Chapter 8

"I knew you'd be good at this," said Bob, when the last kid was out of the room.

She turned to him. The discussion had made her think, and come to some decisions too. "I still have a crush on you," she blurted.

It caught him completely unawares. "You do?"

"Yes, and we have to do something about it." She said it very firmly.

"All right," he said. "What do you suggest? You know I'll cooperate in any way. I'd hate to ask Horace to reassign you, but if that's what you want then I'll do it."

"I don't think it needs be quite that radical," she yipped.

"OK, then, I'll follow your lead. Where shall we go to talk about this?"

"Why do we need to go anywhere?" she asked.

"You want to discuss this here? In school?"

"Why not? It's where it all happened."

"Oh," he said. "Good point." He sat on the edge of his desk. "I'm all ears."

"This is no laughing matter, Mr. Hawkins," she said, frowning.

"I'm not laughing, believe me. I'm taking this just as seriously as you are."

"I was afraid you'd laugh," she said, uncertainly.

He looked at this complicated woman who had upset his normal, sedate, almost boring world. He'd dreaded getting a student teacher, then been delighted when it turned out to be Cee Cee. Since then the proverbial pendulum had swung both ways. Now it looked like it was on the side of things that was stressful, rather than joyful. It was obvious, from her tone, that she didn't WANT to have a crush on him. He knew she was down on men, and what seemed most important now was just maintaining a GOOD relationship with her, even if that meant a sterile one. Like her, he felt like something needed to be done, just to clear the air and so they'd both know what the deal was. He'd made a confession of his own, but she had been so tipsy at the time that she hadn't remembered it. He toyed with the idea of saying it again, just to make them even. He decided that might not be fair to her and didn't.

"I'll never laugh at you," he said. "If nothing else, it's flattering." It was much more than merely flattering, but he wasn't going to complicate her life by telling her that. "So, what shall we do?"

Enduring confused and conflicting emotions, it wasn't surprising that Cecelia reverted to her recent habits. Classifying them both as 'unavailable' would remove the desire ... wouldn't it? She tried to think of all the reasons they were unavailable. First among them was the fact that she just couldn't get past the concept that he was her teacher. Four years ago that had been part of the excitement. Now it was a hindrance. There were ethical problems with having a relationship. There wasn't any policy that forbade relationships between teachers, but it was frowned on. And she was only a student teacher anyway, so for all she knew there WERE policies against that. Then there was the age difference. Again, four years ago that had been part of the thrill. But now he seemed so much wiser that he seemed a lot older than she felt. And, while he had expressed appreciation for her as a female of the species, that was just a kindly older man encouraging a young woman ... or at least that's what she tried to convince herself.

Most humans don't do well in a constant state of flux. They crave some semblance of order in their lives, a pattern they can depend on to deliver a modicum of stability. That is particularly true of relationships, which they want to be well defined and trustworthy, in terms of what they expect from each other. Sometimes, when a relationship is tumultuous, they will introduce artificial strictures into the association in an effort to force some kind of stability.

"It's just the remnants of a silly school girl crush," she said. Her voice seemed shaky and she cleared her throat. "I don't even know why I told you about it."

"It's obviously bothering you," he said. "I mean you don't want to have these feelings, right?"

Her mind screamed that she DID but her voice said, "No. It's not professional. It makes me feel like I'm still in high school."

That cemented in his head that his own romantic and lustful thoughts about her were counterproductive, and he resolved to resist them even harder.

"Well we ARE both professionals," he said. "I can already tell that you're going to do fabulously as a teacher, so maybe if we just concentrate on the professional aspects of our relationship it will be a little easier for you. I confess I still perceive you as a student sometimes. I'll work on that."

"Good," she said, more or less firmly. At least there was a direction in which to move.

"All right then," he said, trying to sound perky and upbeat. "See you Monday."

"Yes," she said.

Kids may be ignorant, in terms of lacking as much education as older people, but that doesn't mean they're stupid. The ability to sense another person's mood isn't something that's taught in a classroom. It's absorbed through something very much like osmosis, as a child is exposed to the psychic energy of emotional situations during the formative years.

On Monday morning, therefore, almost all the kids in the class noticed that something was wrong between their teachers. The two adults who, last week, had been relaxed and smiled and spoke with such energy and passion about history, were now unsmiling, stiff depositories of information that came out in sterile bits and pieces. The two had always referred to each other as "Mr. Hawkins" and "Miss Carter," but when they said it this week, it sounded meaningless, somehow. The mood was subdued all day.

It stayed that way for the rest of the week as Bob and Cecelia clamped down hard on their emotions. Their verbal interaction was precise and stiltedly polite. They rarely looked at each other and, when the kids left, they often left with them.

Since the subject matter for the week was the United Nations and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a second world power, and since neither subject was particularly exciting in and of itself, the teachers eventually realized something was wrong too.

Katrina nodded off on Tuesday, and Brad actually fell so hard asleep that he tumbled out of his seat on Wednesday. Both Bob and Cecelia paid closer attention to the students then, and saw a lot of doodling and staring out of windows going on.

It was on Friday, when Cecelia saw Haley Simpson pass a note to Lucy Schwarz, that things came to a head. She stood up. Bob, lecturing at the moment, didn't seem to notice as she walked down the aisle and held out her hand to Lucy. Lucy had been in the act of opening the folded paper and hadn't read it yet, but there was nothing she could do. She handed it to Cecelia, who opened it, read it, refolded it, and returned to her seat. Lucy looked at Haley, who had her hand over her eyes.

The last fifteen minutes of the class was a pop quiz, which drew groans from all the kids. When the bell rang Bob collected the papers as the students filed out.

He glanced at Cecelia. He almost looked away because she was so achingly beautiful, but controlled it. "Anything interesting in that note?"

She tore her eyes off the cleft in his chin and handed him the note, which was still in her hand. He opened it.

"I'm so bored I feel like I'm going to pass out. I can't wait for the bell to ring. Want to go do something interesting after class?"

"Well," he sighed. "So much for grabbing their attention and keeping them riveted."

"She's right," sighed Cecelia. She blinked and looked startled.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, guardedly. "I hate to say this, and it's certainly not a reflection on your teaching ... but I've been bored all week."

"This is a tough segment," he said. "There's nothing very sexy about the UN, and the wall came down before these kids were born. Comrade Putin is just now starting to repeat history in that part of the world, but the terror Americans felt back then isn't part of that yet."

"Maybe that's it," she said, listlessly. "Are we going to grade those now?" She looked at the papers in his hand.

"I'll do them later," he said. "I don't feel like it right now."

"I'm part of this team too," she said.

"I know that." There was a little heat in his voice. "I just don't feel like it right now, OK?"

"I don't have anything to do tonight," she said. "Or tomorrow," she added.

"I don't have a key to the building," said Bob. "The football team will probably be here tomorrow, though."

"Let's just do it at your house," she said.

"Is that proper?" he asked, feeling like he was being peevish. "I'm sorry," he followed up. "Maybe I'm going a little overboard on this." He didn't have to say what "this" was. They both knew. "This" had occupied most of their concentration for a week.

"Maybe we're both going a little overboard," she sighed. "Whatever we're doing, this has been a miserable week."

"That's a little harsh, don't you think?" Bob thought about it. "OK, I'll admit it hasn't been the best week we've had."

His comment could have been taken in several ways, including the way he meant it, which was a simple admission that it was a tough week. What Cecelia heard, though, was really what amounted to very few of the words in that sentence. What she concentrated on was "week we've had." The importance of that was the "we" in the phrase, because her subconscious mind had been wanting there to be an "us" all along. When he lumped the two of them into that little two-letter word, something clicked in her mind and, suddenly, there really was an "us."

It wasn't a paradigm shift in her thinking or anything like that, but it was a small change, much like a tiny pebble rolling to a new position on a downhill slope. The first result of that shift was that she was more convinced than ever that the TWO of them should grade those papers.

"Seven O'clock tonight?" she asked. "Your house?"

"OK," sighed Bob. It was the first time all week he'd felt hopeful about anything, even if he didn't think about it that way.

When a pebble shifts, it acts on other pebbles. The physics of it is pretty simple. Force is applied and the object impacted reacts. That object moves, impacting others and so on. It sounds benign, but it's how avalanches get started.

When Cecelia arrived at Bob's house ten minutes early, still dressed in the blouse and skirt she had worn to school that day, it was because some part of her was impatient to get there. Bob was ready for his visitor early too, for the same reason. On the surface, the mountain was stable, the pebbles at rest. There was an undercurrent of emotion, but it was well dampened.

If we can take the analogy a step further and call emotions pebbles of a sort, the pebbles started moving around as Bob and Cecelia graded the results of the pop quiz. The first set of tests were shocking. As they graded more and more, their emotional levels fluctuated. By the time they were done it looked like the kids hadn't heard anything all week.

"This is awful!" complained Cecelia. Bob had seen these kinds of results in the past, but not for a few years. HE knew what they meant. They meant that the teaching had been substandard. He had done all the teaching that week, so he was ready to bear the weight of the problem. His primary emotion was depression. He knew it would pass, and that he'd deal with this problem, but right about then he was depressed.

"This is an example of piss poor teaching," he sighed.

Cecelia's emotions were at a much higher level. It wasn't supposed to work this way! She KNEW he was a good teacher, and it upset her more than she realized when she heard him run himself down.

"You might be a lot of things, but one thing you aren't is a piss poor teacher," she said firmly.

"Thanks," he said, feeling a little better. "But the truth is that's what this means. We didn't ... I didn't present the material in a memorable way. It's just that simple. It can be fixed. That's one of the reasons we give tests like this. They expose problems."

"But what happened?" she asked. "We were doing so well. The kids were all interested and taking part. Then this week, everything fell apart. I don't understand what..." She stopped suddenly. Bob could see white all the way around her pupils. "This is all my fault," she moaned.