Teaching Their Omega novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Snow Day

Forty-one people walked through the snow to the Grange.

They came in stamping and pink-cheeked, in parkas and in bathrobes under coats.

With thermoses and notebooks and one girl carrying a toddler's sled as a seat.

We pulled in every bench from the hall.

I stood at the chalkboard in my navy cardigan with a piece of chalk, and I looked at the faces.

Some of them were nineteen and wide-eyed.

Some were thirty and had been told for ten years that something was wrong with them.

A man of about forty sat in the back with his arms crossed.

In the very front row, shoulder to shoulder at the two small desks nobody else had wanted, sat Declan and Rhett.

Declan had his black notebook open and his pencil sharpened.

Rhett had a fresh notebook of his own and had written LESSON ONE on the top line, with a heart beside it.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning, teacher," said the front row, together.

The hall giggled.

Patsy, perched on the radiator with her red hat on, wolf-whistled.

"Before we begin," I said, "the Handbook stays on the desk."

"You are the experts on you. I'm just the person who has read a lot of the footnotes."

I turned to the board.

I wrote, in large letters, SCENT, and underlined it twice.

"Lesson one," I said. "Who here has been told it's shameful?"

Every hand in the hall went up.

Including mine, and including the two in the front row.

I taught for two hours.

I do not remember all of it.

I remember a girl crying and being passed a handkerchief down four benches.

And I remember Rhett making the whole room laugh with a joke about the Handbook's index, a real one this time, warm and exact.

I remember Declan raising his hand to ask whether the textbook was wrong on page ninety.

And I remember the hall, hushed, waiting for my answer.

"Yes," I said. "It's wrong. Cross it out."

He crossed it out in front of forty-one people.

At noon I dismissed them, and they filed out into the snow.

And Patsy hugged me hard enough to crack a rib before she took her friends out to the sleds.

The Grange went quiet.

Rhett rose from his desk, and locked the door, and turned.

"Teacher," he said.

"Yes."

"We'd like to stay after class."

I looked at the two of them.

I looked at the clock on the wall, and the chalk dust.

And the snow coming down past the tall windows, and the ladder to the loft.

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