“She never even met him. She just liked the idea of him.”
“Well—”
“I better get going.”
Hilde stared at me for a moment before she turned toward the living room. “Come give your auntie Helene a hug and a kiss,” she hollered.
Little feet trampled from the living room into the adjoining kitchen and dining room.
“Why’s your sister covered in red and blue marker,” Hilde asked Brody.
“Cause she was coloring…”
“I see—” Hilde started to say.
“…on the walls,” Brody finished.
Hilde groaned. “I’m beyond caring at this point,” she remarked to me. “The house is going to have to be completely redone when this child finally stops destroying everything.
“Heen-Hee,” Sienna said as she lifted her arms up to me.
I swooped her up in my arms, planting her on my hip. “You be a good little girl for your mama, and stop writing on the walls.” I kissed her cheek, and she squirmed in my arms, already anxious to get down and destroy something else.
I let her down to the floor, and she took off toward the living room again. I ruffled Brody’s hair and leaned down to kiss his forehead. “Bye, Brode-man.”
“Bye, Auntie Helene,” he said sweetly as he smiled up at me.
Hilde watched me for a moment, her hands distractedly fidgeting with carrots. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m fine.” I forced a smile to my mouth and walked out of the room.
The slackers were glaring at me again as they set their papers on my desk. I smiled at them. Not a one was empty handed though, and I saw a sea of white textbooks on the second night of class. I flipped through the two chapters we were going to be covering, reviewing my sticky notes and the reminders I’d written in the margin, and just as the hour hand clicked to five, I stood up.
At that very moment, the door opened and Kane walked in. He carried his book in one hand and a pen tucked behind his right ear—nothing else. He walked toward the front of the classroom rather than toward the back where he’d sat the week before.
“Class, please open your books to—” But I made the mistake of looking at Kane as he sat at a vacant desk smack in the middle of the front row. My stomach knotted, and my hands became clammy so fast it was damn near shocking. He winked at me, and my lips parted as I stared at him. Students were watching me with furrowed brows as though concerned for my mental wellbeing, and I finally had to force my eyes away from Kane.
I cleared my throat, trying again. “As I was saying, please turn to the beginning of chapter one.”
Books opened, pages flipped, and all the while I forced my eyes to stay away from him. I waited until the pages stopped turning, and then I looked out at the group of students in front of me, taking a deep breath.
“In order to fully grasp any concept or school of knowledge, we start at the beginning.” I began walking slowly around to the front of the desk, my eyes moving around the room as I did. “In this case, our text begins with the earliest philosophical thinkers, who were, by all accounts, unaware of the very path they were forging. They were simply asking questions, and questions, arguments, and debate are at the very core of this study.” I stopped and leaned against the desk, sitting on the hard edge of the old wooden desktop. “We will review many works by those now considered great philosophers—Plato’s Republic all the way through Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. We’ll cover all the main canonical writings associated with Western ideology.” I reached beside me, fumbling with a pen distractedly and lifting it in my hands with little thought to anything but the words coming from my mouth. “A canon is, by all accounts, nothing more than a representation of a thing.” My hands fidgeted with the pen even as I gesticulated. It was my bad habit, and I could easily talk with my hands at the same time as I fidgeted with something nervously. “It is prejudice, it is incomplete, and therefore, we will expand our study beyond what is considered canonical to some of the lesser studied works along the way. Don’t worry,” I smirked at the young roguish boy who’d winked at me the week prior. “I’ll not ask you to buy any additional books. God only knows what response I’d get to that.”