Page 64 of Breathing Under Water

“I’m learning jujitsu, so I’m busy,” he says, and then he turns the video back on.

I watch him from the hallway a little longer, noting that the movements he’s making look very far from any sort of martial art.

“Are you going to watch the whole time?” he asks as the video comes to an end. “I still have more of these to do.”

“May I come in and talk with you for a few minutes?” I ask, careful to respect the boundaries that he’s made clear are important to him, like ownership over his bedroom.

He nods, and when I walk to his bed to sit down, he lowers himself in his desk chair, swiveling to face me. Not so long ago, I would have had to tell him to do that, to turn toward me for our conversation. Thinking about how much he’s grown recently, I feel a bittersweet tug in my heart and wonder if I’m actually becoming just like Hollis—a parent who’s no longer needed.

“Why do you want to learn jujitsu?”

“Marvin told me it might help me.” Marvin is one of the middle-aged guys in the IT department at the Y.

“Help you with what?”

“He said it might help me make friends. If other kids know I’m tough, they won’t make fun of me.”

I don’t hate the idea of Leo having some self-defense skills, but I doubt he’s going to learn what he needs to know from watching YouTube in his bedroom.

“If you really want to learn, we could sign you up for a class,” I offer, but I realize my mistake as soon as the words leave my mouth.

“No,” he says, clamming up.

We spent weeks trying to convince Leo to get involved inanother group activity after the fiasco with the swim lessons, and he shot us down every time.

“Is someone making fun of you?” I ask as the rest of what he said registers.

“They didn’t today.”

“What about other days?” No one at school has been able to fill the hole Sebastian left behind, but at some point over the summer, Leo came to terms with the idea of finishing high school as a loner. “Have kids been mocking you?”

“I don’t know.” He’s not deflecting. I understand that he actually doesn’t know what the behavior of the other kids means.

“If you don’t want to take a class, then no class,” I say. “You’re old enough to make your own choices and do what makes you happy. I don’t want to stand in your way. I’ll get out of here so you can get back to work.”

I find Phil sitting at his desk in our home office. He’s updating his email signature with his new professional role listed at the bottom. I fill him in on what’s going on with Neil and the chaos I’ve allowed that man to create with our curriculum.

“So much for being the front-runner for principal,” I say as I flop down on the small loveseat opposite him. “I should have caught those errors before the plan made its way to the board. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get canned.”

“Hardly,” Phil says. “This is your sweet spot, Berry. You’ve been studying curriculum tools since the day you started at Stillwell. No one knows more about cutting-edge educational strategies than you. Never mind triaging complicated situations. Micromanaging isn’t always a bad thing. You know somuch about this field. Fire up those formidable brain cells of yours and get to work.”

It’s just the pep talk I need. Phil’s right. I know exactly what to do.

By the time our emergency meeting is set to begin the next morning, I’ve already taken care of most of the discrepancies. I spent hours on the shared drive, replacing Neil’s broken and incorrect links, connecting PDFs from open educational resources to our curriculum portal, swapping in the right lesson sequences, relabeling one folder after another, realigning everything. When the teachers walk in, I hand out a single sheet titled “Corrected Materials: Ready to Teach Today.” The children of Stillwell Elementary Academy will not suffer any additional gaps in their teaching, not on my watch.

31

McKenna

October 2023

There’s a text waiting for me from Leo.

I haven’t heard from him since that day we went walking around his neighborhood back in July, and truthfully I’ve been a little hurt. But I didn’t think it was my place to reach out to a high schooler whose family didn’t want anything to do with me. Beck had made it clear that he didn’t want any drama in his life, and after everything that happened at Hollyhock, he didn’t think we should see each other again.

Whatever.

It wasn’t even a real date.