Page 32 of It Started with a Sunset
She exhaled every bit of her air in one smiling sigh.
As they headed out to the main area, Avery just happened to glance their direction from the other side of the half wall and gave her a grin and a wave. Summer waved back.
Evaluation meetings always took a while, so everyone got their water bottles and sat around the big table. Summer loved these meetings—they kind of felt like a big family dinner. There was also the excitement of talking about an event for over three hundred people that she had worked so hard on and had recently pulled off. She’d also had all fifty of the ambassadors together. The event always gave her such a high that stayed with her days.
And at this meeting, they got to hear all the things that students liked about it and all the things that they thought could make it better. It was thrilling.
Tess divided up all the feedback forms between the seven of them as she opened the meeting, and Summer started flipping through her twenty. They always read through the handwritten part at the bottom and shared with the group any positive feedback and any suggestions for improvement, and Deja kept track of all of it because the woman had superpowers and could somehow do the same thing everyone else was doingandtake notes on it all.
Then they would each tally up the ratings the students had given for each of the individual parts and then combine them to find out the score for each of them.
Everett chuckled. “You’ve all got to hear this one. ‘Props to Brock. If I worked with Summer, I’d want to date her, too.’” Everyone chuckled, too, but then Everett paused a moment and said, “Wait. Are you two dating?”
Summer just shook her head. Apparently, it wasn’t obvious toeveryone.
“Oh, I’ve got one, too,” Elle said. “‘I just wanted to give the heart-eyes emoji every time I saw Brock and Summer look at each other.’ Aww. That’s sweet.”
Brock was sitting at Summer’s right, and she almost became a heart-eyes emoji herself when he reached under the table, away from everyone’s view, to hold her hand.
Deja held a paper up. “I’ve got an ‘I’m rooting for Summer and Brock. I hope those two crazy kids make it.’ and then a hand-drawn emoji of...” She turned the paper to one side and then the other. “I think it’s like that face with one eye bigger than another, an open mouth with the tongue hanging out. Or maybe it’s a picture of a bowl of soup—hard to tell. High school students can be strange sometimes. Okay, I think at this point, we need to make a drinking game out of finding ones that mention Brock and Summer as a couple.”
They got a lot of really good feedback from the forms. A lot of comments about the sprinklers, too. Elle held up a paper to read it out loud. “This one says ‘I gave one star to the presentation about school activities because no one told me to dress in a raincoat and getting drenched wasn’t cool at all.’”
“Toss out her rating on Summer’s presentation,” Tess said, “since it wasn’t based on the presentation.”
Whew. She didn’t want that score against her.
“I’ve got one, too,” Pavani said. “‘I gave five stars to Summer’s presentation because choreographing an indoor rainstorm to happen during it was awesome. So was finishing it outside.’”
“Toss that one out, too,” Tess said.
Bummer.
All during the meeting, Summer kept catching Tess looking at her, scrutinizing her. Like she was trying to decide if it was possible for things to work out between Summer and Brock. She obviously had a lot more reservations about Summer’s ability than she did in Brock’s ability. It made Summer wonder even more if she should be worried herself.
“I’ve got a Summer and Brock one!” Everett said, holding it up like he’d won a prize. “‘Summer and Brock are about the cutest couple ever. Hashtag relationship goals.’ Everyone drink!”
They all picked up their water bottles and took a drink.
Thirty minutes later, as they were getting close to finishing up all the evaluations, Deja said, “I think this is the most hydrated I’ve been all week. Thanks, Summer and Brock.”
A few people chuckled, but Pavani just groaned. “If we keep drinking water at this pace, I’m going to have to leave the meeting early to pee.”
Tess clapped once. “Okay, let’s get the ratings tallied so we can all take a trip to the restrooms.”
A few minutes after everyone wrote down the tallies of their twenty and slid them over to Deja, she said, “Okay, I’ve got the scores. I’ll go through each of the different activities, but since I’m sure Brock and Summer both want to know who won, I’ll start with those. Summer, you got a combined average of four point seven stars out of five.”
“Wow!” Elle said. “That’s so impressive, especially since you had to give half of your presentation outside without the visuals!”
Summer grinned. Four point seven was great. She had been perfecting the presentation for a while now, and she was happy with the changes she’d made for this year’s events.
“And Brock got a whopping four point eight!”
“Whoa!” Everett said and then gave Brock a fist bump.
As everyone else congratulated Brock, Summer did, too, because whether she won or not, four point eight was well worthy of celebrating.
“I had one student sum both of them up perfectly,” Pavani said, pulling a paper out of her stack. “‘Summer’s presentation made me want to go to LBSU, and Brock’s made me feel like it was possible.’”
