Page 11 of Teach Me
“Are those…” His lips curved. “They are. You’ve laminated articles fromOur Dumb Centuryand put them up everywhere. I had no idea you readThe Oniontoo.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Students respond well to satire. Besides, the articles are hilarious, and it’s all grounded in real history. If you don’t know the history, you don’t get the joke.”
“You’re absolutely right.” His eyes caught on the wall to the right of the door. “And thank you for putting up a few world history posters for my classes.” He strode to study one more closely. “This is a stunning photo of the Great Wall of China.”
There. That stab of grief as she remembered what she’d lost at his unwitting hands. That was just the reminder she needed.
Distance. Keep your distance.
“Students should be arriving shortly, and I have a few more things to do before first period. Did you need anything else, Mr. Krause?”
Unlike almost every other man she’d known, Martin got hints. After a final, awkward half-bow, he left and partially shut the door behind him.
But once he was gone, she didn’t check her lesson plans for the umpteenth time or straighten the student desks by a micron or two. Instead, she thought about Martin. Took the observation she’d just made about him and spun it out.
Martin got hints. Martin was watchful. Martin could read and interpret body language.
Most well-off, cishet white men couldn’t do either. Didn’t need to do either, unlike the people in their orbit, because they held the power. They created the weather, while others languished in the rain or cringed away from the lightning.
Maybe he’d grown up poor, like her. Maybe he’d learned empathy and watchfulness from his years of teaching. But the way he’d stepped back from a simple glare…she’d seen that kind of reaction before. In some of the neighbor kids at the trailer park. In the wife of one of Barton’s colleagues. In some of her students, the ones she watched for bruises.
And she wondered. About his childhood. About his marriage.
It was foolish. She barely knew the man. She could be entirely wrong in every way.
Still, what she was wondering burned in her chest like coals. The sudden, shocking anger didn’t leave her until the first student arrived at the door, slouching and feigning casual disinterest to the best of his young abilities.
Then she became Ms. Owens, not Rose.
Right now, Martin didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter.
She stood. Smiled at her student. Told him where to find the class schedule, the syllabus, and his seat. Swung the door wide and waited for the next arrivals.
Her hands weren’t shaking anymore.
The new school year had begun, and she was ready to kick some pedagogical ass.
Four
Martin encountered Roseseveral more times throughout the day, as one would expect, but only for brief instants as they entered or exited her classroom or passed in the hall. He had no idea whether they shared the same lunch block, since he’d brought his food and hurriedly eaten it inside the social studies office next to the other department floater, a twenty-something woman named Dakota Brown.
Dakota was eager and chipper and damned young. She’d arrived in the office right after he’d left Rose’s classroom that morning, and the vast gulf between the two women had disoriented him for a minute. If Dakota were confetti ice cream, sweet, cheerful, and straightforward, Rose would be bittersweet chocolate gelato. Dense. Complexly, intensely flavored. Not to everyone’s taste.
The grocery store closest to his house carried pints of gelato. Maybe he and Bea could do a taste test of those someday and pretend they were classier than they really were.
But Dakota was good company for lunch, and the students were…well, students. Not too different from the kids at his previous school. Some chatty, some quiet. Some awkward, some posturing. They’d relax and become more themselves once they learned the routine and trusted him.
By the end of the year, if all went as planned, each class would become sort of an extended, temporary family. An evolving but unitary organism, working toward the same purposes: factual knowledge, greater ease with critical thinking and writing, increased ability to make connections between different ideas, different time periods, and different subjects, and—above all—comfort in the educational environment.
He couldn’t always make his students happy to be in his class. But he could make them feel safe while they were there, and he knew all too well the importance of safe spaces.
When the last bell rang, and his seventh-period students rushed toward the door clutching backpacks and fistfuls of forms to complete, he dropped down into one of their chairs for a moment. Just a moment. Just until the adrenaline crash inevitable at the end of a long, important, stressful day subsided.
Rose strode through the door, and then came to a sudden halt upon spotting him.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Gave her head an impatient little shake, but somehow it seemed more self-directed than an indication of displeasure with him. “Are you ill, Mr. Krause?”
He wondered idly if the school administered coffee in IV form at the nurse’s office. “Not sick, just tired. Sorry. I’ll move momentarily.”
