Learning Curve

Emily flipped one hand in the air, brushing aside his touching little speech. “Okay,” she said. “I knew coming into this it was going to be a tough sell.” She cleared her throat. “What I’d like you to do is to view my student teaching assignment as an opportunity for a kind of personal and educational renewal.”

“Renewal?”

“A chance to revisit your philosophical underpinnings. To sharpen and highlight the contrast between your views and those of another educational professional—just for the sake of argument.”

“And I suppose the person I’d be contrasted with would be you.” Joe straightened in his chair. An old, familiar feeling was spreading like heartburn through his gut. The kind of feeling he got whenever he pictured William F. Buckley squinting at him from the cover of the National Review. “And just what are these ‘ideological underpinnings?’”

“Let’s see if I remember the legend according to Jack Junior.” Emily raised her hands to tick off the items. “Joseph P. Wisniewski—the P an ongoing and entertaining mystery to your students. Raised at an Oregon commune and Rainbow Family gatherings. Homeschooled, for the most part, with extracurricular activities at antinuke demonstrations. High school years spent in San Francisco, where an early growth spurt grabbed the attention of the basketball coach and landed you a college sports scholarship.”

Emily ran out of fingers and crossed her arms beneath attractively perky breasts. “You joined the Peace Corps after graduation and took up teaching when you got back to the States.”

Dozens of years summarized in less than a dozen sentences. It didn’t matter—he’d lost track when she mentioned the Peace Corps.

Guatemala. Rosaria.

He shut his eyes against the old wounds, and then opened them to confront the new irritant: Emily Sullivan, a living, breathing reminder of what he’d been like when he started teaching at Caldwell. That first year, before the crushing news from Guatemala, before Rosaria’s death. The year he’d been fired up with purpose and filled with enthusiasm.

It was hard to look at her. Hard to look back. But he forced himself to meet her eyes, to smile, to nod. “An impressive performance. I think you managed to hit most of the highlights.”

“Thank you.”

Joe leaned back in his chair, which creaked a warning to keep his voice low and his wits sharp. “So you want me to agree to share my liberal, left-wing soapbox with a…” He gestured for her to fill in the blanks.

“A woman who was raised on Air Force bases and Reaganomics.” Emily leaned down and settled her hands on the edge of his desk. “A conservative Republican.”

“That’s redundant,” he said.

“That’s predictable,” she answered.

He shifted forward and noted the tiny flinch before her smile widened. He waited and watched as her knuckles turned white from her grip on his desk. But she didn’t back off, and she kept her eyes steady on his. He had to give her points for sheer spunk. “Oh, I don’t think you’ve got me completely figured out yet,” he said.

“Good. That’ll just liven things up.” She took a deep breath. “Come on, Wiz. Take me on for a couple of rounds. You’ve got nothing to lose but the right edge of that soapbox.”

He could see the freckles scattered across her nose, and the shards of silver ringing her pupils. One curl slipped forward over one of her eyebrows, and he caught his breath. Such an appealing package wrapped around such repulsive politics. He could reach out and strangle her. Or tip forward just a couple of inches and nibble on those smug, curvy lips. The first would earn him a prison sentence. The second would probably get him fired.

He was sure about one thing. Sexual harassment of a student teacher wasn’t part of his personal politics or his philosophical underpinnings. He leaned back and rubbed a finger across his mouth. “You know, a soapbox can have a pretty slippery surface. And I may have a few surprises left up my sleeve.”

“Sounds like a challenge—or a bargain. Either way, I’m taking it.” Emily slapped her palms against the top of his desk. “That’s the spirit. That’s The Wiz I’ve heard about. This is going to be great, just great,” she said, backing toward the door. “And don’t worry, we can work out the details later.”

She sidestepped into the hall. “I have a few surprises up my sleeve, too. See you on Monday—bright and early!” And then she was gone, taking most of the classroom’s oxygen with her.

Joe sighed and slouched deeper into his complaining chair. He closed his eyes and tried to reach that comfortable state of ennui he liked to wallow in right before the start of a new school year. But everything felt like it was trickling out of his grasp. As if Emily Sullivan had ripped all the self-indulgent pleasure out of his back-to-school misery and twisted it into something…something even more twisted than usual.

Ideas crackled through his brain like static. He couldn’t stop considering all the possibilities, imagining all the delights of an ongoing ideological duel with a well-educated, intelligent adversary. The subtle—no, the visceral thrust and parry that could be played out before a captive but fascinated adolescent audience. Hmm. It was tempting. It was intriguing. It was downright stimulating.

But Joe didn’t want to be tempted or intrigued. He certainly didn’t want to be stimulated. And definitely not by some chirpy student teacher in short skirts and big, wide eyes. Eyes with sparkly silver spikes that rayed out into sky-colored irises rimmed by beautiful navy rings….

Stop right there. Get a grip, Wisniewski.

Joe took a deep breath, but regretted it instantly. There, just beneath the odors of musty texts and stale coffee, was a faint trace of something fresh and floral.

Damn. It was going to be a long, long school year.

CHAPTER TWO

BRIGHT AND EARLY. Those two words certainly seemed made for each other, Joe thought as he shuffled through the main hall of Caldwell High at 7:45 a.m. on the first day of school. Sort of like black and blue. Or battery and assault.

He tucked a stack of folders under one arm and rammed his hands into his pockets, focusing on the floor to avoid eye contact. Eye contact could lead to conversation, which often led to dodging requests and other forms of aerobic exercise. And he wasn’t looking for a workout.

Two sleek, high-heeled shoes bounced into his path. By the time Joe’s gaze roamed over sexy ankles, shapely calves and knees that hinted at more interesting items above a no-nonsense hemline, he knew what he’d find at eyeball level: Emily Sullivan, his own personal triathlon.

She beamed up at him, her smile nearly blinding him with white-toothed enthusiasm. He hoped she came with a dimmer switch. “Good morning, Mr. Wisniewski.”

“Is it, Ms. Sullivan?”

“Well, of course! Don’t you just love the first day of school? All the energy, all the possibilities.”

She sighed a happy little sigh and scrunched up her nose, oblivious to the staggering and chest clutching going on behind her back. Her prim sweater set and that twist thing she’d done with her hair wasn’t going to fool the local male population. Might as well go for truth in advertising and hang a flashing neon Hot Babe sign around her neck.

“I was wondering,” she said, “if I could sit in on all your classes today, since it’s a noon dismissal schedule.”

“If you want to. It’s going to be pretty routine, just handing stuff out. Texts, course schedules. Threats.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

There it was, punching him right between the eyes in the first five minutes of the first morning of the school year: one of the many reasons he didn’t want a student teacher, even one who didn’t look like Emily Sullivan. It was going to be a lot of work for him to find work for his student teacher to do. “I could probably come up with something,” he muttered.

“Great!”

Great. It was going to be like training a puppy. An eager, squirming puppy that followed him everywhere, licking his shoes, looking up at him with big, wide puppy eyes no matter how many times he scolded or stepped on it. He hated stepping on puppies, but it usually happened sooner or later, because the damn things always managed to get right under his feet. Crowding him.

Might as well kill two puppies with one stone, so to speak. Give her something to do, far away from him. He pulled the folders from under his arm and chose some prep work. Emily could do it. She could feel useful and needed, a valuable partner on the educational team. She could establish a meaningful relationship with the copier. “Do you know where the copier is?”

“Linda showed me.”

Probably during some female bonding ritual involving office equipment. “Class rosters are inside. Copy the assignment sheets and reading lists, with a couple extra for each class, okay?”

“Okay. I can handle that.” She hesitated, her smile dimming just a bit around the edges. “But do you think I’ll be finished by the time the first bell rings?”

Squish. “If not, we’ll finish up at the break—my prep period is right after that. Don’t worry about it.”

Emily’s beam bounced back. “I’ll see you in class.”

Joe stood rooted to his spot, watching her blond twist bob through the hall, wondering how he was going to get through five class periods of puppy eyes following his every move.

“Hey, Wiz.”

He turned as Matt Zerlinger, a senior in his Government and Current Events classes, motioned with his chin toward Emily. “Heard you got a student teacher this year. That her?”

“Yeah.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

Matt grinned. “Shit happens.”

“Yeah.” Joe sighed. “And because I have a student teacher, and I need to set a better example, I have to warn you to watch the language in the halls, Matt.”

Matt’s smile widened. “This is going to be fun.”

“Shit,” said Joe.

“Oh, that reminds me.” Matt cast a glance down the hall. “Dornley was looking for you.”

The athletic director. Probably looking for another sucker to coach another orphan team. “Damn.”

“Yeah. Just thought I’d warn you.”

Joe clamped a hand over Matt’s shoulder as they headed toward the stairway. “In addition to running interference for Dornley, I see you’ve registered for two periods with me. What’s the angle?”

“An awesome recommendation for Berkeley.”

“So, you’re going for it.” Joe squeezed Matt’s shoulder before dropping his hand back into his pocket. “Is Walt going to come through with the funding?”

Walter Mullins was Matt’s latest stepfather. Matt’s mom went through husbands like she went through bottles of cheap vodka, but Walt seemed to have some staying power.

“I’ve been working on him,” said Matt, “but it’s too soon to tell. Gonna have to hit the scholarship scene pretty hard.”

“Let me know what I can do to help.”

“Count on it.” Matt shrugged his backpack higher on his shoulder. “Walt says since this is all your idea in the first place, the least you can do is find a way to help pay for it.”

Joe knew it wasn’t wise to get too attached to a student, but Matt had snuck under his emotional radar as a scrawny freshman using his wits to keep pace with the upperclassmen on a backpacking trip. Matt was still a little on the scrawny side, but once he filled out the gangly frame and ditched the lab tech look, the womenfolk would start paying more attention. “Hey, two smart guys like us should be able to come up with some college funds.”

“Yeah.” Matt scrubbed the toe of a stiff new Birkenstock against the floor. “Wonder if that hot new student teacher would be of any assistance.”

“The student teacher’s name is Ms. Sullivan. And she’s not going to seem so hot after she starts handing out detention slips and essay tests.”

“I don’t know.” Matt shook his head. “Hot is hot.”

“She’s too old for you, Matt.”

“I don’t want to date her. I’m just going to enjoy the scenery. Besides,” he added, “the student betting pool is placing the best odds on Walford to make the first move.”

Real pros, those student bookies. “He’s married.”

“Yeah, but it’s kinda shaky right now. His wife went to Boise to visit her mother right after the Fourth of July picnic, and she hasn’t come back yet.” Matt shook his head. “And he’s enough of a loser to hit on the hired help.”

Hitting on the hot new student teacher—the worst kind of power play. And where power was involved in a relationship, it opened the door to some pretty ugly things, with exploitation heading the list. Good thing Joe kept reminding himself of the potential for disaster. Good thing bright and bouncy Emily Sullivan wasn’t his type.

The first bell sent Matt jogging back to his locker and Joe trudging toward the stairs. He tried to focus on his first period class, but all he could come up with was visions of wide blue puppy eyes and the student bookies branding his forehead with an L for Loser.

EMILY WAS SURE that most people never realized how much energy it took to be energetic.

She turned down Main Street shortly after a late lunch at Al’s Pizzeria, so tired she was afraid she’d lose the steering wheel tug-of-war with her battered, bullying ’92 Chevy pickup. It was a good kind of tired, though. The kind that carried a kick, with sparks of self-satisfaction snapping beneath the layers of exhaustion.

She had moved a mountain of texts up a mountain of stairs, had overseen a pile of photocopying and a fist-bruising stack of stapling. There had been enough paperwork to tie up the State Department in a red-tape bow, enough crises to keep a soap opera afloat for a season and no chance for a coffee break. Her back hurt almost as much as her feet, and she suspected her bladder had stretch marks.

But there had also been dozens of shy smiles and friendly greetings. Her welcome to campus had been so warm, so energizing, that if someone asked her, at this very moment, to shift her growling truck to light speed, she was pretty sure she could pull it off.

Cast in the afterglow of all this goodwill, the heart of Issimish sparkled. Main Street’s shop windows reflected the polish and flair filtering down the interstate from Seattle’s suburbs. Even the town’s rough and rowdy origins were getting a stylish makeover, something a little more quaint and a little less quirky.

She thumped over the railroad crossing at the edge of the new industrial park and sped out through orchards lining the old county road, rolling down the window to inhale the ripe tang of a football season afternoon. Houses thinned, separated by acres of bramble-edged fields instead of neatly fenced yards. The pickup’s treads whined over the ragged pavement, their vibrations humming through her in an edgy accompaniment.

Emily planned on keeping the buzz buzzing with a liquid caffeine recharge and the semisweet chocolate bar she had hidden in the back of her kitchen junk drawer. Her schedule until the end of her college term, at Christmas, was a tight one: high school observations in the mornings followed by the lengthy commute to her university classes in the afternoons and evenings. She only had a few hours left to pound out a paper on Piaget due in tonight’s Ed Psych class. And she should record her impressions of day one in her Social Studies Methodology journal before day two hit.

Impressions. Joe Wisniewski, still and self-contained, striking a deceptively lazy pose. Hitching one hip over the edge of his desk, those dark eyes scanning the room for student outlaws. Gary Cooper, calmly lecturing ’til high noon.

Okay, so she was still a bit impressed by The Great and Powerful Wiz, thrilling to his slow grin, or the quirk of an eyebrow, or the rumble of that deep voice. Her adolescent tingles and twinges had matured into, well, more mature tingles and twinges.

There she sat, tucked into the corner of a classroom she’d dreamed of joining at thirteen and clawed her way into at twenty-nine, echoes of her adolescent longings tumbling through her insides while her outsides calmly took notes. Studying his every move, pondering his every word—and wondering what was wrong.

Maybe it was the contrast of her own excitement with Joe’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, maybe it was his laid-back ease and deadpan delivery, but nothing had been quite what she’d expected. He’d been a bit too laid-back, a bit too deadpan, not exactly the inspiring educational model she’d hoped for.

Still, he seemed to have a quiet rapport with his students. And he definitely had a subtle magnetism that tugged at her on every level. Her instincts told her there was something there, beneath the surface, something he was holding back.

But what if those instincts were nothing more than the kind of fantasizing she’d engaged in as a teen? What if this attraction turned into a major distraction? She needed to analyze his effect on her and his other students, not simply sit there and enjoy it. She needed to focus on her job, to evaluate his classroom management style, not get sidetracked by wide shoulders and lean hips.

She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She wouldn’t let it happen. Couldn’t let it happen. There was too much riding on this assignment: her career, her family’s approval, her own self-esteem. Her future.

She was in charge of her educational experience, not The Wiz. If he didn’t offer the inspiration she’d hoped for, she’d work harder to find it elsewhere. Maybe, with time, she’d find what she needed within herself, wrapped in her own dreams and abilities.

In the meantime, if she had to spend several months observing a subject, it might as well be a good-looking one. “Can I pick ’em, or can I pick ’em?” she asked no one in particular as the truck rattled over a series of potholes.

Daydreaming of dark eyes and a deep voice, Emily pulled into her gravel drive and swerved to avoid clipping the fender of a silver Volvo sedan.

Uh-oh. Mom alert.

Emily frowned. What was on Kay Sullivan’s agenda today? More questions about her daughter’s career choice? Doubts about her living arrangement? A reconnaissance mission to check on the refrigerator’s contents or the dryer’s lint trap?

At the moment, Kay was plucking weeds from the box of overgrown petunias on Emily’s front porch. She straightened and waved. “Yoo-hoo, Emily!”

Emily sighed. As if anyone could miss the tall, slim blonde in a bright red double-breasted dress with coordinating red lipstick and shoes. Kay’s was the only coordinated ensemble in the ragtag front yard—although the brownish patches of rust on the gutters did match the brownish patches of gopher mounds in the grass.

“Hi, Mom.” Emily hopped down from the truck, plotting a way to fast-forward through the visit so she could attack the Piaget project before it reached critical mass. Kay had a languid Louisiana way of drawing out an afternoon chat until it felt like a two-week delta cruise into the Twilight Zone.

Emily pointed to a wire-handled shopping bag near the doorstep. “What’s in there?”

“Cookies and milk, just like old times.” Kay’s cheek brushed Emily’s with the scent of gardenia. “To celebrate your first day of school.”

“Oatmeal and butterscotch?”

“With extra chips.”

Kay did have her good points—a couple dozen of them, judging from the size of the bag. Butterscotch could fill in for chocolate, in a pinch. And oatmeal counted as nutrition. She could chew fast, shorten the visit and skip dinner. “Sounds perfect. Except for the milk. I don’t drink it anymore.”

“I remember. But it goes with the cookies.”

Of course. Just because neither of them would actually drink the milk didn’t mean that the afternoon snack of cookies would be offered without the appropriate beverage. It simply wasn’t done. After all, Kay Sullivan was the high priestess of family food rituals. She packed a picnic luncheon every Fourth of July, even when it rained. Spread coconut frosting on the Easter cake, which everyone scraped off. And labored over a jellied tomato aspic every Thanksgiving, though no one had yet worked up enough courage for even one taste. That, too, was tradition: the untouched aspic, trembling on the table in virginal apprehension.

“You know,” said Emily, “they drink tea with cookies in England.”

“I suppose they do.” Kay picked up her package. “It would be rather continental, wouldn’t it?”

“Come on, Mom,” Emily said as she unlocked her door. “Let’s live dangerously. I’ll put the kettle on to boil.”

She caught her mother’s quick, discreet appraisal of the empty walls and curtainless windows as they stepped over the threshold. “My goodness,” Kay drawled. “It’s so refreshing, the way you’re using all this natural light and the open floor plan.”

Emily bit back an excuse and led the way to the kitchen.

“It’s probably best not to invest in things that may be discarded. This is simply a temporary situation, after all.” Kay’s smile was a hopeful one. “Who could possibly know how long you’ll be here?”

Emily dodged the question and arranged the cookies on a paper plate in the center of the tiny kitchen table. She knew her parents didn’t understand her decision to dip into her savings to make the move out of their Seattle condominium.

A change of subject was called for, and Emily knew just the tack to take—her sister-in-law’s pregnancy. “How’s Susan doing? Getting rounder?”

Kay’s eyes went soft and dreamy at the mention of her first grandbaby. “Just imagine, my little Jack, a father.”

“Someone new for you to spoil.”

“I never spoiled you and Jack.”

“I was talking about Dad.”

Kay laughed. “Oh, yes. I’ll admit to plenty of spoiling there. Although it always seems to work in both directions.”

Emily turned to snatch the screeching kettle off the burner. Oh, how she wanted that for herself, that deep affection glowing beneath the patina of years spent rubbing along together. A husband might be a low-priority item on her list of short-term goals, but she intended to have her own glow one of these years.

She poured boiling water over tea bags in her two least chipped mugs, set them on a tray with some folded paper towels and paper plates and snuck a peek at the pig-shaped garage-sale clock before carrying everything to the table. Three o’clock—time to get this visit moving toward the finale. “So, let me give you the completely condensed version of my first day at school. It was great.”

Kay cautiously lowered herself into a plastic lawn chair. “That’s wonderful, Em. But then, you’ve always been able to find some degree of success in whatever you choose to do. All those different jobs—every last one of them.”

Emily sighed over the references to her short attention span and lack of commitment and then piled her plate with cookies and spooned three helpings of sugar into her mug. “Well, today, my successes included photocopying, collating and stapling.”

“My goodness.” Kay sipped her tea and managed to look impressed. “That sounds ever so productive.”

“It sounds as awful as it was. But it had its moments.” Emily wrapped her hands around her mug and leaned forward. “I wish you could have seen the students’ faces—all those expectations. I’m going to love it, I just know it. If I survive the planning, the teaching, the paperwork, the assignments for my university classes and all the extracurricular activities I plan to squeeze in.”

“Oh, you’ll survive. You thrive on hard work. You always have.” Kay smoothed a hand over the paper in her lap as if it were fine linen. “Now, when are you going to let me take you shopping and buy you something special to brighten up this place a bit?”

Emily blew on her tea to cool it. She wasn’t surprised by the shift in topic. Her mother was far more comfortable discussing homemaking than career planning. “Somehow I knew that’s where this conversation was heading all along.”

“Conversations are like the wind. They go where they will.” Kay rose from her seat. “Sometimes they’re wild and stormy, and sometimes they’re just as fickle as a little breeze, blowing every which way and never keeping to any one direction.”