Triple Love Score Read Free Page A

stared deeply into their radiant screens, content to ignore her and each other.
    “Did everyone bring paper?” she asked. This was her fault if they hadn’t. At the beginning of the semester, she declared her classroom a paper-free zone. She held her hands over her head, her cell phone sitting majestically in front of her on the table. We will “ping” each other our poems in real time, she proclaimed. The students just nodded, undergraduates, already jaded. Now she could never tell if they were reading the poems their classmates had just sent or if they were surfing for porn or Facebook memes.
    “Paper,” she said again, waving a few pieces that she pulled from her purse.
    Everyone but Tad produced the required sheets and pens. She handed Tad the stack from her purse.
    “Pen?” he asked.
    Ronan flicked one at him across the table.
    “Thank you, Ronan,” she said.
    “You’re welcome,” he said, his brogue thick with just a few scant syllables.
    Sometimes she picked him to read aloud just to hear him speak. When he did, she could close her eyes and imagine a weekend in Dublin, sitting in a pub, ordering a round of pints for mates and watching football on the television. They cheered in all the right places. When the home squad captured the final victory, the bloke next her let out a whoop in his brogue before sweeping her up for a kiss. When she leaned back to look into her Irishman’s eyes, his face always transformed into Scott’s.
    She shook her head to pull herself back to the present moment. “So did you get my email about the flowers? Let’s use those to free write. Open form. Twenty minutes.”
    She pushed the timer on her phone and left it at her place at the table. Normally she wrote with them, using the exercises to push herself, maybe even to compete against them. But today, with just these six, her heart wasn’t in it. Instead, she stood by the window and contemplated the growing darkness of the evening. Again, the lure of cancelling on her family and just showing up at the airport pulled at her. She could just book a ticket right there for the next plane out, even if it was headed for someplace unexciting like Cincinnati. She wouldn’t have to think about Scott Cramer in Cincinnati.
    Ronan coughed the kind of cough you get from a multiyear cigarette habit. Miranda turned her head slightly, catching his eye to make sure he was okay. He pointed with his pencil toward Clementine who had drawn herself up into a ball. The hem of her skirt opened around her like tulip petals. Miranda saw the torn and ripped crotch of her tights. Tad angled himself for a better view, completely ignoring the blank paper and pen in front of him.
    “Don’t forget time of year, now. Are these flowers natural? Tad? Your thoughts?”
    “I don’t know,” Tad stammered, still not taking his off Clementine.
    Miranda strode across the room and placed a hand on Clementine’s shoulder, pretending to look over her work. She stood there a bit too long, just enough to make the girl shift uncomfortably.
    “Good, good,” Miranda said. She hadn’t read a word from the girl’s page, but it probably was good, usually was good. And frankly it was just an exercise, what did it matter anyway?
    The twenty-minute timer sounded, and all six promptly put down their pens, breathing a sigh of relief.
    “You know,” Miranda said, “we should probably wrap up. That is if you all don’t mind. I know a lot of you are probably leaving town, maybe even have plans to go out tonight.”
    A few nodded; no one offered any complaints or protests about the early dismissal.
    “I’ll collect the exercises and read them over break.”
    They handed her the papers and left the room as quietly as they had come in.
    “Ronan, could you stay a second?” she asked.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said in a way that came out more like marm, which somehow made it less insulting than being called ma’am.
    “Thank you,” she said. “About, you know,