Val buried her face in her hands. The horn/tooth on top of her costume’s head flopped forward. She was sure the video was being uploaded even now. She knew she shouldn’t have baited them, but could she at least have waited for a day when she wouldn’t look like a total fool? Maybe she could blame the costume, say she’d overheated and gotten testy. Maybe someone would buy that.
Lunch period ended and the lobby emptied. The recruiters packed their materials and left without saying another word to her. The bell rang. Val knew she had a class waiting for her in the gym, but she didn’t move.
“Val?”
She looked up. Nick Horton stood at her table. “What are you doing, Val?”
The fishbowl of dollars she’d raised before her outburst sat between them on the table. She pointed at it. “Fundraising.”
He didn’t look amused. “I had two students tell me you were having a breakdown, and I think you’re late for class.”
“I should get moving, then.” She turned and walked toward the gym with as much dignity as she could muster in her narwhal costume with the floppy horn and tail-shoes. When she’d turned the corner, she stopped to remove the costume. If she was lucky, that was the end of the matter.
It wasn’t. A note flashed on her whiteboard halfway through the last period, asking her to stop in the principal’s office. Her stomach dropped. Now she knew what her students felt like when they got busted for skipping. She changed into street clothes as slowly as she could get away with and walked with dragging feet toward the offices.
There was a crowd. Not only Nick, but the principal, Ann Kim, and Val’s own department head, Thomas Healy. Nobody smiled when she entered and took the empty seat.
“What the hell, Val?” Tom was the first to speak.
“I’m sorry. I—I had a bad day.”
“A bad day is forgetting your gym shoes. You had a meltdown in front of students.”
Nick jerked his thumb at Mrs. Kim’s computer. “On video.”
Val sank in her chair. “How bad is it?”
“You should know.” Tom cocked his head. “You were there.”
“I was there, but I’m not sure what I said. I know I probably didn’t represent very well.”
Mrs. Kim’s tight-lipped smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It sounds like you’re under a lot of stress at home.”
“My son . . .” Val said, stating the obvious. They all nodded in varying degrees of sympathy.
“I told you the recruiters were off-limits,” Nick reminded her. “I told you to let them do their job.”
“I know, but David is getting deployed, and I guess I got angry.”
Tom frowned. “You can’t get angry.” He should know, Val thought. He of the purple-faced lectures.
“We have a situation, Val,” said Mrs. Kim. “If any parents see the video, we’re not going to be able to protect you.”
“Protect me?”
“Keep you. Anyway, maybe it’ll blow over. In the meantime, it’s the weekend. Why don’t you take two weeks off and we’ll bring in a substitute? Get yourself together. You can give your lesson plans to the sub.”
“What about coaching? We have meets coming up.”
“You have an assistant coach, right?”
Foolish to think she was necessary, or that she’d done enough for the school that they’d protect her in a moment of weakness. Or maybe that was unfair, and this was the best protection they could give to keep from firing her. Val nodded, numb.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SOPHIE
“Okay, y’all, Listen up! We have a new student with us today.”
Sophie’s class never got new students. If anything, their numbers dwindled month by month, as kids got Pilots and left the non-Pilot classes. She lowered her pen and paid attention. Everybody did the same; only natural to size up the new person. They were tall, which Sophie definitely wasn’t, and Black, like most of her school, with short, intricate braids that pulled their hair back tightly from their face.
Competition? Friend? Foe? It came to those options in most classrooms Sophie had been in, at least in the school-at-large. In this classroom, there was a little bit more camaraderie than in most. That was how it felt to Sophie, anyway.
Ms. Colcetti glanced down at a piece of paper. “This is—”
“—I’m going to interrupt you, ma’am, because there’s a chance whatever it says on that paper is wrong. My name is Gabe Clary. Pronouns he/him.”
Ms. Colcetti nodded and crossed something out on her paper. “Got it. Gabe.”
Gabe surveyed the class in a way that suggested he was used to attention and bored with it, then chose an empty chair toward the middle and sat without checking if that wrecked the seating plan.
What kind of kid interrupted the teacher, and didn’t wait for her to tell him where to sit, then pulled out a notebook and started drawing without acknowledging anybody? Even Ms. Colcetti was at a loss, staring at Gabe as if she was still trying to figure out what had just happened. Sophie was going to have to meet this person.
• • •
She got her chance later that afternoon, when they were paired in science lab.
Gabe groaned when he saw what they were doing. “The how to drop an egg from a height without breaking it experiment? I did that years ago.”
Sophie felt a need to defend Mrs. Rodriguez. Mrs. Rodriguez was definitely her favorite teacher, and science was probably her favorite class, even if she did better in English. Science affected her every day: David and Julie’s Pilots, her own medications. “She wouldn’t be teaching it if it wasn’t on the test for our grade. It must be important.”
“If they’re only teaching it because it’s on a test, how do we know it’s going to apply to anything else we ever do in our lives?
