The Loneliest Stars

Chapter 7

"You called him what?" Lima screeched over the crackly FaceTime connection all the way from Dubai.

It was eight am in the morning there and she was already up and at work with bundles of energy. Meanwhile, due to the time difference between Texas and Dubai, Natalia was winding down after a day of work.

"I called him a racist, okay," Natalia admitted to fresh peals of Lima's great guffawing laughs.

Lima was a pretty, overtly feminine woman but nothing about her laugh was cute and dainty, "Hold on, let me close my office door, the kids have Islamic studies class, I don't want to explain why I'm laughing like the devil himself."

"Lima!" Natalia shouted exasperated, "Can you sympathise with me, a little bit?"

"You have my sympathy," Lima said and then continued laughing until tears spilt from the corners of her eyes.

"Bitch, I'm gonna go to bed if you keep making fun of me," Natalia grumbled.

"Okay, okay," Lima cleared her throat, breathing in deeply, "I'm good now."

"Are you saying what he said wasn't lowkey racist?"

"It probably was, but you're in the South. Didn't they used to lynch people there not so long ago."

"Lima, come on, that's a stereotype. Austin is actually quite woke and hipster-y. It would out-hipster, Shoreditch." Natalia referenced an area in East London, where hipsters ran amok gentrifying and ruining everything from traditional East End curries to Yoga.

"You what? Swear down?" Lima asked incredulously, her boisterous laugh starting up again.

"I swear, Lima, Austin is so weird, even weirder than Dubai."

"Rah, I can't imagine that. So, tell me what happened after," Lima pressed.

"He snitched to the Head, grown man snitching, you know." Natalia's accent always became distinctively North London whenever she spoke to Lima.

Lima let out a noise of disgust in sympathy. "What did she say?"

"Nothing to me yet. But we've got a meeting tomorrow. All of us."

"Bitch, relax and don't call anyone the KKK just yet, it's literally your first week."

"I'll call it as I see it, I don't care." Natalia huffed.

"No doubt," Lima agreed. "Anyways, I gotta go the brats are done with class. I hope to Allah they got some divine guidance because I can't deal with them anymore."

In the morning, Natalia was once again sneaking around her own home and street. She breathed a sigh of relief when she realised his truck was gone and he must have left earlier for work than she had. She had no desire to run into him after their argument.

Who would have thought that Gabe Mercier was the school's football coach? It made no sense to her how she had missed that. He had picked her up from the airport, Natalia had assumed he was some sort of Uber driver or a friend of Ella's owing her a favour. That woman had an uncanny talent for making people do her bidding.

He had been at the staff barbecue, that should have been a signal to Natalia that he was the football coach or at least a member of the school faculty, she had missed that obvious clue. But he didn't look at all like a football coach.

Admittedly, Natalia had no idea what a football coach looked like, she could only compare him to the ageing PE teachers she had come across in the UK. Usually red-faced, wrinkly with an overhanging pouch, skinny legs with more varicose veins than a roadmap and prone to wearing ill-fitting sports clothes.