Wedding of the Century update (Patreon)

“Next question,” Peter said, “What is the displacement of a car moving with a uniform velocity of twenty meters per second for forty seconds?”

Hands. Kids saying ‘me, me!’ like they were in elementary. Peter couldn’t say he wasn’t gratified. He’d known a lot of students over the years who never tried putting their hand up because they thought they were dumb, they thought they’d look like an idiot. But once they put themselves out there and saw there was nothing scary about being called on, they were on their way to proudly sitting in the front row instead of slouching in the back.

“Yes, Dakota?”

“Four hundred meters.”

“Sorry, no, eight hundred meters.”

Dakota hung her head, but Mary Jane waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, girl, I’ve never needed to know the displacement of something, not once I hit five foot eight… among other measurements.”

Peter backed up until she was in whispering range. “Why would you say that to teenagers?”

“Teenagers are actually the target market for my posters,” Mary Jane whispered back.

“Not sure I wanted to know that.”

“Don’t be a prude, they’re artistic. You’re a photographer, you should respect the craft—”

“I do respect the craft! I’m saying don’t tell my kids that school is meaningless while they’re in school.”

“Well, she felt bad.”

“I appreciate that she felt bad, but the thing to do is move on, not make a big deal out of—”

“You’re the one making a big deal out of my big deal!”

“How can I be making a big deal out of what’s already—Kevin, no phones in class!”

Kevin put the phone back in his pocket.

“Was he trying to take a picture of us?” Mary Jane whispered.

“I don’t know. Stop whispering,” Peter said, and retreated out of whispering range.

Though he was pretty sure that Mary Jane hissed “You stop whispering” after him.

Peter held up the test booklet between them. “Okay, class, which type of adaptation is exhibited by sandhill cranes flying north for the summer?”

Mary Jane called on Rose before Peter could pick anyone. “You in the so-cute top, it’s so cute.”

“Behavioral!” Rose cried.

“That’s correct.”

Mary Jane smirked at Peter. “It’s like I always say, it takes smarts to dress nice. Go ahead, hot stuff.”

Rose blushed, put her raised hand down on her desk, and just about drummed her hands up and down. “I, uh, I just wanted to know… uhh… who’s the best kisser you’ve ever kissed?”

Peter thought that the next time he did this—assuming he had enough of a teaching career left for there to be a next time—he’d have to think up a way to vet these questions first. “Could we maybe think of another—”

“It’s fine, tiger,” Mary Jane said. “Just some girltalk, right? To answer your question…” She stitched her fingers together, twitching her thumbs, milking the wait as she made a big show of thinking. “I don’t know if you know his first name—you all call him Mr. Parker? He doesn’t seem that old to me—”

Peter’s ears burned. The whole class was going for their phones and he knew there was no chance of strong-voicing them all into compliance. Why did this have to happen while the History class was doing a unit on mass resistance?

He sat down on the dunce stool which was now called the Administrative Pre-Action Isolation Corrective. He actually hadn’t ever used it until now.

“That’s bull,” he told Mary Jane.

“Bull?”

“Well, not bull… you shouldn’t say bull,” he directed at the class. “But you’re just playing to the crowd.”

“You think I’m just saying that because you’re here? So modest.”

“I think you’re just saying that because we’ve never kissed.”

“Bull,” Mary Jane said, lips wrapping on each enunciated syllable. “Liz Allan’s thirteenth birthday party.”

“I was…” Peter did the math quickly. “I was twelve.”

“So was I?” Mary Jane shot back. “Your aunt helped Liz’s mom bake the cake, so you got an invitation, even though you were a real loner back then.” She looked out at her enrapt audience. “His aunt is a great cook.”

“She is a great cook,” Peter admitted. “And I was a loner, back then, which is why I just hung out—”

“You broke the pinata! Which we all thought was pretty cool.”

“It wasn’t that hard, the rope made a noise when it swung, I just had to wait until I heard it and… I had an unfair advantage, really, I was hanging out in the backyard when the adults put it up, so I knew what to listen for. And you know what, this has all gone on a bit too much, we’re supposed to be doing SAT prep.” Peter ripped his eyes off Mary Jane and looked at the class. “So, question asked, Mary Jane lied about it, what can we do? We don’t have a very transparent process here. Next question.” He firmly brought up the booklet. “What are the building blocks of lipids? Jeffrey.”

“Fatty acids.”

“That’s right,” Peter said, a little smugly.

Jeffrey was a huge nerd. He’d probably want to ask Mary Jane something about how movie cameras worked, which would at least calm things down.

“What’s your question?” Mary Jane asked him. She seemed a lot smug.

“What happened after Mr. Parker broke the pinata?”

Peter hated nerds worse than quips.

“Well,” Mary Jane said at length, tapping her chin. “We all had candy, and then pizza—”

“There was a clown,” Peter reminded her.

“Screw that clown, that clown was drunk. Do you remember that balloon animal Flash asked for?”

“To be fair, he wanted a giraffe. Guy always was a problem child.”

“Well, it was very long, it was not a giraffe,” Mary Jane recalled. “After some of the parents had taken him aside, we all went upstairs to play Final Fantasy… Ten, I think it was? On Liz’s Playstation. Which was boring.”

“It had a slow-paced beginning, it’s an RPG, it has to establish the…” Peter held up a fist. “Never mind. Keep going.”

“Thank you, I will,” Mary Jane cooed. “Amazingly, Peter was not interested in what the RPG was establishing, because some of us decided to play Seven Minutes in Heaven, which I don’t know if you kids still do now that you have cell phones…”

“Okay, okay, rethinking the appropriateness of this story,” Peter said.

“What? It’s PG.”

“It’s personal. Private.”

“Are you embarrassed?” Mary Jane trilled. “It was cute, c’mon.”

“I’m not embarrassed, I just think it’s a private story that no one else really needs to know about and anyway, we’re supposed to be doing test prep. Still. And it feels like I would be better off showing the kids an episode of a BBC adaptation every time they get a question right instead of this.”

“Kids,” Mary Jane said, “assuming you get the next question right, how many of you are going to ask what happened next at Liz Allan’s birthday party?”

Every hand went up. Peter literally had not known he had that many kids in his class.

“That’s not fair,” he protested. “They’re teenagers, they’re forming their own identities by rebelling against authority.”

Mary Jane slipped the booklet away from him and read: “’How does one isotope of an element differ from another isotope of the same element?’”

“Increase or decrease in the number of neutrons!” someone cried, probably Jeffrey, that dweeb.

“You gave them an easy one,” Peter sneered at MJ.

“Who doesn’t like easy?” Mary Jane retorted. She swiveled to the class so effortlessly Peter thought he might be meant to pick her up, like she was in the middle of a ballet recital. “There were six of us, so we all had a number from one to six and Peter rolled these two dice he had on him. Because he carried dice around with him. At the time, we thought he might be secretly cool, but two weeks later we found a character sheet on him. But anyway, we rolled the dice, seven minutes, seven minutes, seven minutes. I was getting nervous, because the dice never landed on my number and I didn’t want to play Seven Minutes in Heaven without ever getting my seven minutes.”

“Yes, how would you ever have found someone to kiss you without dice?” Peter teased.

“Peter was pretty nervous too,” Mary Jane said, “which was weird, because he definitely looked like he practiced the best oral hygiene in class.”

“Never had a cavity.”

“I haven’t had cavities either,” Mary Jane told.

“Yeah, well, you could afford a dentist.” Peter looked off at the poor, forlorn lesson plan written on the board. A lost cause.

He had been nervous. Getting invited to a birthday party, playing games with the other kids… it seemed like making it to the Moon.

But he’d still known there was no way any of the girls there would actually want to kiss him. And all it would take was one of them swiping those dice away and saying that rules or not, there was no way she was going into the closet with him… and he’d be back where he started. Alone.

And he probably wouldn’t get the dice back either.