Mat Barzal Teacher AU
@nicohischier listen I will crtl f if I want to but I didn't do it for this one
But this is the 9th one I've written and posted since Monday so that's gotta be something, right?
Teacher AU Series
Warnings: swearing
WC: 813
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“What are you doing?” Thea asks, walking into Orla’s room.
“Looking at my glassware.”
“Is it nice to look at?”
Orla sighs, closing her cabinets. “I have to replace like half of what I bought brand new last year because the students broke everything.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, oh, shit.”
Orla gets her computer out of her bag, where it had been sitting since she arrived in her classroom for the first time since the last school year ended, pulling up the Flinn website and praying that they had some sort of sale going on. Not that it was likely for the stuff she needed, but she could still have hope. “How much will it cost you?”
“The smallest beakers I need are five dollars, the largest are twenty three.”
“Each?”
“Each,” she groans, drawing the end of the word out.
“Oh, shit.”
Orla laughs. “I think we found our new catchphrase for the year.”
“A downgrade from last years, ‘oh, fuck,’ if I do say so,” Thea laughs.
Orla stares at the screen, adding everything she needed to buy new into the cart and watching the total cost increase by the second. “Why don’t we work at a school that pays for everything?”
“Because I don’t think those schools exist.” The two of them sit there for a second, Orla staring at her computer trying to figure out how she was going to pay for everything she needed for the school year. “Oh, do you know who your new humanities partner is?”
Orla shrugs. “Whoever that new French teacher is, I haven’t met him yet.”
Thea sighs. “I got paired with Richard,” she grimaces. “Why do we have to do this again?”
Orla sits up straight, folding her hands in front of her on her desk and tilting her head back so her nose was pointed into the air. Thea burst out laughing, knowing that she was imitating the vice principal they both hated. “To ensure that we are providing the most extensive cross-curricular education to our students.”
“More like to ensure that we have more busy work we don’t want to do. I mean, what cross-curriculum stuff can we do between biology and English?”
Thea looks at her friend as she puts her feet up on the top of the desk she had commandeered. “You teach AP Bio.”
“And?”
“Don’t they have to read and comprehend long passages just to write essays about them?”
“And?”
“Babe, that’s English. Richard is the perfect person to pair you with.”
“He’s a dick.”
“In more ways than one.”
Thea laughs, getting up to head back to her classroom to do some work before they had to head to the auditorium for their first week back meetings. She turns back to Orla “Don’t you know French?”
“Not really, no.”
Thea, with her hand on the door, stares out the window in the center. “One of your ex’s did, though, right?”
“Two; blue eyes and nostril boy.”
Thea nods, a smirk on her face that told Orla she wasn’t going to like whatever her friend was about to do next.
Orla sat back in her chair as Thea finally left, the door closing behind her. Why would she mention Orla’s exes? It wasn’t like either of them would be a teacher. Blue eyes moved away a while ago, Orla losing track of him after he ended up somewhere in Canada. Nostrils, however, was still somewhere on the island, which she knew because she ran into him way too often for her liking. They broke up because Orla thought he was way too self-involved; stopping just short of an actual temper tantrum when he didn’t get his way.
Granted, they were younger and much more immature when they dated, but it was still enough that Orla knew she didn’t want that.
She shrugs it off, going back to the Flinn website to see if she could pull any of their free resources that could be useful in order to make her feel better about the nearly one thousand dollar glassware purchase she was about to make.
She’s interrupted by a knock at her door while she’s reading about a nuclear decay inquiry lab, not looking up to see who walks in when she calls for them to enter.
“Orla?” she hears a familiar voice, her head snapping from her computer to see the one person she didn’t want in her classroom.
“Mat?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I teach here,” she says, hoping he can’t hear the shaking in her voice. Having a short conversation with him when they randomly happened to see each other was fine, but this? “What are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
The realization of what Thea’s facial expression meant finally dawned on her. You could see who was coming into the building from the hallway outside Orla’s classroom thanks to the weird design of the building. Thea had to have seen Mat coming in. “You’re the new French teacher.”
“You’re my curriculum partner.”
“Oh, shit.”
