Kathleen O'Brien - The Saint

“So.” Winston shifted from one foot to the other and was apparently having trouble deciding where to look. Linda Tremel’s rather large chest seemed to take up too much of his field of vision. “So, Kieran, what time do you head for Richmond in the morning?”

Oh, hell.

Kieran could feel the curiosity emanating from Linda. But what could he do? If he told the truth, that he was going to spend the weekend in Richmond, she’d be giddy with speculation. If he evaded or lied, it would look suspicious.

And it wasn’t suspicious. That he should be heading for a conference in the city where Claire Strickland now lived was a minor coincidence, yes. But Richmond was a big city. Probably two thousand people went there every day without running into Claire Strickland, either deliberately or accidentally. He’d just be number two thousand and one.

“Actually, I’m leaving tonight,” he said as blandly as possible. “The conference starts early in the morning.”

“You’re going to Richmond?” Linda had begun to smile. “Richmond?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m speaking at a coaching conference. I’ll just be there overnight.”

“Are you planning to—”

“No.”

She chuckled. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”

“Yes, I do. And the answer is no. It’s purely a working trip. I won’t be making any social calls while I’m in town.”

Winston looked confused. “But you’ll have the evening free, Kieran,” he said. “You know that time’s your own to do whatever you want. Social calls are fine.”

Kieran laughed. This was becoming the conversational equivalent of gum on your shoe. “Linda’s joking, Win. I don’t want to make any social calls.”

Linda grinned. “Yes, but if you do—”

“I won’t.”

“Okay, fine. But if you do.” She winked at him. “Give her a kiss for me. Anything beyond a kiss, well, then you’re on your—”

Kieran groaned and turned away, which meant he was in the perfect position to glimpse the incoming missile just in the nick of time.

He called out the standard warning. “Heads up!”

Winston, who was seasoned in the ways of mischievous high-school boys, sidestepped instantly. Unfortunately, Linda, who wasn’t, stood there looking confused.

“What—?” She frowned.

A pop, a splat, a splash. And suddenly her lacy white cover-up was splattered from neck to knee with sticky orange liquid. She looked down, horrified.

Somehow Kieran managed not to laugh. He didn’t even smile. He actually tried to feel sympathetic. He didn’t allow himself to believe it had been fate, intervening to spare him any more of Linda’s lip-licking curiosity.

But it had been a lucky shot, hadn’t it?

Principal Vogler, on the other hand, was furious. A courtly man himself, he obviously found pegging a woman with a water balloon to be an outrage. He reached out and snagged the nearest teenage boy, a kid with dark hair and deep blue eyes. “Bedroom” eyes, in fact.

“Come here, young man,” Winston bellowed.

He didn’t wait for the poor kid to say a word. He dragged him by the collar and forced him to face Linda.

“Ms. Tremel, this is Mr. Eddie Mackey. I believe he has something he’d like to say to you.”

THERE MUST BE A LINE from Hamlet for a moment like this. Claire studied her sedate navy-and-white spectator pumps and considered the issue. How about the one that said a person could “smile and smile and be a villain?”

It seemed apt enough. Mrs. Gillian Straine, the principal of the Haversham Girls’ Academy, never stopped smiling. It was how she wooed the best parents, the best girls, the best alums, the best college recruiters. But after almost two years teaching seventh grade here at HGA, Claire had learned how sharp the steel was that lay behind that smile.

Today the metal was in full, lethal force as Mrs. Straine sat at her huge mahogany desk, in her magnificent wood-paneled office, and read a letter of complaint that had just arrived. The letter stated that Miss Claire Strickland was teaching the girls from texts of questionable morality.

The letter was apparently very long—or else Mrs. Straine was a very slow reader. Claire adjusted her modest navy skirt and tried not to be nervous. But Mrs. Straine’s smile was so tight right now her lips had almost disappeared. Not a good sign.

Maybe the better quote was “To be or not to be.” To be or not to be fired.

Finally Mrs. Straine looked up. “This is very troubling,” she said softly. She said everything softly. It forced other people to be perfectly quiet, and to lean in slightly, in a deferential pose, in order to catch her words.

“Is it true, Miss Strickland? You have unilaterally decided to teach Hamlet to your seventh graders?”

“Not the entire play,” Claire said. “Just some of the famous speeches. It’s part of a larger unit on Shakespeare.”

Mrs. Straine took off her reading glasses and tapped them against the letter. “It says here you’ve been telling the children there are such things as ghosts. It says you’ve told them about fratricide and suicide.” She shook her head. “They even accuse you of using the I word.”

Claire frowned. The I word? What on earth was the I word? Insanity? Iago? No, that was Othello.

Iambic pentameter?

Mrs. Straine closed her eyes, apparently grieved that Claire was forcing her to utter it.

“Incest,” she whispered.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

“I didn’t call it incest,” Claire said. “Shakespeare did. Or rather Hamlet did. It’s just a small part of the overall story. You see, Hamlet’s mother marries his uncle—”

“I know what happens in Hamlet, Miss Strickland.”

Claire leaned back in her chair. “Of course you do. I’m sorry.” She’d swallowed her pride in this job so often she’d almost gotten used to the bitter taste. “Then of course you know it isn’t incest with the same connotations we might have today.”

“I don’t believe any of that word’s connotations are socially acceptable,” Mrs. Straine said. She was sitting up so straight her back wasn’t touching the chair. “I honestly would have thought you understood that vocabulary like that has no place in an HGA classroom.”

Claire tried one more time. “But this is Hamlet, Mrs. Straine. This is Shakespeare. Hamlet is taught in classrooms all over the world every day, and—”

Mrs. Straine waved her hand. “We do not judge ourselves by everyone else, Miss Strickland,” she said. “At HGA, the standards are far higher.”

Higher than Shakespeare?

“I’m afraid we must insist that our teachers meet those standards. Every teacher, every day.”

So was this it? Was this where Claire would be told to take her copy of Hamlet and go home? She realized suddenly that she didn’t care very much. Since Steve died, she hadn’t cared about much of anything. But she tried to look earnestly concerned. She did have to earn a living, and HGA at least had the virtue of paying well and recruiting bright, well-behaved students.

“However,” Mrs. Straine went on, “I don’t think we need to overreact. Overall, your performance since coming to HGA has been exemplary. I think it will be adequate merely to place you on probation.”

“Probation?”

Mrs. Straine folded up the letter and placed it in a file marked Strickland, Claire. “Yes. It should not be construed as punitive. It’s merely precautionary. I’ll be keeping a close eye on your work. I’ll need to see your lesson plans daily, of course. After six months, we’ll review the matter and see where we stand.”

Claire understood she’d been dismissed. She stood and nodded—though she drew the line at thanking Mrs. Straine for her tolerance. She looked at the other woman—at her high, tight, extremely sophisticated French braid, her severe Armani suit, her Tiffany-set diamond wedding ring—and she wondered whether there really was no Mr. Straine, as the other teachers sometimes suggested.