Her Best Men

He dragged me to cities I didn’t want to be and postponed the wedding.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a secret life he was living behind closed doors.

We were done.

Now, I was sitting in a classroom I had no business teaching, juggling the numerous phone calls he was sending to my phone, while the students took their pop quiz. Now, the man I called my ex-fiancé was trying to get me to talk. He thought I would come crawling back to him if he sent me gifts.

But those gifts turned into surprise appearances at my apartment. And those appearances that went unanswered turned into angry text messages. And now, those unanswered text messages were turning into angry voice messages he was leaving me every single time I ignored his phone calls.

I needed a serious time out.

The children started bringing their pop quizzes up to the desk and setting them down. I only had seven more minutes until I could release them to go home, and relief cascaded throughout my body. I was ready for Christmas break. I was ready to see my father, my friends and the place I still called home, Castle Rock, Colorado. And finally, I was ready to figure out how the hell I was going to put all of this behind me and follow the dreams I’d once had pulling at my heart strings.

Just as the bell rang to release the students, text messages began to light up on my phone. I put my hand on top of the pop quizzes that were being tossed at me, while trying to ignore the snickering of the students still teasing me.

When I looked at my phone, it wasn’t my ex trying to get ahold of me this time. The Trent brothers were blowing up my phone, wondering when in the world I was coming home. Their jokes and comments had me giggling as I sat there in the quiet of my little classroom.

The Trent brothers had been our neighbors for years. My mother called them the “gaggle of gossips,” mostly because there were six boys, and all of them were prone to running their mouths. They became my solace when my mother died. A rare blood disorder essentially caused her body to turn on itself, and those six boys were my only reprieve from the horrible experience of letting my mother go, far too early.

When she passed, my father and I had troubles bonding. I was a ten-year-old girl going through hormonal fluctuations he didn’t understand, and he was a burly mountain man who chopped wood whenever he was angry. I learned how to play and watch sports in an attempt to bond with him, and in the process, I became fondly attached to the hobby. On nights that got rough, my father and I would watch the latest game he’d recorded. It didn’t matter if it was football, basketball, or even soccer. If it was a sport and people were cheering, he was into it.

That blossomed into a love for playing sports, and that was when the ‘gaggle of gossips’ really played a memorable part of my adolescence. If I got angry, I could count on them to be home to play with me. I’d run them down in football and knock softballs over the edge of the mountain before running all the bases to home. I could outrun them, out-spit them, and out-climb them. Often times, I could throw balls farther and kick balls harder than any one of them could.

What can I say? I tarnished their egos and I was exquisite at it. Lucky for me, we built a strong bond, nevertheless.

And even still, as they sent message after message through the group chat on my phone, they never ceased to make me feel welcomed and warm during a rough time in my life.

“Knock, knock.”

I looked up at my classroom door. “Carol!” I said. “Come on in.”

“Good news,” she said. “If you gave that last quiz today, you don’t need to come in tomorrow.”

“Wait, seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously. Just asked the principal.”

“Oh, thank heavens,” I said. “Is that milkshake for me?”

“Always.”

I met Carol when I started teaching at the school last year. She was a math teacher who, ironically enough, hated math. She was brilliant at it and could run calculations in her head I probably couldn’t even enter into a calculator, but she always proclaimed that numbers never held the same satisfaction that a good fuck did.

She constantly talked about wanting to change her career, because of boredom from teaching.

“Were your students as shitty as mine today?” she asked.

“Yikes,” I said. “Tell me how you really feel.”

“Sorry, but these inner city brats don’t have a filter. And when you blow a spitball at me and then get pissed because I toss my pencil back at you, that doesn’t really make for a decent day.”

“You threw your pencil at a student?” I asked. “What did the principal say?”

She should’ve said ‘way to fucking go’.”

“But?”

“But she actually said I couldn’t do that, and that the school could’ve been sued had the kid gotten hurt.”