Professional Development (Benchmarks)

by Kate Canterbary

  After a moment of silence settled between us, he asked, "Anything else on your mind?"

  "I know what you're doing," I snapped, the words sputtering out of me.

  He glanced down at the mailboxes. "Please, Tara. Tell me what I'm doing."

  The trouble with Drew was that he constantly made his obnoxious fuckery look innocent.

  He knew I wasn't comfortable with a long drive on mountain roads so he stepped up to the plate.

  He knew logistics wasn't my strength so he took the liberty of scheduling parent-teacher conferences for all grade levels without mentioning it to me until after it was done.

  He developed a process for writing and reviewing lesson plans, and shot it off to my team as if I was on board with his plan.

  He took it one step too far and he made sure he was the hero every time.

  So damn helpful, that Drew Larsen.

  "You're making it impossible for me to succeed."

  He shook his head once. "It's not my responsibility to level the playing field for you."

  A startled laugh shot out of me. "There's something I don't understand about you, Drew."

  "Just the one thing? I would've thought you'd have a longer list," he murmured.

  Ignoring that quip, I continued, "I don't understand why you think it helps anyone to get rid of me. You're already indispensable. No one will ever dispute that. You're the only person who can fix the basement copier and you know every single student's history offhand and your voice is heard in every big decision around here. As much as you complain about knowing my work better than I do, you don't actually want to dedicate your days to coaching the early elementary teachers on teaching print awareness or base-ten strategies. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. It would seriously cut into your running-around-and-knowing-everything-about-everything time, and where would you be if you didn't take it upon yourself to reinstall a whiteboard because it's hanging slightly askew? Listen, we don't have to love each other but we do need to play for the same team. I'm willing to make the effort if you are."

  Drew's lips curled up in a grin that wasn't warm, wasn't kind. He regarded me over his shoulder for a long moment before saying, "Have you been rehearsing that long? The delivery seemed a bit uneven."

  I huffed out a breath and pushed away from the table. I hated this guy. "Know this: I'm not letting you win without one hell of a fight."

  As I marched toward the door, he called, "You don't have to let me win. I can do it all by myself."

  That fucker.

  Chapter Two

  Drew

  I couldn't return to our office. There was no way I could share that space with Tara right now. Not when I'd have to share an entire road trip with her next week.

  Everything about our metro Boston campus was perfect with the crucial exception of not having enough offices to accommodate two deans. The space existed—assuming we relocated one of our speech-language pathologists to a walk-in closet and claimed his small room in the name of our power struggle.

  Since neither Tara nor I were willing to compromise the needs of our student services staff in the name of our blood-thick yet petty rivalry, we made do with an office that seemed to shrink by the minute.

  It was a decently sized space but with two desks, a tall bookshelf, and a small, round meeting table that we had to push into a corner and only allowed for two chairs, there was no breathing room left. Writing on the whiteboard required leaning across the meeting table and if I didn't push my chair in all the way, we couldn't close the door.

  I spent a lot of time away from that space. I observed in classrooms every day, tucked myself away in the art or music rooms when they weren't in use, found reasons to hang out in the main office near Lauren and the nurse. None of those people hated me.

  Today, I headed straight for the middle school wing, housing our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Most people scrunched up their noses at the notion of working with tweens and preteens but I loved those kids something fierce. It was my favorite age group. I treasured everything about that weird, wonky phase of development.

  In that regard, Tara had one truth down cold: I wasn't cut out for early elementary. I'd managed well enough in the years before Lauren decided this job was too big for one person—even though I'd abhorred her noticing I couldn't handle it all—but my strengths lived in upper elementary and middle school.

  I slipped into Clark Kerrin's social studies and history class and tucked myself into the kidney-shaped table in the back of the room while he talked through key elements of ancient Olmec society. Because Clark was a pro, he didn't even blink in my direction, instead continuing on with this portion of his lesson.

  My laptop open, I created a new document and hammered out a list of things I'd need to do in advance of this Albany trip. My schedule for next Thursday and Friday needed to be shuffled, I'd have to collect my dry cleaning a day earlier than usual, and my car was going to need servicing—just to be on the safe side. And I'd need to figure out how I was going to survive all that time with Tara.

  I glanced up when I noticed Clark's voice getting closer.

  "I want you to flip back to your notes from last week and draft a list of ways in which the Olmecs and the Greeks were similar in the development of their civilizations," he said to the students when he reached the back table. "Don't forget to check in on architecture and art while you're doing that, please."

  I stood, glancing at the sixth graders as they started paging through their notebooks. "They're really into the comparative civilization stuff, aren't they?"

  He frowned at the page of notes on my laptop and asked in a low voice, "Am I being formally observed right now?"

  "Oh, no, sorry," I said quietly, waving at the screen. While I visited classrooms all the time, I didn't usually sit down and take verbatim notes more than once a quarter. "This is totally unrelated. I just wanted to pop in for a few minutes."

  "And flash murderous glares at me while you did it?" he asked, laughing. "You know that's always a fun experience for me."

  "My apologies. No murderous vibes intended," I said. "I just needed to avoid…" I shrugged, shoved my hands in my pockets. "You know."

  With a knowing nod, he glanced out the door to the classroom directly across the hall where Noa Elbaz was breaking down the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus. She had a roll of blue masking tape dangling from her wrist, three dry erase markers in hand, and two Sharpies clipped to her lanyard.

  "Yep," he replied, still watching her. "I know all about it." The moment broke when he clapped me on the back. "If you're saying a bit, would you make yourself useful and go sit by Braxton? He requires some hairy eyeballs to keep him focused on this class rather than his book."

  When Clark returned to the front of the room, I pulled a chair up beside Braxton and tapped the mostly empty graphic organizer on his desk. "Get caught up while you can," I said quietly. "You don't want to have to do this at lunch, my friend."

  With a stifled groan, he closed the graphic novel he'd been reading under his desk and set to gathering the information he'd missed. I should've done the same but all I could think about was Tara Treloff.

  As if that was anything new.

  Chapter Three

  Drew

  I could never decide whether I enjoyed days like these, when the sun was lost behind cold, gray clouds and the air snapped with icy promises of snow. I didn't favor the dismal dreariness but this weather was ripe for getting things done. No one was itching to go outside when it was thirty degrees and windy. There were no autumn leaves, no spring flowers, no summer fun. Days like these were good for focus and quiet.

  I preferred the quiet.

  As I watched Tara trundling down the school's front steps with her purple roller luggage in tow, I knew I wasn't getting any of it today.

  She was going to talk the entire drive. I was sure of it. She'd talk and talk and talk, and I'd rip the steering wheel off or drive into a ditch if a blood vessel in my brain didn't rupture and
kill me first. That happened to otherwise healthy thirty-four-year-old men, right?

  She was wearing those pants too. The ones that drove me mad and had once started me on a campaign to ban all legging-style bottoms in the staff handbook.

  I'd lost that campaign and earned myself another "What the hell were you thinking, Drew?" conversation with a side of "And don't you have enough work to do as it is?" with Lauren.

  But those pants. The slim black ones that made her seem impossibly small, as if she was a doll come to life rather than a woman in her late twenties.

  She wore a lot of dresses, the kind that announced her as a former kindergarten teacher in loud shouts. The great blur of color and pattern always made it easier for me to tune out her body like an endlessly pulsing toothache. Those pants did not.

  No, today she believed it necessary to pair the pants with a petal pink blouse and boots that served only decorative purposes. If she wasn't careful for that slick patch at the end of the sidewalk, she was going to fall on her ass because they looked about as functional as the bright ballet flats she favored.

  By my count, she had them in eight different colors. Red, hot pink, orange, yellow, dark green, navy blue, purple, black. The yellow was a recent addition.

  In a particularly deranged moment several months ago, I'd looked up the brand of shoes. It was fully unhinged, not a drop of logic to be found, but I wanted to find out which colors she was missing from her collection.

  Now, the internet served me ads for women's shoes more often than anything else. I was on a couple of mailing lists too.

  "Have you used the bathroom?" I called from the parking lot. I popped the rear gate on my SUV. "I'm not stopping in an hour because you have the bladder of a kindergartner."

  "I'm not answering that," Tara replied, shoving the luggage handle down when she stopped in front of me. "But go right ahead and treat me like I'm five. That will work out well for you."

  "I'm not treating you like you're five," I replied because I was physically incapable of letting a single thing go where Tara Treloff was concerned. "I'm treating you like you're a teacher of five-year-olds. We know how teachers mirror their students."

  She hefted her luggage and shoved it in the trunk, right beside mine. "By that logic, you're a moody, pubescent tween."

  You're not wrong, Miss Treloff. You are not wrong.

  I glanced back at the building. Avoidance was essential. It was the only weapon I had left. "Are you sure you don't need to go?"

  She huffed out an aggravated sigh as she rounded the SUV and flung open the passenger side door. "Inappropriate, Larsen. Really freakin' inappropriate."

  I turned my keys over in my palm, still holding out hope for a last-minute change of plans.

  Lauren might decide she needed us here more than she wanted us off site.

  The training could be canceled.

  Moose could overtake the interstate and grind road travel to a halt.

  The eastern seaboard could break off and sink into the Atlantic.

  I could stumble into ongoing traffic and lose both legs under the wheels of a tractor trailer.

  At this point, welcomed possibilities.

  "Are we doing this or what, Larsen?" Tara called from the front seat.

  I glanced at her, the rear gate still open. My car was going to smell like her now.

  It was bad enough I couldn't walk into our office without getting hit with a wall of vanilla and I couldn't sit through a meeting without drowning in her scent, but now it was in my car.

  I couldn't manage that. I'd have to sell the car.

  "Drew!" she yelled. "What are you doing? You sent me fifteen reminders about when you wanted to leave and gave me an enormous lecture about timing our departure to avoid rush hour traffic and icy roads. I rearranged my schedule to be here at the exact minute you requested. Stop screwing around back there and let's go."

  I didn't respond.

  I pressed a button on my key fob and the rear gate closed but I stayed there, rooted on the asphalt while I stared at Tara through the back window as she scraped her long, shiny hair into a bun.

  I'd watched her knot her hair around this time every day for the past two years. She always came to school with it loose, the straight espresso strands parted on the left side. She'd arrive with an elastic band on her wrist too. Sometime between lunch and dismissal, the band came off her wrist and she gathered her hair into a tail or twist.

  I hated that part of the day. I'd taken to avoiding our office in the afternoon because seeing her fuss with her hair pinched and chafed at me in the worst ways. Why she had to groom herself in our small, shared workspace when we had restrooms was a damn mystery to me.

  The hair was one issue but the bottom line was I hated Tara. I hated everything about her. I hated her vanilla scent, her shiny hair, the zany voices she used with kids, the firm, no-bullshit voice she used with adults. I hated how she overflowed with enthusiasm for everything, all the time. I hated that she only used purple or green pens and I hated that she ate exactly one fun-sized Snickers bar every day after dismissal. I hated how she never formatted her documents correctly and couldn't write an all-school memo without also including at least one emoji, gif, or clip art.

  I hated Tara Treloff and I prayed for the day when I wouldn't have to see her huge brown eyes glaring at me, sizing me up, seeing through me anymore.

  I prayed for that day almost as much as I dreaded it.

  Eventually, I rounded the vehicle and settled into the driver's seat. Backing out of the parking space required ignoring a half dozen of Tara's withering side-eyed glances.

  After two years of contending with her special brand of assault with deadly glares, I knew not to look her in the eye when she was in moods like this one.

  I made it to the interstate before Tara started digging through her tote bag. The thing was big enough to hold a turkey dinner, a litter of kittens, and a baby grand piano. I would experience no surprise if she pulled out a perfectly roasted drumstick and offered it to me.

  Tara did crazy things like that. She whipped up six dozen cookies for the staff because she had some extra eggs in the fridge, and made decorative banners for the hallways out of old t-shirts, and invented comparative writing exercises using a random bag of buttons she found in her closet.

  It was crazy—and frustrating as hell. The woman didn't believe in focusing on one thing at a time. She listened to audiobooks while setting up laptops for quarterly assessments and cut out lamination while sitting through team lesson planning meetings and alphabetized homework packets during all-school assemblies.

  Instead of handing me a turkey leg, she opened a paperback book. Minutes ticked by while she read, humming to herself as she reacted to the events. Quick gasps, little chuckles, quiet sighs and murmurs filled with emotion. She didn't turn a single page without making her feelings about it known.

  I was already choking on her vanilla scent but the addition of her infernal noises twisted knots into the base of my neck. I couldn't stop myself from asking, "This is your plan? Reading the whole ride?"

  "It's a long book," she replied, wedging her thumb between the pages to hold her place while she showed me the spine. "It's not like we're going to have a civil conversation."

  This was her routine. I'd ask a reasonable question and she'd come back with an outrageous comment that required me to dismiss her or offer an equally outrageous response.

  I'd started this, of course. I'd turned her first day on the job and all her reasonable questions into a series of outrageous comments. It was only fair she'd continued it. At this point, the reason for my resentment didn't matter. I'd been awful to her, and grown to well and truly hate her. Nothing was changing that.

  "What are you reading?" I asked, my words crisp.

  She turned the book over and studied the back cover. "Game of Thrones."

  "Seriously? Why? I can't see you liking that."

  "Why not?" she snapped. "You think the only thing I read is B
ecause of Winn-Dixie and The Lightning Thief?"

  Honestly, yes.

  I imagined Tara went home to an apartment packed with dog-eared children's books, Play-Doh, Unifix cubes, and a stack of old magazines she kept for collage purposes. I was willing to bet she had a jar of dried macaroni on her coffee table too.

  "No, not at all," I lied. "It's just a very violent series. I didn't think you'd be into that."

  Tara said things like "crisscross applesauce" and cried during the third grade strings concert and wore gloves embroidered with dog faces.

  She took her shoes off whenever she sat at her desk and had a knitted cover for her tissue box.

  I couldn't imagine the same person choosing to page through The Red Wedding for pleasure.

  "That's funny," she murmured, no humor in her voice.

  "Which part?"

  "The part where you think you know anything about my preferences," she replied. "I mean, you're taking your tiny teaspoon of knowledge about me and shaking it up with outdated kindergarten teacher stereotypes and churning out some real amusing bullshit."

  I stared at the road ahead, allowing miles to pass before speaking again. I hated Tara but it wasn't one-sided. She hated me just as much and there was no way I could forget it.

  "I asked, didn't I? If you're determined to believe that I'm the problem here, that's your prerogative, but don't forget I fucking asked. It's a lot more than you've ever done."

  "That's because you are the problem here," she cried, slapping her book against her leg. I glanced at her long, trouser-clad legs before forcing my gaze back to the road. "But yeah, let's pretend none of that exists and I'll justify my choice of books to you."

  When she was alive, my grandmother lived in an old farmhouse. The basement—she'd called it down cellar as one did in New England—was dark and creepy. Nightmare-quality creepy.

  The worst part was all the small rooms with passageways that opened into more passageways like cobwebbed matryoshka dolls. The lure of exploring those spaces was too much to avoid for any kid and I fell victim time after time. And every damn time, I lost my way inside one of those passages. I'd find myself turned around in the dark, not sure which way I'd come or how to get out, and certain I'd never be found.