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4
DEXTER
Before I sit on the stone seat in the amphitheater, I brush the nature off it. Hank has no such compunction. He sits directly on a small pile of twigs without seeming to notice. The amphitheater is one of my favorite underutilized parts of the campus, since it’s under a few feet of snow and ice for much of the school year. But I always bring my classes out here while the days are still warm. It gives them chances to practice performing outside, but that’s an excuse. I just like it here. Peaceful. Surrounded by stone and trees and grass, it feels wild, but controlled.
I can see the new girl out of my peripheral vision when I turn and talk to Hank. I know it’s disrespectful and probably sexist to think of her as a girl. Obviously, she is a woman with a degree and a career. But she’s tiny and adorable and pretty much everything about her screams “Pick me up and hug me.”
Except that she didn’t scream (or say, or whisper, or broadcast in any way) anything like that. She wasn’t impressed with me at all. There were two, almost three moments when I thought maybe she was, but in all fairness, I can’t say that she liked me any better than she liked Hank.
Of course, Hank wasn’t rude and—admittedly—kind of awful to her in the airport. That was all me.
Overall, Hank’s kind of a disaster. I mean, I love the guy, but he’s so deep in the literary and philosophical workings of his own mind that he forgets to eat if I don’t remind him. He’s like one of those British Romantic poets, disposed to long walks and meandering conversations about things nobody else thinks about. If nobody joins him, he takes those long walks and has those meandering conversations alone.
But today he stayed in the moment, flirting shamelessly with both Joey Harker and Ginger Rogers. Neither of them seemed to mind, but they might have been caught in the moment. Ginger has never been friendly with us. She keeps to herself. Maybe Joey is changing her already.
Joey appeared to enjoy our frisbee toss, moving like a dancer across the grass, missing almost every catch, laughing as she ran after the rolling disc and pushing her hair out of her face. And that laugh.
And that smile.
She’s a knockout.
I envision us standing together, leaning toward each other, grinning for a camera. In my mind, we look great—a balance of opposites highlighted by a pair of great smiles. I may not be confident about much, but I know my smile is good.
Too bad I didn’t get to talk with her before Ginger started muttering in her ear. Ginger is impossible to impress, and she must have told Joey Harker something to put her off me. She seemed happy enough to come toss the frisbee, but when Dr. Moreau rang a bell for the meeting, Joey and Ginger walked away and sat together without waiting or keeping seats for me and Hank. Which, of course, doesn’t mean Joey’s not interested. Just not interested enough to sit with me.
Yet.
Or maybe she’s just nervous about the rules. Chamberlain’s archaic dating policy shouldn’t keep us from being friends, right?
Friends.
Right. That’s what I’m thinking about as I remember her laughing as she missed catch after catch.
I watch her now, sitting on a lower row of the amphitheater’s bowl, laughing at something, her shiny blonde hair picking up the sun’s light. Her sunglasses glint in the light and I will her to take them off so I can look at her whole face at once. I slip my sunglasses over my own eyes so if I maybe start staring, she doesn’t need to know about it.
Hank is telling a long story, one that may or may not have a point. It doesn’t matter, really. Those of us who know and love him just enjoy the sound of his voice. He could read an old software manual and we’d listen, letting the fancy accent roll over us.
The smell of the grill hangs in the air, a party scent that feels different today than it will when the grills fire up to feed the kids. I love these few days before a semester, when the faculty gets to be simply colleagues, without the added complication of students around. Weird, I know, but for these few days, it’s nice to be a person first and a teacher as an afterthought.
All the years I went to school here, I never thought of my teachers as people outside their jobs. They existed only as they served my purposes, and it surprised me to discover that there were teachers I didn’t even know—people working so near me without ever crossing my path. That’s one of the reasons I make an effort to know all the faculty now.
Someone taps a microphone, and we all turn toward the stage. Dr. Moreau wears a blazer and skirt that manages to make me feel too hot even though I’m in shorts. How can she stand to dress like that all the time?
Dr. Moreau taps the mic again. “Alors,” she says, her standard opening. I remember hearing her speak for the first time, surprised at the depth of her voice. I also thought she’d been saying “Hello,” until I knew her well enough to realize that she never starts any conversation, assembly, or meeting with small talk.
“Alors,” she repeats. “We begin. Welcome back to Chamberlain Academy, the best preparatory school in the world.” Her French cadence makes even this drastic overstatement acceptable. Not that I don’t think Chamberlain is an excellent school. It is. I did very well here as a student, and I am thrilled to be here on staff. But unsupported and unsupportable claims make me itchy. I stop myself from asking “According to which metrics are we the best? In which categories?”
I don’t actually want to get fired, so I keep my comments to myself, or at least between myself and Hank.
Hank went to Eton and then Oxford; therefore, Hank understands the need to mock (gently) Moreau’s claims of “best in the world.”
Moreau moves through her list of announcements quickly, directing the faculty to check email daily, adhere to the dress code when outside our apartments, avoid all social media contact with students, maintain appropriately professional relationships between faculty members, and be proactive in communicating with parents.
“We control the conversations we initiate,” she says. Seriously, with that accent, she could make anyone listen to anything.
Hank leans over and whispers, “You heard that bit about keeping faculty relationships appropriately professional?”
I shrug. I’ve read the policy and procedure write-up. I read it every year. Obeying the rules was never an issue. But Joey Harker hasn’t been here any of those other years.
