Page 13 of Coached By the Grumpy Gargoyle

Staring at me.

He doesn’t glance away when I catch him looking. Doesn’t give me the polite little nod that might allow us both to pretend this is a normal morning. Those green eyes stay locked on me as the November draft shoves me through the door.

My stomach flips. A big, shameless flip, which is completely unhelpful. I want to go over there. That’s the embarrassing truth. I want him to look pleased to see me, and I am absolutely not prepared to find out that he isn’t.

I put my head down and walk.

On a normal Monday I’d have greeted six kids by name before I cleared the trophy case. Today they get the top of my head and one all-purpose “morning” flung at the general air, because I’m concentrating on getting past Bram without looking at him. My heels are moving at a pace best described as professionally frantic. Click, click, click on the terrazzo.

Then, at the edge of my vision, he moves.

He pushes off from the wall and starts up the corridor. Toward me, in that unhurried, deliberate way of his, and the distance between us begins evaporating at a rate I don’t care for at all.

Nope.

I take a right into the old wing like a woman with an urgent appointment in 1958.

The old wing is where the school keeps its leftovers, one row of fluorescents doing a mad flicker over converted classrooms full of music stands and mop buckets. It’s quiet down here, with nobody between me and the storage room halfway along the corridor. I head straight for it. The storage room door sticks. I hit it with my hip on the first try, and it gives with its little wooden complaint, and I’m inside with it shut behind me before I’ve fully admitted to myself what I’m doing.

What I’m doing is hiding. Like a coward.

Let’s just be honest, since it’s only me in here with the floor wax and the cardboard. I am a twenty-six-year-old licensed professional with a framed master’s degree and a lockable desk drawer, and I am hiding in a storage room like a naughty teenager. All before eight in the morning.

Because it isn’t his face I can’t handle. It’s what he might say. Some version of “About last night. It was a mistake. It meant nothing,” delivered in that gravel tone, level and reasonable, while the hallway traffic parts around us and all that warm stone goes back to being cold.

I know he hasn’t actually said any of that. He might only want to ask why I left. But I can already imagine standing in front of him, trying to look as if I don’t care, and the thought makes me press my back harder against the door.

Last night mattered to me. There. That’s the problem. I can call it a mistake all I want, but hearing him say it would hurt.

So I left before he could, and now I’m avoiding him at work. An excellent, mature solution that has brought me all the way to a cupboard full of cleaning supplies.

Then I hear a sniff.

It doesn’t come from me. It comes from behind me, deep in the room, back where the tall gray cabinets stand in two rows with a shoulder-width gap between them. One of the two fluorescent tubes flickers over the cabinets, leaving the far end of the gap in shadow. The sniff is small and wet and instantly strangled.

Someone is trying very hard not to be heard.

I turn away from the door, suddenly listening for another sound.

“Hello?” I keep it easy, unremarkable, the voice I’d use to offer someone the candy dish in my office. I come around the end of the cabinets slowly, giving whoever it is time to see me coming.

There’s a kid wedged into the far end of the gap, knees drawn up and hood pulled forward. I’d know that particular slight silhouette anywhere, hood or no hood. Overgrown black hair escaping the hood’s edge. Round wire-rimmed glasses catching the flickering light.

“Hi, Eli.”

He flinches. His shoulders pull tighter, and for a second I think he won’t answer.

“Hi, Ms. Hale.” His voice is thick and muffled.

He has a towel pressed to the middle of his face, and he turns his head away as he says it, angling toward the cabinet. Over the towel, his eyes are red-rimmed and enormous behind crooked glasses. He’s been crying, and he doesn’t want me to see.

I crouch at the mouth of the gap, leaving a little space between us.

“Hey.” I rest my free hand on my knee. “Rough morning?”

“’M fine.” The towel muffles his answer.

“Yeah? Okay.” I settle onto my heels like I have nowhere in the world to be. “It’s just, and don’t take this the wrong way, people who are fine don’t usually spend their first period of Monday morning in the storage room. This is more of a not-fine venue. I’d know. I came in to hide, too.”