Chapter Text
she’s the sunset (in the west)
Her last meeting of the night is at six fifty and Yaz has never felt so exhausted in her life.
It’s not the kids. She deals with them day in day out and yeah, it’s tiring, but it’s nothing compared to the tirade of questions from irate parents she’s had thrown at her since four pm. Many of them seemed annoyed at their kid’s reading ability—or lack thereof—which would be a problem if they weren’t four or five years old and, naturally, Harry Potter is still going to be a bit ambitious for a boy who can barely hold a pencil. She’s been through piles and piles of identical maths problems with erratic results, handwriting exercises varying from just about legible to dancing scribbles in HB. The art, on the other hand, is a lot more fun talk about. She tried so hard to hide her giggles when showing a bemused mother her daughter’s drawing of a dog poo she’d seen in the playground.
But right now, all Yaz wants is to lock her classroom door, make her way to her car and have the longest and hottest bath of her life. Ideally with a pizza and half a bottle of white. It’s been that sort of day.
But there’s still one more agonising ten minute appointment to go. Fortunately it’s with one of her…less behaviourally challenging pupils, a little girl called Poppy, with an August birthday that pits her at the younger end of the class. Despite her age, there’s no unintelligible scrawls in Poppy’s exercise books—she’s smart, one hell of a reading ability, but very quiet. Yaz has seen her stalking across the grassy edge of the playground at break and sat alone at lunch, usually armed with a dog-eared picture book about space.
It’s not Poppy’s behaviour Yaz is slightly concerned about. It just can’t be good, or healthy, for a little four year old girl to have not made any friendships in the month she’s been at the school. She’d really like to talk about it with Poppy’s parents, but the clock on the wall above the door ticks on and there’s no-one to be seen.
Six fifty-six.
Six fifty-seven.
At six fifty-eight, Yaz sighs and starts to pack up her things, because sometimes parents forget appointments or can’t get away from work or life happens. At six fifty-nine, she’s about to leave, when—
The classroom door flies open and a woman walks in gripping Poppy’s hand, flustered and panting like she’s just run across the playground. She looks up, blowing a strand of blonde hair that’s blown into her eye-line away from her face. Two vivid green eyes blink back at her—Yaz hasn’t seen anything like them, and maybe it’s the sappy part of her left over from her literature degree, but it’s the kind of gaze that horny Renaissance poets write sonnets about.
(It’s pathetic, but it would be a lie to say that she doesn’t end up writing one herself a little bit later down the line. Oh, well. It’s called being ridiculously in love.)
“Sorry,” the woman breathes in a Northern accent almost as strong as hers, “I’m late. Am I late?”
“You are late,” Poppy says decidedly, identical eyes staring sagely, “Can I please go sit in the reading corner, Miss Khan?”
The reading corner is a pile of cushions and beanbags in an abandoned alcove of the classroom, now covered with posters of The Gruffalo and animals that begin with every letter of the alphabet. Poppy has her space book tucked under her left arm, as well as a little stuffed dog.
“Of course you may, Poppy,” Yaz says, smiling, dropping her bag onto the ground by her chair. “Me and your mummy are just going to have a short chat about how you’re doing at school.”
Poppy nods, and the woman presses a kiss on the top of her head as she rushes away, little shoes tapping noisily on the carpeted floor. The woman turns, smiling apologetically.
“I’m so sorry. I do try, really, but sometimes it’s like the world is working against me to purposely make me late.” Yaz notices the small array of earring glinting on her ear, the smart grey coat she wears on top of some cuffed mom jeans and a long sleeved shirt. She leans across the desk, shaking Yaz’s hand. “I work up at the university, you see, and the traffic is an absolute nightmare if you… sorry, I’m rambling, aren’t I? Already taken up enough of your time, I expect. It’s Miss Khan, right?”
She talks at a hundred miles an hour, waving her hands occasionally, and there’s something oddly compelling about it. It really doesn’t take much to warm to her—or to notice the contrast between her and her daughter. “Yasmin. And you would be Mrs Smith?”
“Miss,” the woman hastily corrects, but then smiles awkwardly, scratching her head. There’s an absence of a wedding ring, which isn’t so unusual, but there’s a pain in her grimace that she doesn’t see in so many divorced parents. Rather the widowed ones. “Technically, it’s Doctor, but I really can’t stand titles, sounds a bit pretentious. Joanna is fine.”
Doctor Joanna Smith. Yaz smiles inwardly, and wonders if it’s totally inappropriate to have a little bit of a crush on one of her student’s parents, because there’s just something about this beautiful and chaotic woman in five minutes that is impossible to put her finger on.
“Okay, let’s talk about Poppy, shall we?” Yaz says, fanning out Poppy’s collection of exercise books onto the table. There are no full-sized seats in the room other than her own, so Joanna is perched on a red plastic one, face comically just above being in line with the desk itself. It doesn’t seem to bother her. “She’s a lovely little girl. Very, very smart for her age—her reading is on par with someone at least three years older and her maths is coming along really well. I’m worried she’ll overtake me!”
Joanna laughs a little, but she’s busy scanning rows of handwriting and felt-tip illustrations, fingertips skimming a picture of roughly drawn little dog. It’s the same one she has clutched in her hands in the reading corner, grey with a red collar.
“Here,” Yaz says, turning the book slightly to an assignment labelled My Family, “We asked all the kids to talk about who they live with, what they do, and so on. She clearly looks up to you a lot.”
It’s heart-warming, really, and Yaz almost teared up sat at home marking it. My mummy is very clever and kind and when we hug we go to the moon. Mummy says I am a star but I think she is a star too and one day we will go to space together
There’s no mention of a daddy, or anyone else, and maybe that’s what makes this task so bittersweet sometimes. Reading about the kids who aren’t like the other kids.
Joanna’s eyes glaze over for a second and she looks over to the reading corner, where Poppy is lying on her back with her book held at arms’ length. Her hands clasp together. “What she like with the other kids? She never talks about anyone at home, really, and she always struggled with making friends at nursery. By that I mean she didn’t have any.”
Yaz softens because she can see concern in her eyes and a sort of muted desperation and hope that she’ll say something that contradicts her thoughts. But lying doesn’t help anybody in situations like these. “She is very quiet and that does often mean she’s by herself, yes.”
Joanna bites the inside of her cheek. “You should see her at home. Can barely get her to shut up most of the time, always banging on about penguins or black holes or…well, she talks about you quite a lot.”
“Me?”
“Oh, yeah,” Joanna nods, “Ever since you read Alice in Wonderland she’s made me read it to her every chance she gets, but apparently I don’t do the voices like Miss Khan does.”
Yaz remembers reading a bit of the story just the other week with all twenty-nine kids sat on the carpet eagerly, rolling with laughter every time she changed from high to low pitch when voicing the Hare and the Hatter. Poppy had sat silently at the back, expression unwavering—yet the whole time she was taking it in, making a bigger impact than Yaz anticipated.
“There’s a fine art to the voices in Alice,” Yaz replies, Joanna grinning, “You clearly just haven’t mastered it yet.”
“I have a PhD in astrophysics but satisfactorily reading a children’s book to a four year old’s standard is where I fall short, yeah?”
Yaz leans forward, rests her chin in her hand. Hopes she’s been subtle but doubts she actually is, but that is usually the way. She wants to keep talking about Poppy but she also wants to talk about her, what she sees when she looks up at the sky and what it means. Her job at the university. The silvery light of a full moon and the pull it has on the tides.
“I’m sure you’ll get there. It just takes practice.”
“Yeah. That’s a good motto for parenting, actually.” She pauses, looking down at her hands. Her nails are painted navy blue and chipped at the corners. “I just—like, I worry about her, a lot. We lost her dad a couple of years ago and most of the time, it’s just me and her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Yaz sympathises—there it is, there it is.
“No, no, it’s fine,” Joanna insists, “Long time ago. I don’t think she remembers him. And I don’t have any family, not anymore, just a few friends who are basically family, but… she needs more than that. I’m not worried about her schoolwork at all. I just want her to be able to talk and play with people her own age rather than me all the time. As much as I’d like to build dens twenty-four seven. Who wouldn’t?”
“You shouldn’t worry. It’s only the first month of term, after all. Kids move at different paces, and it’s just taking Poppy a little longer to settle in.” Yaz smiles comfortingly. “If you like, I’ll keep a closer eye on her. See if I can encourage her to be more involved with some of the children.”
Joanna’s demeanour brightens a little, hands loosening apart. “That would be great, thanks. Sometimes all she needs is a bit of a prod in the right direction.”
At that moment Poppy stalks over to the desk, toy dog straying behind her, book still clutched tight to her chest. She looks at her mother expectantly.
“What is it, baby?” Joanna asks softly, stroking Poppy’s blonde hair gently. “You tired?”
She shakes her head decisively. “Can I show Miss Khan the picture in my book?”
Yaz grins brightly, leaning across the desk. “You know, Poppy, I absolutely love pictures. And I think I’d love to see the one in your book.”
Poppy looks shyly over at Joanna before opening it to the back cover, where a biro illustration of a strange blue box stands majestically amongst the index. Joanna pulls her onto her knee so she can point to it better and Yaz looks intrigued, curious to know what it means.
“This is my time machine. Mummy drew it for me,” Poppy explains carefully, “And we’re going to travel back to the dinosaurs so I can ride on the back of a diplodocus.”
“A diplodocus?” Yaz raises a questioning eyebrow, as it’s a big word for such a little girl, and Joanna masks her giggle by kissing the back of her head. “That does sound like fun.”
“Mummy tells lots of fun stories. I especially like the one about the lizard and her wife and their pet potato.” Joanna does another terrible attempt of hiding her laugh and Yaz finds it ridiculously endearing, especially the way her nose scrunches as she grins. “If you like mummy could put you into one of her stories.”
The thought of being in this woman’s head after she’s left the classroom behind is too good an offer to refuse. They share a look, barely a second—but surely, surely, it’s not just her that feels something?
“I think I’d like that a lot,” Yaz says.
When they shake hands as Joanna and Poppy are about to leave, her hand lingers a little longer than before. Her skin is soft but flecked with black pen, a small silver ring indented with a moon on her index finger. When they break apart, Yaz longs for a reconnect. This cannot be the last time they meet. It cannot be the only time. It cannot.