Page 1 of Past Tents

CHAPTER

ONE

ALLY

“Another one down.” John Witty’s voice hung in the teachers’ lounge like a cloud of perfume. Witty always spoke in a scandalized stage whisper, even if he was just commenting on the weather. Always with his round wire glasses slipped down his nose, so his fierce blue eyes made direct contact.

I just wanted to eat my salad in peace, but instead, the lettuce and cherry tomato hung suspended just outside my mouth while I waited to hear what had Witty’s boxer briefs so utterly twisted.

Rubbing a hand over his dark beard Sherlock Holmes–style, Witty shook his head like the end of planet Earth might be near.

I wasn’t worried. Yet.

Witty had a flair for the dramatic, appropriate since he was the drama teacher, but he sounded like the town crier warning that the sky was falling. Last week, the cafeteria substituted brownies for layer cake, and he made it sound like nuclear winter.

“Another one? Another what?”

“Diamond’s home with the stomach bug.” Witty tilted in his stiff-backed chair, patted his rounded stomach, and adjusted his bowtie. He wore a neat little clip-on every day, and today’s featured tiny rubber ducks on a blue background. The wispy brown hair on top of his head blew gently with the overhead air-conditioning.

Meanwhile, I felt sorry for Loretta Diamond, who’d worked as the school nurse for almost two decades. After a few years on the job, most teachers develop a hardy resistance to any and all vermin that students hurl our way. I hadn’t been sick in two years, despite having one-on-one sessions with several kids who didn’t tell me they had budding colds and flus.

Loretta, however, was the opposite. Anything that even hinted at infecting a student at Green Valley High ended up felling Loretta like a beetle-infested tree.

Unfortunately, a spate of stomach bugs had been sweeping through the school ever since we all enjoyed a faculty lunch a couple days ago. There were rumors—and there were always rumors at Green Valley High—that patient zero wasn’t actually a patient, but instead, a tainted batch of chicken salad.

“Oh, no. Poor thing.” I cast a futile look around the teachers’ lounge. Clara and Nick were the only other teachers there. Sitting in stiff-backed chairs, they chatted away at one end of the table and shared a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. It would have been way more comfortable for them to sit on the couch, butno onesat on the green couch against the wall.

Not ever.

Not since it was rumored that two faculty members had sex on it. One was further rumored to be our principal, and that was too much information for me.

Clara and Nick were so besotted, they didn’t seem to register Witty’s dire news. I could see Nick’s index finger curled around Clara’s underneath the table, and it gave me a warm feeling to think about those early days of budding love. The early days that were nothing but rainbow skies and cartoon hearts floating all around. Steamy late nights that plastered a satisfied grin on a girl’s face for days.

I’d had days like those. Or hours . . . or . . . moments?

The point was that I’d had my cartoon hearts—however brief—and however clouded by revisionist history, dreams, and embellishment. And however ripped off from whatever Regency romance novel I was reading. If my friends accused me of confusing my life with those in my books, they were most certainly...probably correct.

It didn’t mean I’d lost touch with reality. It just meant I had healthy romantic dreams that would most certainly...not become reality.

Sigh. Yeah, who needed reality?

I mean, it’s not like I spent a lot of time worrying about turning my life into a novel. That was impossible. Obviously. I knew Mr. Darcy wasn’t going to rock up to Green Valley on his horse and declare his undying love for me. Still, I could fantasize about the kind of swoony, possessive men whose words dripped with passion and masculinity: “I won’t allow another man to kiss you. You belong to me. You have since the day we met.”

These men had locks of hair that fell roguishly over their foreheads, abs visible through winter-weight cotton shirts, and jawlines that could carve facets into diamonds. Their voices came out in growly rumbles that sent a thrill of awareness right down to my...

“I didn’t see if Diamond ate the chicken salad, but I really hope not because I had two helpings,” Witty whispered loudly, sending a spray of pineapple Fanta in my direction.

The record scratch that brought me back to reality was men like Witty—kind, dependable co-workers who’d married good women and made the happily ever after look easy. Witty served as a father figure to me, doling out hopeful advice from time to time when he sensed I was giving up on romance. “There’s a lid for every pot,” he was fond of saying.

What he didn’t understand was that the men who I fantasized about in my novels did not exist. I knew this. It had been drilled into me by my mother, and then I’d learned it the hard way. Twice. Two budding relationships, two cases of heartbreak I should have seen coming.

Now I relied on myself. I was happy teaching high school art and yearbook design and going home to a small, spotless house. Happy and single.

I stood up to reheat my coffee and noticed the assortment of ceramic coffee mugs with sayings like “Don’t make me use my teacher voice” and “Teaching is a work of heart.” No one ever washed those mugs, so there they sat, week after week, growing ten colors of mold.

I popped my lukewarm coffee into the microwave, watched the inner carousel spin slowly, and wondered for not the first time how microwaves work.

“It’s all about moving the molecules. Exciting them.” I didn’t need to turn to identify the voice over my shoulder. Just like I didn’t have to ask my question out loud for Clay Meadows to know I was wondering about the microwave.

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