Everything Nice by Ellen Shanman

Author:Ellen Shanman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440337454
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

I’M LOVIN’ IT

Mike was formulating a theory that said the difference between “finding yourself” and being a fuckup was about five years. The twenty-six-year-old who lost his job and moved to Costa Rica was destined to be a surfer. The thirty-one-year-old who fell off the corporate ladder was destined to be a serf. It was wildly unfair of her and probably unrealistic, but being at sea in your twenties can feel so much more forgivable.

Every day that she awoke to stare at the ceiling of an apartment she didn’t pay for, and took the subway to a job she didn’t want, Mike felt a little less like the self she recognized and a little more like her own worst nightmare. Gone were the days when she would greet catcalls with thoughts of “You wish.” Now it was more like, “Who, me?”

She wondered if she looked any different from the outside. It didn’t seem to matter at school, where no one cared how she looked. A week after the party, a note from Grace was waiting for Mike in her mailbox in the teachers’ lounge.“My office. ASAP.”

Though she was slowly acclimating to being summoned to the principal’s office, Mike still felt the ghost of an adrenaline surge each time she entered the waiting room. She almost wished she were being hauled in for “unnecessary roughness” on the lacrosse field again. Those were the days.

Grace, who would someday require surgery to have the phone removed from her ear, was barking once again. “I am looking at an e-mail suggesting that my science teachers should be, and I quote, ‘perfectly comfortable working without visual materials’ for the month it will take to get a case of biology textbooks and wall diagrams. Does that sound reasonable to you? Our children are supposed to be learning human anatomy right now. What are these teachers supposed to do, slice themselves open and point?”

There was a moment of silence during which Grace motioned impatiently for Mike to sit down across from her desk.

“I want you to listen to me carefully, and I will speak slowly to make sure you comprehend. By Friday morning, there will be a human nervous system on display in my eighth-grade biology classroom, and either it will be in a book, or it will be yours. Are we clear?”

She slammed the phone down. “I swear to God, the Dairy Queen fires these people and we hire them.”

Mike laughed.

“And you, you damned crazy person—” Grace slapped the folder Mike had submitted down on the desk. “You want to teach little girls what to do in case of an alligator attack.”

“Just as a bonus lesson.”

“No alligators.”

“Fair enough.”

“Where the hell did you come from?” Grace stared down at Mike as if she had just washed ashore.

“Advertising,” Mike explained.

“I still don’t know why I like you,” Grace said.

“You may not be the only one.”

“Give me one good reason, right now, why the mad ravings in this folder are gonna be more useful to these girls than cooking and cleaning and whatever the hell else Derek Luce was teaching them.

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