NOT READY
1298 Words
MAYA.
"Come on, Maya. One Friday. That's all we're asking."
I didn't look up from the stack of papers on my desk. "I have tests to grade."
"You always have tests to grade." Priya dropped into the chair across from me with the dramatic flair of someone who'd been practicing since childhood.
She was the kind of beautiful that made students forget what class they were in — sharp cheekbones, red lipstick at eight in the morning, and absolutely zero patience for what she called my monk tendencies.
"The tests will still be here Monday. Happy hour will not."
"Then happy hour should have better time management."
She stared at me. "You know what your problem is?"
"I have a feeling you're going to tell me."
"You are married to this job. And unlike most marriages, this one doesn't even buy you dinner." She stood, smoothing her blazer. "One of these days, Maya, the papers are going to grade themselves and you're going to look up and realize you haven't laughed in six months."
I smiled at her. "I laugh."
"At your students' grammar mistakes."
"That counts."
She pointed at me on her way out. "Friday. Last call. And I say that with love."
The door clicked shut.
I listened to her heels fade down the corridor, then turned back to my desk.
She wasn't wrong, exactly. I knew that. There was a version of me — the one that existed before — who would have already been deciding what to wear.
Who would have needed the noise of a bar, the easy warmth of colleagues becoming friends, the particular relief of not being alone at the end of a long week.
That version of me had been very good at needing things.
I'd spent the last three years unlearning it.
Teaching was clean. Teaching made sense. I showed up, I gave everything I had, the work asked nothing back except effort. There was a comfort in that kind of transaction that I'd stopped being embarrassed about needing.
I pulled the next paper from the stack.
And frowned.
Tyler Cross. English Composition II.
I'd been looking forward to this one — Tyler was one of those students you remembered. Sharp instincts, genuine voice on the page, the kind of writer who didn't know yet that he was good. Three months ago he'd handed in an essay on identity and belonging that I'd read twice.
This wasn't that.
This was a student going through the motions. Sparse, disconnected, like he'd written it in twenty minutes with one eye on something else entirely. I checked the grade twice, hoping the math would change.
It didn't.
Coach Derrick had pulled me aside two weeks ago in the faculty lounge, coffee in hand, voice low. "Dr. Hartley — Tyler. I need him to turn it around academically or I have to bench him.
And I don't want to bench him. Kid's got a shot at something real." He'd shaken his head. "He used to have it together. Something's off with him lately."
I'd nodded and made a note and moved on.
Now I sat with that note sitting heavier than it had before.
Whatever was going on with Tyler Cross, it was showing up on the page.
And a student didn't go from writing about belonging like he meant every word to producing this — unless something had shifted underneath him.
I set the paper down, capped my pen, and stood.
I heard the court before I saw it.
The rhythmic crack of a ball against concrete, the low back-and-forth of young men who were comfortable enough with each other to be mostly wordless.
I came around the side of the gym building and found them — six boys in the late afternoon light, and Tyler among them, easy and loose in a way he never quite was in the classroom.
"Tyler."
He caught the ball on instinct and turned.
It still caught me slightly off guard, every time — how much space he took up. Seventeen years old and built like someone had fast-forwarded through the awkward years entirely. He was already six-three at least, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of stillness about him that didn't belong on a teenager. His friends had gone quiet.
He jogged over, breathing easy. "Dr. Hartley."
"I need to speak to you about your last composition," I said, without preamble. "How do you think you did?"
His jaw shifted. He looked down at the ball in his hands. “Not great, I guess.”
"Not great is generous. Tyler, if your grades don't come back up, Coach Derrick has to bench you. You know that."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I don't want that to happen. You're a better student than that paper."
He didn't answer. Something moved across his face — not embarrassment exactly.
"I want to help you," I said. "But I'd like to speak with your father first. Tomorrow, if he's available. Even a short meeting — just so we're all on the same page about how to move forward."
He looked up. Something flickered in his expression that I couldn’t quite read. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll—I’ll let him know.”
"Good." I touched his arm briefly. "You're not in trouble, Tyler. I just want to see you do well."
He nodded. "Thank you, Dr. Hartley."
I left him there and walked back through the long shadow the building threw across the grass, already composing the parent meeting in my head. Straightforward. Professional. In and out.
My apartment was dark when I got home.
Or it should have been.
I unlocked the door and pushed it open and walked directly into the warm smell of jollof rice and the sight of my mother and my sister Zara arranged on my couch like they'd been there for hours — because apparently they had.
"What—" I stopped. "How did you get in?"
My mother held up a key with the serenity of someone who had never once in her life felt she was overstepping.
"You gave me a copy two Christmases ago."
"For emergencies."
"We were worried. That's an emergency." She stood and opened her arms. "Come and hug me."
I hugged her because the alternative was a twenty-minute argument I didn't have the energy for. Zara waved from the couch, tucking her feet under herself with a grin that told me she'd been in on this the entire time and had enjoyed every second.
"You've been avoiding us," my mother said into my shoulder.
"I've been busy."
"For one year?"
I pulled back. "I'm fine, Mom. I'm working, I'm sleeping, I'm eating—"
"I made jollof."
"I can smell it." I moved toward the hallway.
"Let me change and we can—"
"Five years, Maya."
I stopped.
Her voice had shifted. Softer. The particular soft that meant she'd been rehearsing this.
"It has been five years since Dylan. And I have watched you disappear into that school like—"
"I haven't disappeared. I'm standing right here."
"You know what I mean." She folded her hands. "I have a friend. Her friend is a doctor, very lovely man, he's right here in this state actually—"
"No."
"Maya—"
"No." I turned around fully. "Mom. I love you. But no. I'm not being set up. I'm not going on a date arranged by someone's friend's friend. I'm not doing any of that." I held her gaze so
she'd know I meant it down to the bone.
"When I'm ready to move on, I will be the one who decides that. I will be the one who decides who. Until then—" I looked between her and Zara— "everyone needs to get off my case."
- Writer
