He glances at the stack of papers. “Let me see that.”
I hand it over. He looks at a page of simple three-letter sight words. “She can already read.”
“I know.” That’s easy enough if you watch her play her games. She also snuck a look at my text messages one time. Who is Noah and why does he want you to call him back? “She’s still supposed to draw lines from the words in butterflies to the flowers where they belong.”
“Christ.” He turns the page. From here I can see the giant circles forming a caterpillar that have giant numbers in them. “She can already do addition.”
“And subtraction.” It only took one time playing Monopoly with her before I realized she had the mind of a landlord. She could calculate the amount of rent due with two houses before I even realized I’d landed on her property. “She still needs to write the sum at the end of the caterpillar. It’s not a question of how smart she is; it’s about doing the work.”
“The work is a joke.”
“She’s six.”
“Even more reason she shouldn’t be made to endure this pedestrian drivel.”
“Listen, she’s not a duchess being forced to mingle with the masses. She’s a child who’s hurting and needs something more from you than a rude remark.”
He gives me a grin. It’s sudden and unexpected, that flash of white teeth. He looks almost… handsome when he does that. As quickly as it appears, it’s gone. “You would make an excellent schoolteacher,” he murmurs, looking down my body with appreciation. “I’ve seen videos that start this way. And you could probably earn more than being a nanny.”
Only then do I realize that I’m standing. Both my hands are on his desk, and I’m attempting to loom over him to help make my point. I sit down—hard.
Porn. He means porn.
Heat suffuses my cheeks, but I’ve lost all of my indignancy. Is he flirting with me? Or mocking me?
He leans forward. His hands steeple. “This is simple. You do the work.”
I stare at him. Is this another one of his crude jokes? “Excuse me?”
He glances down. “Here, you draw a line between this bee and this flower. And here on this worksheet, you add up these numbers and put the answer in the caterpillar’s asshole. They’ve got a real garden theme going on here, don’t they?”
“I can’t do the work for her.”
“I see your point,” he says, turning the page. “This coloring page is going to really stretch you. Color all the ladybugs that have a number less than ten. I mean, which way do you go? Realism? A nice red with black dots? Or do you go with other colors?”
“I can’t do the work because it’s hers.”
“Do you think the teacher’s going to figure it out? Maybe you should get one of the caterpillar ass numbers wrong just to be safe.”
I glare at him. “It’s not ethical.”
“Life’s not ethical, sweetheart. Or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
I hate that I know what he means. Going to sleep hungry so the children could be fed, giving money to the bullies so I could walk away relatively unharmed. Other people my age are going to college with a nice fund maybe supplemented with a few loans. Their parents are driving them to the dorm rooms, trunks full of new sheets and dishes from Ikea. I don’t want to become bitter about it, but it hurts. God, sometimes it just hurts to keep going.
“It will teach her the wrong thing,” I whisper. “She knows she has this work piled up. If it suddenly goes away, if she finds out that I did it, she’ll learn the wrong thing.”
“And the butterflies and caterpillars are teaching her the right thing?”
“It’s better than lying.”
“I built a billion-dollar company before I turned thirty. Do you think I did that by coloring in the lines? By filling out little worksheets? The world doesn’t give a fuck about first grade.”
“Then what about next year? She’ll be behind.”
“Because she won’t know about writing inside caterpillars? She already knows how to read and count and add numbers. She doesn’t need the fucking cuteness.”
“I’m not the one who set the curriculum. The school did. The school you picked.”
His nostrils flare. Dark emotion flashes through his eyes. “She’s already lost her parents, because of me. Because of me. I’m not going to make her do a fucking butterfly just so I can give myself a pat on the back about her goddamn education.”
I blink, taken aback by his outburst. It’s maybe the first real thing he’s ever said to me. I realize this is not only about her grief. It’s about his. “Why would you say it’s because of you?”
He tosses the papers back at me, and I have to jump quickly to catch them before they fly around the room. “Do the work,” he mutters. “Make her do it. Make the crows outside do it. See if I fucking care who does the worksheet, but get her to pass first grade—or get on a plane back to Houston and say goodbye to your salary.”
CHAPTER NINE
I wake suddenly, sitting up in the dark, sweating.
Something happened. A dream? I can’t remember anything. Only blackness.
The moon hangs high in my window. I peek at my phone. Two thirty a.m. There are a couple unread texts from Noah from our last conversion. Don’t do it, he says. It’s a fucking trap. The rich people trap. They get people like us to do their work for them.
It’s not like that, I type back with a swipe of my finger. It’s not about money.
He should be asleep, especially with an early shift at the grocery store tomorrow morning. But he replies back right away. It’s always about money.
I lie back down, wondering what woke me up. I keep my phone on silent, so it wasn’t his texts. The ocean rumbles outside, beating against the cliffside like a drum. It’s a soothing noise. Nothing that would startle me.
A sound comes, a sharp cry.
I sit up again and slide my feet to the freezing cold wooden floor.
By the time the sound comes again I’m already stepping into the hallway. A light comes on a few doors away, and I take a small step back. Mr. Rochester emerges from his room looking rumpled and sleepy and somehow more human than ever before. He’s wearing a plain white T-shirt that hugs muscles I’ve already seen. The plaid flannel pajama pants hang low.
He enters Paige’s room, and her crying quiets.
I’m not sure why I don’t just enter the room and announce myself, but I find myself creeping forward. Maybe I want to see what they’re like together, without me in the middle. Or maybe I want to give him a chance to build a rapport with her. He may have been fighting with her tooth and nail before I arrived, over Pop-Tarts and sweaters, but at least he had a relationship.
Now he mostly manages to avoid her.
“What’s wrong?” he says, his voice low. “Did you have the dream again?”
A sniffle. “It was different this time.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Silence, where I can imagine her shaking her head no.
“Do you think you can go back to sleep?”