With regret, I decided not to go back to the grocery store where Melanie worked. And that sucked for a lot of reasons. Of course, it sucked because I wasn't getting sucked. She was, by her own acclaim, one of the best cocksuckers around, and I would certainly agree to that. It also sucked because that was the grocery where the poor folk shopped. They had past-due-date bread and the bruised fruit and vegetables that I could actually afford. Now I had to go to the expensive market, and I really couldn't afford it.
But I really couldn't afford to go back to Melanie's store either. It was becoming very clear that my self-control wasn't strong enough, and I couldn't control whatever this trick was in my head. I mean, Melanie was hot to trot and seemed down from the get go, but she basically just threw me around and used me. Not that I minded, but there were so many ways that could have gone wrong. Anyone could have walked in on us, and she would have lost her job and I'd probably be drummed out of another town and job.
Well, I didn't have to worry too much about the job anymore. It became clear very quickly that they were never going to get the budget to hire me on full time. At best, they were only able to give me barely enough hours to keep a roof over my head and frozen burritos in my belly. More likely was that they would slowly start reducing my hours before eventually letting me go in one of their budget cuts. I needed to find a big change.
One night, only a few days after the grocery blowjob, I was sitting at my table on the only chair in the apartment, in front of my laptop, trying to make a budget work for the next week. No matter how I shuffled things around, it just wasn't going to add up. I needed to shift something major around. As I cracked open a crappy no-brand beer, the last of a six pack I bought in a hallucinatory fit of optimism, I thought over my options.
Option number one: I could get another job. This wasn't realistic. I had talked to folks at a local temp agency and they suggested I check back in a month or two. I certainly wasn't going to last a month or two without some new income. The only hiring signs I saw around town were at Melanie's grocery, not a healthy option there, and at a topless cocktail club on the outskirts of town, and I was pretty sure I didn't have the qualifications for that job.
Option number two: I've got a second or third cousin that lives not too far away. He's doing great, got the whole wife and two kids, suburban house, corporate job thing going on. Dude has a retirement plan and healthcare with dental. To be honest, I don't know him too well, but we had gotten back in touch over the past year. We seemed to hit it off okay. He mentioned that he'd love to have me visit him for a week or two. So, I could go there, he seemed like a great guy, but I really didn't want to bring my living dumpster fire into his white picket fence world if I had any other options. I'm sure that would end in disaster.
Option three: I could lean into this magic hoodoo thing and try to gigolo my way through life. I could go back to Melanie first. She didn't have money, but maybe I could crash on her couch or something until I could trap some woman with a heavy bank account. Just thinking about that depressed me. Had I already sunk so low. I mean, it wasn't selling kidnapped kids on the black market, but it would be really hard to justify in any way as 'good.' I don't claim to be a saint, but I do want to be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning and not hate what I see there.
Option three and a half: There was Tess. I know I had promised and signed away that I would never contact her again, but she wasn't really connected with the school, and there's no reason she would tell anyone. She was also in no worries at all financially. She didn't owe me anything, but maybe I could get a little loan from her to tide me over until the fall hiring season? She would want to see me though, and that would be a problem. It would be really hard to go back there and not be seen by someone who knows me. Maybe I could convince her to paypal me the money? No, she would want to see me. That would be a lot of fun, but I might never get away. I might end up her boytoy til the end of my days. Would that be so bad?
I sat there at my table, the beer empty long ago. My phone was face up and the contacts app was open. Underneath the name "Tess" was her avatar, a photo of her ruby-red puckering lips, and the icon: "Call."
I stared at the phone and cursed at myself.
Then there was a ding from my email.
I pulled it up and squinted my eyes in confusion. What the hell was this?
TO: Ben Lee
FROM: Kimberly Adams, Bright Hall School
Dear Mr. Lee
I am Kimberly Adams, writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of the Bright Hall School. We are currently running a search to replace our principal, and were given your name by a trusted source who said you would be a good fit. We are looking for an innovative, proactive educator to take charge of our school. Please review the material below and, if you are interested, reply immediately to this address with your CV and a statement of pedagogical and leadership philosophy. The Board has made an exceptional authorization for an expedited search, so we will be moving very quickly. We expect to hold the last of our interviews online by tomorrow and make our offer immediately following that.
Thank you for your time,
Kimberly Adams,
Administrative Assistant
On behalf of the Board of Directors,
Bright Hall School
What the hell was this? A 'trusted source?' I can't think of anyone who would recommend me for an upper administration job, much less a principal slot. My last school said they wouldn't give me a recommendation, so it couldn't be them, and no one else really knew me professionally. But again, I was a history teacher, not a principal. I mean, I could do admin, but it wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse.
What kind of school was this anyway? There was some advertising copy below the closing.
The Bright Hall College Prep School is located in the town of Bright Hall on a beautiful, remote island in the Pacific Northwest. In the tradition of scholarship removed from the corruption and distraction of large cities, our location is deliberately remote, so that we can provide the quiet and piece of mind that promotes outstanding academic and personal success. This location is key to our identity and to our mission in training outstanding, independent men and women.
Our academic mission is as unique as our location. We provide a combination of the traditional boarding school experience with a post-secondary core of coursework, designed specifically for students who choose not to go to college or university after high school. While our classes are transferable, and most of our students do go on to great academic success at colleges and universities around the nation, we like to think that the methods, content, and personal care students receive at Bright Hall are far superior to what students often have to suffer through at regular schools, with their packed classes, uninterested professors, and destructive social environments.
Despite our distance from large cities, there is no reason to be concerned about leaving your children in our hands. Our people are first rate, from the principal and Board of Directors down to each individual teacher and staff member. The campus has all the state-of-the-art facilities you might find at any top-ranked university including cozy dorms, an excellent dining hall, science labs, and Olympic-standard athletics equipment.
The Town of Bright Hall and the surrounding area are themselves excellent reasons to attend. It is a small community is built on the foundations of our school, the small hospital, and the tourists that come to enjoy the lovely mountain trails, the numerous hot springs, the pristine white-sand beach and the shopping district, including a vibrant arts community.
The email went on with the rest of an exhaustive description of the school designed to entice parents to ship off their kids. It seemed like a pretty swank place. It was very small, only a couple hundred students total and only a handful of faculty. A quick search online led only to a fairly out-of-date webpage, and it was hard to tell much more. They had a Wikipedia page, but aside from a bit of history about being founded in the 1800s by some family with lumber money, it was nearly empty.
I spent the next couple of hours hunting down all the information I could about the school. It was legitimate and had all the certifications, but something about it didn't seem right. Maybe it was because it was simply so different. It wasn't a college, but only accepted high school graduates eighteen years old or older. I tried to find photos and more contemporary information. There were some few students with social media accounts, but they were mainly just about personal stuff, and not much about the college. There used to be a local newspaper, but it stopped printing years ago and none of the back issues were online.
I was kind of stumped. I was going to apply, of course. In earlier moments of optimism, I had polished up all my paperwork, all it needed was a quick edit to align details to the opening. So it wouldn't be a lot of effort, but something about the whole situation just seemed a bit off. From the 'trusted source' to the remoteness and unconventional nature of the school, to the kind of manic speed that they seemed to be running the search with. But, hey, I thought, as I turned my phone face-down and got to work on the application, I didn't have a lot of other options.
***
When I woke up the next morning, there was already a reply in my inbox.
