Letters by Her [Book 2]

Chapter 26

Senior Year 

Valentine Quinn looked across the sea of faces in her classroom and inwardly sighed. Each student looked up at her with bored, disinterested eyes, already lost to apathy. Using her sternest voice, Valentine ordered eyes forward to the board as she began to commence explaining the syllabus for the upcoming semester.

As she scrawled on the whiteboard, she began to feel more like a machine than a woman, simply going through the motions. She'd entered teaching out of a genuine desire to inspire others, to mold young minds, but somewhere along the way she'd lost her enthusiasm for the job, her passion, and became another teacher just existing for the holidays, resenting each new crop of students who congregated before her.

She was in a funk, or so one of her friends had so eloquently told her over a beer. "It happens to the best of us," Raine, a teacher at a different high school, had stated.

"But should it happen so early in my career?" Valentine asked, struggling with having already lost her verve for the job.

"It's just a bump in the road. You'll get over it. All you need is that one student who you inspire and ultimately change their life. They come along every couple of years or so, and I promise you that when they do, you'll realize it was all worth it, and you'll reclaim your joie de vivre as the French say."

Valentine had nodded and taken a sip from her cold bottle of beer, not wanting to explain how she'd already encountered that student, the game changer, whose life she'd not only changed but also her own. Meeting and mentoring Dusty had irrevocably changed her. 

**** 

Looking at her new batch of students, Valentine knew without a doubt that the reason she had begun to loathe her profession was because she was missing for the girl she'd let get away, and she resented herself and her position for it happening. Regularly she battled with her inner demons over whether letting Dusty go had been the best decision. She'd said she would stay, but she'd told her to go because that was the best thing, for her. But what about her? Gazing sadly at her class, Valentine tried to focus on the job at hand, on the math.

The math, which was always the same, never changing, became a source of comfort in its predictability. There had been no more letters. Each night after work Valentine would drive home, buoyed by the prospect of a letter sit- ting patiently in his mailbox, waiting to be opened, but the only mail she received were bills. Dusty had not written to her in almost a year. It was a painful truth to face, but Valentine had to accept that she'd moved on with her life and forgotten about her.

The hardest part was that she struggled to forget about her. It had been three years since Dusty had left West to study at Princeton, and still Valentine found herself sniffing at the wind, thinking she'd caught the last fragments of her delicious scent. She'd awaken in the night, hot and panting after yet another dream where she was the main star. While Dusty was out living her life, forgetting all about her old math teacher, Valentine was frozen in time, unable to move forward, unable to forget.

Her friend had been right; she was in a funk. But it wasn't a job-related funk, it was woman related. Therefore, the only cure was to get back out into the dating world and stop waiting for the letter and its author, which were clearly never going to arrive. Valentine found the prospect of dating oddly daunting. She wasn't short of female admirers, even doing her grocery shopping she'd find that women and men cornered her to start making idle chat about the weather or the produce. She'd play along but never wanted to take things further.

She was a firm believer in chemistry, and when she'd first seen Dusty, something deep in her heart had stirred, even though she was a student and off-limits. But no other woman had made her feel that way.
Perhaps no one ever would again. At West High there was a young female art teacher who'd started the previous year. She was tall with bobbed blonde hair, blue eyes, and a smile that showed too many teeth. Valentine was not interested in her, but she made her desire for her obvious.