Her Melting Point

A Normal Day at the Office

She blamed his age and her recently developed taste for regular hanky-panky for her current predicament. Would you look at that, she thought venomously, Jocelyn Burns is having a childish row with her juvenile boyfriend! And it's getting increasingly ridiculous!

She broke down after three more days - and three more shockingly restless nights. It took her more than half an hour to compose a text, which consisted of two sentences: 'Hi!' and 'Would you like to meet?' She'd rewritten the second one so many times, questioning the tone, the word count, and possible interpretations of its subtext; that by the time she hit 'send,' it had lost all its meaning.

Hi. Not until Saturday. After football?

Jackie stared at his response, groaned, and dropped her forehead on her desk. She, of course, agreed to his offer; but there was no sense of victory. They'd see each other at the match anyway; she attended and photographed most of the games for the county's social media.

There was an unprecedented deviation in how being with him affected her: no matter how much she tried, she seemed incapable to put her anxiety over their relationship aside, and to focus on her work. She was completely sure that in the previous years, she had occasionally forgotten that Gabe existed, especially when things had been particularly frantic in her old school. Jackie decided that life in Fleckney was too relaxed, too cushy; and she was getting old and soft in the head; how else would one explain her adolescent fussy yearning?

The next day she had only one scheduled appointment, pitifully insufficient to keep her mind occupied. Perhaps, a video conference with the Board was in order. Those tended to invigorate her, given it was mostly rage and indignation that would course her blood afterwards. After all, even in Fleckney, a funding deficit was a sad and inevitable part of reality.

Her two o'clock was a requested meeting with the family of a pupil. The Kogans were newcomers to Fleckney, having moved to the county the previous September. When they marched into Jackie's office, she braced herself. Based on her previous experience with parents of a similar background, the conversation could be, put mildly, intense.

The man was short, his torso almost cubic; his arms long; the knuckles of his massive, short-fingered hands hairy. The wife was, in compliance with all stereotypes, blonde and slim; her lips, under a thick layer of mauve lip gloss, pursed in a persnickety grimace. They were both dressed in expensive puffer jackets; his, of course, was black; hers - of bright magenta. His habit of shaking and clanking with his car keys, with a large BMW logo doodah, solidified Jackie's opinion of them.

After the man gave Jackie's hand a weak awkward squeeze, no doubt because she was female; and Mrs. Kogan didn't even think to offer her hand; Jackie invited them to take the chairs across her desk.

"We have concerns," Mr. Kogan postulated and gave Jackie a dark look, his bushy eyebrows furrowed. "About our daughter, Alisa. She has bad friends. They have bad influence on her."

Jackie leaned back in her chair. A relaxed posture from a person in power, especially a woman, tended to irritate men like him, which in turn would make him more forthcoming.

"I'm sorry to hear it," she said.

"You don't understand," he continued right away, almost interrupting her. "She's a good girl. And before we came here, we had no problems."

The wife nodded and glared at Jackie with an identical acrimonious expression.

"What sort of concerns do you have at the moment?" Jackie asked; and then, before he could answer, she asked, unscrewing the cap of her fountain pen, "I'm going to take notes, so we don't lose any details." She pulled a notepad closer to her on her desk, and the Kogans followed it with their eyes. "Please, continue," Jackie said with a pleasant smile.