Teach Me Something // LH44

Chapter Twenty-One

It all exploded about midway through the following day, while I was on my lunch break. I was just trying to take fifteen minutes to myself in the staff room, not sitting or making eye contact with the other teachers I would normally class as friends. Nope, I'd had an awful morning and I just needed some time with my soup and my thoughts to reset for the rest of the day. I opened my phone to find several dozen messages from my friends, either directly to me, or in the group chat. The common question:

Is it true?

It took me ten minutes of the fifteen minutes I had to figure out what it was that they were asking me. The question clearly meant for me as my name was mentioned twenty times but I had no idea what they were talking about. Was what true? Eventually, the reason became obvious...

Ferrari.

That single word repeated about 4,000 times in two scrolls on Twitter was enough to make me lose my appetite. As much as I still had to learn about F1, having already begun to be excited to see what the fuss was about, one thing that I already knew was that Ferrari is based in Italy... and I don't live in Italy. I'm not even vaguely comforted as I read on and find that the move in question isn't for this season but next. Hell, it wasn't even confirmed but major publications were posting it as a done deal, outlets like Sky and the BBC aren't going to report gossip as known facts without a source.

On top of all that, I had the benefit of insight into him and as the bell rang, signaling that I needed to head back to my classroom, I felt like I was able to see all the signs at once. The obvious moments, glances, and phone calls all came to hit me over the head with the undeniable truth that he had known all of this, he had been planning all of this while he had been living with me all week long. He was never on the phone with his therapist. Or maybe he was but he wasn't talking about retirement or the pressure of Mercedes or anything else like I'd originally thought. No, he was talking about moving teams, moving country.

I imagine I felt the same way most F1 fans did that afternoon. I couldn't focus on work at all, still hungry as my food had been left untouched. I watched as the kids ran rampant around me and I watched on from my desk, paralysed by my thoughts, uselessly calling out for them to stop doing stupid stuff. I felt even more helpless to stop them than I had that morning when I tried to communicate in two languages to get them all to sit down and do their work, two of the newer kids were Polish with very little English speaking abilities. Safe to say my Polish was about as good as their English.

Some days this job felt impossible and today was one of those days.

It had been draining recently with the new kids and it felt like I was teaching in a room filled with water. I couldn't cross the room easily, I couldn't breathe easily and I certainly couldn't control a room filled with kids easily. It was all so difficult and was then made worse by the questions my friends had sent me running through my head as well as what it might mean. The questions and no message from Lewis to give me a heads up or reassure me otherwise.

It wasn't that I would expect to be a priority for him at this moment - clearly, he was going to be busy with a great many other things. This story had clearly been leaked, he and his team would be busy handling that but there was nothing from him. It was the only thing I'd checked other than Twitter as I made my way back to my classroom from the staff room, my friends' messages were all unanswered because I had no answers for them. I had no messages from him... I had nothing. I don't know why that surprised me. Looking back it shouldn't have really, he'd done nothing to firmly suggest that I would be his priority.