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I can’t help but roll my eyes and glance back at Gabi, who is sitting with her arms crossed and about as much enthusiasm on her face as I’m sure is reflected on mine. This feels like a bunch of stuff that isn’t going to apply to me as a part-time coach for just a few months. OSHA and legal are two things I couldn’t care less about, and the professional development plan sounds like a nightmare.
I suppose the teambuilding doesn’t seem so bad. We do a lot of those exercises at the start of each new year in baseball as a way to get to know the new guys and make them feel like part of the team.
We sit in silence for the next two hours, reviewing new regulations regarding workplace safety and discussing the impact of new laws on students working as TAs and blah blah blah. I find my eyes continuing to scan the room, straying back toward where Gabi sits, though I look away quickly as soon as I realize what I’m doing.
It truly is as boring as I assumed it would be, and when we finally stop for lunch, I’m practically crawling out of my skin. I’ve never been a good student. I don’t mean I’m not smart, I mean I don’t enjoy sitting silently in a room, staring at information on a screen for hours. It’s boring as hell. Give me a lesson that’s engaging and interactive and I’ll be a vocal, active participant. Talk at me from a pulpit and you might as well be speaking a foreign language.
Once Principal Cohen leaves the room, letting us know she’ll be back after lunch, the sense of relief is palpable.
“I hate these things,” an elderly gentleman says as he grabs a sandwich and puts it on his plate. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years. I don’t need to do any more teambuilding exercises.”
“Tell me about it,” says a blonde who looks a bit familiar. She’s standing next to a window, scrolling on her phone. “I used to teach here. The fact that I have to go through this again is ridiculous.”
“Ah, come on guys,” I say as I head toward the lunch table along the back wall. “It’s not that bad.”
When I glance at Gabi, I find her just watching, having not moved out of her chair yet to grab any food.
“You’re the kid helping with baseball, right?”
I look over to the older guy—Bill, according to his nametag—and nod. “Yeah.”
“These aren’t so bad the first few times. But after 20 years of these meetings, we’ll see how bad you think they are.”
My eyes widen and I can’t help but chuckle. Yeesh. Wouldn’t want this guy as a teacher, I can promise that.
“Thanks for the input, Bill,” I say, giving him a salute. Then I make a bold decision to cross over to where Gabi is sitting and take the seat next to her. “If Cohen’s not careful, she’s gonna have a mutiny on her hands,” I joke quietly before taking a big bite of my sandwich.
When Gabi doesn’t say anything in response, just continues to sit there silently, I try something else.
“It’s wild that she’s still here, right? I mean, I know it’s only been four years since we graduated, but it feels like forever.”
“Yeah. Wild.”
She pushes out of her seat and walks over to the table of food, leaving me behind.
My shoulders fall. Any hope I had that maybe today would be a chance for me to talk to her, even briefly, feels shot to shit.
When she finishes plating her food, she turns around and glances at me for a long moment. A glimmer reappears…but then she walks to the other side of the room—the complete opposite from where she was sitting before, where I’m sitting now—and takes a seat, alone, before ripping open a bag of chips.
Suddenly, a mutiny doesn’t sound so bad.
chapter six
Gabi
When lunch is over and Principal Cohen returns, I’m almost grateful. The silence in the classroom was the worst, especially knowing Bishop was across the room, studiously looking at his phone.
But then she says three words that fill me with dread.
“Time for icebreakers!”
On any normal day, I hate these exercises. They feel like pointless excuses to get people to talk to each other who normally wouldn’t. Not to mention the fact that icebreakers seem to be a time when the attention seekers dump all their emotional turmoil in the center of the room for everyone to stare at uncomfortably. I’m not interested in getting my own trauma from someone else’s horror stories. Thanks, but no thanks.
But today isn’t just a normal day. It’s a day when I’ve had to work my ass off not to look at or talk to Bishop, and this exercise is basically going to chuck all that hard work right in the trash.
“Because there are only six of you today, we’ll just start out with a simple exercise of sharing a bit about ourselves and how we came to be working here at CPHS, okay? Then we’ll do something a little more fun.”
I gotta hand it to her. She was able to say all of that with a smile on her face, and I believed her excitement the entire time.
