I never get much sleep after that dream.
It didn’t help that I was stressed about work, too. I knew my second evaluation was happening sometime this week, and since my principal, Anne Henderson, had decided that my fall semester eval was potentially biased, there was a lot riding on this one.
As I dragged my gritty-eyed, cement-filled body out of bed that morning, all I could do was pray she didn’t come today. Not that praying had done me a ton of good in the past, but hey, first time for everything.
I’d only just gotten my coffee brewing when I heard the front door to my house open and shut. I didn’t bother looking to see who it was. It could only be Katie.
Katie was a junior in high school and still lived with my parents, but she stopped by at the end of her morning runs a few times a week.
“Good morning, good morning!” Katie practically sang as she came down the hall to join me in the kitchen. “Rise and shine, brother dearest!”
I gave her a wry glance as I pulled my favorite mug down off the shelf.
“I’ve got the rise part down, but I think I’m gonna need some coffee before I can do any shining.” I pulled a glass down from the cabinet and handed it to her. “How you doing, kiddo?”
“Good. Sweaty,” Katie said, taking the glass and filling it with water from the tap. She bent down to pet Gretchen, my cat, who was twining herself around Katie’s ankles. “And that’s nonsense, by the way. You shine from every pore just by existing. You’re a perfect, beautiful angel of a big brother, and I’m extremely lucky to have you.”
“You’re chipper today.” I waved her over to the table, then moved to the fridge to grab breakfast for both of us. “Wait a second. You’re not just chipper. You’re complimentary.” I narrowed my eyes and looked over my shoulder. “What do you want?”
“Must I want something?” Katie smiled innocently over the top of her water glass. “Isn’t it enough for it to be a beautiful spring day and for me to be filled with the simple joy of being alive?”
“Maybe for you.” I dumped an armload of fruit, bagels, and yogurt containers onto the table, then went back to the fridge for cream cheese. I tossed it on the table along with a butter knife, then sank into my chair and rubbed at my temples.
“Rough night?” Katie asked.
“You could say that.”
“Bummer.” Katie gave me a concerned look as she peeled the rind off an orange. Gretchen jumped up on the table and sniffed at the peel before recoiling, her fluffy white fur going spiky, as though the orange had personally offended her. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Not particularly.” A little ding announced that the coffee was ready. “Oh, thank God. I think I’m going to need to chug this whole pot.”
“As long as you make me a second one, I won’t complain.” Katie grinned. “As an extra favor, I won’t even tell dad that you took the Lord’s name in vain, you heathen.”
I snorted as I grabbed a second mug for her, and milk from the fridge. Our dad was the minister of Adair’s fastest-growing, and most conservative, church, and he had strong beliefs about—well, pretty much everything.
Honestly, according to my dad, I really was a heathen, since I’d stopped going to church as soon as I’d moved out after high school. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in something bigger than us. I had to. Some days, the belief that there was some purpose to life was the only thing that got me out of bed.
But what that ‘something bigger’ was—that was where things got a little fuzzy. Not your traditional fire and brimstone loving god, and definitely not my dad’s version, who thought women were inherently untrustworthy, gay people were an abomination, and that parents were allowed to hit their kids to keep them in line.
If I weren’t determined to stay in Katie’s life, I would have cut ties with my parents years ago. But my childhood and teenage years had been hellish enough. I didn’t want Katie to go through what I had. And so my father and I had reached a tense, unspoken agreement.
As long as I kept my mouth shut about his opinions when I was in their house, I was allowed to come to Sunday dinners, and Katie could drop by my place whenever she wanted. And as long as my dad restrained himself when it came to Katie, I wouldn’t report his more…aggressive parenting techniques to anyone outside the family.
It wasn’t right. I knew that. But it was the best I could do.
“So come on,” Katie said as I gulped down my first swallow of coffee. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I said I didn’t want to talk about it?”
“You did. I’m just ignoring that part.” She reached across the table to grab a yogurt, stopping to flick my hand on the way. “Come on, talk therapy’s supposed to be a good thing, right?”
“Funny, I must have missed the part where you became a board-certified psychologist.”
“Guess you’re not a very good brother after all. But you know how you can make up for it…”
I sighed. I didn’t mind talking with Katie in general. But I didn’t want to burden her with work stuff, and the idea of telling her about Connor was just laughable. Ten years later and I still hadn’t told a soul about what had happened between him and me. I wasn’t about to start with my seventeen-year-old sister.
I just wished the dream hadn’t been such a gut-punch. Hadn’t left me feeling like I’d lost him all over again. Some things, you just never got over.
Still, Katie was watching me with concerned eyes as she shoveled yogurt into her mouth, and if I didn’t say something, she’d just keep pestering me about it. Gretchen pranced across the table, and I pulled her into my lap as I tried to figure out how to word my response. I’d been a little skeptical about adopting her at first, but Deacon, Connor’s older brother, had been desperate to offload some of the stray kittens his daughter had taken in. Now, I couldn’t imagine life without her.
“Work,” I said, finally. “Anne’s doing my second eval sometime this week, but she won’t tell me exactly when, because you’re not supposed to know in advance. And the further into the week we get, the more my brain has decided that insomnia and nightmares are the best way to prepare for it.”
It would be okay. It had to be, because the alternative wasn’t an option. I just had to teach like normal and trust that would be enough.
And Anne probably wouldn’t even show up today. The fifth graders had a field trip, and there was that testing report she was working on. It was only Wednesday. Surely she’d do it later this week.
Katie frowned. “Didn’t you win that teaching award last year? You’re gonna do great.”
“I was nominated,” I corrected her. “I didn’t win. And that’s not—I mean, yes, that was nice and all, but things are a little different this year.”
That was putting it mildly. Ever since Anne Henderson had taken over as Adair Elementary’s principal, going to work had felt like trying to cross a firing range unscathed. I never knew when the shots were going to come, but I knew she was aiming for me.
“But it’ll be fine.” I took a deep breath. “One way or another, it’ll be over by the end of the week.”