Not at all

“No problem. No problem at all,” you say. “So, where to? I don’t know this town.”

“Oh, I know a good place. I’ll give you the directions,” she says as you walk to your SUV.

Following her directions, you drive off campus and pass through the center of town and the diner where you had lunch and onto the state highway. The road twists through some forests and fields before you pull into the parking lot of a small bar. You can smell the barbeque from the back as you push in the door.

It’s a weeknight, so the place is pretty much empty except for a couple of old drunks. "Sit where ever you like." A tall woman with tattoos up and down her arms calls from behind the bar, "I'll be with you in a sec."

“You come here often?” you ask as you take a booth and the bartender takes your orders.

“Not as often as I’d like. I can never get Alice to come with me, and most of the other teachers are uptight old bitches like Naylor,” she said as the bartender sets your beers on the table. “Pink Rose is a nice place to work, but it can get so dull around here.” She laughs. “It’s probably for the best. Can you imagine the trouble those girls would get into in a more exciting town?”

You have to laugh out loud at that. “Shit, that is hard to imagine,” you say, lifting your beer in a toast.

You keep on talking over her salad and your pulled pork sandwich. You listen as she lays out her entirely normal life story, and you choose to go with #3. Hints that daddy smacked you around (but only hints, nobody likes a whiny bitch), a bad boy phase (she looks into it, so you lean into that a bit) and ending with a (fill in the blank) turning your life around, making you decide to become a (fill in the blank) to pay it forward.

It works, like it generally does. In the end, she leans in. “And so you decided the best way to pay it forward is to come teach a bunch of rich bitches?” she asks.

“Well, I got bills to pay, like everybody else,” you answer. “Besides, you said yourself they aren’t all bad.”

“Aren’t they?” she laughs. “C’mon, I want to dance.”