Orientation: The Benchmarks Series

date.
His patience was adorable. He invented excuses for me like he was an old pro at dealing with someone else's anxiety. Sometimes I wondered if he was.
Every time I sidestepped his offers and nearly burst into flames in the process, he made it all better with "No, you're right, you need time to unpack and settle into your apartment" and "Things are too hectic with the first weeks of school anyway" and "Forget I mentioned it. You need a minute to get into a groove. I'll be here whenever you're ready."
Max's excuses weren't too far removed from reality. Things were hectic and I was still living out of boxes in my apartment—not to mention learning how to cope with a roommate whose control freak tendencies were not part of the rental agreement—and my groove had thus far escaped me in the classroom.
But I didn't want him to go away. I didn't want him to stop asking me out.
When I'd first started teaching, I'd believed the school year would go well if the first days and weeks went well—and this was generally true. Setting the tone and establishing expectations right off the bat was essential, even if that thought process was catnip for my perfectionism. It made all my rituals and checklists even more important and built up those initial classes to do-or-die levels.
I knew better—somewhat—now. Imperfect starts didn't mean the year was going to be a disaster. It was okay for me and my classes to spend time getting to know each other and finding good vibes. And I didn't have to lock myself in my classroom for sixteen hours each day, reinventing my lesson plans, rearranging desks, and constructing mind-blowing experiments.
I could spare a minute to hang out with the cute coach…if that sort of thing wasn't triggering the shit out of my anxiety.
The fucked-up thing about anxiety was I couldn't say yes even when that was exactly what I wanted to do. Avoidance was always my first and most powerful instinct and I couldn't climb over it to let myself explore this connection with him. Avoidance was safe and secure, while exploration was an opportunity to get hurt, to be rejected, to prove anxiety right.
I didn't want anxiety to be right.
Irrational fears aside, I didn't want to be in the position of starting something with a new colleague only for it to blow up in my face before the end of the first marking period. I couldn't change schools or teaching assignments again. I could not handle that after several years of teaching in ever-changing grades and content areas.
The minute I thought I'd figured out physical science and sixth graders, I was switching over to eighth grade and life science. It didn't seem like a big deal but it was rather significant. Understanding the instructional goals and the ways that precise group of kids learned best required practice. Bouncing between grades and contents meant I'd only practiced adapting.
On top of that, I didn't want to end up in a disciplinary meeting because I'd violated a fraternization policy. It came as a slight relief when the upper school dean Drew Larsen laughed off that issue.
"That's not a problem here," he said when I'd pulled him aside after a vertical alignment planning meeting for schoolwide science instruction. "If it were, I wouldn't be engaged to Miss Treloff right now."
"Oh," I replied. "I didn't—I didn't know that. Congratulations."
I couldn't decide whether I was horribly self-absorbed or everyone in this school was extremely proficient at keeping their personal affairs on the down low because I didn't notice anyone being more than friendly or polite. Yet the deans were engaged and everyone said Clark and Noa had big time feelings for each other.
Maybe I was self-absorbed. I did spend a lot of time in my head.
Drew glanced across the library to where Tara Treloff sat with Shay and Jaime, the kindergarten and first grade teachers. "Now you do."
I nodded. "Okay. Thanks."
"Make good choices, Hayzer," he added, still watching his fiancée. His gaze was cool, almost unemotional but it lingered long enough to prove it was anything but. How had I missed that before? "Be professional and keep it that way when you’re around kids."
The green light from Drew got me around part of the anxiety.
The institutionalized happy hours closed the rest of the loop.
None of my previous schools maintained a happy hour tradition as robust as Bayside School's. Since I wasn't a big drinker and often found unstructured social events (and structured ones, for that matter) to be unnecessarily stressful, I'd skipped the first gathering. I liked to give my classroom a thorough organization at the end of the week and prep for the coming week anyway.
This didn't seem like a problem to me…until my colleagues started asking for a blood oath that I'd show up.
Clark, Noa, and Juliana had gone as far as to individually seek me out and insist the outing was mandatory for middle school team cohesion. A few of the elementary teachers caught me in the halls to ask if they'd see me on Friday afternoon. Max dropped by my classroom at least four times to confirm I was attending and then waited for me in the school parking lot to make sure I had good directions since I was new in town.
Talk about overwhelming. Part of me felt affronted by the hard sell but the other part percolated with the idea these people were trying to become my friends if I'd just let them. Could it be that easy?
In the end, I'd followed Max to the beer garden everyone seemed to love and shared a pint with my new coworkers. We had to look like a strange bunch, all of us drinking at four in the afternoon while decked out in jeans and college t-shirts because that was our school spirit custom for Fridays.
It didn't take long to realize this tradition wasn't about the beer as much as it was about the company. These people liked spending time