Chapter One

Three Months Later

Jeff was in a funk. He had turned into such a sad sack since he and Manny had broken up. He knew it. His friends knew it. Heck, even his students had started figuring it out. His apartment, no longer his and Manny’s apartment, was in complete disarray. There were clothes scattered everywhere with no rhyme or reason. Every morning he had to sniff every article to determine what was the cleanest and throw it in the dryer to get out all the wrinkles, like he had when he was student teaching back in college. He couldn’t afford a new bed, but he couldn’t sleep in the old one without getting angry, so he spent most of his nights on the torn leather sofa that his sister had gifted him after her cats had destroyed it. He was barely eating, and anything he did manage to eat had little or no nutritional value.

He knew he shouldn’t be so affected by a guy who had literally cheated on him in his own bed on the day of their two-year anniversary, but he couldn’t help it. He was starting to feel like he would never find the man of his dreams. He was a thirty-five-year-old openly gay man in South Carolina. He lived in the most liberal city in South Carolina, but that wasn’t saying much. His options were still pretty slim. He had hit the “feeling sorry for yourself” stage of the relationship mourning process, and he had no idea what to do about it.

So, naturally, he did what he always did when a problem arose in his personal life. He ignored it completely and threw himself into work in an attempt to overcompensate. Currently, he was working on the rubric for an extra credit poetry assignment. It was the only thing he could think of since he’d already graded everything on his table and written all of his lesson plans for the rest of the semester. He was contemplating subject matter when there was a light knock on his classroom door.

“Come in,” Jeff shouted, not looking up from his computer screen.

“Mr. Martin?” said a familiar voice.

Jeff looked up to find Danielle, drama club president and part of his admittedly long list of favorite students, looking down at him. She had her hands folded in front of her and her knees pressed together, like she had a secret that she was dying to spill. There was a hopeful—and mischievous—glimmer to her eyes that made Jeff the slightest bit nervous.

“What’s up Dani?” He asked, bracing himself for chaos.

Danielle was one of the most determined people he’d ever met. Once she got something stuck in her head, she would stop at nothing until the dream became a reality. It was one of the things Jefferson admired about her, but that didn’t mean her ideas never went south. Sometimes they went south of south. Sometimes they landed near the South Pole. Like the time she decided to steal an old pallet off the side of the road to use as scrap wood, and ended up infesting the whole school with termites.

Still, her charm and enthusiasm were infectious. He’d adored her ever since she auditioned for the role of Juliet Capulet in her freshman year. She had gotten up on stage wearing a floor length white nightgown embroidered with roses and vines and her long braids meticulously arranged in a crown on top of her head. She recited the words to a rap song he’d never heard of before, but it mirrored the sentiment of the play so perfectly. Each word out of her mouth sounded like it belonged to her and her alone.

There were so many promising, more experienced, actors that year—this was before the drama department’s funding had been cut down to almost zero—but Jeff hadn’t been able to get Danielle’s audition out of his head. He’d given her the lead, and she’d knocked it out of the park despite the angry and jealous whisperings that “Juliet should be played by a white girl.”

She’d managed to win most of these haters over in the end though. She was just that charismatic.

“I was wondering if you’d come with me to the drama room?” she was saying. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

Jefferson closed his laptop painfully slowly.

“Okaaaaaaay,” he said, standing up.

She was definitely up to something. No use speculating. Better to just get it over with.

He followed Danielle to the drama room, which was really just an old green room that they stuffed with extra chairs and desks to use as a meeting space when the stage was being occupied by other clubs. Her heels, which technically weren’t dress code appropriate, clip-clopped loudly on the hard linoleum as they wound through the maze of hallways shooting off the auditorium. She paused in front of the door and gave a soft little knock with her knuckles, playing it off as a completely normal thing to do. Then she turned the handle and stepped inside without bothering to turn on the lights.

Frowning, Jeff followed her.

“So, what did you want to ask me...about?”

The sentence died on his lips as the lights came on, revealing the entire drama club decked out in costume. They’d hung streamers and twinkle lights all throughout the room and decorated it with various other bits and bobs they must have dragged down from the loft.

“Surprise!” the dozen of them shouted as one.

“What’s all this?” Jeff asked, dumbfounded.

“It’s a ‘we’re sorry you got your heart broken’ costume party,” said Danielle as she grabbed hold of his hand and led him to a chair.

Jeff sat down and two more kids, Kendra and Tariq, came up to place a top hat and feather boa on him.

“How do you guys know I got my heart broken?”

A sophomore named Jackson shrugged.

“You’ve been acting like a sad sack for weeks. What else could it be?”

Jeff frowned at him. He didn’t much care for being perfectly pegged by a fifteen-year-old boy who was wearing a T-shirt with the words, “Made You Look” emblazoned on the front.

“There are lots of reasons for being a sad sack,” Jefferson defended. “What if my cat had just died?”

“Do you even have a cat?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Well in that case,” Jackson responded, “I guess we’d be having a hypothetical kitty memorial.”

Jeff looked around the room from face to face. Everyone was there. Even the freshmen and the kids who sometimes floated in and out of the group. They were all smiling down at him hopefully. He couldn’t believe they’d done all this for him. Sure, they still drove him crazy from time to time, but they really were the sweetest kids. This was one of the many reasons he became a teacher; to connect with people before adulthood grabbed them by the horns and crushed their spirits and turned them into raging assholes.

“You guys didn’t have to do this,” he said softly, voice choked with emotion.

“We had to do something,” said Enrique, their man ‘behind the scenes’ guy.

“Yeah,” Danielle agreed. “We couldn’t stand seeing you so sad. It was pitiful.”

Jeff cleared his throat and took a moment to wipe a tear out of his eye. Leslie, a very shy sophomore, gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said finally, when he felt composed enough to do so.

The kids crowded around his chair and gave him an awkward, seated group hug.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Danielle said. “Let’s party!”

After that, a few of the more affluent kids took it upon themselves to order food and drinks for everyone. The rest spent a few moments digging out and setting up various party games that they’d clearly been working on for days in advance. A senior named Leanne set up a couple of Bluetooth speakers in a corner and appointed herself as DJ.

As they were waiting for the food to arrive, Jeff and the kids got started on a rousing game of charades—nobody was more passionate about charades than theater people. All of the clues were created by Rin and Jessica, and had some relation to teaching or Jefferson in general. He had to admit, it was pretty hysterical watching the lengths they were willing to go just to act out some of his favorite words and phrases. He almost choked on his own spit when Eddie got up there and did a perfectly spot-on impression of him, complete with the hand claps and vigorous eyebrow furrowing. Eddie pointed at someone in the crowd and then at his feet. Then he exaggeratedly tapped his fingers against the side of his head. The phrase was clearly “get your head in the game,” but everyone was laughing too hard to guess it.

After charades, they all sat around and ate their food while taking turns playing hangman on the ancient whiteboard. Even Adam, their resident antisocial tech guy, went up for a round. They followed that up with a brief game of Pictionary and then “pin the tail on the donkey.”

“Just pretend like you’re stabbing your ex in the face,” Valerie told him when it was Jeff’s turn to go up.

His eyes narrowed behind his blindfold. It didn’t make for a very appropriate teacher/student conversation, but nevertheless, it was exactly what Jefferson was going to do.

He approached the bulletin board to which the giant ass was taped and pictured Manny cheating on him over and over again. He took a deep breath and then drove the pin right into Manny’s left eye. When he took off the blindfold he saw that he’d missed the donkey’s butt by several inches, but that didn’t matter. It still felt good.

Around 6:30, Jeff and the kids decided to call it a night. The sky was starting to get dark and gloomy and Jeff didn’t want any of their parents to get worried, even though dress rehearsals often went on way later than this.

“How’s everyone getting home?” he asked.

Quite a few students called their parents to pick them up and Danielle and Enrique each offered to drop off a few people who were on their way. That left two bussers and a walker. Jeff had them pile into the bed of his truck and very slowly drove down the side streets, dropping them off at their homes one by one. 

Once all his students were home safe and sound, Jeff drove back to his apartment and ascended the stairs. Inside, he flipped on the light switch and looked at the place, really looked at it, for the first time since Manny had moved out.

Frowning, Jeff started piling up his scattered clothes and throwing them in the washer. He threw away all the empty takeout containers and took out the recycling. He even vacuumed the rug, which was something he rarely did, even when he was happy and in love. After everything was relatively back in order, Jeff moved on to the bedroom. Things in here were pretty much exactly how he’d left them. Bed stripped of sheets, a collection of poetry on the nightstand, and a picture of him and Manny laying together on the beach.

Jeff immediately snatched up the picture and buried it in the back of the closet. When he came back, he was surprised to find that the room was just a room and the bed was just a bed. It obviously wasn’t defined by what had happened on it. That would make for some very disturbing personification.

Feeling brave, he sat down on the corner of it. The springs gave a familiar creak, but no negative thoughts came immediately to mind.

Smiling, Jeff stood up and went to the linen closet out in the hall where he dug out a fresh set of sheets and made the bed with crisp hospital corners, just the way he liked it. He laid down on top of the sheets and luxuriated in the feeling of comfort after weeks spent sleeping on the couch. He closed his eyes and listened to the soft hum of his clothes tumbling around in the dryer until he started feeling relaxed and sleepy.

As he drifted off, he couldn’t help but think of the kids and how they’d done something that nobody else had been able to do. They’d broken him out of his funk. And he desperately wanted to do something nice for them in return. He didn’t care how much it cost him or how much harder he had to work. He was going to make this spring semester special for them. He was going to give them what they’d all been asking for.

They were going to put on Apollo High’s first official musical in over thirty years.