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“Uh-huh,” I nodded dismissively. I listened to the sound of her footsteps stomping down the hallway and, once I heard our apartment door slam behind her, I collapsed onto the bed.
I stared at my phone, waiting for it to ring even though I knew it wouldn’t. I blocked Caleb’s number. I had to. What happened in the cafe was a wakeup call. A reminder of why Caleb and I were always destined to fail.
He was the billionaire playboy and I was the girl from Brooklyn. He was the legal guardian of one of my students and I was the teacher. He was notorious for being unable to commit to women, and I was the girl with an inherent inability to trust. We couldn’t be more wrong for each other. And no matter how right things felt when our bodies touched, it was always going to end with someone getting hurt. Better for it to happen now, rather than later. Better for it to have been a clean break, without the school board or the tabloids getting involved.
I had gotten out most of the tears and fought through the anger and resentment phase of our unofficial ‘break up.’ Now I just felt empty. I pulled myself back up on the bed and took a sip of wine, then I reached for the first assignment in the stack of homework projects that I needed to grade.
Every week I assigned my class a take-home project that needed to be completed with the help of their parents. The idea was that the project forced parents to take an interest in what was going on at school and get involved. But the sad reality was that most of the time, the nannies just ended up working through the project themselves at the last minute.
For this past week’s project, I provided each of my students with a storybook. The pages inside each book had been pre-printed with the texts of different fairy tales. One book was Rapunzel, another told the story of Snow White. Besides the block of text printed at the bottom of each page, the book was blank. The assignment was for students to read the story with their parents, then work together to create illustrations that matched the passage of text on each page.
Flipping through the stack of completed books, I couldn’t help but wonder, cynically, how many nannies were up late the night before, racing to complete their illustrations.
It was times like these that I questioned whether I really belonged at a school like Bellamy Day. I wanted to help kids that fell between the cracks, but even my best efforts to build real connections seem to falter and fall short.
The truth was if it wasn’t for Emmy, I probably would have considered leaving Bellamy Day a long time ago. Helping Emmy gave me a reason to stay. But now that Emmy didn’t need me anymore, I was wondering if I really belonged at Bellamy. I felt like I was missing my real calling. That I should be doing more.
I flipped open the first assignment and immediately my suspicions were verified. The storybook Aladdin had been painstakingly illustrated with drawings far beyond the preschool level. I flipped through the pages, and felt my heart sink. Then, knowing there was not a damn thing I could do about it, I marked the back cover with a passing grade and moved on to the next book in the stack.
I had made it through the first half of the stack by the time I needed to take a break to refill my wine glass. I checked my phone, then reminded myself again that I blocked Caleb’s number, and I reached for the next book.
Maybe it was because Caleb was still lingering on my mind, but when I see Emmy’s curly handwriting on the cover of the storybook, my heart instinctively leapt in my chest.
I considered moving the storybook to the bottom of the stack, but then I convinced myself that it was better to tear off the band aid and deal with it then. I took a deep breath and dropped the book onto my lap.
‘The Tale of the Lost Queen,’ the cover read, in squiggly magic market letters.
I don’t remember this fairytale… I thought, frowning as I flipped open the cover.
The first page was an elaborate colored pencil drawing of spindly grey buildings, stretched to comical proportions in front of a bright blue sky. In the center of the page, there was a girl with yellow crayon hair and a bright pink crown.
‘Once upon a time,’ the text began on the first page, ‘in the faraway kingdom of Manhattan, there lived a special princess named Emmy.’
I felt my heart thump. This wasn’t the storybook I assigned to Emmy. In fact, this wasn’t a storybook at all. This was a recreation. Someone reprinted their own story, painstakingly following the format of the storybooks I had assigned so that it would look identical to the other projects. Someone had written their own fairytale, replacing the one I had originally assigned to Emmy. And the flutter in my stomach told me that that someone was Caleb Preston.
I flipped the page and found another rendering of the girl in the crown, this time accompanied by an impossibly tall man wearing a matching pink crown and an impressive attempt at a grey suit.
‘One day Princess Emmy was sent to live with her uncle, King Caleb, in a strange place called Camden Castle.’
Flip.
‘King Caleb loved Princess Emmy very much, but he had never taken care of a special little princess before, and he needed a little bit of help.’
Flip.
‘Luckily there was a very kind and beautiful woman named Daisy who was willing to help him.’
Flip.
‘Princess Emmy adored Daisy, and soon King Caleb did, too. Camden Castle began to feel like a home for the first time.’
I flipped the page and my eyes froze on an illustration of the tall king in the grey suit and pink crown, Caleb, embracing a woman with flowing blonde hair and a blue Bellamy Day polo shirt, me.
‘The truth was, King Caleb had been living a dark and lonely life at Camden Castle. Princess Emmy and Daisy brought color and light into his life, and the king realized that he had finally found his Queen.’
Flip.
‘King Caleb hoped that Daisy would be his queen so they could be a family and live happily ever after… but then something terrible happened.’
