themes of the literature we read. I just encourage them to support their ideas with evidence from the texts.”
“I see,” said Julia. Sarah Smith walked through the door wearing a cowboy hat with a red leather chin strap. Andrew Abbott followed in black jeans and boots. “But ‘The Story of an Hour’?” Julia went on. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ plus an article about something called the motherhood penalty?”
Isobel flipped her spreadsheet to A and raised her eyebrows at Lyle. The new arrivals stopped twenty feet from the sign-in table for a selfie.
Julia said, “It’s disconcerting to have my fourteen-year-old daughter claiming she never wants children. That’s all. That motherhood is a trap.”
Isobel turned toward her. “I’d never want her to feel that way,” she said. “I love being a mom myself. I think my students know that.”
Julia smiled, but there was an edge in her voice when she spoke again. “I know everyone says you’re—I don’t know”—Julia rotated her hand, a silver bangle shifting with each circle—“subversive and unpredictable?”
Isobel’s smile froze.
“Anyway,” Julia continued, her tone nonchalant, “people say you’re not quite, well . . .” Isobel’s mouth dropped open. “Not quite Liston Heights material? That you haven’t really earned it?” Julia stared at Isobel’s baggy wind pants and lingered for a second on the LHHS basketball jersey she’d layered over a long-sleeved T-shirt. “But I want you to know that despite all of that, my kids have actually seemed to enjoy your class.”
Isobel fought the urge to turn to Lyle. She felt his hand land squarely on her right shoulder. “Isobel is one of our best,” he said definitively. “Welcome to Sadie’s!” he said to the teenagers before them. “Let’s get you cowpokes checked in.”
TRACY ABBOTT
Tracy clicked into her cross-country skis and headed straight for the wooded trail ahead of her teammates. She didn’t want to talk to anyone or, more important, see anyone’s Instagram feed for the next hour. “I want to get a few extra kilometers in,” she’d explained to her coach, who was more than happy to let her go. On the trail, her cheeks cold on the February afternoon, she felt anger radiating from her tense shoulders even as she rhythmically stabbed the snow with her poles.
She’d texted her father from the locker room befo
re practice. SOS, she’d written. He’d know what she meant. They’d all witnessed Julia’s mania before, most recently after parent-teacher conferences when Julia had launched in on Tracy’s near-perfect GPA. “You have a B plus in English! How could you like that teacher so much when she’s ruining everything?”
Tracy didn’t even want to think about her mother’s reaction to the new Instagram video everyone had been talking about by the end of seventh period. Thank God, none of the kids in French II seemed to know the video’s connection to her family. “I guess, according to the comments, it’s Andrew Abbott’s mom?” said someone who didn’t even glance her way. “Lucky Tryg is so tall. You really get a nice view of the hit.”
While Tracy didn’t need to see the video to understand her classmates’ fascination—she remembered her glassy-eyed mother standing next to a crouched-over Melissa—she figured she should probably know what they were dealing with. While Madame Henderson appeared engrossed in her e-mail, Tracy pulled out her phone. So much drama at the drama board, Tryg Ogilvie had captioned the video, and then Julia appeared in a twenty-second loop, thrusting her fist in the air like a crazed person and then slugging Melissa.
As she whizzed by snow-dusted pine boughs, Tracy remembered several of the comments people had posted on the video. She’d scrolled through them all, a pain forming over the bridge of her nose as she skimmed through the face-palm and laugh-cry emojis. Loosen your Spanx, Mrs. A, @ListonLioness had written. Of course, Tracy knew her mother would never actually wear Spanx. “If you need ‘control top,’” Julia always said, “you’ve got bigger problems.”
Well, here come some bigger problems, thought Tracy. She wasn’t stupid—she could see the other moms’ reactions to Julia’s over-the-top behavior. She’d noted their meaningful glances at one another when Julia wasn’t looking. Those moms, her friends’ moms, would likely revel in this video, whispering to one another about it in the carpool line and at Starbucks. Tracy closed her eyes briefly against the winter wind and picked up her pace.
ANDREW ABBOTT
Andrew!” exclaimed Sarah’s mom as he walked into the Smiths’ kitchen through the back door. “It’s great to see you again.” She sat back from her laptop. Mrs. Smith wore loose athletic pants and a Liston Heights volleyball sweatshirt. Sarah had been the captain setter on the team that fall, and Andrew had gone to a couple of games after Sarah and her friend Erin had joined his lunch table. It had taken him two weeks and some coaching from Maeve Hollister to figure out what they were doing there. Once Maeve clued him in, Andrew had suddenly noticed Sarah’s thick curls and smooth brown skin. Her eyes twinkled when she smiled at him.
“Thanks,” said Andrew politely. He pointed at Mrs. Smith’s computer. “You, too. What are you working on?”
“I have homework for my grad school class,” she said.
“Graduate school?”
“I decided to finish my master of social work now that George is in college,” she said, “and Sarah’s old enough to mostly fend for herself.”
“Wow.” Andrew was impressed. Graduate school? His own mother had the focus of a hamster, it seemed—only enough to urge him to practice singing or to stir up the Theater Boosters via group text. The most sustained effort he’d seen on her part was her campaign to convince his father that they should use some bonus money from a recent property sale to fund the costume shop at school.
“I think we’re going to get some homework done.” Sarah pulled Andrew toward the dining room table.
“Very responsible,” Mrs. Smith said. “Help yourselves to a snack and a drink, if you want one.”
“Thank you.” Andrew glanced at the open Word doc on her computer screen as he walked by. She seemed to be writing a paper. Andrew had been worried that she’d have already seen the video of Julia punching Melissa, but clearly she was too busy to be trolling social media.
Andrew snuck a look at his phone as he grabbed his copy of Gatsby from his North Face backpack. He’d been avoiding the phone for the last thirty minutes since Sarah had shown him the video. As he expected, he had a string of messages waiting for him.
INSPECTOR! the text from his mom read. CONGRATULATIONS!! Let’s celebrate at dinner! She’d followed this with a series of clapping-hands emojis. Gross, Andrew thought.
Where r u?!?!?! from Tracy.
Dad: Call me, ASAP.
And then, from Maeve Hollister, a smiley face and You’re going to be great. Andrew didn’t want to respond to any of them. Maeve, he knew, would have a separate text chain going with Melissa.
“Anything interesting?” asked Sarah from across the table where she’d spread her chemistry textbook and notes.
“A few texts from the family,” he said flatly, “about the video.”
“What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know.” He stared at the giant blue eye on the cover of the tattered school-district copy of Fitzgerald’s novel. “It’s really embarrassing, you know?” He ventured a glance at her, catching sight of a dangly earring as she smoothed her hair.
“It wasn’t you who elbowed Melissa.”
“It might as well have been,” said Andrew.
“But it wasn’t.”
“I’m waiting a while to talk to her,” Andrew said, anger slipping into his tone. “My mom, I mean.” He pulled his bookmark out of Gatsby as he opened the novel. “Do you like this book?” He held it up.
“It’s fine.” She smiled. “I mean, I don’t love it as much as Ms. Johnson does.”
Andrew laughed. “You mean more than life? That’s a tall order for a hundred forty measly pages.” Andrew’s phone buzzed, and he looked over at it to see an all-caps text from his mom: WHERE ARE YOU? COME HOME! He clicked the off button on the side of the iPhone and watched the screen go blank. No, he thought. He wouldn’t respond, and he’d go home as late as possible. The best-case scenario was never going home again.
“I’m not answering,” he said to Sarah.
The two settled into silence, Andrew pretending to read as he alternately fantasized about moving out of his house and touching Sarah’s smooth cheek, maybe letting his fingers slide into her hair. Their eyes met a few times as he thought about her, and when they did, he felt a zing from his shoulder all the way through to his fingertips.
HENRY ABBOTT
Henry opened his top drawer and popped a Rolaid from its package at the close of the call with Martin Young, breathing through his nose as he chewed. He was used to fallout from Julia—he’d made umpteen calls to various family members, friends, and acquaintances to smooth over her transgressions in the past twenty years, but doing this duty with a twenty-million-dollar project hanging in the balance? They’d moved past flippant comments about knockoff purses and store-bought Yule logs.
Henry’s assistant peeked around the corner. “Sorry to bug you, Henry,” William said, “but Brenda wants to know if you’d like to pick things up now or in the morning.”
Henry blinked and sat up straight. “Could you tell her I’ll be ready to go at eight tomorrow morning, please? I need to handle a bit of a family emergency.”
“Everything okay?”
“I think I can fix it,” Henry said, “but I have to get home.”
William closed the door behind him. Henry grabbed his cell and scanned the list of texts, another from Tracy and two from Julia. Call me when you get this, his wife had typed.
He wrote a reply: Where are you right now?
Just home from picking up Tracy.
I’ll be there ASAP. He stuffed the phone roughly in the front pocket of his briefcase, closed his laptop, and grabbed his coat from the hook on the door.
On his way home, he replayed Martin Young’s call in his head. “Bruising to the abdomen,” Martin had said. “Shock,” “stress,” and Melissa’s “lingering feeling” after Witches over Willow Street that Julia didn’t like her.
Something about the wrong look for the part? Her feet were too big? It all seemed trivial. He glided his BMW into the three-car garage and sighed.
As he opened the back door, Henry recognized the familiar smell of warm butter and melted cheese, béchamel sauce for one of Julia’s famous baked pastas. “It’s me!” he called.
“Hi, honey,” Julia said without turning around. “I’m doing mac and cheese for dinner. I know it’s heavy, but it’s Andrew’s favorite. We have to celebrate!” Tracy raised her eyebrows at her father from the kitchen table. Her wet hair dripped on her gray sweatshirt.
“Dad,” she whispered as he approached, “didn’t you get my texts?”
“I did, sweetheart.” He avoided her eyes. He wasn’t entirely comfortable in his new complicity with their teenagers when it came to managing Julia. He could see their adoration of their mother waning each year, their eyes rolling harder when she offered advice. Their texts imploring him to forbid her from calling their teachers made him faintly queasy. Parenting had been more fun when he ran alongside their bikes and took them for ice cream.
“Julia”—he stood next to her at the stove—“we really need to talk.”
“I know.” She set her spoon down to the right of the burner. “I got the most insane call from Wayne Wallace. You know, the principal? He wants to meet with me tomorrow morning at seven thirty. There’s been a crazy misunderstanding.”
Henry glanced back at Tracy, who stared at them, leery, over the philodendron beside the breakfast bar. “Come upstairs with me while I change my clothes,” Henry suggested to his wife.
“It’s okay,” Tracy said. “I’ll do my biology in my room.” She zipped an oversized textbook into her backpack and slid around Henry on the way to the stairs. He patted her back as she scooted past.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” Julia asked. “It’s been quite a day.” She sipped prosecco from a stemless flute.
Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes Page 6