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The room was quiet, still empty as the rest of the teachers that also had this period off hadn’t come in yet. He looked around the room, and I noticed he had a bag in his hand, the logo of one of the small restaurants on it. He must have walked over to grab his lunch and brought it back.
“Long time,” he said finally. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
I didn’t feel like I could turn him down, even though I had an incredibly strong impulse to run out of the room and back to the stage where I could hide for a while. But it wasn’t like I could escape without him noticing. He’d seen me already.
I sat at the table I normally did every year, and Graham came to sit across from me. It was funny; in all the time I had worked at Murdock High, only two other people had ever sat across from me on my lunch. One was Principal Runnels on my first day as he was showing me around and checking in on me, and the other was the chorus teacher as we planned the shows each year.
“So, you’re here?” he asked, taking a seat.
“I am,” I said. “I teach theater.”
I didn’t plan on expounding much more, and I tucked into my pasta salad.
“I bet you’re great at that,” he said, opening his bag and taking out a delicious looking chicken sandwich and French fries. Suddenly, the pasta salad I had looked forward to for so long didn’t seem so amazing.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Lots of experience. How about you? I heard you were coaching at the school for a bit.”
“Yeah,” he said, wiping the corner of his mouth. “Maybe a little longer than a bit.”
“Oh?” I asked, trying to hide the surprise. I knew about his injury, but I didn’t want to seem like I knew. It was probably silly. Everyone in town was talking about it, but I didn’t want him thinking that I still followed his career.
Even though I totally did.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about my injury, end of my career and all that,” he said.
“I did,” I said, “I’m very sorry to hear that. It must be terrible for you.”
“It was,” he said, sighing. He was trying to smile through it, but I could see the pain. I knew what smiling through pain was all about. I could always recognize it in someone else. It was in the eyes. Still, he nodded. It looked like he wanted to move forward. “So how about you? I didn’t know you were back in town. The last time we spoke, you were still in New York.”
I stammered a little, trying to hide my lack of a response by chewing dramatically on the pasta salad and holding my hand and fork up over my mouth.
Come on, Mallory, you’re an actress, I thought.Act.
“I just wasn’t getting the kind of work I wanted,” I said. “Acting in New York or LA, it’s all image based. I’m not tall or blonde enough for them, so, you know.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I lied. “It just wasn’t as fun after a while. Certainly not as easy either. I got tired of struggling to pay the bills in Brooklyn and not have a quality of life. I was working four different jobs by the end on top of auditioning and rehearsing and performing. It was too much.”
At least that part was true. I had been working four jobs and rehearsing and performing. The problem was that I loved every single second of doing it. I didn’t come home because it was hard. I came home because of Owen.
“I see,” he said, seeming somewhat disappointed.
“It wasn’t just that,” I said suddenly. “My mom got sick. She needed some extra help around the house, you know? Someone to take care of her a bit. We could either hire someone or I could come home. It was timing really.”
“Ah,” he said, and I wondered how much of that he believed. I wondered how much of it I believed.
“I came into town to help her out for a few weeks and noticed the high school was looking for a theater teacher. Miss Patterson had retired, and Mrs. Gobble wanted to stay in English, so I pulled the trigger. And here I am.”
“And here you are,” he repeated.
“Yup,” I said. “They let me take the position while I simultaneously earned my teaching certificate, so that made it easy.”
All that was also true. It was just that none of that factored into my decision to actually move back to Murdock. They were happy accidents I found and experienced once I was already back.
A bell rang in the distance, and Graham looked at his watch.
