There hadn’t been sleep the night before. With the cleaning, coaching, fighting and me staring down the bars of a cot, sleep wasn’t going to come. I’d ironed and pressed my best outfit. The slightest wrinkle might be cause for Brollish to invoke the bullshit maturity clause in my contract.
The first hour at work had been easy. Sleepwalking. Check in. Get the kids. Get breakfast. By hour two I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was worried over nothing. Maybe Janet would turn in the essay and Brollish would see that it was a stupid story fabricated by a stupid kid.
It was not quite 9:30 when Brollish walked in with a strange Amazon and asked to speak with me in private. “Not to worry, we have a substitute,” she told me. Brollish was all quiet smiles. I don’t know that I’d ever seen her smile.
So it began…
“Is this going to be a while?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Brollish held open the door and gestured for me to follow. “I think it’s best if we spoke in private.”
On my way out I spotted something poking out of the stranger’s purse, something white and rectangular. “Tracy!” I called out, hoping I didn’t sound as suspicious as I felt. I raised my hands into the air and clapped my pointer and middle fingers to my thumb twice, like I was playing invisible castanets. My assistant saw the signal and followed my gaze to the Amazon’s purse. “Got it, boss!”
I started walking alongside Mrs. Brollish, walking quietly in the open campus back towards her office. “What was that?” she asked. She’d tried to make it sound like she was making small talk. In reality, the interrogation was already under way.
“Crab clapping,” I said, and repeated the motion I’d made. “We’re working on manners and offering it up as an alternative to giving a presenter loud applause. My students don’t really have the dexterity yet for snapping their fingers.” This of course, was a complete fabrication. The motion I’d made was really a bastardization of the sign language motion for ‘diaper’.
The proper sign involved doing that motion over my beltline, like the tapes on a diaper, but Beouf and Tracy agreed that might be too obvious a warning. The coaching was paying off. And yes, Tracy was going to do a lesson teaching all of my small fries about crab clapping as a polite way to applaud a performer when it was time to still be quiet.
Brollish didn’t speak further until we’d gotten to her office. She went to her desk and sat down behind it. I went and climbed into the chair across from it. “Some serious accusations have come to my attention, this morning, Mr. Gibson.”
“If this is a matter of contract,” I said. “I’d like Union Representation, please.”
“Don’t you want to know what the accusations are, or who is making them?”
I didn’t smile. I didn’t frown. I took a breath. Every instinct I’d developed was both screaming at me that this was a trap and telling me that I had to find a way to wriggle out of the trap right now. That’s not how this was going to go down.
“I understand that you’re doing your job, ma’m,” I said. “However if these accusations are serious, I think it would be best if I had appropriate representation.”
“That would be Mrs. Beouf.”
“Correct.”
“I can’t call her out of her classroom during school hours for this.” Yet Brollish could yank me out of mine. Typical Amazon. So typical, we figured it was exactly what would happen. By my own estimation Brollish, was more than twice as clever as Forrest, and not quite half as clever as me. That’s the thing about authority; you don’t have to be clever or even particularly good at your job to win.
