Page 33 of Molly's Mr. Wrong
Finn just smiled and headed for the side exit.
* * *
THEREWERESOUNDScoming from the art room again, wall thumping and chair dragging, so Molly stopped pretending she could concentrate and headed next door.
“Hey,” Allie called from the other side of the room where she was hanging posters on the wall. “Would you mind lending a hand? This thing keeps popping the staple and rolling up before I can get the next staple in.”
“You bet.” Molly grabbed a chair and dragged it over to the wall and then took hold of a corner of the laminated poster. Allie got up on her chair and thwacked the opposite corner with the stapler a couple times, then handed it off to Molly, who did the same.
“Now...if you’d just keep your hand on your corner while I unroll this...” Allie carefully unfurled the laminated poster and fastened the bottom to the corkboard. “So help me, this thing had better not jump off the wall.” She slowly removed her hand and Molly did the same. The poster stayed in place.
“You would think a college would have thumbtacks,” Allie said. “I’d kind of banked on them. Three staplers. No thumbtacks.”
“Maybe so they don’t end up on the teacher’s chair?”
Allie laughed. “That’s probably it.”
She stood back, hands on hips, regarding the poster. “It’s not quite straight, but I’m going to call it good.”
“I would.”
Allie glanced over at the clock. “I’m an hour early. Still kind of excited to be teaching something I like.”
“What did you teach before?”
“I student-taught high school art, but my first actual job was working in the elementary school library and, well, let’s just say I wasn’t a natural there. It was kind of a free-for-all a lot of the time.” Allie wrinkled her nose. “I’m much better with adults.”
“Me, too.” Molly hadn’t taught elementary, but she was comfortable teaching adults. Most adults. Not Finn. She wanted to teach him but wasn’t comfortable doing it.
“I didn’t realize that I’d gone to school with your sister the first time we met.”
“Which one?”
“Jolie.”
“She’ll be back in the area pretty soon. She’s moving onto the ranch.”
“We didn’t really know each other that well,” Molly was quick to explain. “I spent most of my time at school with my nose in a book.”
“Me, too,” Allie said wryly.
Somehow Molly didn’t think it was in the same way that she’d buried herself in her studies, or for the same reasons. Allie did not appear to be one bit shy or awkward.
“No. Really,” Allie said, somehow reading her thoughts. “My sisters were totally outgoing. Well, Mel, the closest one to me in age, was very serious, but she was also afraid of nothing.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “I was a total geek, focused on my studies. Then I married too young, screwed up my life because I didn’t know any better.”
“I did something very similar without getting married,” Molly admitted. “Which is why I’m here in the Eagle Valley. New life.” She smiled a little. “I guess I’m better off because of all the things that happened, but it kind of sucked at the time.”
Allie considered her for a long moment. “Let’s go have a drink sometime. I think we have a lot in common.”
Molly smiled at her. “I’d like that. A lot.”
* * *
FINNLEANEDBACKfrom his computer and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t spent this much time staring at a monitor in forever. How did kids spend hours on video games? The website Molly had given him had nothing to do with verbs—it was about organizing writing. Truly, Finn hadn’t had a clue about organization. He knew what a paragraph was—or rather what one looked like—but hadn’t known much about their structure.
A squeak from the box at his feet had him pushing back his chair and scooping up Buddy with one hand. He held the kitten to his chest and reread the paragraph he wrote. Topic sentence. The three sentences that followed all had something to do with the topic, which was the care of orphan kittens.
He kind of wished now that he hadn’t thrown away his first Molly paper, because he already had an inkling of what he might have done wrong. He’d written off the top of his head, and his mind did tend to jump around. Who knew about organization?
