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cdyssey · 2 years ago

Text

Advocate

Prompt (@kalikoke):

CW: Alcohol Mentions

AO3 Link

As they’re walking out to their cars, Barbara insists on going out to dinner that night to celebrate the reigning Read-a-Thon champ.

Her treat.

“Oh, so you’re takin’ me out on a date, huh?” Melissa grins widely, full of piss-and-vinegar. She loves to flirt with Barbara Howard—married woman, woman of God—thinks it’s fun to see her nearly bend over backwards trying not to accidentally flirt back. Meanwhile, the second-grade teacher has long made her peace with the fact that after nearly thirty years of friendship, the two of them talk like old lesbians who probably own a cat named Fred Astaire.

It’s just one of the occupational hazards of being work wives.

Somewhere along the way, they started to sound like actual wives too.

She likes that.

A lot.

Much more than she reasonably should.

They stop in front of Barbara’s car, a gray sedan that is meticulously washed every weekend. The windshield is completely white with recent sleet, and both of their breaths gather in pockets next to their faces.

“As a matter of fact,” Barbara only harrumphs, at once pompous and playful, a teasing glint in her eyes, “I am. Wear something befitting your winner status.”

“I got a new thong from Victoria's Secret the other day?” She immediately suggests, arching a positively lecherous brow. “Red. Matches my hair ‘n everything.”

Melissa tells herself that it doesn’t mean anything to her when Barbara visibly swallows at these words, when her dark pupils dilate, when the heavy binder in her arms abruptly slips from her grasp and onto her knee, causing her to cluck at Melissa like a mother hen.

“Lord Almighty! Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” The other woman moans, rubbing her leg as Melissa bends down to retrieve the binder, snickering silently.

“Yeah, and everyone else too,” she replies in her most suggestive voice.

“Melissa!”

But the second-grade teacher just laughs and laughs—and she carefully ignores the way Barbara’s cheeks have flushed—and she laughs.

This is all she ever feels comfortable asking for, these infinitesimal moments with Barbara Howard, snatched from the relentless march of time. She cups the nanoseconds in her palms just to hold them, if even for a little bit—which is precisely how long that a moment lasts anyway.

There and then gone, lived and then a fragmentary relic of the past with all the rest.

But, Jesus, how they kiss her fingertips so gently—these moments, these relics, these precious nanoseconds—dusting them, like falling snow.

—

A few hours later, they’re sitting across from each other at a booth in Mamma Mia’s, a relatively new and upscale pizzeria that used to be a laundromat a couple of years ago until the feds finally figured out it was another front for the Philly Mob. (None of Melissa’s idiot cousins were involved this time, thank God. Even they weren’t stupid enough to launder money in a goddamn laundromat.)

All of the washers and dryers and probable bloodstains were removed a few years back, and a yuppie couple has since gutted the rather sizable space, remodeled it, and turned it into the talk of the town. Barbara, completely unaware of its history, has been begging to try it out for lunch sometime.

She’s heard that their salads are excellent.

And Melissa, entirely aware of its history, has always entertained the proposition with a secretive chuckle at the thought of her very proper friend unwittingly stepping foot into a building where at least two men have definitely died.

Yeah, sure, Barb. Let’s go.

Which is how they end up here for dinner, blissfully sipping on their Merlots as they wait for their waitress to come back and take their order. Melissa is indeed wearing something befitting her victory over Janine—a short, green dress with sleeves that billows out around her wrists—but she thinks Barbara has her beat, so elegant in a teal blouse and black vest. Her fitted slacks—also black—accentuate the shapely curves of her hips.

Melissa appreciates the way her friend looks.

(Again, much more than she decently should.)

“You know,” Barbara begins without looking up. She’s been busy scanning the menu for the past few minutes, her readers delicately perched on the bridge of her nose. Melissa’s own menu is still on the table, unfolded and untouched. “I didn’t get to have one blessed slice of pizza today. My kindergarteners were simply voracious.”

“Mine too,” Melissa chortles, recalling how she’d had to tell at least five kids not to chew so fast. They were gonna get indigestion! “And I gave my leftovers to little Benji.”

Sweet kid, Benji Andrews—the youngest in a family of seven.

There sometimes isn’t enough food to go around at his place, so she and Barbara—(who’d had Benji in her class two years ago, and they'd both had several of Benji's siblings)—worked out an agreement with the lunch ladies to make sure that he gets sent home with extra meals a few times a week.

“Ah, that’s my Melissa,” Barbara murmurs fondly, her gaze flicking upwards from the glossy foldout.

“Yeah, well, you would have done the same, ya schmaltzy gagootz,” she readily deflects—never one to accept unadulterated praise without a fight—but even still, she can’t help but smile at the quiet intimacy of being called Barbara's own.

Damn her and God bless her, she always knows how to tease the softness right out of Melissa.

“Oh!” The older teacher suddenly gasps, glasses slipping a little down her nose. “Shame on me—I almost forgot. Melissa, would you like me to call out some menu items for you? There’s a spinach-ricotta calzone that might have your name on it.”

And Barbara glances at her perfectly unopened menu then, apology flashing in her eyes, but Melissa only shakes her head. She’d taken one look at the front of the pamphlet, seen its kookily stylized typeface, and quickly placed it down before any of the letters started doin’ any funny business.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says firmly. “I looked at their menu online before we got here, and I'm fine if you just wanna share a pizza."

“Are you sure?” Barbara frets, conscientious about her reading struggles—always—from the very moment she found out about them some two decades ago when she was the first person to ever realize that Melissa only rarely peruses menus at restaurants.

And that’s only if the font is just right or if there are helpful pictures or if there’s not too damn much happening on the page at one time.

Before the Internet really took off, and Melissa didn’t have a reliable way of checking a menu before she went to a restaurant she was unfamiliar with, she’d just ask the waiter for the specials and choose one that sounded the most appetizing to her—far too humiliated to spend the necessary time trying to decipher a block of text that almost looked comprehensible to her. She didn’t have the luxury to chisel the individual words out, unit by unit, as she did at home with her books. The someone sitting across from her was unfailingly impatient. Her siblings. Some of her antsier friends. Her own ma.

Joe.

He got so freaking annoyed when she took forever to order, even though he knew she had a hard time with menus.

He just swore up and down that she needed better glasses.

But Barbara, from the very moment she found out, approached the matter far differently than her ex-husband, which is to say with the same determination and kindness that governs most of her actions. She suggested that she could read some parts of the menu aloud for Melissa—so as to provide her with options—and for years upon years, she’s done so every time they’ve tried a new restaurant together.

Melissa hated that at first.

Hated that her weakness had been seen and so thoroughly identified by another.

Hated that someone would ever have the guts to call her out on it.

Hated that all of her dozens of coping techniques were stunningly powerless against a goddamn laminated piece of paper.

Hated that it was so obvious if anyone cared to notice.

Which the kindergarten teacher absolutely did.

But then again, Barbara notices a lot of things about Melissa, even the all-too-vulnerable details that she refuses to articulate aloud.

She notices baseball bats firmly taped under desks and irrational fears having to do with ever facing away from a door. She notices new scrapes on her knuckles from bar fights and dark shadows turning circles beneath her eyes after restless nights. She notices when Melissa is having trouble with dinner menus and eighty-paged curriculum updates and legalese from divorce papers that get served to her two days before her fifty-fifth birthday.

And yes, she once hated all of that—Barbara's keen eyes and Barbara's annoying inability not to intervene.

Barbara's hero complex.

And Barbara's pity.

Melissa hated the pity most of all.

But time and trust and her repeated exposure to her friend's particular way of being in the world have ultimately softened her initial understanding of this point, have made her come to terms with the fact that Barbara Howard doesn’t exactly pity her when she reads menus aloud to her, when she sends her emails in big, uncrowded fonts, when she helps her mark up stupid administrative packets with their stupid, tiny text.

She accommodates her.

And this is to say that she loves her.

“I’m positive,” she nods vigorously, well-aware that it takes a lot of verbal and physical gesturing for her friend to ever drop something. She doesn't necessarily want to talk about her insecurities right now—has had to think about them a lot these past few days with Maya, dredging up so many memories—but she damn well won't be responsible for Barbara feeling bad about herself because of them too. “I’m covered tonight.”

As to be expected, though, Barbara, still holding on to her guilt with a frown, sighs deeply.

“You shouldn’t have to be, though,” she insists, vaguely waving her menu around. “It’s absolutely absurd that no one considers how hellacious this font can be on the eyes.”

“Hah!” Melissa snorts, propping her chin up on her fist. “I know you’re angry when you start pullin’ polysyllabic words outta your ass.”

“I’m not angry,” Barbara sniffs (clearly angry). “I’m just disappointed in the lack of accessibility.”

“You should write an op-ed for the Times.”

“Melissa,” she pouts, now finally placing the menu down, crossing her arms over her chest, “I’m being utterly serious.”

And Melissa readily softens, knows that every word is true. Barbara cares so much about making sure that the world is a just place—for her students, for her family, for Melissa herself.

There’s a wheelchair accessible ramp at Willard R. Abbott Elementary School not because some egghead at City Hall gave a rat’s ass.

But because Barbara Howard is a goddamn amazing teacher who fought for it.

There's a reason why she's the best of them all.

“Yeah, I know,” she smiles sadly, impulsively reaching over and offering her upturned palm, an olive branch. But she waits, with remarkable patience, for the inevitable moment when Barbara unbends her arms and takes it, interlinking their fingers together over the checkered tablecloth. She squeezes once and desperately wishes that they could stay like this forever, suspended in time, connected by touch, but the elegant ring on Barbara’s fourth finger shimmers in the light from the tabletop candle.

And so she lets go in the end.

She always does.

(Relics and nanoseconds.)

“I gotta say, I'm... disappointed too,” she goes on with a heavy sigh, pulling her now free hand through her hair. “Had a talk with one of my kiddos today whose parents won’t let her get tested for dyslexia."

“Oh, Melissa,” Barbara murmurs, understanding dawning in her eyes, gentle and profound care. Her best friend knows the very specific way that this situation hits close to home.

It’d been a matter of time for Melissa’s ma.

Or, well, for the lack of it more accurately.

She had five children all under the age of ten to take care of, and she didn’t have the energy to wonder why her eldest daughter sucked at reading beyond thinking that she just wasn’t trying hard enough.

How hard, after all, could it be to read Dr. Seuss?

“I taught her one of my tricks—y’know, highlighting the first parts of words,” she adds quickly, as though to blow past the sentimentality of everything, of it all, “but it made me sad for my kid t’think that she doesn’t have an advocate…”

Maya's parents had been afraid—afraid for their child to get a label, afraid for her to be different, afraid for her to be perceived as less than.

She'd kinda wanted to key their car after that disastrous conference, but she also gets it—she really fucking does.

“She has you,” Barbara immediately says, adamant, adoring and so perfectly convinced. “You were her advocate today. You were there for that baby girl in a way that she will never forget.”

Melissa blinks rapidly, unable to stop a lump from rising to her throat as she suddenly recalls Mrs. Myrick, the teacher who had given her that book about a sad child who was also different all those many years ago.

She’d sat with Melissa in the hallway and taught her how to steady a highlighter against a page without messing things up.

But even if you do mess up, Melissa, the teacher had murmured, brushing a stray curl behind the then six-year old’s ear, that’s perfectly okay too.

You’re enough, Melissa, she finished, soft and so kind. You're always enough.

“I’m so proud of you,” Barbara intones in the exact same cadence some fifty-odd years later, eyes gleaming in the dim lighting of the restaurant, radiant with quiet affection.

Melissa falteringly opens her mouth to say something then, to tell Barbara thank you.

For reading menus aloud to me.

For making sure the school has a wheelchair ramp.

For not pitying me.

For loving me.

For always being in my corner.

For never once betting against me.

Other people have me?

Well, I have you.

You’re my advocate.

And I love you.

But their waitress comes up to them then, a slight, young thing who might be Kit or Kat according to the slightly distorted name tag pinned on her chest, and she’s asking if they know what they’d like to eat. So she closes her mouth again, the words dying away on her tongue.

“A pizza then?” Barbara asks, a smile rising to her plump lips. “To celebrate the fact that you’ve taken the prize home once again, Ms. Schemmenti?”

“Oh, hon,” she smirks, easily shifting back into utter asshole mode. “How can you say that when I haven’t even introduced you to my folks yet?”

“Girlfriend!” Comes another scandalized groan, Barbara pinching the bridge of her nose. “Now is not the time!”

And Melissa laughs with all her belly as Barbara hastily explains to the waitress that they're not dating, they're just very good friends—(which somehow sounds even gayer)—and Melissa is merely being facetious. And she doesn't do anything to refute her, just savors the moment, reveling in the blush that has delicately darkened the skin around Barbara's nose.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #abbott elementary #abbott elementary spoilers #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #LISTEN #OKAY #I KNOW I HAVE TO FINISH MY SECRET SANTAS #BUT THIS EPISODE MADE ME CRY

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