visiting from colleges. Today it is Hendrix and Carnegie Mellon.
I need more tardy slips and am almost out of permissions, so I go to Miss Olivia’s desk. I am the only one she allows near her desk, since it contains the precious slips that she keeps under lock and key. Miss Olivia is obsessed with making sure that no student ever sneaks out of so much as one class. She still talks about a senior two years ago who’d managed to steal her pad of slips and get three of his friends out of class before she traced the stolen slips and got him suspended. For a week.
Miss Olivia’s desk is covered with her massive collection of turtle knickknacks and photos. In the largest of the framed photos she is with her ex-husband and their baby daughter. Her daughter, who is in her early thirties now, has a pink bow taped to the top of her bald head. The ex has one of those eighties haircuts with no sideburns that make it look like the top of his hair isn’t attached, like it is just a hair cloud floating around his head. He looks happy and proud and filled with love. Next to that one is a picture of Miss Olivia’s daughter in a graduation gown with a mortarboard loosely pinned onto her big, curly hair. Miss Olivia stands beside her with the same hair. The father is not in the picture.
Not in the picture.
I guess that’s where the expression comes from.
In the most recent photo, Miss Olivia is holding her asthmatic Chihuahua, Elvis, next to her face and making him wave at the camera. Her hair is thin and flat, the way it grew in after the chemo.
Since she is a giant Pirates football fan, Miss Olivia has a team photo tacked to her wall. But she especially worships Tyler and has a close-up of him pasted in the center of a red football that she cut out of construction paper. I am staring at it when a voice behind me says, “Pink Puke, so this is where you hang out.”
I turn. Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.
Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.
My brain cannot absorb this information. It shorts out and refuses to send signals to my mouth to make it form words or even to my legs to order them to get me up off my butt and walk to the counter.
“I wondered where you disappeared to.” He leans down and rests his head on the back of his hands, folded on top of the counter. “You work here or are you just stealing turtles?”
“What? Oh.” I glance down at Miss Olivia’s turtle paperweights, turtle Beanie Babies, turtle figurines, turtle paper-clip holder, and turtle mouse pad and snort something that is meant to be a laugh but comes out like I might be about to barf again.
“What are you doin’?” he drawls. While I consider and discard a thousand equally stupid responses, he hoists himself up onto the counter, swings his legs around as smoothly as an Olympic gymnast, and dismounts on my side of the counter. He leans in next to me to study Miss Olivia’s turtle herd and says, “I detect a theme here.”
Sadly, the nerd section of my brain unfreezes before any of the cooler parts and I jump up, babbling, “Why are you even here? The athletic faculty handles all sports absences. You can’t be back here.”
“I can’t? Seems I am, though.” He picks up a sneering turtle with a sign around its neck that reads YOU WANT IT WHEN? “This one here has got to be my favorite.”
“That area is off-limits to students!” The top half of Miss Olivia’s body appears at the counter. Tyler’s back is to her, so she can’t see who is with me. “What is he doing back there?”
Tyler doesn’t turn around. He makes the grumpy turtle sniff his thumb, then fall in love with the nail. I ignore him as he puts Miss Olivia’s turtle on the back of his hand and makes it hump his thumb.
“He’s from the district office,” I say. “He’s fixing your hard drive.”
His back still to Miss Olivia, Tyler drawls in a surprisingly realistic hillbilly accent, “Yes’m, your hard drive has to be recalibrated.” His improv is good except that he is patting Miss Olivia’s fax machine instead of her external hard drive.
“He is not from district. He is a student and he is not allowed.”