Happiness

    He burst through the staff room door in a flurry of bundles and papers. A black messenger bag was slung over his left shoulder, the front pocket full to brimming dangerously with a picket fence of capless pens, the strap bespangled with catchy slogans advocating peace and eco-friendliness.

    Under the standard charcoal gray suit jacket, the same style that all of the male staff wore, was a dandelion yellow shirt with canvas brown letters that she couldn’t quite make out stretched tightly across his chest. After stumbling a few steps through the doorway, in a haste rarely seen at eleven in the morning on a Monday, the new hire straightened, righted his long limbs, and pushed his glasses up a beak-like nose. He took a swift look around, like a hawk surveying a promising landscape.

    Lynn swallowed the bite of turkey sandwich that had been sitting, neglected and half-chewed, in her mouth since his entrance. The others in the room watched him, as well, and she could sense their curiosity. After all, he was like an injection of color into the slow, monotonous saline drip that was the staff of Pottersburg High School. She eyed the empty seat to her right, but before she had a chance to toss her briefcase into it, the man had plopped himself down with an outstretched hand.

    “Joel! Joel McLinton.”

    The turkey stuck in her throat.

    “L…” she coughed, bringing up the freshly-swallowed bite for a second round, “Lynn Alberts.” Placing her sandwich down, she shook his hand. He quickly withdrew with a slightly sour look.

    “Mayonnaise?”  Joel wiped his hand on his pants, before turning to his bag and retrieving a school-bus shaped lunch pail. “I never eat the stuff. Loaded with fat. Cholesterol,” he paused to unfold a red and white checkered napkin, spreading it out before him like a miniature tablecloth. “Only veggies for me, thanks. No dressing.”

    He arranged three baggies in a perfect triangle of carrots, broccoli, and spinach, and withdrew a small thermos, from which he poured thick, lobster-bisque colored liquid. “Want some? It’s tomato and garlic. I have a juicer at home.” 

    Lynn watched, amusement quirking her usually drawn mouth. She smiled slightly, but deferred with a polite tip of her head. Joel shrugged, “Not for everybody, I guess.”

She took a moment to watch as he ate. It was a fascinating pattern: carrot, spinach leaf, sip, broccoli stem, repeat. He munched, as if starving, and she wondered if maybe he was. The guy couldn’t have been more than one hundred fifty-five pounds, if that. And she guessed him to be six feet tall or more. There was not a love handle in sight, not an inch to pinch.

    Before she had a chance to venture a guess as to the color of his longer-than-average hair (she would have said copper, if asked), Dale entered the staffroom, fifteen minutes late for lunch, as normal. The lopsided smile he always carried on his face fell at the sight of the new guy occupying his favorite table. He looked as if he had been constantly running his fingers through his thinning blond hair, as if the kids were really getting to him and all he wanted was to enjoy lunch in his usual spot.       

    Dale took his tray to the other end of the room. Lynn glanced at him apologetically, smiling at his choice of salad and not much else; Dale had been watching his diet, but certainly for different reasons than this Joel character.

    “It’s weird here,” he offered between bites.

    She almost forgot the near-stranger was sitting there, so engrossed was she in the little swath of flesh that hung over the front of Dale’s olive-colored slacks.

         “How do you mean,” was all she could manage before he launched into his life story.

         “I’m just so used to Borneo.”

That would explain the tan, Lynn thought, unable to help the smirk that crept onto her lips.

    “The weather’s pretty great there,” he bit into a carrot, and continued talking as he munched, little orange bits spraying onto the impromptu tablecloth, “I was there with Greenpeace, trying to stop the destruction of the lowland rainforest. They’ve got bugs there that are this big.”

    She found her eyebrows levitating to her hairline. Greenpeace? Borneo?

    “How did you end up in Illinois?”

    Joel’s head snapped up, as if he wasn’t expecting her to speak at all, let alone interrupt him. He leaned back, sucking a spinach leaf, “I needed to go back to a steady life in the states. I figured, what good are two degrees if I don’t use them? I’m teaching social sciences here, but I also have a degree in philosophy.”

    Dale was absentmindedly stabbing a spoon into some green Jell-o across the room.

    “I graduated Dartmouth pretty high up in the class, but I didn’t get Summa Cum Laude because of the protests I staged. I’m sure that was it. But things needed to be change…”

    Lynn was forced to recall the modest campus of Wexley Community College, when her dark hair had been long, down to her butt, in fact. When she and Dale had first met, when he’d taught himself how to braid it…

    Her mind began to wander, as it sometimes did during lectures or the uninteresting babble of a co-worker, what life with this Joel guy might be like. She imagined crashes of lightening, warm falling rain, the crunch of roots and brush underfoot as they chased poachers in the thickest jungles. At night, clutching his thin frame to her with nothing but the leafy canopy overhead for shelter. They could be Tarzan and Lynn, and read Nietzsche, and he could lecture her in Existentialism in hammocks hanging twenty feet above jaguar territory. He could feed her broccoli and mangos and home-made tomato/basil juice.

    “…the kids were sad, but they knew that I had things I had to do. I wouldn’t be gone from teaching long, but Greenpeace wasn’t going to wait…”

    Dale caught her eye, that goofy smile lighting up his pale, round face. There were no jungles with him. No adventures in the Asia-Pacific. Only the prospect of late-night B-flicks on his worn and patched sofa, the soft caress of a hand calloused by number-crunching. His receding hairline, her gently expanding thighs and belly. Stability, predictability. Happiness.

    "You must have a story, Lynn,” Joel leaned forward, his elbows striking the table, making her jump. He winked at her, “I bet you’ve got lots to tell; pretty lady, no ring, alone in the staffroom?”

    Her heart leapt at his sudden interest in her, or anything other than himself, for that matter. She felt blood rushing to her face. Had it been that long since a man, other than sweet, harmless Dale, had paid attention to her? Lynn’s gaze flashed over him, over the long nose and the strangely-colored hair, over the tan, and the little leafs of spinach trapped between his too-white teeth.

    “Well, Joel,” she leaned forward, suppressing the strange urge to laugh when he began to conspiratorially lean forward as well, and their noses nearly touched. “Sadly I’m not nearly as interesting as you are,” Lynn said sweetly, winking in response to his confusedly agape maw, before getting up and crossing the room to her favorite chubby Economics teacher, taking the brown bag and half-eaten sandwich with her.