Chapter 9

The GT presentation was only supposed to last until 11:00, but it was almost 11:30 before Cutter made his way to Ms. Owen’s room for the fourth grade team meeting. He walked in to see she already had stacks of papers prepared on the table with each of their names on them. Sitting down in front of his stack, he glanced at the others. “Oh, you spell it R-U,” he muttered, noticing the writing on the stack across from him.

Ru sat down in the student’s chair, which she fit in much more comfortably than he did. “Yeah,” she replied, with a shrug.

“Is it short for anything?” He flipped through the papers in his stack, trying to seem nonchalant, but he really needed to know.

“No,” she replied, another shrug.

Cutter raised an eyebrow in her direction.

“It seems you’re not the only one with an unusual first name anymore,” Jane said, taking a seat at the head of the cluster of desks she was using as an office table. “Cutter, you also have a strange first name. Is there any significance behind it?” She was smiling widely, like a politician with an insincere sneer on her face.

“No, just a name,” he replied, taking a turn at shrugging himself.

“Oh, I thought maybe your parents were cattle ropers or something.” Jane laughed at her own little joke, but no one else did.

Mustering his most sincere face, Cutter said, “My parents didn’t name me.”

Jane’s smile faded and her eyes widened.

“I was raised by wolves. Antarctic wolves.”

The two women across from him began to giggle, and Jane seemed stuck between wanting to play it off and join in or being offended. Peer pressure won out and she began to giggle, though it sounded as fake as her eyelashes.

“We can’t all have plain Jane names,” Candice mumbled under her breath.

Something about the way she said it must’ve caught Ru off guard because she started to laugh, even though she was clearly trying not to, and she almost began to choke. Cutter didn’t know if he should chuckle or be concerned. Ru had one hand over her mouth and one across her midsection, attempting to control herself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she managed to squeak out.

“Very amusing,” Jane said, her face showing she felt it was nothing of the sort.

“You okay, there, Ru?” Cutter asked as she began to calm down.

“I’m fine.” She wiped a few tears from her eyes.

“You must have interesting parents, too,” he said, hoping Jane would give him a moment to dig a little deeper before she insisted on starting the meeting.

Ru was no longer laughing. “I guess you could say that.”

It seemed as if he might’ve hit a nerve. He pretended not to notice. “They live around here?”

She cleared her throat. “Uh… I don’t have a dad. My mom lives in Tarrytown.”

“Oh,” he said, thinking of a million follow up questions he probably couldn’t ask right now.

Once again, Candice had a muttered comment. “You’re nice to call Liddy that.”

Ru elbowed her, though not hard, and then turned her attention to Jane. “I have some papers for everyone, too.”

“Right. Well, let’s get started and we’ll see if we can fit that in when we get to what we’re going to be teaching the next few weeks.”

“Some of them are for learning stations and others are for classroom management,” Ru explained.

Jane either didn’t care or was too caught up in what she was about to say to acknowledge her. “Okay, let’s take a look at the curriculum. If you’ll turn to the stack of papers in front of you, you’ll see a colored map of our first nine weeks’ objectives.”

Cutter took a look at the stack of papers and tried to pretend like he had any idea what Jane was talking about. He was hopeful that his cover story would help. His resume said he’d been teaching fifth grade math before, so if he had questions about fourth grade reading, surely they would think that was natural, wouldn’t they? He hoped so. Otherwise, he was going to have to fake it, and a lot of kids were going to wish they had a different teacher. But then, they would soon enough.