His polo shirt is stuck to him, dried and fresh sweat intermingling: the result of coming in and out of his air-conditioned office. Nobody wears cargo shorts like his anymore, down past his knees. His baseball cap, which he constantly removes and pulls back over his short-cropped hair, is one of many. He keeps it in his office, a portable out back by the football field. The rest live in his car and in the garage, the only place his wife has allowed him to hang them overlapping on the wall. His New Balance sneakers are not one of the pairs designed after the company’s rebranding. They are white, and dad-like, and were acquired at the outlet at Sawgrass. The kids say things behind his back when he makes them stand at attention at the start of class. He has three classes at once; there are too many kids and all he’s trying to do is keep them under control. His strictness is read as meanness, but he only looks angry because his transition lenses are taking too long to adjust to the bright Florida sun. He never used to need glasses, but now they’ve become one of his defining characteristics. He pulls up his shorts though they’re held up by a belt, one he used to threaten his daughters but never hit them. He had to size up his shorts to accommodate the belly that has come and gone over the years, through Weight Watchers and M&M binges; the belly that the kids use as ammo when he sends them to the sidewalk to consider their bad behavior.
A year and seven months. That’s how long he has until retirement. He crosses off the days in a free promotional calendar he’s hung on the bulletin board he shares with the other, much younger, P.E. teacher. They squeeze past each other in the little trailer on their breaks. It smells like old coffee, because neither of them can seem to remember to turn off the pot. It remains on through back to back to back double and triple classes. He thought once he might be a mentor to this kid, but it’s clear that won’t happen. They can stand each other most days, and that’s all he can ask, really. He thought at one time he might be a mentor to his daughters, too, but they chose niche sports as if to spite him. He just wanted to tell someone what foot to lead with as they tossed a ball, but instead he got schooled by his eldest on the difference between a salchow and an axel. They’d all moved away now, and what he’d give to sit and be lectured on the rules of Quidditch by the daughter whose liberal arts college he’d refinanced the home to pay for.
His third daughter, his youngest, is the favorite. She calls him as she walks home from the library late at night, earbuds on under the hood of her parka so she can keep her hands in her pockets against the Midwestern cold. When the others had already begun the years of not talking to him, she refused to take off the pendant he’d brought back from a conference up north in Tallahassee. A small silver dolphin that turned green when she wore it in the shower because he’d said it was sterling but it wasn’t. That was the year he’d almost cheated with the woman on the dodgeball panel, and in the midst of his guilt he’d chosen the gifts distractedly. Looking at that green dolphin made him sick, filled his nostrils with the sunscreen smell that oozed from the woman’s pores. She was from Tampa, with the kind of coarse blonde hair that’s never shiny. He saw her chapped lips whenever he examined the spot where the dolphin bled into his daughter’s skin. “I love that you love this gift but please, please, take it off.” By the time he went to his next conference, his daughter had outgrown dolphins and the woman was, mercifully, nowhere to be seen.
“You’re fat. I want to see you touch your toes,” says a kid whilst failing a fitness test. This has no effect on him. His skin has grown thick over the years. Thick, and brown, and weathered, because the school can’t afford to build a shelter. “Go to the sidewalk,” he says automatically. But that’s not what he’s thinking. A year and seven months. That’s what’s on his mind.
Sasha Tandlich lives in Los Angeles, where she works in film production. Her fiction has appeared in Meridian, phoebe, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. You can find her on her website. Intagram: @satandlich
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