Elementary [n.h. au]

two | the all-important question

If anyone asked, Rolly's favorite time of day, on her best days, was 3:30 P.M.

By 3:30 on her best days, all of her kids had been sent home on time and safely. On the best days, she had no meetings or parent conferences. On the best days, it was just her alone in her classroom, grading papers or finishing up lesson plans or rearranging her students' desks.

On that particular day, a Friday in early November, Rolly was doing the latter. She'd tried making all of her students into "islands" at the beginning of the week because the constant chatter was driving her nuts, but the arrangement of the desks made it harder to move around and monitor, so she'd decided to switch to a variety. A couple groups of three or four, a few pairs, four or five islands.

Rolly shifted her weight from foot to foot as she observed the current state of the desks from the center of the room, her shoes long kicked off in the corner by the door. It was routine for Rolly to go barefoot the second she stepped back into her classroom after dismissal, so that day was no different. In fact, she'd decided to wear some wedges that day and it had been the kind of day that required more frantic trips to and from the workroom to make copies than she'd anticipated, so unstrapping her shoes from around her ankles was pure bliss. Even with the sad state of the carpeting, it had never felt better beneath her sore heels.

She hummed along with the song floating through the room, pulling her hair up higher on her head as she took a slow spin to assess any adjustments she needed to make. Rolly found she worked best after school if she had some musical motivation, so she would usually turn on something upbeat that she could sing along with as she worked. 

With the door closed and the music pumping through her Bluetooth speaker, afternoons transported her from her grossly underpaid, eight-hour job (longer, if she counted all of the extra hours she put in outside of school hours) to an alternate universe where she'd discovered she was actually meant to be a rock star, or something. 

Someone who didn't spend so much of her days raising kids as much as she did teaching them.

Cynical though she sometimes was, Rolly did love her job. It was hard, there was too much to do and not enough hours in the day to complete it all, and she left most days feeling exhausted and frustrated and like things would never fall together...but at the end of the year, things always seemed to work themselves out, and she'd tearfully bid her second graders goodbye before gearing up for the next wave of first graders to come in and make her want to rip her hair out all over again.

It was a tough job, but she got to make magic happen, in a way, and for her, that was enough to make everything else she dealt with—pushy parents, demanding administration, kids with strong personalities—worth it.

Rolly stood at the front of the room with her hands on her hips once she'd finished pushing all of the desks around to survey the final set-up. She gave a nod of moderate satisfaction, deciding it would have to do just as one of her favorite songs began to play.

The dancing started with that nod turning into a head bob. Then, her shoulders got involved, shifting back and forth. It wasn't much longer before her hips joined in, channeling her youth-fueled dreams of being able to move her hips the way Shakira did in the "Hips Don't Lie" music video. Before long, she was dancing around the room without a care in the world, singing along at the top of her lungs. Eyes closed, hands in the air, Rolly put her all into impromptu choreography as if her classroom had suddenly turned into an arena and she was center-stage—under imaginary bright lights, a packed audience of several thousand people watching and cheering her on.

Then she heard a chuckle, which pulled her out of her fantasy to find that she did have an audience...but it was an audience of one, and of course, that audience of one was none other than Niall Horan, the not-quite-as-new, still-just-as-attractive music teacher.