Hate You Still by Lyssa Lemire
CHAPTER SEVEN
EMMA
I wake up nice and rested. Looking at my clock, I see I was able to get a totally uninterrupted eight hours and twenty minutes of sleep. I feel like I’m in heaven.
Breaking into Knox’s house and piling all his trash inside was just about the riskiest thing I’ve ever done. But it might have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Because, apparently, he got the message. No outrageous party last night.
In fact, not even a reasonable party last night! No party whatsoever. All afternoon I heard and saw Knox and Gavin working on bagging up the trash and depositing it on the curb. But once the sun set, there wasn’t so much as a peep from next door.
Maybe I should give it a couple days to see if this new behavior sticks before I start ringing the victory bells. But, for now, I’m pretty damn happy with my hard-won night of sleep, and I’m happy with myself for having the initiative and boldness to do what it took to make it happen.
I take a shower and get dressed for my first day of student teaching, feeling confident and ready. I put on a nice, tastefully fitting dark blue dress, a cute gray jacket, classy black flats, and tie my hair up in a knot. I stand back and look at myself in the mirror.
Damn, I’m loving my look today. Classy and professional.
I know what I said earlier about waiting to count my chickens, but it really feels like this semester is finally turning the corner.
“Damn, girl,” Katie greets me from the couch when I walk out of my room.
“You’re up early. Don’t you have another late class today?”
“I had to see you off on your first day of teaching. I even brewed a pot of coffee for you.”
“I could kiss you,” I say in appreciation, noticing the enticing smell of the brew. “Wow,” I say, taking a sip. “This is good!”
A perfect batch of coffee on top of everything else – and one I didn’t even have to make myself!
Yeah, things are looking up.
I get into my car and drive the ten minutes it takes me to get to one of the two local middle schools. Marshall Middle School is the one I’ve been assigned to – though, despite my online research and my asking around, no one is quite sure who exactly the “Marshall” the school is named after is.
Among the students in the education program at Alton, this school is somewhat infamous. It’s apparently pretty “rough”: lots of behavior issues, demoralized staff, students hard to manage. But after my recent string of successes, I’m not about to let rumors dampen my confidence. People find excuse to complain about anything, or to embellish any negative experiences. I’m sure this school is just fine.
Walking through the front doors, the first thing that strikes me is that the interior is a far cry from the other local middle school that I did classroom observations at last year. It looks like nothing has been replaced since the seventies, at least.
Drab colors, chipped paint, even a flickering light overhead in the main lobby.
Oh, well. Don’t judge a book by its cover, right? It’s not like you need sparkling amenities and being decorated by award-winning interior designers to be a good school.
I report to the room of the teacher I’ve been assigned to, to meet her for the first time. Room 207 on the second floor.
I dip into a bathroom in the hallway as I’m on my way to the room. I want to give myself one last looking over. Hair, check. Outfit, check. Makeup, check.
Alright, I can do this.
I leave the bathroom and, after taking a deep breath, walk into what will be, in a way, my classroom for the rest of this semester.
I’m greeted by a strange sight. On the desk at the head of the room is a woman sitting cross legged, her arms held out at the sides and her fingers contorted into a strange position, her eyes closed, and totally silent.
Uh … well, I guess this is the first curve ball of the day.
I tentatively walk up to her, coughing and clearing my throat to try to alert her of my presence, but no dice. Is this some crazy woman who broke into the school building?
She wears a long, flowing dress. She looks to be somewhere in her forties. She has curly hair tied back into a ponytail with a tie-die scrunchie. She wears glasses with thick red frames.
“Uh, hello?” I venture to address her once I’m standing by her desk, having noticed no changes in her demeanor while walking over.
Nothing. It’s like she’s a rock. Her rhythmic breathing doesn’t change, her eyes don’t open, nothing in her serene expression leaves any indication that she can tell I’m here.
I feel like some obnoxious Youtuber is going to jump into the room and tell me I’ve been pranked or something, because I just can’t figure out what’s going on here. Right when I’m about to go to find a security guard, or the school nurse maybe, the woman suddenly springs to life.
“Hi! You must be Emma!” She beams ear to ear, her expression charged with excitement, as if she hadn’t just spent who knows how many minutes studiously ignoring my presence while locked in some kind of trance.
“Uh … yes, I’m Emma. Are you Ms. Kimler?” I try to recover from the surprise of the first impression. If this is going to be my cooperating teacher this semester, the course of my student teaching experience is suddenly seeming a lot less predictable.
She gets down from the desk. “I am! Please, call me Megan. I’m excited to be learning from you this year!”
“You, learn from me? I’m sure it’ll be the other way around.” I give a modest chuckle.
“Oh, I’m sure not! You know, I may be the teacher here,” she waves her hands and makes air quotes with her fingers while ironically enunciating the word teacher. “But I try to move beyond the hierarchical idea that the teacher is in charge of the classroom,” again the words in charge are pronounced in a dismissive tone to the accompaniment of air quotes, “I think of myself more as a learning facilitator.”
“Learning facilitator.” I say the words back, nodding my head while trying to understand.
“Oh, yes. Sometimes, it feels like it’s the children’s job to teach me. I learn so much more from them than they could ever learn from me.” She closes her eyes and clasps her hands together like she just uttered a deep philosophical truth.
“I see,” I answer, smiling. Okay, this kind of sounds a little nutty. But my advisor told me that she’s a very experienced teacher, so I’m sure she knows what she’s doing once the students come in and the class starts.
“Oh, by the way! Feel free to hop on my desk to get your chakras aligned. This space right on top of the desk has the best resonance in the whole room.”
“Chakras?” I ask, growing more confused by the second.
“You don’t align your chakras at the start of the day?” An expression of chilled disbelief is written on her face.
“I don’t think so,” I say, feeling suddenly like I’ve been a fool all my life to not make this vital task part of my daily routine – like I haven’t been brushing my teeth in the morning or something.
“Oh, my! Well, it’s a good thing you told me. We wouldn’t want to be starting our first day of teaching without making sure our spiritual auras are healthy. That would ruin the entire semester.”
“Ruin the entire semester?” I dumbly repeat.
“It would be a disaster. Come on, get on the desk! Before the students get here!”
I allow myself a tentative laugh, still thinking that this whole introduction might just be some elaborate joke, but the sense of urgency in her voice and in her expression tell me that she’s as serious as can be.
“I, uh …” I mutter and submit myself to her urgings as she shoos me to sit on the top of the desk. “Is this all I need to do? Just sit here?”
I cross my legs like Megan had hers when I enter the room.
“Do you feel centered?” She asks.
“I guess so, I mean … I’m in the middle of the desk, right?” Oof.
“Okay, now hold your arms out like so,” she mimics the position of her hands and arms from minutes earlier. I do my best to copy her.
“Now, just close your eyes and breathe deeply, deeply and slowly …” she models the pace of breathing I should be doing for me.
I close my eyes and do my best to follow her directions. I feel completely ridiculous, and a second of this passes more like an hour. I can only imagine what kind of first impression I’ll be making on the kids if they happen to join the classroom right now.
“Okay, I think you’re centered now,” Megan finally announces. I come down from the desk. “Do you feel any different?” she asks.
Fearing that if I answered no she would force me to get back on the desk and complete the ordeal all over again, or God knows what else, I answer, “Oh, definitely. Never been more centered in my life.”
She grabs my hands with an impossibly joyful expression bursting out on her face. “Awesome! I can already tell this is going to be the best semester ever!”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I say, returning her smile, trying to regain my positivity.
The morning bell rings, and I can already hear the chaos of students running and chattering through the hallways.
Alright, first day of class. You can do this, Emma.
I let out the longest and most stress-charged sigh of my life as I plop down into my driver’s seat, shut the door behind me, and officially end my first day of student teaching.
I don’t know how I’m going to make it.
It was a disaster. Megan had absolutely no control over the room. Moreover, she didn’t think she needed to have any control over the room. After all, she’s a learning facilitator, not a teacher, right? Just playing back those words in my head, my eyes roll so far back that I think I can get a look at my brain.
She never had the attention of more than one-third of the class at a time – and that peak of one-third attention came during her interpretive dance lesson, which was the period of the day where we were supposed to be teaching English.
“Oh, the kids already know English,” she had said, again pronouncing the word English in a dismissive accent, as if teaching the language we speak was some kind of outdated, I’m sure hierarchical, concept. “They don’t need to know a bunch of antiquated, made-up grammar rules. When will they ever use that knowledge? But the ability to express yourself through movement? They’ll cherish that for the rest of their lives.”
And then she proceeded to contort herself strangely to rhythmic drum music played from an old CD player.
I looked on in exasperation while a portion of the class either joined in for a joke, gawked at her confusedly, or – by far the more popular option – totally ignored her to go goof off together in the back of the room.
I tried to get the class to pay attention to a math lesson on fractions toward the end of the day, but she suddenly remembered that we hadn’t had our daily feelings circle yet, interrupted me to gather the class into a seated circle in the middle of the room – the kids at least had fun wildly pushing the chairs and desks to the corners of the room – for us all to share our feelings about the first day.
I force myself to look on the bright side. Hey, it was the first day. First days are always a little less structured and more chaotic, right? I’m sure tomorrow will be much better. I mean, she couldn’t have lasted so long as a teacher if this is the kind of thing she does every day of the school year, right?
Right?
Right!
By next week I’m sure things will be running smoothly and productively.
I drive home and find a parking spot at the curb down the block from our house. The weather is perfect for my half-block walk up to my front door, and a nice breeze tempers the warmth. Just as I’m finally calming down from the super-stressful day at student teaching, I spot something that has every muscle in my body tensing with anxiety.
Knox is out front on his lawn next to my house, with his roommate Gavin. And their tossing a football around.
With no shirts on.
Oh. My. God.
I saw Knox without his shirt on in the dim light of his house a couple days ago, but seeing his exposed upper body under the glory of the shining sun is a totally different experience.
The sharp and defined ridges of his muscles are put in ultra-high definition by the sunlight gleaming against the sheen of sweat that covers him. Every shape and bulge of hard, thick muscles screams for my attention.
His defined arms. His thick, powerful forearms, bulging with veins. His round, boulder-like shoulders. His impossibly wide back that tapers to his slim waist. And the shorts he wears leave little to the imagination, exposing his equally impressive muscular thighs and the shape of his delicious ass.
Emma! What did you just think!? Do not use the term delicious ass to describe Knox Delton! Bad girl!
I notice Gavin nod his head in my direction, and Knox turns around to look at me.
Yikes, have I really been standing here gawking at him like a creeper?
Knox’s face as he turns his head a quarter-turn around to look at me is striking. The angles are even sharper and more acute in the turned pose. Even in the bright light of the sun, his green eyes gleam and draw my attention.
He shoots me a wink. I feel a blush spread from the back of my neck and take possession of my face.
And then he smirks. A taunting smirk. A knowing smirk. A smirk that seems to have … intentions behind it.
I rip my gaze from him and hurry inside my house, climbing the stairs to our second floor apartment quickly.
Even with the apartment door shut behind me, though, I can’t erase that smirk from my memory. Even more than his dazzling body, it’s that smirk that feels burned into my mind’s eye. It was the kind of smirk that seems to send a message.
But what more could Knox Delton have to say to me?