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Eden tsked. “You little liar. Here, lemme take over.” She lurched forward.
Georgie grasped Eden’s forearm, halting her progress. “No. I can handle this.”
“I know, but…” Her friend’s face pinched.
“Eden, seriously, I’m fine.” Georgie let go of her sleeve.
“Babe, you don’t look fine.”
She hugged her cardigan against the front of her high-waisted, loose-fit trousers as the lack of feeling spread to her ring and middle fingers. “It’ll pass soon.” Hopefully.
“But the headache part won’t,” Eden countered. “Yours never do.”
That was true. The stabbing agony was still to come, but Georgie wasn’t about to let a migraine attack take her down, not when so much was riding on this first trip of the school year. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” As the words left her tongue, her lips and mouth tingled with encroaching numbness. She mentally cursed her rotten luck. “I fought really hard to get my students here.” Georgie shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere, even if it means smiling through aura and pain.”
Her expression softening, Eden grinned with reverence. “You’re a tough nut.” She paused, ensuring they didn’t have a teenage audience. “You’ll be an amazing department head. Houdini never puts his students first.”
Georgie bristled. ‘Houdini’ was the secret code name they shared for Brian Sawyer, a fellow candidate for the history department promotion who had a propensity for escaping the time-consuming ‘extras’ expected of all teachers, tasks like advising school clubs and being available after class for extra help. Despite his obviously slack work ethic, Brian had magically wormed his way into Principal Laporte’s inner circle with gifts of hard-to-get Toronto Indy tickets and weekends away at his wealthy parents’ cottage in picturesque Muskoka.
Georgie may have held seniority, her eight years trumping Brian’s four, but with his schmoozy, kiss-ass ways, her lengthier tenure provided little comfort.
“He’s the biggest jerk I’ve ever worked with,” Eden muttered under her breath. “So conceited and temperamental. God, if he gets it…”
“The boys’ club will completely rule the school.” Georgie frowned through her whisper, her vision disintegrating into a kaleidoscope of spiky flashes and twisted shapes. “You hear about the film festival last month?”
“I heard something about A River Runs Through It,” said Eden.
“Yeah. Houdini got them into the after-party,” said Georgie. “Got photos taken with Brad Pitt, too.” Eden’s eyes popped wide as Georgie slowly shook her head. “How the hell do I compete with that?”
Her rhetorical question lingered in the air unanswered until…
“Well”—Eden scratched her jaw—“you could give Laporte your hockey tickets when Montréal comes to town.”
What?! A nauseous knot cinched in Georgie’s stomach. Her lifelong passion, her season tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs, were not up for grabs for schmoozing or anything else, especially if it involved a principal with questionable ethics—a principal who cheered on Montréal, Toronto’s greatest rival.
She expelled a heavy breath. Eden was a dear colleague and friend (eight years and counting), but she would never understand why Georgie was so firm about keeping all her games.
Peering back, Eden blinked. “Uh-oh. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“If my dad were alive, this would kill him.”
“Oh, c’mon, Georgie. It’s one home game out of, what?”
“Forty.” She slid up the sleeves of her blouse.
Eden’s thinly tweezed brows—well, the one Georgie could see—arched with a Stop being silly bounce. “You can spare one, surely.”
“I haven’t missed a game against Montréal since I was thirteen. THIRTEEN! It’s THE highlight of the regular season.”
“Don’t scalpers sell them for, like, hundreds of bucks or something?” asked Eden.
“Yeah. So?”
“So Laporte can’t afford that, not with that bloated mortgage he’s always moaning about. Take him with you and I bet the promotion will be yours before the second period.”
Georgie curled her lip. “I’m not sitting with him! Besides, if I can’t earn it on merit, I don’t want it.”
“But you’d beat Houdini at his own game—”
