Sweet Romance15 min read
Long Time No See, Ms. Carpenter
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I remember the white wine glass turning in a slow circle, the liquid catching the light like a small moon. I breathed a little, then set the glass down without taking a sip.
"Your family cooks Chinese food, right? You don't go to Western restaurants much?" he asked, unhurried, like he had all evening to fill the air with questions.
"I—" I was splitting the hard shell of a lobster with my fork and table knife. My hand paused over a pink curve of meat. "I like both," I said. I tried to sound polite.
He smiled a polite, careful smile. "You studied in the UK, didn't you? London has worse lobster than LA."
"I've been to London once. I stayed two months. Rainy. I prefer LA; sunlight feels safer." I took the piece of lobster I’d exposed and popped it into my mouth. It was worth the dress.
"You don't talk much," he said after a while. "I was hoping—"
"I tend to be quiet," I replied. "A bit boring."
He didn't notice my eyes sliding to the other table.
"You're the third?" I mouthed to myself as polite conversation kept orbiting around me. The man across the table—my third blind-date this month—kept trying to coax me into a story like he could pull a ribbon from my silence. I was already composing a polite exit for dessert.
Then a stray shell flew.
A small arc of orange armor landed on my skirt, staining the pale fabric with a brown-red line. "Oh." I tried to keep my face blank while I stood. "I'll go to the restroom to clean this up."
I walked toward the washroom, catching a flash of a side profile in the doorway and thinking, absurdly, that the glass of the door had framed a memory. He was half-turned away, a face for a photograph: dark hair falling over a forehead, long lashes that shaded a tireless gaze, the jawline still defiantly sharp.
He was not exactly the same man I'd pictured five years ago—but he was close enough to make the small world around me tilt. I scrubbed at the stain with damp tissues until the line blurred, but my thoughts kept replaying that transient profile. I ended up heading back to the table early, hovering, waiting for the dessert to come.
When the dessert arrived I saw him across the room again—same profile, now seated alone at a nearby table. He wore a dark gray sweater, like an armor that failed at being conventional. I almost laughed at myself: five years ago I had called him Li Wushan in my head, like a character from an old film; now that face had one.
"Do you like movies?" my date asked as if we had not both been living inside different winters of our own. "There's a sci-fi one next week—do you want to—"
"No," I said. "I have plans."
He pushed. "I can do weekdays. You're not working now, right? Mondays through Fridays would be fine."
I shook my head. "Not this week. Sorry."
He kept smiling like a man who believed in persistence. "I think we're compatible. You like quiet people? I like quiet people."
"Maybe not," I said, soft as a thread. "I don't think we're compatible."
It felt like I had told him a truth and put it in a drawer.
Then a waiter passed another parcel to the man across the room—takeout. He had a paper bag and a practised, small hand that accepted the package and moved. He had stood, put on a jacket, and disappeared past the door.
Panic moved faster inside me than reason. I quickened my steps, excused myself, and said, "I have to go. I'll pay—I'll pay right away." I left my glass less empty than my patience.
Outside the restaurant the November wind shoved at my coat. I searched among the cars and faces and couldn't find him. I almost took the taxi the third man offered. "I'll drive you," he insisted.
"No, it's fine," I said. I wanted the evening to end without starting anything else that lasted.
I didn't call a car. I stood under the awning and looked down the street. Then a car with a license ending in 7798 pulled up inches away, headlights like an interrogation lamp. The window rolled down, and that profile formed a frame again. A low voice came from the car.
"Passenger, tail number 7798?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, and everything beyond the word went quiet. I climbed in. He had already said the two words that would reset the calendar in my head.
"Long time no see, Ms. Carpenter."
He had called me "Ms. Carpenter." Not a nickname—my teacher title. His voice folded into me the way a place can fold a paper map.
Later, I would call the memory of that night the moment the world rearranged itself. For a few minutes, even the awkward date across from me became background noise.
"Where did you come from?" I asked later in the cab. He shrugged.
"Just left," Kai said. He had a casualness that looked like armor. "Are you okay? Your shell—your top—are you all right?"
"It's fine," I said. "It's just—" I swallowed. "I didn't expect to see you."
"Neither did I."
We didn't go back to the date. We drove two blocks in a silence that said everything and nothing. I climbed out, said goodbye, and watched him walk into the night.
Weeks later my life was rearranged into lesson plans and photocopies. The school I was interning at had a labyrinth of identical white buildings and a teacher's office that smelled like old glue. I remembered the day I wandered around campus lost, the feeling of being in a place that didn't make sense until a compact kid in a buzzcut jumped over a wall and landed like a cat. He looked me up and down, asked if I was looking for someone, then ran away again. My heart did a thing then it hadn't done in years. The kid had a face that cut like paper—sharp, judged, beautiful. The other teachers called him a problem.
"That kid's name?" King, the grade head—Canaan Schwarz—asked later, smiling with the same indulgence you'd reserve for rotund puppies.
"He's Li—" I started, then stopped.
"He's Kai Cline." The teacher's voice dropped, a fact deposited into the air. "Don't get into trouble with him. He's a handful."
I took my placement in the teaching office, sat at a desk near the window, and began to learn the names of the children who would be my responsibility: Colin Cannon—loud, friendly; Kaede Hill—quiet and diligent; Aylin Bray—sharp and bright; and many others. The day I taught my first class, Kai sat in the back row, face angled away, hands folded. He almost slept through my entire opening. When I tapped the desk and called his name, he looked up with that peculiar indifference of his and said, "I'm awake." I told him to stand and listen.
"Stand up for the lesson," I said, part ritual, part bluff.
He stood, leaned against the wall, and went straight back to sleep.
I tried not to let it bother me. I was an intern, a new girl standing in the place where Ms. Hofmann—our pregnant English teacher—had soothed the room with a practiced voice. My job was to keep the class breathing in English grammar and keep students' lungs from escaping into adolescence. No one had warned me I'd also need a small arsenal of patience for boyhood.
On a Saturday my friend Fernanda Ray called and bribed me into going out. "Trust me. It'll be fun," she said, voice a carnival. "I borrowed my cousin's car. Come on."
I lied to my mother—Dolores Davis—and told her plans had changed because I had a late study session. I met Fernanda and the two of us found ourselves in a place I had only ever read about—a club that smelled of perfume and oil and an impossible kind of heat. Fernanda drank, squealed, got pulled onstage by a golden-haired performer. I watched, uncomfortable, nursing an expensive bottle more for appearances than taste.
A big man, all muscle and rehearsal, sat beside me. He tried to be charming in ways that made the air viscous. I tried to be polite. I tried to step back. He misread my reaction and leaned in, too close.
"Here," he said, and they say that in these places the world flips the script. He tried to feed me his drink.
I flinched and something old and reflexive stood up in me: the impulse to push back. I knocked the glass aside, and it plunged a spill across my chest. It was absurdly red on my pale knit.
I remember the flash of embarrassment, the dead spot in my throat. I grabbed napkins. A flash of movement cut across the light and a hand steadied itself at my wrist. I looked up and saw that profile again.
"Kai?" I hissed.
He looked stunned and a little affronted and entirely adult in a white shirt that clung to his shoulders. He had been working here—he told me later—shifts from six to two a.m., the money enough to take the edge off.
"You work here?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It's a job. I know how you look at places like this." His voice had an edge; it felt like an opinion, not an accusation. "If you're worried about a stain, he owes you compensation. He'll pay from his tip."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that I had chosen to be here. Everything complicated.
When the lights went down and the night emptied, we found Fernanda in the manager's room, stomping on a man who had touched her without permission. The obscene man tried to flee. I remember the manager's face quickening like the face of a man who had seen fire and found it inconvenient.
Fernanda was furious. "Call the cops!" she shouted.
"Enough," the manager—Erasmus Larsen—said, baring his belt of authority. We left after the police had taken a report. That night we waited, a ragtag trio of colliding stories, until dawn.
Kai and I walked back to the taxi rank in the freezing air. He asked for my phone and I handed it over like handing over a secret. "Save my number," I said.
He took the phone awkwardly and then, after a pause, nodded. "Okay."
For the next week, the rhythm of school and my attempts to teach wrote themselves around a small string—Kai's presence. I found him in odd corners: delivering test papers to the staff room, catching the elevator, sitting outside the music room, looking like an island. He had a look of distance that did not mean he wanted to stay that way.
Then, a new trouble entered the school like a storm. Kaede—quiet, small-voiced Kaede Hill—began to come to class with eyes that had not slept and a constant look of checking behind her. One evening she spun a tale to me that made my stomach drop: a new transfer student, Javier Dominguez, had been following her home. He had been standing across from her at the bus stop, leaning under his hat with a grin that felt like a threat. She ran. He kept following.
She told me the story in the teacher's office with her fingers black at her nails and eyes like frightened lamps. I made a call. I reported it. Javier's name came with the weight of history; he was a new recruit to the sports program—tall, a scar across his brow, the kind of boy adult rumor called "trouble."
When Javier cornered Kaede in the corridor, something in my internal alarm system—maybe the hours of children and their small known hurts—shouted. Kai appeared like a thought. He moved like a clock hand: precise, exact, snap.
"Hey," he said to Javier.
"Move." Javier's voice had a sound like a blade in a closed room.
Kai stepped forward. He and Javier faced one another, two compact, defiant things. And then there was a burst of motion: a shove, a stumble, a punch. The corridor became an ugly puddle of motion.
I watched Kaede shrink. I heard the crack of leather on flesh. The watchman heard the shout and people clustered. Someone had filmed five seconds on their phone. The rest of the hour blurred into the principal's office where parents arrived like men called to witness.
Javier's father—Augusto Duffy—arrived next and made the scene worse. He was loud and hot with shame and the kind of violence that looks like leather. A fist came up. He stepped forward and—panic bleached the air—he swung his leg at his own son, showed his anger in the wrong direction. People gasped. I moved forward and tried to calm him. A fight erupted again with the father accusing, the teachers trying to hold together a rope of order.
In the end, the administration gave me an option I hadn't expected: an assembly. "We need to be clear," Henry Soto, the homeroom teacher, told the parents. "This is school property. Everyone sees each other. We will look at the footage."
We were a small court that afternoon. The assembly hall filled with the hum of parents and students. A projector made the corridor into a theater of our shame. The cellphone footage, shaky and small at first, grew. There was Kaede—running, breath like hot coal. There was Javier—blocking, smirking. There was Kai—moving without hesitation—and then the shove, the punch, the tumble. The hall was silent.
Then Augusto Duffy stood and lied. "My son was merely trying to talk," he said, voice thick. "He was the one attacked."
"We will judge this on the facts," Canaan said from the stage, voice like a bell. "We will, however, remind everyone: harassment will not be tolerated. Violence is not the way. But we will also ask—what happens when the adults around students are violent? Who teaches them to be men?"
Augusto's face went red. He looked like a man who had planned to be feared. Someone from the audience began to speak—Colin Cannon, who had earlier been called to account for small mischiefs, had his hand up. "Sir," he said, voice seeking, "my seatmate saw it. When the kid blocked Kaede he wouldn't stop. We were there."
The principal invited the police liaison to the assembly by phone. The footage was clear; Javier's harassing steps were repeated in the loop of the projector. The crowd watched the slow truth: the boy had followed, the boy had threatened, and when confronted the result had been the body's necessary defense.
The punishment Canaan announced was precise: Javier would be given a serious school suspension, a copy of the school's code posted in the classroom for a month, and community service. More important, the father, Augusto, would be required to attend a parents’ conference about violence and parenting. The school's legal counsel arranged for medical assessment for the injured—Javier himself had bruises—so everyone could see the full picture. That was the rawness of the thing: we didn't remove pain with shame. We demanded accountability.
But Augusto's retaliation—his attempt to extort a payment "for damage"—escalated. He muttered about lawsuits. He wanted Kai to pay for "medical fees" as though the school's decision didn't exist. The man in the back of the assembly hall recorded his own version of events and posted them to social media. The post had the calm air of a man who wanted an audience.
What followed was, for him, the public punishment he hadn't imagined.
We arranged for a parent-teacher forum two days later. The town's little online community had already sprung into life; people commented, shared, and debated. Someone had uploaded the corridor footage with captions; the feed traveled. Augusto's post came like a match thrown into dry grass: "My son was beaten!" he wrote. "Is this how the school protects its students?" His comments doubled. The local parents formed into sides. A few women who had kids at the club where the other incident had happened recognized faces and reached out. Social pressure is a slow, clean blade.
At the forum, Canaan began with the facts and the footage. "We will show the footage," he said. "You can judge from your own eyes."
The lights dimmed. The corridor filled again with the projector's light. We watched the whole thing: Javier's taunting presence, Kaede's fear, Kai's motion. Many faces in the audience began to flush. Then we played a second clip—Augusto’s own posting. He had filmed short, angry snippets of his son that omitted the harassment entirely. "This," Canaan said, "is not the whole truth."
Augusto huffed, stood, and tried to storm out. A woman with a camera from the schoolman's association stepped forward and asked him for a comment on camera. He obliged, ranting and then reaching for a level of self-justification that only made him look smaller. Within two hours the clip was reposted across the town. The school published the full footage in an edited way to protect students' privacy but to reveal the pattern of events. A mid-level online influencer—Kara Bernard, whose child had graduated from the school—commented, reposted, and added a pointed line about parental responsibility.
What followed was not a legal sentencing. It was a social unmasking. Augusto, who had expected to be an indignant lion, found himself in front of his peers explaining his choices. The local business owners—men who once greeted him at the cafe—asked him awkward, carefully phrased questions. His business partner called. The man's tone had shifted from solidarity to caution.
At the next community meeting in the town square—planned as an educational event on school safety—Augusto tried to stand and raise a point. The moderator invited him to speak. The microphone amplified his voice and made each sentence sound like stone.
"You assaulted your own son in the principal's office," Canaan told the square of listeners later, and the words were met with a murmur. "You demanded money for an act of protection your child prompted. We will not ignore the pattern."
A neighbor recorded the scene. Parents who had previously only muttered behind him began to stand and recount stories of heavy-handedness, of threats, of evenings when he had stormed into businesses. When the local child-run food stall owner—who had once negotiated a loan with him—shook his head and said, "We will not do business if this is how you treat people," the man's posture shrank like a wet paper bag.
He tried to demand apologies from the school. Instead, the PTA offered mediation and the town's dispute resolution service recorded a contract: Augusto would attend anger-management classes, meet with a family counselor, and provide a written apology to Kaede. He was given an ultimatum by the association: follow the plan, or face a formal complaint to the local authority and public naming on the community board. The community's verdict was not verbal alone; it was the quiet but absolute withdrawal of support. His suppliers stopped being friendly. His name slid out of local business listings without ceremony.
He reacted poorly at first—legal threats, hot calls, the kind of bluster that makes people record you saying more than you intended. The footage that showed him loosing his temper and then trying to use the story to coerce money went viral in a small town way. He realized that the indignation he had hoped to command had turned on him.
There was a day he came to the school's public forum in a suit and was asked to speak about what led him to try to extort a payment. The auditorium held parents and children and teachers. A hundred eyes watched him shift in his chair. "I—" he began, then stopped. He looked like a man thinking of his own shadow. "I was wrong," he said, then tried to backtrack into "but." Canaan's face was a composed map of patience. "Yes, you were wrong," he told him. "This is not a school matter to monetize."
Javier got his suspension. He had to do community service. He had to write letters—to Kaede, to the school—and, more importantly, to himself. The shaming was not triumphal. It was slow: a loss of face, a collapse of the swagger that thrives on ambiguous fear. People stopped inviting him to games. Coaches who had once smiled and nodded kept their distance. The father—left with fewer allies—found that his rage had peeled away business partners like paint. The record of his outburst became a kind of legal fixture; it looked like a map of a man who could not be trusted.
American towns and small cities often do their own kind of justice: exposure plus requirements to make things right. It wasn't poetic. It was ordinary and effective. A week later, Augusto's name on the community messageboard was a small, flat notice about mediation. The photos of the hallway that had once shown his son as the center of a drama now made him look very small.
When I thought about the scene, I felt a complicated emotion. I felt relief: Kaede's fear had been acknowledged, the school had acted. I also felt a cold compassion: a man had been shamed and would have to rebuild in a place where pride didn't always allow humility. And I felt pride: Kai had stepped forward on instinct, and for once the rest of us saw how two minutes of courage could rewrite the arc of an evening.
After the public reckoning, things changed in small, human ways. Kaede stopped flinching when she walked. She smiled in class sometimes. Javier nodded once to me in the corridor like a man carrying a bad bruise and the beginning of a lesson. Augusto signed up for counseling. He wrote a letter to the school—bare, not a masterpiece, but a letter—and apologized publicly to Kaede in a controlled, supervised meeting. It didn't erase the past, but it made a path.
Kai and I, awkward as we were, continued in a slow orbit. His father lives far away; he had to cook for his younger brother, Amir Donovan, who celebrated his birthday the week after the big assembly. Kai came home late, a cake in hand, and walked into the sleepy house like someone tired and then unburdened. He apologized to his little brother for being late. "Happy birthday, Amir," he said quietly, and the boy's face lit up.
At school, Kai began—very, very slowly—to pay attention. His test pages were still full of red marks, but he started to hand things in. He sat up in class. One evening I walked the corridor and found him under the pale light, going through the little booklet I had printed for him—a set of handouts: A4 pages of notes and exercises I'd copied at my own expense.
"This is for you," I said, leaning against the rail of the corridor.
He nodded and took it. "Thanks," he said. He looked at me as if he wanted to say more. He didn't. He shoved the book into his bag like it was a relic.
The months unfolded like that: small bright things, small dull things. A friend of mine—Fernanda—kept her promise to be a chaos of support. We both kept the night as an odd story we trotted out like a coral fossil. The school felt, somehow, more like a place that could hold things.
I learned, fast, that being a teacher is less about delivering perfect lectures than being an odd form of anchor. There are moments—hour-long minutes—when you are the only person two people will listen to. Sometimes you fix a wrong by writing words on a board; sometimes you fix it by standing quietly between a boy with a scar and a girl with terrible dreams. Sometimes the repair is getting together the right clip on a projector and letting light do what the world is too clumsy to do: make people face their faces.
Kai and I never became a headline romance. We had our small arcs—glances, protective acts, arguments about whether he should keep working nights, whether I should have stayed later at the office to talk with a worried mother. Once, in the early spring, he handed me a small note in class that read, simply, "Thanks for the folder." He said it like a boy handing over a pebble. I kept it, tucked into a book.
At graduation—months later—our class had an exercise where students read a memory. Kaede read hers and fixed the words to a woman who had learned to walk home without looking over her shoulder. Javier read his and said, "I'll try." Augusto, who had been attending sessions and had his own small, bright, repairable shame, stood in the back with a folded jacket and did not storm out. It was not the kind of clean ending novels promise. It was real life: messy, slow, patched together by decisions.
The last morning I handed Kai an extra copy of the notes. "Keep going," I said. He shrugged, and for once the shrug looked like a small victory.
On the yellow cab ride later, I counted the quiet boxes of paper I had printed for kids like him. I smiled at the memory of the black forest cake once set on a small kitchen table and the way a boy had called out "Happy birthday, Amir!" as if both of them were keeping the impossible work of being kind alive.
There are small things that we keep: an A4 booklet with margins trimmed, a cracked shell on a pale dress, a night where the world smells like spilled wine and someone else stepped forward. When people tell me about marvellous beginnings, I think of that night and how a single, ordinary step—"Long time no see, Ms. Carpenter"—shifted the axis of a winter. It wasn't a revolution. It was a reminder that sometimes the smallest acts of courage rewrite the map we live by.
The End
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