Page 36 of Kiss Me Now
Chapter Fourteen
Brooke
Iopened the door toa delivery person obscured behind an enormous spray of blue hyacinths.
“Delivery for Brooke Spencer?”
“That’s me.” I accepted the vase. “Who are these from?”
“There’s a card included, and the tip’s been taken care of,” the young man said. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”
He jogged back to his van. He was a teenager, maybe one of my new students starting Monday, working his last day of summer break.
I whisked the flowers into the kitchen and settled them on the island, immediately injecting some life into the room. I suspected they were from Ian after our texts last night, but I plucked the card from its plastic holder to double check.
“A stalk for every wrong assumption I’ve made about you,” it read. “I calleda lotof people.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or snort at the six separate hyacinth stalks packed into the sleek square vase. I tapped out a quick text to him.Got your flowers. You’re short at least three.I smiled as I imagined him reading it. Ian Greene was by no means my favorite person, but Miss Lily or his parents had definitely drilled him on how to do proper apologies.
I gathered up my teacher bag, a large tote that brimmed each morning with new whosits-and-whatsits for my classroom, grabbed my keys, and was halfway to my car before I went back and grabbed the flowers too. Those could come to work with me today.
At school, I stepped into my classroom and took a deep breath. I loved the smell of it. Smell was probably my favorite sense. I loved the sharp tang of weeds slipping loose from the soil in Miss Lily’s garden. I loved the musty odor of sawdust with each new mess I made in my house. I loved the scent of this classroom when I walked through the door each time, a mixture of the bulletin board paper on the walls that kind of smelled like sawdust too. Maybe that was what gave this room the feeling of home.
I studied the wall displays. One section showed all the major organ systems in the human body. Another section gave the taxonomy of the blue-footed booby, a goofy-looking bird from the Galapagos Islands that did indeed have blue feet. It would help the kids learn classifications. Another section showed famous women biologists, and a fourth—smaller, but important—gave information about vaping and showed the effect on human lungs.
Today I would have only half the day in my classroom. The rest would be filled up with faculty and department meetings, and like yesterday, probably lots of the other teachers popping in to welcome me to Lincoln High School and offer help with anything I needed.
My room was in good shape going into Monday. The white boards were filled with the daily science standard we were working on, interesting science facts, and an inspirational quote, all in my neatest handwriting. I’d been wishing I’d found my way to teaching sooner, but maybe I was glad I’d come along in the whiteboard era and not the dusty green chalkboard one.
The rest of the day went exactly as I expected, meeting new teachers whose names I remembered using memory tricks I’d read about and planned to use for memorizing my students’ names. I sat in a faculty meeting where we reviewed the school objectives for the year, then a department meeting where everyone complained about their chronically underfunded labs. But they all sounded excited for the new year, ready to be back, ready to get to work.
This was exactly the kind of environment I thrived in, but I couldn’t shake a feeling of impending doom. For three nights in a row, I’d had stress dreams. In one, I’d spent the whole night filing papers and woke up feeling like I’d already spent a whole day at work. In another one, I showed up to discover the office had switched my classes at the last minute, and I was supposed to teach calculus instead of biology. Last night had been the worst of all: a rerun of a high school dream I’d had of going to school in my underwear. It was so much worse doing it as a teacher.
I should feel so good about Monday and my first day of teaching, but I couldn’t tell the difference between my excitement and my nerves. I took a long glance around the classroom again. Everything was exactly as it should be. Crisp new folders waiting to receive student work, lab desks polished free of fingerprints, walls bright and inviting.
Most days I would stay and rearrange, tweak, straighten. But today, on this last Friday afternoon before students came, what I needed most was to get out of the classroom and give myself some garden therapy, digging in Miss Lily’s soil and letting my senses take over to chase the anxiety away.
I scooped up my now-empty tote bag and paused at the door to survey the classroom one last time before turning off the lights.
Ready or not, Monday was coming.
I really, really hoped I was ready.
“They’re coming along,” Miss Lily announced from the end of the tomato row.
