Page 107 of Give Me a Shot

When the initial rush had subsided and everyone was chattering away, he pushed his chair out and went over. He squatted down beside her.

“Congratulations,” he said. “But are you okay? I’m sure everyone would understand if you needed to go inside.”

She smiled at him.

“Was I that obvious?” she asked. He shook his head.

“I only put everything together just now. You don’t have to push yourself, you know,” he said.

She nodded.

“I’m okay, the nausea has calmed down a little. But I can tell that you aren’t okay,” she said.

He blinked. She put a hand on his arm and leaned closer.

“Of course, I don’t know the details. Things might not be hopeless, though. Khalil told me how different you were, how clearly happy you were every time he picked up Maddie. Andnow…” Her lips dipped to one side. “I can see that you’re hurting. If Jess made such an impact on you, I think she might be worth fighting for.”

Mo wasn’t sure what to say. His throat had gotten scratchy. He swallowed.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She rubbed his upper arm.

“Maybe try again. For you,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jess

Lunch had been a bad idea. A misguided attempt to maintain the normalcy of a schedule, but Jess had eaten too many fries, and now she was paying for it. She plopped down at her desk in her office and rolled her chair forward as she opened her laptop. It had been two weeks since she had ended things with Mo. The pain still refused to deaden.

She hadn’t finished putting the most recent grades into the platform and several students had brought it up in that morning’s last class. Getting behind like that was not usually permissible in Jess’s mind, but her first tentative steps in facing her grief through online research had opened up so much that it was all she could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other in her everyday life. An additional challenge was that the aches and pains she’d been dealing with were still there. Sometimes worse than before.

“Ms. Anderson?”

Jess looked up to find one of her most attentive students tapping on her open door.

“Hi, Sophia,” she said, waving her inside. “You’re welcome to sit down.”

Sophia shook her head.

“Thanks, but I just have a question.”

Jess smiled.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Um…” Sophia took a few steps closer, so that she could lower her voice. “Is everything okay with you? I mean, I don’t want to intrude, but…in class…you haven’t seemed like yourself.”

Jess retained her frown. Apparently, she hadn’t been covering things up as well as she’d hoped.

“It’s quite nice of you to ask. Just some stuff, but I’m okay,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Sophia asked and pulled the test Jess had handed back that morning off the top of notebook she was holding pressed to her chest. “The grade you gave me doesn’t match the number I got wrong.”

Sophia handed the test to her and Jess took a look. She was right; Jess had skipped including the points from a whole section.

“I’m sorry, Sophia,” she said, grabbing a red pen and making the corrections. “I’ll fix it on the platform right now.”

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