Routines and rituals don’t stop easily, no matter how I might have wished. I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and staring down at the hard flat surface of my kidney table. The stack of blank worksheets for my students to do that day was looking an awful lot like a pillow to me in the early morning hours.
“Mr. Gibson?” Mrs Beouf’s shadow fell over me. “Clark? Everything okay?” I looked up at her, feeling all the worse for her presence. “Yikes!” She hunkered down in one of my student seats and slid an Amazon sized mug of coffee, hers, towards me. “You look like hell. Are you okay, hon?”
Hon…she called me hon. A pet name? A childish nickname? She said I looked like hell. Adults didn’t use that kind of language in front of children, did they? I reached for the coffee with both hands and lifted it to my lips. “Oh god!” I nearly gagged. “What’s in this stuff?”
“Nothing.” Beouf took her mug back and took a long, hearty gulp. “It’s just coffee. Black.”
“How do you drink this stuff?!” Even as I said it, I felt the caffeine starting to kick in. Better. Not good. But better. Needed sugar. Lots. Cream too. Maybe caramel. It helped, though.
Beouf offered me another sip. “Your eyes look almost as red as Mrs Zoge’s.” Hearing Zoge’s name invoked woke me up more than even the caffeine. I still wasn’t over her snaking her fingers into my waistband like I was a toddler in need of checking.
She offered me another sip of coffee and I steadfastly refused. “What’s wrong with Zoge?” I asked. “She sick? Baby keeping her up at night?“ It was shady, but the subtle dig at Ivy made me feel better.
Somewhat predictably, the joke went over my colleague’s head. “No. Nothing like that.” She waited and stared at me expectantly. I’m not stupid. I knew she wanted me to ask why Mrs Zoge’s eyes were so red that they looked like an insomniac’s. Problem was I was already in a foul mood, and Zoge’s problems were not anywhere on my list of things to care about. “She’s been crying.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Crying?”
“Crying because of you.”
If the straight black Amazon Prime Coffee hadn’t woken me up, that last part finished the job. “I made Zoge cry?” This had to be some kind of joke. Beouf wasn’t laughing. “How did I make Zoge cry?”
“She’s afraid of you. You scare her.”
I scared her? I scared her? I scared her? Nope. No matter how many different ways I thought of it, the idea didn’t make sense.
My incredulity must have shown plainly. “She’s never had a Little slap her hand away and talk to her like that.”
“Good!” I said. “She had no right to get in my space like that!” I could feel the heat rushing to my face. The idea that I was hurting other Littles by my very existence was draining. The notion that even one of the giants was afraid of me? That was damn empowering! It made me angry remembering the other day with Chaz and Zoge. Anger was an emotion I could get behind, just then.
Beouf held her arms out to me in a gesture of calm and peace. “Clark,” she told me. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand that she sees me as a baby,” I practically spat the b-word out like it was a curse. Not a curse word; a literal curse.
“You’re absolutely right.” I was ready to stand up right there and raise my fist to the ceiling. FINALLY! An Amazon admits it! “And she’s desperately trying not to.”
I stopped myself. “Excuse me?”
“Zoge is Yamatoan,” Beouf said. “So’s Ivy.” Yamatoan? Why did that sound familiar? I didn’t have the words, just a vague sense of unjustified familiarity. I just scraped my hand over my head. Whoosh.