Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 65712 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65712 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
I walk her outside and she stops, standing on one foot and tapping the toe of her other on the sidewalk. “Well, bye,” she says and turns to walk away.
“You walked here?” I ask, stopping her.
“Of course, it’s less than a mile.”
“Well, you’re not walking home,” I inform her while simultaneously flagging a cab.
“Boyd, the sidewalks are well occupied the entire route back to my apartment and it’s before ten. Perfectly safe.”
A cab stops and I open the back door for her while passing the driver enough cash to cover her fare home. “Oh, no, safety girl, I can’t let you walk home after that story about how you walked all the way over here because you don’t meet dates within a three-block radius of your apartment,” I tell her with a lazy grin while resting my arm across the top of the open cab door. “I feel a male responsibility to ensure you get home safe after that fascinating tidbit.”
“You’re a jerk,” she tells me. But she gets in the cab and I smile. This girl isn’t going to be easy.
Seven
Chloe
Boyd Gallagher is… something. I’m not sure what, exactly. But he’s something. He thinks I’m awkward, but at least I’ve never crashed someone’s date. Or sat silently and watched. Or whatever he was doing. I suppose he gets away with whatever he wants because he’s good-looking; no one’s ever had the nerve to tell him that his behavior is strange.
I can’t believe I have to go to a wedding with him, but he’s right, I do owe him and I do need the practice. And that thought brings another horrifying thought to mind—what if there’s dancing at the wedding? No, not what if, of course there will be dancing at the wedding. He said it’s formal, what formal wedding doesn’t have dancing? None that I’ve ever heard of. I don’t know how to dance, not really. I haven’t been to a dance since high school and no one had any idea what they were doing at those dances. When a slow song came on you just shuffled back and forth with your date until the song ended.
I feel the familiar swell of panic rise and then I tamp it back down. It’s not a real date. If Boyd wants to dance at this wedding I’ll just tell him I don’t know what I’m doing and he’ll guide me through it. He might laugh at me, but who cares? It’s not like I’m trying to impress a fake date. Crisis averted, relax.
My class is at lunch which means I’m at lunch. Thirty-five minutes of quiet time. Otherwise known as thirty-five minutes of me sitting by myself in the teachers’ lounge. You grow up thinking lunch trauma will end with high school. It doesn’t.
I’m new. I get it. But school started six weeks ago and teacher in-service two weeks before that. So I’m not that new. Not as new as the substitute who replaced Mrs. Clark when she left on maternity leave three weeks into the school year. The substitute who went to see that new suspense movie everyone is talking about with Mrs. Hildrew last weekend. And knits with Miss Ackerley on Tuesdays. Apparently that’s a thing. Knitting Tuesdays. And fine, I don’t knit, but how is it so easy for her to fit in?
Making new friends is hard. Everly has been my best friend since forever. She’s always been there—next store, at school, in college. People gravitate towards her and I benefited from that. Because truthfully, Everly is my friend pimp. She’s the one who brought Sophie and Sandra into my life. She’s the one who organized our trick-or-treating posse in grade school. Brought the guys around in high school and made friends with every girl on our floor in college.
And now she’s gone. Fine. That might be overly dramatic. She’s not gone, she’s married. But for the first time in my entire life, Everly is living more than five hundred yards away. She’s living one mile away, if you’re counting. I could walk there in under twenty minutes. But it’s different. We’re not living in the same tiny dorm room anymore.
I just didn’t realize the transition to adulthood would be so lonely. Which is silly, but how can you really know what it’s going to feel like ahead of time? And I had no idea it would so hard to make friends at work. We’re teachers, for crying out loud. Elementary school teachers. I just gotta keep trying, that’s what I remind myself. And what I’d tell my students. I should walk the walk, right?
So when I enter the teachers’ lounge and see that I have two options—an empty table, and an empty seat at a table with a few other teachers—I plop myself down at their table. And say hello, even though I’m shaking inside because I’m so nervous. Nervous I’ll trip over my words and sound stupid. Or choke on a bread crumb and draw attention to myself. Or just be inadequate in some way. You get the idea.