Page 3 of Bows & Eros
It was going to be a long one.
CHAPTER2
"Is there a coat check, dear?"
I turned from the parents I was attempting to charm to an elderly lady, whose gray wool trench was balled in her arms. "Not officially," I said with half a smile, "but you're welcome to use the pegs behind my desk, if there's any room left."
"I'll make room," the woman said with resolve, and hobbled away to do just that.
Family Fun Day always begins like this, as a sort of melee version of parent-teacher conferences, with all of my students' families crammed into my classroom, checking surfaces for dust and frowning at my paper airplane diorama. Occasionally one of them approaches me, but usually it's just to wait until I have something glowing to say about their child.
I try to herd them out and into the auditorium as quickly as possible, but there's no skipping this part of the day. I was lucky enough this year that all of my kids had a family member present to admire their desks and be pulled around by the hand. Last year, that had not been the case.
I frowned, thinking of what I'd said to Hazel, and wondered if little Aaron Weaver was all alone in her fifth-grade classroom, face in his hands as he embodied the calm before the storm. The kid was a troublemaker, no doubt about it, but he could be intercepted if one saw the warning signs early enough.
I was still pretty certain that his self-absorbed space cadet of a father hadn't shown up today, and Hazel had never had the patience to properly manage a student like Aaron.
"Will you excuse me for a moment," I said with an apologetic smile to the parents currently staring at me. In an attempt at dropping a hint, I added a bit too cheerfully, "I'll see you in the auditorium!" and then beat my exit before I was forced to observe their reactions.
There were people milling around the hallways, staring at decidedly uninteresting bulletins on the walls as though they were part of an art show. The school hosted every student, from kindergarten through 12th grade, in the county, and while that number was generally pretty manageable, having it tripled or more for Family Fun Day was always a bit overwhelming.
I ducked into Hazel's classroom to find her telling a story about the exploits of their children to a half-circle of rapt parents . She had a theatrical way about her, and even I stopped to listen rather than interrupting the spell she'd cast. She was talking about the day we'd carved our jack-o’-lanterns back in the fall, pantomiming the various concerns of giving children anything even marginally sharp to work with while also peppering in an appropriate amount of praise regarding the artistic ingenuity of said children.
It was talent, pure and simple.
But I didn't see Aaron Weaver in the crowd. He wasn't listening to the story, nor was he at one of the desks, looking bored out of his mind, which meant that I had missed the brainstorming stage of his angst, and he was already in the process of executing whatever mischief he'd thought up while simmering over his father's absence.
I tapped one of my former students on the shoulder, returning her bright smile as she spun around to see me. "Hello, Violet," I said. "Do you know where Aaron's gotten off to?"
Her smile twisted into a smirk and she rolled her eyes and shook her head. "He took a bunch of construction paper and left," she said, her tone decidedly tattle-like. "You're probably too late."
"Probably." I sighed. "Thank you, Violet."
"Koi baat nahi," she replied primly in Urdu.
"Very good," I replied as I turned to leave.
To be completely clear, I don't speak Urdu fluently. Not even close.
My parents do, so I know enough to know when I’m being lectured, but that was the extent of my intended study.
But after five years of people repeatedly asking you where you'rereally fromafter "Westchester" was not satisfactory as an answer, which inevitably follows with requests to teach people things in "my" language, I had chosen a few phrases and learned to count to ten just to satisfy eager minds.
Violet Carroway was anextremelyeager mind. I didn't think she'd stay in Crete for very long once she reached adulthood. She already had used magic marker to write YALE on all of her binders by the time she entered my classroom, at the ripe old age of nine. She and Aaron Weaver were not friends, but I could always count on her to know exactly where he was. She always knew exactly whereeveryonewas. Including the teachers.
Useful little informant, that Violet Carroway. I'd have loathed, admired, and feared her if we'd grown up together.
I shouldered my way back through the hallway, looking for the telltale burst of color from a stack of pilfered construction paper. Aaron was exceptionally fond of missiles of any sort: wads of trash paper, spitballs, paper clips, and—this one is my fault—helovedpaper planes.
I teach my kids how to make a few different kinds every year as a very rudimentary physics lesson, but Aaron really took to the artform. Last year, when he'd ended up alone on Family Fun Day, I'd sat with him and made paper airplanes all afternoon, going so far as to confer with the almighty internet for new ideas and special folds. When we were done, I had so many paper airplanes that I'd strung them together for the diorama that now sat proudly in the rear corner of my classroom.
I learned the meaning of regret pretty soon after that day, as Aaron's penchant for missiles not only persevered, but refined into faster, harder-hitting, more objectively impressive forms of mischief. No one in the school was safe, not even me.
It's hard to know whether to lecture or praise a kid when he hits you square in the nose with the tip of a paper airplane from several yards away. Maybe he'd take us to football glory in a few years or go on to become the engineer my parents wished I'd been.
In any event, I'd made that boy an expert, and I'd probably also given him a pretty clear idea of how he should optimize his enjoyment of Family Fun Day, sans family.
I popped my head into the cafeteria to no avail, and with my heart steadily increasing in pace, I walked as fast as I could to the auditorium. It was already swarming with people, but a sweep of the room landed my eyes on the strawberry-blonde head of my favorite little troublemaker, seated at one of the tables with those awful, rickety folding chairs that we'd set out last night.
