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“I really need to quit drinking,” I said to myself, rubbing my temple. A sharp pain ran down the middle of my head and cut through to my forehead.God fucking dammit.
Steaming hot coffee sat in the middle of a long, white table in front of me. The studio where I taught seemed to have white everything. Walls, chairs, window panes. Even white appliances in the kitchen at the corner end of the unit.
The brightness definitely contributed to the symptoms of this hangover.
Five chairs, surrounding the table along the perimeter, remained empty for the moment. I knew it was just a matter of time before these yappy students of mine arrived. Not that the noise level bothered me on a typical, non-hangover day. It was just… yeah… waking up after hallucinating that you’ve seen a dead ex-boyfriend?
Not the best day to teach.
I almost called off sick. After all, it wasn’t that I needed the job. The success from my other books had been good to me, so I really couldn’t complain about my financial position. However, I didn’t like the idea of not having a steady income. So, teaching at Pen & Dagger allowed me to feel more at ease. Especially after the divorce.
And as far as calling out went? I guessed I was just a sucker for punishment.
“Hi, Jemma!” A young girl with a bright smile skipped—and I mean skipped—into the room. She plopped a navy bookbag covered with stickers of anime characters onto an empty chair across from me. After a second, my hungover brain registered the girl as Holly—the youngest student I’d ever had. Still in high school and nearly finished the second draft of a seriously polished manuscript.
“Hey, Holly.” My tone contrasted majorly with the chirp in her voice.
“How was your weekend?”
“Dull and stressful.” Then, trying to be cordial to one of my students, I added, “You?”
“I got into a fight at the Dance Dance Revolution spot… uh… at the arcade.” Holly stepped over toward the kitchen as she relayed the story, long wavy hair bouncing. In the light, I noticed the tri-tones in her hair—dark brown at the roots, an auburn in the middle, and a copper-blonde about two-thirds of the way down. She let out an overly dramatic sigh and waved her hand in the air. “What a mess.”
“You… what?” I cracked a smile, though truthfully, I wasn’t surprised to hear something about DDR come out of her mouth. She’d already mentioned her love for DDR—that dancing arcade game—in a previous class when she read aloud an entire scene in her novel dedicated to it.
“Yeah. Don’t ask,” Holly said. “But… in case you were wondering… it was because some little kid got mad at me for, as he put it, hogging the game.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee from the carafe. She dumped, no joke, five packets of sugar into the mug. Puffing out her chest as she prepared her coffee. Obviously quite proud of herself for this DDR incident.
“So, who won?” I asked, indulging her. “You or the little kid?”
“Oh,me, of course.” She pointed her two thumbs to the area beneath her neck and grinned widely. “Who got five hours of game time? This girl right here!”
I laughed so loud I snorted. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
She chuckled. “No one gets between me and my love of DDR!”
The rest of my students filtered into the room, all saying hello and striking up random conversation. Everyone had weekend stories to tell about their dogs, cats, husbands, wives, kids… I guessed that part of being a writer meant also being prone to telling stories to your writing teacher, too. Lucky me.
“We dropped my son off at college a few weeks ago,” a guy named Brian said. “Brat is already ignoring our calls like we don’t exist.” A few of my older students, obviously parents, groaned in understanding.
“Don’t I remember that feeling,” a woman named Janice said with a chuckle. “Don’t worry. Give it ten or fifteen years. He’ll talk again.” The entire group laughed.
Janice appeared much younger than her actual age, with not a single gray hair and barely any wrinkles on her face, but I guessed she must’ve been in her sixties. She was notorious for knitting as she listened in on the group discussion. One class, she finished an entire afghan that she gave to another student. Today, I watched as she pulled out the needles and started to crochet the yarn around a sixteen-ounce space-gray coffee mug.
Holly watched the lot of us, wide-eyed, barely saying a word. That was usually how she acted once the rest of the students arrived. Quiet, yet observant. Always with a smile on her face.
I rubbed my head as I passed out this week’s reading material. This was how the class worked. We spent the first half reading through an established author’s work. Then, we spent the remainder reading what the students had brought in to the class, providing our critiques to the group.
Man, did I prefer being the editor over being edited.
Then again, that reminded me that I had my own ending to write—rewrite anyway—and only eighteen days to get it back to Meghan.Mergh. I internally groaned as rigid thoughts brushed into my mind. Holly read an excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five aloud, but a buzzing noise in my head kept me far away from the world of Tralfamadorian.
So it goes.
“You’re going to be okay.” A soft, male voice sounded from behind me. Too quietly for me to place who it belonged to, but loud enough for me to hear. My brows knit, and I twisted back to see who had said this.
No one.
