On the bright side, the last two weeks of sweating my ass off on the soccer field had resulted in the shorts fitting less snugly around my ass and mid-section.
“I made you lunch,” Mom said, holding out a brown paper bag with my name scrawled across it.
“Aw, Mom.” For some reason, it went straight to my heart, and I wanted to cry. Even though the food would be something like soggy leftover fish sticks, my parents’ support was both a security blanket and an oppressive reminder that I’d yet to do anything to really earn their love. I felt like they were just making down payments on being proud of me for a time in the future when I’d actually earned it.
This was my first “first day” of school in sixteen years. Holy shit. I did the math again. Yep. I’d been out of college for a whole person who could drive.
But this was by far the scariest first day of my entire life. I couldn’t handle thirty-two teen girls on a soccer field for two hours at a time. We’d barely survived preseason as a team. What the hell was I going to do with who knows how many of them I’d be juggling over the course of the next six hours? Oh, and then there was afterschool soccer practice. Also known as ninety minutes of pure torture. The divide between Team Ruby and Team Sophie was Grand Canyon deep since their fight. And there was bully Lisabeth lurking around being a straight-up dick.
The girls hated me. I disliked them intensely. They questioned everything I did. I yelled at them until practice was over. It sucked.
My dad trotted into the kitchen, a big grin on his face. He handed me my car keys. “All gassed up and washed for your big day,” he said.
The school was five whole blocks away.
There was that stinging behind my eyes again. “Dad, you didn’t have to—”
“Just want to make your first day as great as it can be,” he beamed.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, hugging him hard.
I really needed to not fuck this up.
My office was…depressing. I hadn’t paid much attention to it when Jake hauled my ass in here. But now that I wasn’t dying of heat exhaustion, I took a good long look around. I didn’t have any office knickknacks or supplies to move in. It was just me and my brown bag lunch.
The bell rang, signaling the start of first period. It was a freebie for me. I didn’t have a class until second period, so I had forty-odd minutes to hyperventilate or peruse the Jane Fonda VHS tape collection neatly arranged on one of the bookshelves.
“Yo, Cicero!” I heard Floyd call through the gym door.
I exited my office and stepped out into the gym. The floor gleamed with its new coat of wax, and the HVAC system groaned in the rafters above us.
“You ready for this?” Floyd asked, bouncing a basketball at me.
I caught it and dribbled without enthusiasm. The lump of dread in my stomach had unfurled into a large, winged dragon.
“You look like you’re gonna hurl again,” Floyd observed.
“Very funny,” I said, passing the ball back to him.
He dribbled to the hole, tongue out like Jordan, and made a peppy layup.
“You can be nervous, but don’t be palpably nervous,” he advised, sending the ball back to me. “Miss it, and you have an H.”
It was 7:45 a.m., and I was playing HORSE. Not a bad gig if I could rescue myself from my own terror.
“Palpably nervous?” I drove in, nearly tripping over my own feet, and heaved the ball at the backboard. The gods were smiling on me because the ball dinked off the backboard and swished neatly through the net.
“Don’t let them smell the fear.”
“How does this team-teaching thing work. Good cop, bad cop?”
“Ooh! Dibs on bad cop! Nah. We just tag team two classes at once. You grade your students, I grade mine, and we both get to yell at all of them.”
I was good at yelling. I could do this.
Second period was off to a bang-up start when sixty percent of the kids didn’t show up with a change of clothes. “It’s like the first day of school,” a girl in a purple bodysuit and high-waisted jeans complained. “We’re not, like, supposed to do anything.”
We weren’t asking them to do anything. We were asking them to stand around in the gymnasium and take the pieces of paper we