All three of them nodded a little. The woman with the pink hair jotted down a few notes. As they continued to ask me questions about my career goals and my résumé, I started worrying whether that answer had been what they were looking for. But at least it was the truth.
And either way, there was no taking it back now.
“Do you have any questions for us?” Jeff asked, closing the folder he’d been consulting throughout the interview. He had a warm, inviting voice that put me at ease despite my roiling nerves.
I thought over everything Sam and I had talked about, trying to filter it all through the ground this interview had already covered.
“I do,” I said. “I’d like to hear more about what I’ll be teaching here. What can you tell me about the kinds of arts programming you have here at Harmony, and where my classes would fit into that?”
“I can speak to that.” Bethany set down my portfolio and folded her hands neatly in front of her on the table. “Here at Harmony we take nurturing students’ artistic expression very seriously. From kindergarten through eighth grade students are exposed to visual, musical, or literary arts every day. By the time students are in the Upper School—or high school, as it’s known in the public schools—students select one of four different art tracks that they pursue all four years.”
“For some students, the artistic track they pursue may be music,” Jeff clarified. “For others, it may be theater, or creative writing. Upper School students who select the fourth track—visual arts—would be the ones in your classes.”
“Harmony Academy is proud of all four of its artistic expression tracks,” Cressida Marks said, glancing at her colleagues. They nodded. “That said, our visual arts track has traditionally had the least adventurous and diverse offerings.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “Least adventurous and diverse? How do you mean?”
“Historically, a lot of our visual arts classes have covered the sorts of things you said earlier that you don’t do,” Bethany said, glancing at her colleagues. “Painting watercolor still lifes. Art history classes covering the famous paintings you’d find in the Art Institute of Chicago or the Louvre. Lessons on the pottery wheel. And while any Upper School visual arts program worth its salt must cover these things, we believe we do our students a disservice if we stop there.”
“And that,” Cressida said, “is why we wanted to interview you for this position. We are looking for art teachers who think about art in innovative ways and are excited about sharing these innovations with our Upper School kids.”
All three of them looked at me, as though gauging my response to what they’d just said. My mind was going a mile a minute trying to process everything.
What they were describing sounded . . .
Well. It sounded perfect. Like, too-good-to-be-true perfect.
“That sounds incredible.” I didn’t know if I should be playing my genuine excitement closer to the chest than this, but I couldn’t help it.
Cressida smiled. “We’re glad you think so.”
“Let’s go on a tour of the Upper School,” Jeff suggested. “We can take you to the art studios and show you where you’d be teaching if you join us in the fall.”
That had to be a good sign.
I grinned at them, unable to help myself. “That sounds great to me.”
* * *
My excitement over how well my interview went was short-lived.
When I got back home and there was still no sign of Frederick, all my worry from earlier in the day came rushing back. I checked my phone and saw I had no messages from Reginald, either, which only heightened my anxiety.
True crime documentaries weren’t my favorite flavor of sketchy television, but I knew enough about kidnapping and murder cases to know that the longer you went without news, the greater the chances that the news you ultimately got wouldn’t be good.
On a whim that I recognized as a terrible idea even as it occurred to me, I took out my laptop and Googled Esmeralda Jameson. If she had as much of an internet presence as Reginald had implied, maybe looking her up would give me some clues.
Reginald hadn’t even told me the half of it. Google brought up so many search results for Esmeralda Jameson there was no possible way of looking through them all absent a serious obsession with her I was uninterested in developing.
The top search result was a link to her Instagram. That seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Immediately after clicking, the very-bad-idea-ness of this plan came crashing down on me like a Doberman on a plate of hamburgers. I’d been prepared for Esmeralda to be beautiful and flawless, in the same way sort-of-but-not-quite-ex-girlfriends of hot guys usually tended to be. But nothing could have prepared me for the pictures I was looking at now.