///
The sign read:
BLOOMFIELD HIGH BOOK CLUB
For Teachers!
Please join us on Thursday
In room 214 at 2:45pm
For our very first meeting!
Bring your favorite book!
Gerard studied it for any traces of irony, but could come up with none.
"New guy, English teacher," Greta said, coming up behind him.
"No shit." Gerard shook his head and whipped out his phone. "I gotta tell Mikey, he'll get a kick out of it," he told her as he sent the text. "Hilarious."
"You haven't met him yet?" Greta asked when he flopped down on the couch.
Gerard shook his head. "Haven't been around. Why?"
Greta just gave him a look. He had the feeling that if they'd been living in the 60's, she'd have taken a healthy drag of a stylishly long cigarette.
//
Gerard didn't have a lot of use for the teachers' lounge in the first half of the week, too busy in the arts and music wing to take a breath. Despite it having such a heavy, awesome name, the wing was more like an afterthought, with all the creative juices of the school shoved into the same four walls and called "The Artistic Wing."
The department wasn't very well funded, which meant that in addition to being the senior art teacher, Gerard was also the choir director and jazz band director. He still had no idea how he wound up doing all three despite knowing how to play one or two chords on one or two instruments, but at least he got dental.
//
He absolutely was not going to waste his time on a fiasco that was obviously never going to take off, but curiosity got the best of him, as did Greta's prodding. She was one of the few teachers in the school who didn't have to run home as soon as the bell rang, so she wheedled him into going by using the power of her doe eyes.
They went to room 214 at the appointed time.
Gerard wasn't sure what to expect from the new English teacher, even though Greta's meaningful stare had suggested everything from a retired college professor attempting to win back his youth through the systematic slaughter of literary classics to somebody Gerard could really identify with, such as a World of Warcraft geek just recently emerged from his mother's basement. Likelier, however, was that he would walk through the doorway to find an empty room with a middle-aged, gone-to-seed dude wearing khakis, glasses, and a pocket protector, a pile of books next to him and no one to share them with. Not that Gerard didn't care for middle-aged geeks, knowing he was headed that way sooner or later, nor did he lack the proper appreciation for a pile of books and having no one to share them with. He hadn't been a virgin until college for nothing.
Whatever he'd been expecting, however, the guy setting up chairs in a circle certainly wasn't it.
Glasses - check. Khakis - check. Tie, button-up shirt - check, check.
But he wasn't middle-aged, and he definitely didn't look like a geek. And he was also motherfucking tattooed, holy crap.
"Shit," Gerard breathed, and he jumped as Greta poked him in the side.
"This is why we're here," she mumbled. "Hi, it's Mr. Iero, right?" she added in a chirpy voice.
Gerard let her lead as he counted up the ways in which Mr. Iero was not at all a geek who had just emerged from his mother's basement. In fact, if he had emerged from anywhere, it was from under the rubble of Gerard's teenaged fantasies, and oh, man, was that a great place to emerge from.
