Her All Along

She shrank in size, hugging herself and dropping her gaze and blushing in embarrassment, and I felt awful for causing such a reaction in her, but we needed some boundaries.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

I sighed heavily and slumped down in my seat, and I scrubbed at my face.

Fuck my life.

I had to elaborate with her. Otherwise, she might take it too personally, and she was clearly going through a sensitive period.

“Can you be open about this with Mary and Willow?” I started by asking.

“Yes.” She nodded stiffly, visibly uncomfortable. That made two of us. The difference was, the topic itself hadn’t been awkward for her until I made it so. “Mom’s helpful and understanding, and Willow gets it. She has the same hypersexual periods.”

“Hypersex…” I felt the air leave my lungs, and I planted my forehead against the table.

Hypersexual periods.

Brain aneurysm!

“What?” she cried out, at a loss. “It’s common for people on the spectrum, Avery.”

“Okay—fuck, I’m sorry.” I groaned internally and wished the ground would swallow me whole. All right, time to get through this. I took a breath and straightened in my seat, and I almost cracked when I saw she had tears in her eyes. “I know I’m making this worse, hon. It’s proof that you should talk to them instead of me. Where sex is concerned, I’m no different from your actual brothers.” I pleaded with her to understand where I was coming from. “When you turned thirteen, you told me to stop calling you Pipsqueak, but the thing is, you’ll always be Pipsqueak to me. You’ll always be the sweetheart who skipped over at four in the morning in your My Little Pony pajamas and asked me random things about life.”

It gutted me that she was growing up right before my eyes. And… I swallowed hard, realizing that part of it was because each new “adult” development in her life took her away from me. Summers were for shopping for bikinis and going to the beach with her friends. Weekends were for going to the mall and buying makeup and bras and fucking tampons. Nights were for texting with boys and…yeah.

She finally made eye contact, and she sat there and chewed on her thumbnail. She observed me as her embarrassment faded.

“Okay,” she said eventually. “I get it. I think. We’re in a weird space.”

I tilted my head. “How do you mean?”

“Like, an in-between conventional boxes kind of area. We’re not friends, yet we are. We’re not brother and sister, yet we are. We’re not family, yet… We have our own box, and that’s okay.”

Our own box. I liked that.

“In the end, we’re Mister and Pipsqueak,” she finished.

I smiled. “We are. And we’ll find our way to navigate that space.”

Ten

“Don’t forget to check your attendance,” I reminded them. Again.

These young minds…

They trickled into the classroom wearing matching Friday grins, already programmed to believe that life happened on the weekends. That was approximately 104 days out of the year. Less than a third of your lifetime. And the rest…? Time wasted in monotony.

I sat back against my desk, noting that Keira was here. I’d heard through the faculty grapevine that she’d lost her parents in a car accident over the summer. Keira’s older sister had been my student two years ago.

I could relate to the lethargy in her dull gaze.

Sandra, also our school counselor’s daughter, brushed past me with a flirty smile. “Happy to finally have you as my teacher, Mr. Becker.”

Whore.

I nodded once, then pushed off the desk to get behind it.

Grabbing a whiteboard marker, I waited for everyone to simmer down. Then I walked over to the door to close it and snatch the attendance list that was attached to a clipboard on the wall.

“All right. I trust no one got knocked up over the summer. Well done.” I returned to my desk and drew a line under the words I’d written on the board. “By a show of hands, how many here have posted anything political on a social media platform?”

“We’re gonna jump right in?” one of the boys asked, incredulous. It would take some time before I learned their names, but there was always one student who expressed shock about not “easing” into things after a long break. This wasn’t middle school. “Mrs. Sanders just talked about our schedule.”

“So, you’ve already had one teacher who was gentle with you.” I cocked my head at him, not amused by the laughter that erupted. “Since you’re concerned about what we’re going to do this semester, you can hand these out.” I tapped the marker against a stack of papers on my desk. “And these…” Another stack of papers.

Because yeah, I was the guy who gave them a test on the first day.

There were groans and complaints and curses, most of them directed at the guy they called Cody. As if I weren’t going to hand out these tests eventually anyway.