desk, holding a pen in her hand. She looked from me to the clock on the wall to my right.
“Oh. Julian. Yes. I see you’re actually on time, this time.”
I stepped into the office and closed the door. On time? I was early. Moreover—
“This time? Anne, I got the letter you left, but I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say you tried to talk to me multiple times last week. Your letter is the first thing I’ve heard about my results since the evaluation itself.”
“Hmm,” Anne looked down at a notebook on her desk and scribbled something across the page.
I frowned. “Anne? Is there something I should know?”
When she looked up, I gestured to the notebook.
“Oh, those are just my minutes from this meeting,” she said, her voice bright. “I always find it helps to have a written record of meetings, don’t you think? Especially if someone is going to dispute the reality of the situation. It helps to have documentation, should there be any further discussion.”
Further discussion?
“It’s not disputing reality to say that every time I saw you last week, you ran in the other direction.”
“Hmm.” Anne raised an eyebrow, then bent down to make another note.
Clearly, things were off to a great start.
Calm, I reminded myself. Stay calm. You don’t want to antagonize her before she’s even given you your results.
So I walked, calmly, to her desk. I sat, calmly, in the chair across from her. I, very calmly, did not ask to see her notes, or tell her she was lying, or suggest that this entire process was a sham. I simply breathed and waited. Calmly.
“So,” Anne said after a moment. “I suppose you’d like to see your results.”
“Well, yeah.” Wasn’t that obvious?
Anne pulled an envelope out of a desk drawer and held it out to me.
“I’ll give you some time to read through them,” she said when I took it. She picked her pen up again and watched me. I got the impression she was looking for a reason to make another note, and I decided I wasn’t going to give her one.
Instead, I opened the envelope, began sliding the papers out—and immediately backtracked on my decision when I saw the date in the upper right hand corner of the top page.
“Wait, you’ve had these for two weeks now?” I looked at Anne in confusion. “You could have given them to me any time in the past two weeks. Why wait til now?”
“As the letter I provided you clearly states, I did try to schedule meetings with you last week, but you refused to meet with me.”
It was a little jarring, having someone lie right to my face. Usually when people lie, they try to keep some sliver of truth encased within it, but this was wholesale fiction. I didn’t even know how to respond.
“You could have at least asked me to meet with you this morning,” I protested, pulling the packet all the way free of the envelope.
“Julian, I’m very busy. I can’t be at your beck and call whenever you want to meet with me. Besides, I didn’t want to distract you from your teaching,” Anne said primly.
“Distract me? Why would I—”
That was when I registered what the front page of the packet actually said. The big black letters seemed to pulse in the fluorescent office light. ‘Fails to meet expectations in all categories.’
“Are you serious? Every single section of the summary is marked as ‘needs improvement.’”
“I understand you may be upset,” Anne said, her tone shifting from prim to smug. “But we have some concerns about your fitness as a classroom teacher.”
I looked from Anne to the results and back to Anne again. “Who’s we?”
“We.” She waved her hand in a big circle as though to include the entire school, the town of Adair, and possibly the state of Georgia. “I don’t want to sound discouraging, Julian, but it may be that teaching just isn’t the field for you. It’s a big responsibility, after all, shaping young minds.”
I gripped the results tighter, crinkling the bottom corner of the packet.
“I’ve been teaching for five years,” I said, striving to keep my voice even. My angry voice doesn’t sound all that different from my about-to-cry voice, and I definitely wasn’t giving her that satisfaction. “I’ve had nothing but stellar evaluations until now.”
“Well, things change. I told everyone when I took this job that my goal was to ensure the highest quality of education for our students. Things that might have slid by