Page 14 of Textbook Romance

The class laughs. I nod and take out a pen, watching as she asks a girl in the front with impeccable French braids to hand out some worksheets. She’s polite with her and lends a glue stick to another, joking that it’s her favourite glue stick and she wants it back. When she talks, they’re all quiet, they listen and it’s like some sort of teaching magic. She doesn’t talk down to them, she commands the respect naturally. I need to work out how she does that. I write the word RESPECT in my notebook and draw a bubble around it. I notice Terrill looking over at my page.

‘Find out what it means to me…’ he sings under his breath.

I laugh, perhaps a little too loudly.

Zoe looks up at me. ‘I didn’t realise bar charts were that funny, Sir.’

Terrill glares at me. If I dob him in now, I’ll never crack him.

‘I’m just excited, Miss. You know… it’s maths!’ I exclaim, a little enthusiastically. These kids will now go round the school and tell their mates about some excitable twat who was sitting in on their lesson.

‘Well, I am glad. Just… keep it down.’

I’m glad she doesn’t ask me to leave the room. Terrill side-eyes me. I think we may be friends now. He could have quoted the Notorious B.I.G. song to me and I would have got that as well, though. I’m down with the youth. I follow Zoe around the room again, watching the way she asks kids how they are, if they understand the work. It’s all that warmth which radiates off her. I felt that from the moment I met her, when I shook her hand and she wrapped a hand around mine. Almost a sign, like I could feel safe with her. But every so often, she breathes in deeply and exhales and I also see a person changed. A look in her eyes, as if for a moment she’s a bit lost and has to re-centre herself.

I remember that look. I remember it from that courtyard at the wedding when it felt like something inside her broke, like the calm serenity inside her was shaken up into a frenzy. After her daughter rang, I ordered us an Uber like I’d promised. I’m not sure why I went in the Uber with her, but I made sure she got home to her kids. She sat there glassy-eyed during that whole trip, the confused driver looking back at us every so often, trying to work out the dynamic. I think he thought we’d had a fight. I hope he didn’t think I was the cause of the fight.

‘Shit. I forgot my coat,’ she said, at one point.

‘I can go back and get it. I’ll ring the hotel,’ I told her. And then she grabbed my hand. Her skin was still soft, but her fingers were taut like wire.

‘That’s very kind. This is very kind of you. I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll go back to the wedding. Enjoy the rest of your evening.’

I just sat there thinking, why are you thinking about me? In this very moment, your world is falling off a cliff and you’re thinking about whether I might want to dance and eat a bit more cake. It was good cake, but I can get Ed to bake me cake any time.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked softly.

She didn’t say a word. I don’t think she could. I imagine she was still processing it all. I was trying to piece it altogether. So, Brian is the husband. He’s not in Glasgow. He’s been papped at a hotel with someone she knows. A friend? That’s not good. That’s bloody awful. I would not have handled that well. But she didn’t break there. She just held on to my hand in the back of that taxi.

‘It’s the house with the blue car in the front drive, red door…’ she told the driver and the car pulled up slowly. ‘Here…’ She went into her clutch to find her wallet. ‘Let me offer you some money for the ride.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s on me. Get inside to your kids.’

‘Thank you, Jack,’ she replied. She remembered my name, and said it so sincerely.

I put a hand on her arm. ‘Take care, Zoe. Please look after yourself. You don’t deserve this.’

I don’t know why I ended it like that. I should have ended on ‘take care’ or something generic and safe like ‘good night’ but it felt important to say that. It felt important to tell a person I thought was good that they don’t deserve to be hurt, that despite all the love they put out into the world, when something bad happens to them, it’s not because they didn’t try.

She looked at me and for the first time that evening, a tear rolled down her cheek that she wiped away hurriedly. She smiled and let go of my hand and then exited the car, running lightly down the path towards her front door.

‘Are we going back to the wedding?’ the Uber driver asked me.

‘Yeah, just wait a minute, mate,’ I told him. I waited until I saw her figure through the glass panels of the door, her kids wrapped around her. She was where she needed to be. ‘Let’s go back to the wedding.’

‘You alright, mate? Did she just dump you? I wasn’t quite sure what was happening?’ he asked. ‘It’s why I turned up the radio. We can stop for some chips if you’ve been dumped.’

I met his eyes in the mirror, half-laughing, half in shock. ‘Nah, man. We’re not together.’ I like how he thought chips were the answer, though. ‘She just got some bad news.’

‘Oh. Shame, she seemed nice.’

‘She did,’ I answered. ‘She really did.’

THREE

Zoe

‘Hold up. Didn’t you all go on holiday last year with them? This… Liz.’ I like the way Drew says Liz’s name. He spits it out with the venom it deserves.

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