Fever To The Form – Nick Mulvey
BEN
TWO MONTHS LATER
to the end of our planned agenda. Does anyone have anything they’d like to bring up?” Rob asked the group of assembled department heads and infills, all eyes on him. I don’t know how long I’d been zoned out for, scribbling circles instead of taking notes on the paper in front of me.
“Yes.” Karla, the coach of the girls’ volleyball team, stuck her hand up. “We’ve lost all our balls. Can we submit a request for some more?”
“All of the balls?”
“We think we have a thief.”
“A thief of volleyballs?”
“The basketballs are also running low,” said another teacher who raised his hand from where he stood in the back. Rob looked at me, somehow managing enough physical restraint to not roll his eyes in front of everyone, but I felt the implication anyway.
“Do your departments have the budget left for replacement balls?” I asked, ignoring growing amount of hushed giggles. Rob had been chairing the meeting for the last hour. Although I was still new to the position of vice, with my predecessor deciding he would much rather hit the golf course than stick around for the rest of the year, it was far past time I started pulling my own weight and helping out.
Karla shrugged. “Only enough for a couple.”
“Well then, a couple is all you can have. I suggest you try to make them last,” I said, with a firm nod.
It had been made clear to everyone there was no room in the budget this year. Everyone had to make cuts. Rob had sat me down when I’d finally accepted the role and made it clear how severe the situation was. Even he’d been hoping Olive and my plan to win the competition would work, and when it hadn’t, he knew he’d have some serious fights coming up. If we didn’t stay within our department budgets, or even less, then the school would have to look at cuts to staff.
There was no room for missing volleyballs.
Karla looked back at me, clearly frustrated but instead of arguing she simply nodded and sat back in her seat. I wanted to tell her I’d sign the request and give her the equipment she needed. I didn’t want to be that bad guy, but this was a bigger part of the job than I’d anticipated–but I’d signed up for this.
“Anything else?” I asked, looking around the room. The silent, grim response told me everything I needed to know.
Right next to budget constraints was staff morale. Olive had just been the first to leave over the last few months, with a few others from various departments handing in notices shortly after. Most had found other positions, some outside of education altogether. One English teacher even fled town to live in the wilderness. It was a hard job being made harder. Then with unfilled positions and a resulting larger workload for the rest of us, it was like piling rocks on rocks.
“Thanks everyone for your time, I’ll catch up with you next week,” Rob said, bringing a smile back to the group. There was a buzz around the room as people got up from their seats, and slowly shuffled out.
“Thanks for taking that one,” Rob said, standing next to me as he watched everyone leave the teacher’s lounge, returning to their classrooms before lunch ended.
“It’s the job,” I shrugged, not knowing what else to say. Instead, I focused on putting my empty notebook away in my backpack and helping Rob put away the chairs we had taken out for the staff meeting.
“Hopefully next week we’ll have some good news for them,” he said, lifting a set of chairs over to the side of the room.
I raised my eyebrow. “Good news?”
“Yeah, I think we’ve finally got a buyer for the piano,” he said as if I was supposed to know what that meant. But he didn’t catch on and carried on speaking. “We’ve had plenty of interest, but finding a buyer that felt legitimate was a little difficult. Obviously, the board had certain requirements, especially since it was technically school property.”
I stopped what I was doing, pausing to really look at him.
“I’m sorry, what piano?” I asked, and finally he looked at me, the furrow between his brows narrowing.
“Olive’s?” Her name still sounded strange to hear. “Didn’t she tell you?”
I shook my head. “We haven’t spoken.”
Why did those three words still feel like a tailspin, like chaos and ruin? Weeks of not seeing her hadn’t loosened the grip she had on me. If anything, it had only grown stronger and infinitely more insatiable, like I was trapped in a vice that had been turned all the way, and then some more.
“Oh, sorry, I just assumed,” he said. He looked awkward as all hell as he rubbed his jaw uncomfortably. I fought the urge to ask him about her, if she’d landed on her feet with that other job she’d been offered. If she was really gone. But I knew that wasn’t fair.
“Anyway, you sold it?”
He nodded. “She called me a few weeks ago after she left and told me to sell it. She said she felt that the money would be better for the school than the piano. It’s a pricey thing, you know.”
My grip tightened around the plastic back of the chair I’d been putting away. I was a man starving, and I knew it was rightfully so. But that didn’t help, didn’t ease the need to ask about her, to get every single nugget I could about her.
Rob continued. “It was her mom’s. She gave strict instructions not to sell it when she donated it, but then she changed her mind.”
Her mom’s piano? I knew enough to know it meant the piano had been important. Her mother had been a music teacher after all.
“Why did she do that?” I asked.
“Beats me,” he said unhelpfully with a shrug. Given his wife’s friendship with Olive, I doubted he didn’t know, but not enough to call him out on the lie. “But with the money, things will definitely get easier around here. I didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up, but selling the piano takes a lot of stress off our plates for this year.”
It was true, and I tried to focus on that, but she kept creeping back into my mind. The endless wondering was going to drive me insane if I didn’t get out of here soon. I carried on putting the chairs away, trying to find anything to distract myself. I’d lost count of the nights I’d spent wondering how she was, staring at her contact on my phone, finger lingering over the call button.
“Oh, and she left one more instruction,” Rob added a moment later.
I forced a smile. “What’s that? Defund math and science?”
He let out a laugh, shaking his head. All of those times spent arguing with her across from him in his office came flooding back before he finally replied and erased them all with two simple words.
“Reinstate Mathletes.”
“What?” I spluttered, losing my grip on the chairs I had been trying to lift. My legs almost gave in under me too. “Did she say anything about me?”
“No,” Rob said. “Just she wanted the clubs to be given their funding back. Whoever takes over for Olive can choose whether they want the art club to go forward or not. But in the meantime, the Mathletes should be yours again.”
That woman. Every time I thought she’d left me, she ended up coming right back in some small way.
I didn’t have anything else to say. I didn’t have the words.
“I gotta… I gotta go and set up my next meeting.” The words stumbled out of me, the world tilting ever so slightly on its axis as my head swam. What she had given up for me, for the school and the clubs–it was too much, entirely too much. This big piece of her mom I knew had to be important.
The last time I saw her came flooding back. The melody she’d been playing, so sad and aching, still haunted me. She’d looked so tired and delicate. I missed her, missed her touch and smell and infectious laughter. This time without her had been gray and empty. Would it ever be different now she was gone?
“Sure, I’ll see you around,” Rob said, waving goodbye as I grabbed my rucksack and left, walking down the hallway to the nearest exit. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, not even stopping to think as I scrolled down the contacts, trying to find the one entry under O.
I was done with this distance, done with having her so far away. She had done this and I needed to know why. I scrolled, scanned, then scrolled up again, trying to figure out where exactly O came in the alphabet before it hit me.
I’d deleted her contact.
I’d spent night after night staring at it, fighting the urge to press call and hear her voice. But I knew that’s not what she wanted. She had asked for space and it had been months–months–since I’d last spoken to her. It was clearly over and she was gone. So I’d deleted the contact, trying to kill the temptation to press call and hear her voice again.
What I would’ve done just to know she was okay.
But instead, I’d found it in myself to press delete, and just like that, she slipped through my fingers for the second time.
