Page 21 of Romance Languages

“I mean it. Call me with anything,” I said in a raspy voice to match Grandma. I needed some kind of hydration. I poured myself a large glass of water.

“I’ll make sure we have a birthday cake for you, too,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not going to do to you what that family did to poor Molly Ringwood.”

“Ringwald,” I corrected.

My birthday was one day after their anniversary, so not an exactSixteen Candlessituation. Not like I had much to celebrate…unless Seamus was serious.

Was he serious?

Hecouldn’tbe serious.

“I gotta go, Grandma. I love you.”

“You, too. Is your coffee ready yet? You sound like shit.”

* * *

The school day was a blur.First, I got to South Rock exactly one minute before home room. Then, I had my French classes pair off for the period and practice conversational skills with each other while I sat at my desk in a daze.

It had to have been a drunken mistake.

Seamus.

Friend.

Crush.

Fuck buddy?

“Mr. Bradford, how long are we supposed to be doing this exercise?” asked Mikayla, my top student in third period, a girl who was already fluent in French thanks to her hot French Canadian dad and used this class as an easy A.

“I want you to practice having a long-form conversation in French. You’ll all reach stumbling points, but you’ll have to learn to get through them. Imagine you’re in Paris. You can’t have a conversation with someone while peeking at your textbook every three seconds. You have to go with it.”

“Everyone in Paris speaks English,” said Seth, a student who preferred to coast with a C-average.

I exhaled a breath, the anvil pushing harder against my head. “Then pretend you’re in a quaint French village.”

“They probably speak English, too, especially if they want that sweet American tourist cash,” he said.

Sometimes, I really hated how smart my students were.

“I heard that teachers make students do activities like these when they’re too hungover to teach.” Mikayla narrowed her eyes at me with all the confidence of a teenager who believed they knew how the world worked.

In this case, she wasn’t wrong. Even a broken clock was right twice a day.

“We don’t have to do this exercise. I could give you all a pop quiz right here and now. Is that what you want?”

My students groaned, except for Mikayla, who was guaranteed to ace it.

I almost cried when I reached the coffee pot in the teachers’ lounge. A teacher without coffee was a medical emergency.

I poured myself a large cup and sat with Chase in a pair of comfy arm chairs, or as comfy as furniture in a public school teachers’ lounge got.

“Do you ever wonder why we don’t call salt N-A-C-L?” he asked. His brain was working fine today. No anvils there. “I think it should be shorthand for salt, the way we call water H-2-O. ‘Hey, pass me the N-A-C-L.’ What do you think?”

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