Laura Merrin popped an aspirin and washed it down with a gulp of water. Her temples ached and she massaged them. This was yet another headache in a long line of headaches, stemming from the usual and not-so usual proceedings of your average fifth-grade teacher.
It had all started so innocently, really, she thought. The school year had started nearly a month ago, and everyone was in a tizzy because of redistricting. They had lost part of their student body, but gained another crop. It didn’t matter, kids were kids, but today Laura wished they hadn’t redistricted at all. This was her sixth year teaching, and she’d never had parents so worked up over seemingly nothing.
She could not have foreseen the upcoming dramas on the first day of school when she welcomed her new kids. On the whole, they seemed bright, polite and entertaining, all hallmarks of a good year to come.
She had arbitrarily assigned them seats, and had just happened to place Patrick Halpert and Chriselda Schrute next to each other. They were both nice children; Laura knew from her friend Sylvie who taught one of the fourth grade classes that Patrick was a good student, slightly inclined to socialize, but a good student nonetheless. Chrissy was one of the new students bussed in from the further outlying area of the district, but she seemed like a good kid.
Laura had noticed something between them on that first day. It was probably simple friendship, but Patrick had definitely been fascinated when Chrissy had stood up in her “Soldiers for Jesus” camouflage t-shirt and described playing on her dad’s paintball range during Laura’s annual “What I Did Over Summer Break” sharing session.
When she sat down, he had whispered to her, and she had smiled, dimples popping out. Laura had overheard part of the conversation. (fifth graders didn’t realize that teachers develop superhuman hearing) They were discussing Patrick’s outdoor survival summer camp experience. Laura had smiled; all it took to make friends when you were ten was a shared interest in paintballs and building fires from scratch.
That day, she had watched them walk down the hall to pick up their little sisters, happy that Chrissy was adjusting to the new school and was making friends. They’d passed Laura again, waving, Patrick holding his small sister by the hand. Chrissy was followed by a gaggle of four girls with the same strawberry blonde hair who had to be her sisters.
By the second week of school, it was apparent that both had fallen hard for each other. Fifth graders were such horny little buggers that Laura was surprised it had taken them a whole week to make it official. On Thursday, Chrissy had been made captain of the Safety Squad and Patrick had been made captain of the Service Squad, and on Friday, she had passed him a note. Laura had been able to guess the contents, since Patrick had blushed beet red and made a check mark on the paper without looking at Chrissy.
The third week had gone well up until tonight. Laura could tell that Chrissy and Patrick were still ‘going together’ by the way they smiled goofily at each other and by the way the Patrick’s friends seemed awed. Chrissy had impressed them all by bringing in pictures of herself with her jo staff (four feet long as opposed to a bow staff’s six feet) since Laura (not to mention the district) drew the line at a martial arts weapon inside an elementary school.
Tonight had been Curriculum Night, in which parents could come to school to hear all about how the district would be teaching their kids all they needed to know. Laura had expected the normal throngs of parents, meekly nodding along as she outlined her plans to include all of the state standards and benchmarks while preparing their kids for the rigors of middle school. She had expected questions about field trips and standardized testing and plenty of small talk.
She had not expected Dwight K. Schrute to brandish a paper in her face and accuse her of aiding a juvenile delinquent who was after his child.
