Authors: Lauren Gilley
Ellie frowned. “I made you a lunch.” She’d eaten her own on a bench with a battered and well-loved copy of
Little Women
(she was pinching pennies for a trip to Barnes & Noble so she could buy something new) after her Intro to English Studies class was released early.
“I know. I think I left it up in the computer lab.”
“You think?”
“Well, when I went back to check, it was gone, and it’s not in my bag” - meaning her purse and not a school bag of any kind - “so, oh well.” She shrugged and popped another bite of cracker in her mouth.
Ellie wanted to be aggravated…but there wasn’t enough time in every day to pick apart all of Paige’s faults. Friends since the fifth grade, they’d turned their oil and vinegar personalities into salad dressing a long time ago. Paige needed taking care of, true, but she was a ray of blinding sunlight when Ellie felt the darker corners of her subconscious closing in. Like any good attack dog, if you kept her fed and laundered, Paige would run out to the end of her chain in defense of her closest friends. She was the fun to Ellie’s function and they stroked one another’s dreams. Ellie had turned into sous chef and delivery girl for Paige’s expanding cake business. Paige read every last poem and story Ellie produced and called them literary genius. They worked like fiends to pay the utilities of Abigail’s old house and would have been perfectly happy taking every class together.
But there the bonding was limited. Paige was a business management major with a focus on entrepreneurship. Ellie an English major. They could only take a small handful of required courses together, one of them being HPS, for which they now waited.
Paige’s elbow jabbed at her ribs. “Hey, he’s cute.”
“You have a boyfriend,” she reminded automatically, but glanced up to see anyway.
He
was
cute. Tall and built well, narrow hips and long legs. Not jock, not prep, not obviously anything, just cool and aloof propped back against the wall, skateboard in one hand. The black hair and razor blue eyes were a startling combination she didn’t see a lot of and made him almost pretty in a way that had nothing to do with the square-jawed pretty boys around him.
“I know,” Paige said, “I meant for you. He looks older, don’t you think? Older’s good. You won’t bore older.”
“Thanks,” Ellie said, a touch of sourness creeping into her voice. She was boring and knew it, which was why, as she gave Mr. Cute black-and-blue a full once-over, she didn’t feel a need to fan herself or say “hot damn” or exclaim that her panties were suddenly damp like the oversexed heroines that populated all the modern fiction she couldn’t stomach. She was immune to cute. “But no, thanks. I don’t need you setting me up.”
“Yes you do,” Paige argued lightly. She leaned in close, whisper becoming dire. “It’s been
over a year
, El, and you - ”
“Prof’s here,” she interrupted and had never been so glad to see a PE coach in her life.
She’d become so used to the overweight, balding former football stars gone soft – reliving their glory days while they counted off student jumping jacks – that she wasn’t expecting the very young, thin guy with the mop of almost-brown hair who unlocked the door with his key card and left them all to gather their things and follow him in.
“I hope this class doesn’t suck,” Paige said as they stood. “I heard it’s a total gimme and that the coaches always come up with busy work to make themselves feel more important.”
“We have to run a mile. It’s gonna suck anyway. I feel like we’re still in high school.”
By the time Paige had dropped her purse and Ellie had helped her gather all the lip gloss tubes and tampons that had spilled out of it, nearly all the seats in the small, low-ceilinged room were taken. Two were open, beside each other, miraculously, and they headed for them. Ellie didn’t understand Paige’s pause, stare, and then the wink she threw back at her over her shoulder until she was sliding into her desk and realized she was sitting in front of the cute guy who was, at the moment, playing with his phone.
I hate you
, Ellie mouthed as she glanced over and caught Paige’s evil grin.
No you don’t
.
No, she didn’t, but she was very worried her friend would make an overture and would have garnered her some sort of skateboard-ride invitation by the time class was out. Ellie was leaning toward the aisle between the desks, a warning on the tip of her tongue, but the dead quiet all around her brought her up short.
It was so silent the air was ringing. None of the usual whispers and rustles and suppressed coughs. Ellie faced forward and caught a whiff of the nervous first day jitters that were circulating through the room. The clock up above the whiteboard read two on the dot, and after three other classes this morning, she knew the drill. This was the part where the prof got up and closed the door and began his welcome to class spiel.
Instead, their coach – she was struck by the compulsion to flip open her notebook and check her schedule for his name: Walker, J. – was cleaning his short nails with what looked like a toothpick, Nikes propped up on the desk, ignoring all of them.
It could have been the writer in her, or it could have been one of the traits that had led her to writing, but Ellie always appreciated the opportunity to study people. Handshakes and first meetings were well and good, but she liked a moment in which to take in the details. She loved details.
Their coach had rolled up the bottoms of his breakaway track pants to the knees, and his calves were a thing of beauty, the muscles precise and laced with veins beneath the skin. He had long, lean hands that belonged on a concert pianist. And, its outline visible through the white polo he wore, a torso and biceps that were just muscle and nothing else. No padding.
She had always rather liked finding the remarkable in the plain – she liked real faces, not perfect ones – and approved of his thin, straight nose that was just long enough to compliment the narrow, ordinary face. His hair had some sort of product in it, but it looked like it wanted to be curly, and was a dark blonde shot through with gold and mahogany, soft against his forehead and at the tops of his ears.
She startled in her chair when his eyes lifted up and scanned the room. Big, round, a bright green full of blue that she would have called turquoise if that didn’t sound so cheesy. His eyes were full of light, even if the rest of his face remained impassive.
“So…” he drawled. “HPS. Exciting shit, huh?”
Laughter rippled through the room and Ellie felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Every once in a while, someone opened his mouth and surprised her. It didn’t happen often enough and when it did, like now, it was sweet as candy.
**
Jordan had known that his Exercise and Health Science B.S. was setting him up for a whole lot of non-options for his future. Becoming an assistant coach and teaching the entry level HPS course that all students of every major were required to take had been a logical step. A step that bored him to tears, but he didn’t have much choice.
The beauty of his position, however, was his age. He was too young to get caught up in the self-important bullshit some of his own profs had held over the students’ heads. There was no elegant or important way to paint a basic health and PE class, so he didn’t try to, and was hoping that would keep him in favor with the kids.
Kids…Jesus, they weren’t kids in relation to him.
It took all of ten minutes to cover the syllabus material and then he made the mistake of opening up the floor for questions before he dismissed them.
A hand loaded with bracelets shot into the air and its owner, a girl with pink and blonde hair, asked without prompting, “Not to be rude or anything, but how old are you?”
Several other girls chuckled in a nervous, high-pitched sort of way and suddenly Jordan was heaped with a new worry: giggly girls and the thought that they might try to flirt with him.
That’s
what he needed.
He was standing in front of the desk and leaned back against it, palms braced on its surface. “Twenty-five,” he said with a shrug, and saw the going-gray gentleman in the back of the room give a disgruntled little eyebrow twitch.
“Isn’t that kind of young?” Pink Hair said.
He had to give her credit for being ballsy, if nothing else. He shrugged again. “Isn’t that better than being kind of old?”
A quick flash of white teeth, a sudden smile, pulled his eyes over to the girl in the next desk. Dark hair and creamy, exposed throat, a black-nailed hand that covered her mouth and a tiny bubble of a laugh. He afforded himself a brief impression of her before he set his eyes to moving, not wanting them to stick on any one student for too long. He’d managed to avoid too much direct eye contact in his other two classes so far today and it was keeping the nerves at bay. For someone who didn’t get nervous, his stomach sure as hell had been full of butterflies.
“Well…yes,” Pink Hair said. She nodded. “Yeah, it is.”
“Glad you approve.”
But her curiosity had opened up the floodgates and the questions started coming like bullets.
“How’d you get to be a teacher?”
“What do you coach?”
“How fast do you run?”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Are you married?”
And he folded his arms over his chest with a sigh and gave them the abridged version of his road to coach-dom, leaving out the unpleasant details that pertained to his forgoing any and all scholarships so he could stay local. That was a story for between beers on a sentimental night with only the most trusted of confidants. Plus, it made him look pathetic, and he’d never been big on that.
“Coach Walker.” Tam’s hand made a brief appearance and then fell back like he couldn’t be bothered to hold it up. He tapped his pen against the syllabus Jordan had passed around – he knew the majority of students, like himself, would never bother to print and read the thing on their own dime, and who cared if the school was out a couple hundred sheets of copy paper? – with a pretend sternness, his eyes laughing. “I thought you didn’t like busy work. So what’s with all the quizzes?”
Several students, some nervous looking freshmen, shot furtive glances between their coach and the dark-headed guy who’d dared take curiosity to a more direct level.
Thanks, shithead
, Jordan said with a glance, and Tam looked like he was biting back a grin. “The other HPS classes are doing worksheets. Would you rather do worksheets every night, or have a couple quizzes, Wales?”
Tam gave him an overdramatic thumbs up. “Quizzes are good.”
Earlier that day, in his first class – both of the day and, well,
ever
– the weight of each quiz had been heavily questioned by one of those goody-two-shoes shits who tackled PE with a seriousness best left reserved for physics.
This isn’t complicated!
He’d wanted to shout at them.
This is running and smoking-is-bad and eat-your-veggies!
He’d spent hours one night in the dining room, hoping to get away from the usual bustle of the kitchen, slaving over his lesson plans and hating that he even had to make them. Who needed educating about this stuff? What grown-ass person didn’t understand exercise and basic health? More, he’d realized upon that first ten minutes of class, than he’d ever wanted to think about. With great care, and the occasional input from his sister or mother who came hovering in around his chair, he’d put together a schedule that adhered as closely to the curriculum guidelines as possible while keeping the workload light.
But none of the courses he’d taken or books he’d read had prepared him for this: standing up in front of blank, blinking eyes and yawns and knowing that their success or failure lay in his hands. No pressure.
“If you guys are done with the twenty questions bit, I can let you go.” No one said anything. “Alright, see you Wednesday.”