And they would. It was my job, and I took those kindergarten-readiness skills seriously. I was a good teacher.

But in the scheme of things, one of the most important things my students might take away from their time at Bayberry was how to make a damn pine cone birdfeeder. Who knew, they might decide to make one every year, year after year after year, for the rest of their lives. And wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all took the time to make an occasional pine cone birdfeeder?

“Sarah?” Kate Stone seemed to be saying off in some foggy distance.

And the bummer was that I was the only Sarah in the room.

I blinked myself back to the meeting.

Beside Kate Stone was an enormous pad of white paper attached to a tubular steel display stand. She pulled a purple marker from the pocket of her batik tunic and uncapped it with her teeth. Still using only her teeth, she placed the cap on the marker’s non-writing end.

The whole time she was looking right at me.

I gulped. At this point in my career, I’d been through most of my bitch of a boss’s stupid team-building exercises at least twenty gazillion times, so I took a wild guess.

“Dedication,” I said. “Enthusiasm.”

There was dead silence. And then the entire room burst out laughing.

“On that note,” Kate Stone said. “I’d say Sarah has just volunteered to be in charge of this year’s Bayberry holiday performance. Ethan, you’ll be co-chair.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said.

We were sitting around the long rectangular kiddie table in my classroom. I reached under my bra strap discreetly, removed a sunflower seed that had somehow become lodged there.

Polly scooped some of the remaining suet out of the tub, rubbed her hands together, passed the tub to Lorna. Lorna scooped some suet, passed the tub to Gloria. Gloria scooped and passed it to Ethan, then Ethan scooped and passed it to his teaching assistant June. June was my former assistant. I liked her a lot, despite the fact that she was ridiculously young and blond and beautiful.

They all rubbed their hands together and looked at me.

“You know,” Lorna said, “if we marketed this stuff as high-end hand lotion, we could quit this stupid job and not have to worry about the holiday performance.”

“Great idea, honey.” Gloria held a finger up to her nose. “We might just have to do a teensy bit of work on the smell first.”

There were two events in the yearly calendar that could turn the teacher coerced into chairing them into a star. Either that or cause her to crash and burn in front of the entire Bayberry community. One was the holiday performance, and the other was graduation.