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  “I think he meant that maybe Romeo considered killing Tybalt as, well…as justice,” Carl said.

  “Ah,” Rachel smiled and turned toward him. “Justice. That’s different. Please continue.”

  Carl fidgeted. He opened his mouth, but before he could get anything out, Denise interrupted. “Hold up,” she said. “It’s never OK to kill someone.”

  “Never?” Rachel asked, surprised. Her students knew how she felt about equivocal statements.

  Denise nodded. “Never.”

  “Tell that to the Memento Killer,” Ryan said with a laugh. Nobody else laughed. Denise shot him a sizzling look, and he visibly wilted. The discussion teetered on a knife’s edge, in danger either of falling into a bickering match or being derailed with gossip about Memento Killer theories.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “What about the death penalty?”

  “Yeah.” Chris turned around in his desk to face Denise. “And shooting someone who’s invading your home and might hurt your kids? That kind of stuff.”

  “I just mean it’s never OK to murder people,” Denise said grudgingly.

  Rachel turned toward Carl. “Would you agree?”

  Carl nodded and squirmed in his seat.

  “Doesn’t the Bible say ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ though?” Shayla put in her two cents, looking smug.

  “That’s a good point,” Rachel said, nodding. “But it’s actually murder prohibited in the Ten Commandments. Not killing.”

  “Hah,” said Denise. “As I said. It’s never OK to murder people.”

  “I think we can all get on board with that argument,” Rachel said. “So I guess then the question, Carl, is this: is Romeo murdering Tybalt? Or is he executing justice?”

  Rachel’s choice of words—executing justice—caused Chris to flash Rachel one of his goofy, sideways grins. Reading his mind, she gave him a private smile and a small wink.

  The short warning bell rang.

  “Well,” Rachel spoke over the rustle of the students packing their bags. “I suppose you’ll have to decide for yourselves. I’d like a half-page response to this question on my desk by Monday. Was Romeo’s killing of Tybalt murder or justice?”

  Carl cleared his throat.

  “I mean on Carl’s desk, obviously.” Rachel smiled at her classroom manager, who doffed an invisible hat to the rest of the class and sketched a dorky little bow, round cheeks flushed with pleasure at the attention.

  Chris shot a hand into the air, his body stiff and upright in his desk, a human exclamation point. “But Miss Cooper! The rough drafts of our research papers are due Monday!”

  “Oh, you’re right.” Rachel scratched her chin. “But honestly, if you’ve been keeping up with the steps, your rough draft should be practically done.”

  Chris’s face constricted to a rictus of panic. The class held its breath.

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll debate the murder question in class on Monday. But at least come prepared with points for discussion.”

  “And with our research paper drafts?” asked Carl.

  “And with your research paper drafts.”

  The energy in the room deflated, but Chris gave her a nod. “Acceptable,” he said.

  “I’m glad you approve,” Rachel said, “given that you have no choice.”

  ~*~

  With the move over, Rachel finally had time to appreciate that the last few weeks of the school year were upon her. Typically a time of great rejoicing among teachers and students alike, these weeks simultaneously piled on a fair amount of stress.

  End-of-term projects required completion and grading. Students crammed for finals while teachers organized end-of-year concerts, art shows, exhibitions, and classroom parties. A few forward-thinking teachers cleaned out filing cabinets and closets while surreptitiously removing a few wall hangings and decorations each day.

  Not Rachel. At this point, she could no more have toted home small daily loads of school supplies than she could have danced the Lindy Hop. She could hardly keep up with the bare minimum. Managing each day of work felt like building a house of cards: the smallest puff could send it all flying.

  Not that the days were without incremental improvements. Rachel could now sweep her own classroom floor and wipe down the desks by herself. With her foot swelling less and less, she could keep her leg below waist level for longer periods of time, meaning that she could teach from atop her bar stool again, crossing one leg over the other and swinging her heavy cast back and forth like a pendulum. During early-morning workouts, she could now lie back on the mats and perform leg-lifts and ab workouts without crying. She had learned to move about with considerably more grace, and her door-opening skills were a rare thing of practiced beauty. If ever she were to compete in the Olympics, she felt fairly confident she’d bring home the gold in Crutching Through Doors.

  Even without the added pressures of the broken ankle, Rachel had other last-semester issues. She needed to organize the annual end-of-year Arts Evening. Planning the variety show had become much less cumbersome since Lee’s residency in D Wing. Since it was always held in conjunction with the end-of-year art show, the two of them were able to plan it together. The halls leading to the assembly room were lined with displays; Lee’s art students hosted a reception and viewing before and after the show; and Rachel’s students provided live entertainment. Since there was often considerable overlap between the two groups, the format worked well. And since Yolanda required that any teachers co-directing an event hold meetings at least two weeks prior to the event, Lee showed up in Rachel’s classroom one afternoon in early May just as she had finished wiping down her desks and sweeping the floor.

  She leaned forward, one-legged, on her crutches. Never had she been so proud of a freshly-wiped desk. “Behold,” she said with a dramatic sweep of her arm.

  “Well done.” Lee set two coffees on Rachel’s desk and pulled a rolled-up computer printout from his back pocket. “The coffees are from me. This”—he twirled the paper in the air—“comes courtesy of Ms. Martinez.”

  Rachel crutched back to her desk and sat with a whoosh. “Ugh,” she groaned. “The Agreement.”

  He nodded. “The Agreement.” Lee dragged over a student desk and wedged himself into it. Rachel pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk and plonked her cast across it. While she pried the lid from one of the coffees and sniffed the contents, Lee unrolled the document and pulled out a pen.

  “Let me do that,” she said. “Your penmanship is terrible.”

  “My penmanship is perfect.” He surrendered paper and pen nonetheless.

  “OK.” Rachel scanned the checklist. “How do you want to set up the tables?”

  “Same as last year.”

  “What organizational pattern do you want to use for the art?”

  “Same as last year.”

  “What will be on the refreshments menu?”

  “Same as last year,” he said. “Except more cheese.”

  “More cheese.” Rachel hummed appreciatively and marked this down.

  “I didn’t even get any last year,” Lee complained. “By the time I got done making my rounds, the platters were empty, except for a few broken toothpicks and some sad lettuce.”

  Rachel nodded in commiseration and clicked the pen a few times. “Who will compose the e-mail to contact the PTA and arrange for parent volunteers and servers?”

  Lee ran his fingers through his brown beard and scratched his chin. “You will.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Because I would word it all wrong.”

  “Because you would word it all wrong,” Rachel agreed. She scanned the list, frowning. “So, basically, we’re doing everything the same as last year, but with more cheese.”

  Lee grabbed his beard with both hands. “Sounds like a plan.”

  Rachel frowned at the beard over the rim of her coffee cup. “You really do need to do something to get that mess under control.”

  Lee separated the beard in
to three equal sections and began a neat braid. “Miss Cooper. We’ve covered this. It isn’t just a beard. It’s jailbait repellant.”

  “Certainly by now you’ve aged enough to look sufficiently like a teacher. That shouldn’t be necessary.”

  “You don’t understand, Miss Cooper. Without this beard, I’m irresistible. Girls can’t stay away. I’m lethal. Remember when I was doing my student teaching?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes, but she nodded, smiling. How clearly she remembered the reams of anguished e-mails Lee had sent detailing his frustrations with student teaching. One of his main sources of annoyance was the gaggle of gooey-eyed middle-school girls who had trailed him through the halls. Rachel may even have been the one to suggest that he grow a beard, now that she stopped to think about it.

  “If I even looked at one of those girls wrong…” Lee trailed off, shaking his head. “It would all be over.”

  “You were only twenty-one then. You’re in your mid-twenties now. You probably have all sorts of wrinkles and giant pores or weird moles at this point.”

  “Trust me,” Lee said. “They wouldn’t be able to handle this.” He waved his hands from the top of his scruffy head down his rumpled shirt to his frayed slacks. “You wouldn’t be able to handle it.” He slanted Rachel a smoldering look through his nerdy glasses.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” she agreed, laughing. She picked up her coffee and took a sip.

  “Too bad you couldn’t have grown a beard back in the day,” Lee said, matching this odd comment with an odd look.

  Rachel almost choked on her coffee. “Excuse me?”

  “All I’m saying is that some people would have gotten a lot more studying done if they hadn’t had to look you straight in the face.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Rachel pretended to take offense. Then she laughed. “Who’s to say I couldn’t have grown one?”

  Lee shook his head and lifted his coffee, only to pause with the cup halfway to his mouth. “Looking directly at you was more than most of us could bear. It was like staring into the sun.”

  Rachel flashed back to the talk Lynn and Ann had had with her at Stu’s. Her face began to heat. “Shut up,” she said airily, willing herself to pull it together. This was Lee, for goodness’ sake! Maybe if she kept talking, he wouldn’t notice her face catching fire. “Speaking of looking directly at me, what ever happened to Joey Bryant?”

  Joey Bryant had been in Lee’s graduating class, and his raging adolescent crush on Rachel Cooper had been well-known throughout the school even before he had written her a series of love sonnets masquerading as extra credit assignments.

  Lee snorted. “He’s working his way through a graduate program in Medieval Literature.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’m surprised he didn’t ask you for a recommendation when he was trying to get in.”

  “I haven’t heard from Joey Bryant since he graduated.”

  “When he asked you out,” Lee leaned back in the desk chair, laughing. “Oh, man. I had forgotten.” The chair creaked under his weight.

  “What can I say?” Rachel said. “When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Lee tipped his cup of coffee in a mock salute before taking a slurp.

  “Speaking of graduate programs...” Rachel gave Lee a pointed look.

  “Let’s not.”

  “Lee, come on.”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Miss Cooper.”

  “But you’re so gifted.”

  “Right. I know.” He set down his coffee. “I know, you know, everyone knows. And if everyone knows, why would I need another piece of paper just to tell me I’m gifted?”

  “Don’t get defensive.”

  “I’m not defensive. I just don’t want to have this conversation with you. Again.”

  “You know I just want what’s best for you.” Rachel, well aware that she should not have brought it up, still seemed unable to stop herself. “And it’s not as if you have undergrad debt. Your grants and scholarships covered everything, so—”

  “That’s not fair.” Lee’s hands came down onto the desk in front of him with a slap.

  “What’s not fair?” Rachel blinked, surprised by his sudden vehemence.

  “Bringing up the scholarships. I never could have gotten them without you, and you know it. It’s not like my ‘mom’”—he sketched air quotes around the word—“was going to help me apply to anything.” He scrubbed his hands furiously through his hair, bushing it up around his head. “I’m sorry. I know I’m getting upset.” He paused to take a deep breath. “Miss Cooper, I’ll always be thankful to you for how you helped me, but it’s not fair to use the scholarship thing to try to manipulate me into going to grad school.”

  “Manipulate you?” Rachel’s voice sharpened. “Lee, stop it. I’m just trying to—I don’t know. Motivate you. To do your best. To be your best.”

  Lee stood up, grabbed The Agreement, and rolled it into a tighter twist than was necessary. He jammed it into his back pocket and reached for his messenger bag.

  “Thanks, Miss Cooper,” he said. “But I don’t need you for that.”

  15

  After her fight with Lee, Rachel couldn’t concentrate on grading. She stewed in her classroom for a while, left late, took a wrong turn on the way to State Road 47, and arrived at the carriage house well past dinner time. She felt the cranky despair of one who has been misunderstood, had a stupid fight, and then missed a meal.

  “Go out to dinner,” Ann told her over the phone after Rachel had called her to re-hash her fight with Lee.

  “I’m too tired to go out to dinner.” Having only just dragged herself into the house, Rachel sat on one of the bar stools around the island in the middle of the kitchen. She slumped forward with her head down on the wooden butcher-block. “Besides, I’m all the way out here already, and there aren’t exactly a lot of restaurants around. Or anything at all, actually.”

  Ann sighed. “I’m going to pick up dinner from Stu’s later, but I won’t be home until like nine. So if you want to wait until then—”

  “No. That’s fine. I just wish I had a husband who could take me out to dinner tonight,” Rachel said into the countertop.

  Ann laughed. “No you don’t. You just want someone to drive you to a restaurant, hold the door, listen to you talk, and pay for your dinner.”

  “Isn’t that what husbands do?”

  “You’re cute.”

  “You know what? You’re right. I don’t want a husband to take me out to dinner. I want a husband who will cook for me while I lounge in a hot bath. Then he would bring me dinner on a tray and I wouldn’t even have to get out of the tub.”

  “What would he make?” Ann asked, sounding half-intrigued.

  Rachel could hear dogs barking in the background. She imagined Ann walking a horse out to one of Cherrywood’s far paddocks.

  “Pasta.”

  “Pasta in the bathtub?”

  “Doesn’t that sound delicious?”

  “It sounds messy.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I’m curious about something. What would your husband be doing while you were eating pasta in the bathtub?”

  “Cleaning the kitchen. No, wait! Better yet, he’d be sitting on the side of the tub, holding a napkin and my glass of wine and staring at me adoringly.”

  “So you drink wine in this scenario?”

  “OK, fine. Holding my coffee.”

  “I don’t know…” Ann’s voice had taken on a thoughtful tone. “Pasta doesn’t really go with coffee.” She made a clicking sound with her mouth. Harnesses jingled.

  “Everything goes with coffee.”

  “Are you sure you really want to eat pasta in the bathroom? That doesn’t sound very hygienic.”

  Rachel sat up. “It’s not that I necessarily want to eat pasta in the bathroom. I’m just saying I wouldn’t mind a little pampering. That’s all.”

  “If there’s one thing I wouldn’t want to eat naked and dripping wet
while being observed, it would be pasta,” Ann said. “You should go with something a little easier to eat without the potential for making a mess. Like maybe a corn dog.”

  “A corn dog,” Rachel said expressionlessly.

  “OK, maybe not.”

  Rachel yawned. Her eyes started to water. She rubbed them with one hand while using the other to readjust the phone. “What are we even talking about?”

  “You started it.”

  “This isn’t helping. I knew I should have called Lynn instead. At least she always—are you still there? Hello?” Rachel looked down at her phone, wondering if Ann had deliberately hung up, or if her phone had dropped the call. Cell service tended to be spotty this far out of town.

  Rachel dialed Lynn, who picked up on the first ring, gently scolded Rachel for not thinking to stop by her house to have dinner with the family, and clucked sympathetically while she listened to Rachel’s account of her conversation with Ann.

  “I have to say,” Lynn told her, “you shouldn’t give up on your dream. There are worse things in life to aim for than soaking in a hot tub while being served pasta by your hot husband.”

  Rachel heard squawking sounds in the background and then Lynn’s laugh. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “It’s Alex.” Lynn’s voice was muffled, as if she had turned her head. “I’m talking to Rachel.” More squawking. Then, “Her hypothetical hot husband.” Into the phone she said, “He thought we might be talking about Matt.”

  “Why would he think we were talking about Matt?”

  “Because—don’t be mad—we’ve been referring to him as Rachel’s future husband for a while now—”

  “What!”

  “I said don’t get mad!”

  “You two are unbelievable. He’s not my future husband. He’s—”

  “—he’s not a stalker, Rachel,” Lynn said, her voice gentle but firm.

  “We’re probably just going to have to agree to disagree on this one,” Rachel said.

  “I have to go anyway,” Lynn told her. “The salad’s almost done, and we need to eat and run before we’re late.”

  “OK.”