

When she woke up she felt the cold breeze from the window she'd left open last night. Light streaming in in a mottled pattern in between the leaves. The tree outside her window brushed the building's eaves softly and she stirred just like them. She pushed away the blanket and rolled out of the warm mattress and went to the bathroom and pissed and brushed her teeth and stumbled into the kitchen. Her fiance wasn't far behind and while she was breaking eggs into a bowl he came up behind her and smelled the butter melting on the stove. Those for me? he asked. Some of them. The eggs sizzled in the hot butter and slowly turned up their browned edges, crisping. She didn't have a lot of time before work and by the time the eggs finished she had already put up her hair. You're going to be late for class, she told the man. I'll make it. That's what you said last time. Mind your business. She ate the eggs and got dressed and put on enough makeup that she'd be taken seriously and kissed her fiance and walked out the door.

The morning was cold but not cold enough to show her breath so she could pretend to be a dragon. Creaky wooden steps leading down from her apartment door. The next-door neighbor that never made eye contact and didn't again this morning. Her car that didn't have air conditioning but now it didn't matter because the heater worked. She started to roll the window down out of habit and stopped herself. 

It was a long drive to work but she didn't mind. She didn't even mind the work when she could get it. The trees passed by the way they always did and her old engine whirred and chugged and always managed to make it through. You and me, old girl. Someday I'll be successful enough to replace you. Maybe. She slid into her regular parking space and the car felt like it was glad to have finished another trip. 

The sidewalks outside the school were starting to fill up with students who wouldn't be allowed in the building for another half hour and knew it. They didn't even give her a key so she was in the same situation. She wandered around until a teacher came and followed him inside and went to the office to report and got her folder and wandered around some more until she found the right classroom. She wrote her name on the board and erased it and wrote it again and erased it and did that a few more times until it seemed legible and professional enough. She made sure she knew what busy work she was handing out that day and looked in all the drawers in the teacher's desk to make sure she knew where everything was. Pencils, pens, tissue, band-aids, paper clips, chalk, stapler, post-its. She knew she'd be hearing requests for each of those things more than a dozen times today.

