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Let it be said that Edward Teach does his damn best to not judge people based on appearances. He’s gotten plenty of that from parents who look at him and think he cannot possibly be a good teacher solely because he’s wearing leather, so he doesn’t need to put that kind of energy out there into the world.
(Besides, the kids seem to like him. He’s been reliably informed they think he’s cool.)
But when a parent walks into his classroom wearing a three-piece suit complete with waistcoat and what Ed thinks is a cravat, he’s gonna have a few questions.
“Um, hello, would you happen to be Mr. Edward Teach?” the strange man asks, and Ed is momentarily too distracted by the outfit to respond with anything other than a vague nod. “Brilliant! I’m Alma Bonnet’s father, and I had a couple of questions--”
“No, you aren’t,” Ed replies, snapping out of it in an instant. “I’ve met Alma’s dad. He came with her mom tonight, I just saw them.”
The man flushes. “Er, yes, that would be true, wouldn’t it? Mary did tell me the two of them were at conferences together. I’m, ah, her biological father, as it were. The man you met earlier is her stepfather.”
As he says it, Ed realizes he does recall Alma mentioning her parents being divorced and that her mother had remarried. It's probably in her student file, but he can't remember the last time he checked one of those things outside of the required glance through it at the start of the year. “My apologies for the confusion then, Mr. Bonnet. What did you want to talk to me about? Alma’s doing great, she’s a smart kid. I can’t imagine you have questions about her performance.”
"Oh, no, not at all. I had a few questions for you about your course, actually. She's been rather enthralled with you and your teaching, so I suppose I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about." He smiles at Ed, cheeks still dusted pink from earlier. "I can't recall her ever being so excited about a class."
"Thanks, mate. Glad she's liking it."
"I really admire your commitment to teaching outside of the Anglicized version of history," Mr. Bonnet says, and Ed grins. "Alma talks about it all the time. She adores the informal lesson style, and says she rarely ever falls asleep in history anymore."
Ed preens a bit--never let it be said that he doesn't appreciate a good ego boost--and replies, "Yeah, she's great. Good kid. Awfully knowledgeable about historical piracy for a 13-year-old."
The color that had only just faded from Mr. Bonnet's face appeared again in full force at Ed's comment. "Yes, I'm afraid that's my fault. It's a bit of a special interest for me. She just picked it up from weekends at my house."
"Not a bad thing," he says, a smile tugging at his lips. "I personally like that sort of thing quite a bit."
"Yes, well, I ought to get going. More teachers to visit and all that!" As much as Ed desperately wants this strange man to stay so he can talk to him more about it, Mr. Bonnet is clearly very flustered, so he just nods and leans back in his desk chair.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Bonnet."
"Stede," he offers, beaming at Ed in a way that makes his insides feel warm and also very confused.
"Stede," Ed repeats softly as he heads for the classroom door. "Huh."
He doesn't realize until the next parent comes and goes that Stede didn't end up asking him a single question.
-
Lucius Spriggs is, without a doubt, the worst teacher Ed has ever worked with. He picks favorites quickly, despises grading, and rarely ever assigns actual work because he doesn't want to have to create a lesson plan. He gets away with this mostly because he's the art teacher, and as long as he's not asking the district for funding, they're not checking in on his classes too often.
He is, of course, one of the most beloved teachers at Queen Anne's Preparatory School. The kids love him--both the ones that don't care about art and want to mess around in class and the ones that actually do like art because, for all his faults, Lucius does love art.
The two of them have eaten lunch together more or less every day since Ed started working there two years ago. Ed isn't sure why--just that Lucius sat down next to him and started telling him about his class and now he won't leave him alone. He wants to hate Lucius so much. He's tried, repeatedly, to hate him. The problem is that Lucius doesn't seem to care whether or not Ed hates him.
The day after conferences is no different. Ed is joined by not just Lucius but also the music teacher, Frenchie, who is incredibly good at his job if a little bit prone to wild conspiracy theories, and the upper years' maths teacher, Jim, who is the only person Ed respects at this school.
“Do any of you have Alma Bonnet in your class?” he asks, trying for casual and probably missing by half a mile. “I met her dad last night, and--”
“Which one do you mean?” Lucius interrupts, thankfully saving Ed from having to explain that thing. “The normal one, or the other one?”
“What on Earth do you mean by the normal one?” Jim sets down their sandwich, glaring at Lucius. (Granted, their expressions generally range from “glare” to “glower” with very little in between). “What are you basing that on?”
Lucius just rolls his eyes. “Did you meet Stede or Doug?” he clarifies, and Jim slowly picks their sandwich up again.
“Both, technically, but I wanted to ask about Stede,” Ed says, attempting to give the impression that he does not care about this conversation at all. “Why--”
“Is he like that? I dunno, he’s been my best friend for three years and I don’t think I learned he had a daughter until she started going here last year.”
“He’s your best friend--”
"Oh, Stede?" Frenchie interrupts, glancing up from his food for the first time since lunch started. "Yeah, he's great. Absolutely mental, but great. I don't understand him one bit, but he's on the PTA here. Only parent who actually gives a shit about the teachers."
"We have a PTA?" Ed asks. "Is that a thing we have to go to? More specifically, is that a thing I have to go to?"
Lucius narrows his eyes. "Yes? You're the year 9 teacher representative. Have you not been going?"
Briefly, Ed thinks back to an email from the dean about connecting with parents and some monthly meetings he had thoroughly ignored. "When's the next one?"
"Tomorrow night," Jim answers through a mouthful of sandwich. "Take a video of the parents when you walk in."
"Jim, honestly," Lucius says, but Ed gives them a thumbs-up.
-
Ed lasts five minutes at the PTA meeting before he starts to consider murder.
The first issue is that it’s so goddamn boring that he can’t stay focused in the slightest, and that just makes all of the parents mad at him because it means he doesn’t care about their opinion or something.
He doesn’t care about their opinion, but he’d at least like them to think he does.
The second issue is that Stede isn’t even here, and Ed is starting to think that maybe this is all an elaborate plot by his coworkers to get him to actually do his job and is beginning to wonder if Jim would let him borrow a knife to stab Lucius in retaliation when the door to the library slams open.
Stede blusters into the room a fashionable seven-and-a-half minutes late (but who’s counting, other than Ed), takes the open seat next to him (which makes his heart do a weird backflip that he’s not so sure about), and sets an actual notebook down on the table (a whole notebook, with four different colors of pens!) before saying, “Sorry I’m late! Traffic getting Alma to her dance class was just the worst.”
Several of the other parents roll their eyes, and Ed fixes each of them with a glare in turn.
Stede is funny , he learns, though none of the other parents or teachers seem to appreciate it. He’s earnest in a way that Ed has yet to find in the parents at this school, and seems to not only care about his children’s grades but also their time at the school and how they fit in. It’s refreshing for a school like Queen Anne’s where half of the student body is only there so they can say they went there, and so the parents can brag about where their kids go to school.
Stede cares. He cares about the teachers, he cares about the students--even the ones whose parents he clearly hates if the way he interacts with them at the meeting is any indication--and Ed is absolutely fascinated by him.
At the end of the meeting, as the parents file out to their cars and the teachers head back to their rooms to grab some last-minute grading, Ed pulls Stede aside and says, “Hey, I just wanted to--”
“I’m sorry I was so awkward at parent-teacher conferences,” he apologizes, and Ed blinks. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so… oh, what’s the word?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Old? Obsessed with leather?”
“Kind,” Stede finishes, smiling softly at him. “I wasn’t expecting you to be kind. Alma is quite favorable to you in her stories, but still. You’re one of a kind, Mr. Teach.”
“Ed,” he chokes out. “Call me Ed.”
-
They wind up back in Ed’s classroom after that, trading stories from their college years and talking about piracy of all things since apparently, that’s a shared interest they’ve got.
“Did you always want to be a teacher?” Stede asks from where he’s sitting atop Ed’s desk. “Or were you going to be…” he trails off, and Ed lets out a loud bark of laughter.
“A pirate, maybe?” he asks, and that gets Stede laughing too. “Nah, I was never going to be a teacher. I wanted to be a chef, actually. Open up this restaurant by the seaside and cook food for the masses. Me and my buddies, we had it all figured out, but…” He shrugs loosely. “Anyway, I used to tutor in my spare time while I went through school. Eventually saw that so many of these kids just need someone a little less…”
“Boring?” Stede guesses.
He grins. “I was gonna say stuck-up, but boring works too. So many of these parents, too, they see me and they think I’m a fuckin’--fuckin’ lunatic, just ‘cause I like the color black, y’know? But the kids don’t care. The kids like that I don’t treat them like--y’know, like kids. But kids--they don’t know how they wanna be treated, really, they just don’t like it when you talk to ‘em like they’re babies. So I don’t do that, and the kids--they think I’m great.”
“I think you’re great,” he says enthusiastically. “I mean, if I had a teacher like you when I was in school, I wouldn’t have been able to pay attention at all.”
Ed very carefully does not think about that, fails, and thinks about it all weekend instead.
-
Alma Bonnet strides up to his desk after class the next week and levels him with a glare that could rival Jim’s. “My dad has a crush on you,” she says.
“Alma,” Ed cautions, though he can feel the heat rising to his face already. “That’s not appropriate. What would your dad say--”
She rolls her eyes. “My dad’s a coward and he wouldn’t stop talking about you at dinner this weekend, so Mom said he should talk to you, and then there was a whole argument and really it was just very frustrating because I already know you like him too.”
He drops the textbook he’s paging through onto his desk. “ How-- ”
“Lucius told me,” she responds smugly, “because he says you keep asking about Dad at lunch and that it’s getting really annoying.”
“I’m gonna kill him,” Ed mutters, and Alma giggles. “Well, Alma, thank you for… letting me know, I guess. Have a good rest of your day.”
“Here’s his number,” she says, holding out a piece of paper. “Please text him. It’s getting really bad.”
He doesn’t take the paper, even though he really, really wants to. It’s an admirable display of self-restraint. “Alma, this really isn’t appropriate.”
“Oh my God, fine,” she relents, shoving the paper back into her pocket. “Ask him on a date over email then.”
“ Alma .”
“I’m telling Mr. Spriggs you’re both cowards!” she calls as she walks out the door, and Ed throws his head back with a loud laugh.
-
Stede,
This is maybe not the most professional use of my school email, but the dean owes me a favor anyway. Would you like to go on a date sometime?
If you don’t want to, maybe just delete this email and pretend we’ve never spoken before. If you do… are you free this Saturday?
Ed