Page 14 of One More Chapter
In the kitchen, beneath an open empty cabinet, there’s a taped up box next to an empty protein bar wrapper.
Got hungry. Had snack. Forgot his objective.
On the kitchen table are three different boxes, stuffed with randomly assorted objects. When I see a milk jug full of change on top of one, I don’t even want to dig further.
What grinds my gears the most is that, upon walking into the house, I find him already occupied. On the couch. Computer in his lap. I sigh, lightly stomping over to him.
“What are you doing?”
“Training videos,” he says without even looking up from…the TV? Not his computer? Because he isn’t even watching the videos?
I glance down to see him working through our mandated teacher training portal. We go through the same workplace module videos every year. Apparently, they take precedence over getting all of hisshit out of our shared space.
“Are you even watching them?”
He scoffs, his focus wholly on the baseball game.
“No. Doyou?”
“Yes,” I lie. No one watches those videos. Blood borne pathogens: If someone pukes in my classroom, I’m calling the office. I don’t need a thirty-minute training video to tell me that.
Ant scoffs, aYeah, okay,proceeding to click through the entire next section in flash frame, pushing him right through to the common sense quiz at the end—which he aces without even trying.
“Did you need something?” he asks, routing his mouse to start the next training video. I cross my arms.
“Your stuff is all over the place. If we’re going to live together, we’re going to need to come up with some sort of plan. I cannot handle this level of disorganization.”
“Sorry,” he says without looking up from his computer. “I promise, it’s all on my checklist. I just have to get this done first.”
“Really? Those videos aren’t due until, like, the end of October.”
“I know,” he says, still clicking. “But when I texted Gerald about the school shutting down for the year, he said it was one less thing he’d have to worry about in retirement, and then he mentioned the training videos, and there was also an email about them in my inbox that I cannot delete until I finish said training videos,annnnndnow I cannot focus on anything else until they are done.”
He says this all while clicking through a video on Title IX.
“But you, like, put half of itdowninstead of just putting it away. Couldn’t you just take five minutes to put it away?”
“Pen. Ipromise, Iknow that, but the damnbeesin mybrainwant to do the videosright now, so could youplease just let me finish.”
Bees in my brain.
And now I feel horrible.
Ant told me about his ADHD in Florida—and his subsequent embarrassment of it that I can see climbing his neck in shades of red and vibrating in the way that his eyes won’t quite meet mine. He told me all about it on that beach.
“This vacation—spending time with you, really—has been the first time I’ve been able to slow down.”
“Got a lot going on at home?”
He sighed. Tilted his head back toward the sky as he leaned back on his palms.
“Yes and no. I’m uh… I’ve had ADHD since I was a kid. My brain never shuts off—kind of like there’s a hive of bees inside and I never know what’s going to set them off. But here, with you… I don’t know. I can sit still for a little while. The bees don’t seem so noisy.”
I blushed the same color as he did in the moonlight as he continued.
“I’ve always felt like part of that label meant I would never measure up—would never be able to achieve what others could. Like they all had a ladder and I’d always be at the bottom jumping. You make me feel like I can keep my feet flat on the ground and still reach the mountaintop.”
He had shrugged through his vulnerabilities, and that was the first moment when I’d reached my hand over to his. The first intentional touch. The first time my skin had ever felt like an inferno.